#william hates all children including his own

[lcriedlastnight]

Can you write something with Oscar where they hated each other during their childhood or teenage years, but they meet again during adulthood

hey anon! thank you so much for your request!

tw: fem!reader. swears, i feel it feels a little rushed but idk. not spell checked. lmk if you want me to add anything.

w/c: 1.9k

you and logan were the ‘duo’ during karting, f2 and f3. where ever you went, logan followed and vice versa. you both understanding each other on a different level than the others around you, just simply didn’t . others around you including: oscar piastri.

you knew fine well that oscar and logan got along well. at one point logan even told you that he thought of oscar as his best friend in racing. knowing all of this should’ve made you like him, but it didn’t. you didn’t know if it was the way he walked around the karting course, when you were children, like he owned the place or if it was the little niggle in the back of your mind that acknowledged how good of a racer he actually was and that just pissed you off even more, you didn’t know. all you knew is that he needed to be brought down a peg or two and you would happily be to one to do it forever, much to logan’s chagrin.

logan really wanted the both of you to get along but you couldn’t help yourself, especially when you were younger, you had to tell him exactly what you thought about him, any and every time he pissed you off.

sometimes you did feel bad about hating on the aussie, like the times where a race didn’t really go his way, but as soon as you would go over to commiserate him he’d shout at you and tell you to get out of his way. you stopped feeling bad about it after that.

this rivalry continued all the way through to when both boys made it to f1. maybe it even deepened further. any time the two of you bump into each other, the only words said (if any) were snarky comments and backhanded compliments. mainly from your end.

none of this stopped you from supporting one of your oldest friends though, any time you were able to you would join him in the williams paddock, usually the first one to run to him when the race ended bad for him.

the most recent time you had joined logan for a race weekend was australia. you had watched along during the free practise but afterwards logan seemed to be avoiding you. you had looked everywhere for him, wanting to do your usual ‘after free practise’ routine of dissing the rest of the drivers (especially oscar) and telling logan that he was the best driver on the grid.

you make your way through the paddock searching for him and you eventually find him in the mclaren motorhome, standing with none other than oscar piastri. you roll your eyes and walk up to the two of them but they’re both too deep in their conversation that they don’t hear you coming.

“you have to tell her, mate” oscar tells logan, brows furrowed. logan’s back is to you so you can’t see his reaction, but you do hear it.

“she’ll be crushed!” it comes out a breathy and high pitched.

“obviously she’ll be crushed but do you not think it’s better for her to hear it from you” oscar replies, his eyes gentle. it pisses you off. him saying all this as if he knows you and how you would feel about certain things. you decide to make your presence known.

“i think i trust logan’s opinion on whatever you two are talking about more than yours, piastri.” your voice is a little mean but there are hints of confusion and concern for logan.

logan spins in his spot to face you. his eyes are wide and his brows sit high on his forehead. “oh uh hi! we were just talking about… racing stuff?” logan’s mouth moves faster than you’ve ever seen before.

“racing stuff?” you repeat back, “are you asking me or telling me?”. it’s a half joke, half serious question. i give him a half smile but logan stands there, a little awkwardly.

i wait for a second before my smile falls again. “okay what? what is it?” you asked a little worried now. oscar stands behind him but you forget about him, getting worried about logan now.

“logan you better tell me right now or-” you start but he cuts you off.

“i’m not racing this weekend. alex’s crash fucked up his car and they’re giving mines to him for the rest of the weekend.” logan avoids your eyes, instead choosing to stare at the floor.

it takes a while for you to calm down afterwards. logan takes you somewhere more private than the mclaren motorhome where you let out your anger.

“why weren’t you going to tell me?” you ask him after you had calmed down.

“i didn’t want this to happen. i only really did it because oscar told me i should.” logan explained.

you sigh out. “well you can always tell me anything. we’ve been friends forever, logan. and i guess that was kinda nice of oscar to do that.” logan’s grin is too wide, it’s like he ignored the first part and just focused on the only nice thing you have ever said about oscar.

you roll your eyes and change the subject. “okay well i guess there’s no point in staying to watch the rest of the weekend.” logan gasps.

“well since you don’t want to stay with me, there might be a certain someone who asked for you to stay and watch.” his eyebrows wiggle teasingly. it annoys you to no end. you let him know by the long groan you let out.

that’s how you ended up watching qualifying from the mclaren garage. you were surprised oscar actually let you stay and watch in his garage, but all it took was a mere seconds conversation with logan and you were in.

although the previous qualifying had been a bit of a better result for the aussie he still practically skipped into the garage. the joys of doing well in the first part of your home race, you suspect.

“oh hey! i didn’t think you were actually gonna stay. i thought you and oscar hated each other?” lando asks after noticing you, kind of just standing there. you couldn’t be more thankful for his presence at that moment, feeling a little out of place in the papaya filled garage.

you give him a tight smile. “where did you get that from? we’re best friends.” your tone dripping with sarcasm. lando smirks with a half chuckle at your tone. before you could talk more, oscar comes up behind you.

“i knew i could get you to admit it one day.” he says to you. you can hear the happiness in his tone. this is the first time oscar has said something and it hasn’t made you want to rip his vocal cords from his throat.

“ha ha. aren’t you funny?”. lando rolls his eyes at your response before he stirs the pot.

“well i’ll leave you two to it. there’s too much tension here and it’s making the room a little stuffy.” he bounces out the garage, eager to catch up with his engineers.

you don’t know why but lando’s comment made the heat rush to your face. you hope oscar doesn’t notice. he probably does though. you are stuck on what to say and you don’t like just standing there staring at him because the more you look at him the more you like what you see, so you scramble your brain for something to say.

“thanks for telling logan to tell me about not driving this weekend.” is all you can come up with.

you can feel oscar’s confusion. “you’re welcome? is this your way of repaying me? by watching quali in my garage?” he asks. half joking.

“what no?” oscar laughs at your defensive tone.

“why are you here then?” he questions you. this then confuses you.

“logan said you wanted me to stay and watch?”.

oscar’s head dips down, eyes avoiding yours and hints of what you think is a faint blush on his cheeks.

“you didn’t want me to stay and watch?” you ask, feeling a little bold with your questions.

oscar is quick to correct you. “no i did. i said that to logan.”

“why did you even want me to stay? i thought you hated me?” you ask again, not getting tired of asking him all these questions. plus the blush made him look cute. cute for an ugly guy, you correct your own thoughts. the words that free you from spiralling confuse you more.

“i don’t hate you.”

what? he most certainly did hate you. you had year upon years of proof. possibly maybe even a decade worth of mean comments and dirty looks. what was he talking about?

your mouth opens and closes a few times as you try to find your words. “you.. you don’t hate me?”

oscar’s head is quick to shake.

“but what about all those times we argued? and all those horrible things you said to me?” you remind him. oscar acting like none of that ever happened was baffling you.

“don’t you remember how every single one of those arguments started?” he asks. it’s your turn to shake your head.

“i would always come over after races to talk to logan and of course you were there. i would go to ask logan about the race and you would interrupt me by saying something about ‘there being no need to rub my talent in his face’ or if logan had done better than me you would always say ‘he doesn’t talk to people who only want him when he’s a winner’. even if all i wanted was to let my frustrations out with my friend. you were mean too.” you’re stunned to silence.

you didn’t think anything you said to oscar was that mean. or even worth remembering. it wasn’t in your case, that’s how you can’t even remember saying any of it.

“oh” is all you can say.

“yeah, oh. even though you were horrible i still wanted to talk to you.” oscar admits, head held high, even though can see the way the confidence on his eyes falters a little.

you feel a wave of embarrassment wash over you at your actions. how could you ever hate someone who, even though they were being treated like shit, wanted to be friends to support their other friend?

“i’m sorry. that was so horrible of me. i honestly don’t know what else to say. i’m horrible.” you tell him. you wear your regret all over your face, clearly visible to oscar.

“you’re not.” oscar takes a step forward and hesitates for a second before he places a gentle hand on your shoulder. “you were just trying to protect you’re friend. you’re a good person. the only reason i wanted to keep talking to you was because i wanted you to defend me like that.”

the realisation hits you, you’re face softening even more. oscar liked you. maybe even still likes you.

“oh.”

oscar smiles a little. he’s spent years hearing every little detail about you from logan he feels like he knows you just as well as the american does.

“i’ve got to do some media stuff but why don’t we grab dinner or something afterwards?” oscar offers, you nod instantly, eager to know the boy as well as logan does.

“okay, yeah that sounds good.” you smile at the boy for maybe the first time ever.

oscar smiles back.

you hated being wrong but you didn’t mind being wrong about how nice oscar was.

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

The BRF had too much to sort out after QEll's death, it was overwhelming and H&M were the last things on their minds. They might've evenhoped that the brats will at least soften a little but it got worse. I always thought that the BRF thought treating H with kids gloves might make him come to his senses and they gave him all the time he needed but that was a wrong plan.

They didn't want additional dramas because let's be real - the overseas outsiders will never listen. Remember how M said service is universal and the Queen doesn't own the word royal? People hated her so much when she did that! I feel like the BRF uses this tactic of letting the public see through H&M rather than them doing exposé because they want to always take the high road. Could be the reason why they never cleared any rumors about anything including the children because for them, the public is smart enough to see what's happening and come to their own conclusions while H&M treat the public like we're stupid.

Also I wouldn't be surprised if they start suing the BRF if they strip the titles or do anything more because even the Duke of Windsor wasn't stripped of his titles when he was a very clear threat and traitor to the UK. We might think this is dumb but they both have done many dumb things that doesn't make sense just to satisfy their big egos. The family just doesn't want to have anything to do with them and like you said, they're probably happy with the Sussex surname because PP's family name is saved from this ugly mess.

Also Charles the Weak had always had his darling boy's back that if anything comes out, it might put him in trouble as well like the bullying case. I truly believe stern actions will only come when William becomes King because people respect him more and have always had more faith in him to move forward with the correct thing instead of being an emotional snob. Unfair to him but Charles is useless like that.

I'm sorry for this long rant and my command of English, it's my 5th language so I don't have very good grasp of it 😅 Thank you for reading and looking forward for your response! ☺️

Ask from August 21st

A theory on the BRF's handling of the Sussexes.

I don't really have much to add here except that the reason why the Sussexes got away with it was because The Queen believed the decisions made, and the terms agreed to, at the Sandringham Summit were sufficient. She (or Charles or the courtiers) didn't think the agreement needed enforcing other than the part where they demanded the Sussexes decide by March 2021 if they were going to come back or stay.

Granted, COVID helped to passively enforce some of the Sandringham Summit terms, and probably by the time things adjusted to the new normal, the BRF had other, more important things to worry about (like Philip's and The Queen's health).

And once the Sussexes made their decision (aka the only part of the Sandringham Summit that The Queen was enforcing), that's when they started making their mistakes started. Their first big mistake was accusing the BRF of using Philip's health to squash their interview with Oprah. Their second big mistake was doing the Oprah interview. Their third big mistake was telling all those lies in the interview and forgetting that fact-checkers (and the internet) exists.

I think the BRF understood immediately that the Oprah interview was a mistake for Harry and Meghan when they saw all the people (American and British) supporting them and defending them, before and after they published "recollections may vary."

And thus, Napoleon Bonaparte: "Never interrupt an enemy when they're making a mistake."

Or a proverb, if history isn't your thing: "Give someone enough rope, and they will hang themselves."

[kurain-genealogy]

i said i was gonna post about it and i am. i don't think william afton hates his kids. i don't think william afton is a mad scientist that kidnapped and put children in hallucinogenic gas chambers. whatever the fuck dittophobia said about afton doing all that, plus not stopping/furthering the bullying between michael and cc, is just dumb & wrong. william wanting his kids to fight, even die, is comically evil in the "bad writing" way. him being characterized as someone who experiments on children (including his own with no regard for their lives) in order to achieve immortality or whatever his supposed motivation is, is just really... nothing? as a character there is nothing to make him feel real. in an attempt to flesh out this character, they made him into a cartoon villain with "evil" being his only defining trait. whatever, i could talk for so long about how dumb i think all the dittophobia stuff is but i think most ppl on tumblr are on the same page regarding that.

to me, william afton is best characterized as someone who, at the Very Least, Doesn't Want His Own Children To Die. he can be a shitty father all around, or he can be a genuine loving father who is also a serial killer, as long as he Cares if they Die? most of what makes william afton an interesting villain, and where a lot of people interpret his motivation comes from, is how despite all his best efforts, he cannot prevent the death or downfall of his own family. he is in a tragedy of his own making, a self-imposed hell crafted by his hubris and violence. if you take this away, why should i care what happens to him? william afton was scariest when he was just purple guy and we knew nothing. william afton is most interesting when we have all these relationships and dynamics where we can seriously study and speculate the circumstances behind/around his actions, when he has something to lose (and will lose). william afton is most stale when more things are added to his story without purpose, filling in gaps that were better unfilled or we didn't even know were there – anything after UCN, basically. bro isn't scary anymore because he's either peepaw afton who's brought back despite his story being over, or he's cartoon network's newest over-the-top villian that you can't take seriously.

okay anyway. ANYWAY. william doesn't hate his kids. even if he's a shitty father, i think he still loves his kids. why else would he try and scare his kids away from the robots if he didn't want them to die? why would he design circus baby after his daughter if he didn't care for her, adore her, even? if you believe the theory that he talked to cc through the fredbear plush (idr if that's actually canon), why would he be trying to protect/comfort him?

i don't think he's a perfect, or even a good father, by any means. if you interpret him to be on the better side, that's great and fine. i'd love to hear how other people interpret/characterize afton if you wanna share! continuing on for this post, i'm going to lay out how i personally see william afton.

to me, he is someone who is very concerned and preoccupied with his image and how others view him & his family. even if he's super shitty and awful towards his kids, he at least cares that they all look good as a family unit, that they're well behaved, that he can send family portrait holiday cards to all his business partners and investors.

he strikes me very much as the typical authoritarian parent of the 80s. harsher on his sons because "men don't cry," wants his kids to say "yes, sir," and "no, sir," believes in "tough love," often says "my house, my rules," he has the final say in everything, maybe thinks hitting them from time to time is a normal, necessary punishment. not all entirely malicious, but thinks he's doing what's best, what's right, acting like a parent and father Should act, perhaps how he himself was raised. unfortunately, a very common parental mindset (even outside of serial killers). maybe he was a little scarier sometimes though, a little more unhinged or violently angry. who's to say.

but he's still just a guy who could exist in real life. he still eats dinner with his family every night, hangs his kids' drawings on the fridge, had to turn the car around because they wouldn't stop fighting in the backseat, attended awkward parent-teacher conferences, everything. he was once a new father who happily came home with his first newborn, lost countless nights of sleep over the course of two more, loves them because they're his.

meticulously and senselessly killed children, then came home and tucked his own into bed and kissed them goodnight.

he can be abusive and still love his kids. he can be a murderer and still care for his own kids' lives. maybe the loss of his own kids is what triggered his actions, or maybe it was something else. i'm fine with not knowing because we don't need to know everything, and it's more interesting when we don't.

Something Is Seriously Wrong With This Guy And We Don't Know What or Why. when acquaintances find out he's a suspected murderer, it should be shocking and upsetting. he's such a great man and father, he wouldn't murder those kids! when michael discovers his father's crimes, he should be in denial. sure, he could be scary sometimes, but he wouldn't kill anyone... right? there's a great cognitive dissonance between who he appears to be and who he actually is.

whether william descended into grief-induced madness and obsession, or was just always some kind of freak, or both, i don't think he saw his own family as disposable. even if he didn't truly love them, he at least needed to keep up his own facade as a friendly family man. personally i like to see him as someone who was a shitty father but still loved his kids, because people like that exist, and it makes him a much more interesting, realistic, and nuanced character than if he just didn't care about them At All.

[hoboal87]

Don't Speak, Epilogue

Pairings: Adam x f!Reader, past dark!Winchesters x f!Reader, past!Dean x Claire

Characters: Reader, Adam, Claire, OCs, Special Appearances by Jack and James Novak, mentions of Bobby, Ellen, Jo, John, Sam and Dean

Warnings: aftermath of fire, aftermath of kidnapping/held prisoner, non-graphic descriptions of childbirth, aftermath of non-con, babies, mostly fluff but with some sprinkles of angst, happy ending?

WC: <1500

beta’d by the wonderful, lovely, @writethelifeyouwant

This is a dark!fic that includes potentially triggering content and is intended for mature audiences only. You are responsible for your own media consumption, so please, read the warnings and if you feel that you may be triggered and/or offended please move along. If you have any questions about the warnings/tags please feel free to DM me.

Don’t Speak Masterlist

My Full Masterlist

Part 23

November

As the train jolts to a stop, you shush the baby at your breast, hoping that it won’t jostle him awake. You’re glad to finally be back in Boston, and in only a matter of days you, Adam, and William, will be on a ship heading back to London. Two sets of blue eyes are waiting on the platform– searching the crowds amidst the smog from the train. You gesture to Claire to look out the window and watch as elation fills her, catching a tear falling down her cheek as she lays eyes on her family.

There is a hesitation for a moment before the two of you move from your seats. 

The fire not only claimed the lives of the brothers that night, but also some of the new servants who were still unfamiliar with the layout of the manor. No one was entirely sure how many lives the fire claimed; all of the bodies were too damaged and disfigured by the fire for anyone to be able to tell one from the other.

You and Claire had been confined to the same boarding house that Adam had escaped to for several weeks while Bobby tried to salvage keepsakes from the Manor, and Mr. Finch sorted through John’s will, determining what was to be done with the Winchester Estate. You’d always known that the family were wealthy, but you hadn’t ever fully comprehended exactly how much money they had. John had made plans to ensure that you and Claire and your children were to be taken care of if something had ever happened to the brothers. However, you doubt that he’d expected for his sons to die the way they did.

You and Claire both only wanted one thing: to be reunited with your families. No one in town seemed to mourn the loss of the Winchesters, but there was gossip that made its way through as you and Claire kept up appearances of the heartbroken widows. There was no funeral to speak of, only two caskets filled with charred remains and the conflicted feeling of anguish and joy, knowing that now you and Claire could move on with your lives. 

It took over a month to settle everything. While John had made contingencies for the brothers’ demises, you expect that he never imagined that they would die together, or within only a few months of his own untimely death. Adam could, according to Mr. Finch, lay claim to the Winchester fortune because John had left documentation that Adam was his bastard, but Adam declined, opting to let you and Claire split the money instead. With the estate finally settled, you were free to leave Kansas. Claire had written to her father, and the four of you made your way towards Boston.

You had barely made it out of Kansas when you’d gone into labor. William James Winchester came into the world screaming. A wave of emotions flowed through you as the wailing infant was placed in your arms, tears pressing against your eyes, and you let out a choked laugh as you realized that you’d finally fulfilled the Winchester's plan for you - a legitimate male heir. Dark chocolate eyes and tufts of dark brown hair answered the question that had been in the back of your mind ever since Adam informed you that the baby couldn’t be Sam’s. And though you hated to admit it, you were happy knowing that the father wasn’t your husband or his brother, but their father.

It took longer to recover from the birth than you’d expected, and the mental and physical exhaustion of being held prisoner by the Winchesters and your escape had finally caught up with you and Claire, as well. The decision was made to halt your journey until the end of October, giving you and Claire more time to recover before continuing on to Boston.

As Claire’s eyes lock with her father’s and brother’s, a smile that you haven’t seen in ages grows across her face. You know that she hadn’t explained everything that had happened during the year she’d been gone in her letter, unwilling to let them bear the burden or guilt of knowing that they easily could’ve spared her the trauma. You’d written a similar letter to your family, though you wonder if they would believe the half-truths that you spun. You aren’t even sure you care.

You had early on in your captivity come to terms with the fact that while your parents hadn’t–at least you hoped–known what plans the Winchesters had for you, they had still abandoned you. Part of you wonders exactly what John had said to your father to make him agree to allow you to marry a complete and total stranger. You suspect that he’d offered to pay off their debts, after all that’s why you were at court that evening–to find a prospective husband who could help your family with their debts.

Tears fill your eyes as you watch Claire reunite with her family. Captain Novak’s lip quivers as she shows off baby Amelia, pressing a kiss to Claire’s forehead as she wraps her arms around him. You and Adam stay back, giving the family time to themselves, before Claire calls you over. There’s a flush on Jack’s cheeks as his eyes meet yours, and part of you wants to assure him that you understand that what happened between you was not his fault, but John’s. 

You spend the next few days helping Claire get reacquainted with her family, assuring her that you and she are bonded for life, and that once the children get older, you can visit each other and, when the time comes, explain their parentage. The two of you promise to write at least once a week, and you tell her that no matter what, she’ll always be your sister.

Tears are aplenty as you arrive at the docks. With The Perdition no longer making transatlantic voyages, Adam books you on The Wayward, a much faster ship not much bigger than the Novak's, and promises you will be home in less than a week. When you arrived in Boston, the three of you didn’t have much more in the way of luggage than the clothes on your back, but as you board, you need two extra deckhands to help bring everything to your staterooms.

With a tearfilled final hug, and a last look at Amelia, you and Claire reiterate your promise to see each other again as you're told you must start boarding. You push William’s pram up the walkway, Adam’s arm linked around yours to keep you steady as you say goodbye to America and the horrors that it brought you.

Before stepping onto the deck of the ship, you turn around a final time so that you can give Claire another wave, but instead of finding her, your eyes land on a pair of green ones. You lose your footing, nearly falling off the ramp and into the water, with only Adam’s arms keeping you from doing so.

“Y/N!” he exclaims as he pulls you back to your feet, face filled with concern. 

“I saw–” 

Your breath hitches, heart pounding in your chest. It isn’t possible. He is dead. Buried. There is no way he could’ve survived the fire. And if he had somehow managed to, why would he wait months to come find you and your son? You look back out onto the dock. Maybe your eyes are playing tricks on you. You can’t go back, not when you are so close to escaping for good. 

For a moment, you convince yourself that it was nothing–an illusion–but as you start to turn, he’s there, watching from only a few yards from where Claire is standing. His eyes lock on yours as terror fills you, and you want to scream a warning to Claire. How doesn’t she see him? How can’t Adam? Before you can make any decision, Dean gives you a sad smile and a small nod before disappearing into the crowd.

“What, Kitten?” Adam turns you to face him. “What did you see?”

When you look out onto the dock, Dean has disappeared. The Novaks give another wave, and you decide that what you saw wasn’t him, but a figment of your imagination.

“Nothing,” you shake your head. “I’m just– I’m tired, and ready to go home.”

Adam links his arm in yours and presses a kiss onto your forehead as he leads you up the ramp once again. Stepping onto The Wayward, you decide to leave all memories of the Winchesters behind you, instead, focusing on your new life with Adam and William, and being reunited with your family.

But as you settle into your room that night with Adam, those green eyes still haunt you. You’re mine, sweetheart, echoes in your ear when you finally drift off to sleep.

Feedback is fuel! Please tell me what you think!

[sugarywishes]

A more lighthearted question (hopefully) than the last few I have asked: What is the most positive memory of each member of the Afton Family? I suppose I can ask which is the most negative as well (?), although I fear they might be spoiled for choice there. XD

LOL 😭 they definitely have a lot of options for least favorite memory. As always, answers are listed below! (This one is EXTRA LONG for lore)

Positive/Negative Memories: William Afton (old people first!)

- As expected from this bastard, most of his happiest memories usually don't involve his family (I mean it's not like he has a lot of happy times anyway!) But the ones he does have always have Evan in them. As I said in his character intro post, despite his extremely abusive and cruel behavior, he still had 'tenderness' for his family (uh, in his own way). Not to mention, he heavily relates to Evan's circumstances of being outcasted and othered. So any 'bonding' he had with him made him happy.

- (The birth of the twins also kinda counts? They were actually planned, unlike Mike LMAO. And William loves when things go according to plan, no surprises for him, thank you.)

- He also really enjoyed leaving England, cause yk. IT'S ENGLAND!! AND HE LEFT FOR THE U.S.A. AKA THE RIGHT CHOICE RAHHH 🦅🦅🇺🇸🇺🇸

- Also (eventually) killing children!! Jesus dude get a therapist 😰😰

- As for negative memories (I assume you're also allowing memories that don't involve his family) there is a TON.

- From his childhood days at the orphanage in England, to his college years finding out Clara got pregnant and basically forcing himself to get married to her, to Evan's death, then his business partner/friend firing him and then getting springlocked! Crazy. I know.

- Also I'm not sure if this fully counts as a 'William' memory since it's Springtrap. But he absolutely hated being Springtrap AND Scraptrap. (He totally enjoyed being a little glitch in the system though 👀)

Positive/Negative Memories: Clara Afton (puts the desperate in 'desperate housewives')

- Her happiest memories usually came from her ballet days (she probably could've gone pro)

- And from Mike! Despite her un-fun living situation she had while living as an Afton, she cherished Michael and truly believed he's kept her going. (Depressingly getting pregnant with Liz and Evan was not a good memory, she didn't really get good memories with them at all ☹️)

- Going to college, she was in her girl boss era

- For the most negative memories, meeting William first off. She only vaguely knew him from one of her classes and even then she never talked to him. She got invited to a party hosted by Henry, got drunk, and uh,,, 💀💀 got pregnant. She got heavy pressure from her family and friends, telling her not to have a baby out of wedlock, so she also forced herself to get married to William kinda hoping that maybe something could spark between them. (Whelp, so much for hoping!)

- And speaking of her family, she didn't have good memories with them either. They were a pretty traditional family (and by that I mean they were like 'women are suppose to get married and take care of the children' kind of traditional.) So she defied their orders and went off to college to pursue her dreams of becoming a ballerina! (And then she did end up as a housewife, aw man :( )

- She didn't look back at Evan's death very fondly...

- She also didn't like being Ballora.

Positive/Negative Memories: Michael Afton (okay I'm running out of stupid jokes)

- Anytime he had when he was younger (not including his bullying days), William didn't really mind him, so it left him a ton of time to hang out with his mom! (When he got older, William became a lot more abusive)

- Also with school. Unlike his dad or brother, he actually managed to make friends pretty easily and became kinda popular. He had a ton of freedom to do anything he wanted (Like ditch classes and smoke or whatever teens in the 80s did) Of course he would usually get in trouble but he didn't really care about that.

- This applies only to his younger self, but he found a sick amusement in bullying his brother and bullying in general. He was dealing with a very troubling home life which explains why he did that shit, but it should never be an excuse. He liked having some sort of power in his life where he usually didn't have much at all.

- Hanging out with Jeremy. He was basically Mike's only true friend in the end.

- Also, finally defeating his father in FNAF 6. It finally marked the end of the Aftons. (Yk until they came back for the Security Breach section of my rewrite/AUs 💀💀)

- Anytime with his father. I guess one would know why.

- Killing Evan. It finally gave him an awakening moment and made him realize what he's been doing all his life to his brother was horrible. It also ruined his and his family's life.

- Elizabeth's disappearance. And his mom's.

- Also when he got scooped and worn as a suit by Ennard. Would not be a very nice feeling. In fact anytime in his childhood from before he redeemed himself was horrible.

- Finding out William was a serial killer. It didn't shock him of course but still!!

- (This only applies to the PBTA AU, but coming back as Glamrock Freddy, he basically didn't move on because his life mission of killing William wasn't complete so he got stuck possessing my boy Fred)

Positive/Negative Memories: Elizabeth Afton

- Any interaction with her father. She really just wanted his attention in the end :(

- She loved playing with Charlie, they were besties after all!

- She also enjoyed any time with Mike, he didn't really bully her like he did Evan and more teased her like how normal siblings should treat eachother. Regardless she liked hanging out with him too

- Going back to the real world after possessing Mike's body, it was ages since she last seen anything that wasn't that horrible underground hell.

- Seeing her dad one more time before dying in the FNAF 6 fire. (Reminder that she didn't have any idea abt him being straight up evil)

- Anytime she had to spend time with Clara. She didn't care for her and neither did her mom in her eyes.

- Before their 10th birthday she wouldn't really say she had any remarkable memories involving Evan, but afterwards she hated thinking about him. But still she became devastated by his death.

- Not being able to go to school, she missed hanging out with Charlie. She also hated how her schoolmates started acting weirdly around her after Evan's death.

- Dying. She hated that too, she absolutely *hated* finding out she was stuck underground. Rotting away in that place alone absolutely haunted her.

- She also hated being kicked out of Ennard.

- Finding out that her dad was a horrible person.

Positive/Negative Memories: Evan Afton (does bro even have positive memories??)

- Surprisingly enough, he has a few!

- Anytime with his father. Remember he was being manipulated and shit but still, William comforted and loved him in a world where people thought of him as a freak.

- Fredbear, he loved that toy with all his heart. In fact he loved all his toys and plushies and stuff, they were his friends and he believed that 🤧🤧 (Well not like he had much of a choice, he didn't have human friends)

- He also liked being home while his siblings were off at school, Mike and Liz have a strict 'don't go into my room' policy, so of course Evan was super curious and often broke into their rooms to use their things. He loved playing with Liz's toys and drawing in her unused coloring books and loved playing with Mike's old toys and reading his comics.

- Also, Charlie! She wasn't exactly his friend but it's not like they hated eachother at all. Neutral memories are positive in his mind, at least he didn't cry during those.

- Oh boy. Where do we start for negative memories?

- His entire life. I guess? Being unknownly manipulated by your dad your whole life, being bullied by your brother (and eventually sister, although it's not like you bonded well with her anyway), usually not acknowledged by your mom, totally sucks. And also dying and still being mistreated after death.

- His school days didn't fare much better! Being bullied and ostracized constantly and having staff turn a blind eye everyday. Until eventually he fought back and that's when they stepped in, to punish him for not wanting to deal with the abuse anymore and letting his bullies get away with it.

- He also didn't like getting pulled from school and locked away in his house constantly. It's not like he liked going outside anyway, but this made his paranoia and anxiety worse.

- anything with animatronics, his fear developed from seeing William accidentally get springlocked and almost dying when he was younger. Now he thinks any and all robots will eat him and kill him.

- Being undead. Hey! Maybe dying and being trapped as a robot is traumatizing!

- This only applies to the PBTA AU, but coming back from the dead. His afterlife already sucked you don't have to bring him back to possess Gregory as a vessel, William 🤦🤦

Uh, I don't really think I listed enough, maybe adding 300 more words will do the trick!! /j, hope you enjoy the very long response! (I'm not sure if I did properly answer your question, I think I just used it as an excuse to lore dump again 😭😭)

[pandoraolivine]

All For Me

A FNAF fic I've been working on that follows the story of Michael Afton from the Fall Fest Fire, to his greatest regret until his second death at the end of Pizzeria Simulator. I intend on including Vanessa A. into the story after the Sister Location time skip as well. I'll just be posting the first chapter here since it'll be a fairly hefty project, but if you like it, feel free to continue with it on my Ao3 account below! I just posted the second chapter, which is my interpretation of the Fall Fest Fire.

I'll crosspost the disclaimer from there as well:

This is my interpretation of the story relying mostly off the games, movie and graphic novels. I work a full time job, I ain't reading all those books. You may not agree with the decisions I make and that's chill. The sequence of events I have chosen is what I feel is best from a thematic perspective, so I might make some logical leaps for things I may not entirely back up with evidence, but think it sounds best for a story. For example, these are my two biggest:

1. Cassidy will be the Crying Child, Golden Freddy, and the 5th MCI child. Do I entirely back this theory based on evidence? No, but 1. I like the name 2. It makes the story cleaner having one spirit attached to Golden Freddy and 3. I like the implications it means for William's motivations, which I will be exploring later on. I really liked the YouTube channel Duel Process Theory's interpretation of it, so I will be taking inspiration from it, with my own spin on it.

2. I am making Henry and William brothers, so Henry will be the Afton childrens' uncle. Is there any evidence backing this? Absolutely not. But I want the themes of this to be centered around brotherhood and family dynamics/cycles of trauma, and I like the stakes it has. Plus, I do find it odd how attention has been drawn to the fact that Henry's last name is unknown (Emily is a stretch, and then also only in the books related to Charlie and personally I think it's a middle name)

This will be all for this disclaimer for now. It's ok if you don't agree with the decisions I make, just know I made this basing this off my own research into the series and my opinions on what is the most narratively satisfying. For a story-telling purpose I may make choices that are flakey at best evidence wise-but I'm mostly focused on exploring characters, their relationship and motivations, so that will take priority for me opposed to dissecting this endless lore to make everything 100% correct (if that's even possible at this point, let's be real). Thanks for listening to my TED Talk. I hope you like it 🖤

WC: 3,823

🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑

“Smile, Michael. The newspaper is coming to write an article about us, and they'll be taking pictures.” His father ordered as he combed his hair using the backroom mirror. Michael felt the urge to grumble, but refrained, not wanting to catch an earful from his father. He crossed his arms and rolled his eyes away from view. He hated the pizzeria, forced family gatherings, and being the center of attention; now he was forced to do all three at once.

Elizabeth rocked the chair she sat in from her uncontrollable enthusiasm, her strawberry blonde hair tied pristinely back with a red bow. His mother placed her hands on the toddler's shoulders to settle her, but it was no use-it was impossible to tell his sister what to do once she had made up her mind. His father pulled away from the mirror and set his comb on the table, assessing the family before him with a hint of sourness. Despite having coordinated the entire family's outfits and hairstyles, he remained dissatisfied.

“Are they gonna play the games?” Cassidy asked, his feet swaying as they dangled in the chair he sat in across from Elizabeth. Michael sighed, the smacking of his gum growing louder.

“No, they are not here to play games. They're here to make us the next best family-friendly restaurant in town.” His father corrected, straightening his back as he cleared his throat. Cassidy’s head drooped and he ran his hands along his golden Fredbear plush. “A lot is riding on this. Do not disappoint me. Smile, do not speak unless prompted, and Michael-stop slouching.”

Michael rose his shoulders, blowing a pink bubble from his lips. His father's eyes flashed and he pointed his finger to the nearest trash can. “Gum out, now.” His father demanded. He did what was asked, taking a deep breath to withhold his tongue.

“Now then, shall we?” His father announced, his hands clasped neatly together. Elizabeth giggles as she hurries out of her seat, his mother swiftly seizing her hand to prevent her from bolting. Cassidy slides down, his eyes glued to the floor as he drags his way over to Michael. They exit the room, but Cassidy lingers in Michael's shadow, much to his irritation as his heels are repeatedly trampled on. As they hurried down the hall, the customary ensemble of video game blasters, children screeching, and cheesy pop music grew louder, as did the foul stench of pizza. They entered into the main game area, the rapidly flickering lights distorting Michael's vision. He struggled to fathom his own thoughts given how loud the music was as brightly clothed children scurried about; he could only stand to hear Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” so many times in the restaurant before he started to go mad. Elizabeth squirmed out of her mother's hands and dashed towards the similarly-aged brunette approaching them.

“You're late, Henry.” His father criticized, his arms crossed.

“I believe I'm right on time. Not everyone is as obsessive as you, Will.” His Uncle Henry laughed, scratching his dirty blonde mullet as he let go of his young daughter, Charlie's, hand to pull his brother into a reluctant side hug. The two toddlers forcefully embraced and filled the air with their laughter. His father’s eyebrow twitched at the insult.

“Settle down, Will. The cameras will catch your frown if you're not careful.” His mother cooed, her voice soothing even Michael's own nerves. “Is that them now?”

Several persons dressed in business attire gathered at the front doors wielding cameras and notepads. His father tensed, donning a charming grin as he marched towards the entrance. His family followed suit, with Elizabeth and Charlie skipping close to one another (as they always were), his mother next to his father, Uncle Henry on his father's opposite side, and Michael behind his father. He felt a tug on his sleeve, and he peered down at his little brother. Their gazes locked, Cassidy squeezing his plush while his feet shuffled. Michael sighed, playfully messing his brother's perfectly groomed hair with his hand. Cassidy giggled and pushed against his teenage brother's legs.

“Quiet, do not forget what I told you. And again, don't forget to smile.” His father snapped, his perfected mask slipping momentarily before he picked it back up. He opened the doors and pleasantly addressed the crew, “Welcome to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza!”

Michael thankfully blocked out most of the interview for his own self preservation. He was following his father's instructions, after all, and his father certainly had no gripes praising himself and the business he and his uncle had created to no end. They moved from Britain to Hurricane, Utah, the middle of nowhere, in 1975, just a year before Cassidy was born. Though he barely remembers his time before Utah, himself only being five when they moved, he's at least certain it was better than here. He despised this town and his father's business. His entire life had been consumed by it; anything else deemed irrelevant to his father. All he has ever known was ridiculous carnivals, half-cooked pizza, and forever being dubbed at school as the son of the man who runs the pizza joint. No matter how hard he fought, he never seemed to be able to form an identity that wasn't attached to his father, and it didn't help that anyone who saw them couldn't help but remark how similar their features were.

It wasn't unbearable at first, having been just yearly fall festivals continuing the business that his father and uncle had started in Britain. Sure, he didn't love it, but could tolerate it in small doses. Since the opening of Fredbear’s Family Diner in 1979, Michael's life was swept away by costumes and animatronics. No matter where his eyes rested, there always seemed to be a bear staring at him. It only got substantially worse once the company received investors, resulting in the establishment of Fazbear Entertainment and the recent opening of their new location, Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. The business was his father's most beloved child whom he devoted himself fully to at the expense of bonding with his biological children. Michael didn't care; he’d rather not be in the center of attention. Or, at least, that was what he told himself.

“But, I couldn't do this without my beloved wife and children. I do this for them, and hope to create a fun and family-friendly place not only for everyone, but my own children as well. I make sure to keep the mind of a father when thinking of safety, and the mind of a child to keep the place fresh and exciting.” His father sung his own praises, and Michael was brought back to consciousness with his father's arm aggressively looped around his shoulders. He forced a grin on cue per his father's many reminders.

“We think this place will be a smash hit! Can we get one more picture of the family? It'll look great as the heading.” A woman holding a notepad asked. His father instantly expressed an “of course” and subtly signaled for his family to gather in their practiced formation. His father and mother, of course, stood close together, her hands on his shoulders and Henry on the other side of her. Charlie was wrapped firmly in her father's arms, her being his only primary relative after his wife died during labor. Elizabeth stood proudly in front of her parents, adorning the biggest and most brilliant smile in the family. Michael was on his father's right side, peering slightly behind him, with Cassidy next to him. He was posing when he felt a weak grip latch onto his hand. Knowing it was his little brother, he squeezed tightly.

“Say cheese!” The photographer exclaimed, finger at the ready. Michael cracked a smile as wide as he was capable of, though it wasn't much, and his sister chanted "cheese" the most passionately. A flash struck his eyes and he instantly massaged them once he confirmed the picture was over. After remaining stationary for as much time as she could, Elizabeth charged towards the games, followed by her mother with an exhausted sigh as she wrestled to wrangle the unruly toddler. The news crew thanked his father for his time, with his father quick to say the pleasure was all his, and left the pizzeria. When the doors shut with their leave, his father faced his remaining sons, his features darkened as they stood within the pizzeria walls.

“Could you have at least attempted to look interested during the interview, Michael? We are a family welcoming other families to our pizzeria, and you did not look like it.” His father criticized, gripping his eldest son close to him by his shoulder. Unable to meet his father’s piercing gaze, Michael sank his head, bangs covering his face. He was then released and pushed back, catching himself with his foot. “And you, Cassidy. You looked scared the whole time, I'm sure it put the reporters off. You better have tried to look better for the picture, or else no one will want to come here because of you.”

“Hey, leave him alone, he gets nervous around that many people he doesn't know.” Michael asserted, lifting his head. Cassidy's arms curled securely around Michael's elbow, his face burrowing into his skin and his dark eyes growing red. His father lurched forward before twitching, eyes surveying the surroundings. He then took a deep breath and fixed his hunched posture.

“Take your brother home.” Was all his father said, then he stepped away further into the pizzeria. The knots in Michael's stomach began to untangle and he released a sigh of relief. He ducked his head down to his brother, whose eyes glistened with tears, and nudged him out the doors.

Michael didn't mind the walk back from the pizzeria given that it wasn't particularly extensive or perilous. It was primarily enclosed by trees and he liked hurling rocks at squirrels he spotted. However, today was different, albeit not uncommon, as his brother filled the air with wheezes and the scraping of his feet against gravel.

“You know, you gotta stop being such a crybaby. The kids at school will make fun of you for it.” Michael declared, scratching his own curly brown hair with his free hand. Cassidy sniffled, his beloved plush dragging along the ground. “And for that toy, if they aren't already. It'd probably be best to get rid of it.”

“ No !” Cassidy immediately blubbered, clutching the bear close to his chest as he choked on his own tears. Michael groaned. A devious idea sparked, and he yanked the golden plush from his brother's hands, much to his despair. He then held it in the air above his little brother's grasp.

“I think Fredbear should go back to the woods! It is where he's from, after all.” He sneered, mimicking a throw towards the neighboring patch of forest. Cassidy grabbed hold of his brother, wailing as he fought to retrieve the plush. Michael cackled, backing away as his brother chased him in a circle.

“Stop it, Mike! It's not funny! Give him back!” Cassidy cried, hopping as high as he could. Once Michael noticed his tears stopped surging and his breath back to normal, he chuckled as he lightly tossed the plush towards the trees. Cassidy yelped and stumbled towards it. Michael would eventually think of a better plan to get rid of it. He knew his brother struggled to make friends-his Fredbear plush being his only one-but he would never make any friends lugging around a stuffed animal at nearly seven years old. It was practically social suicide. Cassidy tucked the plush firmly in his arms the moment he gathered it and glared at his older brother. “You're so mean, Mike!”

Cassidy stomped back to Mike and they continued their walk home, now only emitting a few sniffles every now and then as he vigorously rubbed his nose with the back of his arm. Michael stuck his hands into his jean pockets before he spoke, “You know, Father just gets weird about Fazbear. He was just stressed out. Don't worry about it too much.”

“He said they won't have anyone come cause of me.” Cassidy whimpered, his feet kicking the gravel.

“If anything, people won't come because of the shitty pizza. Definitely not because of anything you did.” Michael reassured, prompting a giggle from his brother.

“I don't think the pizza is that shitty.” Cassidy mimicked. Michael shoved his brother's head forward.

“I can say that word, you can't. You're not old enough.” Michael fussed. His brother slapped his hand away.

“No fair! You're not an adult or anything, you're only thirteen.” Cassidy pouted, crossing his arms. Michael snickered as he rammed his shoulder into him.

“Well, when you're thirteen, you can say it.”

His father was working late again, not to Michael's surprise. Though the pizzeria closed at 9 pm, his father would often stay until midnight some nights, maybe even later. His mother had returned home with Elizabeth around 7, placing a box of leftover pizza on the table for dinner then putting the droopy-eyed toddler to bed afterwards. Michael was revolted at the idea of pizza for the third time this week, so he barely picked off some of the toppings to call his dinner. A boy could only handle so much soggy crust in one week, though he’s had enough for his entire lifetime at this point.

With Elizabeth asleep, his mother retreated to her bedroom, as she often did at this time, relying on Michael to watch Cassidy. His father had yet to come home, and neither he nor Cassidy were tired due to it being a Friday night, so they camped in the living room with a pile of blankets and cheese puffs to make up for not being able to stomach their dinner. Michael skimmed their VHS collection to select a movie for the night.

“I don't wanna watch a scary movie. They give me bad dreams.” Cassidy pouted, kicking his feet underneath the blanket. Michael shook his head.

“It's called exposure therapy. We gotta kick this crybaby attitude outta you.” Michael responded, his tongue pushing against his teeth in contemplation as he pondered the horror movie selection. His brother huffed.

“Fine. Can we watch Night of the Living Dead ?” Cassidy pleaded, it being the least frightening movie in their collection. Michael rolled his eyes.

“ No , I hate zombie movies. They're not even scary.” Michael groaned, then placed his index finger and thumb on his chin. “I think you can handle Friday the 13th. ”

“Is it really scary?” Cassidy whispered, pulling the blanket close to cover his neck. Michael shrugged.

“It's not that bad. Besides, it's not like it's real.” Michael assured, inserting the tape into the VHS player. When he saw the end credits appear on the screen and realized he hadn't rolled back the tape after his last watch, he snarled and set it to rewind at maximum speed. Knowing it would reveal the ending to Cassidy, he stood up, and snatched a pillow that his brother was laying on. “You can't look or it'll spoil it.”

“Hey! That's my pillow!” Cassidy shouted before he was promptly silenced by Michael shoving the pillow into his face. Cassidy thrashes, clutching the pillow tightly as he tries to wrestle it away from his face. “Not nice! I can't breathe!”

“If you couldn't breathe, you wouldn't be talking right now.” Michael remarked as a matter-of-fact. He forced his brother down further, glancing over his shoulder at the tv to check the status. Cassidy manages to claw his way out, dramatically gasping as his face hits the air. Michael, knowing the tape is still rewinding, cooks up a malicious plan once he spots his Foxy mask underneath the coffee table. He ducks below it and ties the mask on. “Well, I tried to do this the easy way. This is your fault.”

In a burst, Michael pops out from below the table, arms spread wide as he roars. Cassidy shrieks and swiftly retreats beneath the blanket. “No, Mike! You know I hate Foxy!”

“ Arrrggg ! I do not be knowing this Mike ye speak of, but I, Foxy, Captain of the Seven Seas, have come to take ye eyeball with me hook!” Michael proclaimed in his thickest pirate accent. “Don't ye want to wear an eye patch like me?”

“ No! I! Don't! ” Cassidy cried, curling himself as deeply into the couch as possible. Michael maniacally cackles, yanking at the blanket while Cassidy fusses and kicks back at him.

Once the movie reached the beginning, Michael ceased his brother's torment and slid his mask off. He laughs as he tosses the mask aside, taking hold of his brother's blanket. “Alright, Foxy’s gone. You can come out now, you wuss.”

Cassidy hesitantly peeked his eyes over the blanket to ensure his safety before fully poking his head out. He weakly shoves Michael as he whines, “Not funny!”

The two brothers nestled into their movie-watching pit, Michael wrapping an arm around his brother so Cassidy had something to cling to as the movie flashed frightful scenes. There were certainly moments Michael had underestimated how terrifying they could possibly be to Cassidy, so he made sure to cover his eyes during them. Small steps , he told himself.

As the movie ended, Cassidy’s eyes were bulging out of his head from shock rather than fear. “ It was the mom the whole time? ” He exclaimed while jerking upward. Michael smirked.

“Yep. Pretty cool twist, huh?”

“I don't get it. He's pretty big and can beat her up. Why does he do what she says?” Cassidy asked, his hands clutching his favorite golden bear. Michael sank into the back of the couch.

“Parents can have some pretty powerful control over their kids sometimes.” Michael stated, fighting back a yawn. His stomach jolted as he heard his dog, Sparky, bark, followed by a familiar sound of tires on gravel. He immediately rushed to his feet. “He's home! Hurry, get the bowl and blankets.”

They cleaned up the couch like it was an Olympic sport. By the time they heard keys at the door, Michael was shoving his brother down the hall, pulling him up by his shirt when he would trip on the blanket. They rounded the corner as the door opened then slammed. Michael ensured his brother was in his room, shutting the door behind him, then glued to the walls as he observed his father's movement.

“Blasted Henry! He thinks he's some kind of genius, like we didn't build this business together!” His father hollered, though there remained some hint of his renown class. The ghastly businessman threw his luggage onto the entry table, retreating to the kitchen towards his parent's bedroom. “I deserve just as much, if not more praise than him. He would be nothing without me. This was all my idea, after all.”

Michael peered around the corner to make sure the coast was clear, then tiptoed across the hall to his bedroom door. His fingers managed to brush the doorknob, turning slightly, when his ears were violated by his father, “Michael!”

The teenager winced, his hand curling to a ball. His gut danced as he peeled away from the door and slowly dragged himself towards his father, sweat building along his hairline. His chest heaved with anticipation and he had to remind himself to breathe. The tall, slender man sulked over their couch, nails clawing into the fabric of the backing. Michael avoided eye contact, arms at his side.

“What have I told you about eating on the couch? You've left crumbs everywhere, it's disgusting!” His father reprimanded, firmly grasping the nearest pillow only to shove it back down. “First you ruin the interview, then this? Can't you do anything right? It's like you don't even try to care.”

Michael tucked his head in like a turtle to its shell, grabbing his elbow. “I was gonna clean it up in the morning.” He responded, practically a whisper. His father scoffed and stepped back, running his fingers through his dark brown hair. His hand pressed between his eyebrows as he shook his head.

“I swear, I don't know why I bother to come home at all.” His father remarked, ending in a brief chuckle as he turned away from Michael. “Clean this up. I better not see any traces in the morning.”

Michael stood still with lead for legs while his father stormed away, thrashing his head as he muttered inaudibly under his breath. The teenager's body loosened as the tension crumbled, his face hot and palms clammy. He meticulously combed for every crumb he could spot, checking carefully not to leave any traces of Cassidy and his presence in the living room. Lastly, he gathered his Foxy mask and hurried back to his room.

He shut his door behind him softly, ensuring the knob was twisted as he closed it before letting go. Flinging his mask towards the closet, he released a frustrated grunt, mindful as to not be too loud. He threw himself onto his bed, which paralleled the window, and his hands latched onto the fabric over his chest. Can't you do anything right?

He hissed, sitting up as he formed a fist and started to punch the nearest pillow repeatedly. In his fit of rage, he launched the pillow against the wall, lightly panting afterwards. His doorknob clicked, and he was quick to lay down, his body facing away from the door towards the window. The door creaked as it inched open, and Michael did his best impression of being asleep to avoid further confrontation.

“Mike? Are you awake?” Cassidy whispered. Michael debated answering, gritting his teeth in thought, then huffed exasperatingly.

“What do you want?” Michael hounded as he rotated to face his brother. Cassidy’s hand rattled the doorknob, illuminated by the warm street lamp outside Michael's window, his Fredbear plush tucked into his armpit. He swayed the door slightly as his feet reluctantly shifted.

“Can I sleep with you? I'm scared.” Cassidy mumbled, his head sinking into his shoulders. Michael turned back away.

“You were fine during the movie earlier.” Michael reminded him while clicking his tongue. His little brother scratched the back of his shin with his other foot.

“Yeah, cause you were there.” Cassidy confessed. Michael sighed, tilting his head towards him.

“Fine.” Michael caved, scooting closer to the window. Cassidy giggled as he shut the door and slid into the bed under the blanket. They settled, Michael still facing away, though able to feel the slight warmth at his back. After a few moments of silence, Michael relived today’s moments of his father's disappointment, grinding his teeth. He was interrupted by a poke at his shoulder by a tiny finger.

“Dad isn't mad at you, he's just stressed about Fazbear stuff.” Cassidy murmured, half asleep. Michael bit his lip and dug his nails into his pillow.

“Thanks, Cass.”

[royal-confessions]

“What really bothers me about Meghan and Harry's Netflix documentary it's the fact that have to bring Kate in this mess. They know very well she is not allowed to respond or comment back. Kate is already receiving so much hate online and she has been under public scrutiny for over 20 years (including watching her own children receiving death threats after that Oprah shit show!) and instead of respecting her privacy Meghan and Harry will reveal every private moment they spend with her or insinuate that William married her because she suites that environment. Maybe Harry should address Andrew's scandal instead of trying to hurt Kate that treated him like a brother before Meghan came out to save Harry from his evil family or whatever narrative they are trying to sell. In my best impression of Will Smiths angry voice: "Keep her name out of your mouth".” - Submitted by Anonymous

“Meghan and Harry’s obsession with Catherine is so bizarre. Meghan didn’t want to play second fiddle, but that was Harry’s sister. The fact that he’s letting Meghan/their comms team hang her out to dry makes me feel truly sorry for her. She’s the least culpable person in this mess, all because she wasn’t buying what Meghan was selling.” - Submitted by Anonymous

“I am shocked how much Harry plays into the narrative of the media in the new docu episodes. Instead of claiming the articles were wrong or brushing them off for their ridiculous claims, he actually doubles down on some of them by pointing to kate instead. doesn't look great.” - Submitted by Anonymous

“The wave of hate for the Princess of Wales following H&M’s Netflix series is insane but not shocking. Everyone saw this coming a mile away, but Victim Meghan just had to fan the flames. She’s a hammer calling herself a nail.” - Submitted by Anonymous

[hello-there-world]

hoo boy. thought about Cassidy and William again in the Rewrite. so uh, rambles incoming:

so like. i've mentioned it before on my blog (to my buddy Maxx, specifically), but to give the tl;dr: William does genuinely care for his children, but still sucks as a person. he'd even argue that anything he did that hurt his kids (though he'd probably get offended if you said that he was in any way hurting his kids...despite the fact that he Was, in fact, doing that) was for their own good. he effectively had the thought of "they'll understand/thank me when they're older." like, William was INCREDIBLY paranoid that, if he wasn't careful enough, his kids would die (hence why he, for lack of a better term, snapped after Liz died). Cassidy, on the other hand, thinks his father hates him (because he did. y'know. kill Cassidy and his friends), and Cassidy hates him "right back." he thinks the feeling of hatred he feels for his father is mutual. it's why he got even More pissed off when, in his eyes, William "pretended" to care when Cassidy (understandably, might i add) was angry and vengeful as a ghost. William doesn't understand why Cassidy "changed" (went from a quiet and anxious kid to being angry and violent), when...in a way, Cassidy had always been that way. Cassidy can hold grudges for ages, he could be petty, and he had a LOT of underlying trauma and anger that was bubbling under the surface. i think that learning what had actually happened to his friends, as well as his father killing him, broke the dam. Cassidy doesn't know how else to handle all of those emotions, so that's why he effectively lashes out as a ghost. those emotions need somewhere to go, and uh. i'm pretty sure a mostly sheltered seven-year-old doesn't know a lot of good coping strategies for anger and trauma. just saying.

William, due to all of this, thinks that UCN is, effectively, a major temper tantrum from Cassidy (if a bit terrifying...and painful), and that, eventually, Cassidy would get it all out of his system, tire himself out, you get the idea. um. Problem: Cassidy, effectively, wants some form of regret from William. some sign that he actually cared about Cassidy, that he felt bad about his murder. and while William does, in fact, have some regrets about Cassidy's murder, he's been trying so hard to justify it to himself that it practically drowns out that regret. so it's...a horrible cycle. Cassidy just wants some sign that William regrets what he did, so that he can move on and rest (because Cassidy really, truly, is tired), while William would rather get tortured over and over than admit any regret.

but that's not the only thing i thought of.

so like...William's paranoid about anything bad happening to his kids. that INCLUDES Cassidy. and since Cassidy's the youngest, obviously he has a...heightened sense of concern for him. to make matters worse, Cassidy has horrible anxiety issues (that CERTAINLY aren't partially William's fault, no siree), and Cassidy is "sensitive," as some would say. a "crybaby," even. and William, who sees some of himself in his youngest, worried about his son potentially getting bullied for things out of his control (and God, Alex really isn't helping those worries), decides to homeschool him, keep him close, make sure that, if Cassidy is out of his sight for any extended period of time, that he knows where he is, and that he'll be safe (it's why he's more fine leaving Cassidy at home with his siblings or letting him go to Fredbear's or Freddy's unattended, than, say...letting him have a sleepover at Kelsey and Andrew's house).

meanwhile, Cassidy wants to go to school, despite his worries. wants to prove he can take care of himself. wants to live a normal life, despite everything.

it makes him wonder...why can his siblings go to school? why is he the only one who has to stay home?

why is he the exception?

of course, Elizabeth, who was...mostly oblivious to how bad things really were in her house, thought Cassidy was lucky. he got to stay home all the time, he didn't have to sit through boring lessons, he had more than like, half an hour to actually have fun.

but Cassidy? he wanted to go to school, like his siblings did. because, well, that's what normal kids did. they went to school, right?

so, he tried to gently convince his father that he'd be fine; he had friends going to school who could keep an eye on him! Kelsey and Baker would be going to Kindergarten, and he knew them!! maybe he could try school out for a bit? just to see what it was like? i-if he didn't like it, then his dad could homeschool him! shouldn't he be allowed to at least try?

but, William never budged. the closest Cassidy ever got to convincing him was when William said he'd "think about it," but it was obvious that he really didn't.

all Cassidy ever wanted was to at least have the opportunity to live a normal life, to try to be like his siblings. to not feel like he was some fragile thing that needed to be coddled.

but he never got that chance.

Cassidy died before he could get that chance.

Augh, I love this. Poor Cassidy, he should get to be mad about it... and he is, but his dad just thinks he needs to chill out about it...

[teecupangel]

I come with my own Hurt Desmond Ask: What if Desmond had an eidetic memory? He'd remember everything in specific detail, from combat forms to how to build bombs to the horrible deaths of his ancestor's families... Just saying, reliving the lives of his ancestor's in the animus is bad enough, but with a memory like that he'd remember things so much more clear and for a really long time.

If Desmond had an eidetic memory before he was in the Animus, he would have had a different childhood. This might even be a Desmond that managed to achieve and go beyond William Miles’ expectations.

In that kind of scenario, it would be easy for Desmond to be broken in a different way: loneliness.

By having an eidetic memory, he would remember everything that he sees and hears which includes how different Bill treats him compare to the fathers of the other children on the Farm.

From there, it would be easy for Desmond to fail pry to being emotionless, trying not to think about such thing and focusing on pleasing Bill. Maybe when he was a child, it was a way for him to try and receive the same warmth he could only see from the other children. Perhaps he had received it once or twice before from Bill when he had been quite young.

But the older he got, the more Bill treated him less as a son and more as a soldier.

And Desmond knows it. It’s hard not to when he can remember every interaction he has with Bill, after all.

Things only gets harder once he starts reliving his ancestors’ life in the Animus.

It was the easiest with Altaïr. They had similar upbringings… too similar, in fact, that it makes Desmond uncomfortable how easy it was for the Bleeding Effect to mix their memories together. But Altaïr was the easiest to endure of the three of them. Even though they had similar upbringings, it was easy for Desmond to accept his memories.

But Ezio and Ratonhnhaké:ton…

They were hard to accept.

Feeling the tightness in his chest as he remembered the love Ezio received from his family, reminding Desmond of the Farm…

Feeling his lungs about to collapse as the memories of Ratonhnhaké:ton’s mother would come to him in inopportune time, reminding Desmond of the cold detached way his own mother had been…

Haytham Kenway…

And then he started to remember Altaïr’s memories that he didn’t even access in the Animus thanks to the Synch Nexus.

The kind smile of Umar…

The warmth he felt as he held his oldest son in his arms for the first time…

Desmond wanted to hate them.

It would have been so much easier if he could just hate them.

Hate would such a kinder emotion to have…

Than the painful desire to feel such warmth be directed at him.

Not as a memory of someone else that was as clear as his.

But his own memory…

[blapis-blazuli]

Now listen up

I am obsessed with this man. He's got so many weird details about him and I love (almost) all of them.

First, Slim's original concept fucks. Being an undead cattle rustler out for bull's blood due to being trampled to death is fascinating. I don't know how long it took before someone at Disney cried "too dark" at that backstory, but I'm surprised it was even in consideration given the mostly lighter tone of the final product. More than that, Disney could've had a literal ghost rider among their villains! Had that movie been any good, he might've joined Disney's popular villain lineup, or maybe we could've even gotten a boss battle with him in a Kingdom Hearts game. That's not what we ended up with due to Reasons, though, which is a bit disappointing, but not much you can do about that.

Anyway, onto what we did get.

Before Slim makes his formal appearance, he's only seen in silhouette, on a wanted poster, then in disguise, and is finally fully revealed when he rides in on a bison. He is huge, and I don't mean because he's fat, I mean he's a good deal taller than most of the other characters. He's set up to be someone threatening, to be taken seriously.

And then comes his yodeling villain song.

The moment it's revealed that Slim's yodeling can hypnotize cows, the music picks up and there's a literal rainbow of colors for the rest of his number. As I said, he's a big man, but he's also light enough on his feet to dance and jump on and off any of these cows while not missing a beat in his performance. When the men who got knocked out beforehand come running after him, he doesn't threaten them, he just throws his spurs at a precarious bit of rocky landscape with such force that it falls and blocks the pathway to him. That's more badass than if he did draw his gun on them.

Actually, I wanna talk about the music he performs. The movie's set in Wyoming during 1889, so obviously Slim's not gonna be yodeling A Cruel Angel's Thesis or whatever. They could’ve come up with something original for him to yodel to (which, I mean, they kinda do), but they chose music by composers such as Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, which aren't exactly things you'd associate with the wild west. The obvious out-of-universe answer for why those pieces were chosen is "they existed before the year this is set in, and they're recognized even today," but we've no in-universe answer for why he chose them or how he knows them. Regardless, it's kinda amazing that he knows them well enough to yodel them.

His lair in Echo Mine has an area with some nice furniture in it. How'd this shit get there? Who knows. Anyway, this is where he reveals that he disguises himself to buy up the properties owned by the people he's stolen cattle from, which includes his former employers. Why doesn't he work for any of them anymore? He never directly says. According to him, they didn't "appreciate [his] talents," which means they probably hated his yodeling. I don't blame him for being mad about that because why the hell would you tell someone that? If he's doing the job right and well without hurting anyone, then who cares? The idea that he's moved on to use a skill against the former bosses who didn't like it is kinda great though.

(Side note: a nice, small detail about this part of the lair is the faded branding on the map, which shows that Slim has been doing this for quite a while. Shame that it's not more consistent from shot to shot though. I can't take credit for noticing this myself: my partner pointed it out after I posted a screenshot as a joke on Discord. She's so cool.)

Slim doesn't like it when someone calls his yodeling "singing": he thinks singing is beneath him given the disdain in his voice when he says that's what birds, saloon gals, and children do. No, he considers what he does to be an art. He's not entirely wrong, though: it is an impressive skill, especially since he can yodel to certain classical pieces like The William Tell Overture, Ode to Joy, Ride of the Valkyries, and The 1812 Overture. (Also Yankee Doodle, because, well, American. Also maybe Largo al factotum from The Barber of Seville, but I'm unsure of that one: unlike Slim, I am no classical music expert.) There's no need for him to be quite as defensive about it as he is, but his nephews calling it "singing," saying that might be why his bosses didn't like him, and calling yodeling "silly" is enough to make him get violently angry at them. Man's got issues.

Oh yeah, Slim has nephews. They're triplets named Gil, Phil, and Bill, and they're collectively known as The Willies. Unlike their uncle, they're all blond and thin, so god knows what Slim's unnamed and unmentioned sibling must look like.

Slim also has a bison named Junior. I'm not fond of the whole "he's too fat to ride anything else" angle of that, but I do like that they chose an animal that people are constantly told to not mess with because of how dangerous they are. Slim's not afraid of him: he's got this creature trained to listen when he calls for him. I can only guess that Slim is the one who named Junior, so maybe he also raised him. It would explain why Junior appears annoyed with him but still puts up with having Slim jump on his back and the like.

You know what Slim doesn't have though? Kids. Putting together the disdain in his voice when he mentions children, his seemingly low opinion of saloon girls, his big villain number turning the landscape into a rainbow of colors, the queer history of cowboys, and the prevalence of queer-coding in Disney villains... well, I think you get where I'm going with that.

Moving onto his disguise. Don't ask me why nobody figured out this was Slim sooner, given that his wanted poster shows they have the same facial hair, bushy eyebrows, and bags under the eyes. My best guess is because it's in black-and-white and he's in a different outfit, and unless someone's encountered him before they probably don't know what he sounds like. Anyway, His alias is Yancy O'del (yeah, I know), but the one sign we see him with has both "Mister" and "Esquire" in there.

Having looked this up, I learned a few things. First, having "Mister" and "Esquire" together isn't something you're supposed to do, yet nobody in-universe caught this. Second, in the United States, "Esquire" is a title only used for lawyers, so maybe that's why nobody questioned him - fear of a sudden lawsuit for something or other. Third, "Yancy" was not really a name used back then, or at least not a common one. Why'd he choose that name (besides for the pun)? I dunno.

(Also, where the hell does Junior stay whenever he goes to one of these auctions? The world may never know.)

Slim's final defeat at the hooves/wings/what-have-you of several farm animals is pretty pathetic, even by silly Disney villain standards, but I got to give him credit for not wanting to give up even after his disguise is (literally) blown and while he's stuck in a train's smokestack. I have no idea how he planned on getting out of that one, and whatever it was most likely wouldn't have worked anyway, but I admire his refusal to back down in the face of obvious defeat.

Even in his very last scene we see him struggling with the ropes they tied around him while he's carted off to jail. He does not give up.

Anyway, here he is picking up Small Black Market Dealer Steve Buscemi one-handed like it's nothing. (His name is Wesley, but Slim keeps calling him Mister Weasley. That's right, this movie used that joke before Frozen did.)

And here he is lifting three full-grown cows off the ground before tying them up faster than they can react to it. (The cows have names too, but this post ain't about them.)

He uses his left hand to write and aim his gun and seems just as adept with using it as much as his right, which is cool. (There's no frame with both his face and the gun, so you'll have to trust me on that.)

Speaking of his hands

Look at this huge-ass man and his pinkies, I can't with this dude

Look at that smile, sir, who gave you the right

If there were a whole movie about just these two, I'd watch it, I won't even lie.

I've gone on about this guy for probably too long by this point, so to sum it all up:

Babygirl

[that-darn-clown]

boy oh boy i need to ramble about Rewrite!Willry because Christ it is literally insane. like this is a combination of toxic yaoi and complicated yaoi, JESUS-

so. we'll start from the beginning and work our way to The Fire:

so. of course we've gotta start with them Experimenting With Their Sexualities. because that's where it all started technically. sure, there were...feelings before, but y'know.

so y'know like that one meme of the two people lying in bed, but one is just chilling and smoking, while the other one looks like they're questioning their entire life up until this point? that was Henry and Will after they [REDACTED]. Henry's the chill guy, William is the guy who's questioning his life choices.

while Henry still has some Feelings for Will, he leaves the situation with more knowledge of himself (he is Pansexual) and is able to be normal about his still lingering feelings for his roommate. William, on the other hand, Also learned about himself (he's Bisexual) and is also being Normal about those Feelings (< he is not, in fact, normal about it).

they both go about their lives, getting married, having children, running their business together, everything's normal.

...well, except for the fact that William still clearly loved him and could Not be normal about that fact. in the 70s. but y'know.

then Claire dies...and things change. and not for the better.

Henry can tell that whatever Will's doing, it's hurting the kids. not physically, though: he never sees bruises or any signs of anything physical. not yelling at them either. all he knows is that whatever William's doing, it's bad.

but he doesn't really know what to do about it. William would get pissed off and deny any implication that he was hurting his children. but Henry also can't take Will's kids away from him, that would likely only make things worse, considering that the man just lost his fucking wife.

he's stuck between a rock and a hard place. the best he can do is try to comfort William and be a shoulder to cry on for the kids. it's why he never asks Mike if William allowed him to come over and stay the night; the answer is usually a no.

and...well, besides all of that, William practically clings to Henry, like he's scared he'll lose him too. Henry just assumes that it's anxiety born out of grief and not anything serious (Annabeth screaming into a pillow in the background).

when Anna and him finally divorce, William's behavior gets more...noticeable. like, enough so that Henry can't deny it anymore. but it's not like Henry can really do much to reciprocate these feelings (it is. the 80s).

Liz dies, and William decides that the Totally Normal response is to murder Henry's daughter. yep bestie, this isn't going to fuck up your relationship with Henry at all when he finds out (sarcasm).

well would you look at that, Henry Doesn't Seem To Like The Child Murder, William!! Especially When One Of Them Is His Own Kid!!

William, who has just kinda lost it a little at this point, doesn't fully get why Henry hates him so bad. sure, he killed Charlotte...but she was still here, technically!! she was even in a form he could talk to her in!!

we can now move onto Springtrap Era "Willry" (aka William is feral now, and Henry still hates him).

William becomes obsessed with this idea of "reuniting" his family in death. and that includes Sammy and Henry.

he hurts Michael when he comes to work at Fredbear's as a security guard, but it's not a deadly injury. Mike books it out of there and locks the door before William can get to him, but...it didn't just scar him physically. it scarred him mentally, too.

and Henry was fucking PISSED when he found out.

Fnaf 3 rolls around. look, we've heard the whole thing already of "Springtrap/Afton toying around with the player," i don't feel like i need to reiterate that here. but like...William's plan after getting to Sammy wasn't to kill him. not yet, anyway. it was to use him as a lure to get Henry to come to him. then he'd kill two birds with one stone. literally.

of course, that didn't work out...but the first fire clearly didn't kill him. he basically stalked everyone he once knew for two fucking years, including Henry. like, he wakes up in the morning, gets a cup of coffee, and then sees Springtrap staring at him through a window. and that's just kinda what his life was like between Fnaf 3 and 6.

then we get to Fire #2. and Henry stays behind as Michael runs.

the best way i can describe what happened afterward is a mix of mauling and what was basically a slow, torturous death. ending with William ripping the fucker's heart out.

even in the afterlife, William still calls out for Henry to help him. he also thinks Henry is trying to help HIM by trying to get Cassidy to move on. Henry's doing it more for Cassidy's sake than William's.

and there you go. William being Very Normal (< lie) about Henry in the Rewrite.

Mmmm a nice breakfast of toxic old man yaoi my favorite!!!!!!

[mcalhenwrites]

The main characters of Rascal are Hazel and Ferdinand, a couple in their mid-20s who practice a domestic discipline relationship. Hazel is the second oldest child in the wealthy Raston family. His sister, Opal, is married and expecting a child at the beginning of the story. His parents are Edith Anne and William aka “Willie the Rascal”. All recent generations of Rastons have been called Rascals, but Hazel is also a rascal of a sub. Ferdinand is the only child of Randolph and Tillie Aletto. He grew up in a “paycheck to paycheck” sort of household. Other characters include Sinclair, Ruth, Celia, Frey, and Avery. Frey is Eugene Glasser’s son. He is not in SGH, but Avery is. I love Sinclair. He’s a mischievous character who loves to tease Hazel. Sinclair can’t lie. Even worse, he will blurt out thoughts when he’s excited about them. You had best hope if he catches you doing something wrong, he forgets. It’s unlikely, though. Sinclair has since learned to make a lot of jokes and exaggerate statements, which makes it harder for people to know if he’s serious or not. That still gets him into trouble in other ways. Celia is a former neighbor whose husband Sal passed away. She lives in a countryside home with her parents now that she’s a widow, but she will appear in the story later on. Celia is a reserved type with strictly traditional parents, and she hates living with them. They harp on her about getting remarried. They never really knew Sal or they probably wouldn’t have liked him after a while. He was a fun guy. They just though he was a “respectable scientist”, but he was an affectionate nerd and openly bisexual. (Celia is also bisexual, but in a very closested way due to her unfortunate need to rely financially on her parents, since she was brought up to only be a wife instead of given any educational opportunities.) Ruth is a lesbian who teaches art and makes art of her own. Unlike Celia, Sinclair, Hazel, and Ferdinand, she’s much older. The “elder queer” of their friend circle. She has a busy schedule and is extroverted. Ruth is a bit of a troublemaker, but she’s also sensible. There isn’t anything she doesn’t have an opinion on. Yes, she probably will vocalize that opinion. Then there’s Opal. Wife goals tbh. Opal is fun and counters Sinclair well. This is a woman who has an excellent poker face and uses it frequently. She’s joking? No one can tell. She loves to make absurd statements to freak people out. If Opal has something she is working toward, she goes after it with fierce determination. She is unstoppable and always thinks several moves ahead. Opal and Hazel had an okay relationship as children. Hazel had moments where he was a brat to her–often out of petty jealousy–but they mostly got along. They were never super close, nor were they the children who bickered endlessly. She’s Willie’s favorite child, but that’s in part because Hazel and Willie fight all the time and have very little in common. While she has always been a Daddy’s girl, her father would have doted more on a son whose interests aligned with his own. Opal is the one who is stepping up in Willie’s company while Hazel tries hard to pull away from his father’s clutches both financially and emotionally. Hazel distances himself from Opal due to this closeness. In adulthood, he thinks she looks down on him. The truth is that she’s one of his biggest supporters. Willie works on the automobile industry and is great friends with Otis Odelli. The Raston company makes parts, and Willie invests in many faucets of the transporation industry. His friend, Otis, uses some of these parts for his cars, which are grossly expensive and designed for fashion over safety. So Willie and Otis suck. Lots. Willie and his group of friends are pretty shitty for reasons that would spoil the story. I’ll be publishing Rascal in 2025 if I’m lucky. It has only a few bare connections to SGH and should be fine to publish ahead of it. :)

[justforbooks]

The immense talent of the American novelist Cormac McCarthy, who has died aged 89, was for three decades a secret that circulated from hand to hand between a small number of readers, but among them were some influential champions of his work.

Gordon Lish, senior editor at the New York publishers Alfred A Knopf, gave a copy of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) to the critic Harold Bloom. Bloom loved it, declaring it a great book, right up there with William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. There are pages of prose in his work, remarked George Steiner, “that may be at the moment the most electric, the most violent, the most inventive prose being written”. Saul Bellow bullied and cajoled the prize committee of the MacArthur Foundation in 1981 to acknowledge McCarthy’s remarkable talent.

McCarthy seemed to come from nowhere and for most of his career wrote in the hermit-like obscurity of a JD Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. Refusing all attempts to publicise his work, McCarthy politely declined to be interviewed, never signed copies of his own books, attended no literary conferences, did not teach, and was more interested in science and cosmology than fiction. He was an American original.

Working at first in the southern gothic mode, he remade himself as a southwestern writer after settling in Texas in 1976. He carried the influence of Faulkner, Herman Melville (Moby Dick was reportedly his favourite novel) and Ernest Hemingway along with him, and remained true to the literary values that those richly complex writers had made their own. McCarthy had no time for Marcel Proust or Henry James; he had no interest in the psychological intricacies of motivation, sensibility or modernist thinking about consciousness. His novels, early and late, were grim, violent tales of life stripped down to the raw fundamentals of existence in a hostile world.

Acclaim and a mass readership came late in his career. Until the runaway success of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 (his first New York Times bestseller), McCarthy had sold fewer than 5,000 copies of the hardback edition of any of his novels. By 2006, Blood Meridian, a blood-dripping tale of scalp-hunting and massacres in northern Mexico in the 1840s, was placed at No 3 in a Time magazine list of the 25 greatest American novels. McCarthy seemed the real deal to readers such as Bloom, Lish and Bellow. He reached an even wider audience via film adaptations of books including No Country for Old Men (2005) and the Pulitzer prize-winner The Road (2006). Not since Faulkner had an American author been so extravagantly talented and, by choice, so distant from the literary culture.

McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the eldest son and third of six children of Gladys (nee McGrail) and Charles McCarthy. The family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937 when his father, a Yale law school graduate, was appointed legal counsel for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Growing up in a large Roman Catholic family in the fiercely Protestant environment of Tennessee, McCarthy was sent to exclusively Catholic schools in Knoxville. Neither the family’s religion, nor their comfortable upper-middle-class life (maids, a large family house), was much to his liking. He did not want to be respectable, and this was not popular in the McCarthy household.

McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee in 1951-52, studying physics and engineering, but dropped out. He had no career ambitions, hated “progress” and rejected most of the expectations that shaped the lives of his siblings and fellow students. He had been named after his father, and the decision legally to change his name from Charles to the Gaelic Cormac suggests some of the family tensions that shaped McCarthy’s relations to his family.

In 1953 McCarthy enlisted in the US air force, and was sent to Alaska, where he had much time to catch up on his reading. He also hosted a programme on a local radio station. After his military service ended in 1956, McCarthy re-enrolled at the University of Tennessee where, as “CJ McCarthy, Jr”, he published two short stories in a campus literary magazine. They attracted some attention, and he received the university’s Ingram-Merrill award for creative writing in 1959.

He promptly left the university without taking a degree, and went to Chicago, where he worked in an auto-parts warehouse. In 1961 he married Lee Holleman, a fellow student from the University of Tennessee. They had a son, Cullen, moved back south to Asheville, North Carolina, and were divorced soon after. When asked years later about whether he paid alimony, he responded: “With what?” He was, for the next 25 years, poor, rootless and happy.

In Chicago, Asheville, and then in New Orleans, he worked on the manuscript of his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. Knowing little of the literary scene, and less of the publishing industry, he sent the novel unsolicited to Random House, where it was plucked from the slush pile of doubtful self-submitted manuscripts and reached the desk of Albert R Erskine, vice-president and editorial director. Erskine was a legendary figure in the world of literary publishing, but even with his support, The Orchard Keeper (1965) – a Faulkneresque tale set in rural Tennessee in the inter-war years, portraying the relationship of a young boy to an outlaw and bootlegger who has murdered the boy’s father – attracted little attention.

Nonetheless, McCarthy received the William Faulkner Foundation award for the best first novel by an American writer. Erskine’s enthusiasm for McCarthy’s talent was undiminished, despite the commercial failures that followed. McCarthy remained a Random House author until his editor’s retirement in 1987.

The Orchard Keeper also won McCarthy a travelling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. On his sea voyage to Europe for a planned visit to Ireland, he met Anne DeLisle, a young British singer and dancer, who was working as an entertainer on the ship. They married in 1966, and lived in a rented finca in Ibiza in a boozy community of expatriate American artists and writers. In that happy milieu McCarthy wrote Outer Dark, a tale of incest and violence, in a note-perfect recreation of the Tennessee poor-white vernacular. It was published in 1968, and sank without trace.

A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation enabled the couple to return to the US in some style for DeLisle’s first visit to McCarthy’s parents. When they reached Tennessee, they rented a cottage adjacent to a pig farm south of Knoxville, where they lived for 10 years. McCarthy poured the memory of his life in Knoxville into a long autobiographical novel, Suttree, which appeared in 1979, telling the story of a young man who turned away from a privileged family background and chose to live on a houseboat boozing with a colourful assortment of locals.

With Suttree in mid-draft, he walked out on DeLisle, and moved to El Paso, Texas. Although they divorced, he continued to send drafts of Suttree to DeLisle in Knoxville for typing, and they remained close friends. “I lived waiting for him to come home for years and years,” she recalled. “I never would have stayed there unless I thought he was coming back to me.”

McCarthy received a phone call from the MacArthur Foundation in late December 1981 informing him that he had been awarded a “genius grant” of $500,000, which enabled him to buy a small stucco house behind a shopping mall in El Paso. The Nobel-prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann was the director of the MacArthur Foundation, and he and McCarthy became close friends. Invited by Gell-Mann to affiliate with the Santa Fe Institute, a freewheeling thinktank for scientists, McCarthy at last found an intellectual home. In 1999, with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John, he settled down in Tesuque, New Mexico, and worked on his later novels in his office at the institute, pecking away on a small portable Olivetti Lettera 32. “I like being around smart, interesting people, and the people who come here are among the smartest, most interesting people on the planet.”

The move to El Paso began a new phase for McCarthy. His books up to Suttree were “southern” novels, written strongly under the influence of Faulkner. With Blood Meridian, he wrote about southwest Texas and the Mexican border territory, which he explored in an old pickup truck. His descriptions of the cauterised border territory were stunningly vivid. Bloom claimed that the landscape in Blood Meridian was better than anything except Shakespeare.

The novel’s violence was also spectacular, though oddly affectless. Death comes helter-skelter for the killers and innocent villagers alike in northern Mexico in the 1840s – scalpings, evisceration, beheadings, presented in detail. The motives for this gory mayhem, conducted by contract killers selling Apache scalps to the governor of Sonora, are unfathomable. The figure of Judge Holden takes motiveless malignity to sickening heights. Philip Roth, a novelist whose interests never involved skinning knives, rifles or clubs, found nothing of interest in Blood Meridian; it was described as an ambitious and sophisticated failure in the New York Times, and sold fewer than 1,500 copies in the first printing. A film adaptation was talked about, but the consensus seems to have been that it was unfilmable: too dark, too violent. Asked about this, McCarthy robustly dismissed these objections as “all crap”.

In the early 1990s, McCarthy acquired a new publisher (Knopf), a new editor (Gary Fisketjon) and, for the first time in his career, an agent (Amanda Urban). In 1992 Fisketjon and Urban persuaded the reluctant author to give an interview to the New York Times. All the Pretty Horses appeared that spring, and was a runaway success, winning the National Book award for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle award. In 2000, it was made into a film directed by Billy Bob Thornton. Matt Damon played John Grady Cole and Penélope Cruz played Alejandra, both rather miscast playing adolescents.

McCarthy thought the movie “could’ve been better” and bought a new pickup truck with the income from the book. It was the first volume in the Border trilogy, and was followed in 1994 by The Crossing, and in 1998 by Cities of the Plain. Most of the elements of his earlier books are here: virtuoso descriptive powers, laconic dialogue, a set of engaging younger characters and his signature violence. Occasional flights of inflated rhetoric accompanied McCarthy’s search for deep meaning. His account of the doomed relationship between John Grady Cole and the beautiful Alejandra is suggested by: “As she walked toward him her beauty seemed to him a thing altogether improbable” – which was hard to disagree with.

No Country for Old Men, published in 2005, was dismissed by the critic James Wood as “an unimportant, stripped-down thriller”. The Coen brothers movie of 2007 revealed the perfect geometry of this violent tale of pursuit and revenge. Tommy Lee Jones led the cast superbly as craggy Sheriff Bell, Javier Bardem was Chigurh, the remorseless killer with the bad haircut, and Josh Brolin was the outgunned man who found the drug money.

McCarthy attended the Academy Awards with the Coens. “They had a table full of awards before the evening was over, sitting there like beer cans,” he recalled. “One of the first awards they got was for best screenplay, and Ethan came back with the Oscar trophy and said to me, ‘Well, I didn’t do anything, but I’m keeping it.’”

The Road appeared in 2006, a spare, powerful novel portraying the struggle of a father and his young son to survive in a world in which civilisation, and the ecosystem, has collapsed after an (unspecified) cataclysm. It received the best reviews of his career. The experience of fatherhood is seen powerfully in this novel, as are the doom-laden seminars at the Santa Fe Institute discussing entropy, climate change and Carl Sagan’s widely-read scenario on nuclear winter. Together they offered McCarthy a subject that was perfectly matched to his late prose, muscular and taut.

For a writer never much known for his concern for intense emotional attachment, the feelings of the (unnamed) father for his son was something new in McCarthy; it gave The Road an emotional depth. There are hints of a consoling, redemptive ending, unknown in his earlier books, but the stronger note is a sense of the inevitability of death, of a father’s bitter knowledge that he will leave his young son to make his own way in the blasted world.

The Road was filmed by the Australian director John Hillcoat in 2008. Joe Penhall’s screenplay stayed close to the book’s dialogue (McCarthy explained it had been basically transcribed from conversations with his son John). Filmed mainly in Pittsburgh in midwinter, the film embodied McCarthy’s sense of a world dying. The relationship between father and son, played by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, preserved much of the novel’s intensity of affection.

McCarthy received the PEN/Saul Bellow award in 2009, given to an American fiction writer whose work “possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature”.

Two late novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, appeared in 2022, capstones to an intense and remarkable career.

McCarthy’s third marriage ended in divorce in 2006. He is survived by his sons, two grandchildren, and two sisters and a brother.

🔔 Cormac McCarthy (Charles Joseph McCarthy), novelist, born 20 July 1933; died 13 June 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[obaewankenope]

Anti-Semitism isn't hard to see if you know some history and literature.

When someone tries to make out that you’re being Anti-Semitic when you point out that goblins in Harry Potter are Anti-Semitic as heck, and that the recent Blood Libel game is incredibly Anti-Semitic because of its basic premise, respond with this:

It's not that I'm Anti-Semitic for being able to recognise when characters are Jew-coded, but rather the fact that culturally-speaking, the representations of Jews in media, in history, in literature, have been tied with creatures and individuals who are craven, immoral, greedy, or violent towards what is portrayed as the 'good' society of Christian folk. For example, the works of opera-composer Richard Wagner are incredibly Anti-Semitic with his portrayals of specific characters as Jewish and evil; this is because Wagner himself was Anti-Semitic and this was included in his own works. [1] Works which, by the way, have had a significant effect on all subsequent operatic plays in some way, and the ensuing musical and theatrical arenas. 

A more recent, and more relevant example of this sort of Anti-Semitism in media that people consume is found in the classic novel The Canterbury Tales where a "devout Christian child" is murdered by Jews who are offended because he sings a Christian hymn passing through a Jewish quarter in an Asian city. [2] This novel went on to inspire a plethora of later fiction, writers, authors, visual media, and so on. [3][4] Therefore we have a return of the concept of 'Blood Libel' wherein Jewish individuals murder Christian children for [insert reason here].[5]

William Shakespeare also portrayed a negative example of Jews in The Merchant of Venice which was inspired by an earlier work by Marlowe named The Jew of Malta. In this, Marlowe's Jew is the first portrayal of a psychopath in theatre and, as a result, the perception of Jews is set in place, especially when Shakespeare utilises Jews and the Othering of a group in The Merchant of Venice.[6] The archetype of a Jewish moneylender stereotype actually came about from Shakespeare's play, the character Shylock, and this then goes on to influence and inform all subsequent portrayals of Jews in literature.[7] Furthering this, Shylock's character in the plays, were often portrayed in a devilish manner, tying the character (and Jews by association) with sinfulness, anti-Christian mentality, and being inhuman compared to 'good Christian folk'. Shylock's character often possessed a hooked nose (seen more recently in portrayals of goblins in Harry Potter who also 'happen' to be moneylenders and hate wizards) and bright red wings (signifying devilry).[8]

And, another example of a popular Jewish character is that of Charles Dickens' Fagin in Oliver Twist!.[9] With the multitude of film adaptions of Oliver, it definitely is a problem when the main villain is a Jewish individual obsessed with finances, riches, is a thief, and uses good children who aren't Jewish for his own ends. Dickens does, however, also present some Jewish characters in other novels more positively which is a departure from the majority of portrayals by authors who already use Jews negatively. However, Fagin's description in Oliver is predominantly influenced by long-held presumptions of what Jews look like to English society which, incidentally, threw all the Jews out of its society in 1290 and thus didn't have an actual interaction with Jews for a very, very long time.[10] This lack of interaction to dismantle fanciful and bigoted stereotyping is what has greatly influenced such pervasive negative perceptions and portrayals of Jews in English literature and other media for generations.[11]

The Jewish family name "Rothschild" became somewhat synonymous with moneylending, greed, and control of economics and governance as a result, by Ezra Pound's portrayal of Jewish money attitudes in The Cantos. A poem that looks at economics and governance of individuals, where Pound implicates Jews as sinister manipulators of monetary supplies.[12] Even if the name was changed, the association remains.

The fact that such a perception of Jews as manipulators of finances on a global scale is now part of the pervasive and, quite honestly, Nazi-centric ideology wherein Jews are seen as the controllers of the world (think Illuminanti and such) is neither a coincidence nor unexpected. Especially when you have to consider the history of Europe and World War Two wherein Jews were specifically targeted because of existing Anti-Semitic opinion, and were also convenient scape-goats for a government that required a target for everyone to 'blame' and to justify their inhumanity. Of course, there's also the fact that, by removing the individuals who were forced into accepting monetary positions by a Christian culture hundreds of years prior because handling money was seen in Christianity as immoral and sinful for good Christians the Nazi's enabled themselves as financiers of their own war effort and, in a larger sense, gained control of the wealth of Germany at a time when... honestly, Germany was bankrupt and the Nazi's needed a way to obtain funds quickly via warfare, invasion, and the theft of resources and finances of the country/'s they invaded. 

This is all the result of generations of isolation, exclusion, othering and the turning of individuals who are Not Like The Majority into monstrous beings, and so much more. There is a reason why so few actually recognise the pervasive Anti-Semitism in goblin portrayal by Rowling in Harry Potter because, especially in England, the characterisation of goblins is so deeply ingrained that people do not recognise the origins of the characterisations as based on ignorance, fear, the othering of a group that is not the majority, and plain old religious intolerance.

.

I am not Jewish. This was a 25 minute google search and actually putting some effort into reading the sources to summarise here. Not all of it is 100% accurate in terms of how I've described it only because it is summarised but:

TL:DR; Anti-Semitism is real, literature is full of it, society and culture in near every country is influenced by it and Anti-Semitism is ingrained like institutional racism. Shut up if you think otherwise because your precious Rowling made you a pretty game where you can kill Jews goblins or whatever.

References:

[1] https://www.brandeis.edu/tauber/publications/books/katz-wagner.html

[2] https://archive.org/details/scatteredamongna00alex 

[3] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Z98ixsptZNMC&pg=PA25&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales#Later_adaptations_and_homages  

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel 

[6]  Greenblatt, Stephen (1978). "Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism". Critical Inquiry. 5 (2): 291–307.

[7] https://www.grin.com/document/93563 

[8] https://archive.org/details/antisemitismmode00macc  

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagin 

[10] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Z98ixsptZNMC&pg=PA43&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false 

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion

[12] Levine, Gary Martin, The merchant of modernism: the economic Jew in Anglo-American literature, Psychology Press, 2003, p 154-156.

[yr-obedt-cicero]

Was it true that Hamilton's mother was a whore?

If yes, how did he feel about it? Did his political enemies use it against him?

If not, who started the rumor?

Thank you and have a nice day!

The only informational and reliable source material I can find in regards to Rachel are; Ron Chernow's biography, and Micheal E. Newton's blog. If by whore, you mean she didn't let herself get restrained by bitch ass men; then yeah. The truthful rumors originated from Rachel's first husband, Johann Lavien. 

Lavien peddled household goods and was a slave holder. He owned at least sixteen slaves, including five to seven children. He was possibly a Jewish man, but if he was; he hid it greatly. The Carribean region was treated as a sideline international trade center, especially for the British and Americans. Lavien attempted to utilize the system to make himself wealthy, and spent all his fortune on a plantation and pompous attire.

According to Hamilton; despite Rachel's disinterest in Lavien, her mother, Mary Uppington Faucette, encouraged Lavien to marry her. Because she was captivated by his expensive clothes and rich appeal, and had to push Rachel into reluctantly agreeing to what became a hated marriage. And in 1745, they married — Rachel was sixteen at the time. The couple moved to a plantation called Contentment. The coming year, in 1746; they had their son, Peter Lavien. Although it appears the marriage quickly became an unhappy one. Hamilton claims that Lavien only married Rachel for the wealth that she inherited from her late father;

“A Dane a fortune-hunter of the name of Lavine came to Nevis bedizzened with gold, and paid his addresses to my mother then a handsome young woman having a snug fortune.”

(source — Alexander Hamilton to William Jackson, [August 26, 1800])

Likely due to the disheartening conditions of their marriage, Rachael soughted out a romantic relationship with a man named Johan Jacob Cronenberg. According to Newton's records findings;

“Johan Michael Lawin [...] had been obliged to experience that his wedded wife, Rachel, who for a long time had absented herself from him, was residing with a bachelor Johan Cronenberg.”

“Johan Michael Lawin, whose wedded wife the aforesaid Cronenberg accuses of having resided with him for a long time in fornication.”

(source — Discovering Hamilton)

Apparently Lavien heard somehow of Rachel's residing with Cronenberg, and “found” her in Cronenberg's “lodging, well hidden behind locked doors, wherefrom her husband fetched her and drove her home.” Due to this being an act of infidelity since Rachel and Lavien were not divorced; Cronenberg was “not only…seriously warned to keep away from this woman of loose morals but also punished with some days’ incarceration.” Despite this, Rachel soon returned to live with Cronenberg. And Cronenberg “again had sexual relations with this woman and without feeling shame publicly kept her with him in his house and lived there with her.”

October 8, 1749, John Lavien; “requested the court’s assistance to repair with him to Cronenberg’s plantation house to seize and arrest Cronenberg and Rachel for further legal prosecution.” Which did eventually lead to the arrest of Rachel and Cronenberg;

“‘This the agent of the court complied with, and at night at about 12 o’clock had come to said plantation and […] the 2 accused persons were found in the bedroom taking their usual night’s rest.’

‘The agents of the court […] seized them both in their bedroom, undressed and with more debauched circumstances that sufficiently demonstrated their shameless intercourse and scandalous life’ and ‘declared them both to be under arrest and had them brought…to Fort Christiansvaern’ to be imprisoned.”

(source — Discovering Hamilton)

By the 10th, or 20th, the court case of Cronenberg and Rachel was brought before the municipal court. And both Rachael and Cronenberg were charged and found guilty, they were sentenced to be imprisoned at Fort Christiansvaern.

US National Park Service marker for the Christiansted National Historic Site

“Rachel spent several months in a dark, cramped cell that measured ten by thirteen feet, and she must have gone through infernal torments of fear and loneliness. Through a small, deeply inset window, she could stare across sharpened spikes that encircled the outer wall and gaze at the blue-green water that sparkled in the fierce tropical sunlight. She could also eavesdrop on the busy wharf, stacked with hogsheads of sugar [...] All the while, she had to choke down a nauseating diet of salted herring, codfish, and boiled yellow cornmeal mush.”

(source — Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow)

Nearly eight months after having his wife and her paramour imprisoned; Lavien requested to the municipal court to free Rachel, and expressed his belief that she had been sufficiently punished. On the 4th of May, 1750, the court agreed and decided that Rachel, “in consideration of her long incarceration,” was to be released so that she “might again betake herself to her husband and with him lead a better life.”

But instead of submitting to the disgusting patriarchal system, and her cruel husband; Rachel left in 1750, after five years of unhappy marriage. She moved to St. Kitts early of that year, where she met James Hamilton (There are a few theories they had met previously, but there are no official records to support such). They had both been struggling with the taints involving their names, and had likely been drawn together. Hamilton claims his parents married, but in any legal sense they had not;

“My mother afterwards went to St. Kitts, became acquainted with my father and a marriage between them ensued, followed by many years cohabitation and several children.” 

(source — Alexander Hamilton to William Jackson, [August 26, 1800])

In 1753, they had James Hamilton Jr., and on January 11, 1757 (Or 1755), they had Alexander Hamilton. Some sources claim (Including Hamilton himself) they had more children, but if they did; they are unknown, and there are no surviving records to prove such. Rachel inherited a property in the capital Charlestown, also three enslaved servants from her mother — who were; Rebecca, Flora, and Esther, one of them had a son named Ajax, and he was assigned to care for James Jr and Hamilton.

Fast forward to 1759 - nine years after Rachel fled - Lavien has found himself in a lot of debt. He had to sell most of his plantation, and rent out his few slaves to make enough. A dutiful woman was living with, and cleaning for Lavien. It is likely that he wished to marry her, which lead to him wishing to obtain a divorce summons on February 26, 1759.

Lavien claimed Rachel had;

“absented herself from [Lavien] for nine years and gone elsewhere, where she has begotten several illegitimate children, so that such action is believed to be more sufficient for him to obtain a divorce from her.”

(source — Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow)

Lavien also said he “had taken care of Rachel's legitimate child [Peter Lavien] from what little he has been able to earn,” while she had, “completely forgotten her duty and let husband and child alone and instead given herself up to whoring with everyone, which things the plantiff are so well known that her own family and friends must hate her for it.”

Even after this merciless allegation, Lavien demanded that Rachel be denied all legal rights to his property. He warned that if he died before her, Rachel, “as a widow would possibly seek to take possession of the estate and there- fore not only acquire what she ought not to have but also take this away from his child and give it to her whore-children.”

Mistakenly, Rachel didn't even try to refute the allegations, or show up to court; which meant on the 25th of June, Lavien recieved a divorce that permitted him to remarry — but on the other hand, Rachel couldn't. To make matters worse, in April 1765; James Sr. got a business assignment located in Christiansted. And brought his family with him to St. Croix, although Lavien was far from there he was still on the island. Even more unfortunately, Rachel was no longer allowed the liberty of calling herself “Mrs. Hamilton”, due to how close the Fort - that she was once imprisoned at - was in the area, Rachel would have had to renter her infamous identity as a notorious woman of misdeeds. As records from this time only title her as correct, or mispronunciated, forms of “Faucette” and “Lavien”.

James would then also adruptly leave and abandon his family, after a victory with the Moir case. His motives or intentions are unknown. Hamilton generously claims his father could no longer support his family, and others claim Rachel's smeared name was likely rubbing off on his own.

-

Anyway, that's the tale of Rachel's many marriages and love lives; I think it unfair judgement to call her such derogatory names when considering everything she was dealing with, and additionally from such a young age. It is clear she committed infidelity while married, and they are not only rumors — but I don't think it's a fair assessment to fault her for such, when she was trapped in an unhappy marriage.

As for people using it against Hamilton; they did. As mentioned previously, Lavien called James Jr and Hamilton “whore-children”, and according to Chernow; journalist nemeses called Hamilton “the son of a camp girl”.

Hope this helped!

[mermaidsirennikita]

I rarely talk about books I actively dislike on here--not because I don't critique books (see: my ARC reviews lol) but because I generally prefer to talk about books I want people to read, but I just have to get Jo Segura's Raiders of the Lost Heart off my chest

Despite the cartoony cover that made me think it was possibly closed door (spoiler alert: it's not, I'd rate it around a 3/5 on that level) I was super excited for this because a) despite my issues with... some things and my general ambivalence on museums, I love Indiana Jones b) we need more "adventure romances", imo.

And it does get off to a good start! The hero and heroine hate each other because of some UST and grad school drama, she's super confident, he's in awe of her competence, the book has some interesting deconstructions of the "spicy Latina" stereotype.

BUT LOL.

*spoilers*

The first issue I had was that Ford, our hero, had all of these insecurities re: inadequacies in the bedroom in his last relationship, which were triggered by walking in on his girlfriend, who he often left alone for significant periods of time while he went and did archeologist things... taking care of herself. And rather than try to be like "oh hey, let's make this a fun couples' activity"/"sometimes you just gotta", he was super SHOOKETH by this. Why? He is a grown man? In his thirties at that point?

And Ford is generally shooketh, as it turns out. He's not just like, charmingly soft boy to Corrie's badass girl, which I can totally get behind. He's also so obsessed with comparing himself to her, his own general inadequacies... and he (the whitest bread white guy ever) actively used his position as the boyfriend of an influential boss guy's daughter to take opportunities from Corrie, our heroine, a woman of color who isn't taken seriously by her field despite her many accomplishments. Including the opportunity he got, a major dig she has an emotional connection to (a weird connection, but still)... when she was already essentially chosen as the leader of the dig. And then he keeps this from her for the majority of the book, including after they begin a relationship.

What???? I'm not against secret keeping in romance, I think it can be an interesting device, but when the secret has your white guy hero taking an important opportunity from the woc heroine, I just??? Especially when the heroine is a Latina with indigenous Mexican heritage and the dig is on an AZTEC site????

And then as a sidebar, not as bad but still illogical for a very logical-seeming woman, Corrie's big motivation to go on this dig isn't the glory or the credit (which I would super appreciate, make heroines ambitious and self-motivated) but primarily because she believes, based on a story her grandfather told with "documentation", that she is the direct descendant of this ancient Aztec hero whose gravesite they're trying to find. Mind you, the entire time there's doubt that this could be possible, because stories surrounding the hero are conflicting--one of them involves him being castrated before he could have children. Then, when they apparently find the hero, it turns he did have a wife and child, but the child died young, so it is unlikely (though really not impossible, who's to say this guy didn't have other kids, let's see if a DNA test is possible before we jump to conclusions and if it's not possible which is also entirely possible, YOU WOULDN'T KNOW ANYWAY) that Corrie is descended from him. Again, this descent is based entirely on stories from her dead grandfather. I can understand disappointment, but this ESTEEMED ARCHEOLOGIST who has a lot of common sense is like? Having a mini crisis over it? And she's super mad that her grandfather would "lie" to her? Like, this is equivalent to a "you are descended from Ragnar Lothbrok" or "you are descended from William the Conqueror". Sure, was it possible? Yes. Is it a great dream? Yes. But she is so practical--I can understand some emotional investment, but THIS?

But also, going back to Ford... the author naturally gives Ford the most sympathetic reasons for lying to Corrie and stealing a job that paid $1.5 MILLION. His mom is dying of cancer, he's broke because his dad basically died bankrupt, and he needs the money for an experimental treatment. It's a contrived reason that is meant to make us and Corrie forgive him. But if you take it at face value, who doesn't get doing something incredibly underhanded to save your mom's life. Artistically, this is a dumb choice and of course it doesn't completely justify his actions and absolutely, he still did a horrible thing, but you GET IT. Corrie doesn't have to forgive him, of course. Even though she clearly will based off this information.

However, her initial reaction, aside from the justifiable anger, is to basically brush off the super sick mom she's known was giving him conflict throughout this journey and has been crying over several times in front of her... And go "Ford, you know you could've come up with the money somehow".

LOL WHAT. WHAT. NO???? He's an archeologist, they make NO MONEY. Could Ford have perhaps done something to like, share this opportunity with Corrie and beg her for a little chunk of the massive payout because he needs his mom's treatment and she for sure was a good enough person to do that? Yes. Could he have just "come up" with the money? NO. And she initially doesn't have the number for the cancer treatments, but anyone with a working brain knows that the out of pocket cost for cancer treatments in America, especially experimental treatments, can be ASTRONOMICAL. And surprise, he's stuck with a $30K bill that isn't even the whole of it, and is basically for his mom to be in a special rehab center. So Corrie feels shitty. Because yes, it is absolutely ridiculous to think that this guy with a job that is essentially academic, would just be able to come up with high-cost cancer treatment money. And she is smarter than that, just like she is too smart to buy into this story her grandfather told at face value.

I just. Hate this kind of nonsense, especially when it comes from an author who can clearly write and struck a really fun tone initially. Like, I'll try out another book by Jo Segura based on that. But this? Was just so disappointing.