i feel like ppl on here need to learn the difference between "this character is doing horrible things that are being unintentionally portrayed in a positive light by the author due to a lack of accountability/acknowledgement of those things as wrong" and "this character is doing horrible things that are being portrayed in a positive light by the narrator/protagonist due to their own bias/unrealiability" bc ive seen way too many people accuse media of being the former when its actually the latter or vice versa

Hello and happy Muse Monday! I'm so sorry, but I couldn't resist. Selene, what could you tell me about the dragons of your world? And have you/the others ever encountered one? 8)

*Selene grins and immediately summons a large stack of books onto a table* Right then, let's get started.

The origins of dragons upon the world of Titan are actually a little shrouded in mystery. The creation myth of our world dictates that the dragons were created by Kilanirax, the King of Dragons, in collaboration with Glantanka, the Mother of our world. This seems to bear out for the vast majority of dragons on Titan, though there are some exceptions to that rule, but I'll get to those in a minute. It's unknown how many dragons Kilanirax created, but among them was the Night Dragon, the first dragon to be corrupted by Evil. How many of his kin followed suit is also unknown, but many of the most evil dragons in our world are likely descended from the Night Dragon.

We tend to group dragons by the colour of their scales as this is the easiest way for the layman to identify the various types, though each colour is also distinct physiologically and each has a reasonably distinct breath weapon- though some subspecies share an elemental type, the way the breath weapon is utilised between the subspecies is still reasonably distinct. Each colour grouping also has distinct personality traits that they share with others of their subspecies. However, there is still a degree of variation between individuals in each subspecies, as the dragons are an intelligent and fully sapient life form fully capable of speech and wielding magic. All subspecies are grouped together into two distinct cohorts, chromatic and metallic, with the chromatic dragons being generally considered evil and descended from the Night Dragon, while the metallic dragons are considered at least neutral to the rest of the world and are descended from those First Age dragons that remained uncorrupted by Evil (yes, there's a difference in this world between ordinary evil and the Evil that caused corruption in our world. That is a whole other story I'm not going to get into right now).

There are rumours that there are Gem dragons around as well, though where they have come from is a hotly debated topic. I have it on good authority that at least one of them seems to have been a direct creation of Throff and may be the only example of a First Age Gem Dragon on Titan, with the others theorised to have arrived when the Outer Gods (Pelor, Correllon , Moradin etc) found our plane and took on followers (just don't ask me when that was, it was enough of a headache trying to avoid another dwarven religious war from breaking out when Edwin and I told the dwarves of Fangthane what we found in the God Vault with the portal to Mechanus in it). Other, more elementally-aligned, subspecies of dragon are also found here and there, though it's obvious they've come through minor portals and tears from the Elemental Planes.

As far as dragons I've met, there are a few. I never got to meet Kypris myself, but I did get to meet his mate and numerous children during my first adventure, though Alexis did recall her interactions with Kypris quite fondly. Then there's Karlylax *shivers*. Karlyax was a Dracolich, one of the most evil creatures I've ever had the displeasure of meeting, and he was the one responsible for Kypris' demise. So, naturally, we were asked to find and destroy him. We did, after an extremely hard fought battle and, hopefully, he will never rise again.

Then there's Old Red, the dragon that took over Firetop Mountain and is Toreguarde's comparitive neighbour. He's not exactly pleasant, but we did manage to make a deal with him to protect the area around his mountain during the Demon War. I don't think he's entirely happy that Drakemar came along and took Toreguarde as his own. I think the two of them have some sort of history with one another, though I'm not stupid enough to ask either of them about it. I value my life as it is a bit too much to risk it.

While not common knowledge, there are some in the upper echelons of the Toreguarde Council (the Triumverate chief among them) that know that Drakemar is a dragon. That's something kept a bit close to the chest though, as most people dislike the idea of a Red Dragon, in particular, having any sort of authority over their lives. Not that Drakemar actually has anything to do with the running of Toreguarde besides taking taxes these days, but he does come along to protect the city if the need is dire enough, and he's not busy defending Wyrmholme.

I did meet Silver and White dragons during my adventures too, and visited the lair of a Green dragon by the name of Arakas at one point.

Then there's Harbinger, a dragon that likely came from the Elemental Planes during the recent Ragnarok Event. He was an ancient Pyroclastic dragon, and he set about trying to level Toreguarde to the ground, starting with the wizard's tower and the surrounding area. It's only thanks to Elowyn and her friends that only the Wizard's Quarter sustained any major damage at the time.

Of course, I can't forget Aurianna either. I don't know much about the hows and whys of the link she shares with Elowyn (you'd need to ask them directly), but she is the dragon I have the most contact with these days, even if she's normally in the form of a cat.

I'll be happy to waffle on some more if required, but that covers the basics of your question, I think. I hope my answer was useful to you.

Title: Pale Fire

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Rating: 10/10

A strange and beautiful book, like a rare and perfect pearl, and yet strangely un-pearl-like, which must be very hard to polish? Yes. Yes. This is a book which, once it catches your attention, it is difficult to forget. It demands to be talked about and thought about, like no other book I know of.

And yet the more you think about it the more baffling, and the more "pearl-like," the whole book appears.

I am not sure that you can explain this, but I will try. The great "pearl" of the book, the pearl which it demands to be remembered and thought about, is not any one of the hundreds or thousands of pages: it is the whole "book" as a whole, the shape of the whole, its unique "aura," the way the book makes you feel on a deep, intuitive level that you must discuss it, that you cannot "take the book" or even read it in any ordinary sense — you can only look into its aura, you must hold and examine it in a very particular way, the way one examines a gemstone.

For example, just looking at it, I can make the distinction between the "book" (its shape and its unique aura) and the individual text. The text may be very long — but the aura is inescapably different.

The text does not "go on" (the way a book does), it breaks up. It never really does what it says on the tin; it doesn't "conclude." It does not form one clear "argument," it does not have one "claim" and one "corollary" to back it up. It doesn't "say one thing and prove it" to any great degree: it says a thousand things and proves only the most tentative and peripheral ones. One of its great virtues is that it makes you question and think about what it's saying, and the questions it raises tend to be difficult questions — not questions with easy "answers."

And yet if you're used to thinking of books as a "conclusion" — as containing an "argument" and one "corollary" — you must ask yourself what it even means to "conclude" it, since it is very far from having an "argument" or "conclusion" at all. And indeed, there is almost no explicit argument to be found: the "conclusion" is implied throughout the book, and can be inferred, but the "conclusion" is not really an explicit part of the structure of the book's "bookness" — it is part of its "aura" which is like the "aura" of some rare and beautiful piece of music (or of a person)

......

Pale Fire reads like a series of "tweets" and "replies" and "retweets." The book consists of a series of poems, "discussed" by "others" — usually in very brief, rapid-fire, seemingly casual exchanges, the way one tweets. And yet, even in these little "conversations," each of the "tweetees" has a unique voice, a unique "aura," and together they make up a large whole, which is as much one "person" in conversation as it is one "person" in conversation with another "person."

This leads to a curious difficulty in reading the book. Because each of the "tweetees" is a "person" in conversation with one another, the book has no "center." There is no one person who "is the author" (as in other famous books, like Infinite Jest). The whole "book" is, as I said earlier, a "pearl." There is no one "person" who is doing most of the "tweeting." There are multiple tweeters, and each of them "tweets" in conversation with the others, even while other tweeters are "talking" to them — so that, even though there is a "center," it is a center without a core, or a center which shifts around in response to other centers.

And yet there is one central "topic" of conversation throughout the "book." It is the contrasting of two "poets," "Andrew Marvell" and "Wallace Stevens," which runs through each of the book's many conversations. The contrast is, in part, between "tweeting" styles. The contrast is, in part, between "contemporary poetic norms" and "medieval poetic norms" — between a "conventional," "standardized" poetry which is supposed to follow certain "rules" (the rules that Marvell adheres to), and a "non-conventional" "abstract" poetry (Wallace Stevens' poetry) which does not follow any specific rules or "rules." The contrast is also between the "conventional" and "abstract" forms of poetry which, in turn, contrast with the ways in which the two poets "tweet." The difference between the two "tweeting styles" is that, while Marvell is supposed to write "conventional" poetry, his poems are written on the "left" side of the page in "left-handed" italics. Wallace Stevens, by contrast, is supposed to write "abstract" poetry. His poems are written on the "right" side of the page in "left-handed" italics, and they contain elaborate, long-winded verbal "commentaries" ("essays") which are at odds with the "conventional" style of his poetry.

The contrasts of the two styles of poetry are, I feel, part of what makes the book so difficult to "read." The contrasts are, first of all, between "conventional" styles and "non-conventional" ones, and so they're hard to "tweet" in exactly the right "way" — especially to the degree that they're "conversational," to which both tweeters must respond "appropriately"

......

If you read the book without any awareness of these contrasts, then it is just like a normal book, which means that the aura it has is just like any other book. There are good, mediocre, and bad parts of the book, no more different from Finnegan's Wake than from a novel one person finds enjoyable and the same person finds dull. The "aura" of the whole book, in other words, is something that is always there in all books — something like the "aura" which distinguishes a truly good book from a merely good book, or from a merely good one which one can take pleasure in, or from a merely good book which is too familiar to be truly enjoyable.

But if you read the book with this awareness, and in light of the central contrast of the two poets, then you see that the book is a series of conversations which are all "saying something different about the contrast." And so, you realize that this is something which is unique to this book, which cannot really be compared with anything else. And you cannot "take the book" in any ordinary way. You just can't "take it" at

It’s been a while, what with me being being more active on Twitter these days, but I had some thoughts churning around in my brain and this felt like a better place to post them rather than threading them over there.

This is a post about Persona 5 and restorative justice. Before I go any further, though, a note: this is meta about restorative justice and prison abolition as ethical philosophies only, how it can be expressed/structured in works of fiction, i.e., Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal, and what the importance of doing so is.

I should also note that I am not a philosopher, a legal scholar, or an activist, I just like to read, and I strongly encourage you to look into the topics I’m discussing in this essay. If you want specific recommendations you can DM me; again, this being meta about a video game, I think linking those titles here would diminish their importance regarding what they’re actually about.

Ready? Okay. Let’s get started.

what is restorative justice?

‘Restorative justice’ is a concept in ethical and legal philosophy that holds itself in contrast to two other kinds of justice: punitive and carceral. Punitive justice is justice as punishment, i.e., an eye for an eye, while carceral justice involves justice as the confinement of criminal offenders. While both have heavy overlaps with one another, they’re distinct in the generality vs the specificity of their outcome: punitive justice can involve the death penalty, property seizure, permanent loss of rights, etc., carceral justice refers strictly just to the incarceration of criminal offenders in institutional facilities (jails, prisons, etc.).

Restorative justice, in contrast, roots itself in the understanding of closing a circle: the best and most holistic way to heal harm one person inflicts on another is to have the person who inflicted the harm make reparations to the person they hurt in a tangible and meaningful way. This can take many forms, and if you’re passingly familiar with restorative justice already, you may have heard about it involving the offender and the victim meeting face-to-face. This does happen sometimes. Personal acknowledgement of the harm you’ve inflicted on someone is important, and direct apologies are important, but these need to also be coupled with actions. The person behind a drunk hit-and-run of a parent could help put their orphaned child through school, or a domestic abuser could be made to take counseling and go on to help deter domestic violence in other households, and so on. 

The vast majority of states across the world use punitive/carceral models, though small-scale community trials of restorative justice have been attempted, to varying degrees of success. No one is going to argue that it would be easy to implement, but it is important. Restorative justice is about recognizing that crime, specifically crimes against other people, are fundamentally still about two people: the perpetrator and the victim. And we have to look beyond the words perpetrator and victim to recognize that they are both human beings and challenge ourselves to build a society where our concept of justice means healing hurts instead of retaliation.

It’s not easy, but it is possible. It requires changing your own perceptions of justice and humanity and society and the big wide entire world to have the kind of mindset that allows it to be possible. But it is possible, and I know that from personal experience, because it’s my own mindset and I’ve been through trauma too.

prison abolition and the god of control

Persona 5 has an authority problem. By which I mean, Persona 5 has a problem challenging authority in any way that functionally matters.

The game is drenched in heavy-handed prison imagery, from jail cells to wardens to striped jumpsuits to cuffs and chains to an electric chair. Throughout the long build-up of the main storyline we’re treated to a confectionery delight of punitive justice, stick-it-to-the-man justice: the Thieves find a bad guy who coincidentally has personally hurt or is actively hurting one of their members, and they take it upon themselves to make the bad guy miserable and then send him off to jail. By the end of the arc you’re meant to feel like you accomplished something heroic, that by locking someone up you’re balancing the scales of justice. In the Kamoshida arc Ann even frames this in restorative justice terms, telling him he doesn’t deserve the easy way out of ending his own life and needs to live with his mistakes and repent, but he’s still sent off to jail regardless and Ann and Shiho are left to struggle through the trauma he put them through without anyone to really support them. This repeats itself, over and over: Madarame, Kaneshiro, Okumura, Shido--expose the bad guy, bring him low, publicly shame him, and then send him away (or, in Okumura’s case, watch him die on live TV to riotous cheers from the public).

And what does this all accomplish, in the end? You get to the Depths of Mementos on Christmas Eve to find the souls of humanity locked away in apathy, surrendered willingly to the control of the state, and your targets right there with them, thanking you for helping them return to a place where they don’t have to think of other people as people any more than they did before. In prison, they can forget that they are human beings and that all of the rest of the people in the world are too. The Phantom Thieves march upstairs and defeat the Gnostic manifestation of social control, that being that masquerades itself with lies as the true Biblical god. And then you go back home and the adults tell you that everything is okay now, the system itself isn’t rotten, and you just have to sit back, stop actively participating in the world, and let them take the reins.

It’s one of Persona 5′s most ironic conceits. “Prison abolition....good?” the player asks, and Atlus swats you on the hand and says, “Silly kids, prison abolition completely unnecessary because you can trust the state to not fuck up anyone’s lives anymore ever.” All while using prison imagery to present prisons as institutions inherently divorced from what might constitute actual justice.

Prisons exist because hierarchies exist, and so long as hierarchies exist, inequality will exist and people will commit harm who otherwise likely would not. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too, Atlus. You can’t frame prisons as an inherently unjust institution used to control people because you didn’t do anything to get rid of the hierarchy. You just gave the hydra a few new heads.

restorative justice and rehabilitation

Rehabilitation is Persona 5′s favorite buzz word, and for all that it’s used the game never really clearly defines what it’s supposed to mean. Yaldabaoth uses it as a euphemism to describe the process by which he creates his ideal puppet, but Yaldabaoth bad, and by the end of the game, Yaldabaoth dead. We get barely any time with Igor after that for Igor to define rehabilitation properly on his terms, which is notable in that Igor is the one who’s supposed to be the spiritual mentor of the wild card within the Persona universe. 

We can only infer from that that it’s the player who’s meant to define what rehabilitation is by the end of the game, but because the game fails to take any concrete stance on its themes that could in any way undermine the idea that society isn’t functionally broken, it’s hard to figure out what conclusion we’re supposed to draw. As I stated above, the game immediately walks back any insinuations that it’s the institutions themselves that are rotten by having Sae and Sojiro step in and assume responsibility for making the world just by continuing to operate within the rules society itself has created. If you can’t beat them....join them?

If anything the closest we can get to coming up with a definitive understanding of what the game wants us to understand rehabilitation as is when the protagonist is in juvie. During those months we’re treated to an extended cutscene of all of your maxed out confidants taking action to get you out of jail, but because you can trigger this scene even if you haven’t maxed out all of your confidants, and because the outcome (getting out of juvie) is the same even if you haven’t maxed out any besides Sae, then we’re right back where we started.

But that cutscene still has a sliver of meaning to it despite it being largely window-dressing, because the game does push, over and over, the argument that it’s through your bonds with others, through building a community, that you’ll rehabilitate yourself and find true justice.

And that’s what restorative justice is about: community.

the truth: uncovering it vs deciding it

I can’t find enough words to convey how infuriating it is that Atlus comes so close to telling a restorative justice narrative and then completely drops the ball on displaying it at all in Goro’s character arc.

Goro’s concept of justice is fundamentally punitive, the textbook “you hurt me so I’m going to hurt you back.” In doing so he goes on to hurt a whole bunch of other people: orphaning Futaba, orphaning Haru, triggering a mental shutdown in Ohya’s partner Kayo, and also killing countless millions other instances of mental shutdowns, psychotic breakdowns, bribery, and scandal that caused people material harm and, in a handful of cases, killed them.

Yes, Shido gave him the gun, but Goro pulled the trigger. And in a restorative justice framework, you don’t bypass that fact: you actively interrogate it.

There’s been a lot of really great meta about what the circumstances of Goro’s life were like, including the Japanese foster care system, the social stigma of bastardy in Japan and the impact it has on an illegitimate child’s outcomes, and the ways in which Shido groomed and manipulated Goro into being the tool of violence he made him into. These things aren’t excuses for what Goro does, however: they’re explanations for it. They are the complex social issues that create a situation where a child feels his best choice, indeed maybe his only choice, is to take the gun being offered to him and use it on other people. If you want to prevent more kids from slipping through cracks into those kinds of situations, you need to understand the social ills that made those cracks appear in the first place and you need to fix them. Otherwise there will always be another kid, and another recruiter, and another bad choice, and another gun. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.

Even so, none of that bypasses the fact that it was Goro’s hand on that gun, that it was Goro who performed the physical action of killing Wakaba’s and Okumura’s shadows, and that, as a result of Goro’s direct actions, Wakaba and Okumura died. You can say Okumura deserved it all you like, but Haru doesn’t deserve to be an orphan. Haru deserved to repair her relationship with her father. Okumura deserved the chance to learn and make direct, material amends to the employees he hurt and the families of those who died on his watch, and they deserved to have him give them a better way to heal.

But this isn’t about the loss of Okumura making amends to his family or his victims: this is about Goro Akechi, and the fact that even in Royal his fraught relationship with Haru and Futaba is never explored, barely even addressed. There’s not even any personal, direct acknowledgement from him of the pain he put them through.

You can say he doesn’t care, and that’s fine that he doesn’t care. And it is. He’s a fictional character, this is a video game, they are anime characters.

But Persona 5 flirts with the idea of restorative justice and never fully explores it, and it’s a weaker game for that.

the thin place, the veil between worlds, the line in the sand

This is the last part, I promise, and I’ll be short and brief here, because the truth is that none of this matters, at least not in the way that you think. Persona 5 is a story. It’s a lie that we buy. It’s all zeroes and ones and electrical signals and optical images on a blank black screen.

But art can be powerful. Art is like magic, the deepest magic, the oldest kind. We human beings are creatures of art and poetry, of images and patterns, of music and words. Good art, really good art, can allow us to explore new ideas and critique our internal assumptions about how the world works.

No, fiction doesn’t affect reality, not the way that you think it does.

But if you’ve gotten this far, I just got you to read an essay on restorative justice and prison abolition in regards to a Japanese role-playing game, and that is something to think about.

How do you define rehabilitation? What kind of justice do you believe in? Is the way you conceive those things really the best way?

And how much more interesting could a story that challenges those concepts be?

Crossed Wires pt.3

Flash Fanfic

——

Warnings: None

Word Count: ~2,500

Pairings: Oc x Canon

***Note: Emily is my own creation, I just like sticking her in random places***

——

Emily woke early the next morning, Harry still sleeping sound beside her. She pondered if it would still be Harry or if Nash took control again before stretching and leaving the warm covers. With one last stretch she rummaged around for something to wear, picking up a pair of her pants before looking for a shirt. Not finding any of her spares that were clean, she instead opted for one of Nash’s. He wouldn’t miss one of his many white shirts nor would he really mind, in fact he seemed to stare a little bit longer whenever she borrowed one. Smiling to herself she slipped out of her sleep shirt and into his before turning to the bed after having heard the sheets ruffle. “Morning,” she said smiling.

“Mornin’,” the response came with a distinctive southern drawl. Emily froze studying the familiar yet unfamiliar face looking back at her. Where in the world did his shirt go? Harry certainly fell asleep with one on. “Whaaa....?” she started confused.

“My apologies,” he replied standing. “Lothario, at your whim and desire.” He bowed low looking her up and down once he righted himself with a half smirk. Emily cringed a bit recognizing who it was that had taken control. “Ah, right. You dropped trow at a council meeting.”

“Made an impression did I?” He asked somewhat smugly taking a few steps toward her. “If only because it was so unexpected,” Emily countered taking a step back. He chuckled having come to a stop a few feet in front of her. “Yes, well, I’m not just impressive to look at. Should you so choose, I’d be more than happy to demonstrate my skills.”

“Ah, no, no thank you. That won’t be necessary,” Emily dismissed stepping around him. “Worried little ole Nash won’t measure up after?” he asked cheekily. Emily spun around and looked him in the eye, something she suspected may have excited him a degree given his reactionary behavior. “Did you forget you’re just borrowing Nash’s body?” she asked.

“Are you implying you’re already, *intimately,* familiar with him?” He attempted at prying. Although she could feel her cheeks become red and ears begin to burn she held her glare. “I’m not gonna stay on this topic,” she declared bringing an intrigued raised eyebrow to the man’s face. “Doppelgängers is carbon copies of each other,” he calls after her as she turns to leave the room. “But that don’t mean he can do what I do.”

“That’s perfectly fine with me,” she called back continuing towards the kitchen. “If you want food you’ll drop it and follow me.” Lothario smirked and followed her keeping quiet about the previous topic like she asked. “Since I’ve only seen you in passing,” she said rounding a corner into the kitchen. “What did you want for breakfast?”

“You,” he said pointedly sauntering up to the table. Emily gave him a look and sighed somewhat annoyed. “I meant food.”

“You look appetizing, you tellin’ me you ain’t nowhere on the menu?” He asked trying his best at flashing a smolder look. Emily glared completely over his schtick. “You’re not the first person with such a mindset I’ve had to deal with,” she said with some authority. “I’m not afraid of enforcing boundaries.”

“Ohh, scary,” he dismissed still smirking.

“Fine, you will get toast and you will like it,” she said matter-of-factly before turning to place four slices of bread in a near by toaster. After pressing the button she spun back around to point at him having heard his steps coming up behind her. “Sit,” she ordered. Rolling his eyes he complied taking a seat near by continuing to watch her and she continued keeping her eye on him. When the toaster popped, and without breaking eye contact, she floated the bread out and a plate from a cupboard before placing the toast onto it floating it over to Lothario. “What, no butter? Honey? Maybe some sugar?” He asked wiggling his eyebrows. Keeping a deadpan face, she floated over butter setting it down next to his plate. “When you’re done I’m taking you to the lab,” she said. “So don’t dawdle.”

“Yes, of course,” he smiled buttering his toast. “Are you gettin’ somethin’ as well?”

“I basically run off cosmic radiation and as such don’t need much food,” she explained. “I’ll be fine.”

“Nonsense,” he dismissed holding up a piece of toast. “Even Superman needs breakfast. ‘Ave one at least.” Emily eyed him for a moment before accepting. “Alright, fine. One piece.” She floated over some brown sugar and cinnamon to sprinkle on top before taking a bite. Lothario watched her curiously. “What you doin’?”

“Hmm? Oh, you’ve never had brown sugar cinnamon toast?” Emily asked mid bite.

“Can’t say that I have,” he responded.

“My mom used to make that for a special breakfast whenever there wasn’t time for actual special breakfast like strawberry shortcake.” Emily explained.

“Sounds delicious,” Lothario replied interested. Emily smiled reflecting on the breakfast memory. “Started by my memere, it has dense biscuits, sliced strawberries and lots and lots of whipped cream.”

“Whipped cream you say?” Lothario asked with a smirk. Emily’s face dropped, her jaw slack and cocked to one side clearly not amused. “Uh huh,” she said before deciding to just play along. “Sometimes it gets all over, just really messy y’know?”

“Uh huh,” Lothario agreed too distracted to finish the piece of toast in his hand.

“‘Course, if you don’t wash it off right away, the cream and syrup from the strawberries just make things really..... really..... sticky.” Emily took slow careful steps toward the table where he was sitting and leaned over it. Lothario stared wide eyed and slack jawed at her, his mind swimming with images until he dropped his toast startling him. Emily smirked. “You done?”

“I uh.... yeah. S’pose so,” he said still dazed.

“Good, lets go then,” she said holding out her hand. Lothario took the opportunity to get up close pulling her right up against him as he held her hand, almost like he was preparing to dance. Emily blushed and felt rather uncomfortable, especially with the placement of his hand so low on her back, but kept her composure enough to form a wormhole and transported them both to the lab. “Caitlyn!” Emily called trying to pry herself away from Lothario who had pressed himself closer to her. It was still rather early in the morning but she had taken note she usually showed up first. Caitlyn rounded the corner into the cortex in time to hear Emily scolding him. “Let me go before your hands are broken,” she said sternly.

“Nash?” Caitlyn asks.

“Lothario,” they both answer simultaneously.

“Please tell me he has cloths on this time,” Cisco pleads from around the corner just as Caitlyn was about to ask what he meant. “Council of Wells, has little to no concept of pants,” Cisco explained seeing Caitlyn’s confusion. “Ah,” she responded in understanding eyeing him warily.

“I made sure he kept pants on,” Emily assured.

“Not for lack of trying,” Lothario teased still keeping uncomfortably close to her. Emily stuck her hand in his face to keep him from making eyes at her. “He’s not very convincing.”

“You didn’t give me an opportunity to,” he countered trying to get his face close again.

“Caitlyn, help, please,” Emily pleaded.

“Alright, ok,” she says heading over to break things up. “Lets see what the device readings are for last night. Maybe it can tell us how to reverse it seeing as its happened again.”

“Don’t feel you need to rush,” Lothario said nonchalantly walking to the exam room. “I’m happy hangin ‘round for a while.” He winked at Emily who huffed still somewhat flustered.

“I think we may have to rush that actually,” Caitlyn said studying the readings. “Why, what is it?” Emily asked concerned. “It would seem that, somehow, the neural device not only monitored but malfunctioned during the night and caused his brainwaves to become unstable.”

“So what does that mean exactly? Is it dangerous?”

“It’s hard to tell but, it’s possible he could suffer permanent brain damage if the instability goes unchecked effectively leaving him in a vegetative state,” she said pointing at the screen.

“So how do we fix that?” Lothario asked now worried himself.

“Well, perhaps we could make adjustments to the device in order to stabilize and prevent spontaneous jumps. Most importantly though, is getting Nash to the front and preventing as many jumps as possible. The more jumps, the more damage.”

“So, I could disappear for good?” Lothario asked. “Caput? Erased? No more?”

“You, and every other Wells entangled in there,” Caitlyn confirmed.

Hearing the news, Emily became restless and tried to keep herself calm. “Emily? Hey, are you alright?” Caitlyn asked concerned. “Yeah, I’ll.... I’ll be ok,” she said stiffly. “Just a bit of anxiety, that’s all. How many jumps happened last night?”

Caitlyn paused while hiding the tablet. “Emily....”

“How many?” She insisted. “Please, it’s gonna be worse if you don’t tell me.” Caitlyn pursed her lips and paused. “According to the data retrieved, it looks like.... maybe 5,” she explained hesitantly. Mild panic flashed over Emily’s face and her whole self seemed to fall. “How bad did that leave things?”

“I can’t say exactly,” Caitlyn admitted. “But, we really don’t want more than that to happen again. Considering he still seems coordinated and aware of what he is doing, if there is any damage it’s not serious and easily reversible.” Emily ran her hands over her face and took a deep breath. “Why don’t you go take a walk?” Cisco suggested. “You look like you could use some air.” Emily shook her head. “No, I’m fine,” she dismissed. Cisco and Caitlyn nodded after a reluctant pause, Lothario studied her curiously mentally noting her attempt at saving face. He could tell she wasn’t handling this as well as she wanted them to believe but didn’t say anything.

“Alright, what’s step one?” She asked crossing her arms and resolving to see a solution.

“First step would be to recalibrate the neural device to stabilize his brainwaves,” Caitlyn explained nodding to Cisco.

“The device is wired mostly to Caitlyn’s brain, which thinking about it now, may have contributed to the malfunction; it wasn’t calibrated to handle so many patterns,” Cisco chimed in. “So we’ll need a detailed recent scan to start things off.”

“We still have the scan from when Eobard was expelled, right?” Emily asked.

“Right!” Caitlyn said remembering the prior events. “We can use that as a ‘target’ for the device. So that just leaves programming it to re-merge the brainwaves and getting Nash back to the front.”

“I’ll see if I can get th’ other Wells’ t’talk,” Lothario offered keeping his attention on Emily. “Don’t worry, we’ll get ‘im back for ya.” He nodded with a genuine smile and not his usual leer. Emily returned it causing a glimmer to appear in his eye and his smile to widen a bit. “So you, go head off with Cisco there and deal with the programming and I’ll stay here with Miss Caitlyn, and work out how to get Nash back.” Emily nodded with a deep sigh before turning to Cisco who ushered her away. “You sure you’re alright?” Cisco asked once they got a few feet down the hall. “I’ll be better when things are sorted,” she muttered. Cisco nodded in agreement before they entered his lab to begin working.

After a bout two and a half hours, Cisco and Emily felt confident they were making good headway. Using the data from the expulsion of Thawn, they modified the device to alternate frequencies until the brainwaves merged back into stable position. All they needed now was for Nash to be in the forefront when everything fell into place. “This should keep jumps from happening,” Cisco explained holding the modified device. “Once Nash takes control, we can increase the frequency to start and hopefully complete the merging process.”

Emily smiles and sighs with some relief. “Alright, lets get this to Lothario and see if it helps stabilize things,” she suggested. Cisco nods in agreement and they both leave for the cortex. “When we see the results of this first test, we can tweak the settings to better resonate,” Cisco explains as they walk, more in an effort to break her unease than to clarify the functions. Emily nodded understanding what he was doing and suspected it was for his benefit as well as hers, he and Nash had grown into quite good friends since Earth Prime had been created and everyone settled into their new routines. She was sure he was just as worried as her about these developments. The closer they got, the louder a murmured voice became until they realized Caitlyn was having a very intense argument with Lothario. Although, Lothario didn’t quite sound like himself; it seemed to them that he donned a new accent. Emily’s face fell in concern at the immediate implication to such a development and quickened her pace. Hurrying into the room they both were at a near sprint when they arrived.

“Will you shut up!” Frost, who couldn’t take the arguing much longer and took over, nearly yelled. “And keep your voice down will you?”

“Jou can’t zeriously ve conzidering listening to zat oafs propozition,” a new Wells voice asked somewhat insulted. “He haz no idea vat he iz doing!”

“Wolfgang?” Cisco asked in surprise. The man turned and faced them having been shaken from his thoughts momentarily. “Jes, jes, of course,” he dismissed. “Ze only juan who knows vat to do apparently.”

“Yeah, that’s Wolfgang,” Cisco confirmed sourly glancing over at Emily. Wolfgang followed his gaze and his demeanor changed to a more friendly tone. “Ah, Emily,” he said with an actual smile. “So nice to meet jou again.” He breezed over and clasped his hands around one of hers, Emily staring blearily at him. “Vorry not,” he assured, “I am formulating ze perfect tactic to get jou jour Nash back.”

“Another jump?” was all Emily could mutter. “Well, at least it was one. It was only one, yes?” Her eyes pleaded more than she outwardly showed. Wolfgang paused tensing briefly while holding her gaze. “Ah, jes, vell.....” he started, gaze wavering as he struggled to hold it. “I...... I am ze..... only vun to appear.... if zat is vat jou mean,” he struggled. Emily didn’t say anything continuing to stare, Wolfgang began to feel uneasy under the unrelenting gaze and even Cisco became wary of her rigid demeanor. “Emily, dahlink.....” Wolfgang continued. “Lothario.... he’s not ze best at vorming coherent toughtz. Ezpecially zince he, well, can’t ‘tink properly’, if jou get vat I’m zaying.” His eyes and head rolled downward for a moment and he shuddered before looking at her again. “Don’t you listen to him none,” Lothario said assuming control again. “He’s just angry I have a diffnt way of doin things is all. Unorthodox he calls it.”

Emily felt her panic rise a degree witnessing a jump first hand. “No, no....” she said quietly to herself registering what he just went through. “Now, don’t worry,” Lothario tried reassuring. “I know just how to get ole Nash front n’center.”

“No, Lothario, did you just—“ Emily started before yet another Wells appeared pulling Lothario back into the recesses of Nash’s psyche. “They have no idea what they’re doing,” he said with yet another accent, this time sounding french. “They are neglecting how his emotional being is, how to calm him in order to ease the transition.”

“H.P.?” Emily asked trying to keep her freak out under wraps. “Yes, indeed,” he replied with a smile. “So good you remember me. Perhaps we could have a conversation sometime in the future. It seems something is always going on lately and prevents proper socializing.”

“Wh-Wait, you... you don’t..... You can’t......” Emily stuttered before yet another jump happened. It took him a moment to shake off the now sluggish delay before making eye contact again. “Can you b’lieve them?” Lothario said back in the lead. “I wasn’t nearly done with my-“

“No, STOP!” Emily nearly yelled, her hands now shaking as panic finally set in to full effect. Everyone froze and stared in surprise at her outburst. They knew she was worried but had no idea how much trouble she was having keeping her cool. “I think.... I think I’ll go take that.... that walk now,” she said, voice wavering a touch as she ran her hands through her hair. “I could use some air....”

“Yeah, go get some air...” Cisco agreed placing a hand on her shoulder as she walked away. He turned back to Lothario with an irritated and disapproving look. “What?” Lothario asked seemingly oblivious. “I say sum’n wrong?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” Cisco retorted sarcastically. “You were warned about brain jumps and what do you do? How many happened??”

“Now hold on, it wasn’t just me,” Lothario defended.

“I’m not talking to just you, I know the other Wells’ can hear too,” Cisco near snapped. Lothario stared after Emily for a moment before inhaling deeply and changing posture. “I’m going to go talk to her,” he said still looking past him. “No, I think you’ve done enough,” Cisco denied.

“It would help more if you stayed here,” Caitlyn added switching with Frost again now that Wolfgang had receded. “She’s really quite concerned with all this.”

“I know,” he said finally turning to make eye contact with someone other than an empty hallway. “I know. But, this is Harry. Please, I think I can put her at ease.”

“Not you too, Harry,” Cisco started to complain.

“No, I promise it wasn’t a jump or anything like that,” he assured. “I was permitted to ‘drive’, so to say, and I think that’s the key. Having Nash just close enough to the surface and then giving him permission to take control again.”

“But the question remains, how do we find him and bring him forward?” Caitlyn added.

“Well, I’ve been......I’ve been conversing, or as close to conversing as you can call it, with the other Wells’ and they’ve been trying to guide him forward. And let me tell you, it isn’t easy. Especially with Wolfgang and Lothario making so much noise.”

“I can imagine,” Cisco commented sourly.

“But I think it will help if she’s here too. Like a.... like a target or anchor point for him to aim for. But it would be best if she was on board with the idea,” Harry concluded. After a brief pause and moment of consideration, they both nodded in agreement. “So, anyone have any idea where she may have wandered off to?” He asked.

——

I must admit, my mind started rambling a bit at this point so I apologize if things get confusing. I couldn’t quite figure out how to articulate what it was I wanted to say.

JK Rowling continues to spout TERF ideology, continues to say she’s not a TERF.

JK Rowling, best known as author of the world-renowned Harry Potter series and the decider of who is and isn’t gay, took to Twitter within the past 24 hours to make what I can only assume was supposed to be a joke in response to a Tweet about efforts to help create a more equal world “those who menstruate” in a post Covid-19 world, saying that “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people.”

When called out for her erasure of trans men, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people - all people who can be assigned female at birth but do not identify as women - Rowling went on the defensive, criticizing the idea that “sex isn’t real”.

Here’s the thing, Rowling: sex is real. Trans people know this. That’s kind of what makes most of us trans. Their biological sex, which is a real and tangible thing, does not match the identity they see for themselves, which is also real although it can be a lot harder for us outsiders to see. This is why many trans people opt for modified clothing (such as binders and gaffs), hormones and surgeries to make the exterior body match the internal sense of gender. Granted, many trans people will not do this, and they are not obligated to do so, but the vast majority of us will opt for such measures, not just to make ourselves more comfortable in our skins, but also so people like you don’t keep misgendering us and then pretend to be the victim when we call you out on it (which you’re doing right now). Absolutely no one is arguing that biological sex isn’t real.

She then goes on to say that saying women like her, “who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades”, hate trans people “because they think sex is real and has lived consequences - is a nonsense”.

Like I said Rowling, sex is real and absolutely no one is saying otherwise. You’re the one who keeps saying it. You said it during the Maya Forstater debacle and you’re saying it now. “Woman” is not a term that refers to someone who is biologically female. An overwhelming amount of the time it does, but not always. “Female” and “female-bodied” are somewhat controversial terms when it comes to afab transgender people, but they always refer to someone who is biologically female. “Afab” is an acronym for “assigned female at birth”, which can even refer to cis women. So as you can see, there are better terms to refer to someone with female reproductive organs than “women”. And believe it or not, a lot of those “lived consequences” are often the same for a lot of afab people. Not everyone has the privilege to transition at 6-years-old, before the horrors of the real world affect most of us. Many afab trans men (I would like to quickly acknowledge that some trans men may be biologically intersex), non-binary and gender-nonconforming people will have lived as females or a somewhat “female experience” up until they come out of the closet and begin their transition, if they do so at all. Pre-transition afab people are still subjected to the same amount of sexism, misogyny, sexual harassment and general dangers that come with being a woman because even though they are not women, society sees them as women. And yes, these people will even menstruate, because they have a female reproductive system (although it is worth noting that some people born with these parts may not menstruate at all, because biology is weird and sometimes things don’t function the way they’re supposed to). And on top of all that, trans women will also face the same hazards during and after the main stages of their transitions. In fact, statistically speaking, transgender women are even more likely to experience male violence than cis women, so let’s not pretend they aren’t involved in this whole conversation at all.

And just a quick sidebar, like I said, some people with female reproductive parts don’t menstruate because their body just never kicks that system into gear. If a cis woman never menstruates because she’s one of those people, is she no longer a woman, J?

I would also like to take the time to comment on how she pretends trans people don’t exist when she wants the spotlight and only references them when she gets called out for it. This is a lot like the, “I can’t be racist, I have black friends” “argument”. We’re not tools that you can use and then put back in the closet when you’re done (only we can decide if it’s time to go back in the closet, and I would rather not do that again, thank you very much). We’re not accessories you can flaunt to show how accepting you are. We exist even when you’re not making exclusionary remarks and pretending that the issue at hand is exclusive to cis females only.

She goes on to claim she would support trans people if we are discriminated against. I don’t have a Twitter account so I can see only very limited Tweets online, but so far I haven’t seen her comment on the proposed UK bathroom bill that would force trans people to use the bathrooms that correspond with the sex marker on their birth certificates. If she has commented, let me know and I will update this section of this post appropriately.

She tries to justify herself by saying she is well-read in scientific journals and transgender experiences, so she knows the distinction between sex and gender. But if this was the case, she wouldn’t still be using “woman” to refer strictly to cis women, and she certainly wouldn’t be using it to describe all  people who menstruate.

She says, “Never assume that because someone thinks differently, they have no knowledge.” And she would make a good point, if saying that only women menstruate and implying that if you menstruate you are a woman, plain and simple, wasn’t TERF rhetoric. Listen, you can know all about a subject as complicated and relatively new as gender identity, but knowledge and acceptance are two different things. Just because you major in Africana Studies and can name just about every major figure in black history doesn’t make you less racist when you clutch your purse tighter when you see a black man jogging down the street. Having a degree in Women’s Studies doesn’t make you any less sexist when you tell a woman to make you a sandwich because you disagree with her opinion. And reading scientific papers about transgender people and what it all means doesn’t make you less transphobic when you make sweeping claims that only women menstruate, and that transgender people don’t understand the struggles of being a woman.

In what is her most damning move so far, Rowling then Tweets out, “‘Feminazi’, ‘TERF’, ‘bitch’, ‘witch’. Times change. Woman-hate is eternal.” One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong...

I get it, there are plenty of terms and phrases used with the intent of shutting up women you don’t agree with. TERF is not one of those terms. TERF is in the same category as racist, misogynist, neo-nazi, etc. NOT the same category as women-silencing words like ‘bitch’ or ‘feminazi’. A TERF is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, someone who discredits the existence and experiences of transgender people (primarily trans women) because they feel like it (the transgender experience) doesn’t belong in discussions of women’s rights, or even that it threatens their identity as women. Sounds kinda familiar, doesn’t it? Calling someone a TERF is not a silencing behavior, and you’d figure a feminist would understand this. Calling someone a TERF is calling them out for behavior, while also letting the transgender community know that this is not a safe person to be around. If anything it’s a warning label. 

And look, don’t take this all to mean I hate women. I don’t. I only hate it when we pretend that an issue such as menstruation is exclusive to cis women. It isn’t. Women’s issues typically aren’t restricted to cis women. Trans women will experience violence and hate, usually at a disproportionately high rate when compared to their cisgender sisters. Trans men will often experience discrimination pre-transition, and maybe even post-transition from people who still see them as women. Not only that, but trans men typically experience the issues that come along with being biologically female (again, those that are afab). Most transgender men will menstruate and experience all the absolutely wonderful symptoms that come along with it. Some transgender men even get pregnant and have babies. No one is arguing that women have it easy. Transgender people - regardless of if they’re trans women, trans men, non-binary, agender, gender fluid, or gender-nonconforming - don’t want to erase women’s experiences throughout the years. We just want to live our lives in peace like everybody else. I just wish Rowling would stop pretending otherwise.

Is JK Rowling a terrible person? I don’t think I can go that far. She has made some serious contributions towards the acceptance of LGB (although notably not T) themes in children’s media, supports the Black Lives Matter movements, and even showcases fan art from very young fans on her Twitter. Although, she did share an article talking about the lesbian experience with discrimination and erasure, which is very important (hell, I admittedly don’t come across a lot of lesbian content on my Tumblr feed so I don’t get a chance to reblog a whole lot of it), but it also says that “ask my pronouns” is decidedly anti-lesbian, and paints the entire LGBTQIA+ community (referred to as “LGBTQ” with the quotes) as greedy, money-hungry, well-supported, and even predatory against children. Is this just a subject I’m not all that knowledgeable in? Perhaps, but I have a really hard time taking your arguments seriously LGBTQIA+ community is decidedly predatory against children, but I digress. I will say, however, that I am just disappointed. I’m disappointed someone who has been all about standing up to bullies and fighting against oppression has been using her platform to side with bullies and take part in said oppression. I’m disappointed she lumps “TERF” in with “Feminazi” and other terms designed to discredit women with opinions. And above all, I’m disappointed that she claims to offer us support when her actions support just the opposite. But, after all we’ve seen over the years, I can’t say I’m surprised.

A 2019 essay on the puffer jacket as a symbol of late capitalism argued that “under [its] terms . . . anything that streamlines day-to-day tasks that are only peripherally necessary for its functioning—eating, commuting, and, yes, dressing—is to be encouraged, rewarded, and, of course, sold back to us.” The author goes on to explain that “our clothing choices have been shaped by the demands of optimization. Time spent layering knitwear, scarves, and overcoats is time not spent answering emails or online shopping” . . . as if nobody has ever worn both a puffer jacket and a scarf. Even by the standards of “this thing is late capitalism” essays, positing that puffer jackets are part of a conspiracy to make people work more is pretty out there. Yet this is the logical end point of a line of thinking that doesn’t really hold anybody responsible for anything. Even the people buying $1,000 Canada Goose jackets live at the mercy of the system! What can any of us really do, apart from answer emails and online shop?

Take the many pieces that have been written railing against the twee women’s networking club The Wing, with its apparently feminist ethos but exclusively high price. Few have made any of the women who choose to the join The Wing the subject of their ire. One essay describes how the club’s brightly colored, floral-patterned spaces demonstrate how “the radical potential of ‘playful’ and ‘zany’ aesthetics can be appropriated to mask a capitalist logic”—as though the workings of capitalism are “masked” for those women who can afford to pay The Wing’s $2,350 single location yearly fee. Writer Eloise Hendy continues: “The Wing offer[s] women luxurious ‘treats’ while profiting from their desire to escape or reform society’s ills.” But The Wing serves primarily as a space for professional women to meet and advance their careers; it is not a forum for people campaigning against homelessness or poverty. Are Wing members being unwittingly used by a deceptive and exploitative company, or are they willing contributors to a system that is working pretty well for them already?

...These essays all borrow from more substantive and radical criticisms of marketing made decades ago, like in Naomi Klein’s No Logo, or the countercultural magazine Adbusters. But most of them come to conclusions that feel curiously flat. While these earlier works advocated boycotts and protesting, “this thing is late capitalism” essays end instead on a note of knowing resignation. They point out that brands are insidious, and capitalism is oppressive, but conclude that, though awareness of this may be widespread, our power to act on it is minimal. These writers are right, of course, to argue that individual change won’t bring about the end to capitalism. But that doesn’t mean that choice does not exist.

Ultimately, linking a brand or cultural trend to “late capitalism” is an undemanding way to affect profundity and a kind of superficial universality. It is easy to complain about our collective helplessness, and convenient to flatten all experiences of the capitalist demand for productivity, as if an honest parallel can be made between the self-imposed short lunch breaks of an upwardly mobile urban millennial with two degrees and the timed bathroom breaks of an Amazon factory worker. All workers experience exploitation of some sort under capitalism, but it’s not an act of solidarity to obscure the very uneven way this manifests. No Logo was just as engaged with the conditions of marginalized workers in sweatshops as it was with brand saturation, but such considerations are conspicuously absent from “this thing is late capitalism” discourse.  

The trend in like the discourse or w/e of going like “welp the system is the system and all possible responses to its pressures/exertions against our lives amount to the same thing' is so fucking infuriating to me like it’s a v empty and convenient way of looking at things for a certain type of relatively advantageously placed subject of ~late capitalism~...approaching things as if we're all completely and comprehensively helpless and therefore there's no such thing as moral distinction at all so we don't have to bother with any of the implications and consequences of the particular ways in which we might engage with the system because it actually all amounts to the same thing it’s basically predestined which is so awful but also aw shucks guess that means I might as well just keep doing what I was gonna do anyway and not even consider changing the way I look at and engage with the world in any way at all ! All that really needs to and can be done is ritually self-flagellating by reminding myself and of course others on my feed of the existence of this bad inescapable thing called capitalism and that absolves me of reckoning with all of that shit at all beyond that superficial acknowledgement and the irony that reification of capitalism as an overarching system as well as of its particular symptoms is masquerading as critique is lost on us all

I don’t remember when or where, but I was looking at translations for a interview ONE did a while back and someone asked what Genos’ personality was like before he was a cyborg and ONE with something along the lines of ‘his personality hasn’t changed much’ so Genos may have been a very stoic kid. But don’t take it for face value cause I don’t exactly remember

Yes! 

I think I know exactly what you’re talking about. I don’t speak Japanese but there are translations of interviews on this page:

 https://onepunchman.fandom.com/wiki/Interviews#One_Punch-Man:_Hero_Encyclopedia_Q.26A

I believe the part you’re referring to is: 

Question: During Genos school period what kind of person was he?

ONE: He wasn't all that different compared to now.

So, unless there is a difference in the way one said it in Japanese, or unless there is another interview I am not aware of where ONE elaborates, the idea that he was ‘stoic’ would actually be a bit of an interpretation. 

And that interpretation has a lot to do with whether or not a reader might consider his stoic now. How readers choose to interpret characters varies as wildly as human diversity itself and so much of what we choose to see in characters reflect more on how We Ourselves view the world around us, and less an objective view of the characters. 

Correct me if I’m wrong but I assume you’re referring to this post ( https://iwillgetridofyourangerforyou.tumblr.com/post/621555101577936896/here-are-some-of-my-head-canons-and-young-genos )? I tried to make it clear that those are thoughts that I personally enjoy, not necessarily ideas I think are accurate or supportable. For my own part, I make an effort to be *aware* of my personal biases and that not everyone thinks the way I do, and so I try to be careful to inform my audience when I am speaking from my subjective opinion for my own purposes, or whether I’m actually trying to share what I think the author is doing. I haven’t always been the most successful at making this distinction. (work in progress) So I always appreciate interacts and dialogue that help me see other people’s perspectives.

Read more for tangential ramblings:

I’m a bit of an imperfect student of stoicism myself and I’m curious to know what your interpretation of ‘a stoic’ kid would be? I’m not intending to attack your interpretation, I’m just attempting to recognize that it seems we may be coming from different perspectives on this. On my interpretation, there isn’t necessarily anything specific I mentioned in my post that would contradict a calm, measured, responsible and serious kid. I don’t think stoicism has as much to do with the degree to which a person experiences emotions and more with how a person chooses to measure their response to those natural human stimuli. 

If by stoic you mean unemotional? Personally, I’ve always been slightly confused by interpretations that describe Genos as robotically unemotional. I could (and have alluded to in other posts) argue that Genos is canonically is a deeply emotional character. Frankly, making the argument that Genos is a good representation of a ‘stoic’ character is a bit of disservice to stoicism and to Genos. 

Tuesday Op-Ed---Good Morning/Afternoon Tumblrs!

Ok ... I am sharing what my Friend Dena Lynn wrote about this , more than the article itself!

“” This article was sent to me by a friend, saying that this author reminds him of me.

Initially, I was flattered to be thought of as a strong woman. But then, as I read what this author had to say, I had some strong and immediate objections

Sure, she makes many excellent points. Co-dependence is a lousy and unhealthy way of relating, once we're out of early childhood. We all need to grow up into maturity in order to have healthy relationships as adults.

In many ways, yes, I am a strong woman, and I know myself well, and I know what I want, what I need, and what works for me. I do relish egalitarianism in a relationship, even as I recognize that masculine and feminine traits, in both men and women, are unique. Equal, yet different.

That said, I do take some issue with what's described here. The woman who's being described in this article is a mythological character.

No human being, no matter how much soul work they've done, has all of their shit together. We were all wounded in childhood, to varying degrees. No one escapes childhood unscathed. And we all carry various forms and degrees of unresolved early childhood trauma.

The major difference is in how well we are repressing that, versus how well we are owning and expressing that.

There are layers under layers of ever-deepening levels of unresolved trauma within us. We have basements, and sub-basements, and some of us even have dungeons. It takes an intimate relationship in order to trigger the hell out of each other. Figuratively and literally.

We are wounded in relationship. And we are healed in relationship.

I'm also not a feminist. Any more than I would expect any man to be a masculinist. I'm a humanist. I love being a woman, and I love the differences between men and women. Vive la difference.

This author is doing what so many feminist authors are doing of late, in elevating women, while denigrating men. News-flash: women are not inherently superior and virtuous, any more than men are inherently inferior and villainous.

Perhaps we do indeed attract that which most reflects us, or perhaps I'm simply oddly fortunate, in that I am surrounded by men of a stellar caliber. Men who take their own work seriously, men who own their shit and take responsibility for their own lives.

Men who don't deserve to be spoken to as if they are unruly adolescents in need of a stern lecture.

Thus, I am a humanist, not a feminist. I value each person for who they are, even while I desire to reflect the best of each person back to themselves.

I want people to be exactly who they came to be, and one of my life missions is to inspire everyone I encounter it to see and be who they truly are. And that's a lifelong journey. There's no destination, no arrival point, no expiration date on that journey.

Contrary to the spiritual-bypassing of the "Cult of Positivity's" creed, Independence is not the penultimate human goal. Interdependence is a more noble, more mature, more developed, albeit far more difficult, way of relating to other humans.

Particularly with the intimate relationship, such as is being described here.

Of *course* we need each other. If we didn't, we would each be the solitary inhabitant of our own planet. We need each other in ways we don't dare admit, because that's raw vulnerability, and vulnerability is risky. And this article is all about feigning invulnerability, detachment, and solo Independence. In the name of self-protection. In the name of bypassing the deepest of work.

The crucial distinction is in *how* we need others. I'm not talking about a co-dependent, valid yet juvenile stage of development here, in which we need another for survival.

I'm talking about the grown-ass realization that follows the next stage of development, known as Independence, in which we discover our wholeness, only to then discover that we, as a whole individual, desire, and yes, *need,* the interaction and intimacy with another whole human being, in which to plunge the depths and soar the heights of interpersonal and intimate relating, in ways in which we could not see (due to our dedication to our shadows and blind spots), much less manage, on our own:. Interdependency.

Because we are masters of repressing our unresolved shit during the stage of Independence. It's oh-so-easy to be that solitary guru on the hill, triggered by no one, smug in our self-realizations, untested by the intricacies of intimacy, wherein we hand the beloved a knife, and ask them to perform soul-surgery, sans anesthesia, while simultaneously trusting them to not dissect us alive with that same knife.

Intimate interdependence is not for the faint, nor feint, of heart.

Most won't go there.

So, instead, we laud and applaud the mythology of the independent woman, the independent man, who need no one, who risk nothing, except the ultimate risk of dying with their unresolved trama still safely and subconsciously tucked away in their psychic sub-basement, imagining that their resolute self-protection is a treasured and precious part of their personality.

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate." ~ Carl G. Jung

So please don't call me a strong, independent woman.

I am a courageous, tenacious, unapologetically integral, interdependent woman.

Your mileage may vary.

~ Dena Lynn

Victim Focus

https://victimfocus.wordpress.com/2020/01/04/dear-men-so-you-think-you-want-a-strong-independent-woman/?fbclid=IwAR3ZFHuCElka81HPXo7fBqAEEJXsZVSQ3hNZu8gMGS9rEzaTkT7rejeM7JE

Secularism vs Atheism

According to Merriam Webster, secularism is defined as the “indifference to, or rejection or exclusion of, religion and religious considerations” (Merriam Webster). The secular demands any believer to separate their religion from life. This blatant interference in the freedoms of others, it does not separate their secular religion from life, or even separate them from others’ lives because of its many interventions. But it interferes in the religious dress, in the education and upbringing of their children, in their social relations and even in their attitudes towards homosexuality, adultery, the quality and durability of Western culture, rejection of heritage, etc. They wonder why you hate homosexuality, why hurt the feeling of homosexuals and call them homosexuals? As if they do not hurt the feelings of Muslims when they call them terrorists? Billions of human beings are apparently terrorists.

Secularists want to impose their opinion and only their opinion is to be said, and then claim they do not belong to a religion or doctrine. Although the features of the doctrine are prominent, although it is not labelled a religion, I call it a religion: the religion of liberalism and atheism based on the opposition of religion, and against the independent entity even if it is negative, just as the light is an entity, darkness is an entity, and cold entity versus heat and space versus existence, and non-religion against religion. All include laws, theories, philosophies, influences, followers and conflicts. Secularism comes in degrees, such as degrees of colour; some darker than some. It belongs to a strange Western culture and wants to impose it on people and then speak about freedom and locate the people of religions saying your religion is in the mosque or in the church. Who determines the place of religion, owners or enemies? Did Islam say that religion is in the mosque only? Since it doesn’t, secularism interferes in religion and legislation and wants to delete what it wants and keep what it wants and acknowledges what it wants and denies what it wants (without admitting to interference). At the same time, it demands not to interfere in the beliefs of others, including its’ own.

There exist distinct traditions of secularism in the West (e.g., French and Anglo-American) and beyond, where public events or decisions are not influenced by religion (Nader Hashemi 2009). There are inherent dimensions of French secularism that were not neutral about matters of religion and civil society in general because they were of a radical fighting nature, with a hostile destination to the Catholic Church in particular and religion in general. French secularism bets on freeing the public sphere from the domination of religion and filling it with "eternal" cultural values, and Educational institutions in general are considered among the most important means of this. For French secularists, the school is not just a learning space, but an ideal field to recreate a second nature for a child, uprooting it from the social milieu. Secularists are betting on changing the structure of society through the tools of the school. Therefore, French secularism is concerned with all manifestations of religious expression, whether in its institutional or even individual form.

And French secularism is a special and unique case even compared to European and American political history, a specificity whose general features derive from the contexts of the French experience itself. The state is a later response to the formation of the nation, to the point of saying that the modern history of France is first and foremost the history of the founding state of the nation-making nation.

The harvest of the eternal culture imposed by the French state on society was the transition from neutrality to atheism, which is an important lesson that exceeds the importance of the veil file, and according to statistics, in the year 1966, 89% of the French declared their affiliation with one of the religions, while 10% affirmed that they do not convert to any religion. After 32 years, the percentages, respectively, became 55 and 45%. Those without religion constitute a clear majority in French society among those under the age of fifty, with a percentage of 63% within the age group 81 - 42 years, and it can be considered that for the first time in centuries there is an equal number of French people outside and within religions.

In other words, secularism demands that people belong to their religion, which is to separate religion from life, secularism always runs under power and this confirms that it is a religion that needs authority to support it because people will not accept it alone.

Preventing the veil is only an imposition of the secular religion, which relies on the detection of women and undressing unlike religion, which depends on the cover of women. And the obligation to teach the theory of evolution in schools, all this is done by authorities while keeping the prosecution to preserve freedoms. And like the removal of religion from education, they are demanding to take it out to replace secularism based on the philosophy of non-scientific material, which is a religion of thought. Secularists believes that what works for them is suitable for all people and this sign of religiosity, each religious person believes that his religion is the most suitable for all. Yes, secularism is a religion and has its symbols, sanctity and personalities that do not touch the niches and platforms in the West and is accepted by scientists and theorists and advocates and predecessors of the good.

 REFERENCES

 Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster Inc.

 Nader Hashemi (2009). "Secularism". In John L. Esposito (ed.). The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  WIN-Gallup International, GLOBAL INDEX OF RELIGIOSITY AND ATHEISM – 2012 

https://sidmennt.is/wp-content/uploads/Gallup-International-um-tr%C3%BA-og-tr%C3%BAleysi-2012.pdf

FROM RECKLESS MEN TO EMOTIONAL DISASTERS

AN ANALYTICAL EVALUATION OF THE AESTHETIC QUALITIES OF A FEW FAMOUS TOM CRUSE CHARACTERS

To start off, yes, I’m doing another essay on this. (Mel, this doesn’t change the fact that we are fighting because you know I’m right. So, write a paper or admit that I’m right.) This was requested by @sweetbouquetartisane because she wants to hear my thoughts on why I find Mr. Tom Cruise attractive, on a physical level anyway. And I am very inclined to write this first in the series of essays that will come out soon. But I digress, the main point is that Tom Cruise is a very good-looking man and that characters he plays from movie to movie bring out very different responses from me. So let’s dive head first on the characters of Barry Seal, Jack Harper, Ethan Hunt, and Danny Kaffee. This order corresponds from least favorite to most favorite. I don’t hate any of these characters. In fact, I love them. A little too much. But l Digress. 

American Made, for me as a film, was something I wished to watch for the historical nature of it, given that it sort of documents the situation surrounding the Iran-Contra affair (look forward to that essay soon). And so when I watched it the very first time this week, I was excited. I had never watched a film that directly talks about this stuff, especially with such a big-name star like Tom Cruise. He plays Barry Seal, a very crazy man irl who worked for the CIA and The Medellín Cartel and ultimately died before the Iran Contra Scandal went public. Now I’m supposed to hate this character very much cause of his involvement with said cartel and CIA, but from his very first words, he grabbed my heart and never let go. GOD, he’s so fucking charming it is insane. He speaks in a slight southern accent, he flies like a mad man. HE SPEAKS FUCKIN SPANISH, I JUST.

So, a bit of context about why that is important. Before I watched this film I was away in Guatemala visiting family for two weeks. Because of that, I was limited to Spanish only conversation. It got me thinking. Mel and I had a discussion on this about how great it would be if Ethan Hunt would speak Spanish on screen. We never get to hear it in a movie, and it was a very fun conversation. So I watched American Made the day I returned home, not knowing that Tom would be speaking Spanish. I FUCKIN LOST MY SHIT. I just couldn’t FUNCTION. And he starts off with very limited Spanish and over the course of the movie he gets a bit better. MEL AND I JUST LOST IT. I showed it to her the second time I watched (but she does not like Barry, she likes Schafer and she hasn’t watched to the end of the film.)

The outfits they put Barry in this movie, like in every scene almost, he has the Sleeves™ and Mel and I LOVE THE SLEEVES. Tom Cruise with rolled up sleeves, very good yes. Also, Mel, I know you appreciate when Tom is wearing a uniform and he wears a pilot uniform for a good portion of the beginning of the movie. 

HE LOVES HIS WIFE SO DAMN MUCH. AND WHEN SHIT HITS THE FAN THAT’S THE ONLY THING HE CARES ABOUT, HIS FAMILY’S WELLBEING. THE VOICE KINK IS STRONG IN THIS MOVIE FOR ME. (yes Tumblr I have a voice kink, the least Extra™ of any kink I’ve ever admitted to, shut up. Well, that and the Sleeves™.) Also, he fucks his wife in a plane and it just stresses me the fuck out but also makes me feel things. I’m very conflicted about it.

Jack Harper, The Softest™ Man. I can’t thirst over him, it breaks my heart too much. BUT THAT WON’T STOP ME. Look, he just wants to live a peaceful life away from this bullshit. And HE JUST LOVES THE EARTH SO FUCKIN MUCH. AND VIKA IS JUST A STICKLER FOR THE RULES. LET HIM KEEP HIS FLOWER FOR FUCK’S SAKE. PLEASE DON’T HURT HIM HE JUST WANTS TO BE HAPPY AND LIVE LIFE ON EARTH. (also, he does have that scene where he’s restrained and its…. fuck)

Ethan Hunt. Ethan Fucking Hunt. THIS MAN DRINKS RESPECT WOMEN JUICE FOR BREAKFAST LUNCH AND DINNER. He is such a badass and he cares so much about his loved ones it’s crazy. He just wants to protect the world and he fights his government to do the greater good. He clings of a plane, free climbs the side of mountains, marries Julia in the hospital before the mission (and then proceed to fuck in the medical supplies…JULIA YOU ARE A NURSE WHAT THE FUCK.)  He looks damn good wearing a tux and riding a bike. He has the sleeves in fallout. I just love him a lot.

Like ok look, not to go too in depth about Ethan’s character (Look forward to that essay as well) but he is an Extra Spy who cares too much and risks his life because ultimately he cannot let anyone die. He won’t allow it. The mission is all he has left, he has no life outside of that because he learned early on that the risk is too much for his loved ones. He’s always ready to die for the sake of a mission, and he speaks French and Russian. So, in turn, he dedicates himself to being the best agent, not for the sake of his government, however, (because the government is shown to be very sketchy.) It’s the embodiment of the thesis posited by James Bond in Skyfall. In Skyfall, when Bond is meeting  Q for the first time they have this conversation of Technology vs Old-school Tradecraft

Bond: Oh, so why do you need me?

Q: Every now and then a trigger has to be pulled.

Bond: Or not pulled. It's hard to know which in your pajamas.

Ethan Hunt is the embodiment of the critical thinking in the espionage trade. By that I mean, after his first mission gone wrong, he thinks about the decisions he makes. And it’s nice that people consider the consequences of their actions and don’t go shooting everyone who crosses their path. Ethan Hunt Certified Badass and Respecter of women. (also he has the scene in with the pole). He has an engineering degree and he was in the army. He DOUBLE MAJORED IN ENGINEERING AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS! HE’S A SMART BOI AND I LOVE AND RESPECT HIM VERY MUCH! JUST LET HIM LIVE A HAPPY AND NORMAL LIFE. (also he has those scenes...)

And lastly our last candidate for evaluation. You know who it is, THAT’S RIGHT. LT. DANIEL ALLISTER KAFFEE SMARTEST SMARTASS TO EVER SMARTASS IN THE HISTORY OF SMARTASSERY. (Did I ever mention I have a thing for lawyers?) This is different from all the others I’ve mentioned here. Like Kaffee is not the Tom Cruise Action Hero™ he is a quietly intense drama boi. He’s insecure and masks it with a layer of cockiness because he is afraid of the shadow of his father’s legacy. It’s just so sad. He’s a very smart Boi who doesn’t apply himself because he understands that litigation is an artwork to itself and he’s trying to make sure his clients get the best deal possible. He knows that if his case goes to trial he cannot control the outcome, he can present his case but at the end of the day, it is up to the jury to decide whether his clients are guilty or not. I could discuss Kaffee, my actual husband, all day. He has some certifiable looks in this movie.

HE HAS HIS REGULAR NAVY UNIFORM.

HIS SOFTBALL OUTFIT

THE JOCK OUTFIT

THE WHITE NAVY UNIFORM

And my absolute favorite HIS CLASS A UNIFORM.

HE HAS EVERYTHING I LIKE. ROLLED UP SLEEVES? CHECK! TOM CRUISE IN JEANS? CHECK! SMARTASSERY? DOUBLE CHECK! UNIFORMS? CHECK FROM HERE TO COLOMBIA! ISSUES WITH AUTHORITY? CHECKAMUNDO! (also his reluctantly subbish tendencies, but not everyone is into that. BUT FUCK YOU MEL, I’M RIGHT JUST ADMIT IT)

LOOK MY ACTUAL HUSBAND DANIEL KAFFEE

This man is such a disaster, he doesn’t know how to eat apples, he gets sick on boats (Jesus Christ Kaffee, You’re in the Navy.) All he has in his house is Yoohoo and Coco Puffs, He has a baseball bat fetish (not the sexual definition, the witchcraft one.) He fuckin walked in the rain drunk af and then proceeded to drive a few blocks looking for Joanne, while still drunk (Sam WHAT THE FUCK, WHY DID YOU LET HIM DRIVE???) When he tells Jessup to return to the stand and he drinks water, he’s fuckin shaking. He swears when he’s frustrated. His voice, oh my fuck, HIS VOICE. He gesticulates a lot in court as well (I’m thinking about his cross-examination of the doctor specifically) I don’t know why but I find that endearing. The way he speaks in court is so smart, and when he whispers, It just. IT’S Like ASMR but I like it instead of being creeped out. He just, GOD HIS VOICE. I LOVE IT. He never has a pen on his person, like Danny, sweetheart, please. He just. GOD I THINK I’M IN LOVE.

So that’s essentially my Deep Dive™ on Tom Cruise characters that I’ve watched this week. He’s just so charming in all these roles and they all have something different to offer. All are distinct people: Barry Seal, the most fucking reckless man ever. Jack Harper, the softest soul who just loves earth please just let him keep his flower. Ethan Hunt, the most badass Extra™ spy who consumes gallons of respect women juice. Daniel Kaffee, my Harvard educated smartass who is very fucking stupid. Each of them just provides me with a very different experience emotionally, but they all have their merits and I love them all.

(Mel, fuck you. I’m Right.)

Seventh night of writing! At 12,600 words, the first week is done with the target beaten. 

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She noticed Eciurtal looked frustrated about something, though. Probably that she wasn’t paying attention.

“I’m sorry, I was thinking of…” V. tried to think of an appropriate lie, “...my last solo mission. Would you mind repeating that?”

Chief Nurse Eciurtal had the distinction of being half-Icosan, and half-Rastra—a far western nation that had, thus far, opposed Icarian rule. In particular, her parent had been from a population of the people of the land found in one of the largest Rastriyan ports, a notorious thief known only as Silver Dhanukkar. The special scandal of Firoza Ciurtal’s parentage was not her mixed heritage, but that nobody would admit to who was her mother and who was her father. Silver Dhanukkar’s gender was a mystery as great as anything else about the burglar, and whether they had borne a child by the eldest son of the noble Eciurtal family, or sired one on that same son’s twin sister, it was unknown. The Eciurtals were notoriously private, eccentric, and possessed of a strange code of pride that excused Firoza’s existence while at the same time keeping nearly everything about her life secret.

Perhaps that was the reason she was attached to the Corpse as Chief Nurse.

“I said that you need to remember to keep your emblem on you, or else you won’t resurrect,” she said to V., sighing as she rubbed her own, an abstracted likeness of a squirrel with its tail curling around its body.

“Oh, of course,” V. said, reaching into her collar to pull out the animal symbol she kept on a chain so tight it might as well have been a choker. She was used to it being there, in spite of never having liked it or wanted it, like so much else in her life. “I never forget it.”

ONCE AGAIN, TEN YEARS BEFORE THE PRESENT, I KNOW IT’S CONFUSING

“Again, after your emblem is cast, never forget to keep it on your person. These charms will contain a portion of the very same immortal essence as our beloved Emperor, his personal gift to you as members of his Corpse,” intoned the Witch General, lifting one of the small bars of metal that would soon be reshaped into the likeness of an animal through powerful sorcery. It was aluminum, a precious metal that itself required powerful magic to process from ores, and was ordinarily reserved as a possession of Icosans.

L. raised his hand.

“Yes?” the Witch General asked, barely glancing in L.’s direction at the far left of the assembly.

“What’s an emblem, anyway?” the small, pale boy asked.

The Witch General—whose name was a matter of national secrecy, and in fact was rumored to be regularly and according to randomized timing replaced by a new Witch General in order to further confound enemies of the state—opened his eyes wide. Even from the floor below the podium, V. could see that he was so regular a user of the medicinal compounds that even the whites of his eyes had a bluish tone to them. Nobody in the audience seemed to offer any more understanding than L. had.

Those eyes darted towards the assembled instructors, who coughed and shuffled as if they were children themselves, caught having neglected a chore.

The Witch General sighed, and began, “as your trainers ought to have informed you well before now, an emblem is a personal symbol of profound significance in the likeness of an animal, monstrous creature, mythical beast, plant, or on some occasions, a type of person recognized by trade or other category.”

He handed the tray of aluminum bars to an assistant at his side, and gestured grandly to a brooch on his breast. Suddenly, a phantasmal image grew from it, a large white bird with a black mask over an orange beak. “A mute swan, the symbol of the office of the Witch General of the Icarian Empire; as an appointee to this office, I have been assigned this as my official emblem, and shall surrender it for another in the event that I am retired.”

The bird began to gesture with its wings and move its long neck along with the Witch General as he continued, “it is perhaps more traditional that an emblem be assigned either in recognition of a great deed of the recipient, or else on the establishment of a family or clan; this is considered by some to be a tradition originating amongst the Amoric nations—”

Doctor Flastbic, the instructor in magical arts, coughed audibly into his palm. The Witch General gave a brief glance in his direction, before continuing. V. felt as though there was something a bit more dangerous in his expression, now.

“—there is no substantial evidence for this, and it is well-established as a practice original to the Icarian Empire in recognition of the virtues embodied by our citizenry. Most significantly,” he said, now leaning forward and and enunciating in an annoyingly deliberate manner that V. was certain was covering the podium with spittle on each hard consonant, “an assignment of an emblem that most accurately encapsulates the character and potential of an individual may allow them to effect greater works of magic by focusing on this image.”

There was some shuffling and half-murmuring from the crowd. Doctor Flastbic had only just begun to teach them more than elementary wizardry, after having spent a great deal of time on theoretical, historical, and cultural matters, with special emphasis on the flaws in foreign and Amoric magical practices. On top of supposedly making them immortal, this promise of the emblems was akin to an offer of bonus points on their assignments.

“Owing to the significance of this, and in recognition of your age and the degree to which you have advanced in your training,” the Witch General said over the rising noise, smirking as he saw his audience become excited at his words, the phantom swan puffing up its breast, “the Emperor himself has authorized me to determine suitable surnames for each of you, based upon the emblem you receive.”

The rising chatter turned to silence for just a beat before gasps and the like of “did he?”, “what?”, and “really?” began to break out like birdsong at dawn. V. was stunned. A surname assigned with the authorization of the imperial authorities meant full citizenship. It meant that they would not simply be orphan wards of the state, but would be able to own land, have influence in local governance and perhaps even become members of the lower house of the Parliamentary Congress, and make all kinds of purchases and conduct business that they had only dreamed of. Once they had retired from the Corpse, of course.

So it was that V. was half-dazed as the assignment began, the Witch General personally divining their emblems, starting in the first row with A.—a barn spider, and thus the surname Aranya, matching her letter-name. The aluminum bar rose in the air and turned into something like a spoked wheel, before the Witch General’s assistant threaded a fine chain through it and presented it to A.

So it continued with the rest of First Row. V. was at once in a fog, and paying close attention. R., the gray fox, Renar. K., a wild mare, got the name “Glesb” from the Witch General’s more guttural pronunciation of the letter as “Go” instead of the familiar “Ko”. Making two canines in the same row, C. got the coyote, Koyot.

It was starting to get V. excited. Ideas were forming about what kind of animal would be right.

Second Row was much the same. E. gave a considered nod as he was assigned the book scorpion, and given the translated surname Ekdish. Þ’s was a more supernatural creature, the little beast of the near-eastern timberlands that was called a Teakettler. P. was granted Palomba, her emblem taking the shape of a mourning dove. M.’s was a little black field ant, and so she became M. Murashke.

Maybe something more monstrous, then, or magical? No, V. had a pretty good idea.

In the Third Row, O. was given the name Onza, after the Witch General identified her with the oddly vague “catamount”, without specifying which of the several animals that name described was her emblem. H. was named Hayfish, after being divined to have the tiger shark as his emblem. F. became Ferdbin, for the yellowjacket, while D. was identified with the razorbacks of the hill country, and was named Djavali.

V. was practically ready to say the animal’s name aloud along with the Witch General, but it wouldn’t do to interrupt. Especially not now that the Fourth Row’s turn had come, and—V. couldn’t understand it. That couldn’t be right.

The little metal charm was dropped into V.’s hands, and a name was assigned based on the animal in question. As B. was brought over, V. continued to mouth the name of what was most certainly the right animal, the correct emblem.

For whatever reason, the Witch General had given all of them names from the languages of the people of the land. Flastbic had been growing more and more clearly frustrated the entire time, and V. was dimly aware that the old wizard was now in the corner having a coughing fit.

It would have made sense—the Witch General had even pronounced V.’s name as the “vuht” that rang more true than the usual Icosan accent. But, why that animal? It just seemed so obvious, after all. They had even just been reviewing recent papers on the right one in their natural history studies.

Why not a wolf?

...and why did V. feel more comfortable naming that “Velfikhe”* instead of the masculine “Volf”?

* She-Wolf.

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Substance [hide]

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Title: “Bad Habits” Chapter 4 Author:  @ageless-aislynn​ Characters/fandom: Caitlin Snow/Harrison Wells|Eobard Thawne (ReverseSnow), The Flash Summary: Caitlin is finally ready for a little heart-to-heart with the man in the yellow suit...  For Snowells Week 2018 Day 5, prompt: "I know you." Rating:  PG Length:  1,846 Spoilers/warnings: None Disclaimer: Definitely not mine but I do enjoy borrowing them just for a bit! ;) A/N:  I'm a few days late because RL has been particularly unkind this week. I honestly almost threw in the towel but I wanted to finish this chapter off if I possibly could. I love these crazy kids, what can I say? ;) So I turned on my "Eobard *hearts* Caitlin" playlist (everybody has one of those, right? ;) ) as loud as I could and just ~went for it.~ ;) There will be an epilogue following in a few days. Unless RL decides to sic an army of angry metahumans on me. Or something like that. I'ma try REALLY hard to get the epilogue in here before the "grace period" week closes, though. ;) If you read, I hope you enjoy! ♥

Walking back into S.T.A.R. Labs the next morning as if nothing had gone on had taken a degree of courage that Caitlin hadn't been sure she possessed. But she did it, ready to face the Reverse-Flash-in-Harrison-Wells'-clothing and to... What? Was she going to confront him in front of Barry and Cisco? Was she going to walk around the wheelchair she now knew he didn't need and try to pretend like nothing had happened?

So it was rather anticlimactic when she entered the Cortex and he wasn't there.

"There she is, my girl who's out socializing and everything! Let's hear about that date!"

Cisco came in behind her, grinning broadly.

"Sorry," she said, trying to school her expression. "Turns out it was a no-go."

"You got stood up?" he said, the grin quickly downgrading to a frown. "Give me his name and I'll ruin his credit."

That made her smile, even as she said, "Now, didn't we talk about this before? No credit ruining."

He scoffed. "You're no fun!" Then his tone and demeanor grew more sincere. "Are you okay, though?"

She gave a half-shrug. "Yeah, I wasn't really into him, anyway. I think it's for the best."

He patted her shoulder as he headed over to his computer.

"So," she said, in what was probably the worst attempt at a casual tone ever, "is Dr. Wells already here?"

"Nope," he said, dropping into his chair. "He called earlier, said he's got business out of town. Should be back in a few days, maybe a week."

Run, Reverse Flash, run, she thought sarcastically. Well, while he's avoiding confrontation in his life, we'll be here saving Central City from evildoers!

***

Several hours later, she rested her elbows on her desk and sighed out loud. "I can't believe not even one evildoer showed up today," she muttered.

"Slow day, hm?" Barry said sympathetically. "Might as well head out early then, what do you think?"

The notion of sitting at home, twiddling her thumbs, was about as appealing as watching the proverbial paint dry.

"Sounds great," she said, struggling to sound a proper degree of enthusiastic without going overboard.

***

The next few days were maddeningly similar. Perhaps the most frustrating part was that Harrison called in and spoke with Cisco or Barry a few times, all when she wasn't there. How he managed to time his calls so perfectly, she wasn't sure, but it didn't take long to get on her nerves.

I should've talked to him when I had the chance, she thought, walking home from the local store with a bag of groceries in hand. I guess I didn't realize I'd feel--

A hard strike between her shoulder blades sent her crashing painfully to her knees on the cement. Her grocery bag was yanked partially from her hand before it split and rained her groceries onto the sidewalk.

The distinctive sound of a speedster arriving made the rather vengeful thought of Now you'll be sorry! pop to mind.

"Hey, are you all right?"

She looked up, pushing her hair from her face, and found Barry in his Flash suit looking down at her in concern. He had a tall man restrained with his hands behind his back.

"Yeah," she said, her voice a little shaky. "I'm not hurt."

Barry nodded and sped off with his captive, then returned alone a few seconds later, helping her to stand.

"What happened?" he asked, gathering up her produce at super-speed into the new bag he'd brought to replace the torn one.

"I don't know," she said, taking the bag back when he offered it. "I guess I wasn't paying attention. I didn't realize he was behind me. Thanks."

"Sure. Let me run you home," he said, holding his arms out in an offer to pick her up.

"That's not necessary," she demurred. "It's not far."

"Come on, Cait," he urged. "It's the least I can do. I want to make sure you get home safe."

She finally agreed. He swept her up and deposited her on her doorstep in a matter of moments.

"Thanks," she told him again, giving a final wave before he sped away. She locked the door behind herself and turned--

--to find Harrison standing not three feet behind her, in his Reverse Flash suit with the mask pushed back.

"Are you okay?" he asked at the same time as she barely managed to crush a shrill scream down to a squeak. Her groceries once again hit the ground.

"How did you get in here?" she finally asked. "No, wait, don't tell me. It was 'speedster magic,' right?"

His only response was to blur away and, in a blink, her bag of groceries was off the floor and presumably put in the kitchen since the light was now on when he returned. "Caitlin, you were mugged. Are you okay? If something would've happened to you, I... I don't know what I would've done."

Anxiety radiated from him in palatable waves. It was so unlike anything she'd ever witnessed from him in either of his guises that, for a moment, all she could do was just stare at him.

He stepped closer, leaning down to be more on her level, his hands coming up as if to rest on her shoulders. At the last moment, they paused, hovering uncertainly in mid-air. "Caitlin?"

"I really wasn't mugged," she finally said. "He just knocked me down but Barry got there before he stole anything."

After the fact, she realized she didn't censor the name she normally would have. Harrison waved it away as if she'd said that part aloud.

"I'm glad he was there," he said, surprisingly genuine. "I want you kept safe."

His hands finally turned over, palms up, in a mute request and she placed hers in his before she even thought about it. He sighed, like he hadn't dared to hope for even that much.

"Can we talk?" he asked, just as her coffee maker chimed. "I, um, made coffee. Obviously."

***

It took a little while to get used to sitting at her kitchen table, drinking coffee with a man who looked like the friend and mentor she'd known for years but who talked more like the villain who'd been coming to her rescue for a while now.

"What do you want me to call you?" she asked after she'd tripped over the issue a few times and decided it was better to just ask.

He ran a hand through his hair, ruffling it. "'Harrison' or 'Eobard,' either is fine."

Neither felt entirely natural. She just nodded.

They had already covered the worst of his deeds, such as the murders of Nora Allen and the original Harrison Wells: he'd spoke of them in a tone tinged with regret that also indicated he wasn't expecting forgiveness.

He had told her about his grudge against Barry in the future, though had omitted the actual details, had told her how he'd gotten trapped in the past. How every plan he'd come up with to get back to his own time had resulted in failure, then how he'd finally been forced to accept his fate.

There was still so much more to talk about than what could be covered in one night. Caitlin stifled a yawn, noticing the sun peeking around the curtains in her kitchen window.

"You need to get some sleep," he said softly, pushing away from the table. "And I know you've got a lot to think about."

She stood as well, oddly loathe for him to leave as she walked him to the front door. "Are you going to disappear on your 'business trip' again? Or are you coming back to work?"

He paused, looking down at the sleeve of his yellow suit as he straightened it while he spoke. "Do you want me to?"

She took a deep breath, considering her reply. For their entire conversation, she'd been testing out her feelings. Everything he'd told her had given her more of an understanding for his actions but nothing could make those actions acceptable.

She must've paused overly long because he said, "I know you, Caitlin. You're not just going to be okay with all of this."

"No," she agreed. "I'm not. And you could do wonderful, philanthropic things every day for the rest of your life and that won't erase the terrible things you've done."

He nodded, head down. "Yes, I understand if you don't--"

"But," she said, speaking over him, "if you do good things from here on out, it means something to me."

He thought about that for a moment, then said, "You haven't told Barry and Cisco. I'm pretty sure one of them would've mentioned that if you had, anyway. Are you going to?"

"I don't know," she said honestly.

"Fair enough," he said, then spread his hands awkwardly. "Thanks. I... I would like to come back."

"Why?" she asked, crossing her arms, tilting her head curiously.

"At the beginning, stopping crime, helping people, it was a means to an end," he admitted. "But somewhere along the way, I guess I fell in love with you -- with all of you."

She felt her cheeks burn even as he corrected himself.

"Once I knew I couldn't go back to my own time again, I knew I'd have to find a way to make a life here. I'm a pretty good criminal myself," he admitted, showing a hint of the roguish attitude she'd come to be familiar with from the man in the yellow suit. "But stopping other criminals became strangely satisfying as well."

"Bad habit," she murmured and he smiled at their shared joke.

"Bad habit," he agreed. "I'll see you tomorrow, then. Well, later today, technically."

"Goodbye," she said with a soft, crooked smile.

He pulled his mask on and was gone in a sharp gust of air.

She didn't realize until later that he hadn't actually put up her battered groceries, he'd replaced everything with unblemished duplicates.

I believe that's cheating, she thought and couldn't help but laugh.

***

Caitlin paused outside of the Cortex, hearing Cisco and Barry mock-arguing over some technical minutia, then a familiar voice dryly correcting them both. Her heart pounded as if she'd downed 10 cups of coffee instead of just one. Despite the lack of sleep, she felt wide-awake and buzzed, driven by nervous uncertainty. This was it, this was the moment when she had to truly decide: who was she throwing her lot in with? Did she keep the Reverse Flash's secret or come clean with her friends? Didn't Barry especially deserve to know?

It felt like she was standing on the edge of a cliff of infinite height, the bottom of which was concealed in smoke and darkness. She walked into the Cortex, looked at Cisco who was laughing, looked at Barry's innocent face, then looked at the man in the wheelchair she knew he didn't need.

She made her choice.

"Good morning," she said, smiling. "Dr. Wells, it's good to see you. How was your trip?"

So I think my denomination is going to be having another big internal fight soon and there’s a part of me that’s dreading the possibility of being involved in it simply because I may be a part of the denomination when it happens and I’m terrible at staying out of things like this. Now, I know who follows me and that a number of you will disagree with the current SBC stance on at least some of the issues at hand, and may have varied views on the possibility of a fight because of it. I want to remind you that, as the largest protestant denomination in the nation, a sufficiently large fight in the SBC could have consequences in other spheres of life for Americans.

So, here’s the quick and dirty backstory, and then I’ll get to my point:

The Southern Baptist Convention has had some degree of controversy pretty much since it was created*, but the event that is called The Controversy in-house (also known as the Conservative Resurgence in- and out-of-house, and the Fundamentalist Takeover by particularly disapproving outsiders) is an ideological fight that had roots as far back as the 20s but really took off in the very late 1970s and didn’t end until roughly 2000. Conservatives within the convention had reason to believe that at least some of the SBC seminaries were allowing universalism and a denial of the legitimacy of scripture to be taught in the classrooms**, while breaking from the standard SBC views on a number of moral issues. These included women in ministry and the nature of sexual relations (yes, this included homosexuality, but was not limited to it). In response, two men started writing and asking for information and urging other people to begin investigating and acting accordingly. These men were Paige Patterson and Judge Paul Pressler.

The concerns were affirmed. It had gotten to the point where they were able to prove that these teachings were happening, that the SBC was sending out missionaries who weren’t sharing the gospel and didn’t believe Christ was the way to salvation, and that the leadership of various SBC entities were actively lying about their views to the convention at large and attempting to bribe people who challenged them to stay quiet. The Executive Committee, the entity responsible for all SBC operations between annual meetings, was facilitating all of this and helping to hide it behind smokescreens and lies about political involvement. Various attempts were made to do something about it, but resolutions passed during the SBC annual meeting are pretty loosely binding, if at all. The real move to change things was for the messengers from the churches at the annual meeting to elect a conservative President of the SBC, who would appoint a conservative Committee on Committees, who would appoint a conservative Committee on Nominations, who would nominate conservative individuals to the Boards of Trustees of the various SBC entities, who will then make necessary changes. Yes, it is complicated. That’s how we roll. This would need to happen for a number of years in a row to gain a majority in each Board of Trustees because only a handful of Trustees get replaced each year. There’s a reason The Controversy lasted 20 years. There has not been a non-Conservative elected to the presidency or the Boards since the Controversy started to this day.

The issue at the center of the whole thing was what grounds Baptists use to define their theology. The conservatives argued that it was Biblical inerrancy, that the Bible was the sole rule of faith and that it was trustworthy in all it included. The progressives argued that the core Baptist distinctive was the priesthood of the believer as an interpretive tool, that the ability of individuals to interpret scripture was more important than the accuracy of that scripture itself. They both maintained that scripture should be primarily interpreted through the lens of Christ, but the conservatives used the words and life of Christ as recorded in scripture for this purpose while leadership in the progressive party held that Christ in direct communication with the believer was the lens through which scripture should be understood. In one extreme case, some faculty at one of the seminaries used this argument to defend their then recently discovered wife-swapping and drug abuse, as something they felt Christ told them was acceptable. Ultimately, the stance on Biblical inerrancy won the day and was incorporated into the updated Baptist Faith & Message in 2000.

During this time, at least two groups broke from the SBC at large. The very progressive parties formed the Alliance of Baptists, which I believe fully broke from the SBC. A number of moderates, who believed that the in-fighting was completely unjustified and that the conservatives were just trying to gain political control instead of concerned about theological issues, formed the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which has not fully left the SBC (most CBF churches and some state conventions are affiliated with both, and there are very few who are only affiliated with the CBF) but operates its own press, missions agency, and annual meeting.

So, in current events. Just a month or two ago, the conservative President of the Executive Committee resigned after confessing to an affair. Around that same time, the CBF announced that they would be shifting further left theologically and welcoming homosexuals into certain positions of authority. In response to that announcement, the two main state conventions in the CBF (Texas and Virginia) backed out. This is the most recent of a series of blows to the CBF as it has moved in a more progressive direction, and this last strike might actually be enough to remove its viability entirely. Pressler has gotten wrapped up in a series of legal issues over accusations of sexual misconduct and outright rape of younger men during his career, and Patterson was just this week fired in disgrace from his presidency at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary over statements that seemed to consider sexual abuse an invalid grounds for divorce and mishandling of a case during his tenure at Southeastern BTS in which a young woman was counseled to forgive her rapist rather than contact law enforcement.

We’ve got some issues that need to be sorted out and I’m not sure how it will be handled. The seminaries took the right approach in the case of Patterson, the Executive Committee was right to accept the resignation and begin looking for a new leader, so that’s a good sign. Obviously we don’t know yet what’s going to happen to Pressler and probably won’t before the annual meeting, but he also doesn’t hold a leadership position in the convention, so we don’t have much to say about what happens to him however this turns out. My issue isn’t that today’s SBC isn’t handling these things well--I would argue that it is--but that I see opportunities to use these situations to pick fights.

The leadership of the SBC most associated with The Controversy is being removed, through scandal or age, and the people who fought against their changes and never fully left the convention are in a position where they need to reassert themselves in some way or lose the ability to function as a denominational body. The systems to make widespread change in the SBC are no longer secret+, and attendance at the annual meeting has been on the decline since people no longer felt there was need to be sending significant delegations to deal with important issues. If there was ever a time for the moderates and progressives to start fighting again for a new direction to the SBC, it feels like now would be the time to do it. I don’t know if they will or not, but I see the opening, and I’m bracing myself for the possibility that The Controversy isn’t over. I’ll be sure to let you all know if that happens.

* In opposition to the Triennial Convention, at the time the main national gathering of Baptists for the purpose of supporting missionaries, who had decided not to send slave-owners out as missionaries. The southern delegates, most of whom supported slavery to some degree, took offense to this decision and broke away to make their own missions agency. It is worth noting that recent generations of SBC members recognize the errors in this but would rather keep the systems the SBC has created in place and use them for the purposes of the gospel than leave. Frankly, it is hard to find a Baptist denomination that can do some of the things the SBC can do at this point. Anyway, this caused a lot of strife between northern and southern Baptists, which got worse during and after the Civil War. And then we had Landmarkism and the anti-missions movement and basically the SBC has always been fighting about something, usually with other Baptists in and out of the SBC.

** This latter one is often summarized as saying that the SBC, during The Controversy, shifted toward a literal reading of scripture. This is...partly true. The denomination at large always held to about as literal a reading as it does now, but the seminaries had started to shift away from it and were being brought back in line with the churches, because that’s how Baptist seminaries operate. However, the issue was inerrency, and the fact that teachers were actively saying significant parts of the Bible weren’t true. In some extreme cases, literally anything miraculous was tossed out as an analogy, which one may note makes the Bible itself pretty useless as a testimony of anything. It also excludes almost everything Christ did to affirm His nature and teaching and calling, which makes one wonder how a person who believes that could be bothered to follow Christ at all.

+ In the years leading up to The Controversy, the Executive Committee was very quiet about the actual power of the SBC Presidency and encouraged messengers to vote people in as something of an honored figurehead who would ultimately just approve what the Executive Committee decided to do with his power, unaware that they actually had the power of decision.

mic Is this the beginning of the end of the pandemic in India?                     This was an organism unknown to science five months ago. Today it is the subject of study on an unprecedented scale. Antiviral drug trials have been launched. Some 150 vaccine trials are on the anvil! ICUs have been strengthened. Schools closed. To put it simply the World was in a lockdown. This may not be the end! But certainly, the beginning of the End! This is a public-health emergency, and only public health is going to get us out of this. It doesn’t matter how much virus is out there, if people aren’t susceptible to getting it, then the virus will go away. 2021 looks like it will be much better than 2020. India inches closer to the beginning of the end of COVID-19 pandemic. A timely response mitigates the effects of a disaster and India has been spot-on in this regard. The leadership role that India has assumed in dealing with this crisis is now being appreciated across the globe. India has shown the world that it can handle this crisis upfront.   The most tenuous moment is over: The scientific uncertainty at the heart of COVID-19 vaccines is resolved. Vaccines work. And for that, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief. “It makes it now clear that vaccines will be our way out of this pandemic,” The invention of vaccines against a virus identified only 10 months ago is an extraordinary scientific achievement. These are the fastest vaccines ever developed. The coronavirus continued to rip through the country and daily counts of new infections rose to record heights, the seemingly impossible occurred: good news- the beginning of the end of corona virus disease. Following India’s assiduous fight against the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic since the past six months, the country finally sees signs of green shoots with the faster recoveries and sharp decline of new cases. R0 for India is slowly going down to 1.55 from 1.63 in last 20 days. Current R value is at 0.92. Containment zones in the city of Bangalore is down from a whopping 40,000 to Two in the last three months! The recovery rate has gone up to 93%. A year from now, India is likely to be in the midst of a massive vaccination initiative. If I’m getting your hopes up, then there’s good reason. We may be finally turning a corner on a pandemic after a year in which over 1.3 million have already died globally. On 9 November, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their ribonucleic acid - RNA-based vaccine was 90% successful in preventing symptomatic covid-19. Overview of the corona pandemic The disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus is known as coronavirus disease 2019 – or COVID-19. Coronaviruses are a large family of enveloped, non-segmented, single-stranded, positive-sense RNA viruses that derive their name from their electron microscopic image, which resembles a crown – or corona. There have been 58.7 Million cases of COVID19 world wide with1.39 million deaths. India was home to 9.14 million cases with 134000 deaths. The decline has come in spite of release of lockdowns and other restrictions. 70% of the people with COVID have stopped transmitting the disease. The current India corona numbers are 45209 a day and there is a progressive decline! As the COVID-19 pandemic evolves around the world, it passes through several phases, raising distinct questions and challenges in each Phase 1 An unknown virus emerges 2 A pandemic unfolds 3 The pandemic accelerates 4 State of decline India has carried out 13 crore corona tests so far. This was the sixth consecutive week of falling coronavirus-related deaths in India. The highest deaths from the virus were recorded during the September 14-20 week, when 8,175 people had succumbed to the infection. The current week's toll, at 3,600, is a 56% fall from the peak. Fresh Covid-19 cases continued to fall for the seventh straight week in the country Transcending geographical boundaries — and every socio-economic and political demarcation — the COVID-19 outbreak has caused huge disruptions globally. It has substantially punctured mankind’s vanity. The scourge of nature is far more serious a threat than man-made wars. It is in this context that I see India’s role as exemplary. Among the world leaders, Prime Minister Modi seems to be particularly perspicacious — not only did he ascertain the real nature of the crisis, but he helped to prepare a graded response to it. It is important to step back and think about the monumental achievement of creating effective vaccines that work for a never-before-seen virus causing a disease in under a year. This rapid pace has been due to the technological advances in the last few years and also due to the rational approach used to design the front runner vaccines. Pfizer and Moderna have separately released preliminary data that suggest their vaccines are both more than 90 percent effective, far more than many scientists expected. Neither company has publicly shared the full scope of their data, but independent clinical-trial monitoring boards have reviewed the results, and the FDA will soon scrutinize the vaccines for emergency use authorization. Initial doses of vaccine should be available in December Pfizer and Moderna - they both bet on a new and hitherto unproven idea of using mRNA, which has the long-promised advantage of speed. This idea has now survived a trial by pandemic and emerged likely triumphant. If mRNA vaccines help end the pandemic and restore normal life, they may also usher in a new era for vaccine development. Several COVID-19 vaccines may soon cross the finish line. To vaccinate billions of people across the globe and bring the pandemic to a timely end, we will need all the vaccines we can get. When the Pandemic emerged with murky origins in late 2019 and found naive, unwitting hosts in the human body. science began to unravel many of the virus’s mysteries — how it spreads, how it tricks its way into cells, how it kills? How the body would react? How dangerous was it to life? How would it infect others etc. A fundamental unknown about vaccines hung over the pandemic and our collective human fate: Vaccines can stop many, but not all, viruses. Could they stop this one? The answer, we now know, is yes. A resounding yes. The day Chinese scientists shared the genetic sequence of a new coronavirus in January, researchers began designing vaccines that might train the immune system to recognize the still-unnamed virus. They needed to identify a suitable piece of the virus to turn into a vaccine, and one promising target was the spike-shaped proteins that decorates the new virus’s outer shell. Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines both rely on the spike protein. Human immune system and the Vaccines! The human immune system is awesome in its power, but an untrained one does not know how to aim its fire. That’s where vaccines come in. Vaccines present a harmless snapshot of a pathogen, that primes the immune system to recognize the real virus when it comes along. Traditionally, this snapshot could be in the form of a weakened virus or an inactivated virus or a particularly distinctive viral molecule. But those approaches take time and expertise. Both are lacking during a pandemic caused by a novel virus. mRNA vaccines offer a clever shortcut. We humans don’t need to intellectually work out how to make viruses; our bodies are already very, very good at incubating them. When the coronavirus infects us, it hijacks our cellular machinery, turning our cells into miniature factories that churn out infectious viruses. The mRNA vaccine makes this vulnerability into a strength. What if we can trick our own cells into making just one individually harmless, though very recognizable, viral protein? The coronavirus’s spike protein fits this description, and the instructions for making it can be encoded into genetic material called mRNA. Several more vaccines using the spike protein are in clinical trials too. They rely on a suite of different vaccine technologies, including weakened viruses, inactivated viruses, viral proteins, and another fairly new concept called DNA vaccines. Never before have companies tested so many different types of vaccines against the same virus, which might end up revealing something new about vaccines in general. The next few months will be a test of one potential downside of mRNA vaccines: their extreme fragility. mRNA is an inherently unstable molecule, which is why it needs that protective bubble of fat, called a lipid nanoparticle. But the lipid nanoparticle itself is exquisitely sensitive to temperature. For longer-term storage, Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine has to be stored at –70 degrees Celsius and Moderna’s at –20 Celsius, though they can be kept at higher temperatures for a shorter amount of time. Pfizer/Bio-NTech and Moderna have said they can collectively supply enough doses for 22.5 million people in the United States by the end of the year. The good news is that while we wait, new treatment options for covid-19 are also becoming available. Just last week the first monoclonal antibody (created by Eli Lilly) received emergency use authorization in the US for the treatment of early stage covid-19. There are other monoclonal antibodies which may be approved in the coming days. All of us are united in the hope for a Great Vaccine. But as they say, hope is not a strategy. Prudence demands that decision-makers of all hues have actionable and cost-effective plans to achieve resilience even in the face of a Protracted Covid. People should receive the vaccine on a war footing. It’s a public good and to be treated as such. But the end of the pandemic does not necessarily mean the eradication of COVID-19. The closing act of this public health calamity is likely to be a gradual return to a new normal, with infections, restrictions, and public health fears falling away one by one rather than all at once. Getting there will not be as simple as getting a shot, but with effective vaccines, robust distribution plans, widespread testing, and continued social distancing through the winter — all possible but hardly assured — our exit from the pandemic could come much sooner than many dared hopes. Testing, isolation and contact tracing, however, are all essentially a backup plan for fighting an infectious virus like SARS-CoV-2. The only way to ensure that the virus won’t burn through a global population again is to build a better defence. And the most impenetrable fortress against a virus is immunity by getting vaccinated. The virus is not likely to go away, maybe ever, but certainly not for a long time. “But that said, we’re not going to be living like this forever, and in fact, I expect by springtime that things will start really getting much, much better. And then it’ll continue to get better. And at some point, we will no longer feel like we’re living now. Dr N Prabhudev Former Director Sri Jayadeva institute of Cardiology Former VC of Bangalore university Former Chairman Karnataka state Health Commission [email protected]