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okimargarvez · 4 years

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REVERSE - 19

Original title: Reverse.

Prompt: Penelope is the new girl on the BAU team and Luke tries to treat her cold.

Warning: A.U., possible OOC.

Genre: drama, romantic, family, friendship.

Characters: Luke Alvez, Penelope Garcia, BAU team, Derek Morgan, O.C. Sam Cooper’ team, Roxy.

Pairing: Garvez.

Note: oneshot 62 in Garvez collection.

Legend: 💑😘👓🔦🐶❗🎲🎈👻🎬🎵.

Song mentioned: Amici per errore, Tiziano Ferro.

Reverse- Masterlist

GARVEZ STORIES

19 # Friends elsewhere, friends by mistake...

Since a while, his life has become an endless series of I shouldn't have. The last bullshit, to be added to the bottom of an endless list, was to accompany JJ to prison. He stayed out, but her expression told him everything he needed to know. She is one of his best friends, of course, not like Chrissie... but she has always been a separate matter. However, he cares a lot about her and cannot bear to see her so destroyed. Like there is nothing they might do to change things. They remained embraced in that shabby courtyard for at least five minutes, amid the astonished looks of the prison guards. And it was as if through that grasp he had absorbed his friend's pain. And not only that. Backing to the base, he ran to the bathroom, where he is still, spewing even his soul. He has cleaned up any trace, but his face is too pale for his usually darker complexion. Hair is wet, pulled back. He made no effort to settle down. He doesn’t expect visits, not there, then. Not she, over all.

Already the ticking of the heels should be a good clue, but his brain today has decided not to work and his intuition too. -Luke, are you okay?- Garcia is standing in front of him, in her white dress with lipsticks and mascara (not low-cut), her flower and pink shrug. Her lost expression.

She had just left the toilets when she heard noises from the corridor, noises that she identified with someone in pain. It wasn't any of her, business but then she had that totally irrational feeling and she understood, she sensed that it was Luke. For this she entered without announcing herself, not even considering the possibility that it was someone else or that he was not alone. -You are in the men's room.- he points out the obvious. But she is trying to recover from that unprecedented and so intimate vision. She has already seen him sad, embittered and above all angry, for example when they returned with Reid handcuffed or during the bail process. She never liked this, though. Those black shadows that she had only caught in passing inside his eyes are now dancing freely. He seems to be sick both physically and emotionally. He is completely down. She forces herself to answer him, rejecting the need to hug him.

She stays where she is, on the threshold, without approaching. -I know, you think they'll arrest me for this?- the joke has no effect, not even a half grimace, absolutely nothing. She swallows, but now she is alone in this mess and can no longer look the other way... if she ever succeeds. -Hey, what happened?- she asks, in a sweet, sad, low, sugary, comforting tone. All in one package. Luke turns away from her, staring at the sink. She ventures to look at him. She doesn’t know that her words were like medicine on his wounds. After an endless pause, realizing that he won't get rid of her so easily, he faces her again.

He shakes his head. -Nothing, absolutely nothing.- his eyes are dull, vague, even if Garcia senses that he hasn't cried. Which is already something, but too little. She doesn’t think that he is one who often allows himself to cry. -Go ahead with your life.- he claims. His tone is nuanced, so empty. He doesn't really try to drive her away.

She understands that he needs a shock, to recover, or at least to break trough it. Away the sweetness, then. Hard way are needed, as with one of her adoptive brothers, who loves to bask in self-pity and watch others solve his problems. -Now don't start talking like a woman, Alvez.- here, a little twinkle in his pupils. -You know perfectly well I won't go away.- she says, showing more convinced than she really is. The time has come to take advantage of the skills learned thanks to the theater course recommended at the group's meetings on the creative elaboration of mourning. -Now you understand how stubborn I can be.- she adds, crossing her arms. Luke sighs and she realizes that he has given up. He runs a hand over his face.

He speaks without looking at her. -At least let's get out of here.- his voice sounds so fragile that only by a miracle Garcia doesn’t hold him against her breast, like a mother with her baby. And he's damn sexy in this moment too. They walk along the corridor at a certain distance, until they reach one of the balconies that face outwards. Even that time of the joke about Roxy, he had chosen the outdoors. Perhaps he finds comfort in the caress of the wind. Or maybe when something like this happens, he becomes claustrophobic.

She gives him plenty of time to open up, but he doesn't get the message. He clings to the balustrade and looks down. -Therefore?- she captures his gaze for two seconds. She approaches. -I am aware that you would prefer to speak to anyone outside of me.- she suddenly feels selfish, wanting to be the savior at all costs. She sighs. -You want that I call someone? Rossi, JJ, Emily, Tara, Walker?- with the last surname she doesn’t tear a chuckle from him by a hair. Without knowing it, she almost followed a precise hierarchical order. She doesn't say the right name, of course. She can't be there. He reads in her face the awareness of not being that person.

But Luke surprises her doubly. -No. Please.- his is almost a moan. She clears the distance by a few more centimeters. He too. It's the only way he has, in this moment, in this state, to make her understand that he doesn't really want her to leave. He needs her, her words, her understanding. Even if he could never admit it verbally, even if he hadn't that lump in his throat.

Garcia, never been a profiler, has guessed the right explanation at first sight. -Is it about Reid's matter?- man doesn’t move. -I haven't received any new messages.- she then adds, not knowing how to proceed. He sighs, realizing that she is much closer than he thought. He scratches his head.

-Yeah.- he says. It’s still a result. -You know he can get visitors now.- a nod of assent; of course, it was she who had made a chart to establish the order of the visits and had placed herself at the bottom, even after Walker (moving him to tears). -JJ went to see how he was. I accompanied her.- it should be enough, but now that he has removed the cap, everything flows towards the drain. -They hit him. He is hurt.- he looks away suddenly, unable to bear the eyes of the woman, who foreshadows the worst.

-Oh God.- she covers her mouth with her hands. -Is it so bad? He's not going to die...- an absurd smile appears on Luke's lips. She doesn't even think for a thousandth of a second that it's for happiness or relief.

He nods. -Yes, he's serious, but I don't know how to answer the other question.- she sees him tremble. She puts her hand close to take his, but then she doesn't. -Prisons are a microcosm in its own right, as he would say.- a sob escapes him. It is almost the coup de grace. Because he can't really imagine him in that context. His mega brain is useless in that place; in fact, it could even be a problem.

He watches her move her fingers on the railing. -But he did not even find a friend?- she asks him, keeping her tone soft, so as not to increase, if she can't decrease, his level of anxiety and stress. Luke's look climbs along the curves of her body until he stops in the eyes.

-Two, according to JJ.- he tries to remember the names she said to him. -One is called Delgado and the other... Shaw, I think.- Garcia lights up like a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. She would definitely play the shooty star in the crib.

-Shaw?- she repeats that surname, which had no particular meaning for him. -It won't be Calvin Shaw?- he nods, recognizing the name, hearing the voice of the other blonde in his head. He frowns forehead and eyebrows.

-Why, do you know him?- he can't understand what someone like Garcia has to do with a human trash (of the worst kind) like that guy. He didn't know him, but he read his file, furtively, taking advantage of the fact that JJ was driving. It is partly the cause of his nausea. The idea that Reid was bonding with him...

Garcia shakes her head, a cascade of blond curls. -I don’t, but Morgan...- she doesn’t need to specify who she is talking about. If he knows, better for him, otherwise, it is not fundamental information . -I think he took care of his case. If I remember correctly, it was one of us.- Luke nods. -He killed his Russian contact.- he doesn’t hold back, doesn’t choose to add that detail, but his mouth opens and the words come out on their own.

-Yes, and probably his own baby.- she opens her eyes and looks at him in shock. Now she has all the elements to understand why he is so angry, even if he never thought of wanting to become a father, start a family, carry on the name of the Alvez, with discontent of his entire family, especially of his beloved grandmother.

She swallows, he can hear her sucking the air and holding her breath. -God, was she pregnant?- he breaks eye contact. Absurdly he sees Chrissie with her baby bump, her husband Richard with the baby in his arms, when they announced that he would be the godfather, if he wanted to.

He pushes the image away with difficulty, closing his eyelids. -Considering HCG levels, it would seem so.- he is not prepared for her reaction. Garcia punches the balustrade, probably risking to get hurt, at least to break a fingernail.

-What a bastard!- she exclaims. It is the first time he has heard her say a dirty word. -I'll call Derek and ask him to have a chat with this… man.- she reassures him, but her gaze is bad, another novelty. Can she really hate people? Maybe then she's human. -He is the best in this kind of thing.- she says, full of pride for her best friend.

He can just say one word. -Well.- there is no problem, she speaks enough for both. She comes closer an inch, without noticing, or maybe it's him. He has no certainty, nothing in any area.

-And hopefully in the meantime Emily and Fiona will be able to move the bureaucratic waters.- he nods, feeling a flame developing in his chest. He cannot remain indifferent to her way of expressing herself. But then he hears a familiar sound that catches her gaze going towards the bag, towards the cell phone.

-There is a case, there isn’t it?- a flicker of provocation. Garcia willingly takes the blame (actually not hers) for interrupting his opening moment.

But then she reaches out and finally squeezes his hand, hard. -Luke, trust me.- her gaze is equally intense. -We can save Reid.- it sounds like a promise.

But he can't risk evreything. How would he come out in the event of a defeat? He lets go of her hand and shakes his head. -I wish I could believe you.-

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#garvez #criminal minds #cm #penelope garcia #luke alvez #penelope x luke #luke x penelope #garcia x alvez #alvez x garcia #spencer reid #tiziano ferro #amici per errore #a.u.

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janiedean · 5 years

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I really, really love your metas! In "Why a Jaime/Brienne Endgame in the Books Makes More Sense Than One Might Think, Based on Previous Works of GRRM's" you wrote, that you have endless reasons to assume that both, J and B, will survive the whole series - can you please name some? Aside from this mentioned meta I've only read an explantion of the weirwood dream, which can be interpreted in both ways. Or can you link a good meta that explains other reasons? Thank you very much!

hey!

first of all thank you so much, glad that you appreciate my rants. ;) that said, sure I can go in-depth. in order (btw @ginmo has written also some excellent meta about this, just check on her blog), and also counting the weirwood dream which I’ve ranted on at length in that specific meta:

now, the first thing is how grrm strategically placed these two in the narrative, in the sense that:

brienne has spent her life being passed for a joke and she desperately wants for someone to see her worth as a person and she’d about kill herself for the people who manage to get as far as to gain her trust/love, jaime has spent his life loving people without getting much in return and with that trust being used/abused/thrown away and everyone taking it for granted... and we’re assuming they’re not set up to be together when as stated grrm has written them as romantic from the first moment?

(also, jaime’s entire first chapter in asos is basically ‘I find brienne attractive but since I never considered that I could be attracted to anyone but cersei I can’t understand I’m attracted to her so I’ll stare at her and think she’s ugly all along even if I really am attracted to her. brienne’s issues are also rooted in the fact that no one sees her as attractive. jaime does. hmmm?)

both of them start from a miserable situation from which they’re finding their own way up, not down - jaime is more obvious but brienne is too because she starts at the point where she’s so starved for recognition she would die for someone who just was nice to her but didn’t really gaf about her and now she’s... well, becoming a knight because sure af that is happening, I’m sticking with the theory that the knighting is book canon too -, and if they both end up miserable or one of them does it doesn’t work;

both of their chapters have heavy foreshadowing concerning possible marriage/having children/finding love - jaime wants to father his kids and at some point resents that other men are husbands and fathers but not him because he was always the warrior and he doesn’t say it happily, brienne is half-glad her first betrothed died because she thinks she’s not suited to typical feminine things/to fit into a woman’s role in society but she’s also sad at thinking she will never have children, these two are going to get together very soon, and I’m supposed to think they’re set up for failure? k but I can respectfully disagree;

also, this goes back to that meta I wrote in which I said that grrm does not do grim for grim’s sake and he’s actually way less cruel than it seems, likes a good love story and has more than once finished his other books with satisfying resolutions to that kind of storyline, but adding to that: in comparison to whatever calvinist crap message hbo wanted to send, I have to inform y’all that grrm is a currently agnostic lapsed catholic and it’s exceedingly clear in the way he explores/deals with redemptive themes.

now, let me break the jb narrative for a moment to inform you of a few things that as an atheist born and raised in a 99% catholic country whose literature’s funding works are heavily based on catholic themes/on stories rooted in catholicism:

the ‘you need to die to be redeemed’ narrative is 100% bullshit according to catholic morals and on top of that it’s opened to anyone at any time;

like, the basic distinction between catholic and calvinist approaches to the topic (and I can’t believe I’m defending catholicism but nvm that) is that calvinism preys on a narrative where your negative qualities define you and you cannot escape them (which is because calvinism accepts predestination ie the idea that seeing your lot in life you can deduce if you’ll go to heaven or hell, so if you’re poor/unsuccessful/you committed mistakes/a crime and so on you’re not redeemable and it’s proof you’re damned) and that meant that in societies with calvinist background the death = redemption narrative is extremely popular because it’s seen as ‘hey this person is wretched and they suck so they couldn’t have lived anyway and they did something good with it for once and it’s the best they could hope for’. catholicism, at the contrary, works on the basis that as we all have free will we can change for the better and if you repent for your sins/past wrongdoings/mistakes then that’s enough to be redeemed and if you do it on your deathbed.... you can still go to heaven, you’ll just have to atone for your wrongdoings (that’s the entire point of purgatory’s existence ie making people who repented near death or too late to gain heaven atone for their sins before they can enter heaven). and the moment you repent then you’re free to start your new life and do better and gain your place in heaven, which you’ll obtain in virtue of having turned a new leaf;

(again: not to be that person, but in luke’s gospel one of the two thieves crucified with him is like ‘can you save us since you’re the son of god’, the other thief is like ‘please he has done nothing and we have sinned we don’t deserve to be saved just please remember us when you go back to your father’ and jesus tells the second thief I won’t need to remember you because you’ll sit at my right. also, in dante’s divine comedy there’s a guy who had been excommunicated in the middle ages waiting to get into purgatory for having repented on his deathbed and in manzoni’s the betrothed ie italy’s funding novel the character who’s objectively better written is a dude so heinous for his crimes that he’s called THE UNNAMED and the moment this guy gets doubts and wonders if there’s any hope for him left the local arcibishop leaves everything saying that the moment someone like that is in need then they’re more important than his own parish, goes to receive unnamed guy, tells him that just wanting to be better is enough as far as god is concerned and he’s saved as far as he cares. like, as much as catholicism sucks for the entire rest of it and for how much the catholic church is the worst ideologically the fact that everyone can be redeemed is the basic staple of the entire thing.)

now, given the ^^^, this is where I tell you that most lapsed catholics/people who left catholicism for whichever reasons usually grew up catholic and if you grow up catholic you spend your first twelve years in church at least and if your parents/people around you are also catholic you will absorb it, good and bad, so if grrm grew up catholic, he grew up with that background. (I could again rant for hours about how atheist writers who grew up catholic differ from atheist writers who grew up protestant/calvinist because if you compare grrm and idk kurt vonnegut it’s glaring but this isn’t the place for it so nvm let’s go on)

now that I’ve told you this, I’ll get back to jaime and brienne’s canon survival chances. I needed to tell you that because...

all of the stories with redemptive themes in asoiaf (jaime, theon, sandor, whoever) are not by nature calvinist. whatever d&d think or hbo thought, none of them are written in a way where death is their best option/their only way to achieve redemption/to finish their story with dignity. theon has gone through hell and back and left and regained his sense of identity, he’s not built to die now, sandor has freaking gone to rehab and I’m 100% sure he survives the series and gets closure, while jaime is exactly a poster child for the above stuff I described. like, jaime is someone who’s fundamentally good who had the misfortune to spend his entire life jumping in different kinds of abusive situation one to the other (tywin’s parentage in general, his relationship with cersei throughout at least from the moment they were *experimenting* and like hell I’m going back on that sorry not sorry, guarding aerys, being with cersei at *her* terms and being forced to relieve his trauma all over and not having his needs met etc., tywin potentially ruining his only healthy relationship [with tyrion] and so on) who in turn has done exceedingly bad things/taken bad decision/committed heinous deeds that he regrets having done out of his bad reaction to all of that, not treating his ptsd and basically deciding to stop giving a fuck and embrace being the horrid person everyone thinks he is... until he meets brienne, remembers who he wanted to be because she’s posing an example of it and decides on his own to try and be better, which is... exactly... the entire fucking point. the moment he decides to try and be better and reclaims his dreams/the person he wanted to be/tries to do good he has automatically achieved a narrative status where he chose to be better and therefore the narrative is giving him a chance to be that, and usually those stories are meant to.... have the message that you can be better than the bad things you did and you can turn back the page at any point. like. jaime is written to show you that it’s not too late to get your shit together and not letting others/your surroundings define who you are;

on the other side, brienne is presented as extremely sympathetic from the beginning. also, grrm is very good at describing how shitty is your life if you grow up a woman who is not standard attractive, that everyone laughs at and who has endless insecurities for it.... and she’s the paragon of knighthood/everything good about chivalry in the goddamned series. brienne is legit one of the best people in these books and it’s not because I stan her - she’s kind, she’s just, she’s brave she’s everything a knight should be, she’s willing to change her mind when she misjudged people, she’s forgiving and life threw her crap all along and she’s still persevering from it. brienne is written in a frankly painfully objective way to eventually succeed at what she wants. if in affc she’s crying because she feels like she’s too much of a freak to be her father’s heir and she’s not woman or man enough for anything, the entire narrative point is that she has to succeed at both being a knight and a lady otherwise grrm can’t plant hints and believe me he can;

this means that jaime is headed on a redemptive path which in that kind of story when written by catholics or former catholics never ends up badly (also, aside: redemption is good for everyone and it can’t be just ONE character having it, you don’t buy it at the supermarket, so saying that if jaime has it then tyrion or theon or sandor or whoever can’t have it is just poor reading, people change all the time irl and in narrative you aren’t obligated to redeem one and kill everyone else) or in death, brienne has been written to succeed in her endeavors after she suffers a shitton and I think stoneheart has to be the worst and the end of it (in the sense that after that situation is resolved the way for her is down, not up). which if I do the math and we have stated they’re headed for romance, means the both of them should have a chance at a future together;

also, I can go and tell you that their asos road trip ending with harrenhal is bursting with symbolism that includes death and rebirth - not going into the weirwood dream and sticking to the basics... guys, jaime starts as a prisoner, then ends up losing a part of herself he thinks define him but in truth only defines what he thinks he is (and he’s not ie cersei’s double, the kingslayer, the person who has to drive himself crazy to protect everyone else), then ends up almost dying and sitting in the middle of his own filth for the entirety of the trip (and even then he does good things ie saving brienne from being raped *cough*) and then ends up in a scalding hot bath where he confesses his most well-kept secret and source of 50% of his trauma to someone he trusts regardless of how much he likes it or not, faints and then wakes up again when everyone thinks he might be dead. symbolically, I think it speaks for itself. thing is, during the entire thing *brienne* is there alongside him and while she’s also getting her own share of trauma/ptsd (I mean brienne has totally bloody mummers related ptsd and I’ll die on that hill) she physically is the reason he survives it - she cleans him up, she gives him enough pep talks to convince him to live, she hears his confession, she changes her mind about him for it (but imvho she had after he saved her from being raped because that’s where she calls him ser for the first time) and she catches him in the bath when he faints which is.... fairly symbolic in itself, and she is the one who puts him back on his feet after. like, while jaime’s choices after are all his own, his symbolic journey through his own physical/mental filth he has to go through during asos succeeds because she helped him even if she didn’t know she was doing it, and like... guys, there’s a reason why in the weirwood dream the brienne in jaime’s head which he has conjured and who is basically what jaime sees brienne as in that moment, not necessarily the real one..... keeps on telling him all the time she’ll keep him safe/protect him and she basically tells that to anyone he feels threatened by (or his subconscious feels threatened by), and as stated before, jaime lannister has never, until that point, assumed that *he* would be in the position where someone else gives a shit about him to the point where they will defend him rather than in the position where *he* is the person that has to protect everyone else regardless of how much appreciation he gets in return. like, excuse me but if I was writing my own book I wouldn’t put this much work and care and this symbolism in these two’s history if I meant to kill one of them off or to not have them be happy in the end.

like, the point is: grrm is an extremely meticulous writer with an astonishing attention to detail and who put in book two shit that made extra sense when reading book FIVE, see theon saying he wouldn’t go to his death wearing dirty clothing in acok which makes you go like ‘....... why’ the moment you read his adwd chapters. no one, unless they have a penchant for sadism, would put that much work with those themes in that specific kind of story if then it doesn’t deliver. or, in different words, using a character I love as well so no one can accuse me of being impartial: when grrm put the same kind of work in catelyn’s chapters from got to asos and then you read them knowing about lady stoneheart and the red wedding, it’s obvious that he built her up for being an extremely tragic character and that she was destined to die regardless of all her efforts to save her family (same for robb but we’re talking pov characters). but catelyn’s storyline doesn’t have redemptive themes. it’s about regret, loss, loving your children but being imperfect/not being able to be there for them, and so on. catelyn’s storyline never promises you a happy ending from the moment ned dies and probably even before then. catelyn’s storyline promises you endless suffering and that’s fine because that’s her point in the narrative.

on the contrary, brienne’s tells you ‘hey there’s this girl who has had it like shit all her life without deserving it and whose worth no one sees because she’s ugly and who at the same time is actually a genuinely good person who’s trying her best and okay, she’s gonna suffer but she’ll come out on top while getting what she wants which is recognition as both a lady and a knight’ and given that brienne is also an extremely rare rep (say what you want, cishet unattractive women with her issues and her backstory are basically only less rare than unicorns in media) that I’m 100% sure grrm knows speaks to a lot of people (because he writes her too well to not know), if brienne doesn’t get that after all that shit, the narrative would not deliver on a fairly huge promise.

even worse, jaime’s tells you ‘hey there’s this guy who has been an abuse victim to at least three different people who doesn’t even realize it and whose life is so fucked up you’d need fifteen psychology textbooks to even start grasping it and that everyone sees as the worst person ever and who has ended up believing he is out of not managing his trauma well and hey look at him going through an insane amount of extra suffering but coming out of it wanting to be better and sort of succeeding and hey he has setbacks but he’s starting to see himself as his own person and he’s out of his #1 worst abusive relationship and he can decide what to do with his life now and you should root for him’, which means that if he dies or worst of all dies like in the show (but that’s not happening) the narrative doesn’t deliver on a huge promise and gives you the message that you can’t escape your mistakes and the abuse you received...... which is not the message grrm likes/wants to pass. like, I’ll die on that damned hill.

and to finish it, that was for them as single characters, but going back to the beginning: love is a fundamental part of both their storylines. as I said in the beginning, brienne suffered because she wasn’t loved enough and would die for anyone she loves herself without even expecting anything in return because she thinks no one will love her like that, jaime suffered because he loved too much without getting anything in return (or better, getting cersei’s abusive crap for his entire life) and he turned it into something toxic that’s not what he thinks it should be (he sees his and c’s relationship as the best thing ever where they’re soulmates because she sold him that narrative, but that’s not the kind of rship where you *turn your partner’s blows into kisses* which is actual text). at this point, the narrative is telling you ‘oh hey here’s two damaged people who actually would be very good together because their personalities match in that sense [as in, brienne would thrive with someone who loves her that much openly and finds her attractive and respects her for all that she is and jaime would thrive with someone who would appreciate that tenfold and who’d love him back just as much and who’d die for him - canon! -, and it wouldn’t be the kind of rship where anyone’s blows turn into kisses unless they were friendly sparring before] and oh hey look at that they’re in a storyline where they both influence each other greatly and oh wait he’s attracted to her and she thinks he looks like half a god and she’d die for him and he was willing to get mauled by a bear for her and they’re obviously meant to hook up’, which automatically promises a resolution where they both get what they want or you basically spent all your time rooting for it.... for nothing. which would not give anyone reading it satisfaction unless you hate jb that much, but I’m 100% sure that most people reading asoiaf casually would not hate it that much and grrm likes that trope that much to not deliver on it.

so, tldr: if one of them dies or if they aren’t endgame with a reasonable happy-ish ending for the both of them, the entire narrative fails to deliver on the promises of their individual storylines and their shared one, and there’s nothing in grrm’s writing that suggests that he would not deliver on it. I mean, if it was stephen king I’d hold my breath because I love steve but imvho his endings suck 85% of the time and he manages to do 180° turnarounds that have no sense whatsoever, but it’s grrm, not stephen king, and everything of his I’ve read that actually had an ending ended in a way that was coherent with the overall storyline and maintained its promises, so here, the above is pretty much the summary. hopefully I haven’t exhausted you. ;)

#jaime x brienne #jaime lannister #brienne of tarth #valyrianscrolls #asoiaf meta #janie writes meta #sorry for the lack of quotes but I'm on limited internet and I wrote this offline ops #long post for ts #abuse cw #anti-lannincest #anti-jaime x cersei #Anonymous #ask post

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a-queer-seminarian · 5 years

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reformed theology

throwing all my notes about theology from my Presbyterian Heritage and Polity class here!

Why Reformed theology is all about Grace

there is no part of us that is untouched by sin

but there is also no part of us that cannot be touched by God’s grace!

the knowledge that we are sinful and that only God can fix that should make us act with humility -- we’re gonna mess up a lot, including in regards to what we believe, and have to be open to hearing people tell us we messed up so we can do better

this is how we can show gratitude for God’s grace and show grace to one another in turn

Sin

sin is an infection so holistic that we cannot cure it

taints our sense of the divine available to us in creation

we are “little idol factories”

we would prefer a smaller, more manageable, more manipulable God to this big God whom we do not control

we always try to make God containable, by limiting language for God and narrowing our theologies...

Knowing God

yet we do all have a sense of the divine – God is transparent in Creation; but because of sin we can’t figure it out on our own (and also because God is ~Mysterious~)

because we are finite and because we are sinful and because God is mysterious, we can only know God insofar as God chooses to reveal Themself to us

Shannon’s example: If an elephant shouts at a ladybug, the ladybug won’t know what’s going on. But if the elephant becomes a ladybug, and speaks the ladybug’s language, they can communicate

Protestants down the line are going to twist this idea of knowledge, they’ll say that it’s all about knowing the right truth claims to assent to

What Calvin’s concept of knowledge is about is way more interesting; it’s kinda hard to grasp but i like it. It has to do with...

Affections!

affections = the kind of knowledge that includes both the intellect and the emotion -- a much more holistic idea of knowledge than what we usually think of

Don Saliers is a theologian who calls affections “belief-laden emotions”

And then there’s Wesley’s language of “our hearts are strangely warmed”

If you know “I am sinful,” but have no emotion of being sorry, being remorseful about that, then you do not truly know that you’re a sinner

Thus believing something in a religious sense is different from believing something in, say, geometry class

if you believe that Creation is a gift from God, you will have an emotional response to Creation – it won’t remain a neutral “it just exists” but involve gratitude, reverence

Shannon adds that there should also be a volitional response -- our will for how to be in the world: should belief that Creation is a gift from God not also include willing oneself to be in relationship to God?

If you believe Creation is a gift from God but then you go and destroy it for profit – then you don’t really believe that Creation is a gift from God

I’m starting over the bullet points for the next bit because i think it’s cool and important, but it’s still about the affections stuff above

Belief thus involves bodily responses

That doesn’t mean that every “belief-laden emotion” that affects your will and body and great

When we do something we know is wrong, our whole person is involved in the knowing -- we may feel physically sick

We practice affections like hope, like repentance; we do not practice affections like resentment and bitterness (because who wants to have those negative physical & emotional reactions?)

practice = attempt to be formed in such a way that we can know and live in emotions like forgiveness

LAMENT is a Christian affection!

all the affections we work to shape ourselves in are ultimately rooted in scripture, and that includes lamentation

Scripture

Calvin heavily influenced our modern church language about the Bible

We know God in and through scripture, through the power of the Holy Spirit

but interpretation is key to that! -- you don’t just wait for God to interpret it for you; the Spirit does the work through your studying of the text

Calvin’s humanist background led him to say that we should interpret scripture as we would any other text -- while taking its context seriously

This is why he argued that pastors need to be educated in scripture -- so they can help their congregations read the Bible well

being able to think critically about scripture will prevent the kind of idolatrous religious abuses that we are all tempted to

Law and Gospel

In a rare instance of Calvin saying something I actually like lol, Calvin added a third use of “the law” -- the torah -- on top of the two that Lutherans had: while Lutherans claimed the law’s purpose was (1) to show us our own sin and lead us to Christ and (2) to control non-Christians from “running wild” (lmaooooo garbage), Calvin said that (3) the law was also a guide for us

The law/torah has ongoing moral authority -- Presbyterians don’t agree that the Gospel “freed us” from the law (thank goodness, that’s super supersessionist)

The torah, which was a way for God’s people to relate to God, is really good news in itself – evidence that God wants to be in relationship with people and shows people how to do that!

Providence, Free will, predestination

This was such a huge section i went ahead and made it all a separate post.

But one big point is God’s sovereignty -- their active care and control over every aspect of life, no matter how small

There is no moment in your life when God is not with you, actively loving you in that moment

God wills the ultimate flourishing of all -- and humans have a role in that

And as to predestination stuff, the main thing to know is that we have no role in our own salvation -- God saves us freely; our proper response to that is gratitude

Reformed Theology’s development after the first Reformers

Since the time of Calvin, Christians were arguing about how Christianity can hold together with reason, with science

the Enlightenment that influenced the Reformation brought with it an ideal of knowledge as universally true and accessible

i.e. if one person does an experiment and no one else can replicate it, something is wrong with it

by the turn of the 1900s, some were coming to think differently about fairness; it was stuff that took place in the 1800s that caused that

Nineteenth Century Protestant Liberal Theology

emerges in the last quarter of the 1800s, continues through early 1900s

historical critical method of biblical scholarship – studying the bible in context, etc. – was new but becoming widely accepted

science and history as the lens through which you view scripture

theology is compatible with history and science; the relationship between theology and history matters

use methods of critical scholarship to avoid coming up with a personal view of Jesus who’s different from the historical Jesus

relativizing dogma: truth is relative to time and place -- different from that Enlightenment view of universal truth

a judging of Christian expressions as appropriate and correct

a sense that you don’t have to believe everything that Christians believed before – frees Christians from some of the constraints of tradition

General Themes

a desire for a living, vital faith like that of the early Reformers

the parts of the Bible that hold the most weight involve Jesus’s activities

a sense that Christian faith has strong practical and moral implications

the social gospel movement grows from this

theme of the Kingdom of God

fundamentally optimistic -- we can make progress by moral effort

Experiential faith

“I know something of God through Jesus and through great literature / watching a sunset / listening to music”

...And then Karl Barth drops in.

his work is described as a “bombshell tossed into the playground of the theologians.”

once a Liberal theologian himself, Barth’s time as a pastor in a little village impacted by WWI causes him to criticize Liberal Theology as an attempt to domesticate a God who is known only as the Unknowable, whose yes is our no and no our yes.

Some of his criticisms of Liberal Theology:

too high a regard for humans

you are so optimistic about humanity -- have you forgotten that we are sinful? that our viewpoints are corrupted and twisted by sin?

humanity didn’t seem to be progressing that much from where he was sitting, with his parishioners struggling and bombs dropping.

if you’re tying to find the “golden kernel in the husk of Christianity,” how do you discern what’s kernel and what’s husk – an awfully high evaluation of your own discernment methods to think you’ll succeed

claims liberal theologians are too complacent, too self assured

“You look at the Bible and question it, instead of allowing it to question you.”

You’re not studying God; you’re studying human beings!

Better to word things not as “God does this” but “I experience God as”

An anthropological starting point -- liberal theologians are trying to get to God from humanity

in doing so, you’re only going to get a human blown up really big.

you have a general understanding of truth and history and reason and use that to approach the revelation of God

Liberal Theology makes God’s action continuous with social movements

don’t assume that God’s actions are continuous with yours – that makes God much smaller and more manageable than She really is

he criticizes these folks for being apologetic – trying to make Christianity understandable in cultural terms

you end up saying “God is like this human or that created thing”; “Christianity is like this”

Barth is talking to people who are used to walking around and seeing craters left after bombs

“What we know of Jesus is the crater left after the bomb is dropped”

revelation is not some kitten curling up next to you is to make you feel better

We cannot handle God’s bigness…so we make idols

Barth calls idols “no-gods” that give us their stamp of approval on our lives, instead of looking to the God of Jesus who upends our lives and whom we cannot manipulate

We cannot get to know God on our own steam at all

Revelation = God’s act in Jesus

God’s act of revelation in Jesus is like a flash of lightning that penetrates the sphere of human existence

gives us a reality of God that is inscrutable, rather than being a detailed description of who God is—God has revealed that God is Mystery

#pcusa #reformed theology #theology #ordination exams #polity class #notes

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tanadrin · 6 years

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There is an attitude I am going to call LRBish, which is perhaps unfair, but which has received that name because every time somebody talks about a “really good LRB article” that I have to read, this is the thing that makes me hurl the magazine across the room in disgust sooner or later. But perhaps it is not endemic in the LRB, only in the articles I occasionally am recommended; and god almighty knows it’s not unique to that publication. Most recently I was reminded of it reading (re-reading?) Amia Srinivasan’s piece on EA which, on paper, is one philosopher disagreeing with another on some very high-level stuff about where the proper locus for conceiving of the fulcrum of moral action is: is it within the individual or society? For Srinivasan it’s in the latter, which means that to her EA (at least at the time of writing) felt insufficient to her as a philosophy. That’s an interesting discussion! It’s worth having. Alas, it was mostly confined to the end of the article.

The rest--and this is typical for LRBish pieces--was a journey through EA, not through the eyes of a curious observer, but through a thick piece of jade that must have been cut from the rarest of stone found only in the Pessimism Mines of the planet Hyper-Cynicon 7, deep in the heart of the Ennui Cluster. If EA and its attitudes were truly alien to Srinivasan--like, if she found them actually repugnant--it would be one thing. That invites many stylistic attitudes, like polemic or strenuous argumentation or invective or exquisite takedown. That’s not what the article is, though. There seems to be almost nothing on the concrete level Srinivasan disagrees with about the subject of her piece. It’s just that their attitude is wrong.

The heart of LRBishness is interrogating everything for evidence that it is not one hundred percent morally pure and clean, by whatever standard you like (if one standard doesn’t suit, discard it and use another), and, when you find some little smudge of uncleanliness, you hold it up, point, and loudly announce, “See?? I told you everything was terrible!” Srinivasan coyly adumbrates a half-dozen sins that she never states outright--EA is too tainted by capitalist individualism, EA is too white and too male to be taken seriously, EA’s leaders don’t follow their values to their logical conclusion--some of which are nonsense and some of which might be the beginning of a good critical essay on the movement, but she refuses to be nailed down on the particulars of any of this, because that would involve an actual argument, taking a stand, having a thesis--and this you are absolutely not allowed to do when being LRBish.

LRBishness is, at heart, a kind of cultural Calvinism where no cause, idea, or work of art is sufficiently good, no effort sufficiently heroic, to be laudable. You are never allowed to be enthusiastic about something, even if that enthusiasm is tempered by reservations. Indeed, you must never be hopeful, or determined, or even exactingly precise and thoughtful, for all of these qualities would betray an unspeakable naivete on your part. To be hopeful or determined would imply that perhaps you do not believe All is Lost And Doomed. To demand thoughtful precision is even worse--for it would imply that you cared enough to be precise and thoughtful! And anyone who claims that all is, in fact, not Doomed is either themselves deluded, or is participating in a Machiavellian plot to sell you something.

This is the attitude of drunks at a party at 3 AM, when the hour of productive conversation has passed, and the lack of sleep and fading buzz of inebriation means that everybody’s starting to feel a little depressive. Or the attitude of that one friend who repeatedly mentions in casual conversation, ha-ha-only-serious like, we’ll all be dead in fifty years due to climate change. Heck, this is my attitude when I forget to take my Lexapro for a week and a half and suddenly I’m wondering why I’m irritated all the time and video games have lost their savor. And perhaps that offers some clue as to why I am so tired of it: not only do I get enough of it from my own brain (though, admittedly, my internal monologue isn’t as good a prose stylist as your average LRB columnist), but it speaks to me of a fundamental dysfunction in how you relate to the world.

Once, I mistook it for wisdom. When I was fifteen, the LRBish attitude felt impossibly refined. Perhaps this is the universal fascination teenagers have with ironic detachment. Perhaps it was that, in general, LRBish writers did in fact know a lot more about the world than I did, by virtue of being older and better-read, and I labored under the misapprehension that their attitude was a product of their intelligence. But I have grown exhausted by it. I have come to understand it as a defense mechanism: a cognitive armor worn to protect against a world which does indeed often disappoint, and which, if you are unguarded against it, might lead you to falsely conclude nothing is worthy of your faith or your enthusiasm, your energy or your give-a-fuck. And that’s not true. There are a great many things in this world that are beautiful and worth investing our passions in. As for the columnists--whether of the LRB or the New Yorker or the NYT Book Reveiw, or merely of internet thinkpieces--please, figure out what you do give a shit about, then write about that. I promise the results will be about a thousand times more interesting for everyone.

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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In First Become Ashes, K.M. Szpara Makes Us Wonder if Magic is Real

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

K.M. Szpara‘s debut Docile was one of the most binge-able, divisive reads of 2020. A near-future drama set in a world in debt crisis (imagine that), Docile explores the violence of capitalism at the most intimate of interpersonal levels, as we follow Elisha as he sells himself to trillionaire Alex in order to pay off his family’s debts. With Docile, Szpara, a queer and trans Baltimore-based author, proved himself willing to dive into some complex, culturally loaded subjects to tell a science fiction story that reflects some central yet ignored truths about our contemporary society. For me, a White reader, the ways in which Docile works outweigh it doesn’t (one major criticism: the book’s avoidance of addressing America’s real-life history of slavery), but this will be different for every reader.

In his second book, First, Becomes Ashes (out today!), Szpara is similarly ambitious in topic and theme. Ashes is a standalone novel that takes place in the aftermath of the destruction of a maybe-magical cult, following four different characters caught up in the messy repercussions of the FBI’s raiding of the Fellowship of the Anointed. Much of the novel’s early perspective comes from Lark, an almost 25-year-old who believes wholeheartedly in the teachings of cult leader Nova, and that he has been chosen to learn magic and martial arts in order to hunt the monsters that ravage the world outside the Fellowship gates. Like Docile, it’s a startlingly unique premise. Despite having four separate POV characters, Ashes is able to maintain a mystery around some of the fundamental truths of this world, leaving the reader to wonder if magic exists in this world or not.

Den of Geek: Where did the inspiration for the book that would become First, Become Ashes begin?

K.M. Szpara: The idea hit me like a comeback three hours too late! I’ve always been interested in cults and faith and belonging. As a speculative fiction author, I had to give it a fantasy twist. Magic is something many of us have wished for since childhood. What if it was real—and then what if we were told it wasn’t?

This book has several POV characters, but you very much begin with Lark’s POV. Can you talk about how you went about deciding who would be POV characters and how you came up with the pacing for expanding the perspective-scope of this story?

One of my favorite ways to create tension is to show how different people experience the same event(s). Ashes shows dissolution of a cult from four points of view. Two “privileged” members who are Anointed—one a believer and one a doubter. One member who is a Fellow, a regular layperson. One outsider who has dreamed of having the magic the Anointed claim. Each of these characters experienced life differently before and after the Fellowship’s dissolution and they’re all tied together in deeply personal emotional ways. The pacing really comes down to knowing how to choose each chapter’s POV. And for me, it’s which character will be most effected by an event. For example, Lark performs healing magic on himself in front of Calvin. Though Lark is the one being healed and performing magic, it’s Calvin who’s seeing magic up close for the first time. It’s Calvin who’s wanted magic his whole life and is inches from it. That’s what drives the story forward.

Something you do in both Docile and Ashes that I love is give us a POV character who is an outsider to a world the reader will most likely recognize and then offer Nacirema-esque observation from that protagonist-outsider. Is this something you do intentionally? Why are you interested in telling stories in this way?

I had not heard of Nacirema until this question, but I love this observation! For anyone else hearing this for the first time, a cursory Google tells me that the term Nacirema is “American” spelled backwards and is a term used in sociology and anthropology to show distance while studying people in the United States of America. (I’m not a social scientist—amateur Googler over here!) I use outsider characters in this way because I want readers to see how aspects of their lives mirror the characters’ lives, how our society mirrors these harmful fictional societies. It’s easy to read about a cult and think you would never be drawn in, but that happens to people like you and me—and there are aspects of the U.S. that are cultish but not named in that way. I want people to see how they have been drawn in, how hard it is to unlearn and escape that harm. Because sometimes it looks and feels like magic and that’s all you’ve ever wanted.

I love all of the fandom explanation and outsider observation in this book. Why did you want to have a fan character like Calvin as such a central part of this story, and how did you want to depict fandom more generally?

When I think about who would be deeply invested in magic being real, it’s people like me who grew up reading SFF, wishing I’d walk through a portal to another world—even though the stories that took place in them were full of danger. There was magic! I’ve joked with friends that if one of them texted to tell me a real wizard or vampire or werewolf was in their house, I would absolutely drop everything and go to them. I want to see! I want to lift the veil! That’s what Lilian does when her BFF Calvin texts that an Anointed member of the Fellowship is in their hotel room.

But that doesn’t mean Calvin’s motivations are pure and good—nor are they malicious! Like fandom, he’s imperfect. He wants magic and monsters to be real so badly that he’s sometimes willing to hurt others in pursuit of his dreams. Though Calvin doesn’t represent fandom as a whole—what one person could?—I did want to show someone who’s helpful and harmful, family-friendly and sexy, successful and unfulfilled. Complicated, like most of us and our interests are!

A central tension of Ashes is the mystery of if Lark’s magic is real, which creates this experience as a reader of not totally understanding as you’re reading what genre the book itself even is—is it speculative fiction or is it something else? It was a really unique reading experience, and led me to wonder as I was reading if and why I cared about classifying it. What a cool use of the “unreliable” narrator! Can you talk about creating and sustaining this tension/mystery and what you wanted to do with it?

It was difficult! Whether magic appears successful depends on the chapter’s POV character and its place within the arc. Sometimes a spell’s result is instant and sometimes it’s implied. Often faith is the difference. In that way we’re all unreliable narrators—everyone is only telling their own truth as they see it, as they’ve been raised and taught to see it. I wanted to keep readers wondering, not just for the thrill of “is magic real?” but why they’re asking. Who do they believe—who do they want to believe? Does it matter who’s “right”? Why? Read and answer for yourself! Ashes is a fantasy novel… if you want it to be.

Were the in-universe discussion of preferred pronouns always part of this story and the culture of the Fellowship?

Yes. Cults don’t exist because they seem unattractive and survivors often have at least some fond memories. I wanted to create a place that felt somewhat harmonious and fruitful, which included the ability to find and be yourself with full acceptance. Something I wish existed outside of my imaginary cult, as well!

Both Ashes and Docile depict experiences and topics that are very sensitive for many readers—i.e. abuse, rape, and sadomasochism—and that therefore most “mainstream” authors either shy away from completely or depict very superficially. Why are you interested in exploring these themes in your storytelling? What conclusions, if any, are you hoping for readers to come away with in relation to these themes specifically?

Firstly, no authors are required to deal with such heavy topics. I choose to; they’re common experiences and I’m not interested in glossing over them. I want to show how rape and abuse and conditioning affect people both in the moment and long after. And the sadomasochism in Ashes is not a depiction of a healthy S&M experience, but that’s not to imply that S&M is inherently unhealthy—because it absolutely can be! And lots of real people experiment with and engage in various forms of BDSM, sometimes healthy, sometimes not. I’m not writing guidebooks or after-school specials. My goal is not to portray perfect relationships or characters taking all the right steps. It is to show emotional truths. To portray how complicated and messy people are and reality is when it comes to traumatic situations.

It’s interesting to me that you use 25 as the coming-of-age age in this story. Can you talk about why you made that decision?

Ages like eighteen and twenty-one only mean something because we have decided they do. The Fellowship doesn’t operate by our rules, so I chose twenty-five, which felt like a natural milestone as a quarter century. Additionally, I wanted those leaving the Fellowship on their quests to be young adults (not in the publishing category sense) who were old enough to consider themselves competent but not so old that they’d had a lot of time as an adult to reflect on their experiences. A lot is ingrained in children and teenagers and I personally spent a lot of my early twenties both learning more and new information about myself and the world, but also unlearning some of the harmful aspects I’d absorbed from my younger years. It’s a time when many are figuring out their place in the world as independent adults, for the first time, not unlike the Anointed going out on their quests.

Are there things you especially learned in the writing and publishing of Docile that inspired how you wrote and edited this story?

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It was nice to edit a book having already done so once because the mystery was gone—but that didn’t make it any easier! Second books are their own brand of tricky—and I like to try new things with craft, to push myself, which is fun but also stressful. There is a feeling of both familiarity while writing a second book, and also fear that maybe you wrote that first book my accident somehow and will never be able to do it again. Luckily, I have an awesome team at Tordotcom Publishing and they saw me through it, again.

First, Become Ashes is now available to buy wherever books are sold, including via Tor.com.

Note: First, Become Ashes contains explicit sadomasochism and sexual content, as well as abuse and consent violations, including rape.

The post In First Become Ashes, K.M. Szpara Makes Us Wonder if Magic is Real appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3dDRjqT

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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robbyrobinson · 6 years

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So, Sinfest. It's hard to really say when I began to follow the webcomic, but if I were to choose, I'd have to say later 2006. Since then, I had been keeping up with the story. Created by Tatsuya Ishida, Sinfest originally revolved around Slick, a self-proclaimed pimp midget who thinks he's all hot stuff when he really can't get a girl. Along the way you have Monique, a self-absorbed woman who took advantage of her looks, Squig, an anthropomorphic pig who loves burritos and smokes pot. There is also Seymour, a Christian fanatic, Li'l E, a young boy who wants the Devil to notice him, the Devil himself, and a truckload of other characters. For the most part, Tatsuya tended to take the middle ground when regarding societal issues. For instance, Seymour is exaggerated because of his extreme devotion to his faith, or other extremities were poked fun at. Tatsuya hardly ever took sides with any of these subjects.

For story arcs...for the most part, one thing that Tatsuya has difficulty with is telling a story. With the earlier strips, they were often episodic, but one storyline that I did like was the one concerning what is my favorite pairing, Fuchsia x Criminy. Essentially, Fuchsia was a succubus who worked for the Devil, her job being to ensnare the souls of men. But all that changed when she met Criminy, a young nerdy boy who was an avid bookworm who had a fortress built out of books that served to protect him from the outside. At first, Fuchsia tries to tempt Criminy as succubi do, but Criminy actually makes her question her position. The build up was slow, but it is revealed that Criminy's words had made Fuchsia reevaluate her life, and she gradually becomes less evil over time. Eventually, she quits her job altogether to be with Criminy. Yes, taht's right: she gave the Devil the middle finger and hightailed it out of there. Honestly, I found Fuchsia as one of the better characters in the webcomic. Her development was believable, and it actually further delves into showing how demon folk are mistreated by society. She was mistreated to the point where you can say that she believed that there wasn't anything good about her. But Criminy actually treated her like an ordinary person. No wonder she fell for him. My only gripe is that we hardly see her or Criminy as much in the webcomic like we used to, which sucks because that was one of the main reasons as to why I continued to read the strips.

Another character that received some massive character development was surprisingly Li'l E. After he received amnesia (long story), we learn that he was actually the son of the Devil and Lilith (a woman who was ostracized for forming a relationship with the Prince of Lies). Really, everything about Lil E's life is depressing. He was bullied for his appearance, his father was distant because he was disappointed that his son wasn't that evil as he'd hoped (he still does care for him), and his mother's missing...or dead. Though my only issue is that it doesn't seem complete yet. We still don't have the crucial point wherein Lil E became who he was prior to his amnesia. So with these story arcs, they were okay to say the least. Tatsuya still kept the middle ground on social issues, the characters were likable. It seemed that nothing would go wrong. That is, until she came....

Without much prompt, the webcomic became very pro-feminism. While I do agree that women should have rights in some areas, the webcomic completely went off the rails with it. The Sisterhood is introduced into the webcomic, led by a tricycle riding young woman named Xanthe. Now, when she arrived many thought that she was going to be an exaggeration of feminism much like how Seymour was one for Christian fundamentalism. But the problem was that the Sisterhood was always proven right in their accusations which gave little to no legroom for a middle ground. Suddenly, the webcomic became cynical as the Sisterhood completely derailed the plot of the story. For instance, Monique's character was completely changed. Xanthe gives Monique a red pill which reveals that everyone hated her (even though previous comics showed the contrary). Suddenly, Monique shaves off her hair, and becomes an embittered cynic convinced that everyone hates the very ground she walks on. The Sisterhood completely destroyed her life, and yet somehow they were in the right. That's not even getting into Monique's relationship with Absinthe, a demon girl who's kind of an airhead. Now, the strip wants to portray their relationship as cute. I know that many debate that this relationship was not fully developed, but I personally felt that the build up was okay. My only issue with this is that at no point in the webcomic's history was it ever implied that Monique was a lesbian. Throughout her appearances, it was made explicitly clear that she was boy crazy. She flaunted her looks, dated several men which ended in one nightstands, among other things. It would be different if at the very least she were bisexual, but that wasn't the case either. One strip was about Slick reading a porn magazine, and Monique makes a comment on it, and she also compliments a woman for her....assets. But that was because she was someone who craved attention. She always did something outrageous as she was a black hole for attention.

It doesn't especially help that by having Monique date Absinthe it actually destroyed one of the prevalent themes of the comic. That being whether or not Slick and Monique were ever going to hook up. Nowadays, Slick hardly ever hangs out with Monique during her post-transformation. After one of her poetry nights goes awry, all Slick does is accidentally give Monique bad advice that she takes as him labeling her a victim. There are even times where she nearly got Absinthe, her own girlfriend mind you, fired. Out of all of the changes the comic's gone through, Monique suffered the worst. Going back to the Sisterhood, though. These groups of girls started out as borderline terrorists. They would bomb factories, reprogram sexbots to kill people who took advantage of them, the vandalized property, etc. Yes, I know that the Patriarchy is seen as the evil force within Sinfest (with the Devil now being upgraded to the head of the organization), but the Sisterhood alone had done more damage than good, and yet, they're the ones who are supposed to be the good guys.

Though one of the worst aspects of this is how like I have said, Tatsuya doesn't know how to tell a story. One such story arc was the zombie one. Fuchsia originally would tell stories to the damned in Hell after her redemption arc. After she severed her ties with the Big D for good, the damned came together to form an undead zombie, and they went out to search for her. That story hadn't been updated for a long time. Or another regards Slick's doppelganger trying to become the dominate of the two. This hasn't been resolved yet either. And there are many other instances of where there are too many story arcs being juggled at once.

Overall, Sinfest was a good webcomic at first before it slowly became preachy. Really, Tatsuya himself had the habit of bashing anyone who complained about the drastic chanegs, assuming that they were misogynists who were peeved that Monique didn't shake her ass anymore. The art style is still alright. It reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes and other newspaper comic strips. It's simplistic, and cute to an extent. Though the Sunday comic strips are especially great. I would ultimately recommend the first half of the webcomic before its descent into radical feminism.

#austindr #sinfest #webcomic #web comix #monique #slick #robbyrobinson #deviantart'#tatsuya #ishida #feminism #radical feminism #absinthe #fuchsia #christian fundamentalism

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shslbullrider-blog · 7 years

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45 qs

oooh my god this is typical ellie “answered too long” there are no short responses but lots of ebull spoilers bc i dont care.

1. Does your character have siblings or family members in their age group? Which one are they closest with?

ebull has one big sister! she and her are obnoxiously close, and have been known to game situations so that they’re both doing similar things at the same time -- just so they can spend as much time together as physically possible. they’re physically separated most of the time, so they have to make any time they get for each other really count--!

ebull has always been achingly protective over her sis, who, in turn, is a bit more clever and wise than her. they kind of have always lived in each other’s minds and they really balance each other out!

2. What is/was your character’s relationship with their mother like?

loving, but distant. ebull doesn’t see her mother that much -- mostly for vacations and for the odd week or two out of the year. she talks to her on the phone often enough, but it’s not quite the same.

most of their face-to-face interaction is based in her mom making up for lost time -- which tends to lead to ebull’s fashion and life choices being prodded at. lovingly! but in that completely-serious-tongue-in-cheek way. theyre a pretty dry but warm family over there in gen, but it does embarrass her a bit.

she’s a bit more secretive towards her mom than with her dad -- but doesn’t really find that to be a bad thing! mostly bc her mom is a bit of a gossip though and it Strains Her Life. she’s also got an issue with respecting ebull’s privacy and she really hates that.

3. What is/was your character’s relationship with their father like?

extremely close. ebull is a bit of a daddy’s girl and it’s kind of obvious -- she spends a lot of time with him, tells him all of her issues, asks him for advice, rags on him -- and he dotes on her like no one’s business. she could probably get away with murder and have her dad ask her where to hide the body -- he enables a lot of her behaviors in a way her mom refuses to.

he does have a few very hard limits, though. and ... makes it painful when she crosses them, because he tends to feel rather personally slighted if ebull keeps things from him or goes against direct advice. they live together most of the time when ebull isn’t at home, so she tries to avoid this whenever possible.

sometimes by drawing in! oops. privacy.

he’s a really dry but extremely warm guy in gen tho -- kind of a great person and ebull admires him a lot.

does not fucking get video games though.

4. Has your character ever witnessed something that fundamentally changed them? If so, does anyone else know?

ummm not really, not counting murder game things.

sawako’s death fucked her up in a way that she doesn’t like to talk about -- even to people she’s close to -- but well! that’s private--!

not even michiko knows the extent there and that’s saying something.

5. On an average day, what can be found in your character’s pockets?

advil, spare bandannas, potions, sawako’s love/friendship potion (it pokes at her back like constantly), tissues, pens, little scraps of paper, small vials of perfume, essential oils, hand cream, hershey kisses, needle + thread, mini toothpaste/toothbrush, a photo of her sister, gum, about four tubes of lipstick, mascara, her ID, like a single monocoin, sometimes you get a spare pair of clothing in there (plus calvins!), breath freshener, nail polish, nail cutters.

...

her jacket has more pockets than you’d ever fucking know.

6. Does your character have recurring themes in their dreams?

warmth. being enveloped in warmth. sunny days, laying in the grass, swinging a bat with her dad, driving over 100mph and feeling the warmth of the car through her hands.

....

sometimes she dreams of ow characters kissing her too but that’s a whoooole other kind of warmth she wouldn’t admit to.

7. Does your character have recurring themes in their nightmares?

coldness. dying slowly and alone. calling out to people to receive no answer. people she’s close to telling her she’ll be right back and not answering her call thirty minutes later. various situations of seeing various corpses of cared-for people in increasingly horrifying death poses.

8. Has your character ever fired a gun? If so, what was their first target?

nah! why use guns when she’s got THESE GUNS [pretend she flexed]

9. Is your character’s current socioeconomic status different than it was when they were growing up?

nah not really! and if it did change, she didn’t really notice.

10. Does your character feel more comfortable with more clothing, or with less clothing?

being honest -- super honest? more. a lot more. jackets and things to cover her neck -- she can’t wear dresses comfortably without pulling tights up or she feels uncomfortable.

but she’s willing to wear the hot ‘skimpy clothing’ to fit in better with her ‘fellow teens’ because that’s what’s attractive, right?? god shes sure this works?? janties are in season right she can bring them back??

stunningly if ebull is comfy w u she tends to wear more clothes in ur presence idk what that says about her.

11. In what situation was your character the most afraid they’ve ever been?

the first few months in the game, before merge. it was a constant, waking fear back then. wake up in cold sweats and close to puking. character spoilers: she was always worried, anxious, and uncomfortable but u know she’s thriving.

(also, she’s ridiculously good at seeming calm).

there have been high points since merge -- including not getting texts back from tomoka, michiko calling her for help in ch5, and some assorted Other Business (lol) but yeah it’s eased off a little and hasn’t breached that level since.

outside of game i dont know if ebull knows what it’s like to know fear. she DID have a frighten that she thought was rather substantial in telling her parents she got into hpa for being a gamer but honestly she lived and like most things in her life it went better than she expected it to.

12. In what situation was your character the most calm they’ve ever been?

well, she’s really good at SEEMING calm despite alarm bells in her head. and she actually thrives during high stress situations! she is deathly composed and very comfortable during raids, and actually has found that trials are kind of becoming comforting, in a sense -- and she feels calm in her accusations.

... thanks.

in general, she does better once she’s used to a rotation.

13. Is your character bothered by the sight of blood? If so, in what way?

nah not really! she’s more squeamish than she seems at first glance, but it doesn’t obstruct her from what ‘has to be done,’ so to speak.

14. Does your character remember names or faces easier?

names -- comes with the territory (given the fact that she deals primarily with online people). but she’s super good at both, and very rarely gets a name unattached to a face -- or forgets either. she finds it inspires bad blood.

15. Is your character preoccupied with money or material possession? Why or why not?

kiiiiind of ? it’s a strange case. ebull’s used to the finer things in life and has certain standards -- like, if she’s dating someone, she insists on both sentimental and expensive gifts (because the combination ensures that she covers her bases and that they “really” care about her -- it’s proper that way), and if she was denied anything from her current standard of life she... might go through a bit of a culture shock, really.

money and status has been a huge theme of her life and upbringing -- with two working parents who sacrifice family time for their successes. so she knows what it’s like to have a lot of it in a rather... passive way. she has no interest in the excess that her family can get into, but she’s never ever ever had to even think about money in a lasting way -- she gets speeding tickets out the ass and the only concern she has is how her family might bully her, rather than the monetary cost associated with it.

she can afford to not be preoccupied with wealth, is probably the best way to put it. she gets that this puts her in a pretty good position, and is empathetic to people who struggle, but really wouldn’t know what to do if she couldn’t just pay for shit she breaks without thinking about it. so like, she’s not out there purposefully decorating her house with useless pieces of shitty expensive art or always after the highest brands, but wouldnt know what to do if the ability to do that was suddenly stripped away.

16. Which does your character idealize most: happiness or success?

ebull would claim a mix of both -- that competence and fulfillment in other areas help to ensure happiness, etc, but.

if you really put a gun to her head on this one, she’d have to admit to ‘happiness.’ she’s not very ambitious and not competitive in the slightest -- if she’s struggling emotionally and upset all the time, what point is there to her successes? does success mean anything if it’s not attached to fulfilling work?

she’d never claim that people have to be happy all the time, but don’t you have to lose to fully appreciate your wins? it’s a conundrum.

she’s very go-with-the-flow in nature, and finds things escalate fast when people stress over finishing, being right, or attaining perfection. it’s better to take a walk and let it sit for your health and happiness than push yourself further.

this is probably at least partially due to her overall ‘ahh’ feeling about how much her family works, but she absolutely doesn’t hold it against people who think differently. kind of admires them, really! she’s just not built for it.

17. What was your character’s favorite toy as a child?

a stuffed monkey her dad got for her during one of his trips to america. she keeps it somewhere in her room.

18. Is your character more likely to admire wisdom, or ambition in others?

ambition ambition ambition -- though admittedly, ebull has neither trait, in her view. wisdom is fine and good, but it’s easy to sit and get complacent with it, she finds. also people who think of themselves as ‘wise’ tend to give her headaches.

she admires cleverness above both but finds it’s not the same as either.

19. What is your character’s biggest relationship flaw? Has this flaw destroyed relationships for them before?

jesus christ where do i even fucking start it’s kind of a cyclical mess.

her biggest is most likely how long it typically takes her to get comfortable with people. ebull finds vulnerability, opening up, and the like... extremely difficult (but v attractive). she’s extremely adept at turning conversations into what the other person is feeling, and avoids giving any insight about her life in most situations -- even with people she claims to be close to. she keeps any cards she intends to keep close to her chest, even when it doesn’t make sense to. she’s understanding to the point of becoming a doormat in some places, and is easy to take advantage of once she’s committed -- but fears getting to that level, and will naturally close off if someone doesn’t read her mind and figure that she’s uneasy.

then she’ll ghost that person for hurting her feelings or just using her. which happens often, not because someone actually did, but because she thought they did.

she works primarily in the realm of assumed knowledge, and, as a naturally perceptive person, knows that it’s unfair of her to assume people will remember as much about her as she does to them -- but it hurts her feelings anyway if she’s close to (or is crushing on) someone who doesn’t seem to just ‘get her.’ you can’t rush things in too fast, but you also have to be the one to make the first move. you have to get her but be okay that she will almost never tell you a direct answer.

she keeps her preferences and desires coy and mysterious until she’s comfy and ugh yeah.

like in general this is a self-feeding mess of an issue here and it’s of no surprise that before the game she’d never been in a relationship.

20. In what ways does your character compare themselves to others? Do they do this for the sake of self-validation, or self-criticism?

usually it’s just to look for improvements to herself. she very rarely uses other people as a basis as to what she should be doing in an excusatory way -- like ‘if theyre not working, i dont have to be.’ she hates that.

21. If something tragic or negative happens to your character, do they believe they may have caused or deserved it, or are they quick to blame others?

she always -- and i mean always -- blames herself first. this drives BYE(star)BYE up a wall when theyre playing games because yeah she does this incorrectly a lot.

she usually needs people to let her know when she’s being a bit too hard on herself or over-extending. but even in these situations she... relies on someone else to take the blame off her directly, rather than believing it entirely herself.

22. What does your character like in other people?

cunning, warmth, a bit of a tongue-in-cheek attitude, bullying, ambition, COMPETENCE, a bit of daredevil attitude, ability to hold her leash, genuine care, passion, ability to admit fault, EMPATHY, work ethic, good-humoredness, effort, something that i can only describe as ‘has the vibe of a ‘’’bad boy’’’ but treats her right,’ the ability to balance her out in any way fucking possible, the ability to make decisions, teamwork, commitment, the ability to just ‘get her,’ caution.

no one person can have all these things which is so upsetting but she lives. mostly if you balance her out and make her smile... she’s good.

23. What does your character dislike in other people?

brattiness, hypocritical behaviors, blaming others needlessly, saccharine niceness, people who are weirdly friendly, touchiness too soon, obstructing team work, people who think theyre somehow above rules/norms, unwarranted self-importance, people who dont even pretend to try to understand where others are coming from, people who expect other people to do work for them, people who spread gossip too far, no boundaries, people who act as if theyre above bias/other human things/etc, ‘weak’ personalities, people who just escalate her rather than grounding her out a bit, people who take advantage of other people’s feelings, people who intentionally hurt others, sadistic qualities, overt self-flagellation, cattiness over men in women, men who are nasty towards women, infidelity, lack of loyalty, promise breaking, people who claim to care past a polite level but don’t.

...she can take any of those in doses, and she’s very willing to admit that no one is perfect -- and she’s sure she expresses some of those herself, sometimes.

24. How quick is your character to trust someone else?

weird question for ebull.

trust is a strange thing for this gal. when ebull uses the word ‘trust,’ she means she has an expectation. for instance, she trusts someone named “bigdragonfucker42069″ to be kind of unbearable in the team’s groupchat. she makes these kinds of judgments very quickly, and can be said to ‘trust’ every single member of her class -- such as, she trusts veronica to come into a trial logically and get exasperated by any court theatric, and she trusts masashi to say little in trial but to be marginally sensible when he gives ideas.

most of these expectations do include trust for being alone together with them, sometimes during motives, because she trusts people to not go after one of the clearly athletic people who could phone a friend and have backup in minutes. shit like that.

this doesn’t mean, however, that she trusts people in a traditional sense -- and it goes in negative ways -- like she trusts that there are maybe two people that, even before the game was revealed as a vr, would give a shit if she died beyond ‘fuck now we lost someone who does shit.’ it doesnt always work to her self image’s favor!

for a more traditional trust -- like trusting with emotional intimacy... um.

....

that takes. a long time.

...a very long time. and you have to pass shittests.

25. How quick is your character to suspect someone else? Does this change if they are close with that person?

quick to suspect, slow to solidify -- if that makes sense. she doesn’t put much above just about anyone, but she’s willing to see reason or be proven wrong, and is pretty gracious when this is done.

doesn’t change a damn bit if she’s close to someone, but her um. reaction. might be a lil different.

26. How does your character behave around children?

she loves kids so much and is eager to teach them things, show them things, the whole bit. god. she loves kids. easiest way to get her to genuinely smile is to bring a damn toddler around her.

27. How does your character normally deal with confrontation?

eagerly, but levelly. she doesn’t shy away from much, but she’s more looking to compromise or do whatever suits the group best than whatever interests she might have.

she finds she does get a lil excited at ‘locking horns’ with people, though. so to speak.

28. How quick or slow is your character to resort to physical violence in a confrontation?

depends entirely on the situation. usually really slow -- she’s got about three locks on herself, calm down mechanisms, ability to tone down her impulses (and her impulses are RARELY ‘hurt someone’) -- but she does have. big. no-nos.

if any of those no-nos are touched she kind of goes blank white and will get violent without warning. these things don’t really happen in real life though so she’s usually safe.

sucks 2 b in this game tho lol sorry jiji.

29. What did your character dream of being or doing as a child? Did that dream come true?

she really wanted to be the first female mlb baseball star. died when she was about nine because it felt really unattainable, and she’d rather... accept her lot in life than try hard for something and fail that badly (oops). now it’s too late to do anything about it even if she wanted to so she considers this a success in some way.

she isn’t here to make waves or so she says. she doesn’t talk about this much but she does still love The Sport.

30. What does your character find repulsive or disgusting?

people who use other people’s feelings against them, or abuse the trust other people have in them for their own gain. people who lie in relationships. cheaters. people who could give a shit if they hurt someone they claim to care about.

31. Describe a scenario in which your character feels most comfortable.

sitting with her family in their country home for their week alone together. having only a few homework assignments to do, about to go on a walk with her sister so her parents can have time alone.

32. Describe a scenario in which your character feels most uncomfortable.

she’s accidentally hurt someone she cares about -- they’re trying to act ok, but she can tell that they’re upset and that their trust in her took a hit. she has no way to really apologize -- no way to fix it quickly. she’s alone in her room, trying not to dwell on it but finding it impossible. it’s cold.

33. In the face of criticism, is your character defensive, self-deprecating, or willing to improve?

always always always willing to improve. she takes all crit pretty well and never takes things personally. maybe to a fault.

34. Is your character more likely to keep trying a solution/method that didn’t work the first time, or immediately move on to a different solution/method?

not only does she immediately move on to a different method, but she mapped that method out mentally around the middle-mark of her first attempt, making it easier to jump into. ebull has never seen the point in trying things over and over again in desperation, and is always looking for new ways around something. she’s adaptable in almost every sense, and doesn’t feel too bad about failure the first dozen of times as long as she eventually settles on an answer.

this sometimes leads to some rather unconventional solutions but you know.

35. How does your character behave around people they like?

ummm this is really dependent on the person, her intentions with the person, and their overall ‘relationship chemistry.’

ebull is extremely adaptable and finds it easy to go along with what other people need or desire in a relationship -- and therefore most of the time, if she likes a person, she tends to turn into some kind of balancing act. she’ll also seek their company in her own ways!

it diverges a little between her intending for a friendship and her intending for a lover, however. if ebull wants to have someone as a friend, she tends to spoil them -- to get into their interests a bit and starts to joke around early. friends also get clued into her feelings and her background almost readily, and she’s more willing to explain herself or get into the things she likes (or even reveal embarrassing tidbits about herself) with people she feels mostly platonic towards.

if ebull intends to try to date someone, she um.

does her best to act absolutely detached from them. if at all possible. she shields any information about herself behind seven proxies of coyness. she tries to turn every conversation into something about what the other person wants or their feelings rather than her own. she gives little, coy compliments -- winking nudges of her interest -- but absolutely doesn’t invite the chance to get closer. above all else, she tries to remain mysterious.

...it’s a lot easier to be her friend. or like. go from friend=>lover because holy shit is her dating scheme a pain in the ass.

36. How does your character behave around people they dislike?

depends on if this is a business/pleasure relationship. in business, or for similar things (like a family her parents are trying to impress), ebull is remarkably good at acting at least interested in and polite towards other people. she’s very willing to be or act compassionate even to people she detests, as she finds that there’s too much emotional energy used up by being mad or trying to behave anti-socially around someone she has to be around. ebull values group cohesion and effort above most else, and finds that she starts causing issues by gaining attitudes.

if she has to be alone with someone she dislikes, she’ll smile politely, giggle at all their jokes, shrug her shoulders a lot, and move on quickly. mostly you can tell if she dislikes you if she’s consistently trying to avoid speaking with you, and doesn’t coyly hint at things.

37. Is your character more concerned with defending their honor, or protecting their status?

she finds these two are almost irreparably related, and likely couldnt choose between the two. mostly because she’s more interested in just letting her actions speak for her, rather than get into fights over if she’s a good leader or deserves her position or anything. it’s counter-productive to focus on either of these.

38. Is your character more likely to remove a problem/threat, or remove themselves from a problem/threat?

weirdly enough she will usually just remove herself and her healers, if at all possible. that, or try to calm the problem/threat or work around it -- rather than remove it entirely. she’s not afraid of confrontation, but finds being quick to jump doesnt tend to look good.

39. Has your character ever been bitten by an animal? How were they affected (or unaffected)?

nope! ebull doesn’t tend to deal with animals often.

40. How does your character treat people in service jobs?

politely, doesn’t tend to seem entirely bothered by slip ups or the like. the type of person who notices that something is going wrong in the kitchen or her waiter seems frazzled and responds with “im in no rush, so take your time” or merely steers the dinner conversation away from how hungry people are into something more productive. tips well.

41. Does your character feel that they deserve to have what they want, whether it be material or abstract, or do they feel they must earn it first?

earn it, fullstop. and this includes things that people don’t traditionally associate with being earned -- like a good partner, for instance. she detests when people demand or act deserving of things like other people’s respect, time, sympathy, or effort without giving a good reason. this is partly why she’s not easy to phase even in the game when things go badly, because it’s easy for her to rationalize that she must have done something to disrupt other people’s trust in her -- and therefore lost her standing for their attention.

she has never, ever assumed that she deserves something just for being there or showing up -- and finds that when things are just given freely, she gets a little anxious. usually she assumes some ulterior motive.

42. Has your character ever had a parental figure who was not related to them?

nah!

43. Has your character ever had a dependent figure who was not related to them?

um unless you count 12 year olds on youtube who love her tanking videos, no.

44. How easy or difficult is it for your character to say “I love you?” Can they say it without meaning it?

if it’s by text to a person she’s friendly with and has no intention of ever dating? super easy. “ilyyyyyy” and shit, sometimes cheeky. she can also use the term ‘love’ very indiscriminately, as one of her more charming speaking tics.

any other circumstance? hoo boy. she can think of no harder phrase to utter -- and this is coming from a gal who refuses to make first moves or say things in a non-delicate manner.

she finds phrases like ‘i love you’ way too fucking vulnerable to be said lightly -- and has to be absolutely sure before saying it. because she fears not having her feelings reciprocated over most things, ebull will NEVER say it first, even if that means it takes years to exchange the phrase. she’s also the type of person who could hear someone else say it in earnest and feel only uncomfortable -- if she doesn’t feel the same way. rather than fake her feelings and return it, she’d find coy, cute ways to brush it off. she doesn’t take this shit lightly and has determined ‘i love you’ to be something said only with absolute certainty.

also if you say it too fast or in a position she thinks is kind of manipulative (such as saying it for the first time to her as you’re attempting to get next stage intimate), she’ll probably get disgusted at you for faking your feelings in an attempt to make her put her guard down and that’s a break up.

so yeah if she says it to you out loud, platonic or romantic? she means the hell out of it. also it probably embarrassed her to say and she might be close to crying.

45. What does your character believe will happen to them after they die? Does this belief scare them?

ebull is a buddhist and is therefore ‘covered’ when it comes to the afterlife -- so she doesnt really fear what will happen to her on paper. off of paper she’s kind of still a bit weirdly superstitious and it’s a meld of traditional worries on top of bizarre concepts like american ghost hunting shows. she’s kind of superstitious and willing to believe a lot of things -- especially things that can’t be especially disproven -- and can consolidate a world where most people reincarnate but maybe christians or something all turn into ghosts, and--

she also quietly believes in cute sounding myths, or old adages like “what will be will be” which she finds strangely comforting. most things all point to her still being accounted for in the afterlife.

her big fear associated with death is leaving people she loves behind -- or how they’ll do without her there. she doesnt want people she loves to dwell on her being gone.

#about bull #oc questions

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nbtful · 7 years

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Stuffed Fun

They say never to meet your heroes, but I would add not to revisit them either. Returning to someone or something that you once held in high esteem with the curse of fresh eyes has a similar effect to seeing it up close. It’s much easier to see the whole of something, warts and all, given the benefit of passed time and it’s hard not to take the reality of a former love falling short of one’s admittedly colossal expectations as a personal affront to everything one holds dear. That said, I’ve never been one to follow my own advice, so I recently revisited one of the defining pieces of media from my childhood; Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. Despite the aforementioned tendency for childhood entertainment to not fully realize the rose-tinted memories that they inhabit, Calvin and Hobbes nevertheless seemed as vital as when I first read it. For good reason maybe, as it’s hard not to love Calvin. He’s an effortlessly charming scamp, moving around wildly across the strip, constantly in tow with him is his best friend, a stuffed tiger. It’s all instantly endearing and it’s not hard to understand why people are instantly drawn to inhabiting this world. Still, where other comics derive their following largely from the lengthiness of their run, it’s audience growing through syndication and long-term exposure, Calvin and Hobbes lasted a relatively paltry ten years. Add in its creator’s intense aversion to publicity and the comic’s lack of merchandising and it becomes increasingly strange to take for granted how often people of all ages treat it as a personal touchstone. The comic somehow attained a sustained cultural impact while never resorting to prolonged commercial overexposure. This continued relevance betrays a fundamental difference in the technical makeup of Calvin and Hobbes compared to its contemporaries, a key artistic decision that keeps it sticking in our public consciousness. There’s something at the heart of Calvin and Hobbes that’s genuinely affecting, and much more than say, Garfield. Whatever it is, this crucial creative choice of the series, the element that keeps us returning to it, what is the reason that so many of us care so much about the boy and his tiger?

First and foremost, Calvin and Hobbes is a traditional, four-panel comic strip. The Sunday strips would push wider, but for the majority of the strip’s run, a simple, black and white four panelled story would be what was offered. It’s important to identify the structure of the comic, as there is a direct link between how an audience consumes a piece of art and how it affects them. Fred Sanders argues that the statements made by the strip obtained a greater impact by its adherence to the traditional comic formula, noting that “Insensitivity to the medium-message connection” is what can cause a piece of art to be “bathetic when it attempts profundity” (Sanders, “What You Can Learn from Calvin and Hobbes”). This “medium-message connection” is crucial to understanding at least part of the strip’s appeal. Much like any other form of media, there’s a set of conventions that the average comic reader has been conditioned to expect. These conventions can either be met or subverted, but what is important is that they are respected. Watterson was adamant in refusing to license his strip for commercial merchandise because, in his slightly dramatic words, all the “licensing would sell out the soul of Calvin and Hobbes.” He goes on to say that “the world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize“, revealing his belief that artistic and thematic consistency is key to the success of a piece of art (West, 59). It’s an approach that can provide a richer sense of story and characterization, but it’s also one that demands more from the readership. Since the only avenue with which the public had to these characters was through the comic itself, not through one-joke t-shirts or plush toys, to be a fan of the strip required a greater deal of engagement than it would for other comics. The investment that the strip cultivates was, at least partially, a direct result of it’s refusal to betray the message of its medium.

As compact as that sounds, I can’t imagine that it’s the primary reason for my own unending devotion to the series; somehow I think that the commitment of the comic to its chosen artistic medium was particularly resonant for a six year old. Beneath the purity of the comic as a comic, there’s another, more affecting facet: nostalgia. To some extent this is unavoidable, as comics are largely consumed during childhood and the memories associated with them oftentimes are rose-tinted. Nostalgia is behind all that unending disappointment, the type that springs from the contemporary discovery of something’s true quality. It can also work in the opposite direction, becoming a tool to obfuscate our current experience with the art into a mere recollection of our original experience with it. We are then no longer participating with the art itself, but rather with our perceived reaction to that same art. It makes it hard to detach yourself, from conflating your current opinions with the memory of your past ones. Is there a way to reconcile the sentiment of the past with the critical experience of the present? In “The Ghost of the Hardy Boys”, Gene Weingarten attempts to come to terms with the sheer awfulness of The Hardy Boys, novels that were once, to him, “the pinnacle of human achievement.” He delves into the author’s life story, the publisher’s tyrannical edits, the contexts behind the writing of each book. And while he realizes that the series is hardly superb, there’s always something that “made you turn the page”, an “all-too-brief moment in which the writer seems suddenly engaged” (Weingarten, “Ghost of the Hardy Boys”). While Calvin and Hobbes doesn’t suffer from this problem, Weingarten’s methods in finding his original attraction to the books without the lens of nostalgia lay in looking at the intrinsic nature of the books, the way that the small, engaging details drove the plots. So what intrinsic is hidden in the details of Calvin and Hobbes?

It’s hard to encapsulate a decade’s worth of artistic choices into a few easily digestible points, but some elements tend to stand out. Calvin’s idiosyncratic tastes, from the works of DuChamp to a magazine about bubble gum. The ever changing backgrounds, from completely empty to vividly inked and populated. The tension between fantasy and reality. A potential thread emerges, one of memory; not in the intellectual sense, but in the emotional one. The strip is able to transcend simple “nostalgia buttons” because it doesn’t ask us to remember specific shared moments or events, but rather specific feelings. We see Calvin being banished to his room and sulking outside his window in an imagined Martian landscape, filled with the brilliant colour and configuration that only childhood loneliness can muster. We see this and we don’t remember this exact event happening to us, but we remember feeling alone, misunderstood, ostracized. And we can remember the methods we used to try to escape from this unhappiness. As Libby Hill puts it in her retrospective on the series, “isolation breeds fantasy, which breeds isolation” (Hill, “Calvin and Hobbes Embodied the Lonely Child”). The rejection pushes one inwards and the continued time away from anyone other than oneself causes further rejection. It’s thoroughly emotionally exploitative, in that we can’t help but feel sorry for him. It triggers an uncontrollable empathy, as we’ve all been children and experienced that powerlessness. Watterson is reminding us what it felt like to be completely powerless, completely vulnerable, and completely alone, all within the realms of a four-panel comic strip. It's the kind of juxtaposition that tends to stick with people.

What’s significant about this specific type of juxtaposition is its usefulness in fostering both comedic and dramatic material. The incongruity can be mined for laughs, like Calvin tracking polls for his father as if he was a presidential candidate, or moments of almost unbearable resonance, like the repeated collision of Calvin’s hyper-vivid daydreams with the mundanity of his schoolwork. It’s non-escapist fantasy, the type that is fully inhabited by a dreamer who is nevertheless completely self-aware of the context of their situation. It’s reminiscent of early Simpsons episodes, where the family dynamic is grounds for great humour, but the creeping shadow of a burdensome reality consistently threatens to dramatically tear down the surrealist facade that has been ever-so carefully constructed. It was not uncommon for The Simpsons of the early 90s to have an average, slice-of-life storyline (like a housewife needing to get a job in order to make ends meet) that was punctuated by instances of brilliant absurdity (like that same episode featuring a 50 foot tall Marie Curie and a Scottish groundskeeper wrestling a wolf). Calvin himself best resembles a tragic combination of The Simpsons’ two child protagonists. Bart Simpson is the devious prankster, tirelessly putting every ounce of his energy into the next meaningless act of destructive mischief and Lisa Simpson is the isolated intellectual, forever an outsider because of her contextually inappropriate sophistication. Both The Simpsons and Calvin and Hobbes are consistently held up as all-time greats in their respective fields of entertainment, but unlike the latter, The Simpsons doesn’t have the benefit of an expedited run to sweeten the memory of its early quality. Indeed, the common rap on The Simpsons is that its creative decline came around the time when it started priding outlandish storylines over more emotionally grounded plots (Sullentrop, “The Simpsons”). Its downfall, according to the detractors of the show’s later years, came from the move towards treating its characters as a tool to deliver quirky jokes instead of treating them as a realistic family. Perhaps some of Calvin and Hobbes power is derived from the strip’s laser-like focus; it never forgets who or what is at it’s centre. While it deals with many topics, the power of imagination, the peculiarities of growing old, the fleetingness of the good times, the core of the strip is a young, confused, surprisingly wise little boy. The tragedy of Calvin’s character is that he lacks the inhibition or self-agency to prevent himself from slipping in and out of his chosen reality, but he’s granted the intelligence to be painfully self-aware of his circumstances. He’s been put in a world he can’t hope to understand or change and he knows just enough to realize the full extent of his powerlessness.

There’s a Sunday strip from 1989 that I think defines the entire series, as it’s one of the few moments where Watterson lets the curtain of imagination completely fall away. On March 26th 1989, Watterson, for the umpteenth time, showed us what an average day was like for Calvin, except this time, Hobbes is nowhere to be found. He starts his day off being yelled at by his mother to get out of bed, then he’s being berated by his teacher for not knowing the answer to a math problem, then he’s being threatened by a bully, then there’s homework, bad food, bath time, a turned off TV, and then back in bed again. His mother kisses him goodnight, reminding him that “tomorrow’s another big day!” And all alone in the dark, he sighs, broken and thoroughly sad. This is a terrifying comic strip. There is not even an attempt at humour here, no half-hearted jokes made, just full-bodied, unencumbered, childhood angst. This is a child that is dreading his every waking moment and finds the world he inhabits unbearable. Is it any wonder he needs a friend entirely of his own control and creation? This is a strip that best exemplifies how, according to Hill, Calvin and Hobbes “normalized the inherent loneliness that childhood can bring”, how the lack of any kind of control can lead almost inevitably to feelings of extended solitude (Hill, “Calvin and Hobbes”). This one strip is perhaps the series’ most devastating, precisely because of how it normalizes isolation, how it presents loneliness as life’s fundamental feature rather than an easy-to-avoid pitfall. Instead of asking how to deal with the death of our loved ones, it asks us about the death of desire, our motivation to wake up the following morning.

I’ll admit that despite my attempts to disentangle myself from the nostalgic web Calvin and Hobbes weaves, this strip is still distressingly evocative. Yes, the routine portrayed in the strip contains the average, normal events that all children go through. But it’s the mundanity that makes it worse. If we can’t deal with the everyday, what hope do we have to cope with everything else? And by not judging Calvin’s adverse reaction, Watterson provides validity to all forms of stress, regardless of age or status. Tony Kushner. in reference to Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak, once said that “for the great adult creators of children's books, the work at hand is a reclamation, through the difficult exploration of feelings most people have forgotten, of the past” (Kushner, “How hard can it be?”). Reclaiming the feelings of the past is exactly what’s happening here. In revisiting Calvin and Hobbes, I tried to confront my hero. I tried to deconstruct it and see what made it tick. But maybe all I was doing was trying to reassert what Calvin represented, to stake a claim in rebelliousness, whimsy, and crushing loneliness as the tenets of childhood. Maybe the series was like a companion, providing hope and comfort by showing us the universality of our feelings of solitude.

While there is undoubtedly a cathartic sense of relief that the series grants, there’s a nagging doubt that stating this is somehow antithetical to the core of the comic. Looking at other bastions of slightly melancholic children-oriented media, like Charles Schultz with Peanuts or Maurice Sendak’s aforementioned Where the Wild Things Are, there’s a tendency in them to portray children and adults as fundamentally different. Sendak’s adults were authoritarian figures and the Peanuts cartoons famously had a teacher communicate literally incomprehensibly through the nosies of an unidentified brass instrument. Calvin and Hobbes doesn’t really do that. The dichotomy between adults and children fades, where one finds instances of Calvin’s father being just as prone to staging a scene in a grocery store as his son is. The lack of distinction between the two seemingly disparate groups suggests something. Furthermore, the huge popularity of the comic strip suggests that there is a a deeper connection being forged than one borne out of surface-level enjoyment and to find it, we can revisit Kushner’s quote about Sendak. He specifically mentions how the work of the “adult creators of children’s books.” In a field where the best work regularly incorporates serious subject matter in an accessible way, their work is not simply an exploration or a celebration, but first and foremost a reclamation.

Think about the word “reclamation”. It’s not just taking back something, it’s about reasserting that it was always yours. Despite efforts to the contrary, whatever it is that’s being reclaimed has always been there; lurking in the shadows perhaps, but still there. One might immediately associate ”reclamations” with “reminders”, but in this instance, it’s more precisely related to a “realization.” A realization that we still have what we once had and that it never truly left. In the case of Bill Watterson, one needn’t look too far to see what he is making us realize. Hill’s assertion that her attraction to Calvin and Hobbes was “seeing a child…struggle with the world he inhabited” makes all the more sense in this light (Hill, “Calvin and Hobbes”). It’s the struggle that binds us. Regardless of age, creed, or affiliation, we all struggle everyday. Watterson reclaims that struggle by showing it through the lens of one intelligent, imaginative, and lonely child. The problems that Calvin go through are always articulated in a way that is not only widely accessible, but widely applicable. Take a strip from December 1987. Calvin is musing to Hobbes that he doesn’t understand the concept of Santa Claus. “Why all the mystery?” Calvin asks. “If the guy exists, why doesn’t he ever show himself and prove it?” And just in case the implication wasn’t clear enough, he ends the strip with admitting that “I’ve got the same questions about God.” That’s childhood pre-holiday anxiety combined with a grown-up crisis of faith. It’s an unending struggle that the comic reminds us doesn’t really go away.

When we’re confronted with the harsh realities of whatever situation we finds ourselves in, a natural reaction can be to ignore them. It can be overwhelming to have to deal with all of the troubling issues in the world and it’s all too easy to disregard them entirely. But Calvin and Hobbes doesn’t promote apathy. If anything, Calvin’s interest in such issues as environmentalism, mortality, and religion all point towards a call for a greater interest in pressing social matters. What it doesn’t do is offer pat solutions for how to deal with all of them, how to reconcile our struggle. Sure, sometimes it can help just to talk to a friend, but all too often we’re left alone, staring out the window at our blasted Martian dreamscape. And for Watterson, that’s okay. If Calvin can be said to be one thing, it’s persistent. We might be powerless, but that isn’t an excuse not to try. As long as we keep fighting, keep struggling against the issues, against the way we fit in the world, we have a reason to wake up. Tomorrow’s another big day, after all.

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