#come rape meeee
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need to be on my knees waiting obediently to be useful, inspecting me and telling me how I'm such a good girl for him. making me beg to be his slut
#i haven't played in awhile ok#nevermind suffocating in sweaty balls#free house and ive just been waiting to hear someone break in#come rape meeee
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GODDD it is actually so nice to see your posts about how splinter and abe are technically the same but the difference you explained are actually so nice to here bc in relation to my own experiences with that typa stuff ive always thought that way about it but cldnt put it into words and its actually so nice seeing that it isnt just a me thing yk
YEAH IDK ITS LIKE. ok its not like a special interest, but I am very sPECIFCALLY INTERESTED IN THOSE KIND OF INTERNAL DISTINCTIONS cause like i feel like it helps to know/think about that kinda thing. to not just consider everyone who does similar bad shit and "evil monster" because that makes it harder to conceptualize people you know as BAD PEOPLE.
cause like most people don't think of themselves as evil or doing bad things. most people justify shit in ways its hard to understand unless you're there for the whole thing. and its just. fascinating to meeee.
abe and splinters actions are very similar, but they arrive at them through very different avenues of thought. and while one of those ways of thoughts comes from Abe being attracted to kids and justifying his relationships with them to himself, the OTHER train of thought comes from a more widespread societal issue about obeying your parents and mimicking their behavior that anyone could potentially fall into. which humanizes the abuser (Splinter) and in turn makes it easier to see people you care about, who you see as PEOPLE, as capable of abuse.
it also helps to differentiate people who have intrusive thoughts or genuine urges and DON'T hurt anyone. like when i was around 13 i was afraid I was a pedophile because of my intrusive thoughts and weird sexual fantasies fueled by my abuse + puberty, but I decided that if I didn't hurt anyone then it wouldn't matter if i was a pedophile or not and that actually helped a lot. like as long as i don't rape anyone then i'm fine, and it's not like i was planning on raping anyone anyway. (I also forced myself to see if I was really, actually attracted to kids, since i was never around them in the first place and i found that no, I was not. so whatever was going on in my head wasn't pedophilia. which then lead me to figure out what intrusive thoughts were)
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Malfoy's PureBlood Puppet
Warnings: Rape, Rough Sex, Dom/sub, Pain, Imperio | Imperius Curse (Harry Potter), Teacher-Student Relationship, Oral Sex, Sadism, Breeding Kink, Anal Fingering
Chapter 6: First He's Sweet Then He's Sour
Summary:
Posing as the perfect gentleman for her parents, he gets the exact info he needs and puts Adelia back in her place.
Notes:
In this chapter of Adelia and Perseus, does Adelia think she understands how Perseus might be feeling or is she completely wrong, and this is going to get way worse than it is?
Thanks for reading :)
Adelia walks outside Hogwarts to meet Perseus on the pathway to Hogsmeade. She wore a flowy yellow dress that slightly blew up a bit from the small breeze that would come by. Adelia put her hands down, so she could keep herself from not being exposed to much. As she walked to the start of the path, she saw colorful roses all along the pathway leading up. Before she walked any further, she stopped really quick to make a bouquet of flowers. As she finally got to the meeting spot, she saw Perseus already there waiting for her. His hands were in his pockets, and his face looked annoyed.
“You are late.” Perseus says taking his hands out of his pockets.
“Riiiiight, but that is because I needed to restock my candy stash this morning, and then I wanted breakfast for all the yummy pastries. After that I got distracted by all the flowers on the way here.” Adelia said, smiling, holding up the bouquet she made. “Don’t they look nice? Here, smell them!” she said, stuffing it in his nose.
“....Let’s go.” Perseus says heading down the path now.
“Wait for meeee. I got little legs. Jeeez someone woke up on the wrong side of the candy patch this morning. “Adelia said running to catch up.
“You already made us late enough.”
“My parents know I’m going to be late all the time.” Adelia says huffing and puffing.
“.....Maybe if you didn’t get distracted all the time, they wouldn’t have to think that. Being timely is an important skill…..what are you doing?” Perseus says looking over at Adelia kneeling down at some more flowers.
“Look at these ones, they're super pretty. Also, I got tired. I didn't have any candy today yet.”
“You said you restocked this morning!”
“Well, I said I restocked, but that doesn’t mean I had any yet.” Adelia says now sitting on the ground relaxing.
“That’s it!” Perseus says walking over to her and picking her up to sling over his shoulder. “You are not making us later than we already are.”
“Great, now I don’t have to walk all the way there, and I can eat my candy!” Adelia says reaching into her pocket and unwrapping a piece of candy to eat.
Perseus sighed and continued walking to her parents' house. This was his first time, so Adelia gave him directions as he carried her.
“Okay, a left up here.”
“Adelia, we went in a circle. Do you know where the fuck we are going!” Perseus says getting angry now.
“....Well I mean I would, but you put me over your shoulder, so since I’m looking behind you everything seems a little backwards. My bad.” Adelia says giggling.
“I’m going to fucking-” Perseus stopped himself and took a deep breath and after a while of bad direction they finally made it.
As they walked up the steps to the home Perseus set her down finally at the top. Adelia knocked on the door, and her mother opened it.
“Adelia honey! Oh, look at youuu.” her mother said, giving her a huge hug. “I love the dress! Did you make it?”
“Ya, don’t you love it?” Adelia says excitedly and twirls around.
“I do. You take after me, and my sewing skills. You are getting as good as me. Her mom says with a warm smile. “Now come in your father will be happy to see you too!”
“Oh sorry, mom, this is Perseus.” Adelia says gesturing behind her.
Her mother looked surprised. Adelia never brought anyone home before. She always had flings and not real relationships, so she never thought it was important to tell her parents about anything if it wasn't serious.
“Hello, Mrs. Lovegood, it’s lovely to meet you.” Perseus says, taking her hand and gently kissing it.
“Oh, what a gentleman.” Her mother says blushing. “Well, come in, come in.”
They all walk inside and join in the living room where her father is sitting reading the daily prophet.
“Dadddddddy.” Adelia says running into the living room to him. He gets up off the couch and gives her a big hug lifting her up.
“Ooooh my little girl! How are you!”
“Dad, I'm not a little girl! I’m 18 now!” Adelia says with a stern look.
“Oh, I know, but you will always be my little girl.” He says still hugging her, and then looking behind her at Perseus. He slowly moves her a bit away and holds her shoulders now.
“Darling, who is this?” Her father says with a concerned tone.
“This is Perseus. Perseus Malfoy. We are sorta seeing each other, and I wanted you to meet him.” Adelia says, smiling at her dad.
“.....Malfoy….” Her father says reaching for the top of her head and squeezing it.
“Dad, nooooo, you are squeezing my memories.”
“Good. Now what do you think you are doing with a Malfoy?” He says, very angry now.
“...Well, I told you I’m seeing-”
“Nope, nope no you are not.”
“But Daaaad, you can’t do that!” Adelia says, shouting at him and holding on to his wrist still holding her head.
“I can do what-”
“If I may sir, I completely understand how you feel. I understand that my family has a bad reputation, but I’m willing to answer any questions you have to show you I don’t follow in the same footsteps as them. “Perseus says to her father.
Her father looks down to Adelia turning her head completely to look at him. “Fine, let's have dinner and we can talk.”
“Yay. I’m starving!” Adelia says running for the dining room table after her dad lets go of her head.
As they sit at the dining room table for lunch it starts off very well with some casual conversations catching up with her parents. Then her father starts to ask some questions to Perseus, and it seems to be going well.
“Well how about enough of the hard ball questions from your father and we lighten the mood a bit shall we?” Her mother says, passing more of the mash potatoes around. “Tell me honey, how did you two really start getting to know each other and trying this relationship out?”
“Well Perseus was in the Potions Classroom, and he told me to-” Adelia stopped when she felt a hand grab her thigh and squeeze it hard under the table.
“If I may, I love this story.” Perseus says in a fake charismatic tone oblivious to Adelia though.
“She was in the Potions Classroom, and she was having a hard time. So, I asked her if she wanted help. She looked at me and smiled, letting me help her, and as I did, we realized we talked for hours while brewing, and the rest was history from there. After that, I knew I wanted to keep seeing her and getting to know who Adelia was more. “Perseus says, smiling at Adelia while telling the story.
Adelia blushed, stunned at what she had just heard to call him a liar or even look confused at what he said.
“Oh, that is beautiful.” Adelia’s mother said, with her hand under her chin completely mesmerized. “Isn’t it honey?”
“Sure.” Her father said, completely unamused by the story.
“Well, let me get this cleared up.” Her mother said, grabbing some plates.
“Oh, here, please let me help you.” Perseus says grabbing some plates as well and bringing them to the kitchen with her.
Adelia and her father sat there as they cleaned up in the kitchen.
“Listen Adelia, are you sure he makes you happy?”
"...Ya, he does. I mean just yesterday he took me to the candy shop, and it was amazing!”
“Adelia, focus you know what I mean.
“I know dad. I do. I wasn't sure before, but he came here, and that meant a lot to have him see you guys. So please if I trust him then you should too.”
“I don’t, but you are happy so, fine. If that changes though, he is dead.”
“Understood.” Adelia says, as she gets up and gives him a hug.
Perseus and her mother come back laughing with each other. Adelia was happy to see that they were all getting along and for her father to at least be trying.
“Are you ready to get going, Adelia? We should head back before it gets dark.”
“Ya!”
Perseus and Adelia give her parents hugs goodbye and leave with them waving them off when they get outside to the path back to Hogwarts. The walk back was quiet with Adelia still occasionally getting distracted, but eventually they did make it back to the front entrance.
Adelia looked up at Perseus and smiled, as they walked into Hogwarts again, maybe Perseus really started to like her! Perseus looked down at her and saw her smiling “What are you smiling at me for?” He asked, for some reason he felt his face heat up, and he didn’t like it one bit! Adelia blushed a bit and smiled softly “I…am just really glad you decided to meet my parents…it actually really means a lot to me”.
Perseus looked away as he felt his cheeks flush… Why was this girl making him feel like this!? She was nothing but a stupid Hufflepuff, that he was using for his own personal gain! Nothing more! Adelia tilted her head a bit at his reaction and giggled a bit “Haha you like meeeeee” she teased, and Perseus glared at her “S-shut up…” he said in his usual stern voice, his face now getting red in anger. Adelia poked his cheek and smiled “Nooooooo you like me a little bit!” She said happily.
Perseus gripped her wrist tightly, making Adelia wince “I said… shut.up.” He growled. Adelia gulped “I-I’m sorry I…”, Perseus suddenly slammed her against the wall hard, looking over at a specific gargoyle statue he smirked… he knew that statue hid a secret room. Dragging her to the gargoyle it opened to reveal the room, and he pushed her into the room and slammed her against the wall “You think just because I met your parents means you get to act like that? I think it’s time to have you polish up on your lessons…” he said and gripped her hair, pulled her head to the side he began to kiss and suck her neck, leaving a large hickey.
Perseus ripped her shirt open, buttons flying onto the floor. Groping her breasts hard, he squeezed them to the point of leaving fingerprints “You think I’m going to give you special treatment now? Just because I met your parents means I will act like an idiotic lovesick fool?” He hissed in her ear. Adelia rapidly shook her head “N-no… I’m sorry I…”, Perseus grabbed her throat and squeezed “I’m going to remind you of what you are to me…” he said darkly, and Adelia felt him rip off her panties and position himself at her entrance. Adelia gasped; she wasn’t wet! This would hurt if he didn’t prepare her at least a bit “Perseus don’t I’m not wet enough!” She exclaimed, but Perseus only squeezed her throat harder and thrust inside her “Shut up Adelia…” he grunted and winced a bit at how tight she was like this.
Adelia whimpered and bit her lip, trying to stay quiet, as he practically dragged himself out of her, and then pushed back in. Perseus became impatient, this didn’t feel good for him either, moving his hand down her body and under her skirt to tease her clit. Slowly Adelia loosened up for him and his thrusts became smoother, slapping her ass he smirked when he heard her moan. Slapping it again he felt her tighten around him “Oh…so you like it when I’m rough with you?” He asked and slapped her ass harder, leaving a red handprint, Adelia could only whimper in response.
Perseus looked at her…he looked at her slim body… he felt her perky breasts… her tight ass, fuck he wanted nothing more than to fill her with his kid. “I can’t wait to see you swollen with my baby…I’m gonna breed you like the slut you are, my own personal breeding slut… that’s all you are to me… understand?” He asked as he pinched her clit. Adelia let out a small sob as he continued to pound into her. Was that really all she was to him? She had thought maybe… maybe he had cared a little bit.
Tears began to run down her face and Perseus slowed down a bit. Wait… is she crying? Why is she crying? And why do I…. Feel bad? This confusion only made Perseus angrier and more aggressive “I’m going to fill you up with my cum until I knock you up… and even after that you’ll still be my personal slut” he groaned as he felt himself getting close to cumming. The thought of a pregnant Adelia made him feel that much more aroused, and finally flooding her pussy with his cum and pulling away to look at what he did to her.
Adelia slid down the wall as he let go of her and she began to softly sniffle and weep “I…I thought that… you maybe actually… liked me…” she whispered. Perseus felt a pang of guilt in his chest and his jaw clenched. “Well… maybe you should do less thinking…” he said in a monotone voice before leaving her alone in the small room to go to his office. He had work to do, he smirked a tiny bit… the mother was so easy to let her guard down, now he could finally get that stupid birth control off her.
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Review: The Winners (Beartown #3) by Fredrik Backman
Book 18 of 2022
Start Reading Time: 16 November 2022
Finish reading Time: 26 November 2022
Page Count: 671 Pages
TRIGGER WARNINGS: RAPE, VIOLENCE, GUN VIOLENCE, MURDER, GRIEF, SUICIDE
This is the spoiler-free part of the review. I will put up a spoiler alert before going into the review that contains spoilers.
HERE WE GO AGAIN WITH THE WORST BOOK HANGOVER IN A WHILE.
This hurts too much to touch with words, indeed. (It should be a fucking warning on the book cover) And that's another quote that has the power to instantly destroy me mentally.
I haven't been this devastated because of a book since A Little Life and The Hero of Ages, so naturally, this book automatically gets a five stars from me. I needed 5 days to recover from this book, where I do nothing but sleep and cry while listening to The Winner Takes It All by ABBA, and think about Benji.
I am so emotionally drained. Remember how I said I felt like a shell of myself after I finished reading The Hero of Ages? Well, I didn't expect to experience it again this soon. But I guess, it's just an indication of a good book series, that the ending has such a powerful effect on you after you first finish reading it.
First of all, before we go into the review, I'd like to thank Backman for dedicating this book to me. I mean, he's kind of describes me perfectly (and it feels a little like a read too) when he wrote:
"To you who talk too much and sing too loud and cry too often and love something in life more than you should."
When I first read it, I was like 😱😱😱 OMG this dedication is for meeee!!! IT'S ME, HI, I'M THE ONE THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO, IT'S MEEEE.
I mean, If that's not me, I don't know what I am. So, thank you, Backman, I felt so seen and you just made my year with that book dedication because this is one of my favorite book trilogy of all time, and this book is my favorite read this year.
Now, here's the non-spoilery review: To say that Backman stick the landing with this book is an understatement, I honestly think with every book in this series, the story becomes bigger and better, and what a great first trilogy for him, I'm so excited for his next book series. I am aware that I have more criticisms in my review of Us Against You (Book 2) than Beartown (Book 1), but I also still love it very much, as it explores so much more about the town and the characters that I have come to love and care about very, very much. Yes, Beartown can be read as a standalone, and it would be a great standalone read all by itself, but I personally think that Us Against You and The Winners have added so much more to the story and make it so much richer, especially for the fans of Backman's works like myself, and I am so grateful that he made it into a trilogy like it is now, because imagine if there's book 2 and three for his other awesome books like Britt-Marie Was Here or Anxious People. I would lose my freaking mind.
I know I'm very much in the minority with this opinion, as I have found that a lot of the criticisms of this book by other people is that it was too long and that there are parts that should be cut from the book, but I honestly feel that one of the best things about this book (and there are a lot, as I will explain later in this review) is that it's THICC and much longer than Backman's previous books. Well, I disagree with those people. I personally don't think that there's any part that should be cut from the book, in fact, I think there are some things that should be added and included in the book, and if that makes this book even thicc-er, the so be it, I don't care if I'm the only soul in the whole world who thinks this. I have always been a lover of big thicc books, and I always will be. The thicc-er the book, the better for me.
I mean, did Backman wreck me with this book? Yes. Yes, he most certainly did. But, oh boy, am I beyond happy that this is so much longer than all of his other books so far. I pray that Backman will make his books longer from now on, and may all his books have no less than 1000 pages, AMEN. But I'll still read his books even if they're short though. Listen, I'll take what I can get.
Awesome authors like Backman, Sanderson, RF Kuang, Hanya Yanagihara, and Khaled Hosseini should only write long books, IMO. It should be a crime for great stories and books to be read so briefly.
Having said that, I feel like Backman kinda cheated because even though there are more pages in this book, the chapters are way shorter than the previous books. I mean, there are so many short chapters in this book, and many of them are scary foreshadowing of the events that are about to happen, and they make my anxiety goes 📈📈📈. Especially that first chapter about Benji. It was fucking brutal, if anybody wants to hurt me mentally, just show me that chapter, and I will be hyperventilating and sobbing in a second.
However, this book has exceeded all of my expectations. Yes, it did wreck me mentally, but there's also still so much joy and happiness in it, which makes it all the more harder to move on from this book. Because if you're gonna shatter me, at least give me a few moments of happiness first.
The cast of characters also grew bigger in this book, which stumped me at first, because it's not as if the first two books don't already have a large cast of characters in them. But I'll just go ahead and get attached to even more characters, I guess. Whatever you wanna do, Fredrik. But it paid off, I think, because the new characters added new and much needed perspectives to the story. Now, we won't only care about the people of Beartown, but also the people of Hed.
There is so much light and darkness in this book that I think Backman fairly focused on the contrasting hues of the two vastly different sides of some of the things that are being mentioned in this book. There's happiness, but there's also heartbreak. There are deaths, but also newborns. There are losers, and there are winners. For every ending, there's a new beginning. And sometimes, the same thing happened to two different people, and the outcome of that same thing ended up being completely different. As Ramona said in the book, “Two of everything, one we see and one we don’t, an upside and a downside,” Sometimes we get one thing and other times we get the other, and it's all just a part of life. Reading about it in this book makes me want to appreciate both the upside and the downside in life, which is just the outcome that's expected from reading the Philosopher King's book.
I don't think I need to mention this, as it has already been well known how much I love Backman's style of writing, but I just need to mention how I think Backman just becomes better and better with every book he releases. To this day I don't think there's anyone who writes about human emotions and human connection as good as Backman. And I think that the initial title of this book, which is "Those Who Run Towards Fire" fits this book so much better, now after knowing the content of the book, but I get that The Winners is a catchier title, and I don't have any problem with that. But now just hearing or reading those words gives me the chills and the feels, man. (Also, it reminds me of my boy Spook/Lestibournes in The Hero of Ages of Mistborn trilogy, The Survivor of The Flames himself, because he literally run inside a burning building to save a town from burning down)
WARNING: SOME SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
Speaking of people who run towards fire, let's talk about Benji. I did know that Benji's going to die in this book, since Backman has given it away since Beartown and Us Against You, and it feels like he has been preparing us for it since Beartown. So, I think we all BEEN KNEW about Benji's death in this book. But, guess what, I was STILL DEVASTATED when IT happened. I swear to God, when I got to THAT scene, I was legit like:
It was pure pain and devastation. "This hurts too much to touch with words" is accurate because it REALLY is. I could babble on and on for hours about how painful it was, but no words could adequately represent how shattered I was when I was reading it. But I understand why Backman has to kill him off, though I was afraid at first as it seems to be feeding off of the Bury Your Gays trope, but it's really not, and you have to understand Benji's character to know how he had to die the way he did in this book. It was so fucking hard, but I accepted it and hope that now he can be in peace, somewhere in heavens with Ramona, Vidar, Ann-Katrin and maybe even his dad. And it is so right that this trilogy is ending after his death, because he really is at the heart of it.
Overall, this book is gorgeous, it made me cry and laugh and sob and reflect. It's gut-wrenching, but it's also a beautiful ending to this much beloved trilogy. Now that all three books are released, and I have finished all three of them, I can safely say that this trilogy is solid and definitely one of my favorite of all time. It's bittersweet to say goodbye to not only this trilogy, but also one of my comfort characters. As much as I want this book series to last forever, I know I need to let it go for now. Nothing gold can stay, Frost says. But I can always visit Beartown again in the future. Now, how do I get out of this book hangover?
BOOK SUMMARY:
It's two years after that tragic night, where the violence between Beartown and Hed reached its peak, and took one incredible young man's life. Beartown and Hed had been in truce since then, and no violence occurred between the two towns. Benji has left Beartown to travel abroad and find out who he could be without hockey, in many new places where he doesn't know a soul. Maya left Beartown to study music in the big city that made her realize just how small and remote her town actually is, in comparison. She's still fighting her demons that she got ever since that night Kevin took away her youth and her chances of living a carefree life in which she can drink at a friend's party without having to worry if she's getting too drunk that someone might rape her while she was intoxicated. She still calls Ana from time to time, but their friendship is not as it used to be.
Meanwhile, back in Beartown, The Beartown Hockey team keeps winning game after game, thanks to Amat, who is now the star player of the team, and Hed seem to be losing game after game. Along with Beartown Hockey Team's success, comes the sponsorship, and investors who are going to bring development and business to the town, while there are rumors that the Hed hockey club is going to be closed down. It's the exact opposite of what happened two years ago. However, there are rumors going around that Amat is faking his injuries, he was absent from many hockey games and cost the club the championship, because he kept getting drunk. He was doing amazing at the beginning that he was able to carry the team to finals for the first time in a long while for Beartown hockey club. However, suddenly Amat started missing games, the team soon started losing and in the end they lost the championship. Amat also went to the US for the NHL draft, but he did not get drafted and he'd been staying in his house all day since then.
Ana is recovering from a knee injury that she got after she kicked a guy who said that girls can't kick properly. Bobo is now working as an assistant coach to Zackell. Peter is still working for Kira at her hugely successful law firm, but it did not mend their strained marriage like Peter hoped it would, two years ago. Things may not be as good as we wanted it to be, but the people of Beartown are known to be strong and resilient. And that's a good thing, because a storm is happening and it's bringing chaos and changes with it.
Two remarkable things happened during the storm, someone we love passed away in their sleep, and a pregnant woman was about to give birth to a baby, but she was stuck in the car with her husband on their way to the hospital, because of the storm. Someone from Hed would have to work together with someone from Beartown to help the woman deliver her baby.
Another remarkable thing that happened during the storm is that the hockey rink in Hed collapsed due to the storm. Some business man from Beartown will take advantage of this, which will cause the rivalry between the two towns to reach new highs that will cost them dearly.
The funeral would bring Maya and Benji home, and the old gang's back together once again in Beartown. We would later hope they didn't.
The people of Beartown mourn the passing of someone we love, but they will do it again so unexpectedly soon, and the death would make them evaluate their collective failure as a community that led to said loss. Can the people of Beartown and Hed weather the storm?
🚨 SPOILER ALERT 🚨
From this point forward in the review, I will mention spoilers, plot twist and the ending. So, if you don’t wish to be spoiled, you can skip the rest of the review and come back to this review once you’ve finished reading this book.
So... let's talk about it…
THE CONTRASTING THEME: LIFE-DEATH, AND TWO VASTLY DIFFERENT SIDES OF THE SAME COIN. I sensed a really strong theme of the contrasting of two different things in this book. First is about life and death. When Ramona died during the storm, Vidar (the baby that Ana and Hannah helped deliver) was born. When Benji and Matteo died, a set of twin babies were born into the world in a hospital in Hed.
Sidenote, and this is not in the theme, but notice how all three of the tragic deaths, Ruth's, Matteo's and Benji's, all described the same way: they died before they hit the floor.
Both Maya and Ruth were raped, one happened not long after the other, one happened in Beartown and the other in Hed, but the outcome of these two cases are so vastly different. Ruth died after abusing drugs and alcohol, while Maya survived, though she's still battling the PTSD from that night, but she's thriving in the big city, she's enrolled in a music school, and she'll go on living and become a successful and famous singer. The difference between these two girls is the support from their own family, friends and community. Maya was blessed with a family and friends who believed her, and fought for her justice, while Ruth's family didn't. Amazing how much difference a good support system can make on a person's well being.
Matteo and Leo also had such contrasting endings, even though they're so similar in so many ways. They're the same age, they both love video games, they both felt the rage for what happened to their sisters, they both felt helpless, not knowing what to do with all of their rage, but they both felt the need to act on it. We know how in Us Against You, Leo joined The Pack, but then his family stopped him from being involved in the violence and danger, while Matteo had no one to protect him from doing the stupid things he did in this book, as his parents are both mentally checked out from reality, and no one stepped up to care for him, thus he felt invisible in his town. I feel like guys like Teemu, Vidar and a lot of guys from the pack were able to grow up to be somewhat "decent" guys (debatable, I know, but at least they protect the weak and each other, and they never hurt anyone who doesn't deserve it) because at least they had a parental figure in Ramona, or each other, who would later be their support system. Who knows how they would have turned out to be if they never had Ramona or each other. Again, what difference a good support system can make.
I really like this theme and I applaud Backman for including this theme in the book, because as he stated in the book, most rape survivors don't have it as good of an outcome as Maya, and there are so many people with stories like Ruth's out there in the world. And same thing for Leo and Matteo's case. I think the message is clear, that every one, especially if they're still children, need good familial support system, and how we need to step up for our community and be kind to each other, check up on one another, so no one would have felt invisible, or not heard, or not believed.
IT'S ABOUT REDEMPTION. I know that this is the final installment to the trilogy, so Backman might want to end it with everyone having character development and growth, but I feel like everyone got a redemption arc in this book, except for Ruth's rapist. Tails got a redemption arc with him helping Peter with "The Cathedral", Lev got a redemption arc when he helped Ana staged an alibi for his father, Richard Theo helped Kira bury the story on Bearton Hockey's corruption, even Ruth and Matteo's parents got a redemption arc with all of their charity works.
I think the theme of redemption is very easily felt in the book, especially in the last part of the book, with the whole "Cathedral" thing that Peter, Tails and Kira are doing with the new ice rink in The Hollows, Kira's new law firm, and everything Lev and Matteo's parents did. I feel this quote accurately represents that theme in the book:
"It’s that sort of town, where everything can change and the people can be transformed. Where we find the strength to play even though our lungs are screaming. Possibly because we’re used to withstanding the darkness, both inside and outside. Possibly because we live close to wilderness. But perhaps most of all because, just like everyone else in every other place: If we don’t have tomorrow, what’s the alternative?"
This theme reminds me of this Backman quote from Anxious People about forgiveness and redemption:
“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”
Maybe that's the main moral message that Backman is trying to tell the readers with this trilogy, that people fuck up all the time, whether it was done with intent or not, as long as we're alive, we still have a chance to make up and repent for our mistakes. That's why sports, or more specifically in this trilogy, hockey, is the main theme of the trilogy, because as Backman wrote in the final chapter of this book:
"It’s easy to love hockey then, because hockey isn’t the past, it isn’t yesterday, it’s always next. The next change of line, the next game, the next season, the next generation, the next magical moment when something we didn’t think was possible becomes a miracle. The next chance to fly up from your seat and yell with joy. Next."
And from that quote, I took it to mean that for all of us, the most important step is the next step, no matter how you fuck up in the past, it's all about how you make up for it in the present. Your next action is the most important one.
THE HOCKEY CORRUPTION STORY. I feel iffy that the story on corruption in Beartown is buried, even though I absolutely love Peter, and I hate the way it all happened, but most of all because it involves Richard Theo, I just hate how it's being buried. My conscience is screaming at me that it's so wrong, just because I love Peter and don't want him to go to jail because he was just being used by Tails, doesn't mean that the truth should not be exposed, and they can deal with the outcome in court maybe.
Also, the sentiment about moral and ethical standards, being expressed in the book via Kira's law business partner, that when it involves our own family and the people we love, all of our moral and ethical standards go out the window, I think it's kind of hypocritical.
"“Do you think I’m doing the wrong thing? In purely moral terms? Defending Peter like this?”
“You know, Kira, all my thoughts about morals and ethics boil down to one single thing: not if it concerns your family. You can have a thousand principles, but not if it concerns your family. That’s what you protect first and foremost, above morals, even above the law. Family first. You’re loads of things, but you’re a mother first. A wife first.”"
I know, it's easier said than done, but I'd like to think that I would hold the same moral and ethical standards I have towards other people with my own family too. Because I trust other people to do the same towards their own family too. I don't know, I think there's debates to be had about it, and maybe when tested in real life, I would share the same sentiment as Kira's colleague, but theoretically and ideally speaking, the sentiment is hypocritical.
Also, even though the journalist is publishing the expose on the council members' corruption may bring the citizens of Hed and Beartown together, I think the two towns would still have the rivalry for years to come.
TAILS. Boy oh boy, do I hate him. He was okay in Beartown (book 1), and irritating at worst in book 2, but in this book you just can't help but hate him, and if you disagree we can't be friends.
I mean, the AUDACITY of this guy, he had A LOT of nerve making the tragedy that is the storm to benefit him, his politics, Beartown and its hockey club. How is this guy not the villain here? And I can't believe it's taken us three books to find out how rotten he really is.
He's just the the absolute dumb-ass for making Peter responsible for his corrupt hockey politics, even though he may not had the sinister intent of making Peter the scapegoat for his corruptions. And I don't like that in the end he gets to redeem himself by helping Peter build the Ice Rink or "The Cathedral" in The Hollows, but whatever. Maybe it's just my petty ass, but if I were Peter I would probably cut him out of my life for good.
HANNAH AND JOHNNY BEING KIRA AND PETER 2.0, OR HED VERSION OF KIRA AND PETER. I guess they're sweet and couple goals too, and I think that Johnny is funnier than Peter, but I'm already too invested with the Anderssons. Another family like them being introduced to the story this late in the trilogy just can't compare to the OG one. I like their family, don't get me wrong, I like Hannah and Johnny as well as all of the children, I found each and everyone of them to be very interesting characters, but unfortunately we just have not spend that much time with them to care about them that much. But I appreciate that they represent the Hed's perspective, though.
The best things about this book for me are...
BENJAMIN OVICH. The official guardian angel of Beartown. The heart and soul of this trilogy. He IS, and always will be my comfort character. All I wanted for him in this book is to be happy, and to finally read about him being happy in this book is truly everything, it's definitely worth the wait, and what a joy it was to read. It's so so good to read about Benji being happy, that I want to inject it into my veins. And as much as I hate that he's killed off at the end, in a way I'm also glad because in this book he seemed to be the most contented we've ever known him. Also, he died the way he lived: protecting other people. We all know how in Beartown (Book 1) he had protected Kevin in and out of the ice all throughout their friendship until the rape, then in Us Against You (Book 2) he protected Leo, and in this book he died protecting Alicia. Because that's just the kind of person he had always been: a protector, someone who runs towards a burning building to save other people. How can your heart not break for him?
I know I said in the review of Us Against You:
Well, I’m not rioting because now, I have peace with his tragic ending. As much as I hoped that he didn't die and wished for him to find someone he can be happy with, and spend the rest of his life with, and for them to live together happily ever after, I can appreciate Backman's choice to kill him off in this book. His death is a powerful lesson for the whole town of Beartown, and I can't even be mad at Matteo, for pulling the trigger and shot the bullet that killed Benji. It's the failure of the entire town that drove him to this point, and now they have to pay dearly. Benji had lived such a tremendous life in such a short time that the whole town mourned his passing, and he had such a big heart that everyone in that town loved him. It's not everyday that a character in a book gets me to be this emotional about them passing, while simultaneously accepting it and have peace with it. He's in the Elite Characters Heaven now, with Rin (TPW), Kelsier, Vin and Elend (Mistborn) and others. They're guardian angels now.
Now, what I wish we get in this book that I didn't get is the stories about Benji's travels. I do think that Benji's been transformed, even if just a little because he's still his awesome self, but he's been transformed by his travels nonetheless, and the little glimpses of it that we get in this book is waayyy too small. I understand that Backman already had too many stories to fit into this book, and there are new characters that we need to get to know too, but I just need more Benji.
One of the saddest things about Benji in this book is the way that he's still haunted by Kevin, even after two years and thousands of miles away from home, but still he blames himself and can't seem to mentally let go of Kevin. Knowing that Kevin was his first love, best friend, and the love of his life, it hurts too much to touch with words. And the way that Benji still blames himself for Kevin raping Maya. As if it was his responsibility to keep Kevin behaving appropriately towards women. There are so many times I just want to yell at him "IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT, BABE!!!" like Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, lol.
I mean, my guy needed to see a therapist, like, yesterday. He needed it so freaking bad. How I hope he had at least seen a therapist, how different his life would have been like. Oh, if only...
Benji and Alicia's unlikely friendship is something that I didn't know I needed in my life. I mean, inject it straight into my veins. Every time these two are having a cute interaction I just have the biggest smile on my face, like an idiot. Their friendship takes the prize in this book, beating Maya and Ana's and even Amat and Bobo's, and that's saying a lot, if you've read my review of Beartown and Us Against You. My favourite moment of theirs is a tie between that scene where they lay down on the ice together and Benji taught Alicia to not be scared, and that scene where they just said "Hi bestieee" to each other. I mean, just look at the material:
"Adri drives through the forest and stops on the slope above the campervan. She has Alicia with her, the girl rushes down through the trees and throws herself into Benji’s arms.
“Hi best friend,” Benji whispers.
“Hi best friend,” she giggles back."
It's pure serotonin for me. Every time I get sad, I'll just read that and I'll be happy again.
And Alicia's not the only lucky soul to have Benji as her friend, Maya and Ana are also so lucky to have been besties with him in this book. But especially Maya, I feel like she and Benji have an even tighter bond in this book, since in the last two books we didn't get a lot of interactions between them. So, I was a little taken aback when I read about how Maya ran and hugged him the first time she saw him at Ramona's funeral, because it feels like a long time friendship's reunion. Did they keep in touch and get closer since they last saw each other in Beartown? I wish we knew. Nonetheless, their friendship tugged at my heartstrings, and I adore them together. The kind of friendship where you just wish for a happy ending for each other is so wholesome and precious that I think people who truly have that are the luckiest ones among us. I strive to be one of them too.
It's also great to know that Benji and Ana are great friends now, that Benji has forgiven her and Ana has learned her lesson and is now a better person. Their friendship hits different for me, because to Ana, Benji was a crush, then he's a boy who broke her heart, then he's her victim because she outed him against his wills, and now, he's one of her best friends. And for Benji too, Ana was someone he sympathized with because of her drunk father, then she was the one that outed him, and now she's one of his best friends too. Their friendship taught me a lot about forgiveness, specifically to forgive people's mistakes and believe that people can really change and be better if they're given the chance to.
Benji's friendship with Amat and Bobo too. They have my whole heart, these boys. They keep on cheering and motivate each other on, and even though they were separated for two years but when they see each other again it was like they've never been apart, and their chemistry's still as strong as ever, even though all three of them have changed and grown a lot since they last see each other. That scene where Benji and Amat were helping Bobo courting Tess by playing with her brothers, and that scene when Benji were "hyping" Amat up to come back to practice for Beartown Hockey team, and that scene in the forest when they were camping and Benji were accompanying Amat and the Bobo pee on a tree, these are the moments that keep me going these last few days. I cherish those moments so much.
Now, Benji's friendship with Aleksander/Big City is one that made my heart flutter a little. I do sense a kind of a "vibe" between these two, and I get the feeling that Benji might actually have a crush on him, but it sucks that the guy's straight, lol. But I did enjoy it so much, how their friendship blossomed in such a short time. I love how Benji was the first real friend for Big City, because of course he is, someone with such a big wild heart and the most beautiful smile like Benji's could be anyone's friend.
I've said in my review of Us Against You that my ultimate ship in this trilogy is Benji and Happiness, and in Ch. 69 - Leaders, Ch. 70 - Players & Ch. 72 - Campers, my ship is SAILING. I even cried out of pure happiness for Benji. I knew that after those chapters, everything was gonna go downhill for him, Backman was being too generous, all of the characters that I love are happy and well, so something horrible must be waiting to happen to them soon. But I appreciate those happy moments so much. I hope we can all pretend that those three chapters last forever, or the book ends right there with everyone being happy. But you can't have happiness if you don't know suffering, I guess.
AMAT. My sweet baby boy who's not so much a baby anymore in this book. He's a grown man now, and although he's no stranger to adversities (literally, the guy's an immigrant POC who's trying to make it in the predominantly white sport, in a predominantly white town), he's about to face them at the next level in this book, and oh boy was it hard to read. I think he's got the reverse of a glow up in this book, he got a character regression, and it's heartbreaking to read. What I expected to read about him in this book is him being happy, being the best hockey player, playing in the NHL, making his mom proud, happy and able to retire from cleaning the rink, and just living their best life together. Pretty much the exact opposite of what we actually get of him in the beginning to middle of this book.
Amat got "hustled" by Lev and didn't get drafted into the NHL because of him, he became a drunk and was depressed after he got back home, the people of Beartown blamed him for faking his injuries and making the team lose the championship. I feel like, yes, we did get significantly more of Amat in this book, which is great and just what I wanted since the first two previous books, BUT NOT LIKE THIS. My guy's really struggling here and it's hard to read through the tears. It's as if Backman said, "Okay, I hear ya, here's more Amat, BUT HE'S GONNA SUFFER MUAHAHAHAHHA"
Suffice it to say, I cried while reading about him in the beginning, A LOT, and my heart was shattered.
JK, I still love you, Backman.
What's really bugging me about Amat's character regression is that it seems like, other than his own mother, and sometimes Peter, he doesn't really have a support system. Which is why I'm so mad that Lifa and Zacharias disappeared in this book, because they were such an amazing support system for Amat in Us Against You, they gave him a freaking army when he lost his hockey team, they pushed him to keep training and not give up on his dream. WHERE THE HELL ARE LIFA AND ZACHARIAS, BACKMAN? Are they being kept hostage in a basement somewhere?!!! I need to know, not only for Amat's sake, but I genuinely care about them both, and I was hoping to get more of them in this book. Okay, I'll save this rant for the criticism part of the review. Anyway, I feel like everyone, other than his mom and Peter, had failed him. Zackell, Bobo, Mumble, his team, even other people in Beartown like Tails, and Sune failed Amat, but I feel like the person to blame the most is Zackell.
I think the blame should be on Zackell for Amat getting burned out like he was in the beginning of the book because she should have looked out for him. Zackell was able to detect Filip's shoulder pain in Us Against You, but her own player, nay, not just any player, but her own STAR PLAYER she didn't know had a badly injured wrist?! Is that an exaggerated overlook or what? And she should have cared for Amat more, visited his home, and had a talk with him. There's just so much she could have done to help Amat, it's so frustrating. I get that she lacks social cues and is very awkward but we get to see her care about Benji, and about Bobo, but Amat she didn't care enough to visit and talk things through? To this day, I can't bring myself to like her.
Hard as it was though, in the end I'm happy with Amat's character arc in this book, because I feel that there's an element of a realistic depiction of the immigrant struggle in Amat's story in the beginning of the book. I know that a lot of immigrants every where in the world are pushing themselves so hard to be the "model minority", trying their hardest to not cause any problems, and to always be grateful for the new life in the new country. And they try to excel and contribute something great for their new community because they feel indebted to their community, just like how Fatima is always grateful no matter how hard she and Amat have it in Beartown, and so she taught Amat to also always be grateful too. I can imagine it being very taxing on a person. And for Amat, to be pressured by everyone to win every game, like he owes it to them to bring victory home, and be blamed for the losses, as if he's responsible for how his teammates play in the games too. No wonder his love for hockey slowly turns to hate, I would hate it too if I were him.
I did not appreciate that scare where Backman was insinuating that Fatima is going to die. I was already devastated and I was screaming, crying, kicking, and throwing up, but then Backman did what he does best, and said, "SYKE!!!" 😂🤪🤡🤭 And I was like 😭😭😭 PLEASE SIR, SOME OF US HAVE CRIPPLING ANXIETY, HAVE MERCY. However, I'd be Backman's lawyer for a moment and say that maybe Backman just wanted us to feel what Amat felt when he was looking for his Mom in the middle of a storm and found her in a ditch, so we understand his dread, because it took him out of his slump.
I love that despite everything he's been through, Amat still got back up, and then he got to thank and acknowledge Peter for all his help, and even though we didn't get to know or get to read much of it (which is criminal), he gets to become an NHL player, just like he had always dreamed of being.
MAYA. Let's check in with my No. 1 girl now. Well, Maya is doing great. Well, as great as she can be anyway, as she's still dealing with the PTSD from the rape. But other than that, Maya is moving up in the world, she's striving in her music school, she's living her best life in the big city, away from her family, and childhood friends, but also the people who only knew her as the rape victim. Maya finally get her chance to live her life freely, without people defining her only by the horrible thing that happened to her. Now, I have to be honest and say that there's not much to Maya's story in this book, unlike in Beartown and Us Against You. Although I do think that Maya has grown stronger and wiser in this book, she's less of a main character in this book compared to the previous two. The most exciting part of Maya's story in this book is when she was being secretly interrogated by an undercover reporter for the exposé of the corruption of the Beartown Hockey Club and its district council. And then later at the very end of the book when she took Alicia out of the rink, away from Benji's lifeless body.
However, I have to point out that I did enjoy so much reading about how much Maya has matured into such an amazing young woman in this book, she even helped her mom and dad with their issues. And even though there's not much Leo, nor Maya and Leo bonding moments in this book, that little scene where Maya busted him smoking cigarettes but then she herself asks for two cigarettes to keep quiet from their parents, it's so sweet and just shows how much both of them have grown up.
Her songs still slap so hard, and I love them so freaking much, but especially that song about that last game Benji played, that song took the wind right out of me when I reread it after I finished reading the book. I wish Backman had commissioned a musician to make it into a real song, it would be one hell of a soul crushing banger, for sure. But, for now I just have to make do with songs that have the most similar vibes to her songs, I guess. It's Spring Day by BTS and Who Knows by P!nk on repeat for me, I guess.
In the end, when Maya took Alicia away from Benji's lifeless body and held her outside of the rink, it's one of the most powerful things I've ever read. What a way to tie it all together in the end, because I think that one of the most prominent theme of the whole trilogy is female empowerment, and that one of the strongest message of the trilogy is that the biggest downfall of hockey is the misogyny and how toxic the winning culture is, not only to the athletes, but also to the people around them and their community. Maya was the first KNOWN victim of the toxic winning culture that was nurtured into the young athletes in Beartown, and Alicia lost her best friend due to the violence that was resulted from the victim-blaming and victim-silencing culture that the town had. The main moral message is, when we discriminate against one gender over the other, we ALL lose, we all pay the price. Also, when we don't say or do anything after we witness or know something that's morally wrong, we indirectly endorse it. That's why we need more people like Amat, who stood up for Maya, and people like Benji who supported Maya and condemned Kevin's actions, even though he's the love of his life, same as Kevin's mom who apologized directly to Maya. And so, that scene with all of those women holding Maya and Alicia is so powerful, it's like they're saying, no more, we will not let any more of our friends, sisters, and daughters fall victim, as we will protect and save each other from harm. I love that so much.
ANA. My fighter queen. I had such a great time reading about her in this book. I think she's more of a main character than Maya in this book, for the first time. I mean, this book really is about people who run towards fire, and that's why Ana shines so bright in this book, because that's what she is. When she drove Hannah through the forest in the middle of a storm to help someone deliver a baby, I thought, of course that is something she would do. It seems very fitting and in character for her, because we know ever since she was a child she had always been that kind of person. That's how she met Maya, she rescued her from drowning and being froze to death. However, I legit thought that she was going to die when she was helping Hannah get to that couple and then when she was driving them to the hospital, that's how severe my trust issue with Backman is. Thank God nobody died in that scene. Anyway, the fact that the couple named their newborn son Vidar in honor of Ana's Vidar is just...
I'm just a sucker for tragic love stories, and Ana and Vidar's never fail to wreck me emotionally no matter how many times I read about them in Us Against You, so to read about the baby being named Vidar, I literally had to take a break because it just hit me in the guts.
But back to Ana now, I think she just becomes more awesome in this book. She didn't get a glow up, nor did she go to a school in the big city like Maya, but I still feel that she just becomes more badass and awesome in this book. I think that it's criminal that we didn't get much of her martial arts career in this book, but I'm grateful for what we have of her in this book.
In the end part of the book, in that scene where Ana and Lev took her father home, and created an alibi for her father so he won't be criminally charged for Matteo's murder, and Ana was crying as she get drunk for the last time, it's so fucking heartbreaking. (Here we'll have to talk about having the same moral and ethical standard towards our family and loved ones as we do towards other people, but in this case I personally think that what Ana's dad did was justified since Matteo was shooting up the locker room and took Benji's life, which is an innocent's life, so I think Ana's dad shooting Matteo down can be seen as defense, but I'm not familiar with the law in Sweden, maybe what he did can be criminally charged, so I don't have any qualms about Ana and Lev protecting him, even though they're lying to the police, but that's just my opinion) Ana's dad saved other people in that locker room from being shot by Matteo, and he gave Matteo a quick death too, and Ana just lost one of her best friend and she must also be so fucking scared that her dad will be held in prison for the rest of his life for what he did. I really feel for her in that scene, I just want to give her the biggest hug and tell her that everything's gonna be okay.
I love Ana's relationship with Hannah, I love how awkward they both are towards each other but also how much they care about and love each other. Also, her wanting to be an ambulance helicopter pilot came out of left field, but also so in character for her. In the end, I love her character's arc and her story, she's such a free spirited and badass character that she'll fit perfectly with a group of my other fave badass and strong protagonists: Toph Beifong (ATLA), Fang Runin (TPW), Vin (Mistborn), Lift (The Stormlight Archive). I also love how her dad is finally sober again, and hopefully he'll be able to keep being sober for the rest of their lives.
PETER AND KIRA. Everyone's favorite couple is STILL having a hard time in this book. I thought by the end of Us Against You, their problems had been resolved but NOPE. It's as existent as ever and they even avoid each other now, even though they work at the same office, a few feet from each other. As a child of a broken home, this was NOT fun to read.
Reading about Peter feeling not needed in the office and in his own home is heartbreaking, but him baking bread all the time is SO FREAKING CUTE. I found him to be so charming when I found out that he likes to bake and share his baked goods with others, it's so freaking wholesome. I liked him when he was the Beartown Hockey Team's GM, but why do I like him more when he bakes and just being a wholesome person. I feel sorry for him, but there's no shame in being a stay at home dad and husband who loves baking, though. I just hope that he and Kira could have communicated better so things wouldn't have to be that bad.
I love when he tried to help Amat with the whole NHL draft situation and when he felt happy that he could help in any way with Beartown hockey club, so he helped Zackell in recruiting Big City. It's kinda sad, I know, especially with Tails, his supposed best friend secretly abused his naiveté and trust that Peter could have been criminally charged and be kept in prison, and him feeling not wanted anywhere, so he really cherished what little joy he could get from hockey. But I think all of that just builds up his character even more, and although he doesn't really have a character arc as he was a consistently good character all throughout the trilogy, he kept having to overcome all of these adversities and I believe he's an even better and stronger man now because of them.
As for Kira, I'm so proud of her for going to therapy, that means she's willing and actively seeking out help to work things out with her husband. She did have her moments of being hard headed and too proud to start talking things out with Peter, or rather she didn't know how to, but in the end she came around because of the love they have for each other is too strong. She is truly goals, because not only she's girl boss, but what makes her even greater is that though she made mistakes, she worked hard to learn and make up for those mistakes. I love that about her. She's honestly such a remarkable woman, wife and mother.
Reading about her feeling guilty all the time because she blamed herself for her marital issues and not being a good enough mother is heartbreaking, because that just shows how much she actually cares and wants to be better, even though she's an already amazing mom and wife. Every time she thinks about Isak, I just start crying because that pain is so real and Backman is just a master of writing emotions like these.
I also love it so much when she finally decided to close her successful business law firm and open new one non profit law firm to advocate for rape survivors. And her friendship with her work partner is just friendship goals. And her wanting to help and mentor Tess because she saw her young self in her is just beautiful. I love all of these women so much.
BOBO. The one with the best character arc of this whole trilogy. Just when I thought this boy couldn't be any better, Backman proves me wrong. He's the ultimate boyfriend goals in this book, and he is just so freaking endearing and cute with Tess. His and Tess's love story is the cutest, I just wanna burst when I read about these two.
I know I said that he failed Amat earlier, but let's also acknowledge how Amat also brushed him aside constantly but Bobo was never one to hold grudges, which is so admirable of him. So when they made up, their friendship is still as heartwarming as ever, and that Lupines scene is so wholesome. These two are still my fave friendship in this trilogy, well, maybe after Alicia and Benji's friendship.
RAMONA. Trust her to still be iconic even from beyond the grave. Can you believe that she made Peter and Teemu brothers even after she died? The influence this woman has, I swear.
THAT FUNERAL SCENE AND PETER'S EULOGY... DRINK MY TEARS
I don't even care about QEII's death, but this Queen's death right here, we truly need 100 days in mourning for her passing, because how could we cope without her??!!!
Peter, Teemu, Vidar, and Benji were Ramona's sons, no one can tell me otherwise.
TEEMU. Did I become his stan because of this book? Yes. Yes, I did. How could I not? Like I said about The Pack in the previous review, he might be a psycho, but he's OUR psycho. No, he's actually the antihero. Also, he just lost Ramona in the beginning of this book, who had been a parental figure for him, and he tragically lost his only brother two years ago, the man deserves a big warm hug.
I am sad that he didn't end up with Adri, Benji's sister, because I shipped them, but I'm happy for him nevertheless when it was revealed in the end that he has a son who likes soccer.
He has been such an interesting morally grey character in this trilogy and you know I love my morally grey characters, and I'm adding him to my list of fave antihero characters.
Also, The Pack are still as violent as ever when they attacked Hed when they mocked Bang the dog's death at that hockey game, but I just can't help but love them. What other group of men would go absolutely feral like that to defend deceased dog? They're the type of guys who love something or someone so strongly and unconditionally, that it made them lethal, and I think that is so sweet.
I also love when The Pack gave Peter a bouquet of flowers to give to Kira because she was helping the club legally. They're all as sweet as cinnamon rolls at heart.
RUTH. When I think back how mad and devastated I was reading about Maya in Beartown (Book 1), it makes me so much more mad now because Ruth's story makes me realize how good Maya actually had it, that there are so many others who had it so much worse, like Ruth, and I'm heartbroken for all of them. It's not a competition, no one has monopoly on trauma, it's fucking awful that these women went through something so horrible, I just wish there was someone who could have supported Ruth, and others like her, and help them go through all of the process like how Maya had Ana and her family. Ruth's story is so painful and heart-shattering to read, but sadly it's accurate to a LOT of real life rape cases.
If anything, Ruth's story highlighted the importance of having a support system, loving and supportive family, friends and allies who care, speak up and stand up for the rape victims.
MATTEO. I desperately want to hate him, for what he did, but I can't. How can I when I know he's hurting too, and I understand a little too much about how hurt people hurt other people. I still remember so much about how Leo was doing self harm and looking to get into trouble in Us Against You, because he felt so much rage and pain for all of the fucked up shits his sister had to go through and how every one around them seem to fail her. And I think, if you've ever loved someone, you will be able to understand his pain and frustrations. Also, keep in mind that he's only 14 years old, and he has no one to talk to, no friends, and his parents are mentally checked out from reality, and other people never seem to notice him in Beartown. Knowing all of that, it's very hard to blame and hate him, instead I just feel so sorry for him.
Even Backman pointed out how things would have turned out to be if only one person had noticed Matteo:
"Then Matteo gets back on the moped and drives home to Beartown. It breaks down halfway. He stands at the side of the road waving at passing cars for help, but those who see him don’t stop, and those who might have stopped don’t see him. One of the vehicles that drives past in the other direction is a police car. How differently this story might have ended if it hadn’t just driven past on its way, because the police were hurrying to get to a reported gunfire incident at a parking lot in town. Then Rodri would have been the only person who died."
It reminded me of this story from a great Youtube video, where a psychotherapist is interviewing someone who was going to shoot people at their school, the person said that what had stopped him from realizing his intention of shooting up his school is a girl who was adamant on being his friend, because she had noticed that he was being bullied, so that one act of kindness from the girl (along with the things the person learned from his studies and the internet that open up his mind more about the world) was able to put a stop to his deadly and extremely destructive plan to shoot up his school, and I just marvel at how amazing and inspiring that is. Imagine if Matteo had that too, there would never have been a shooting at the rink, and nobody would have died.
Matteo really didn't have to kill Bang the dog, though.
MUMBLE. My initial reaction when I learned the truth about him and how he didn't stand up for Ruth was shocked, nay, FLABBERGASTED. And the, RAGE. I mean, I liked him, I was rooting for him.
I WAS FUCKING ROOTING FOR YOU, but all this time you were a coward who didn't stand up and speak up for Ruth?!!! I was beyond disappointed.
HOWEVER!! I quickly realize Backman was right when he wrote a lot of us are cowards, and a lot of us probably would have done the same thing as Mumble, and that Amat was an anomaly for being so brave and stood up and spoke up for Maya, so who am I to judge Mumble when I maybe would have done the same thing? Of course we all like to think that we would have been brave enough to speak up in defense of those who need it, and I truly hope we are, but until we are tested ourselves, who are we to judge Mumble?
Also, this is every introverts' worst nightmare, Mumble was in the wrong place at the wrong place (at the night of the rape), which is why he couldn't speak up to defend Ruth, on top of the threats from Ruth's rapist, and he had chosen a wrong company to keep. Yeah, I think that's his biggest mistake, that he kept being friends with that trash. I know Ruth's rapist wasn't a bad person when Mumble first met him, but how I wish that Mumble had dropped him completely when he turned bad and toxic, since Mumble couldn't do anything to save him from his toxicity, nor was it his job to. It reminds me of the importance of keeping the right companies, and not being scared of cutting out toxic people out of my life. Although, I understand that mumble really had a problem with expressing himself and he had almost zero personal agency, which is probably why he kept being friends with Ruth's rapist and couldn't get away from him, which is so fucking horrible, and if that's actually the case then Mumble's completely not to blame. I don't know, he was just in such a horrible situation, he was trapped, and some would even argue that he's also a victim of Ruth's rapist, and I feel so bad for him.
In the end, I'm heartbroken that he had to "go into the forest and never come out".
SUNE. My sweet wise old man. Truthfully, I'm sad that there's so little of him here, but glad to know that he's still around. It's sad though, that he's mostly here for the Bang being killed storyline. Well at least he wasn't at the two games where the violence happened, so he didn't get hurt.
It's also great that Sune's still Alicia's guardian, at least she still has him and Benji's sisters and Mom.
As much as I love this book, I do have some criticisms…
While I do think that adding new characters to the story is a great move as they add a fresh and new perspective, I do feel sad that old characters from the first two books are being excluded in this book. Characters like Lifa, Zacharias, Jeannette, William, David, and Filip, that I think should be present in the story in this book. Like I feel like Lifa and Zacharias would never let Amat get to his lowest point as he was in the earlier part of this book, since we know in Us Against You that they gave him an army so he won't give up on his dream and hockey. And what happened to Jeannette? Is she still coaching Ana? And we know that David cared a lot about Benji, how did he react when he knew about what happened to Benji? And didn't he and William and Filip leave Beartown hockey club to play for Hed? Why aren't they present in this book, since Hed's hockey played a pretty big role in the conflict? Maybe they have moved on to coach and play at bigger hockey clubs (it might be mentioned in the book, but I couldn't remember it and I didn't make note of it) which is why they didn't appear in this book, but still. I get that there may be too many characters in this book, and the new characters are important and necessary to the story, but to completely write these old characters off feels very weird to me. Not to mention that I was excited and expecting to get more of Lifa and Zacharias in this book, so this is a big let down for me. Is losing all of these characters worth having the new characters? I don't know. I love most of the new characters, but not getting any Lifa and Zacharias blows so hard.
I wish there were more Hockey games, the two actual games we get in this book, the violence got in the way of it actually being played. I miss the hockey games like the ones in Beartown (Book 1). But at least we get that practice game scene with Amat, Big City, Mumble, Bobo, Benji and Peter playing, and it was one of the best scenes in this book.
So many short chapters in this book. I think Backman could have added more to them and made this book even thicc-er, which would make this book even better, IMO. Like, don't be shy Fredrik, make it 1000 pages, please.
My favourite moments from the book:
When Ana bonded with Hannah after she delivered the baby during that storm
When Amat and Bobo run together again for the first time in a while, where Bobo told him that he's like Lupines because he's so strong and unbreakable, and Amat apologized to Bobo, and Amat hoped that Bobo will be a father in the future because he has such a big heart and a short memory which are the two best qualities for a father
When Peter and Teemu bonded like brothers after Ramona's death
The Gang's reunion at Ramona's funeral (Benji, Maya, Ana, Bobo, Amat, Mumble)
All of Benji and Alicia scenes, where they're being the best besties ever
When Bobo, Amat, Mumble and Benji went to Tess's house, Bobo and Tess made dinner, and Amat, Mumble and Benji played and bonded with Tobias, Ted and Ture
That fun after practice game with Amat, Big City, Mumble, Bobo, Benji and Peter playing, and Maya, Ana, Sune, the caretaker and Fatima were watching and all of them were super happy and full of life and laughter
That camping night where Benji and Maya were being the cutest besties, with Big City, Maya, Ana, Bobo, Amat and Mumble
When Bobo told Johnny that it's not up to him whom Tess dates and he knows he doesn't deserve Tess and he would never hold her back from achieving and realizing her dreams and aspirations
When Kira told her colleague and Maya that she wants to give up their current firm and open up a new non-profit one to help rape survivors like Maya, and so Tess could one day work there too, and her colleague told her that she's gonna join and help with with that
When Kira and Peter finally talked honestly and openly for the first time in a while and seem to be working on their marriage and their family.
My favorite quotes from the book:
"Naive dreams are love’s last line of defense, so somehow we always convince ourselves that no terrible tragedies will ever afflict those we love, and that our people will succeed in escaping fate. For their sakes we dream of eternal life, we wish for superpowers and try to build time machines. We hope. Dear God, how we hope."
"Do you want to understand people? Really understand them? Then you need to know all the best that we are capable of."
"It took chaos to set him free, loneliness to stop him being alone."
"People say that age brings wisdom, but for most of us that really isn’t true, when we get old we’ve just accumulated more experiences, good and bad. The result is more likely to be cynicism than wisdom. When we’re young we know nothing about all the very worst that can hit us, which is just as well, because otherwise we’d never leave the house.
And we would definitely never let go of those we love."
"“You know a lot about men for someone so young.”
“They just think we want them to protect us the whole goddamn time, as if we need their fucking protection,” Ana snorts."
"Every now and then their dad gently puts one hand on his sons’ and daughter’s backs, one at a time, to make sure they’re still breathing. There’s no good reason to suspect that they aren’t, but there’s nothing reasonable about being a parent. The only thing everyone said when he was about to become a father was: “Don’t worry.” What a meaningless thing to say. There’s an immensity of love that bursts from your chest the first time you hear your child cry, every emotion you’ve ever felt is amplified to the point of absurdity, children open floodgates inside us, upward as well as down. You’ve never felt so happy, and never felt so scared. Don’t say “don’t worry” to someone in that position. You can’t love someone like this without worrying about everything, forever. It hurts your chest at times, a real, physical pain that makes Johnny bend over and gasp for breath. His skeleton creaks, his body aches, love never has enough space. He should have known better than to have four children, he should have thought about it, but everyone said “don’t worry,” and he’s always been an easily persuaded idiot. Thank goodness. We fool ourselves that we can protect the people we love, because if we accepted the truth we’d never let them out of our sight."
"“Home.”
There really ought to be several different words for that, one for the place and one for the people, because after enough years a person’s relationship to their town becomes more and more like a marriage. Both are held together by stories of what we have in common, the little things no one else knows about, the private jokes that only we think are funny, and that very particular laugh that you only laugh for me. Falling in love with a place and falling in love with a person are related adventures. At first we run around street corners giggling and explore every inch of each other’s skin, over the years we get to know every cobblestone and strand of hair and snore, and the waters of time soften our passion into unfailing love, and in the end the eyes we wake up next to and the horizon outside our window are the same thing: home.
So there ought to be two words for that, one for the home which can carry you through your darkest moments, and one for the home which binds you. Because sometimes we stay in towns and marriages simply because we would otherwise have no story. We have too much in common. We think no one else would be able to under-stand us."
"“That’s because you don’t get it. We’re your mothers. We loved you first. Maybe everyone else loves you now, but we loved you first.”
“Doesn’t feeling like that make you a good mother?”
“It just makes me a mother.”
The psychologist chuckled.
“Well, you’re right about that, of course. I’m almost sixty and my mom still worries that I’m not eating properly.”
Kira raised her chin but lowered her voice.
“We’re your mothers. You can’t stop us.”"
"Most people don’t know when their childhood ends, but this girl will always know exactly.
Maya remembers the hospital, after the rape, when her own mom wanted to murder the whole town and her dad whispered: “What can I do?” and all Maya could manage to say was: “Love me.” It’s a terrible moment for all kids when we realize that our parents can’t protect us. That we won’t be able to protect our own. That the whole world can come and take us whenever it likes."
"So instead she calls the only person she’s got, the only person she’s always had, because that’s the question a crisis asks us: Who’s your person? She calls Ana."
"“You get success by having extremely high integrity but absolutely zero prestige. Because integrity is about who you are, whereas prestige is only about what other people think of you.” The man often thinks that this might be true in sports, but when you’re talking about the survival of a town the opposite is true: prestige is everything."
"Everything that happens in childhood is a postcard that parents send to themselves. Things are never quite the way we remember them."
"Maya chewed the rest of her chocolate ball slowly for a long time before she dared ask: “Do you miss Isak every day?” Peter kissed her hair. “Yes, all the time,” he admitted. “I want to miss him too, but I don’t really even remember him,” Maya replied unhappily. “I think you can miss him just as much anyway,” her dad assured her. “How does it feel?” she asked. “Like having blisters in your heart,” he said."
"Our children never warn us that they’re thinking of growing up, one day they’re just too big to want to hold our hand, it’s just as well we never know when the last time is going to be or we’d never let go. They drive you mad when they’re little, yelling every time you leave the room, because you don’t realize at the time that whenever someone yells “Daddy!” that means you’re important. It’s hard to get used to not being important."
"“Home.” There really ought to be more words for that. One to cover the people we have there, another with room for those we have lost."
"One of the first things she learned was that up to forty percent of all young bears die during their first year of life, and that the most common cause of death was being killed by an adult male bear that wasn’t their father. That was when Fatima realized that one day she would have to be a bear as well, when someone threatened her offspring. So she fought for his right to be a carefree bear, naive and untroubled, like all the others. For him to be able to play and have fun. Because, to be honest, not even she believed that Amat would become as good as he did, that he would make it “all the way,” she just loved the fact that he didn’t have to think on the ice. He had no pain there, he was free, that was enough."
"People can bury so many of their loved ones during a lifetime and still get up the morning after, but something inside gets a bit heavier each time. She’s had more than a few mornings when she’s woken up and wondered if she can be bothered to get up once more."
"The end of life is as unstoppable as its beginning, we can’t stop the first and last breaths we take any more than we can stop the wind."
"The most unbearable thing about death is that the world just goes on. Time doesn’t care. "
"He takes a cigarette from the packet on the bedside table and smokes with her one last time. He suddenly starts laughing, because she looks so angry, even when she’s dead. If she’s in any sort of Heaven now, Vidar is also there, and his little brother will be getting one hell of a telling-off for daring to die before her, he thinks. Then he gently closes the old woman’s eyes and pats her on the cheek, and whispers:
“Say hi to the little shit. And Holger.”"
"People talk about “coming out” as if it’s something you only do once, but obviously you never run out of new people, so you keep having to come out and come out until you snap."
"When they were little they did everything together, Benji never left Kevin’s side. When some boys find their first best friend it’s the first real love of their lives, they just don’t know what falling in love is yet, so that’s how they learn what love is: it feels like climbing trees, it feels like jumping in puddles, it feels like having one single person in your life who you don’t even want to play hide-and-seek with because you can’t bear being without him for a single minute. For most boys this infatuation obviously fades as the years pass, but for some it never does. Benji traveled right across the world but never found a single place where he could stop hating himself for still loving Kevin."
"Benji was Kevin’s best friend, and Kevin was the love of Benji’s life."
"We all have a hundred fake personalities depending upon who we’re with. We pretend and dissemble and stifle ourselves just to fit in. The very last words Benji said to Kevin the last time they saw each other were: “I hope you find him: the Kevin you’re looking for.” He doesn’t know if Kevin ever did. Benji has been looking for a Kevin he can put up with, but hasn’t succeeded yet."
"A common misconception about dangerous people is that they lack emotions. That they aren’t sentimental. That’s almost never true, often the most sentimental and sensitive people are the most dangerous, because they’re not only capable of abuse, but can also justify it. Sensitive people never feel that they’re doing the wrong thing because their feelings always convince them that they’re on the right side."
"Over the past few years he’s heard so much about what a “talent” he is, but the people who use that word know nothing about hockey. They say “talent” as if it comes for free. As if Amat hadn’t been the first person at the ice rink every morning and last to leave ever since he started junior high school, as if he hadn’t trained harder than everyone else year after year, covering thousands of miles on his skates, running until he threw up, dribbling empty cans at home in the apartment until his hands were blistered and the neighbors furious. As if hockey hadn’t cost him precisely what it costs everyone who wants to be any good: everything.
The one thing he has learned about talent is that the only sort of talent that’s worth anything is to submit totally to training. To tough it out."
"Hannah can’t go home until the road is cleared, but Johnny can’t go home because he’s the one clearing the road. That pretty much sums up their relationship, both to each other and to their community. Hannah once heard a marriage guidance counselor on television say that “the important thing in a marriage is to have shared goals and to keep facing the same direction,” but she often thinks that the problem with that is that if you’re both facing the same direction, you never see each other."
"He drank away the whole of her childhood, yet she still wanted to do the same job as him. Never underestimate a dad who’s trying to be forgiven, he’s capable of anything."
"Where you are born and who you become is a cruel lottery. He wonders exactly what it was that divided him and his sister from happiness, and if it is even possible to measure all the “if only”s and “if that hadn’t”s, because when it comes down to it, that’s really all life is."
"Parents who lose a child never trust the universe again."
"Tales of boys and their fathers are the same in every age, in every place. We love each other, hate each other, miss each other, hold each other back, but we can never live unaffected by each other. We try to be men and never really know how. The tales about us who live here are the same sort of tales that are told about everyone, everywhere, we think we’re in charge of the way they unfold but of course that happens unbearably seldom. They just carry us wherever they want to go. Some of them will have happy endings, and some of them will end exactly the way we were always afraid they would."
"One simple, painful truth for all teenagers is that their lives are rarely defined by what they do, what really matters is what they almost do."
"They roar with laughter. Roar and roar. Two minutes, and everything is normal. The same jibes, the same laughter, the same tattoos on their arms: guitars and rifles. The musician and the hunter. Never have two girls with so little in common been so inseparable. They talk at the same time, sisterhood’s capacity for simultaneity, neither of them ever has to shut up to hear what the other is saying."
"“I love you, you stupid donkey! You’re the only person I know who apologizes for being here while you’re here! Seriously? You can hardly be more here than HERE, can you?”
Maya holds her best friend so tightly that her lungs hurt.
“I miss you so damn much.”
“You’re actually HOLDING me, you donkey!”
“Shut up!”
How do other people bear it, Maya wonders, how do they live without an Ana? How the hell do people cope?"
"“Peter used to get beaten at home if he so much as spilled his milk. Benji didn’t dare tell anyone he was gay. Amat is the cleaner’s son in the rich kids’ sport. All the best players have a darkness inside them, that’s why they end up the best, they think the darkness will disappear if they can just win enough times…”"
"He’s fourteen now, and his sister always told him that this age was the worst, that people were at their worst then, she said he just had to survive these years. But of course she was the one who didn’t do that. She said he could be anything he wanted to be, but he can’t now. Because he wants to be happy."
"He stops like a rat trapped in a corner, turns around, ready for anything. The men in black jackets have left the gate and are walking straight toward him. He has been loved by them but he’s also been hated, the way only someone who has been loved can be, when they found out about all his secrets. Once he symbolized everything they wanted Beartown to be: everyone feared him and he feared no one. He was just a boy then, but he was their man on the ice. Their warrior. Theirs. The roar that can rise up from a stand full of men in black jackets when you’re full of adrenaline and throwing yourself at the Plexiglas is something Benji has never felt anywhere else, because it doesn’t exist anywhere else. How many times has he wished that he could have stayed there? That the truth had never come out? Warriors are supposed to love other men, not fall in love with them."
"But there’s incalculable loss in his eyes, in all the men’s eyes. The skin of their faces is swollen with alcohol, drowned inside to stop them drowning in tears outside. They belonged to Ramona, she belonged to them, most of them were closer to the old bag than their own parents. So even humor isn’t a defense now, it’s an act of defiance, you’re not getting us, bastard grief."
"“Marriage.”
There ought to be a different word for it once you’ve been married for enough years. When you’ve long since passed the point where it stopped feeling like a choice. I no longer choose you every morning, that was a beautiful thing we said on our wedding day, I just can’t imagine life without you now. We aren’t freshly blooming flowers, we’re two trees with intertwined roots, you’ve grown old within me.
When you’re young you believe that love is infatuation, but infatuation is simple, any child can become infatuated, fall in love. But real love? Love is a job for an adult. Love demands a whole person, all the best of you, all the worst. It has nothing to do with romance, because the hard part of a marriage isn’t that I have to live seeing all your faults, but that you have to live with me seeing them. That I know everything about you now. Most people aren’t brave enough to live without secrets. Everyone dreams about being invisible sometimes, no one dreams of being transparent."
"Marriage? There ought to be a different word for it after a while. Because there’s no such thing as “eternal infatuation,” only love lasts that long, and it’s never simple. It requires a whole person, everything you have. The whole lot."
"Her fingers find him and she buttons his jacket to pretend that they’re not just looking for intimacy. He stops, almost dizzy, and they look past each other because if they look each other in the eye right now they would probably both crumble. It’s been so long since they touched each other that her fingertips are enough, they’re like electric shocks to him, she dares not rest the palms of her hands on his chest. Dear Lord, how close you have to be to giving up each other to remember to fight for each other."
"There really ought to be a different word for “marriage,” but perhaps also a different word for “divorce.” One for when you’re only almost there. When you want to whisper that I don’t know what I want, I just don’t want it to be like this. A word for simply saying that I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it if all we’re going to do with each other is just bear it."
"“I love you too.”
It’s been so long since they said that, but now it’s very recent. Above all the other words for love, there ought to be one for this: one that says how many times we’ve come close to losing each other but turn back and start again. One for the very smallest things, the inches, when we brush past each other in the kitchen instead of only almost doing it. Something that says I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it if you can’t bear me. I can’t bear it without you."
"The two young women trample over the memories and two invisible little girls pad after them. Because they’re always walking behind us: the children we were before the worst that has happened happened."
"She once said she hated the world because it forced children like him to become hard simply to survive, but then she saw that he got scared and ruffled his hair and said it was probably good to be soft, because then you didn’t break when you fell. Like flower petals. Perhaps that’s what happened to her, she grew hard, the way a rose that freezes to ice can be shattered with a hammer."
"Then she detects the smell of cigarette smoke that’s just settled on a jacket nearby, then something warm in her hand. Maya’s fingers, closing around hers.
“I’ve missed you, Mom.”
Dear God. Kira almost walks back to the car and sits there instead. Our children have no idea what they do to us."
"He pulls himself together and folds the sheet of paper up and presses it into his pocket, because he’s shaking so much that he realizes it’s becoming a joke. He doesn’t know if it’s the audience in the church or the one in Heaven that’s worse, but he just does what he used to do in the locker room: bites his lip so hard that the pain and the taste of blood force his mind to focus:
“A few moments, I said to her, that’s all this sport gives us. And then Ramona poured a large shot of whiskey and laughed at me and said: ‘So what the hell is life, then, Peter? More than moments?’ ”
Teemu is sitting in the front row, his face motionless but with his fists quivering on his knees. Benji is standing alone right at the back of the church, as close to the door as possible, his tears dripping softly onto the stone floor. Peter tries to steady his voice. Three boys without dads. If you want to know who Ramona was and what she really meant to this part of the world, you only have to look at the desolation in their faces."
"Things always happen quickly when everything goes to hell."
"Bobo pulls a large wicker picnic basket out of the back of the ramshackle campervan, then can’t get the door to close. This doesn’t appear to bother him. Tess comes out of the house as if she’s having to force her feet not to leave the ground and fly off with her. They do try their hardest, their very hardest, not to wrap themselves around each other’s necks in front of his friends and her brothers. She invites him into the kitchen and he immediately starts asking thousands of questions, about her and the house and the family. She isn’t used to that, she’s used to boys only wanting one thing, so in the end she asks what he’s got in the basket. He shows her. Pasta and meat and vegetables and stock and cream. She laughs and thinks that she was right after all, boys really do only want one thing.
They want to make dinner."
"Tobias thinks for a long, long time before he looks down and answers:
“She can probably see that he’s friendly.”
“Is that good?” Benji asks honestly.
Breathing through his nose, Tobias pokes around his shoelaces with the stick.
“She doesn’t want a remarkable life, just a… normal one. Our dad’s a fireman, our mom’s a midwife, we’ve spent our whole childhoods getting told we’re being raised by heroes. The sort of people who run toward fire. But Bobo isn’t a hero, and my sister can probably see that. He wouldn’t run toward fire, he’d run toward her.”"
"Ted fires a puck. Leans on his stick.
“My dad says pressure is a privilege. If you don’t feel pressure, that’s just because you’ve never done anything valuable enough for people to have expectations of you.”"
"Mothers and daughters know how to wound each other in totally unique ways, possibly because daughters often carry the guilt of their mothers’ consciences, until they end up arguing about sins that they haven’t even committed."
"There’s no life like youth, no love like first love, no friends like teammates."
"“It’s nothing personal, Bobo. I’m sure you’re a good guy. But I don’t want you to hold her back. If I’m honest, I think her mom is hoping deep down that she’s going to stay and have an ordinary life, because Hannah can’t live without Tess, but… damn it, Bobo. She can be anything she wants. She could be something big, our daughter. Do you understand? She isn’t like…”
Bobo nods with his back bent. He blinks too hard too many times for it not to show how badly he’s falling apart.
“Don’t you think I know Tess is too good for me? That she’s special and I’m just ordinary? I’m not so smart, but I’m not THAT un-smart! I don’t know anything except cars and a bit about hockey, I know I can’t GIVE her anything, but I will never… never… try to hold her back, I… I’ll never act badly toward her. And maybe I can’t study at university like her, but I’m pretty good at fixing things and I’m fairly strong and my friends like me and Tess likes me. I try to be a good man and I think I could be a pretty good dad one day. And I WON’T hold her back. If she wants to move away from here, then I’ll go with her. I can live anywhere if I can live with her. There are bad cars to fix everywhere. And if you want to try to get her to stop liking me, go ahead, but I’m not going to give up… I can’t…”"
"This is how a community’s corruption is measured. It isn’t cheating if you don’t get caught, and it isn’t a scandal if it never gets revealed. Until then, there are just secrets. All forests are full of them."
"Bobo stumbles euphorically down the stands but Zackell doesn’t go back to the office. She stands and watches as Benji chases Amat across the ice and Amat bounces away and laughs and Bobo pulls on a pair of skates and throws himself into the fray and one of the very best things of all happens: almost-adults forgetting that they’re adults."
"Amat will remember this evening as the start of something. Bobo as the end of something. For Peter it feels like belonging to something again, for Mumble it feels like belonging to something for the very first time. For Big City it’s like getting a second chance to be a little kid and fall head-over-heels in love with hockey again. How it feels for Benji nobody knows, this is the last time they see him play."
"All children are victims of their parents’ childhoods, because all adults try to give their kids what they themselves enjoyed or lacked. In the end everything is either a revolt against the adults we encountered or an attempt to copy them. That’s why someone who hated their own childhood often has greater empathy than someone who loved theirs. Because someone who had a hard time dreamed of other realities, but someone who had it easy can hardly imagine that things could be any different. We take happiness so easily for granted if we’ve had it from the start."
"The very finest thing you can give a child is somewhere to belong. The biggest thing you can have is being part of something."
"Churchyards are meant to be final destinations, but for many of us all the gravestones are question marks. Why? Why you? Why so early? Where are you now? Who could you have been if everything had been different? Or if just something very small had been? If you had had different parents, a different name, if you had lived somewhere else?"
"That damn animal. Unmanageable and impossible, wild and crazy, never gives him a moment’s peace, and there’s nothing Sune is more grateful for than that. He was never really prepared for the love he would feel for his dog. That’s what he says, my dog, even though the entire basis for what he feels when it looks at him is the exact opposite: that he belongs to it. That he is its human. It trusts him so much that it sometimes becomes too much for him, because he doesn’t know if he can handle the responsibility. He doesn’t know if he can cope with being so needed. So loved. No matter how many mornings he gets woken by those eager paws on the edge of the bed, that rough tongue on his face, he is still taken aback by its acceptance of him. Dogs are like hockey, a fresh chance every morning, everything is constantly beginning again."
"“Then I would lie here and look up at the roof and think, ‘Now I’m alone in the world.’ I sort of memorized the silence. Because I’ve never been scared when I’m alone, only among other people.”
“Me too.”
Benji hates the fact that the child knows exactly how that feels. She’s too young for that. But he tells it like it is:
“No one can hurt you when you’re alone.”
Her fingers clutch his a little tighter now, the bear beneath them, eternity above them. "
"Matteo doesn’t feel powerful, he just wants to stop feeling powerless, just for a single moment. He thinks about the green jacket Mumble was wearing in the churchyard, Sune has one just like it, he’d like to take something from them so that they know how it feels. Because he’s sure they’d mourn the dog more than they ever mourned Ruth. In the town of bears, girls are worth less than animals."
"They’re sad that Sune is sad, of course, but they don’t really understand his loss. Because of course it was only a dog. It’s so hard to explain that it’s more than an animal when you’re that animal’s human. Perhaps it takes more empathy than most people are capable of. Or more imagination."
"But if anyone can understand the unbridled, unreasonable love you can feel for an animal, it’s probably men who have been told all their lives that they love something more than they should: “But it’s only hockey.”
The Pack feels precisely everything, precisely all the time. They know that the extent of grief isn’t measured by what you’ve lost but by who you are. They have imagination. So much imagination, in fact, that the very thought of losing something they can’t live without makes them lethal."
"“I wouldn’t be where I am without you.”
“Stop that, you have a God-given talent, you had—” Peter protests, but Amat interrupts him quietly but firmly:
“Talent isn’t enough. Or at least it wouldn’t have been enough for me. You need someone who believes in you too. Not just me… you’ve done the same for Benji and Bobo, and now you’re doing it for Aleksandr as well… we aren’t your kids, but you’ve always made us feel like we are. You’ve always believed in us more than we did ourselves.”"
"Mothers have no armor to get them through life because they give every last bit to their children, by the end of their teenage years there isn’t even any skin left, so every feeling of loss cuts right into her flesh now."
"“What are you even doing HERE, you crazy kid?” he yelled.
“I wanted to watch the game but Sune didn’t want to, so I came ON MY OWN!” Alicia snapped back, trying to sound angry even though she was actually terrified.
Benji reached down and lifted her out of the chaos, and is now carrying her as if she was his little girl. She has her arms wrapped around him like she’s always been his, clinging on like seaweed to a body that’s just stepped out of the sea."
"Like all parents, he just dreams of his children having things a bit better than him, a bit easier, but there’s no way to protect them against the world. We can’t even protect them from themselves. So he closes his eyes and thinks that if Hannah is right, if the boy in this bed really is going to turn out like his dad, then there’s only one thing for Johnny to do.
To become better."
"Benji thinks of something Ramona once said: “Men are scared of telescopes, you can’t look at the stars without shitting your pants because you can’t think about how big the universe is without seeing how small you are in comparison. Nothing scares a man more than the thought that everything he does might lack all meaning.”"
"“Just stick around this time, promise?” Bobo repeats.
Benji shakes his head.
“No, no, I’m not going to do that. But I’ll try not to forget to come back home.”
“I fucking love you,” Bobo whispers, and the best thing about him is that he makes no attempt at all to laugh it off with a “but not like that.” He’s more than capable of just loving someone, the gentle giant.
Benji smiles.
“I love you too. But not like that, so don’t go getting any ideas.”"
"Because one of the very worst things we will ever do in this forest is to try to tell our daughters that girls like Ruth are the exception. That isn’t true, of course. It’s Maya who is the exception. That’s why those who do that, those who get the slightest bit of retribution or an ounce of justice, call themselves “survivors.” Because they know the truth about all the girls like Ruth."
"Ruth left the country exactly two and a half years ago, just after what happened with Maya and Kevin became public knowledge. Maya had gone to the police and the whole town had turned against her. Everything was going to change in time, but no one knew that then. Ruth didn’t stay to find out what happened. She had been through all that herself a few months earlier, she knew what this forest did to girls like her and Maya.
Shoot. Dig. Silence."
"You never get the same kind of friends again like you have when you’re a teenager. Not even if you keep them your whole life. It will never be the same as it was then."
"For her the rape went on forever but for him it never even started. For the rest of his life he could never understand that he was a rapist. He thought he was a hero."
"In her diary Ruth wrote:
When girls start primary school and the boys hit us and pull our hair during breaks and we go to an adult and ask for help, the adults say: The boys are only doing that because they like you!! That’s how you teach boys that they have rights over us. Then we get bigger and then they rape us but we’re just stupid little whores because we don’t take it as a COMPLIMENT? They beat us and kill us but it’s only because they like us. Why don’t we understand that?
On the next page it says:
didn’t even fuck that other guy in Hed but he told everyone I did and that meant I was already a whore. And whores can’t get raped."
"On one of the last pages she wrote:
I’ve got no chance if even my own parents don’t believe me. Why would the police believe me then? Why would anyone? You aren’t going to believe me until Rodri kills me."
"On the very last page, in shaky handwriting, she wrote:
Parents always think they have to talk to their daughters about guys. We shouldn’t wear short skirts and shouldn’t go out alone and shouldn’t get drunk and shouldn’t let guys like us too much. But you don’t have to talk to us about guys because we already know all that, for fuck’s sake, because we’re the ones they rape!! Talk to your damn sons instead!!! Teach them to talk to one another and teach them to stop one another. Raise just one fucking boy somewhere who can become a head teacher who understands that when boys pull girls by the hair, it’s the fucking boys there’s something wrong with. Tell your sons that if they have to THINK about whether or not they’ve had sex with a girl who didn’t want it, then they HAVE!!! If you can’t understand if the girl you’re having sex with wants it or not, then you’ve never had fucking sex with a girl who wants it. Stop telling your daughters. We already know it all."
"Ruth never went back to the police. The young man at the station waited. Perhaps he hated himself afterward for not doing more. Perhaps he managed to suppress it. Everyone like him is just trying to do their job. They all say they’re just following the law. It’s just that laws aren’t written for girls like Ruth. They’re written against her."
"“Don’t worry.”
“I’m your mother, you can’t stop me!”
Maya smiles in such a way that it’s impossible to know if she’s about to make a joke or start crying.
“I’m sorry that what Kevin did to me almost broke you and Dad.”
Now it’s Kira’s turn to look like she’s about to cry.
“Darling, it didn’t do…”
Maya nods, so grown-up and so strong, so honest and vulnerable.
“Yes, Mom. It did. Your love was like organ donation. You and Dad and Leo gave me pieces of your hearts and lungs and skeletons so I could put myself back together again. And now you hardly have the strength to stand up and keep breathing yourselves. I think about that so often, and I think about all the girls who don’t have you. I feel like I only just managed to survive this. How the hell does everyone who doesn’t have you as their mom even stand a chance?”
Good luck having a daughter and not going to pieces when you hear that."
"Something about the bright, unadorned enthusiasm on his face makes Amat curious. The former general manager leads him away from the apartment blocks, toward the forest at the edge of the old quarry, and doesn’t stop until they reach a large, open space where there was once talk of building a supermarket. Then they said it might be a medical center. At one point someone even dreamed of a small business center. None of it ever came to be, of course, because this isn’t the part of Beartown where things get built. The town may be getting bigger, but nothing grows in the Hollow.
“There!” Peter says, pointing at absolutely nothing.
“I… I don’t understand…,” Amat says, seeing nothing but snow and gravel.
Peter sees something else. He sees redemption."
"Amat looks so tall, suddenly, as if he’s grown taller than Peter overnight. Peter laughs. Everything is only a dream so far. He doesn’t know if he dares actually believe he can get this done. But Beartown is a special place. What a fucking town. There are so many places and things here that have strange names whose origins everyone has forgotten.
In a few years hardly anyone will remember why the ice rink beyond the apartment blocks and gravel pit in the poorest part of town is always called “the Cathedral.” But the man who dreamed it up knows, and the boy who one day scores his first goal in the NHL knows. He’ll be interviewed on television afterward:
“Do you want to say something to everyone watching in your hometown? How do you pronounce it? You’re from Beartown, aren’t you?” the reporter on the other side of the Atlantic will ask.
Amat will look directly into the camera and say: “No. I’m from the Hollow.”"
"“What am I supposed to do? Stay here and get rich? I don’t even like expensive wine. I’m going with you. Wherever you go.”
Maya sits there and watches the two middle-aged women hug, and thinks that when she gets old, really, really, really old, she hopes she’s just as crazy as they are."
"Kira locks the office. In a few months’ time she will surrender those keys and hand the whole business over to some of the employees, and she will sell her expensive car. The new law firm’s first office will be her kitchen. One day women throughout the country will know who they are. That too is a sort of cathedral."
"The game is about to start, but it will never be played. Instead, now everything that we will never stop regretting starts. Every single person in the ice rink will go over and over these minutes for the rest of their lives, asking silently: “Could I have done anything different? Something small, something microscopic, anything at all? Could I have stopped him?”
We’re on our way into a night when we question everything we have ever done, all that we are, and the entire society that we’ve built. Because what is it? The whole lot of it? Only the sum of all our choices. Only the result of us. Can we cope with the way it turned out?"
"This hockey game will never be played, and for many of us it will feel as if we never really emerge from the ice rink. We will be stuck in the nightmare forever. We are a people who tell stories, who try to use stories to put what we have experienced into some sort of context, to explain what we have been fighting about in the hope that it will excuse what we have done. But stories reveal both the very best of us and the very worst, and can one ever outweigh the other? Are our triumphs greater than our mistakes? What are we responsible for? What are we guilty of? Can we look ourselves in the mirror tomorrow? Can we look each other in the eye?"
"Lev never had children of his own, almost his entire family died in a war the rest of the world didn’t even call a war. He has seen good people capable of great evil, but also terrible people capable of great goodness. It’s the same everywhere: almost everyone loves too much, hates too easily, forgives too little. But most people want the same as him: to live in peace, to let your heart beat a little more slowly when night comes, to earn a bit of money to support the ones you love."
"It’s like a cruel joke, as if God wants to point out that He can do what He likes with us. Unless this is the opposite: His penance.
As two cherished lives end over in the ice rink, the twins’ hearts start to beat in Hannah’s arms. Two childhoods begin. Beep-bo. Tickles and helpless giggling. Climbing trees. Puddles and boots that are too big. Ice on the lake. A million ice creams. Whisper-shouts from parents on the phone when you’re playing with a ball indoors. Swings. Best friends. First love."
"Matteo is dead before his body hits the floor.
But so is Benji."
"Everyone who knew Benjamin Ovich, particularly those of us who knew him well enough to call him Benji, would have wished him a really long story. A secure life. A happy ending. We hoped, oh, how we hoped, but deep down we probably knew that he wasn’t the sort who would get that. Because he was always the sort of person who stood in the way, the sort who protected, the sort who ran. He always thought he was the bad guy in all stories, the real heroes always do, that’s why stories about boys like him never end with them growing old. Stories about boys like him only end with us no longer dreaming of time machines, because if one was ever invented in the distant future, it would already have been used to travel back here by someone who loved him.
There are so many of us.”
"We can’t fight against evil. That’s the most unbearable thing about the world we have built. Evil can’t be eradicated, can’t be locked up, the more violence we use against it, the stronger it becomes when it seeps out under doors and through keyholes. It can never disappear because it grows inside us, sometimes even in the best of us, sometimes even in fourteen-year-olds. We have no weapons against it. We have only been given love as a gift in order to cope with it."
"Maya wishes she could stop shaking, she wishes she could hold the girl tighter, that she could hug away all the shock and despair and all the terrible darkness that will never leave either of them now. But she doesn’t know how, she isn’t big enough, isn’t strong enough. She can’t breathe, she’s gasping for air, trying to think away the blood and death on the floor in there and she needs to be strong for the child’s sake. But how do you do that? Where do you find the strength? She doesn’t have it. She’s certain she’s going to collapse on the ground in the snow when she feels two arms around her own shoulders. It’s her mother. Kira didn’t run toward the fire, she ran after the children. Behind her comes Tess and soon other women will come, from all directions, in red and green jackets, some even in black. They wrap their arms around each other, in circles, ring after ring, forming a wall around Alicia.
Nothing that happens to the girl in the rest of her life will ever be worse than this. But in the very worst moment, in the midst of the greatest terror, mothers and big sisters from the whole forest ran here to protect her.
No one can fight against evil. But if it wants to take Alicia, it’s going to have to go through every last one of them first."
"We have gotten used to so many types of violence, but we could never foresee this one. This one we will never understand. This one we will never get over. Adri picks up her brother and he feels so small in her arms. She carries him out of the ice rink and the whole town stops breathing. A hole in every heart.
How will the sun rise tomorrow? How can daylight still exist? What is the point?"
"Good people can be capable of great evil, and evil people can be capable of great good."
"Maya will remember how incomprehensible it was that the sun even rose on the day after Benji’s death. That she was still alive. That she kept going. But she understands her parents, for the first time, really understands them. How they learned to cry inwardly when Isak died. Silently, silently they cried for years so that Maya and Leo wouldn’t hear. How the very air must have hurt their skin. How they must have wanted to lie down with their cheeks to the ground and whisper into the grass to the child beneath it. How they must have hated themselves for not being able to die with him.
How many of all the things they have done since then have been their attempts to achieve something important, something grand, something worth getting to Heaven late for? Almost everything.
It’s unbearable that the sun rises again, that Maya is here and not Benji, for the rest of her life she will stop almost daily and think: “Would he be proud of me? Have I lived a worthy life? Been a good enough person?” Because of course that’s all she is, all everyone she grew up with in Beartown is: hopelessly simple but horribly complicated. Ordinary, unusual people. Unusually ordinary people. We try to just live our lives, live with each other, live with ourselves. Accepting joy when we find it, bearing grief when it finds us, and being amazed at our children’s happiness without falling apart when we think that we can never really protect them."
"She will say that we’re just trying to live, damn it. Live in spite of each other. Live for each other.
Live on."
"Soon millions of people will know Maya’s name, but every night she will only be singing for Benji. Not all her songs will be about him, but they will all be his, somehow, even the ones that are Ana’s. One evening, several years from now, Maya will be so famous that she’ll be performing in one of the biggest arenas in the whole country. It will be sold out. The first time she steps out into it she will realize what it is used for when concerts aren’t being held there. It’s an ice rink. It’s the biggest moment in her career, and she cries her way through every song."
"When Benji is buried, it isn’t in a church with open doors but under the bare sky. Two entire towns turn up. The notification in the newspaper is superfluous, everyone knows the time and the place already, even the factory closes, but beneath Benji’s name is printed what everyone is feeling:
This hurts too much to touch with words."
"Their brother is laid to rest beside their father, not far from Ramona and Vidar. Around here we usually say that we bury our children under our most beautiful trees, but not even the best among us can find a tree beautiful enough to watch over Benjamin Ovich. So we grow new ones, all around the stone bearing his name, we let Alicia and other children plant them in the soil so that they grow up around him. Until he is no longer sleeping in a churchyard, but where he was always safest and happiest. In a forest."
"Are you scared? Someone who loves you wanted to know.
I said: Oh no—he’s in a different form though
Because the grave’s only a place for memory
The earth around his coffin isn’t where he’ll be.
Where you are now I cannot say
You’re not here, you’ve gone away.
There’s a folding chair by the water and there
I think you sit and laugh and feel a love so rare.
There’s ice around your island, you’ve got your skates,
There goes a boy whose beauty never fades.
You’re playing a game, don’t even feel cold,
There plays a boy who’ll never grow old.
You’re everything you wanted to be
You’re safe and happy, wild and free.
I don’t know where you are now my friend
But in a hundred years we’ll meet again."
"It’s that sort of town, where everything can change and the people can be transformed. Where we find the strength to play even though our lungs are screaming. Possibly because we’re used to withstanding the darkness, both inside and outside. Possibly because we live close to wilderness. But perhaps most of all because, just like everyone else in every other place: If we don’t have tomorrow, what’s the alternative?"
"There are many types of leadership, the sort Big City, Amat, and Bobo demonstrate this year isn’t the sort that goes forward, but rather goes backward. Back to everything we are. Sometimes the greatest leadership is knowing the way home."
"Elisabeth Zackell becomes a famous coach. She wins hundreds of games. She wins leagues, titles, and trophies. The only thing she never really wins back is that first, uncomplicated joy. Hockey never really becomes a game for her again. But one day in many years’ time she will coach a national team, the one Alicia plays on, and then Zackell will make an exception to her strictest rule.
She lets someone play with the number 16 again. For one single game.
Alicia gets up from the bench in the locker room and leads her team out and storms the ice, and Zackell watches her and for a single moment forgets that it isn’t him."
"“I’m proud of you,” she whispers to her brother.
“I’m proud of you too,” he whispers back.
Leo will do great things in life, he will go far and give her every reason to really be proud of him. She’s just being proud in advance. That’s the job of big sisters."
"What is life, other than moments? What is laughter, other than a small victory over sorrow? A single moment, just one, when everything inside us isn’t broken."
"Maya sings for thousands of people in hundreds of arenas over the years when she’s grown up, but mostly she sings for herself and the best friends she had as a child. One day Ana takes her up in the helicopter, rising straight up into the sky. They take the girls with them, the girls they used to be, two laughing kids they wish they could go back in time and protect. They pick them up off the ground in the forest and hide them inside their jackets and the rotor blades spin and they fly far above the earth. High and free."
"She doesn’t forgive, doesn’t forget, but she doesn’t use violence just because she can. She doesn’t destroy Kevin’s life even though he deserves it. She spares him.
But Kevin’s wife will ask him who that woman was. Kevin takes a series of terror-filled breaths, but eventually he is too weighed down to carry the lies, so he whispers the truth. Everything. The whole of the reality he has constructed since that night in Beartown collapses around him inside that car. He loses everything.
Can he be forgiven? Can he be spared? Allowed to have a life?"
"Spring comes, and summer. It’s almost unbearable. But then autumn arrives, as brief as the blink of an eye, before winter finally hits us again. Life doesn’t go on, it starts again, everything is possible once more. Anything can happen, all the best and all the most beautiful and all the biggest adventures in the world."
"Early, early in the morning the caretaker opens the door to the ice rink and turns the lights on. Alicia looks so lonely and small as she skates out onto the ice, but she isn’t, she’s bigger than everyone and never alone again. She lies down in the center circle and looks up at the roof. When she closes her eyes and reaches out her fingers she hurts in so many places inside, but there and then she doesn’t feel anything, because Benji is lying beside her and soon a new hockey season will begin and everything can still be okay. Throughout the whole of her long career, in every ice rink and in every national game, she will do the same thing every time she gets scared or nervous: look up at the roof, reach out her hand, feel that he is there. Because Benjamin Ovich isn’t in a grave. Benjamin Ovich is at the game with his best friend."
"It’s easy to love hockey then, because hockey isn’t the past, it isn’t yesterday, it’s always next. The next change of line, the next game, the next season, the next generation, the next magical moment when something we didn’t think was possible becomes a miracle. The next chance to fly up from your seat and yell with joy. Next."
"Her hundred years will be our very best, most loved, most told story. And that says a hell of a lot, because we’re a hockey town. We have nothing but stories here. But all our stories have really only been about one thing: ever since the very first, about a boy who made it all the way from here to the NHL and came back with his family, about his daughter who found the best friend in the world, about a terrible crime and love that was like organ donation. About tears and struggle, about hugs and laughter, about a stage and a guitar and thousands of people in the audience. About a boy who was born in a place that had never seen ice but who one day could move faster on skates than anyone else, about other children who became the best in other ways, about the boy who became a coach and the ones who became parents and the girl who flies a helicopter to save the whole world. About a young man who could never see himself as a hero but who died like one, who ran toward fire to save a child. About families and friends. About climbing trees and adventures. About a vast forest and two small towns and all the people here who are just trying to live their lives. Sit in a boat. Tell lies. Catch zero fish."
At the end of this book... Was Backman hinting that there will be another trilogy about Alicia? God, how I hope it's true. Give me more Beartown stories please, and how Amat gets into the NHL and how he's doing in NHL, how Maya gets into her stardom, how Ana goes after her aspiration of being an ambulance helicopter pilot, how Bobo becomes a dad, and about everyone else too.
It took me almost a full month's time to make this review, and I think it's because I was trying so hard to properly say goodbye to this book series. It's ridiculous how much love I have for this book series, but as Backman wrote in the book:
"But if anyone can understand the unbridled, unreasonable love you can feel for an animal, it’s probably men who have been told all their lives that they love something more than they should: “But it’s only hockey.”
The Pack feels precisely everything, precisely all the time. They know that the extent of grief isn’t measured by what you’ve lost but by who you are. They have imagination. So much imagination, in fact, that the very thought of losing something they can’t live without makes them lethal."
And it's exactly how I feel about saying goodbye to this trilogy.
But here we are now, this trilogy is finally completed and, like it or not, I have to say goodbye to Beartown. It's bittersweet, because I love this trilogy so much, but now the wait is finally over and there's no more nights staying up late wondering about what's gonna happen to my favorite characters. I just have to let those wonderful characters go and rest now.
I'm reminded of these quotes from the brilliant TV Show, The Good Place, about letting go and moving on, and it helped me tremendously:
Eleanor Shellstrop: "Working out the terms of moral justification is an unending task." That's what I was thinking about. That sentence.
...
Eleanor Shellstrop: The whole book is about how we should try to find rules other people can't reasonably reject, and then he ends it by saying, "The search for how to find these rules will go on forever." I proposed a rule that Chidis shouldn't be allowed to leave because it would make Eleanors sad. And I could do this forever, zip you around the universe showing you cool stuff... and I'd still never find the justification for getting you to stay. Because it's a selfish rule. I owe it to you to let you go.
Chidi Anagonye: Picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it - its height, the way the sunlight refracts as it passes through - and it's there, you can see it, and you know what it is, it's a wave. And then it crashes on the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just... a different way for the water to be for a little while. That's one conception of death for a Buddhist: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it's meant to be.
Janet: What do you think happens when people walk through the door? It's the only thing in the universe I don't know.
Eleanor Shellstrop: I don't know either. The wave returns to the ocean. What the ocean does with the water after that is anyone's guess. But as a very wise not-robot once told me, the true joy's in the mystery.
This trilogy truly has given me so many wonderful gifts apart from the story and the characters themselves, it made me learn Swedish, and it introduced me to Ice Hockey, which I am now obsessed with. It's very hard for me to say goodbye to this trilogy and all of my favorite characters in this trilogy, but I know I'll always be reminded of them whenever I study Swedish and watch Hockey, I'll always be looking for Benji, Amat, Maya, Ana and Bobo in my studies and every hockey games I watch.
I do hope that there will be a TV show adaptation of the full trilogy, one that is more faithful to the books, because I think they are perfect just the way they are.
Thank you so much for such an amazing ride with this trilogy, Backman.
PLOT - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
WRITING STYLE - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
ENTERTAINMENT LEVEL PAIN LEVEL- 💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔
BOOK COVER DESIGN - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
OVERALL BOOK RATING - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
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Meeee. I want a longer version of the voyeur deku and bully kacchan. but in kacchan's pov tho. 💜💜💜👀
My dear anon. You ask and so you shall receive 💓
Pt.1, Pt.2
Tw: implied gangbang, stalking, implied noncon
If there’s one thing Katsuki Bakugo hated more than Deku, it was you.
No, actually, scratch that.
He couldn’t stand you around Deku.
As his childhood friend-or rival, whatever the fuck you wanted to call it, Bakugo knew Deku like the back of his hand.
He knew how he liked his breakfast, eggs runny with cheese and pepper sprinkled in the middle. He knew how crazy he could be as a fanboy for All Might, collecting over 500 antiques of the hero. He knew how he liked spring better because then he could stand under the Sakura trees and close his eyes in bliss while the petals floated softly down on his face.
He knew how he liked to steal your panties and jerk off to them.
He knew that his favorite position to watch him rape you from the front so that he could see every expression while you were filled to the brim with cum.
How the fuck could you be so blind?
Did you not notice the way your undergarments slowly started to vanish, one by one? Did you not realize who’s handwriting it was when you found yet another threatening yet lewd note in your locker? You had to actually be brain dead to not catch on to how he was always the last person out, just to trail behind and watch how your ass swayed when you walked out of the classroom.
But no, apparently you were even more stupid than he thought.
Because instead of correctly matching a face to actions, you thought him, Bakugo fucking Katsuki was the one doing all of this.
He supposed he couldn’t actually hold it against you though. I mean, he was the one slipping a hand up your shirt when you were walking out said door, he was the one who was shoving you against the lockers right when you were about to unlock it and find the notes, and he was the one who tore your panties in two, dangling them in front of your face while you pleaded for him to give it back. He never did, of course, he simply threw them over his shoulder and proceeded dragging you away so he could fuck you in privacy.
But he guesses there wasn’t much privacy if he was being watched all the time.
It was actually pretty typical of Deku. To leech off of what he left behind and try to claim it as his own. First his All Might obsession, then his shoot style, and now you? It’s pathetic, but typical.
He should’ve realized it wasn’t the shadows moving in the corner of his eyes when he was buried to the hilt inside your warmth. When the hairs stood at the back of your neck in the showers, it wasn’t because he was fucking you dumb, it was because someone else’s moans were in synch with his.
But it’s okay, because he knows and you don’t. He knows how the dweeb looks at you, how he sports a tent in his pants when you innocently lay a hand on his shoulder, he knows why your window is broken even though you fell asleep with it intact.
He catches Deku one day. He catches him red handed like the little rat he is.
It was so easy, too, the green haired little shit follows him around like some lovesick puppy anyways. Sometimes he can’t tell if he’s following you or himself.
You walk home from your night classes one evening, when the night is darker than your own shadows and the stars barely dust across the sky. No one else is around, and so you clutch your bag a little more tightly against you whenever you hear a leaf or a start car rustle in the trees surrounding your path back to the dorms.
Bakugo knows your schedule, of course. You take English and Statistics in the morning and save Quirk Training for the evening when you’re the most tired-a stupid plan, in his opinion.
Or at least he thought, at first. Turns out that you’re the easiest to follow when you’re spent and covered in bruises from being thrown against rocks and burned by fire from class. He wishes he could’ve seen you in person when that all happens, but it doesn’t matter when you’re stumbling down the cobblestone path towards your dorm, deaf and blind to any person that might be right behind you.
You just want to go home, he can accept that. Especially when he can so easily trail after you, merely 20 feet away on the same path as you. No one would suspect he’s up to no good from the leisurely way he strolls with his hands in his pockets, and he would bet his entire life that you wouldn’t waste a second to turn around and check your surrounding in favor of hurrying up to your room so you can sleep the aches away.
He might be subtle, but Deku isn’t.
The fucker hides in the bushes and almost crawls like a bug in the foliage after his two favorite people. It’s not even a clever disguise because his hair is three shades lighter than the leaves on the thickets.
Bakugo can hear the twigs snap and rustle as he bumbles around trying to be inconspicuous. He rolls his eyes and turns around, a deep scowl on his face.
“You’re not fooling anyone you bastard. Get the fuck out here right now before I blast you away.”
It doesn’t even take a full three seconds before Deku’s head meekly pops up and he gives a weak smile.
“H-hey Kacchan. Nice to see you here, I just dropped my papers-“
“No you didn’t. How long have you been following us?”
Deku blanches and slowly lifts his eyes to meet Bakugo’s. His mouth might’ve tried to open and refute the accusation, but when he saw the subtle smirk in the latters eye he found himself caring less about being caught.
“Howd you know?”
“You fuckin’ kidding me?” He scoffs and takes a quick glance back at you to ensure that you hadn’t walked too far off. You were still slowly trudging away, an easy distance for him to cross. “You’re about as stealthy as my quirk you freak.”
Deku laughs nervously and scratches the back of his head, also trying to quickly turn his head to see where you are.
“You likin’ the show so far?”
“Huh?” The green haired boy snaps his head back to him, blushing furiously now.
“You heard me. And don’t pretend to be so scandalized, you’re not holier than thou.”
The low voice to an almost predatory tone makes Deku drop the act. He straightens up a bit taller and his eyelids lower, his brows raised in a mocking sneer of some sorts. His lips curl and his teeth gleam in the moonlight, almost looking like fangs.
Bakugo has to remind himself for a moment not to back up a step.
“Yeah, I’m likin’ it.”
“I knew it. I bet you watched us every time we fucked, you bastard. Next time I’ll make you pay for front row seats since that’s where you always seem to be.” He crosses his arms and stares Deku down.
But the other doesn’t cower. Instead, his expression morphs into that of a weird hopeful look.
“I wouldn’t exactly say fucked is the right word. I’d say raped is better, Kacchan.”
It’s the utter confidence and ease in which he says this that makes Bakugo do a double take, his scowl breaking for a moment.
But he regroups. He knew this little shit was weird and fucked up, but he didn’t realize he was twisted beyond repair. In reality, he knew he was actually having sex with you without your full consent but hearing it from a guy like Deku made it so much worse.
It made his heart pound a little faster, while it made Dekus mouth water.
“Yeah? You liked watching me motorboat and fuck her tits? You liked hearing her scream for me, scream to get away from me too?”
And even in the shadows from the trees he can see how hard the degenerate nods his head eagerly like a dog waiting for its bone.
Even though he doesn’t like how the glint in his eyes darken with each vile word coming from his own mouth, he can’t help but go further down this rabbit hole and see how much Deku can take before he snaps-he’s never seen him so hungry for something before, except for when he would be around All Might.
So he eggs him on.
“I bet you got off on watching her struggle underneath me, didn’t you?” It’s less of a question and more of a statement to which Deku confirms.
“I did. I got off so many times I thought I’d have to get it checked out. But honestly, I think you could do better.”
Katsuki wasnt expecting that response.
“Who the fuck are you to-“
“Have you ever really savored the look of fear in her eyes? Have you ever tied her up and really played with her?”
His voice gets stuck in his throat as Deku continues.
“She’s pretty when you fill her up, but I can’t help but wonder..what would she look like with every hole plugged?”
He has no right looking so shy and nervous when such filth leaves his salivating lips. A drop of spit falls to the cobblestone and as Bakugo grimaces and steps back a bit, he realizes that he has not given his childhood rival as much credit for being a creep than he actually is.
“No fucking way. You better not be suggesting you get in on any of this action. She’s fuckin’ mine and I’ll be damned if I have to share her with some useless fuck like you.”
“I promise I won’t be useless, Kacchan. I’ll make sure to keep her moving at all times. She won’t stop bouncing when I’m with her, please, please let me give it a try too.”
And when he doesn’t look convinced, Deku rambles on like a madman. “I’ll even gag her with her own bloodstained panties so that she can shut up and I can focus better. I won’t ask you for her pussy either, I’ll take her ass or throat instead if you want!”
Katsuki wishes he didn’t hear the childhood boyish eager in his voice as he spoke.
He also wishes his dick didn’t get quite so hard when all of that was said.
“God, just shut up already, she’s getting farther now. Okay look, I’ll let you give it a go this one time only so that I can fuck her in peace without you staring at my ass the entire time.”
Dekus eyes light up and he lifts a leg over to step over the hedges. “Really, you mean it? I can fuck her too?”
Bakugo snarls and turns away, heading towards the same path you took. “Whatever, just don’t think this is gonna be a regular kind of thing. I worked hard to get myself a toy and I’ll be damned if you fuck it up for me.”
And when they both join the other towards you, there’s a moment when you glance back that you think the shadow that has been following you this whole time has turned into two.
#tw: stalking#tw: noncon#mha#bnha#mha smut#bully bakugou#creep deku#villain deku#weird little incel deku#yandere deku#deku smut#deku mha#yandere bakugo x reader#yandere bakugo katsuki#yandere bakugo#bakugo smut#bakugo bnha#villain izuku#yandere izuku#izuku smut#katsuki scenario#katsuki smut#bnha smut
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chosen last: part three
The people asked and so they shall receive
https://chiliiscereal.tumblr.com/post/650808822043115520/chosen-last
https://chiliiscereal.tumblr.com/post/651201066386554880/chosen-last-part-two
Summary: a boy takes notice of reader for the first time and Donnie is worried that he’s bad news. Little do both of them know, he’s right
Warning: mentions of attempted rape
——-
You felt so much better about yourself when your birthday was over. It was honestly one of the best you’d ever had. Better than the ones your friends planned anyway. You still went, but it was nothing like the party that the turtles threw. You didn’t think it could get any better.
Until, that is, something happened that almost made you change your mind.
You friend put a picture of you and her, together, up on Snapchat.
And... for the first time in your life... a guy took notice of you.
It wasn’t much. It was just “who’s that? Low key cute. Whats their snap?”
That happened to your friends.
Never to you.
Even more surprising, your friend gave him your snap.
Eric.
Eric was his name.
And he also went to your school!
You were incredibly nervous about this. Every single time a boy took interest in you it never seemed to be what your thought it was.
Last time a boy took interest in you it was ACTUALLY so they could get with your friend. That, my friends, was two years ago. Your friends blasted through boys like there was no tomorrow. But you? You’d never had someone interested in you like that.
Until now.
You talked to him and... honestly... you felt like there was something there.
He asked a lot about you and just seemed like the one, you know? You both shared the same interest in shows! You both enjoyed the same music!
Whenever he responded to you, you just couldn’t help but feel elated.
You would fall back on your bed and stare at the ceiling, feeling like this was a scene from a movie.
He didn’t wait for twenty minutes to respond to you.
He acknowledged every single thing you said.
And when he met up with you after school...
Wow.
Just wow.
He was incredibly handsome and polite.
He even held doors open for you!
You found yourself meeting up with him again and again.
It made you feel so... important.
Unfortunately, the turtles didn’t feel the same way.
————
“Who ya talkin’ to?” Leo leaned closer to look over your shoulder from his spot beside you on the couch.
It was movie night with the boys and April.
You brought you phone to your chest to obscure his view. “Hey hey hey back off!” You playfully shoved him away. “Just a friend.”
Mikey gave you a shit eating grin when he noticed the smile slipping onto your face. “Just a friend huh?” He pulled himself off the floor and reached for your phone. “Let me see let me see!”
You held it away from him to. “Woah this is my phone! Get away!”
A metal claw snatched it from your hand, retracting back to Donnie.
“And is this ‘friend’ a boy or a girl?” He opened your phone. “Ugh, what’s your password?”
You leapt off the couch and tried to grab your device back. “Does it matter?”
Donnie tapped away at the buttons, using his metal claws from his battle shell to keep you away. “No, it doesn’t matter unless it’s a BOY.” You phone buzzed slightly as it opened to your home screen. “Aha, I am in!”
Mikey and Leo both crawled over to their soft shelled brother to observe from behind him.
“Donnie, give it back.” You ordered, looking to April for help. She just shrugged and continued watching with a smirk. “Guys, come on! It’s not a big deal!”
Raph pulled himself off the floor and placed his hands on his hips. “Alright, jokes over; give the phone back.”
Donnie groaned. “Come on! I’m so close to figuring out who y/n’s talking to!”
Raph gave him a stern look. “Now. It’s private and obviously Y/n doesn’t want you looking through it.”
Donnie, Mikey, and Leo all gave him giant puppy eyes.
Raph simply held out his hand.
Donnie sighed. “Fine. Here.”
You sighed as well but in relief.
Raph took it from him, glancing down at your phone. To your dismay, it was open up to messages. “Eric Sherrin?” He asked in confusion.
“AHA!” Donnie shouted in triumph. “A name is all I need!” He began typing in the device on his wrist.
“Raph!” You accused angrily.
Ugh what were you gonna do now??
You’d never hear the end of this.
“Hey! Raph’s on your side! I didn’t know he could find out with just a name!” He held up his hands in defense.
“Eric?” April asked as she swiped through her phone. “Does he go to our school?”
You glared at Donnie before you decided whether or not to share that.
He shrugged. “Hey, I already have his social media up and every piece of information I could find. Whether or not you say will change nothing.”
“Fine.” You growled. “Yes, he goes to our school. He’s a mutual friend with my other friends.”
April raised a brow. “And that’s supposed to make me feel better.”
You shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Well it doesn’t.”
April was dead set on despising your friends. You knew she had good reason but you didn’t need it brought up now.
Leo took the computer that Donnie had sent all the information to, scrolling through Eric’s social media. “Wow, there are a lot of pictures of him holding fish.” He snorted. “Does he think that’s gonna impress people or something?”
“I’ve never understood the appeal.” Donnie shook his head. “So what? You killed an animal good for you.”
“I think it’s about killing a BIG animal.” Leo squinted at the screen. “There’s also lots of pictures of him with other girls.”
“Guys can you just stop?” You placed your hands on your hips. “It’s sweet that you’re trying to make sure he’s not some idiot but you’re invading his privacy-!”
“Woah, look what I found in his records from the school.” Donnie waved his brothers closer.
Even Raph and April did so.
“He harassed at girl at school?” Mikey repeated as he read the screen. “Really?”
“Yeah no this guy’s bad news.” Donnie shook his head in disappointment. “Y/n, give me your phone. I’ll block him for you.” He even reached his hand out expectantly.
You held your phone closer. “No, that’s just a rumor that spread at school.”
The boys stopped what they were doing.
“You knew?” Leo narrowed his eyes. “And you’re still interested?”
“He told me that the teachers didn’t believe him.” You responded as you crossed your arms. “Some girl made it up cause she didn’t like him.”
“You can’t take that risk.” Raph crossed his arms.
“Raph, I thought you were in my side!” You protested.
“That was before Raph found out that the guy harassed someone.” He defended. “Come on, you know this can’t end good.”
Your stomach burned with anger.
Anger that they felt they could order you around like that.
That they wouldn’t even let you figure it out yourself.
That this might end just like every other romantic interest would.
“Why won’t you just let me handle this myself?” You stuffed your hands in your pockets and flopped back down in the couch.
Mikey crawled into the spot next to you, wrapping his arms around you. “You’re one of our best friends! We don’t want anything to happen to you!” He gave you wide innocent eyes as if that would erase your anger.
Well... it did.
Curse him and his adorable eyes.
You rolled your eyes and hugged him back. “I know. I just want to figure this out myself.” You gave Donnie a hard glare as your rested your chin on Mikey’s shoulder.
“Fine.” He closed all the tabs on his computer grudgingly. “But I know this is just gonna end in heartbreak.”
“What a vote of confidence.” Leo snorted and plopped down in the spot next to you.
He smirked when you ignored him, still hugging Mikey.
“Hey, come on, you know you can’t stay mad at this face.” He leaned against you dramatically. “I’m the face man! You can’t resist me!” He pulled you away from Mikey and draped his arm over your shoulder. “You know you love me.”
You turned your head away from him, more playful now than spiteful.
“Come onnnnn...” he smirked. “You love meeee...”
You shoved him off the couch with a laugh. “I’m still thinking that over.”
Raph quickly took Leo’s seat as his younger brother rubbed the spot he’d landed on.
“No hard feelings?” Raph rested his arm on the couch behind you as he started the movie back up.
“Fine. No hard feelings.”
Leo moved so he was sitting on the floor and leaning against your legs.
You couldn’t stay mad at them. Well, except Donnie. You could very well stay mad at Donnie.
And it seemed that Donnie could stay mad at you as well. He left the room with all his tech, grumbling something under his breath.
“I already know how this is gonna end.” He grumbled.
“Love you to, Donnie.” You muttered, sinking into the couch.
Whatever.
He’d get over it soon enough.
————
Donnie didn’t get over it.
Whenever you came over to hang out he brought it up again casually. Well, as casually as Donnie could be, which wasn’t very casual at all.
“Ugh, this game sucks!” Mikey shouted at the tv once.
“Not as much as Eric What’s-his-face’s record.” He’d commented, giving you a glance out of the corner of his eye.
Or even:
“Ugh you can’t trust those pop up ads.” Raph told Leo when his phone had downloaded a virus after he clicked an ad.
“Just like how you can’t trust Eric.” He’d ran into the room to spit that out.
If Raph ever asked how things were going with Eric, Donnie either magically appeared next to him with a hopeful look or disappear with a groan.
You and Eric weren’t even together.
But... you hoped you would be soon.
He invited you to a party that Friday! And he’d specified that he’s invited you as his date.
Your friends were excited, surprisingly. They wanted to help you find an outfit and everything.
Finally, you felt like things were going right.
Why couldn’t Donnie just be happy for you?
——-
“Why won’t you come?” You begged April as she flopped down onto your bed.
“You’ve got Eric and all of your other friends.” She waved you off. “Besides, you know I hate parties.” She sat up slightly. “And Eric gives me the heebie jeebies.”
You rolled your eyes and held out a dress. “Yeah, yeah. Fine, I won’t make you.”
April touched the fabric of the dress with a frown. “Is this what your friends picked out for you? I thought you didn’t like dresses?”
You shrugged. “They said Eric would like it and that it looked good on me.”
April fully sat up now. “But you’re gonna be so uncomfortable in that!”
“I mean, it’s supposed to be pretty, not comfy, right?” You shrugged, slipping it on over your head. “Does it look good?” You gave her a small twirl.
“Of course it’s pretty... but its a little... much.” She shook her head. “Does Eric really deserve to see you in that?”
The last bit was playful but still...
“I think so.” You say down beside her. “I’m just so incredibly nervous and I don’t know if this is a bad idea.”
You felt exposed.
But, you also trusted that the people at the party could be trusted with that.
April draped her arm over your shoulder. “Well you look stunning.”
You smiled back at her. “Thanks.”
“Alright, girl, your party’s in twenty minutes. Ready to head out?” She jabbed her thumb in the direction of the door.
You stood up and smoothed out the dress. “Ready.”
———
You stood in front of the house nervously. You could hear the music and see the lights and people dancing. You just didn’t know if you actually were ready.
“You look hot, y/n.” Your friend told you, glancing at one of your other friends. “He’s gonna love it.”
You didn’t really love it, but if he liked it then so would you.
“Hope so.” You muttered, checking your phone.
Donnie sent you a simple text:
Don’t trust Eric and keep pepper spray on hand.
Wow, such confidence.
You ignored it and stuffed your phone in the dress pocket. You didn’t need that. You needed all the confidence you could muster.
“Wow.” A voice said from behind you, causing you to jump.
There was Eric, dressed nicely and with a charming smile on his face.
“You look hot.” He grinned.
Your stomach fluttered. “Oh, thank... thank you!”! You smoothed it out nervously.
You didn’t know if your stomach felt this way out of nerves or out of feelings for him. You really couldn’t tell.
He placed his hand over your hip and pulled you to his side. “Well Let’s head on in! Can’t wait to show you off.”
Your stomach jumped. “Well, I just wanted to wait a little,” he opened the door and dragged you in, “oh okay!”
Your friends and Eric were at your side the whole time.
You still felt as if you were on display while you and your group were dancing.
You still felt like the dress was too short when you and Eric sat down on the couch.
You felt like he was staring at you when you noticed the couples in the room kissing and making out.
“You wanna head upstairs?” He asked as he took your hand.
Your heart jumped. “No, no I’m good. Really.”
“Come on.” He nodded his head in the direction of the stairs. “It’ll be fun!”
You shook your head. “No I don’t want to go upstairs.”
He looked disappointed but you stayed confident with your choice. You didn’t want that and you weren’t ready.
He recovered quickly and dropped your hand. “Alright! I’m just gonna go talk to a friend real quick, I’ll be back.”
You sighed in relief when you realized he wouldn’t push it on you.
He got up and you pulled out your phone, trying to decide if you wanted to text Donnie back.
You settled on typing:
Yeah yeah whatever.
You saw he read it but he didn’t respond.
What was with him?
Why couldn’t he just be happy?
You glanced up, noticing Eric talking to one of your friends. You noticed him glance back at you and then back at your friend. She handed him something and he left to go to the kitchen.
You went back to your phone, waiting to see if Donnie would respond.
You just wanted your friend back.
Why couldn’t he just... ugh no you had to stop asking that. He was being too judgemental and untrusting.
There was nothing untrustworthy about Eric.
He was just being crazy...
You glanced up again, noticing Eric at the drink table. Whatever it was your friend had given him, he was slipping it in his drink.
You looked closer.
It was some sort of... powder?
When he turned back around you immediately acted like you hadn’t been watching.
He made his way to you and sat down, a drink in each hand. “I thought you looked a little thirsty, so I got you a soda!”
He handed you the red cup enthusiastically.
No, he couldn’t be trying to spike your drink. He wouldn’t do that.
But he was looking at you so expectantly.
“Oh, thank you!” You swirled the soda suspiciously. “I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to corn syrup so... sorry.” You set the drink back down.
Again, he looked disappointed. Maybe even a little mad.
“Hey, We’re gonna go upstairs and play a game!” Your friend shouted from across the room. “Wanna join?”
“What game?” You asked, feeling incredibly nervous.
“Truth or dare!” She giggled. “You’ll love it!”
Eric jumped on that idea expectantly. “Come on lets go!”
“I don’t really...”
He pulled you up before you could even finish.
You wanted to stay where people could see you!
But... you WERE gonna be with your friends...
“Alright, Fine.” You settled. “I’ll go.”
“Awesome!”
You and your group headed up and down the hallway.
Your friend opened the door for you and let you in first. Eric followed closely behind you.
It was a bedroom. A very dark bedroom.
“Hey, We’re gonna head down to the bathroom and freshen up first.” One of your friends smirked. “You two have fun!”
“Wait, no-!”
They were already gone and the door was shut.
Eric had gotten you upstairs.
Alone.
————-
Donnie sighed, trying hard to focus on his work. “Why can’t y/n just listen to me.” He groaned to himself. “I’m just trying to help! How does that make me the bad guy?”
He continued wiring his latest invention, frustrated at how he kept messing up.
“It’s not gonna end well.” He growled. “It’s gonna end in heartbreak and I’m gonna have to pick up the pieces.”
“If y/n even trusts you with that.” Leo added from behind him, causing him to jump.
“Nardo, how long have you been standing there?” He glowered at him. “I’m busy.”
Leo held up his hands in surrender. “A while. Anyway, you’re just pushing y/n away.”
“But y/n isn’t listening to me!” He protested, dropping his tool. “I’m right!”
“Maybe, but you’re also being a jerk.” He shrugged. “Maybe she’ll get her heart broken but you could at least be there for support.”
“Oh no no no I’m not supporting that relationship.” He shook his head vigorously and picked up his screwdriver.
“Not the relationship, egghead.” Leo rolled his eyes. “Our friend?”
“Oh.” Donnie tapped the table in thought. “Yeah, I guess I shouldn’t have left y/n on read...”
“...And maybe go apologize?” Leo prompted.
“No she’s at a party.” He glanced around his phone, checking your location again. “Actually...” he leaned closer to stare at his screen, “y/n’s not at the party any more.”
“Perfect!” Leo clasped his hands together. “Go apologize!”
“It can’t wait?”
“Go!”
———-
You sat on the rooftop, clutching your jacket to your body and watching the city.
How could you have been so stupid.
How could have let something like that happen.
It was incredibly cold on the rooftop but you didn’t want to move. You didn’t want to go home. You CERTAINLY didn’t want to go to the lair either.
You just wanted to watch the city and pretend everything was okay again.
Why did you have to get your hopes up.
No one ever took interest in you like that unless they wanted something from you.
“Scoff, there you are!” Said the last person you wanted to talk to. “I thought you were in the building and spent about an hour searching for you.”
“Tracking device?” You asked, not even looking at him.
“Yep.” Donnie confirmed. “Now, might I inquire why you’re out here?” He glanced at his watch. “And not at your party?”
You stayed quiet.
“Something happen with Eric?”
You gave him nothing.
“I knew it!” He jumped up and cheered. “I was right! I was RIGHT! Ha!”
His every word made you feel colder and more embarrassed.
“I knew from the start! I knew he was untrustworthy!” He continued. “Eat that!”
Finally, he calmed down enough to sit next to you.
“Now, tell me, what did he do?” He leaned close expectantly. “Did he cheat? Did he kiss a girl? Did he try to get with one of your friends? Did he-?”
“He tried to rape me.” You spat out, bringing your knees to your chest.
Well I’m out of room XD
Part four up soon!
#rottmnt x reader#rottmnt mikey#rottmnt raph#rottmnt oneshots#rottmnt leo#rottmnt imagine#rottmnt headcannons#rottmnt donnie#rottmnt#rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles#rise of the tmnt#tmnt fanfiction#tmnt x reader
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do you know if anyone wrote meta about Jon and Littlefinger being foils? like both were raised in a paramount house next to the lord's children, forced out it in their teens thanks to a betrothal, started from the bottom and climbed to the top, wanted to be loved by catelyn. I'm not smart enough to figure out how LF's relationship w Sansa will be a foil to Jonsa by myself, do you know if someone wrote anything?
I wrote about it here and there:
Jon Snow and Petyr Baelish
Jon and Petyr were raised along with Tully girls (Sansa, Catelyn and Lysa).
Jon and Petyr loved redhead girls (Ygritte, Catelyn) that are described as half-fish (Ygritte’s swimming skills and Tully sigil).
Jon and Petyr lost their virginity with redhead girls (Ygritte, Lysa).
Being a legitimate Stark and inheriting Winterfell is Jon’s deepest desire, while Petyr conspired the fall of House Stark.
Jon and Petyr have Bael the Bard imagery around them. Bael the bard abducted the Rose of Winterfell, Rhaegar abducted Lyanna Stark (Jon’s mother), and Petyr abducted Sansa Stark. Bael and Rhaegar were harp players, while Petyr spread lies in his favor through songs (A harp can be as dangerous as a sword, in the right hands —A Storm of Swords - Sansa VI).
Unlike Petyr’s forced kisses, Sansa associates “snow” with lover’s kisses (Drifting snowflakes brushed her face as light as lover’s kisses, and melted on her cheeks. —A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII).
Unlike Petyr, that has used the godswoods of the Red Keep and the Eyrie, to lie and trap Sansa, and is an awful replacement as a father figure for Sansa, Jon would never lie to Sansa in front of the old gods, like Ned taught him (Jon said, “My lord father believed no man could tell a lie in front of a heart tree. The old gods know when men are lying.” —A Clash of Kings - Jon II).
Littlefinger is grooming Sansa, forcing sexual advances on her, and those started during the snow castle scene. The symbolic image of a giant invading Winterfell also plays as an innuendo (“May I come into your castle, my lady?” Sansa was wary. “Don’t break it. Be …” “… gentle?” He smiled. —A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII). Sansa defended herself with “a handful of snow” (Sansa […] grabbed a handful of snow, and flung it full in his face. Petyr yelped, as the snow slid down under his collar. “That was unchivalrously done, my lady.” —A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII).
From: THE BLACK PRINCE WITH THE WHITE GUARDIAN - Jon Snow, Sansa Stark, the Tourney at Ashford Meadow and the songs about Florian and Jonquil.
* * *
3. Petyr Baelish
Littlefinger was never at Winterfell or the godswood, but he feels a deep hatred for the castle, he always dreamed of Winterfell as Catelyn’s dark and cold prison:
He walked along outside the walls. “I used to dream of it, in those years after Cat went north with Eddard Stark. In my dreams it was ever a dark place, and cold.”
—A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII
Littlefinger is the cause of the War of the Five Kings that killed Sansa’s parents and older brother and separated her remaining siblings. The war also caused the fall of Winterfell that was, invaded, sacked and burned by the Greyjoys and Boltons.
But there is a connection between Littlefinger, Winterfell and the godswood. Littlefinger has involved Sansa in several murders, Joffrey’s and Lysa’s being the more important (Dontos and Marillion also suffered murder and mutilation). The King’s murder was planned in the Red Keep’s goodswood, and Lysa’s murder was a direct consequence of Petyr kissing Sansa in the Eyrie’s goodswood.
Now Littlefinger is grooming Sansa, forcing sexual advances on her, and those started during the snow castle scene. The symbolic image of a giant invading Winterfell also plays as an innuendo:
“May I come into your castle, my lady?”
Sansa was wary. “Don’t break it. Be …”
“… gentle?” He smiled. “Winterfell has withstood fiercer enemies than me. It is Winterfell, is it not?”
“Yes,” Sansa admitted.
—A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII
The ambitious men that pursed Winterfell through marrying Sansa, also had to take her maidenhead and conceive an heir, in order to consolidate their claim to the castle and the north. So “coming into the castle” also means having sex and making children.
Littlefinger is too machiavellian, it seems he has used the godswoods not only to trap Sansa but also to reenact his children fantasy of being Catelyn’s love:
I saw you kissing in the snow. She’s just like her mother. Catelyn kissed you in the godswood, but she never meant it, she never wanted you. Why did you love her best? It was me, it was always meeee!“
—A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII
But Sansa, like Catelyn, never wanted and will never wants Petyr Baelish as lover.
Meanwhile at the Wall…
Jon Snow
Unlike Theon, Jon doesn’t feel rejected by the heart of Winterfell. Jon got a direwolf sent by the old gods that shares the weirwood’s coloring:
Red eyes, Jon realized, but not like Melisandre’s. He had a weirwood’s eyes. Red eyes, red mouth, white fur. Blood and bone, like a heart tree. He belongs to the old gods, this one.
—A Storm of Swords - Jon XII
Unlike Theon that invaded Winterfell and allowed the Ironmen to sack, pillage, kill and rape. And later let the Boltons into the castle to burn it. Jon wants to rebuild Winterfell:
They can’t be dead. Theon would never do that. And Winterfell … grey granite, oak and iron, crows wheeling around the towers, steam rising off the hot pools in the godswood, the stone kings sitting on their thrones … how could Winterfell be gone?
—A Storm of Swords - Jon VI
Winterfell, he thought. Theon left it burned and broken, but I could restore it. Surely his father would have wanted that, and Robb as well. They would never have wanted the castle left in ruins.
—A Storm of Swords - Jon XII
Jon wanted Winterfell, as much as he had ever wanted anything, but unlike Tyrion, Jon rejects the castle in favor of Sansa. And Jon would never forced himself on Sansa if she doesn’t want him as well.
He wanted it, Jon knew then. He wanted it as much as he had ever wanted anything. I have always wanted it, he thought, guiltily. May the gods forgive me.
—A Storm of Swords - Jon XII
I want her, he realized. I want Winterfell, yes, but I want her as well, child or woman or whatever she is. I want to comfort her. I want to hear her laugh. I want her to come to me willingly, to bring me her joys and her sorrows and her lust.
—A Storm of Swords - Tyrion IV
The wording of these two passages (“He wanted it” / “I want her”), the Winterfell references, and the guilt and angst for desiring something forbidden (“May the gods forgive me” / “I want her as well, child or woman or whatever she is”), is way too similar to be a mere coincidence. Winterfell and Sansa are merged in the text.
Tyrion and Littlefinger sexually desire Sansa and used the same Winterfell reference as an innuendo:
"Come, wife, time to smash your portcullis. I want to play come-into-the-castle.”
—A Storm of Swords - Sansa III
“May I come into your castle, my lady?”
Sansa was wary. “Don’t break it. Be …”
“… gentle?” He smiled. “Winterfell has withstood fiercer enemies than me. It is Winterfell, is it not?”
“Yes,” Sansa admitted.
—A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII
Both Tyrion and Littlefinger have giant imagery around them, both even talk to her about the Giant of Braavos, both wanted Sansa politically (Winterfell) and sexually (her body), and Sansa has been prophesied slaying a savage giant in a castle built of snow (Winterfell reference). I think that Jon might help her to fulfil that prophecy.
Indeed, Tyrion associates Sansa’s rejection of his advances as icy courtesy and compared that rejection with a castle wall and the Wall in the north:
“You hide behind courtesy as if it were a castle wall.”
“Courtesy is a lady’s armor,” Sansa said. Her septa had always told her that.
—A Storm of Swords - Sansa III
Sansa’s misery was deepening every day. Tyrion would gladly have broken through her courtesy to give her what solace he might, but it was no good.
—A Storm of Swords - Tyrion IV
He wanted to reach her, to break through the armor of her courtesy.
[…] He had always had a yen to see the Titan of Braavos. Perhaps that would please Sansa. Gently, he spoke of Braavos, and met a wall of sullen courtesy as icy and unyielding as the Wall he had walked once in the north. It made him weary. Then and now.
—A Storm of Swords - Tyrion VIII
But Sansa is “stronger within the walls of Winterfell” and Jon at the Wall is “the shield that guards the realms of men.”
Sansa also throws a handful of snow at Littlefinger’s face during the snow castle scene:
The Broken Tower was easier still. They made a tall tower together, kneeling side by side to roll it smooth, and when they’d raised it Sansa stuck her fingers through the top, grabbed a handful of snow, and flung it full in his face. Petyr yelped, as the snow slid down under his collar. “That was unchivalrously done, my lady.”
“As was bringing me here, when you swore to take me home.”
She wondered where this courage had come from, to speak to him so frankly. From Winterfell, she thought. I am stronger within the walls of Winterfell.
—A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII
A handful of snow… Wouldn’t be awesome if Jon Snow continue the Stark men tradition to beat Littlefinger out?
I was always suspicious of Littlefinger helping Sansa build her snow castle, but since Petyr Baelish has giant imagery around him, it all makes sense after reading this passage:
She looked as if she thought he was making that up. “How could men build so high, with no giants to lift the stones?”
In legend, Brandon the Builder had used giants to help raise Winterfell, but Jon did not want to confuse the issue. “Men can build a lot higher than this. In Oldtown there’s a tower taller than the Wall.” He could tell she did not believe him.
—A Storm of Swords - Jon V
Sansa will be certainly grateful if she can take advantage of any help Baelish could offer to rebuild Winterfell, but she will slay him anyway, as in the songs:
“If the tales be true, that’s not the first giant to end up with his head on Winterfell’s walls.”
“Those are only stories,” she said, and left him there.
— A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII
Unlike Petyr’s forced kisses, Sansa associates “snow” with lover’s kisses:
Drifting snowflakes brushed her face as light as lover’s kisses, and melted on her cheeks.
— A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII
Unlike Petyr, that has used the godswoods of the Red Keep and the Eyrie, to lie and trap Sansa, and is an awful replacement as a father figure for Sansa, Jon would never lie to Sansa in front of the old gods, like Ned taught him:
Jon said, “My lord father believed no man could tell a lie in front of a heart tree. The old gods know when men are lying.”
—A Clash of Kings - Jon II
As I said before, if Jon had accepted Stannis’s offer, he would have had Winterfell, but at an extremely high price: burning the weirwood tree, which, to him, would be sacrilege:
When Jon closed his eyes he saw the heart tree, with its pale limbs, red leaves, and solemn face. The weirwood was the heart of Winterfell, Lord Eddard always said … but to save the castle Jon would have to tear that heart up by its ancient roots, and feed it to the red woman’s hungry fire god. I have no right, he thought. Winterfell belongs to the old gods.
—A Storm of Swords - Jon XII
Sansa feels empty like a godswood without gods, like a godswood without a weirwood tree, mostly because she lost Lady, but also because she feels like a lone wolf without its pack, and a body without its heart due to the extreme disillusionment she has suffered so far.
But Jon Snow has a direwolf that is a symbol of the weirwood tree, Jon himself is a symbol of the weirwood tree. And Sansa has become a symbol of Winterfell and the godswood, but she feels empty without her wolf. Then Ghost might complete Sansa’s empty godswood, and Jon might fill Sansa’s heart again. And together they could be a pack. And together they could rebuild their home. Please play North by Sleeping at Last here.
So…
…One would have to wonder why GRRM is always comparing and contrasting Sansa’s suitors with her bastard half brother Jon Snow? What is the reason for that? Does that mean that something romantic will happen between Sansa and Jon in the future? Is that just a mere coincidence? If the same thing (Sansa’s suitor being compared and contrasted with Jon Snow) happened three times, can we really call it a mere coincidence? One would have to wonder… Why?
From: i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) - Jon Snow, Sansa Stark & Winterfell. An exploration.
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photo stolen from @coelacance ’s post here
I refuse to shut up about the power that this scene has. Spoilers for Like Grains of Sand (Nagisa no Shindobaddo), a 1995 film by queer director Ryosuke Hashiguchi that won Best Feature Film at the 1997 Torino International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.
tw: rape mention.
In this scene, Ito and Aihara have just come from their own respective appointments with their psychologists. Neither of them knew that the other was going to therapy, until now. We learn from their scenes speaking with their therapists that Ito is putting on a brave, casual face, but holds a lot of shame and is sorting through all of society’s ideas about love, sex, heterosexuality, etc. We also learn that Aihara was previously raped. And that, naturally, she now doesn’t trust people or believe their motives.
Aihara calls out to Ito as he leaves his appointment, and in spite of the fact that Ito hasn’t liked her too much so far, they wind up walking home together. Before, Aihara teased Ito about having a crush on a male classmate (Yoshida). But this time around she asks him earnestly if he’s confessed to him yet. Ito picks up on this earnestness and tells her very truthfully and vulnerably that he has, and that he was - unsurprisingly - rejected. He laughs it off, but as the audience we understand that him telling her this information is a big deal.
Aihara a moment before had asked Ito what he was asking his therapist about when he was saying weird stuff like “aaah and ooooh”. He chastises her for eavesdropping and they drop the topic. But after he says that he confessed to Yoshida, he says that after being rejected he kind of lost hope of finding love and thought about doing sex work. That’s when Aihara says “so if you do that would you say aaaah and ooooh?” Ito laughs and says “yeah, I guess I would.”
So Aihara turns to look out over this river and yells “aaaaah and ooooh!” to the ether. Ito, smiling, yells it again, louder. “Aaaaah and oooooh!!” She smiles and yells it again. “Aaah and ooooooh!!”
The scene ends there. But to me this moment is so powerful. Here we have two kids who for very different reasons have had their feelings about intimacy - specifically sex - become very complicated, scary, connected to trauma, and inextricably tied up with a massive amount of shame.
And without explicitly saying so to each other, they take this moment to take their power back. They laugh in the face of their fear of intimacy and sex. They say “I’m not scared of you. I’m not ashamed.” It’s a seriously beautiful and powerful scene.
(dm me if you want a link to this movie. Enthuse with meeee <3)
#渚のシンドバッド#like grains of sand#tw: rape#tw rape mention#nagisa no shindobaddo#sinbad of the shore#ryosuke hashiguchi#橋口亮輔#浜崎あゆみ#ayumi hamasaki#aihara#ito#ito-kun#yoshinori okada#岡田義徳#lgbt映画#japanese queer cinema#1995
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You have awoken meeee, the OC disaster machineeeee! Under the cut, cause I have wayyy too many- I'm keeping most of it short lol.
Ikei Kazuto
Ultimate: Seamstress
Backstory: He comes from a slightly poor family who owned a tailor shop. He was criticized for being "girly," for knitting and sewing. That created most of his insecurities and his self-doubt. Not very confident anymore, in himself or his capabilities.
Extra: Man is our protag! Our super insecure protag- He is bisexual, but more Yoshindo-sexual to be precise, preferring him over, well, everything-
Yoshindo Hiro
Ultimate: Technician
Backstory: N/A
Extra: Is actually like a programmer, hacker, tech fixer mashup. Is gay. Likes Ikei. Died for Ikei. Details can be given lol.
Akahiya Yoshimoto
TW: Rape mention, Homophobe
Ultimate: Heiress
Backstory: Need I say much? She was born into the Yoshimoto family, a higher branch similar to Togami corp. They were actually fiancees at a point in time. She was rap3d by her homophobic father so he could prove that if you have s3x with a guy, you're not gay. Which, clearly, caused her some PTSD and trauma.
Extra: She's secretly dating her bodyguard and no, it's not a cliche plot like they can't love each other. I mean, they can't, but no one is forcing anything on the other. Shizuo actually respects Akahiya's position and stands by, letting her love just sit there and hope they were in more fortunate circumstances.
Shizuo Nakajima
Ultimate: Bodyguard
Backstory: Her family has sworn loyalty to the Yoshimoto Corp for saving their lives from poverty. The Yoshimotos, despite raping their daughter, are somewhat kind? Unless you bring up gay relationships to the father, you'll be fine. Shizuo has dedicated her life to protect the current generation and the others to come.
Extra: Is willing to lay down her life for anyone else, regardless of status, wealth etc because everyone deserves to live, regardless of what they've done. Unless it's murder. Shizuo can't condone murder.
Aki Miiyaro
Ultimate: Stunt Performer
Backstory: She's always been an acrobat since birth, before she became a stunt performer, she uploaded her parkour videos online in hopes of becoming a legit one. Soon because of her good looks and acrobat skills, she was hired to star in an action movie with a female lead! Her brother soon became a movie fanatic of her movies to cheer her on and ended up becoming enamoured with action movies!
Extra: Her brother and her act fairly different! She has a foul mouth while he is pretty polite. She's super hot-headed while he could wait days for someone to apologize.
Kai Miiyaro
Ultimate: Action Movie Fanatic
Backstory: It was only until his sister got a job as a lead stunt performer in an action movie that he became intrigued by them.
Extra: He recommends all his sisters' movies to his friends!
Ichiki Kazuhara
Ultimate: Doctor
Backstory: N/A
Extra: She is fairly short, making people assume her age, which she hates.
Tsukishiro/Yuuki Onishiba
Ultimate: Casino Dealer
Backstory: His father was a gambler who ended up in so much debt, that he was going to sell off his daughter. Yuuki, who loved his sister and loathed his father, had to prevent this. So, he started looking for a job, something to pay off the debt. He was offered a very job at the casino where his father lost all his money, coincidentally. But the money he earned wasn't enough so he was hired by the debt collectors. He was forced to kill or his sister would be given to them.
Extra: Man loves his sister so much, he would die for her. His alias is Tsukishiro because it means White Moon and his sister loves the moon. He uses his alias in the killing game to hide his identity as he doesn't trust anyone but himself.
Yuuna Onishiba
Ultimate: Cheerleader
Backstory: Well, this is Tsukishiro's younger sister.
Extra: After her brother got kidnapped, she ran away from home in search of him. She began attending a high school under the guise of a foreign exchange student from her brother's co-worker's help. She started cheerleading as a hobby and began to like it a lot.
Shuro Kakeru
Ultimate: Actor
Backstory: No idea yet ;-; Maybe something like he constantly had to hide his emotions for a reason and he got used to acting happy?
Extra: He is super rude and non-chalant. He acts like he would only want to profit himself but actually finds that he's unworthy of everything-
Ayuki Sasuka
Ultimate: Jester
Backstory: N/A
Extra: She's super bubbly and bright. She loves hanging out with Hibiki and really wants to break Hibiki out of her shell.
Hibiki Hanase
Ultimate: Florist
Backstory: Her parents owned a flower shop together and she adored flowers because of how pretty they were. She's always been timid and shy because she's not completely sure how to approach others.
Extra: She's my first canonly demiromantic character! She is also Ace!
IM SOBBING OMGGGGG
I NEED TO KNOW HOW HE DIED FOR IKEI AND I JUST- I LOVE HOW THOUGHT OUT YOUR CHARACTERS ARE!!! THEYRE SO GOOD CRIESSSSS - MOD IBUKI
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Hey lovelies!
Welcome!!! Im a little inactive atm but i try my best to keep the writing coming
Please feel free to send in asks or notes! Ill reply to them all (unless they are hate, there is no room for that here) i hope you guys like my blog and are doing ok!!!!
Rules
There are some lines that need to be drawn when suggestions are sent -apologies if these disappoint you- i dont entirely feel comfortable with
OH BTW all my characters or y/n are over the age of 18! I might specify them as being older in certian posts but they will NEVER be a minor!
I will not write:
1. Incest
2. Shit/piss/vomit kinks
3. Pregnancy/ children/ anything to do with kids
4. Paedophilia
5. Sexual assult/rape
6. Eating disorders
7. Self harm
8. Kidnapping
About meeee
So hihihihi im scar and i luv a bit of anime a little addicted if i admit I loveloveloveeeeeee dabi he is my comfort character. I also have a soft spot for hawks and midari. im not comfortable giving out personal deets like my name age or location but i can assure you i am over the age of 18!! i’m not a motivated person i really only made this account for interactions but ill try write suff from time to time lol. Thats about it lol feel free to ask more. (please message me if ive upset you or i missed a tw or you think ive made a mistake) yea thats defo all of it!!!
Ps: you are amazing 🤌🤌
#writing#sports anime#shounen#shoujo#mha#mha fanfiction#kakeguri x reader#mha x reader#boko no hero academia#haikyuu#haikyuu x reader#bnha fanfiction#fanfic
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2/5/21
Plants.
My children looking all cute.
Went in to work on my day off and was there for hours picking up the slack. Also discovered that a certain employee on my team added to the post-its i left with instructions/reminders and chose to mock me, recent policies I’ve implemented, etc. I left 4 postits. The top row. And the middle one in the second row. All others were made by the barista. Last nerve.
This kid has been non stop disrespectful and unprofessional. But he has the most coffee experience and was hired a year before me. He’s a favorite of the manager i replaced. I can’t stand him even though i feel for him. He’s the one who made a rape joke when I was still just a barista, who made a black face joke after “throwing an MLK party” with his white christian friends, and who clocks in when he is not even at work. So guess who got to create an improvement plan and come up with some pre-termination steps because work has none in place. Meeee.
Anyways. Hello fresh meal was delicious tonight.
I also deleted my island and am starting ACNH all over
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There is a book. That I read in highschool. More then 5 years ago. That I read TWICE while in school. I think once as a Freshman and again as a Senior. BUT I can’t remember the name of the book or the AUTHOR. I can’t find the BOOK. IM DYING. I think about this book often sometimes. It was an intense book for my little high school. If the library hasn’t changed much I’m 90% sure I could walk in and find where it was on the shelf but I can’t remember the god damn name and I’m pretty sure I can’t call up my old highschool and be like “haha I graduated some time ago but you may still have a book in that library that haunts me as one of my favorites. I can’t remember the name of it and would like to come into the library to find it.” That not gonna happen. Never. Especially not with the Big C going on. They might not even have it. I think it was an older book when I first read it.
Things I can remember about the book: (R@pe warning):
The girl gets raped. Like I also kind remember she was scared she was gonna get raped, so she braids/knots her pubic hair as much as she can. Still gets raped and then the prick it’s like “You didn’t bleed. Your no virgin. You’re just a whore.”
She runs away into the woods for awhile. Maybe learns some witchy stuff. Think she learns about her self. Maybe over comes her trauma a little.
At some point they have a festival where men and women kinda randomly get together and go have sex in the woods. She gets with a man.
She then gets convinced to go with the man to be his Sheath during the war. I remember I was like “ohoho. The sheath to his sword I get it.” Shes his war time woman basically
I think she thought they’ll get married at some point. Or maybe they fall in love but turns out war guy has a wife and son at home.
I THINK maybe at one point she helps some prostituties out with their problems. Like in a brothel maybe. One of the girls is suppose to be a virgin but oops she fucked someone but they already like auction off her virginity so the main-girl helps them fake some cherry blood some how. Oh maybe there were also thorns on the cover of the book? Maybe.
I also think the main girl is one a ship at some point. She also maybe got stuck by lightning and lived and also she maightve gone blind at some point near the end of the book. Idk. I just wanna reread the book. I remember it being so cool. Please if any of this sounds familiar, tell meeee
#books#library#highschool#favorite books#help#help me find my book#what should I do#reading#book#bibliophile#school library#public libraries#librarian#school librarian#read#book help#book report#school#high school
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Yang has been teasing and prodding Jaune for months now, wanting to take the Blonde's eyes off her sister. Unfortunately, she never accounted for how pent up Jaune would get, the dam breaking when Yang interrupts his training at the gym. Having had enough, Jaune barges into the female shower, determined to mak Yang regret her actions. (Rough, rape, hair pulling, forced orgasms, slight mind break)
(With help from @vecnawrites thank you very much!)
Ever since she found out he had googly eyes for her sister, yang couldn’t stop herself from teasing and prodding Jaune, wanting to keep her sister away from him a bit longer. She knew ruby was growing up but Yang wanted her to stay a kid a bit longer. However as she teased the Arc she never knew about the beasts she was creating. Even as she went to the training gem alone to get a workout done. Jaune was going through the motions, attempting to keep himself calm with the burn of exercise. Ruby had recently confessed to him, blushing darkly, and he accepted. They were currently figuring things out, but one thing was sure: Ruby wasn't ready for sex, instead saying it was ‘okay’ for him to fuck others, as long as he came back to her. He was shocked, but thankful, his semblance worked passively internally with his own Aura, making everything improve and heighten, including his libido...however, with every sunny day, there was always a rain cloud, and that cloud was Yang. She did everything she could to keep them from spending time together when they had downtime, and even *Ruby* was getting annoyed with her over it. Yang was currently minding her own business this time, going into the gym with her tight leggings and tank top. MP3 in hand as her ear buds were on. She didn’t notice Jaune not the way he looked at her as she began to do some squats. She’d eventually tease him today, but she didn’t know she already was, with the way her ass showed off to him each time she did a squat. Jaune ground his teeth together, watching Yang's ass bounce and jiggle as she worked out. Not as bountiful as Blake's ass or as perky as Weiss' or Nora's, and *especially* not Ruby's, but it was still nice. He could feel his cock growing hard, sliding down the leg of his exercise shorts. He refocused on his exercising, not wanting to give his fellow blonde another reason to tease him. He was reaching his limit. Yang felt herself being watched, but ignored it and kept going, once she moved and she did some stretches her leggings hugged against where legs and ass more than ever, giving off the nice shape and figure she had as she teased Jaune indirectly. Jaune switched to push ups as his cock stretched down his inner leg to it's full length. His size was part of the reason that Ruby wanted to wait, after all, a ten inch, wrist thick cock wasn't something to laugh at...he only got harder when it became obvious from the jiggle that Yang wasn't wearing a bra of any sort, catching a protruding nub of a nipple as well as she twisted and stretched herself. If she teased him *one* more time, he would not be held responsible for his actions...
When yang finished her stretches she groaned and sighed while moving her hips a bit. “Damn Im good.” She said slapping her ass nicely in front of a mirror. Loving the shape she had, it was no question that she worked to get strong, and she liked it. Besides an added bonus to teasing Jaune as well. Jaune caught the action, but was unimpressed. Ruby had done the same thing to him to tease him in those tiny things she *dared* call "workout shorts"...and he had subsequently pinned her to the wall and made out with her...as well as give her her first orgasm by accident due to her grinding against his leg. Looking back she noticed Jaune and then noticed the lack of attention she gave her. Smirking Yang still noticed the erection growing in Jaune’s pants and began to rub her tits to ‘adjust’ her top a bit more in front of him. Jaune scoffed under his breath. Yeah, her tits were large, the largest of those he travelled with, but considering he flirted with Weiss and was dating Ruby, hadn't he proved he liked them a bit smaller?...it didn't mean that he wouldn't love to get his hands on them, though. He wasn't stupid. Yang then pushed her hair into a pony tail before moving past him and spoke. “Hey careful Vomit boy, if Ruby gets a glimpse at your short sword she might blush.” She mocked as she took notice of the large bulge in his pants and tried to make fun of it before she went off to the showers. Jaune stilled, fighting his anger, before he took a deep breath as he heard the shower starting...before standing, his cock sticking out and pulling his shorts away from his body as he moved towards the shower. He was horny, and how very...*kind*...of Yang to "volunteer" to sate his libido. Yang was cleaning her body in the showers. Her workout was nice and as a bonus she even teased Jaune. It counted as a win for her, as she cleaned her body she didn’t notice anyone like Jaune enter the showers as she was fully naked and oblivious. Stripping himself naked, Jaune licked his lips as he looked over Yang's naked, glistening body under the hot water. As much of a bitch she could be, she was hot. Walking up slowly behind her, he grabbed her and ground his cock between her ass cheeks, enjoying the squeal of shock he received. “Ahh! J-Jaune?!” She looked back and gasped as she felt something thick and long between her assheeks and she realized what he was doing. “W-Wait Jaune stop! I don’t know what your trying but if you don’t get off me I’l-AH!” She felt his cock rubbing between her asscheeks more.
Jaune chuckled as he reached around and palmed one of her heavy breasts, pinching and tweaking the erect nipple. His other hand came down and cupped her core. He snorted. "*REALLY?*" he asked, trailing his fingers over her soaking folds. "Just a little bit of teasing me, and you're *this* soaked? You truly *are* a slut, aren't you?" he asked.
“Nnngh Ahhh!” She felt him tweak her nipples, making her gasp and moan out involuntarily as she panted and tried to move her body against his but no luck in getting him off. “N-No I’m not! So... nnngh.. let go of me...” she said with her cheeks bright red and her pussy getting wet as something other than water dropped down her thighs.
Slipping one, two, three fingers into Yang easily, Jaune snorted again. "With how easily you're swallowing my fingers? I'm pretty sure I could shove my *fist* in you without trouble..." he chuckled, feeling her walls squeeze around his fingers and her legs tremble. "Did you just *cum*, you slut? *Wow*..."
“Nnngh... be quiet.... just pull your fingers out and go.. before I... I...” Yang felt so helpless. Her pussy already gushing with arousal as she came. Her hips bucking a bit she felt her Pussy clenching down on Jaune’s digits.
Jaune laughed. "No, I don't think I will, slut." he pressed his thumb on Yang's clit and rotated it, getting a squeak and loud moan from the blond in his arms. "You must be the Beacon Bicycle being *this* sensitive? Tell me, how many men, women, or *both* have had you in this position?"
“Nnnaaagh~! No... I haven’t... no. I haven’t even... nnnghaajhhh~!” The feeling of Jaune’s thumb pressing against her clit was enough to make Yang cum and squirt all over Jaune’s fingers. She moaned out loudly as she did, leaning back against him.
"You haven't even what? Been gangbanged by every boy in the year yet?" Jaune asked, his other hand abandoning Yang's breast to grab her lush blonde locks and *tug* on them, yanking her head back. Instead of anger, which he was expecting, he got rolled back violet eyes and a loud, slutty moan. Brow furrowing in thought, he moved his index finger and thumb to circle her clit for a moment...before squeezing. "Oh my *Gods*...not only are you a slut, you're a masochistic one, too!" he said as Yang cried out, pussy squirting hard enough to hit the shower wall before them.
“Ahhhhh! Jaune! Let gooo~!” She wailed out in pleasure as she felt him pull her hair back moaning. Her cheeks were bright red as she felt so embarrassed, being reduced to a cumming puddle as Jaune caused her orgasms. “I-I... I’m not.. aaaa slut~!” She could help but yelp as her clit was circled by his index finger and thumb.
Jaune laughed, tugging her hair harder, enjoying the sight of her breasts rapidly bouncing from how hard and fast she was breathing. "That's what *all* sluts say, Yang! But don't worry, I'm more than happy to accommodate *every single one* of your slutty holes with my cock..." quickly shifting himself, he lightly knocked Yang's leg, making her fall back onto his cock, her pussy making a loud *SLICKT* noise as it swallowed his cock to the base with no difficulty.
“N-No Jaune wa-AIIIIT!” Yang screamed out in the showers as she felt back into his cock. Yelling out as she felt it slip into her pussy entirely. She gasped out with wide eyes as she looked down to see a slight bulge in her abdomen and a bit of blood running by the water from her pussy. She gasped and sputtered as she shook in his grip. Moaning out as Jaune pulled her hair and groaning as she felt it enter her womb. Jaune didn't hesitate a moment, one hand yanking Yang's hair, the fingers of the other roughly pinching and rolling her clit as he moved his hips with focus, feeling his tip slam into her womb, her walls rippling around him in what he recognized as another orgasm. God, he was going to make it so this slut couldn't *live* without his cock! “Guh! J-Jaune... waiaitz.... your brealing meeee~!” Yang said crying out as she felt her pussy being fucked and railed by his cock, her hair being roughly pulled and the feeling of he clit made her cum, even if she didn’t want to. Her voice was coming out and her breaths ragged with each orgasm she had.
"As often as I'm sure you've done this, I doubt I'm breaking you." Jaune felt her clench tightly around him, milking him of his cum. "Here cums your first load, Yang!" he groaned, pressing his hips flush to Yang's ass as he unloaded into her pussy.
“N-No Jaaaauuuunnnee~!” She felt his hot load fill up her pussy and womb, making her gasp out as she went limp in his arms. Speaking incoherently as she was just raped and creampied by the guy she wanted to get away from her sister. As she did go limp she fell out of his hands and fell to the floor panting with her ass in the air as her gaped pussy was oozing out Jaune’s cum along with some red from her hymen being broken by his cock and her tougue stuck out form her mouth, panting as she tried getting up.
Yang's heart shaped ass was upturned towards him, her pussy oozing a mix of his and her cum out of it. Above that, was the untouched pucker of her ass being offered. "Why, thank you, slut...don't mind if I do!" Jaune grabbed Yang's ass and spread it apart, pressing the slick head of his cock to it. With a quick snap of his hips, he slipped into Yang's backdoor, reaching halfway before he met any resistance. "Wow, such a slut...even *BLAKE'S* ass made me work to get in!" granted, he hadn't had sex with Blake, but then Yang didn't need to know that, now did she?
“AHHHH~! Nnngh.. Jau.... Ju....” she couldn’t even say his name right as her toes curled and her hands were flat against the floor as she tried to get up but the feeling of his cock going deep into her ass made her lay back down against the wet floor panting like a slut as Jaune’s cock went deeper in.
Jaune laughed as he began to saw in and out, spanking Yang's ass hard, loving the wobble of the creamy flesh, which was swiftly turning red the more he slapped it. "Admit it, your body was made to take cock! It's all it's made for!"
“Ah! Nnngh Ah~ Jaune... slow... doooen~” she couldn’t even say words right as she felt him thrusting deep into her ass. Stretching her unused hole more as she stuck her tongue out and her eyes crossed from the sheer pleasure and pain she was received.
Yanking on her hair more, Jaune grinned. "What was that? Go *faster*? Okay, just for you!" Jaune thrust harder and faster, his hips slapping into Yang's backside, the loud *cracks* filling the showers, his free hand slipping around and between her thighs, rubbing, pinching, and twisting her clit again.
“Nnngaaaaggg~ jaaaune your gonna drive me crazy!” Yang came again as she felt her ass being pounded before her eyes began to roll up as she felt her clit being rubbed and pinched as she came more. Her legs shaking as she felt her mind breaking.
Jaune chuckled low. "That's the general idea, my slut. Here cums the second helping!" Juane thrust several times more, short and hard, before slamming his hips against Yang's cherry red rear and unloading his second load into her ass. Yang couldn’t say much more as she felt him cum deep inside of her ass. cresmpieing her as she stuck her tongue out and panted loudly as her body shook. Slowly pulling out of Yang's ass, Jaune let her go and watched her collapse to the floor, watching her gaping ass gushing out his cum with a smirk. He knelt down next to her and turned her head so she wouldn't drown, before speaking. "Did you enjoy the show?" he asked their watcher, before gasping slightly, looking down to see that Yang had wrapped her lips around his still hard and cum slick cock, slowly swallowing it down as she looked up at him in adoration.
“Yeah... I guess you can say I did.” Ruby said revealing herself as she saw her sister sucking Jaune’s cock hungrily with her eyes having small pink hearts and the eager gags coming from her as well. “Hopefully she’ll stop teasing you so much.” Ruby said as she walked over and kissed Jaune’s cheek. “That’s my job~”
Turning his head and capturing his smaller girlfriend's lips, Jaune made out with Ruby as he grabbed Yang's hair and *pulled* her down to the base of his cock, her nose buried in his trimmed hair. The choking and tight throat wrapping around him made him cum one final time, his balls emptying down Yang's throat and filling her belly, before yanking her back and unloading the last shots on her face.
Breaking the kiss, Jaune bumped noses with Ruby. "Yeah, and you do it so well..." he glanced down at Yang, looking up at the pair of them with glazed eyes and cum spattered features. "How do you like the picture?"
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THE MUN WATCHES. The Resident - 2xx09 - The Dance - MID SEASON FINALE.
Okay. Here we go. HERE WE GO.
I AM SO READY FOR THIS.
Okay at first I thought this was like a hallucination scene but it is not. ....What the fuck are you doing. What the fuck, Pravesh. I 1000% like Julian right now. All of her reactions are good. Do not make her the reason for your marriage not happening. Go, Julian!
Mina’s dress already looks AMAZING. And I see Nic’s blue dress from the previews. Aaaayyyeeeee.
THE COMMUNITY CLINIC. Damn. This shit is happening fast. I love this whole scene so far. Nic and Mina are dropping those numbers. They have thought this through and are badasses. Take care of your community. <3 Also, Nic watching Marshall closely and then Marshall collapsing. NOOOOOOOOOOOO. :( Don’t let her future father-in-law die. <3 I really do love him. I don’t think he is as bad as Conrad says. Either he’s gotten better or Conrad had child/mom pref. blinders on.
He has Crohn’s? I have a lot of friends with it.
Marshall looking at Nic and going ‘They’re ganging up on meeee’. I adore him liking Nic. It’s so cute.
LAWL. HODAD’s lawyer makes me laugh. I hate him but also he speaks my language of sass and sarcasm.
Um. You want Lane to get off ( .....again... ) Like a doctor that RAPED his patients? I take everything back.. I really do hate him.
Ugh. QuoVadis. Fuck this place.
I am SO HERE for Julian being short and pissy at her job. I really do love her. I always loved her I just didn’t like what they were doing with her in regards to Devon. Like...I do enjoy their chemistry but I am not here for her being the reason that Devon and fiancee don’t work out.
‘I can heeeeaaar you.’
#Bless Marshall Winthrop
MARSHALL JUST GLARIN’ AT HODAD. SO FUNNY.
And his loveliness with Nic. Just.
NIC. “Talk to your dad like you talk to all of your patients.”
CONRAD THINKS HIS DAD LEFT HIS MOM AND HIS DAD JUST SAID THE OPPOSITE AND PAUSED AFTER CONRAD ‘CORRECTED’ HIM. I SMELL LIES. I SMELL MARSHALL PROTECTING HIS SON’S MEMORY OF HIS MOTHER.
‘I don’t want to be a burden.’ ‘You do not have to take care of me.’
I just.......... MARSHALL.
omg. Irving and Bradley. I love them.
JULIAN PLAYIN NANCY DREW.
GUYS. I am so worried they are going to murder Julian.
Oh look. The lab that existed is now gone again. IMAGINE THAT
SHOCKING.
The Raptor is so good at dealing with people even if he doesn’t want to be. lol
Awwwwww. Marshall turns to Nic to explain things.
LAWL. “Anybody but Bell.” HOW CAN YOU HATE HIM. LMFAO. BEAUTIFUL.
oh wow. Marshall listed Conrad as his medical proxy and Conrad is freaking out. I love that Nic is just calm about all this and is not letting Conrad derail himself or try and get out of his reasoning to not be it.
Irving doing a magic trick. Bless this man. “Is losing your sense of humor part of the marriage vows?” // “I’ll be by the elevators. Pacing.”
Is Devon’s mother telling him to just marry Priya?? Please no. [ My sister watched some c-drama last night and at one point this guy was guilted to get engaged the younger sister of his former best friend {or rather one of his group of close friends; she died in a car accident and he was driving). The younger sister was in love with him and tried to kill herself because he didn’t like her. So then the family and a mutual friend basically guilted him into getting engaged to her because she was going to kill herself otherwise INSTEAD OF GETTING HER MENTAL HELP. NO. LET US JUST MAKE THIS GUY THAT HAS NO FEELINGS FOR HER MARRY HER. ] okay good. She was not.
Oh god. Is that FDA guy going to be in the pocket of her work? Julian worry level is increasing.
Oh shit. ......Maybe HODAD will want her killed? Because QuoVadis is about to have a whistle blown on them......
Awwwww. Is Conrad going to ask Raptor/Mina to do his dad’s surgery?? Because that would be super cute. I would love that.
There are so many cute Nic moments in this episode. GOD. I NEED NIC AND CONRAD TO HAVE A BABY. Can’t tell if it is just me or Nic. Either way feeling a bit baby crazy. 99% sure that it is Nic going baby crazy.
Look at my babiessssss. They both look so lovely. ‘We don’t have to leave right away.’ Good Nic. I love her encouraging Conrad to be with his dad. That is a NOICE suit. OH. OOOOOHHHH. HERE IT COMES. ‘Do you want the truth?’
Oh shit. Mommy fell in love with the neighbor. This is some Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time stuff right here. Awwwwwwwwwwwwww. Marshall is making me want to cry. He is so loving and understanding of his dead wife even though they had their differences.. GOD. I LOVE THIS MAN. A+. THEY BETTER NOT KILL HIM. I WILL RIOT.
“I’m glad you came back.”
CONRAD JUST SAID I LOVE YOU TO HIS FATHER.
MARSHALL’S LIP WOBBLING.
THESE GUYS AND THEIR FEELS. MY HEART.
.....................
I called it.
Julian why would you announce who you were meeting. Especially if it is the FDA. This was all covert. Don’t say that shit out loud. That is how you get murdered.
75% of the way done and I am SO FUCKING PLEASED.
But now I am worried I have been lulled into a false sense of security....
Julian I am 100% with you, babe.
NO. NO SHE IS NOT A TEAM PLAYER. YOU ARE RIGHT. BECAUSE YOU A LIAR.
I’m sorry. Did Nic just say she doesn’t want kids? Conrad also looked SUPER surprised at that declaration. She keeps lighting up when around children or interacting with them. She is so freaking good with them. WHAT IS THIS.
Is this because of the miscarriage? I know she said something about currently having to take care of Jessie but she can’t use her sister as an excuse. I’m thinking Nic has some PTSD from the miscarriage. It is very common and super not talked about. I know she has a lot of things going on. Probably a lot of pent up feelings. Her mom dying when Nic was young, Jessie and her drug problems, the miscarriage, Conrad and his frustrating problems with opening up. But the last few episodes it seems like Nic is pretty happy but as we all know depression is easy to hide from others. And we saw that panic attack at Halloween. Definitely anxiety to some degree.
omg. Irving. ‘Hey guys. any of you seen Devon?’ Not good.
I am not okay with any of this. Devon is that guy that I hate. Like. How dare you do this to her on this day. ‘Why did you wait until now to tell me?’
‘you have humiliated me. and you think this little speech gets you off the hook?’
I give Priya 100% permission to murder her ex-fiancee.
SO. How the fuck is this going to go over when he goes downstairs and tells them he is calling it off?
Oh no. The dad is going to have a complication post-surgery isn’t he? Is it because of Mina rushing at that one point? Jeez. They are laying on the parallel between him and Marshall thick.
OH GOD.
MARSHALL.
NO. GET HIM SURGERY RIGHT NOW.
FUCK IS HODAD GOING TO BE THE ONLY ONE ON CALL RIGHT NOW????
Because if not, FUCK.
......FUCKING HELL.
MOTHER FUCKER. AND NIC HAD THEM TURN OFF THEIR PHONES. GOD DAMN IT
HODAD YOU KILL HIM I WILL FUCKING MURDER YOU.
AND NOW JULIAN IS GOING TO DRIVE INTO A DITCH SOMEWHERE
Why is everyone still chilling at the not-wedding???? TURN YOUR PHONES BACK ON. TURN THEM ON RIGHT NOW.
IT IS TIME TO RIOT.
JESUS CHRIST
Yes, Julian you are being followed. Maybe she pretends to crash her car? Or not. She legit ran off the road. Fuck.
Okay but....Nic and Conrad dancing together with no music was super sweet and I am pissed that nice moment was ruined but HIS DAD BETTER NOT DIE. AND WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT NIC NOT WANTING KIDS RIGHT NOW.
Preview: Okay. So it looks like HODAD shares a look with Conrad from the operating suite. and it looks like a not good one...but then there is another clip that looks like Conrad at his dad’s bed post surgery??? HE BETTER LIVE.
#☤ ┊ THE MUN WATCHES. / ◜ ❝ too many shows to little time ❞◞#the resident#the resident spoilers#I AM SO EXCITE
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Lanas day continued
We reached Yunas room and Gray was not in there.
“Where the fuck is Gray?” Joni announced
"I don’t know haven’t seen the fucker”
“Thank you Aiden!” I had assumed she would leave with that but she walked over and made herself a refreshment and found herself a place on the couch to sit.
I wondered if her and Gray had sex. I am pretty sure they don’t even though Grays smugness he seems to try to get people to think they do. She's with Noah anyhow I am pretty sure. Do they have sex? I have heard Jonis not the sexual type. Unsure if that's from her childhood or what. It spooks me out knowing so many people's intimate life stories. Yet Harry seems to get some sick pleasure of making sure everyone knows everyone else's past tragedies. I remember when they had to put me in the “worst life” contest I was disturbed them arguing about if getting raped or parents dying is worse. How can you even compare it? Spooky. Anyhow the room was popping from just a glance I noticed Aiden was here seemingly blazed outta his mind. Yuna by his side in a similar boat and camping with the pipe. Didn’t see Marcus but noticed his coat so he probably was here earlier, maybe he’ll come back. Natsu and Adam sat on the couch thumb wrestling loudly and Rikku sat in corner coloring in a colouring book.
Yuna definitely made her room welcoming and cozy for a large amount of people. She had two couches, 3 chairs, along with her bed for places to sit. Her table had on it numerous apparatus for smoking weed, plus a giant jar of weed next to it, a hookah, a cigar box filled with cigarettes and even another box filled with heroin paraphernalia for her other friends. She herself didn’t use, but she liked keeping it around for her friends. Our sin savior really was a saint.
She smiled warmly at me and busied herself asking if I needed anything and pulling out a chair for me.
“No I am good, thanks Yuna.” I smiled. Yes, these were my people. Needed to reset after what I just went thru with Jenn. Should I mention to Aiden he probably was going to come home to an angry girlfriend? Nah best he finds out for himself and I leave myself out of it.
Aiden began busying himself making up a hit for him and Joni who yelled at him to make her one. I looked away. Even though I had seen people shooting up on multiple occasions it still made me feel a little weird watching it. I heard Joni swearing about missing her vein.
“Aidennn find a vein for meeee” She whined.
“What are you gonna do for me?’
“Please I’lll get Noah to suck your dick”
Aiden scoffed at this but proceeded to hook her up. He was incredible at finding veins I once saw him find one between his toes to use.
“Shit this stuff isn’t as good as Grays, where the fuck is he?” Joni said this while nodding. The junk could be 1% actual dope and 99% chocobo shit and she still would shoot it up.
“Well go find fucking Gray then.” Aiden made himself comfy leaning against Yuna for support. I wonder how Jenn would feel seeing this. Maybe that's why she doesn’t come around. I wanted to bring up the jealousy thing but was waiting for Marcus. Also probably better to do it with Aiden not in the room.
“THUMB WRESTLER CHAMPION OF THE WORLD FUCK YEA BITCHES.” Natsu got up and made a lap around the room. Accidentally kicking Rikkus shoe on his way around
“YOU STUPID FUCK WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING!!” Rikku got up and pushed Natsu who proceeded to fall over the table and knock many things over in the process. Yuna gently moved Aiden to a pillow then rushed to help him up and began cleaning up the mess. I got up to help her out and almost jumped out of my clothes, noticing christian in the corner. Was he here the whole time and I missed him? He’s so strange sometimes when I am in the dark in my room I swear to god he’s breathing in the corner.
Chrisitan smiled his creepy smile and spoke to me “Hm just sensing my presence?”
I thought he had to touch people to read their minds. I hope I am right on that.
“Yea sorry didn't see ya before”
He smiled knowingly at me and lurked back in his corner. I swear to god the corner go darker when he moved back in it.
“Nobody notices your ugly ass mug” Aiden flashed his raised lip smirk at Christian then stared at me. “Wait what the fuck are you doing in here get the fuck out I don’t need your dumb fuck self around right now.”
“When shall I return?’
“3:14 A.M now fuck off”
Christian lurked out of the room giving me strange smile on the way out. The guy gave me goosebumps.
Aiden seemed to notice I walked in now “Where have you been? You look weird”
Fuck is my uneasieness showing? Play it cool Lana. “umm I was-”
“We were hanging with Jenn ! Why don’t you bring her around more Aiden? She’s soooo much fun!” Joni giggled and lurked around looking for fresh booze.
Aiden stared at her not seeming to know if she was joking or not. For being as sarcastic as he is, he seems to have difficulty picking it up himself.
“Why were you with Jenn?” Oh shit his paranoia seemed to be coming out.
I quickly spoke before Joni could fuck it up “I was looking for some mascara and I assumined she had some. We just hung out a bit.”
“She kicked us out, she just freaked out, out of nowhere.” Joni either forgot about the cigarette dropping or didn’t feel that was relevant to Jenn freaking out.
“Oh no is she alright?” Yuna looked at us with real concern. I wonder if she knows Jenn’s feelings towards her. Not that it would change her concern. She still worries over Axel. The flaming fuck of a person who not even sure why they still keep him around.
“Oh yeah she's fine, she just got upset over her pants.”
Aiden seemed to cool off after this, I assume she freaked out over her clothes a lot so he didn’t need to venture into why she freaked out. Their relationship has always been a curiosity to me. How the hell did those two end up? It would be like if I got with Thomas, or worse Harry.
Marcus meandered in with Buddy and retook his chair with his jacket. Before this though he walked up to me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I grew so giddy inside. Marcus rarely showed physical affection to me in public. Butterflies swam around in my stomach.
I wanted to be with Marcus so bad, pathetically so. We kinda were in ways like we had sex regularly enough. I knew he cared about me too but dating just wasn’t his style. At least to me since I knew he had a girlfriend named Lisa for quite some time. He had various reasons why we weren’t boyfriend/girlfriend. Generally being about his camp and it not being a suitable place to date. But its like we are gonna at this camp literally forever and we didn;t age or die so couldn’t even escape it in that way. We had in past had some people as they put it “actually die” but we always had to go on a mission then to do something weird like get a stone or a potion or something and then they were brought back. So yea previous point confirmed, couldn’t actually die. I also suspected he liked to keep himself available for any other girl he wanted to have sex with. That I would be okay with, I can do an open relationship I like sex as much as the next guy. It just sucks and so confusing. Some days he’s all loving and super into me. Then other days its like he’s meeting me for the first time. For today thought it seems like the former, which perks my day up.
“Bro Marcus guess whose the thumb wrestler champion?”
“Wild guess, you? Perhaps?”
“Yea bro its me, wanna challenge the pro?”
“Mmmm perhaps after I have trained up. Wouldn’t want to give you such an inadequate fight.”
“Aight brah! I gonna remember this and then “ Natsu blew on both thumbs then proceeded to double thumbs up “Its on!!!”
“Take on the thumb it get you numb. Fight with all your might but Natsu’s know shiatsu and them thumbs leave ya a bum” Adam rapped
“BROOOOO that was fuckin tight !! Gimme 5!” Natsu and Adam did a minute long handshake that they musta had to have rehearsed at least 100 times.
“Aww my dear Lana where have you been I was looking for you.”
“I was hanging with Jenn.” oh right I was hanging with Jenn! I have to tell him the findings.
Still gotta wait for Aiden to leave though, damn. I decided to try to speed that up. “Idk maybe you should check on Jenn she did seem pretty upset.”
He scowled at me and I was terrified he was gonna flip out.
“Dude I go check on her, she likes me” Natsu stated this with so much conviction for a second I believed him
“You stay the fuck away from her.” I think if Aiden wasn’t so high he woulda been a lot more scary at this point.
“Nah bro you sit tight me and Adam got this come on bro.” They got up rather quickly and huddled out of the room. Aiden at this sighed grabbed his gear and followed them out.
“Damn white people be actin crazy all day” Buddy began rolling himself a blunt and shakin his head muttering about white folks. We didn’t really notice skin colour in Spira, it was just race of Al Bhed but here they seem to hate black people. I feel bad for Buddy in both worlds he’s looked down on. I guess apartly after Yuna saved the world, Al Bheds gotta get a lot more involved in shit. I missed that though, didn’t get to benefit from the perks of sin being gone.
Joni rolled herself outta the bed and muttered about finding Gray and also departed the room.
Marcus turned himself towards me “So you were with Jenn? No wonder I couldn’t find you I would not have assumed you two would be together.”
“Well I went in there to kinda see what Jenn was all about.”
“Wait Lana shut up I am calling Jesse, I know he’ll wanna hear about this.” Rikku took out her phone and loudly yelled into it “JESSE GET THE FUCK IN YUNAS ROOM WE TALKING SHIT ON JENN.”
“I wouldn’t say we talking shit on Je--”
“Lana shut up you know its gossip and you know theres only shit to talk about with her. She suckssss so bad.”
Jesse entered surprisingly fast. “YO YO bitches whats the 404?”
“Whats 404.” Rikku asked while pulling her skirt up some before pushing Jesse on a chair and planting her ass right on his dick. Smiling mischievously while doing so and winking at him.
“Ya know hot gos, ins and outs, whats the fad”
“hee hee your so funny.” She then proceeded to intensely make out with him
“So Lana relay your information to us” Marcus smiled and patted the chair next to his
I moved into it and he pulled it closer to his to place his hand on my thigh. Fuck I loved it
“Okay well me and Joni were in there, well first Gray but he left and Joni was in there looking for Gray but well anyhow Yuna got brought up and she seems like shes like jealous of Yuna.”
Rikku peeled her face off Jesses at this “OMG no way thats so funny and like she probably totally is cause shes such a cunt and Yunies the bestest!”
Buddy laughed slapping his knee while doing so “Man dat girl don’t got no sense to her.”
“I feel Jenn probably sees some threat in our dear Yuna here, yet if she would really grasp who Yuna is, she would realize that everything is in order.” Marcus proclaimed. His hand was rubbing back and forth up my thigh.
Yuna looked quite flustered at all this and grabbed the blunt from Buddy to take a surprising large hit for her frame. Exhaling with ease and no coughing. Impressive.
Sighing she sat in the bed “I don’t understand why she would be jealous of me, shes so beautiful and wonderful and a fantastic artist I just don’t see it.”
“Yunie shes jealous your gonna fuck Aiden !”
Yuna blushed and looked down “Oh I didn’t realize she felt that way.”
“Damn she should be jealous if that boy had any brains he should get with you, your a steal girlie.” Buddy pinched her shoulders a little and Yuna laid her head on his.
“Oh Buddy your the best friend a girl could have!”
“Seriously though Jenns a-” Jesse looked both ways dramatically for effect then hollered “A BIIITTCHHHH”
Rikku laughed her bimbo laugh she used specifically when flirting with dudes “Shes more like a class A cunt with a pretty face, I hate her.”
Rikkus bitcheness was impressively callous.
“I wouldn’t call her that, I would say she is more ,perhaps, confused. A confused girl in a hard world she hasn’t fully come to grasp.”
Passing outside the door I noticed Gray and Marcus called out to him
“Oh there you are Gray, please come join us. Lana’s observations have led us to discuss, why Jenn has a special hatred for our dear Yuna here.”
Gray looked in on us. He looked like he had seen a ghost. He looked like shit
----then to your story----
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On 21 August 2017, the Great American Eclipse caused a diagonal swathe of darkness to fall across the United States from Charleston, South Carolina on the East Coast to Lincoln City, Oregon on the West. In Manhattan, which was several hundred miles outside the path of totality, a gentle gloom fell over the city. Yet still office workers emptied out onto the pavements, wearing special paper glasses if they had been organised; holding up their phones and blinking nervously if they hadn’t. Despite promises that it was to be lit up for the occasion, there was no discernible twinkle from the Empire State Building; on Fifth Avenue, the darkened glass façade of Trump Tower grew a little dimmer. In Central Park Zoo, where children and tourists brandished pinhole cameras made from cereal boxes, Betty, a grizzly bear, seized the opportunity to take an unscrutinised dip.
Across the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Oscar Isaac, a 38-year-old Guatemalan-American actor and one of the profession’s most talented, dynamic and versatile recent prospects, was, like Betty, feeling too much in the sun. It was his day off from playing Hamlet in an acclaimed production at the Public Theater in Manhattan and he was at home on vocal rest. He kept a vague eye on the sky from the balcony of the one-bedroom apartment he shares — until their imminent move to a leafier part of Brooklyn — with his wife, the Danish documentary film-maker Elvira Lind, their Boston Terrier French Bulldog-cross Moby (also called a “Frenchton”, though not by him), and more recently, and to Moby’s initial consternation, their four-month-old son, Eugene.
Plus, he’s seen this kind of thing before. “I was in Guatemala in 1992 when there was a full solar eclipse,” he says the next day, sitting at a table in the restaurant of a fashionably austere hotel near his Williamsburg apartment, dressed in dark T-shirt and jeans and looking — amazingly, given his current theatrical and parental commitments — decidedly fresh. “The animals went crazy; across the whole city you could hear the dogs howling.” Isaac happened to be in Central America, he’ll mention later, because Hurricane Andrew had ripped the roof off the family home in Miami, Florida, while he and his mother, uncle, siblings and cousins huddled inside under couches and cushions. So yes, within the spectrum of Oscar Isaac’s experiences, the Great American Eclipse is no biggie.
Yet there is another upcoming celestial event that will have a reasonably significant impact on Isaac’s life. On 15 December, Star Wars: The Last Jedi will be released in cinemas, which, if you bought a ticket to Star Wars: The Force Awakens — and helped it gross more than $2bn worldwide — you’ll know is a pretty big deal. You’ll also know that Isaac plays Poe Dameron, a hunky, wise-cracking X-wing fighter pilot for the Resistance who became one of the most popular characters of writer-director JJ Abram’s reboot of the franchise thanks to Isaac’s charismatic performance and deadpan delivery (see his “Who talks first?” exchange with Vader-lite baddie Kylo Ren: one of the film’s only comedic beats).
And if you did see Star Wars: The Force Awakens you’ll know that, due to some major father-son conflict, there’s now an opening for a loveable, rogueish, leather-jacket-wearing hero… “Heeeeeh!” says Isaac, Fonzie-style, when I say as much. “Well, there could be, but I think what [The Last Jedi director] Rian [Johnson] did was make it less about filling a slot and more about what the story needs. The fact is now that the Resistance has been whittled to just a handful of people, they’re running for their lives, and Leia is grooming me — him — to be a leader of the Resistance, as opposed to a dashing, rogue hero.”
While he says he has “not that much more, but a little more to do” in this film, he can at least be assured he survives it; he starts filming Episode IX early next year.
If Poe seems like one of the new Star Wars firmament now — alongside John Boyega’s Finn, Daisy Ridley’s Rey and Poe’s spherical robot sidekick BB-8 — it’s only because Isaac willed it. Abrams had originally planned to kill Poe off, but when he met Isaac to discuss him taking the part, Isaac expressed some reservations. “I said that I wasn’t sure because I had already done that role in other movies where you kind of set it up for the main people and then you die spectacularly,” he remembers. “What’s funny is that [producer] Kathleen Kennedy was in the room and she was like, ‘Yeah, you did that for us in Bourne!’” (Sure enough, in 2012’s Bourne Legacy, Jeremy Renner’s character, Aaron Cross, steps out of an Alaskan log cabin while Isaac’s character, Outcome Agent 3, stays inside; a few seconds later the cabin is obliterated by a missile fired from a passing drone.)
This ability to back himself — judiciously and, one can imagine after meeting him, with no small amount of steely charm — seems to have served Isaac well so far. It’s what also saw him through the casting process for his breakthrough role in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2014 film Inside Llewyn Davis, about a struggling folk singer in Sixties New York, partly based on the memoir of nearly-was musician Dave Van Ronk. Isaac, an accomplished musician himself, got wind that the Coens were casting and pestered his agent and manager to send over a tape, eventually landing himself an audition.
“I knew it was based on Dave Van Ronk and I looked nothing like him,” says Isaac. “He was a 6ft 5in, 300lb Swede and I was coming in there like… ‘Oh man.’” But then he noticed that the casting execs had with them a picture of the singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne. “Suddenly, I got some confidence because he’s small and dark so I said to the casting director, ‘Oh cool, is that a reference?’ And they were like, 'No, he just came in here and he killed it.’” Isaac throws his head back and laughs. “They literally said, 'He killed it.’ It was so good!”
In the end it was Isaac who killed it in Inside Llewyn Davis, with a performance that was funny, sad, cantankerous and moving. The film was nominated for two Oscars and three Golden Globes, one of them for Isaac in the category of: “Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture — comedy or musical” (he lost to Leonardo DiCaprio for The Wolf of Wall Street). No cigar that time, but in 2016 he won a Golden Globe for his turn as a doomed mayor in David Simon’s HBO drama, Show Me a Hero. This year, and with peculiar hillbilly affectation, Vanity Fair proclaimed Isaac “the best dang actor of his generation”. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that, some day very soon, Isaac may become the first Oscar since Hammerstein to win the award whose name he shares. Certainly, the stars seem ready to align.
Of course, life stories do not run as neatly as all that and Isaac’s could have gone quite differently. He was born Óscar Isaac Hernández Estrada in Guatemala City, to which his father, Óscar, now a pulmonologist, had moved from Washington DC in order to attend medical school (having escaped to the States from Cuba just before the revolution) and where he met Isaac’s mother, Eugenia. Five months after Isaac was born, the family — also including an older sister, Nicole, and later joined by a younger brother, Michael — moved to America in order for Óscar Senior to complete his residencies: first to Baltimore, then New Orleans, eventually settling in Miami when Isaac was six.
Miami didn’t sit entirely right with him. “The Latin culture is so strong which was really nice,” he says, “but you had to drive everywhere, and it’s also strangely quite conservative. Money is valued, and nice cars and clothes, and what you look like, and that can get sort of tedious.” Still it was there, aged 11, that he took to the stage for the first time. The Christian middle school he attended put on performances in which the kids would mime to songs telling loosely biblical stories, including one in which Jesus and the Devil take part in a boxing match in heaven (note the word “loosely”). For that one, Isaac played the Devil. In another, he played Jesus calling Lazarus from the grave. “So yeah,” he laughs, “I’ve got the full range!’
He enjoyed the mixture of the attention and the “extreme nature of putting yourself out there in front of a bunch of people”, plus it gave him some release from stresses at home: his parents were separating and his mother became ill. His school failed to see these as sufficiently mitigating factors for Isaac’s subsequent wayward behaviour and, following an incident with a fire extinguisher, he was expelled. “It wasn’t that bad. They wanted me out of there. I was very happy to go.”
Following his parents’ divorce, he moved with his mother to Palm Beach, Florida, where he enrolled at a public high school. “It was glorious, I loved it,” says Isaac. “I loved it so much. I could walk to the beach every day, and go to this wild school where I became friends with so many different kinds of people. I met these guys who lived in the trailer parks in Boynton Beach and started a band, and my mom and my little brother would come and spy on me to see if I was doing drugs or anything, and I never was.”
Never?
“No, because I didn’t drink till I was, like, 24. Even though I stopped being religious, I liked the individuality of being the guy who didn’t do that stuff. Maybe it was the observer part of me… I liked being a little bit detached, and I wasn’t interested in doing something that was going to make me lose control.”
When he was 14, Isaac and his band-mates played at a talent show. They chose to perform 'Rape Me’ by Nirvana. “I remember singing to the parents, 'Rape meeee!’” Isaac laughs so hard he gives a little snort. “Yeah,” he says, composing himself again, “we didn’t win.” But something stuck and Isaac ended up being in a series of ska-punk outfits, first Paperface, then The Worms and later The Blinking Underdogs who, legend has it, would go on to support Green Day. “Supported… Ha! It was a festival…” says Isaac. “But hey, we played the same day, at the same festival, within a few hours of each other.” (On YouTube you can find a clip from 2001 of The Blinking Underdogs performing in a battle of the bands contest at somewhere called Spanky’s. Isaac is wearing a 'New York City’ T-shirt and brandishing a wine-coloured Flying V electric guitar.)
Still, Isaac’s path was uncertain. At one point he thought about joining the Marines. “The sax player in my band had grown up in a military family so we were like, 'Hey, let’s work out and get all ripped and be badasses!’” he says. “I was like, 'Yeah, I’ll do combat photography!’ My dad was really against it. He said, 'Clinton’s just going to make up a war for you guys to go to,’ so I had to have the recruiters come all the way down to Miami where my dad was living and they convinced him to let me join. I did the exam, I took the oath, but then we had gotten the money together to record an album with The Worms. I decided I’d join the Reserves instead. I said I wanted to do combat photography. They said, 'We don’t do that in the Reserves, but we can give you anti-tank?’ Ha! I was like, 'it’s a liiiiiittle different to what I was thinking…’”
Even when he started doing a few professional theatre gigs in Miami he was still toying with the idea of a music career, until one day, while in New York playing a young Fidel Castro in an off-Broadway production of Rogelio Martinez’s play, When it’s Cocktail Time in Cuba, he happened to pass by renowned performing arts school Juilliard. On a whim, he asked for an audition. He was told the deadline had passed. He insisted. They gave him a form. He filled it in and brought it back the next day. They post-dated it. He got in. And the rest is history. Only it wasn’t.
“In the second year they would do cuts,” Isaac says. “If you don’t do better they kick you out. All the acting teachers wanted me on probation, because they didn’t think I was trying hard enough.” Not for the first or last time, he held his ground. “It was just to spur me to do better I think, but I definitely argued.”
He stayed for the full course at Juilliard, though it was a challenge, not only because he’d relaxed his own non-drinking rule but also because he was maintaining a long-distance relationship with a girlfriend back in Florida. “For me, the twenties were the more difficult part of life. Four years is just… masochistic. We were a particularly close group but still, it’s really intense.” (Among his fellow students at the time were the actress Jessica Chastain, with whom he starred in the 2014 mob drama A Most Violent Year, and Sam Gold, his director in Hamlet.) He says he broadly kept it together: “I was never a mess, I just had a lot of confusion.” He got himself an agent in the graduation scrum, and soon started picking up work: a Law & Order here, a Shakespeare in the Park there; even, in 2006, a biblical story to rival his early efforts, playing Joseph in The Nativity Story (the first film to hold its premiere at the Vatican, no less).
By the time he enrolled at Juilliard he had already dropped “Hernández” and started going by Oscar Isaac, his two first given names. And for good reason. “When I was in Miami, there were a couple of other Oscar Hernándezes I would see at auditions. All [casting directors] would see me for was 'the gangster’ or whatever, so I was like, 'Well, let me see if this helps.’ I remember there was a casting director down there because [Men in Black director] Barry Sonnenfeld was doing a movie; she said, 'Let’s bring in this Oscar Isaac,’ and he was like, 'No no no! I just want Cubans!’ I saw Barry Sonnenfeld a couple of years ago and I told him that story — 'I don’t want a Jew, I want a Cuban!’”
Perhaps it’s a sad indictment of the entertainment industry that a Latino actor can’t expect a fair run at parts without erasing some of the ethnic signifiers in his own name, but on a personal basis at least, Isaac’s diverse role roster speaks to the canniness of his decision. He has played an English king in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood(2010), a Russian security guard in Madonna’s Edward-and-Mrs-Simpson drama W.E. (2011), an Armenian medical student in Terry George’s The Promise (2017) and — yes, Barry — a small, dark American Jew channelling a large blond Swede.
But then, of course, there are roles he’s played where ethnicity was all but irrelevant and talent was everything. Carey Mulligan’s ex-con husband Standard in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive in 2011 (another contender for his “spectacular deaths” series); mysterious technocrat Nathan Bateman in the beautifully poised sci-fi Ex Machina (2014) written and directed by Alex Garland (with whom he has also shot Annihilation — dashing between different sound stages at Pinewood while shooting The Last Jedi — which is due out next year). Or this month’s Suburbicon, a neat black comedy directed by George Clooney from an ancient Coen brothers script, in which Isaac cameos as a claims investigator looking into some dodgy paperwork filed by Julianne Moore and Matt Damon, and lights up every one of his brief scenes.
Isaac is a very modern kind of actor: one who shows range and versatility without being bland; who is handsome with his dark, intense eyes, heavy brows and thick curls, but not so freakishly handsome that it is distracting; who shows a casual disregard for the significance of celebrity and keeps his family, including his father, who remarried and had another son and daughter, close. It’s a testament to his skill that when he takes on a character, be it English royal or Greenwich Village pauper, it feels like — with the possible exception of Ray LaMontagne — it could never have been anyone else.
Today, though, he’s a Danish prince. To say that Isaac’s turn in Hamlet has caused a frenzy in New York would be something of an understatement. Certainly, it’s a sell-out. The Sunday before we meet, Al Pacino had been in. So scarce are tickets that Isaac’s own publicist says she’s unlikely to be able to get me one, and as soon as our interview is over I hightail it to the Public Theater to queue up to be put on the waiting list for returns for tonight’s performance. (I am seventh in line, and in my shameless desperation I tell the woman in front of me that I’ve flown over from London just to interview Isaac in the hope that she might let me jump the queue. She ponders it for a nanosecond, before another woman behind me starts talking about how her day job involves painting pictures of chimpanzees, and I lose the crowd.)
Clearly, Hamlet is occupying a great deal of Isaac’s available brain space right now, and not just the fact that he’s had to memorise approximately 1,500 lines. “Even tonight it’s different, what the play means to me,” he says. “It’s almost like a religious text, because it has the ambiguity of the Bible where you can look at one line and it can mean so many different things depending on how you meditate on it. Even when I have a night where I feel not particularly connected emotionally, it can still teach me. I’ll say a line and I’ll say, 'Ah, that’s good advice, Shakespeare, thank you.’”
Hamlet resonates with Isaac for reasons that he would never have foreseen or have wished for. While playing a young man mourning the untimely death of his father, Isaac was himself a young man mourning the untimely death of his mother, who died in February after an illness. Doing the play became a way to process his loss.
“It’s almost like this is the only framework where you can give expression to such intense emotions. Otherwise anywhere else is pretty inappropriate, unless you’re just in a room screaming to yourself,” he says. “This play is a beautiful morality tale about how to get through grief; to experience it every night for the last four months has definitely been cathartic but also educational; it has given structure to something that felt so overwhelming.”
In March, a month after Eugenia died, Isaac and Lind married, and then in April Eugene, named in remembrance of his late grandmother, was born. I ask Isaac about the shift in perspective that happens when you become a parent; whether he felt his own focus switch from being a son to being a father.
“It happened in a very dramatic way,” he says. “In a matter of three months my mother passed and my son was born, so that transition was very alive, to the point where I was telling my mom, 'I think you’re going to see him on the way out, tell him to listen to me as much as he can…’” He gives another laugh, but flat this time. “It was really tough because for me she was the only true example of unconditional love. It’s painful to know that that won’t exist for me anymore, other than me giving it to him. So now this isn’t happening” — he raises his arms towards the ceiling, gesturing a flow coming down towards him — “but now it goes this way” — he brings his arms down, making the same gesture, but flowing from him to the floor.
Does performing Hamlet, however pertinent its themes, ever feel like a way of refracting his own experiences, rather than feeling them in their rawest form?
“Yeah it is,” he says, “I’m sure when it’s over I don’t know how those things will live.” He pauses. “I’m a little bit… I don’t know if 'concerned’ is the right word, but as there’s only two weeks left of doing it, I’m curious to see what’s on the other end, when there’s no place to put it all.”
It’s a thoughtful, honest answer; one that doesn’t shy away from the emotional complexities of what he’s experiencing and is still to face, but admits to his own ignorance of what comes next. Because, although Isaac is clearly dedicated to his current lot, he has also suffered enough slings and arrows to know where self-determination has its limits.
What he does know is happening on the other end of Hamlet is “disconnection”, also known as a holiday, and he plans to travel with Lind to Maine where her documentary, Bobbi Jene, is screening at a film festival. Then he will fly to Buenos Aires for a couple of months filming Operation Finale, a drama about the 1960 Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann which Isaac is producing and in which he also stars as Mossad agent Peter Malkin, with Eichmann played by Sir Ben Kingsley. At some point after that he will get sucked into the vortex of promotion for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, of which today’s interview is an early glimmer.
But before that, he will unlock the immaculate black bicycle that he had chained up outside the hotel and disappear back into Brooklyn. Later, he will take the subway to Manhattan an hour-and-a-half or so before curtain. To get himself ready, and if the mood takes him, he will listen to Venezuelan musician Arca’s self-titled album or Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie and Lowell, light a candle, and look at a picture of his mother that he keeps in his dressing room.
Then, just before seven o'clock, he will make his way to the stage where, for the next four hours, he will make the packed house believe he is thinking Hamlet’s thoughts for the very first time, and strut around in his underpants feigning madness, and — for reasons that make a lot more sense if you’re there which, thanks to a last-minute phone-call from the office of someone whose name I never did catch, I was — stab a lasagna. And then at the end of Act V, when Hamlet lies dead, and as lightning staggers across the night sky outside the theatre, finally bringing the promised drama to the Manhattan skyline, the audience, as one, will rise.
Fashion by Allan Kennedy. Star Wars: The Last Jedi is out on 15 December. The December issue of Esquire is out now.
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