Qui-Gon Jinn: Certified Hypocrite, Fascinating Failure, Mass of Contradictions

For starters, I am just going to let direct quotes from the man speak for itself.

Some excerpts from Master & Apprentice

Wise words.

Wait a minute...

😯😯 What the hell is happening here? All quotes are from the same man in one book.

Qui-Gon Jinn doesn't have an ounce of self-awareness and it is so hilariously terrible.

What is even better (or worse), this is perfectly in line with The Phantom Menace characterization .

I mean,

Remember when he said all this than spent the rest of the movie obsessing over prophecies, the chosen one and literally the future?

"He still has so much to learn of the living force." Qui-Gon Jinn about Obi-Wan in the council scene

After that scene

"The boy is dangerous. They all sense it why can't you?" Obi-Wan Kenobi about Anakin Skywalker to Qui-Gon Jinn

You see Obi-Wan, Master Jinn here has completely lost any sense of "here and now" between his crusade against darkness and divine mission to save the Galaxy.

This in turn, unsurprisingly blinds him to the fact Anakin is not suitable to become a Jedi. Or at least not ready to directly move on to becoming a padawan.

Anakin himself would suffer in a road that is not meant for him. But he is not planning for Anakin the child. He is thinking about The Glorious Chose One.

He is the chosen one. You all must, see it.

And yet from Qui-Gon's perspective it is Obi-Wan who doesn't understand the Living Force.

I have to say if he is truly a student of the living force as many fans claim he has been failing the class for at least 8 years.

Let's move on to another set of entertaining and horrifyingly oblivious quotes from M&A.

If you look upward you can observe Mr. Here and Now in his natural habitat.

He really acts like future is set in stone than thinks he is the right person to talk about about concentrating in the moment. Unbelievable.

Let's look at this dialogue again. In contrast with the excerpt from above.

He is all about the future when it suits him. But when Obi-Wan makes a remark on it he obviously should just focus on the moment. This is actually the third time in this post where he contradicts himself while specifically chastising or criticizing Obi-Wan for something Qui-Gon actually does.

Now I don't think Qui-Gon acts with malice. But it is important to point out his obliviousness has become a way of ensuring he is never in the wrong.

He suffers from an immense hubris. And a man obsessed with prophecies and chosen ones definitely has some kind of savior complex.

But notably Jinn doesn't actually want to put any effort into enacting real change with his limited yet existent capabilities.

He turns down a council seat in M&A because he thinks it would hold him down. From what? Dear God, the reason they offered him a seat was for different opinions. Qui-Gon can complain all he wants but one time he actually had a chance to make his opinions a reality he freaking bailed.

Why? He doesn't want to face his own limits. He can't bare to try and fail. It is much easier to sustain a superiority complex when you are complaining from the sidewalk.

So he fixates all this belief onto prophecies, visions that will magically cure the Galaxy. And of course his place to help fulfill them. To the point where it is the one thing that keeps him standing.

He has binded meaning of his life and belief for goodness dangerously close to his supposed importance in the Galaxy. (You can feel the influences of his former master)

His absolute refusal to engage with reality turns him into mass of contradictions. Cause he doesn't know what he will find or become if he is mistaken in his belief of himself.

He can't face reinvention on the event of defeat.

But this situation was different. It had to be, because the only thing Qui-Gon knew to be absolutely true was that his vision was real.

Oh by the way, it turned out he misunderstood the vision. But when does being wrong ever stopped Qui-Gon Jinn?

No words.

Only Qui-Gon could have come near declaring himself a prophet after making a mistake. Maybe stop and reflect man? Just stop and think about your actions.

Obi-Wan Kenobi: I have a bad feeling about this.

Qui-Gon Jinn: I don't sense anything.

Of course you don't.

Honestly he doesn't have much to speak for in the cosmic force department either.

(There is the whole force ghost thing I guess. But I have no idea if that is more connected with living or cosmic force. It seems to be more about spiritual enlightenment. Which is ridiculous when you consider Yoda had go through so many trials, face his darkside, learn to truly let go just for Force priestesses to deem him worthy enough to study immortality. Yes Qui-Gon never became a force ghost but he had started his training before he died. And much of Yoda's tests on TCW was about self-awareness. It is not just about being a good person. How did Force Priestesses approve Qui-Gon "I was meant to misinterpret this vision." Jinn? I would understand if he became wiser after death and faced his flaws and all but he never was on that level before he died. You might say even Anakin became a force ghost. But I would remind you, Anakin in the end broke out of denial, acknowledged the wrong of his ways and took that leap to the light side. Self-awareness seems such an important key to becoming a force ghost. Right there with selflessness. Personally it doesn't quite feel right for a character whose biggest flaws are their lack of introspection and hubris which we never see him rise above to be the one that discovers immortality again. It feels more like a rushed plot point to explain how we get from A to B.)

This post got out of control 😂. I honestly just wanted to point out lack of communication might be one of the reasons Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon have trouble understanding each other but it is sometimes even harder to understand Qui-Gon when he actually says something. Cause ration is not what drives him.

Qui-Gon is such a complex character. He is undeniably good especially compared to other SW characters. Yet for all fandom's deifying he might be the most flawed Jedi we see on the franchise. (The ones that fell to the dark side not included.)

It is a shame wider fandom completely write off his flaws to the degree I can't even recognize the character when they talk about Jinn. Cause that Qui-Gon is so hard to feel empathy for.

When people constantly make statements like "He is The Wisest sw character." his hypocrisy stops being amusing. It doesn't end on screen or page instead often used to bash other characters.

An unbelievable analysis from Wookiepedia:

When Jinn saved the Gungan exile Jar Jar Binks, who in turn swore a life-debt to him, his compassionate nature was such that Jinn took the hapless Gungan under his wing, much to Kenobi's dismay. His empathy toward all life forms, including the most pitiful and unfortunate, was Jinn's greatest strength. Additionally, he remained understanding and patient with Queen Padmé Amidala. During the short time they knew each other, he never asked for her to do more than she was willing to.

You know out of the two, Qui-Gon was the one who insulted Jar Jar to his face. And he didn't took Jar Jar under his wing. They forced him to take them to a city where Jar Jar could have been punished for entering. Now it was the pragmatic thing to do. For all three's survival not for their own gain. Understandable. But compassion is just pushing it.

Also he never asked Padme to do more than she was willing to do?

Padmé : Are you sure about this? Trusting our fate to a boy we hardly know? The Queen will not approve.

Qui-Gon Jinn : The Queen does not need to know.

Padmé : Well, I don't approve.

And he is aware she is the queen, herself. Padme was nearly tearing out her because of this man in TPM.

What is weird, Jinn in his bewildering hypocrisy probably thinks he is being admirably compassionate with Jar Jar, highly understanding and patient with Padme. We clearly see he is not.

Out of universe he has been a force ghost for decades now but fandom is nowhere near acknowledging his flaws than he is.

And honestly SW doesn't have that many major morally complex characters. People like Maul, Palpatine, Anakin,Ventress don't think they are serving a higher purpose or oblivious to the evils they commit.

Emotionally complicated, yes. Going through moral dilemmas, no.

Three major characters come to mind who make huge mistakes, condone or commit atrocities while thinking they are in the right/with good intentions/for a greater cause. With varying degrees of culpability.

Qui-Gon. Padme. Dooku.

In that order.

Let these characters be interesting instead of demonizing nearly inhumanly selfless Jedi characters. (They make mistakes too but funnily enough they are still way better beings than most people on our planet.)

By the way I found the epitaph "Fascinating Failure" from the article here. Especially the last paragraphs make some interesting points. ⬇️

👀

This post might seem harsh but that is expected since it focuses on Qui-Gon's flaws.

"People are more than their worst act,” Quote from Qui-Gon Jinn in Master & Apprentice

Appreciating a character as a whole is not a shame. Stop being ashamed of enjoying Eren. This guy is cool. Of course, no one in their right mind can buy something like genocide, but we're talking about fiction. Don't confuse everything. What allows you to insult us of pro-Nazi?! (like whatttt???!) or insult the author of this masterpiece of pro-genocidal dude? 3/4 of you don't even live in Europe, how can you talk about something like World War II and Nazism when you have briefly gone through it at school? I assure you that AOT has nothing to do, and has nothing to do with Nazi propaganda. Eren is not a fascist, quite the opposite. Get your heads out of your asses and educate yourself. I'm going to stick you with the definition of the word "fascism" for the most uncultured among you. "The fascist regime intends to make the nation a single community united behind one man (cult of personality and importance of hierarchy), with one individual who must step aside in front of the state. Rejecting human rights, it is accompanied by a strong and secure police state." Does Eren expect to rule the world and for everyone to obey him? No. Is Eren against human rights? He is fundamentally in favor of freedom for each and every Eldian, who at the base have been imprisoned and despised for a century now. Did Eren talk about establishing a totalitarian state led by a militia? No. To make a long story short, how can one call Eren a fascist when, instead of despising and carrying out a totalitarian policy on his people, Eren just wants to offer them the one thing that he considers to be a right for all: Freedom as a human being, as a representative of the Eldian people.

I think that everybody confuses fascism and genocide. It's not necessarily linked, even though very often in a fascist political system there are genocides.

I don't consider Eren to be a racist either. His line "When I knew there was humanity behind the walls, I was disappointed" was really misinterpreted. I just consider Eren as someone who lacks the words to express himself properly. Let me explain, what Eren wanted us to understand here is not a repulsion of other people from other countries, other cultures, or whatever, but rather it is when getting the memories of Grisha, Eren understood how much the rest of the world despised and treated them. He was just disappointed to see how stupid and mean humanity can be, what had they done to deserve this inhuman treatment? He learned about Ymir Fritz, about what the Eldian people have done to others, but wasn't cutting them off on a small island surrounded by titans who are, in the end, fellow countrymen turned into monsters, eating human beings, a punishment worthy of the task? I remind you that the Eldian people are parked like cattle in concentration camps, a kind of ghetto, pushing them back to the entrenchments so as not to mix them with pure-blooded Marleyeans (perhaps one of the only comparisons to be made with Nazism and the Holocaust) and this concerns Marley, I read somewhere that in other countries, when you are Eldian, you die, you shouldn't even exist. Eren, finally understanding, that the only mistake he made, he like all the inhabitants of the island and Eldians living in other countries like Ymir (not Fritz) Reiner, Annie, Berthold, Marcel,Gaby, Falco, Porco, Pieck... even Zeke, is to be born of Eldian blood, to belong to this people, and for some of them to be subjects of Ymir. 

This is exactly what they are accused of. They are being made to pay for what the people may have committed as an atrocity centuries before, with punishments such as confinement, bashing their own existence as a person, transformation into a horrible beast, even death penalty. 

The Eldians are considered impure human beings, the demons of this world, horrible people, kind of atrocities, they deserve to die: this is the way the rest of humanity thinks about Eren and his people. 

Then Eren must be the one who needs to be questioned? Eren is the madman, ready to commit genocide because he is going through his little adolescent existential crisis? Well, even if that was one of the reasons, I remind you that Eren is not an average boy, besides having suffered a strong trauma, he is the bearer of a heavy burden, and he has to do it by himself.

Do you think it's normal that a kid like Gaby is part of the Marleyeans soldiers, when she's, like, what, 11/12 years old? This kid should be in school. No, she's much better as bait for the enemy of Marley's state, since she's a little Eldian bitch, and the worst thing is that this kid is so propagandised that she considers her own origins as vermin to be exterminated since they are the demons of this earth and the reason for her confinement and mistreatment in Marley. In the end, I understand this kid, who wouldn't? Already, she had an uncontrolled hatred of the island's Eldians, now Eren comes undercover to attack Marley, she lost her friends (Sofia and Udo) in the process, so it's normal that in the end, nothing scares her anymore, and Sasha ended up with a bullet. Eleven-year-old Gaby lost her innocence a long time ago, just like her cousin Reiner. It’s sad.. really sad, and Eren was the first person to get it. He truly forgave the man who “killed’ his mother, because he knows that Reiner, like Berthold, like Annie, didn’t have any choice. They has been raised this way. Like Mikasa loves to say “This is world is cruel but beautiful”.

They pushed Eldians to think about them and consider themselves like trashes. It made Zeke thought that the best plan to help Eldians was their euthanasia. Can you imagine?!

They finally acted the way they did in order to save their loved-ones.

- Grisha did it because of his sister who has been slaughtered by some Marleyean officiers, then for his first wife Dina, then for Carla and his sons.

- Reiner did it because of his mother, to finally make his marleyean father be proud of him so, him and his mother could finally live together.

- Berthold, I guess, did it for his family, to obtain the certification to live as Marleyean random person, and stop being considered as a trash because of his eldian blood.

- Annie did it because of her father, because she wants to return to him. She even stated that even she knows that what she did to Paradis’ inhabitants was really awful, she would do it again because of her father.

- Gaby did it because of her propagandised mind and in purpose to honor her family like Reiner did before her, at least, it’s what she thinks.

They deserve to be forgiven, they deserve to be at peace, even if they’re Eldians. They deserve freedom. Freedom in a way to be freed from what people think they are, to be freed from what Eldia did centuries before, it never has been freedom like no political rules, like hippies, no way, it’s more deeper than that.

We still don’t know Eren’s ORIGINAL PURPOSES to start the rumbling. Why is he actually acting this way?

 Is that for freedom? Yes, I think.

 Is that for all the people he lost and all the people he loves and still alive? Yes, I think. 

Is that for a selfish purpose? I don’t think so.

Is Eren enough psychopath to want the rest of the humanity dying? No, I don’t think so.

Can someone bring him another solution - not including Islanders’ euthanasia, or genocide? Unfortunately, no.

I’m no smarter than anyone here, but I really think the moral of this story here is all about changing things, breaking the infernal cycle of things, and forgiving others, getting back on a healthy footing.

Eren is actually changing things, he is breaking the infernal cycle of things, he forgave the ones who spoiled his childhood, he is now waiting to be understood, and being forgiven. He is doing this for his people, like the others did.

You've talked quite a bit about Shiwan Khan, would be OK with talking about the other villains who show up more than once, Benedict Stark and The Voodoo Master?

The Voodoo Master tends to get overshadowed by Khan by virtue of being less prominent and because, in a lot of ways, Mocquino does feel a bit like a prototype for Khan. Like Gibson was testing the waters of what kind of major supervillain he wanted the Shadow to have, and was gradually figuring details like the hypnotic traps and unique henchmen and mystic background and a fraudulent dark magician figure with Mocquino, before Khan blew it all up to bigger proportions. Twice already we’ve had instances where Mocquino was set to appear in a Shadow adaptation after Khan, and said adaptations got canned before he could show up (and I don’t think it does either character a favor if Mocquino comes after Khan). And of course Mocquino has the problem of being an ethnic supervillain whose identity and name are tied up to grotesque prejudice that twists cultures and beliefs into Hollywood boogeymen, and the novels sadly treat vodou beliefs far less charitably than how the other novels approach tibetan/asian mysticism. It’s definitely a problem, but not without it’s solutions.

Putting that aside, The Voodoo Master trilogy is very fun, the first novel in particular was the number one rated Shadow novel in a fan poll back then. Personally, my favorite is City of Doom because of it’s blend of gothic, urban and industrial settings, great battles even for a Shadow novel, and a spectacular finale, but they all have very strong points. And I do like Mocquino himself as a character. He is historically significant as the first true supervillain of Shadow Magazine (if you don’t count other odd criminals like The Black Master or The Cobra). He is different from Khan personality-wise in the sense that he is more of an old-school supervillain, who likens his conflict with The Shadow to a “game” they play, who likes to boast and brag about his powers and whose goals largely revolve around extortion. He has a vendetta against industrial society (although he himself employs industrial tactics, because he is a hypocrite), and said vendetta being largely just him trying to destroy it so he thinks people will fall in line with his cult more easily. Unlike with Khan, there’s no delusions or aspirations of grandeur and greater purpose here, it always comes down to crime and profit with Mocquino and he barely bothers to pretend otherwise.

He is resourceful and insidious and racks up a bigger body count than Khan on City of Doom alone, and there’s a real creepiness to his zombie minions as they are regular people stripped of all identity and forced into becoming walking meat shields. I think one way to make him work better on his own could be by playing up his ruthlessness and charm, and focus on the mind control/cult leader aspect. Make him the Jim Jones of Shadow villains.

Justice Inc redesigned him to look like Boris Karloff, divorced him of racist trappings, played up his dark magician persona and ballooned up his abilities into outright superpowers, all of which worked quite well as the closest he's ever had to an update And interestingly, there’s some odd Joker-esque aspects to him in his final appearence in Voodoo Trail:

Though almost silent, the explosion was forcible. The tank disgorged a greenish gas that spread like an expanding monster, filling the entire room that the trio had just left. 

There was something parched and withery in his face, particularly noticeable when The Shadow saw the Voodoo Master's profile. Mocquino bore the scars of flame, not only on his face, but upon the scrawny arm he extended from his robe. Those burns showed like livid brands: a fitting mark for a supercriminal.

That hissing sound in the zombi cave! It was gas, leaking from underground pipes that led into Manhattan. Filtering through the porous stone, it gathered other chemical elements. Mocquino must have discovered that leakage and noted its effects. He had put the discovery to his own use. 

...lips formed a grin so jagged that it was difficult to note where his mouth ended and his scar began.

Mocquino's shrill laugh told that he expected his men to overwhelm The Shadow through force of numbers.

Honestly, “Doctor Mocquino” I think is a better name for him than Voodoo Master. A Rogues Gallery isn’t complete without a major Doctor in there, and divorcing Mocquino of “Voodoo Master” and all that implies could be the better way of making this character work again. Play up the fact that he’s exploiting Caribbean religions and citizens for personal gain and roping them into his crime ring, maybe even have him use similar theatrics as The Shadow to paint himself as this great master of voodoo, but in the end, he’s always just Doctor Mocquino, an evil, rotten shyster who puts his knowledge to use for evil and evil alone. 

Responsible for the first and only cliffhanger of Shadow Magazine with the kidnapping of Rutledge Mann, Benedict Stark is easily the single worst scumbag out of all Shadow supervillains. Just this completely horrible, wretched monster who ends up being somewhat dissappointing and frustrating of a villain in my view. Despite having quite a bit going on for him, Stark is not really interesting enough to warrant the 4 novels he gets, and where as Khan and Mocquino usually escape The Shadow thanks to prior planning and last-minute escape and strokes of luck, Stark seems to get away with it only because the narrative says so, not nearly as impressive as the other two despite being far, far worse, which makes it you don’t want The Shadow to match wits with him, so much as you just want The Shadow to kill him as soon as possible. In fact, here’s what Stark gets away with in the first ten pages of The Prince of Evil alone:

He gaslights a man named John Harmon into thinking he was developing amnesia

Gets Harmon to sign away enough money to be bankrupted for life, and no one, not even his wife, believe him when he says he was conned

Causes Harmon to commit suicide. 

Then, while Cranston's talking with a friend of Harmon named Jackson who wanted to help him, the two go to Jackson's house to find it completely destroyed, his priceless belongings acid-ruined. 

Then, they find Jackson's dog dead, with it's throat slit, and a Bible scattered nearby with the story of the good Samaritan marked, making it clear that this all happened because Jackson tried to help Harmon. 

And then, as Cranston tries to stop one of Stark's goons from brutally assaulting a boy who was just paid by Cranston to watch his car, he gets attacked and knocked unconscious.

And THEN, the henchman gives the kid a brain concussion and then hauls him in front of a coming truck, with Cranston just barely saving the kid in time as the henchman escapes.

This is just the first 10 pages. Not even Spider novels usually start with this many atrocities happening all at once. Whatever problems Tinsley has as a Shadow writer, I’ll give him this: He definitely knows how to go from 0 to 100 in ways Gibson never would. The book obviously doesn’t keep this up forever (thank goodness), but The Prince of Evil is really all about building up Stark’s presence as this new ultimate Shadow villain, and I think the build up is quite solid up to a point.

He’s established as possibly the richest man in America. Where as Cranston is a millionaire, Stark is a billionaire, who owns “ailways and steamships, factories and mills all over the United States". Nobody knows what he looks like, nobody’s ever seen a picture of him, and Cranston, who knows everyone and everything, has never once laid eyes on the man. We also know in advance that he uses drugs delivered by chewing gum to turn his thugs into bloodthirsty savages who desire only terror and torture and inflict those at his beck and call, and we get a passage where Clyde Burke ingests one of these gums, experiences it’s effects, and ends up chasing down a mouse and killing it, for no reason other than it was the only living being nearby, much to his horror. And it very nearly develops into something even worse:

He could hear the snoring of a man sleeping inside a cellar apartment. Clyde halted. His fingers tightened on his iron bar. He guessed that the man asleep inside was the building janitor. He fought against a hot impulse that flared anew in his blood.

He wanted to kill that janitor! He wanted to smash at him with the iron bar until the man was battered and dead! Murder seemed so exciting. And so easy! Clyde could picture the terror of his victim as he struck at him. It would be sheer delight to maim the fool before he killed him.

The thing that saved Clyde was the thought of the chewing gum. He knew that the savage whisper that urged him on to murder was not his own brain talking, but the voice of a powerful drug.

Laying the bar on the concrete floor, he ran for the cellar exit. He didn't glance back. He was afraid that if he did, he'd be tempted to pick up the bar and commit a senseless and brutal crime.

The cold bite of the breeze was like a draft of cooling water against his parched lips. He began to get a grip on himself. Once more he was Clyde Burke, a normal human being who would go out of his way to avoid hurting a fly.

Stark has weaponized and mass-produced a drug that creates an army of Mr Hydes at his beck and call, that can turn even one of the kindest and most heroic characters into the series into a sadistic maniac itching to main and murder anything that’s in front of him, and that alone is not just a much more viscerally horrifying kind of mind control than what Khan and Mocquino use, it’s also got a an edge to it more suited for gritty urban drama. It’s an idea I definitely would have liked to see used again even after Stark’s out of the picture.

And then we actually get to see Stark for this first time, and he’s described as a grotesquely deformed baboon man leering at his beautiful secretaries, who deliberately employs the most attractive people to make his own deformities stand out further, and who is cartoonishly vile everytime he opens his mouth. He never really displays exceptional cleverness, compared to other Shadow villains, except for the fact that he keeps suspecting Cranston is The Shadow, and sometimes just seems to get really lucky. Stark tends to get much, much less interesting as the build-up evaporates and he has to stand on his own feet as a character, I barely remember anything he did in the following books. At the time, I thought Stark’s characterization was weak, and I still do. 

This text blurb here was used on a promo S&S did for Prince of Evil, and it starts by talking about incredibly well-liked people who are kind and how Stark is the opposite because he's evil. Of course, as we all know, evil and well-liked are not opposites. 

Stark may have been a tad more interesting had they went with the angle of him being a horrible monster who's also incredibly popular and beloved and friendly. About 70% of The Shadow’s villains are already middle-aged to elder rich businessmen pretending to be good, so maybe Stark being young and attractive and initially sympathetic-looking, atop being the richest and cruelest of them all, could also help set him apart. Sort of an evil Harry Vincent maybe. 

But instead he's so obviously and viscerally awful all the time he shows up, so incapable of restraining himself, that it's impossible to buy him as a deceiver who’s pulled the wool over society’s eyes. At the time, I thought to myself that he was just painfully obvious of a villain and too brutish and stupid for me to buy that he’s supposed to be the richest criminal genius in America. 

But then again, nowadays I’m well aware that wealthy and respected figures of society, who are cartoonishly horrible even openly in public, is just what billionaires are like, so maybe Tinsley had a point here. 

ani....morphs.....

ok so picking up after the david trilogy, which hit hard as FUCK, we have book 23, which basically was a semi truck that ran over my corpse, jesus christ, they really followed up the david trilogy w/all that....

23 was so so good and also painful. its the culmination of a lot of tobias’s characterization in the series thus far and also we finally get the reveal we’ve been waiting for about elfangor....ooooh man 

and there was a lot of painful stuff in this book but the worst imo was tobias wondering if it were possible that somebody wanted him and would take care of him, only to have it all come crashing down in the worst way when it turned out aria was visser three in morph, ouch. 

that was so brutal augh. and when he figured it out and just crash landed and kept thinking about how he wanted to die and how he was stupid to think he could have a home...bro get these kids some THERAPY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

so yeah that book was absolutely brutal but also so good...and it further fleshed out the animorphs working as a near-flawless team, w/the whole setup of tobias meeting w/the lawyer being so airtight and well-planned 

also more free hork bajir!! its cool that there's stuff happening w/them offscreen, I like that 

I literally had to take a break from reading the books bc the david triology + 23 was like so much, and also bc the olympics were on and all my time got dedicated to watching those, but then I opened 24, not sure what to expect, and BAM it was the helmacrons lmaoooo

I don't even remember the helmacrons but ig a lot of people hate them? lmao so that whole reputation preceded the book and I was like oh wow time for a change in tone

which wasn't wrong but also I liked that book?? I was never bored, even tho the whole thing was patently ridiculous and also had very little bearing on the overarching story

but I think it would be a standout if it were a TV episode w/a good budget - the visuals were amazing even in text, and I can imagine all the cool shrinking/growing/cellular stuff would be WICKED cool visually (ideally 2d animation but an ant man-esque live action adaptation wouldn't be terrible if they had the budget for it)

whatever let me dream. so yeah I didn't hate the helmacron book even tho the helmacrons themselves were...sure something. lmao I think they come back? that should be interesting

next book is the arctic one, we have yet another alien of the week style adventure - I liked this one too, it felt like more plot-y stuff happened since they destroyed the base, and marco’s POV is always fun 

I do find it funny/interesting how sometimes when the animorphs do something - like in this book, destroying that base in the arctic - it doesn't really seem to impact the yeerks much/it doesn't get brought up much after that. and then other things like them destroying the ground-based kandrona get mentioned a lot (that example is understandable tho bc that WAS a big deal). its just hilarious to me how blowing up entire building complexes has become so routine that it isn’t even worth mentioning at this point

Also I adore when they meet other random people/kids and are chill w/them, like w/that kid they met in the rain forest earlier on w/the time travel 

the descriptions of the brutally cold weather were great. I hate the cold so I was like oof this is a nightmare lmao

also ig that was the first ghostwritten book and I did kinda notice it was slightly different than usual? maybe? I could be imagining it tho 

okay but book 26 tho...BOOK 26. bruh 

that was SO good and I really didn’t know what to expect - but when we finally revisited Jake’s dream w/crayak I knew it was gonna be good (but I didn’t expect it to be a chess game war epic..!)

basically I loved it. SUCH a good Jake book - I really appreciate his character now as opposed to when I was 10 and often overlooked him (sorry jake).

similarly, when I was a kid and read these I sympathized a lot w/the chee and felt bad for them towards the end of the series when they had to get more involved in the war (genuinely don’t remember what they even do but ik I felt bad) 

but now I've basically 180′d and I'm like damn those chee sure are hypocrites huh. 

like they could solve So many of the animorphs problems but their stringent adherence to nonviolence leads to them actively getting in the animorphs way sometimes? and obviously pacifism is a complicated topic, but in this case it also intersect w/the whole ‘child soldier’ thing, and as beings who are insanely old and wise, the chee probably shouldn't just leave all the dirty work to a bunch of literal middle schoolers

aaaaanyways. there’s so much I love about this book. the iskoort! they were sure something. and the ‘plot twist’ that they are actually 2 beings, the Isk and the Yoort - and the Yoort are essentially Yeerks - that slapped. the symbiosis of it all! 

I loved the part where they all realize what this means, that this is why Crayak wants the iskoort destoryed - because someday the yeerks might come across them and realize parasitism is not the only way. I love it! 

alas I don’t recall the iskoort returning in the story (but also my memory is terrible so who knows?) but still that would be cool

basically I feel like this is the book where Jake Truly comes into his own as a leader, in every sense. he outmaneuvers Crayak, and even the ellimist, who’s yanking them around in his own way

the scene where jake shoves the howler off the cliff and jumps off and morphs and acquires the howler...that was fantastic and tense. 

also the murder is definitely becoming more overt. I mean, it has been for a while, but it isn’t really pointed out as much anymore. oof

more on the chee - as Jake points out in this book, and other characters point out in other books - the chee could have saved the pemalites, but instead just stood by while their creators were slaughtered. on the other hand, jake says, what do the chee do AFTER they’ve killed the howlers - where to point them next? when is the end of their violence? 

buuuuut also standing by while atrocities occur is pretty damning, as is frequently mentioned in this series - from the very beginning, when marco initially doesn’t want to get involved in the war at all, and the other animorphs basically tell him that turning his back on the war and acting like he doesn’t even know it’s happening would be immoral and cowardly (which imo this reaction helps to push marco in the direction he ends up going, but I digress) - this topic comes up again in 19 when cassie quits the team and rachel is upset bc she sees it as cassie elevating her own feelings above the greater good (as in, as long as cassie feels good about how she acts, it doesn’t matter how much preventable evil the yeerks are committing while she turns away). etc etc. but that’s essentially what’s happening w/the chee - even tho they help w/intel, the lack of any sort of Action on their part means that they’re essentially allowing awful things to happen when they could prevent them. this is rambly but basically...animorphs deals so much in grey areas, and the chee are noticeably black and white in their actions, despite falling, in a meta sense, in an extremely grey area. its such good, thought provoking writing!

anywayssss I keep talking about the chee lmao what else was there. oh YEAH jake and cassie kissed for the first time awww that was super cute 

and ofc immediately marco teases them as asks jake if he’s gonna kiss him next, and all I can say is...marco is a bicon 

also I love the background worldbuilding w/the iskoort, how they have all these groups and guilds and stuff - its not dwelled on much, which actually works really well to give the world/species a sense of lived-in realness 

okay oh man and the reveal at the end that the howlers were just like...children who thought the whole thing was a game...AUGHH man that’s sooo fucked 

like, when jake morphs the howler and has rachel ready to knock him down in grizzly morph if he gets out of control due to the howler’s murderous instincts, and he morphs to find that the howler is...playful, like a dolphin morph. SUCH a good fucked up sense of dawning horror there 

and the fact that as far as I can tell the chee KNEW this, but wanted revenge anyways, so they let the animorphs assume that the howlers were Evil On Purpose

also I love smaller moments, like jake seeing that ax is ashamed for briefly running away during one battle w/the howlers, and then entrusts him w/an important task bc he knows that ax will see that as redemption - and when everyone thought jake was dead and were so happy when he wasn't (they all love each other so much im gonna cry about these child soldiers augh)

basically that book was so good

man one thing I absolutely love is that the longer the series goes on the more obvious it is that andalites, despite inventing morphing technology, barely use it themselves 

like, most of the andalite characters we see barely morph. its kind of a last resort to them, as they’re already plenty dangerous in their regular forms 

meanwhile for the animorphs, that’s all they have to fight with. that’s their only weapons against the yeerks, and its so fun to see them use the power in so many varied ways, and so creatively, while the andalites have barely scratched the surface of their own technology

its also interesting to contrast against the yeerks who start out w/absolutely no technology, and the andalites share some but not all of their technology w/them...its too bad that morphing technology was just starting out cause that would’ve been interesting

like imo a lot of the conflict w/the yeerks could’ve been avoided if they could just nothlit into better forms - of course, there’d still be plenty of yeerks who want to go start wars or w/e, just like pretty much any species in the series, but a lot of yeerks would probably be like ‘yeah I'm good’ and just chill out as nothlits

also people online love to talk about how humans are alienfuckers and would definitely have sex w/sentient aliens and whatnot, and while I'm not saying that's untrue, its just funny bc in animorphs the truest alienfuckers are definitely the andalites

as of the hork-bajir chronicles, we now have a second instance of an andalite morphing another species to be in an inter-species alien romance (and eventually have kids) 

speaking of, I don’t think I’ve talked abt the hork bajir chronicles yet??? even tho I read it a while ago lmao 

HBC was great...I honestly haven’t really run into an animorphs book I’ve actually disliked at this point, I’m sure it’ll come w/all the ghostwriting and whatnot, but I’ve liked at least some aspects of every book

anyways HBC was great, and it’s funny bc I remember that I read this book as a kid, and yet rereading it now I didn’t remember a single bit of it lmaooo

I really liked the framing device of the free hork bajir telling this story to tobias. I also liked how we know from the beginning that this story wont have a happy ending - we know all the hork bajir end up enslaved by the yeerks, but it’s still somehow hopeful at the end? I think this is largely due to the framing device tbh. 

also I love toby, and I love that the First free hork bajir named their kid after tobias ;_; 

and oooh mannn I LOVED the different POVs from this book. all the characters were so interesting! aldrea was fascinating - I really like the increasingly negative view of the andalites that the readers are getting, all while maintaining the sense that they aren’t like, actively evil, just that they have their issues - like aldrea’s arrogance, and the general andalite arrogance which lead to the loss of the hork bajir. also, who knew andalites had their own brand of sexism? Ls

I did like getting a female andalite tho, that was cool. and dak was really cool, he was such a good, compassionate character who was able to maintain his morals in an interesting way throughout the story

and VISSER THREE...or should I say esplin 9466, because he’s not visser 3 yet...getting his ‘origin story’ was excellent - I really like how we’re learning about visser 3 backwards - we start off the series w/him as the main villain, and he’s campy and menacing, and then we see him in the andalite chronicles as a power-hungry sub-visser trying to climb the ranks and eventually getting alloran as a host, and then back even further here, w/the start of his focus on the andalites and the beginning of his ambition. its been very cool and interesting to see

plus, the beginning of the yeerks as we know them! seerow! alloran! it’s a party and nobody is having a good time, except for some of the yeerks. 

I like how it’s pretty obvious that the andalites are well-meaning with their interactions w/the yeerks, but go about it the wrong way - they give them enough technology that the yeerks realize there’s a whole world out there to experience, and then they blockade the yeerks on their planet and tell them they can’t leave. nnnnot the best approach imo

again, as I said above, I’m interested in how things could’ve gone if the andalites had given the yeerks morphing technology early on - could a lot of the conflict have been avoided, or would it have been worse? the yeerks seem pretty evil in this book, immediately jumping to enslave anyone they can. otoh we hear from esplin that not all yeerks like having host bodies, and find it overwhelming, preferring to swim around in the yeerk pool as a slug - I assume as host bodies became more available this type of thinking was probably stamped out in yeerk society or w/e, but there are a lot of interesting what-ifs in the situation 

I loved the scene where esplin first experiences having a host, and immediately knows he can’t go back. there are a bunch of great sensory descriptions, and it’s a nice scene to pinpoint as a foundational moment for the visser three in the current story, who spent a lot of time and energy getting what he sees as the best possible host body, an andalite

I find it interesting how much visser three clearly respects the andalites, even while constantly deriding them. and you can see the origins of that here as he immediately focuses in on the andalites, working to become an expert on them in order to make himself useful enough to move thru the ranks

another thing I like is how esplin seems a lot more crafty and ambitious than the visser three from modern times - I would guess that reaching his goal (andalite host body) and being given all that power was detrimental, playing on his weaknesses instead of his strengths. basically, I don’t think it’s ooc or anything, I can see how HBC-esplin became animorphs-esplin, especially w/TAC in between

as for seerow...poor dude. you really do have to feel for him, because you get the sense he really did just want to be kind to the yeerks, but it was borne from a place of pity, and he (and the other andalites) consistently held too much power over the yeerks for the species relations to ever be truly equal and functional 

AUGH I have so many thoughts about alien space politics. omg. I need to talk about the actual story lmao

so yeah I also feel for aldrea, she had a rough time, watching her entire family die and being thrown into a hopeless war

and then the andalite council or w/e not listening to her bc she's a girl AND seerow’s daughter...oof

also, I really really liked the running theme of the andalites - specifically aldrea - looking down on the hork bajir as ‘simple’ and constantly underestimating them, especially dak

and I like how this is portrayed as a bad attitude for aldrea to have, and she still remains and interesting and sympathetic character even while having obvious flaws. it’s about being 3-dimensional baby!

and oh man I love that dak realizes that aldrea looks down on him, and his entire species, but he can see that that’s how the andalites are, and it all connects back to the beginning of the story w/the yeerks, bc the andalites looked down on the yeerks and treated them with pity and kept them pinned under their proverbial thumb ‘for their own good’ and look how that turned out 

but dak is wise and kind enough to not hate aldrea for this, even acknowledging when she’s using him, but not pushing her away because he recognizes good in her too - and she ends up changing, partially because of his faith in her

and I feel like it can all be compared to that scenario of like - a hypothetical creature that lives in a 2D world suddenly being thrust into a 3D world, and comprehending what its seeing, and understanding that there’s so much more out there outside of the flat lines of its world - and then its dropped back into 2D-land with the knowledge of all the stuff its missing out on, and no way to get back to it or explain it to anybody else

I loooove that ‘trope’ or w/e you wanna call it, and it’s done beautifully here w/the yeerks - whos the say they wouldn't have been fine in their pool swimming around; as esplin said, a lot of the yeerks were terrified of having a host, it was only from the andalites’ perspective that their lives were sad and pitiful, and the andalites showed them what the world could be like, and then said ‘no, you can’t travel the stars like we do, you have to stay here on your planet and do what we say.’

and then again, w/the hork bajir - dak talks about how, even though he drinks up the knowledge that aldrea gives him, in the end it might have been better to just have lived peacefully, not knowing what was in the sky or the Deep - as aldrea says: “It was too late for Dak: he knew that the stars were not flowers.” 

plus the hork bajir having to go from a completely peaceful species who don’t even understand the concept of violence, to a bunch of soldiers fighting a war...oof 

basically everyone in this story uses the hork bajir. the yeerks use them as hosts, the andalites use their planet as a convenient place to dump seerow and then take their sweet time coming to help, and the arn created them as means to stabilize the planet, but block them off from their society and refuse to help when the yeerks come

like, the arn modifying themselves to be un-infestable by the yeerks and then being enslaved for physical labor instead? oof guys. if they had teamed up w/the hork bajir resistance things might have gone better, but probably not 

more on aldrea - throughout the story I was always thinking ‘how am I supposed to see her? as a good person, or as a bad person?’ 

as a POV character, especially a ‘good guy’ andalite, you just start off automatically thinking of her as a good person, but as the story goes on, she starts getting lost in revenge and begins using dak and the hork bajir, and you’re left wondering if this is a story about her slide into darkness, and then towards the end of the story her character development culminates in her making the decision to stay w/the hork bajir, and the be with dak, and that’s about when I went ‘ohhh right this is animorphs so every character is pretty much gonna be grey’

I feel like that moral grey-ness was on full display w/aldrea, and I really enjoyed that. I love so much when characters who are good do bad things, for good or bad reasons, especially in media like animorphs that’s aimed at kids. it’s so compelling. 

oof, and the ending when aldrea convinces dak to mobilize the hork bajir and teach them violence...and dak asks her if she’s ever killed another andalite, and she’s horrified, and says of course she hasn’t, and he says that that’s what she’s asking him, and all the hork bajir, to do - to kill their own people, even if they are being controlled by the yeerks. biiiig oof. I love that dak can keep up w/aldrea and her andalite supremacy attitude - it seems that the non-andalite characters who get along best w/the andalites are the ones who wont take their bs 

what else happened....oh my god how could I forget about alloran, and his quantum virus. oooof. I like how we find out about alloran in parallel to visser three, in the same backwards way - in animorphs he’s the tragic host of visser three, in TAC he’s the disgraced but still semi-respected war-prince who becomes the first ever andalite controller, and here he’s the guy who decides to commit some war crimes because, hey, we haven’t tried that yet 

but yeah that was fucked up, I love it. I’ve said it before I think but I like that alloran isn’t some perfect martyr tragically taken by the yeerks - it’s a lot more compelling that he’s a very flawed person who was taken as a controller partially due to his own bloodthirstiness. 

but yeah, the part where aldrea morphs alloran and ‘sneaks’ into that room was great. aldrea’s dedication to disposing of the virus is a great indicator of her character development - it really feels like the straw that broke the camels back w/re: to the andalites not being what she thought they were, w/their tardiness coming to help the hork bajir planet and the way her father was treated being the precursors to this realization. it all culminates nicely in aldrea saying ‘fuck this actually’ and nothlit-ing into a hork bajir.

and it’s really tragic but realistic that even though aldrea and dak end up seeing eye to eye at the end and getting together, the virus ends up being released anyways (and fails in its objective to stop the yeerks from using the hork bajir - the whole thing was p much a lose-lose situation oof), and aldrea and dak still die fighting a hopeless war 

but then we have the free hork bajir on earth, including toby, who, like tobias, has andalite ancestry, but no DNA to show for it - I like that they have that connection as well as tobias being her namesake

so yeah I enjoyed that one and its many-layered themes

WOW this got long uuuuuhhh ok I think i’ll leave this one off here. at the time I’m actually finishing the writing and editing, I’m on book 35 lol so I have some backlogging to do. never fear, I have a lot to say....

Optimally Maximal Relationship Failures

https://www.deviantart.com/antoni-matteo-garcia/art/Optimally-Maximal-Relationship-Failures-863430102

This demotivational poster is super aggro and mega highly Anti-SessKagu, Anti-KogAya, Anti-InuKag, Anti-Kagura to some extent, Anti-Kouga to a vastly significant extent, Anti-Kagome to a huge extent, but also Pro-Sesshoumaru, Pro-Inuyasha, Pro-Ayame, and highly Pro-SessAyaInu. Sit back and relax, as I tear into Sesshoumaru's and Kagura's failure of a relationship, Kouga's and Ayame's major fart of a romance that should never have been, and Inuyasha's and Kagome's annoying volatility, why Kagura does not deserve Sesshoumaru, why Kouga and Kagome only deserve my ire, wrath, and fury, and why Sesshoumaru, Inuyasha, and Ayame deserve so much better in each other. Furthermore, this is my contribution to this year's Red Ribbon Reviewers' month. Behold, my dear readers, my three greatest NOTPs of all time. Sure, I consider Naraku with anybody my greatest choice of a NOTP because someone as manipulatively dastardly such as Naraku deserves to be alone, done for, and truly deserves jack shit! However, that is too obvious of a choice. These three are the ones that make me want to tear my hair off and carve the hearts of Kouga and Kagome out with a blunt knife as well as tell Kagura to vamoose. As you can clearly tell, I have put these from bad to worse to the worst, with Sesshoumaru x Kagura being something absolutely unpleasant, Kouga x Ayame being a whole lot more atrocious, and Inuyasha x Kagome being the indubitable equivalent to toxic waste mixed with gallons of poison. Ergo, SessKagu is a bad pairing, KogAya is so much worse, and InuKag is the absolute worst pairing to exist in Inuyasha. I am aware that there are a good number of people who love to pair Sesshoumaru with Kagura because of how appealingly sexy they appear together. However, now that I have discarded those rose-tinted glasses for good, I can see this failure of a relationship for what this signifies and this all falls on Kagura's shoulders. Lest one forget that Kagura killed Kouga's tribesmen of her own volition and got pleasure out of that, trapped Miroku and Sango at Mt. Hakurei also by her own volition, kidnapped Rin, used Akago as a vessel to feed on Kagome's dark side, was manipulated into serving Princess Kaguya in the false hopes of wanting her freedom, and tended to mock Inuyasha. All of these atrocities would make Sesshoumaru fully cognizant that Kagura is far from being his equal in a relationship. Her dirty record as well as her hissy fit at Sesshoumaru for not helping her desire to be free from Naraku make her a co-dependent partner which can only spell failure in the long-term. As a mother to Rin, she would definitely fail badly because of her aforementioned dirty record and she would not be fully worthy of any sort of emulation. For someone like Kagura who is a formidable fighter, she has abused her wind powers to cause chaos and misery. Her passing may be tragic, but the awful deeds she has done are not worthy of my forgiveness. At least Sesshoumaru is free from being in a co-dependent relationship with that polarizing wind sorceress. Kouga x Ayame or KogAya is a couple I will never understand the appeal of. Yes, they are both wolf yokai, but these two could not be any more different, as Kouga is a big bluffer of a bully and a Karma Houdini and Ayame is a naturally brave, strong, fearless warrior princess with hidden depths that should have been fully realized! I have dreaded at the thought of these two ending up together because of all the failures and atrocities that would all resurface if Ayame were to find out all the horrible crimes Kouga has committed against an innocent young girl, Rin, and his entire tribe. This also extends to him not being the strong fighter he has made himself out to be and nothing more than a perennially pathetic loser who has relied on the Shikon Jewel's power instead of harnessing his own strength, as if the Shikon Jewel shards on his legs are a metaphor for steroids being used to give someone an artificial boost of strength and power. If Ayame dared to discover all of those atrocities, crimes, and rubbish Kouga has committed, she will be undoubtedly appalled at him and would repudiate him for good. I will reiterate that all of my sympathy goes to Ayame because of the fact that she deserves so much better than this pathetic waste of effort and time and deserves to grow as a veritably formidable heroine worthy of emulation, especially to all the young girls of the world. The mere fact that Kouga and his wolves killed innocent villagers including Rin who has lost her family and had to wander the world alone before she was revived Sesshoumaru through his Tenseiga and got away with murder, mainly relied on the Shikon Jewel's power to accelerate his strength and speed without working that on his own, and did not avenge his fallen comrades at the hands of Naraku and Kagura should all make Ayame's insides turn and make her reject Kouga for good and for all. Ergo, Ayame does not deserve this pathetic Karma Houdini and deserves to estrange herself from him forever, thus making her be the mother Rin truly deserves and will gladly give her her unconditional love and compassion to help her grow as a person. Speaking of couples I do not understand the appeal of by any shape of the imagination, we have my most dreaded NOTP of all time in the form of Inuyasha x Kagome or InuKag. Even as a child of eleven years old, I did not tune in to Inuyasha to see their soap opera fart of a relationship desecrating Adult Swim let alone the airwaves no matter where I was watching this series. I mainly tuned in to Inuyasha to see him growing from strength to strength and kick loads of butt, especially in his full yokai form. Furthermore, the more I saw Kagome and her brand of shrewishness, manipulativeness, brattiness, pettiness, jealousy, and callousness, the more irritated I became. There was barely any semblance of a romantic relationship blooming between Inuyasha and Kagome, as it was more of Kagome being the owner to Inuyasha's pet, especially where the Beads of Subjugation and the purpose of Inuyasha's sword Tessaiga are concerned. The Beads of Subjugation were used for Inuyasha to not do anything rash while the Tessaiga, aside from being a sword of destruction, was also intended to be used to protect those who are oppressed. Being the manipulative shrew Kagome was, she believed this would give her leeway for Inuyasha to shield her and be her "knight in shining armor" who will save her from all forms of danger without honing her own skills as a fighter. What is worse is that Kagome extends her manipulation to Miroku, Sango, and Shippou aka The Dunderhead Family to be nothing more than her pathetic posse and have them jump on a certain bandwagon that has brought Inuyasha a whole bunch of trauma. I am, of course, talking about how he was still hurting from the guilt he felt when Naraku manipulated both him and Kikyou into betraying each other. Miroku, Sango, Shippou, and especially Kagome never understood Inuyasha's pain and trauma in the slightest and The Dunderhead Family think that anytime Kagome was hurt it was all because of him. Furthermore, there is the fact that Inuyasha and Kagome are an undeniable example of being in a Karmic relationship with each other, given the many times they have been yelling, bickering, squabbling, and getting themselves in a heap of messily addictive habits that will only dig them deeper into more quagmires than find any sensibility or profound meaning. It says something that someone as compassionate, genuine, kind, and natural as Rin makes a far better companion to Inuyasha than The Dunderhead Family and...ugh....Kagome combined. Do not even get me started on the first episode of Yashahime because Inuyasha still has those accursed Beads of Subjugation on and she still does not trust him where Kikyou was concerned. Kagome was never attentive to him, never understood him in a profound level, and always believed she had dominance over him. This, my friends, is why I absolutely loathe InuKag with all of my being and it stands perched atop the medal platform of shame as my most disdained NOTP of all time. InuKag makes SessKagu more tolerable in comparison and the only other NOTP to ever come close to InuKag's brand of disgust is KogAya. Regardless, InuKag is the NOTP I will never want to touch with a twelve-foot pole. You might even noticed a recurring theme in terms of my discussion of my Inuyasha NOTPs and that is the importance of Rin. Well, she does play an integral part in not only Sesshoumaru's life but also the lives of Inuyasha and Ayame. Considering that Kouga and his wolves killed her in cold blood and got away with murder, Kagura kidnapped her as ransom for Sesshoumaru to annihilate Naraku, and that Kagome and The Dunderhead Family do not even come close to Rin's brand of compassion, I say that it was high time for Sesshoumaru to ditch Kagura, Inuyasha to give a big, fat, ugly screw-you to Kagome, and Ayame to drop kick Kouga in his family jewels to be the worthy parents to give Rin the great home she truly deserves complete with siblings in the forms of Dai, Roku, Kai, Shiori, and Shinta. To make things better, Rin will be definitely grateful to have two strong, powerful, brave dads like Sesshoumaru and Inuyasha, one courageous, honorable, compassionate mom like Ayame, three tough, independent, loving older brothers like Dai, Roku, and Kai, a lovable, caring, compassionate "twin" sister like Shiori because they are also the same age though Shiori is a month younger than her, and a lovable, sweet, attentive younger brother like Shinta. Just squeeze in Shuran, Hakkaku, and Ginta to be her loving uncles and Shunran to be her equally loving auntie and it will be a glorious family Rin will be more than happy to be a part of. With that said, having a three-way relationship with Sesshoumaru and Inuyasha being the chivalrous, caring, noble husbands to Ayame is so much better than having these three suffer a series of terrible relationships. This also extends to how proud Toga the Dog General and The Wolf Elder shall be of their progeny for giving Rin a great home and for finding true friends in Shuran, Hakkaku, Ginta, and Shunran who are just as supportive of Sesshoumaru, Inuyasha, and Ayame being in a three-way relationship. In conclusion, I am so ecstatic to make SessKagu, KogAya, and especially InuKag my biggest NOTPs for life. I will never touch these failures with a twelve-foot pole ever again, but the putrid effect of these NOTPs will forever remain ingrained in my memory as a stern reminder what bad relationships can look like. From the co-dependency found in Kagura's failed relationship with Sesshoumaru to the utter deception and lies Ayame would have found herself falling hook, line, and sinker all for Kouga's pathetic hide to Inuyasha's and Kagome's fart of a relationship only spelling death and destruction for years to come, there is nothing that will salvage these losers together. I am just going to keep Sesshoumaru, Inuyasha, and Ayame in a loving three-way relationship complete with a great family they can call their own and Shuran, Hakkaku, Ginta, and Shunran are going to be part of that family as their siblings for life. I hope you all enjoyed my evisceration of SessKagu, KogAya, and InuKag as my biggest NOTPs for life and I would love to hear from you if you agree with me on this. Until then, I will see you in the next submission. Take care and Happy Holidays, everybody. Sesshoumaru, Inuyasha, and Ayame as well as the lame-os known as Kouga, Kagura, and Kagome from Inuyasha belong to Rumiko Takahashi and Sunrise.

XVII. ghost stories

Connor doesn't want to admit it to himself but he has is currently over the moon. Living alone in that dreadfully dull apartment whose purpose has been that of a prison cell, a place where he'd spend the rest of his days waiting for some kind of divine punishment to restore the world's balance by putting him through suffering most soul-wrenching has not been a very pleasant experience. But Sumo, that helpless creature he gets to call his friend and roommate, has done nothing wrong to waste his life like that, cooped up in a supersized terrarium. The angel of a dog deserves a proper home. And if Gavin doesn't mind the android tagging along, then who is he to deny the floofpuff his favourite company.  Maybe it’s a bit presumptuous to think that Sumo has any distinct preference towards him, but that’s something Connor allows himself to indulge in, the idea that he’s doing a good job taking care of that overgrown puppy, that no one else would love him the same way Connor does. Of course, this kind of love would be better defined as an emotional dependency, but the canine doesn’t have to know that. 

He's happy, no one can deny him that, but with it also comes to the violent inner conflict, for the joy that flows through him never stops feeling wrong, one way or another. As if every little bit of content that he steals for himself extends the sentence he made himself serve, that he has to make up for each and every time he smiles or feels his heart flutter in something else than fear.

Yes, he did agree to Gavin's proposition, but it doesn't mean his mind is automatically set on actually going through with it. 

Every time they're locked in a shared moment like that it's hard to deploy rationality. Hard but not impossible. And if he really was against the idea of sharing home with the one person he’s sure he loves, he wouldn't have answered so enthusiastically. It's just that there is a mess inside of him and he can't quite sort through all the excess guilt and sorrow. 

“Hey, Con, what’s going on inside that head of yours? I can basically hear your brain cogs grinding.” 

They've been lying side by side on the bed closer to the window, keeping a polite distance between their bodies. The snowing outside has ceased, which can’t be said for the weather beyond his eyelids. Connor hasn't wanted to face anything tonight, so he has submitted his vision to the darkness, listening to Gavin's slow rhythmical breathing, one of his favourite sounds in the world.  

Many times has he found himself wishing to share the events that lead him to his current devastated state, times upon times did he want to transfer his memories to some innocent bystander just so he doesn’t have to suffer alone. But never to anyone close to him. It used to be a wound too ugly to be shown, and he feared that once it’s revealed, it would make him revolting in the eyes of the recipient. If it's just him who has to bear the hideous burden then he can justify it as a consequence for his shortcomings, that was something agreed upon in his mind. But when the weakness is stronger than his resolve to let it stew inside of him for all eternity, he can't do anything else but to listen to its cries for help. Because when he closes his eyes and concentrates, the voice screaming for someone to come and save him is no one else's but his own. 

And Gavin just happens to be the first one to get near enough to hear. 

"I'll tell you, but only if you really wish to know what happened on that day. It won't be an easy story to tell, and even less so to listen to." 

"I'd bet you anything that I've heard worse. Witnessed, even. Maybe."

Connor turns to face him, just to give him an expression that conveys how unconvinced he is about that. 

"Okay, sure. Just. This is very… hard for me, so…" 

"Hey it's fine, we don't have to do this if you're-" 

"No, I need to get it out. It's been weighing me down for almost a year, and I don't know how much longer would I be able to last like this.," he squeezes his eyes shut again and dares to grace Gavin with a minuscule smile. 

Gavin extends his hand far enough to almost touch him, letting it linger in the vast space between them. It feels like they doing something like this for the first time, like they’ve regressed back to how it was before this December. He can’t stand it, so he seizes the hesitating hand and clutches it like it’s the only thing keeping him from slipping into the endless dark. 

"Let's be fair here, no one deserves to be my outlet more than you." 

He's the main reason Connor's still here, after all. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What a terrible fucking day has it been already, and it's only ten in the morning. Hank has woken up with a hangover tracing his every step, directly followed by his ever so caring partner. They have been stuck working on a seemingly never-ending case, and the lieutenant isn't known for his patience. Every day he grows wearier and wearier of not being able to find their guy despite it feeling like they're oh so impossibly close to apprehending him. Like he's hiding just around the corner, laughing his ass off at their incompetence. It bogs down not only him, but Connor has been invested in this more than everyone else. The poor android probably blames himself for the fact that the perp is still walking freely among all of his potential victims. 

So when they finally get the call of his whereabouts, when this nightmare of an investigation is about to come to an end, he is so wired-up he cannot see anything besides that what matters to him right now, which is nothing else but the hooded figure fleeting away across the busy street like exhaustion doesn't even exist to him. Unfortunately, Hank is an old man and his muscles are not what they once used to be, so he has no choice but to leave this chase to the one of them who doesn't need any organic tissue to run at the speed of a motorcycle. When the lieutenant does eventually catch up to them, he releases a sigh of relief that gets lost in all the breathless heaving as he watches the monster of a man lying on the floor in the pool of his own blood. He is not a callous person, not usually that is, but right now he wishes that the person on the ground wasn’t breathing anymore. Maybe he'll regret thinking like that later, but at the moment it feels more than justified, given what inhumane atrocities the man has committed. 

He's about to praise Connor for his good work when an arm sneaks around his shoulder, and he senses something sharp against the skin on his neck. 

"Tell me Jake’s not dead or I''ll kill this geezer like the pig he is." A gravelly voice grazes his ear and he wants to throw up from the undesirable proximity. 

"You won't." 

Leave it to his android partner to always have the upper hand in a crisis. He’s is sure that the gun Connor’s holding in his hopefully steady hand won't miss his target and that he'll be released from this death grip in a matter of seconds. It's not the first time he's found himself in a perilous situation like this, but that doesn't mean he's isn't sweating like he's about to get murdered in cold blood. Because he isn't. He can’t be-

A loud bang reverberates through his head down to his spine, ending at his feet just as devastatingly hot lava takes his mind under. It's the worst pain he's ever been in, yet it feels so… liberating.  He can just make out a desperate scream of his name in the voice he's got used to hearing these past months before all his thoughts slowly disappear into the all-encompassing darkness that is carrying him somewhere distant, somewhere painless. Here, in the great void of salvation, he's nothing but an idea.  

Happy because he’s arrived in the place he's been trying to get to all this time, for a hope that he can meet the most important person in the entire world, the missing piece of his soul. Sad because he’s leaving the other one behind. 

He doesn't know if the flickering light that is gradually moving closer is the thing he's been longing for, but he's more than willing to find out. 

Because nothing burdens him anymore. He's finally free. Home at least. Just like he should be. 

@a-convin-new-year should i continue tagging this blog or it too late? 

Empathy, pt.3

Let’s start with this: Jamal Kashshoggi was a man.

Do you remember him? He was a man, a human being, and like any of us he had hopes and dreams and memories.

He was also a journalist. After years of supporting the Saudi royal family and their authoritarian regime, he was murdered in 2018 for writing and speaking out against their abuses and, eventually, their war in Yemen. That was the version of him who fled Saudi Arabia, and the one who was marked for death by the Saudi crown prince he had once called a friend.

Last fall, the Saudi regime commuted the death sentences of the men it offered up as his murderers. Three months ago, an investigation confirmed that it was the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who had ordered his death.

We’re forgetting him. Even now, reading this, we are already forgetting. We can’t help it. At least, we tell ourselves we can’t.

In many ways, Kashshoggi was a lot like Alexei Novalny. Novalny hasn’t left the news quite yet. Like Kashshoggi, he supported the corrupt, authoritarian regime in his country, Russia, before turning against it. The attempt on his life, by poison, failed. Barely. He’s still alive, locked up in a Russian prison, a cautionary tale for those daring to oppose Vladimir Putin.

How long before we’ve forgotten him, too?

It’s a lot to ask of ourselves, remembering everyone around us. Sure, in some abstract way most of us try, “Good will towards men,” and all that, but we have the luxury of looking away and of not having to commit ourselves to thinking of others the way those two men did.

For each of them, it was an inescapable empathy for the suffering of they saw around them that compelled them to risk their lives to draw attention to it. They did so knowing the cost.

That cost - personal loss, imprisonment, death - is enough to keep most of us looking away. So much of what we do is to enable us to look away, to keep unpleasant reality at a distance. When others are already physically far away, it only makes it that much harder for us to do the right thing.

Looking out past our borders, the world today is filled with men, women, and children suffering, more than a few at the hands of authoritarian regimes, and of them far too many paying that cost for standing up against abuse.

The most present case this past week, because videos on social media have made it impossible to ignore in ways that it has been, has been that of the Palestinians.

The facts of this latest series of abuses against them should not be in doubt. During the last days of Ramadan, Israelis began forcing Palestinians out of their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah district in East Jerusalem. This was followed in quick succession by Israeli troops occupying the Al-Aqsa mosque following a confrontation between Palestinians at the mosque for Friday prayers and Israelis celebrating the capture of the mosque in 1967.

This was all a deliberate provocation, beyond the aggressive offense of what the Israelis were doing. The timing of it, during the Muslim holy month while right wing Benjamin Netanyahu struggles to cling to power, was intended to add insult to injury.

It worked. Clearly.

Hamas, ever eager for an excuse to be violent and to be seen to be violent, gave an ultimatum that would make Netanyahu’s regime look weak if accepted, Netanyahu gratefully rejected it, and Hamas began firing rockets, knowing that Israel would escalate and retaliate with a kind of brutality that can only be described as criminal.

The unpleasant reality is that both political powers rely on perpetuating the conflict between them, doing so at the expense of the people they claim to want to serve and protect. And those people pay the cost of it.

Note, please, how I have avoided referring to those instigating these atrocities as Muslims or Jews. That they use their religions and their histories as justification for violence and abuse should not be taken as representative of either religion. If anything, it should be taken as a kind of cruel irony, or perhaps an insight into how the abused, as individuals or groups, can become abusers themselves.

Zionism is not Judaism. It never was and never will be. It grew out of two things: the technology-driven late 19th century belief by Europeans, and their North American “cousins”, in their right to colonial domination of non-Europeans; and the centuries-old, routine and systematic attacks on Jews - pogroms - especially in Central and Eastern Europe that led millions of Jews to flee for their lives, many of them to the United States.

The establishment of Israel in 1948 followed the same pattern: that same, late 19th century belief in the right to claim or assign ownership of others’ land - no matter that it had once belonged to your ancestors; and the routine and systematic attempted genocide of all Jews in Europe - the Holocaust - by Europeans who chose to believe Jews not to be Europeans but some other, lesser race from West Asia.

That, of course, has been the assigned role for Jews the world over: they are accepted as insiders when times are good and scapegoated as outsiders when times are bad. To be Jewish - I am - is to understand that this never quite goes away. There’s always somebody having a bad day, always a big lie ready for justification.

Technically, it is true that Jews are Asian, in the way that Palestinians are also Asian, and that Egyptians are, too, but also African because different people have had different maps which they used for different purposes at different times.

Also true is that these things are only true due to the arbitrary drawing of continental lines on maps made by Europeans, from the ancient Greeks to those carving up the “New World” in the century after Columbus to the 1885 conference in Berlin carving up Africa for colonial exploitation.

This is not, strictly speaking, a European thing. Every culture has a tendency to see themselves as the center of the world. Just ask those living in China, or as they call it, Zhongguo, the “Middle Kingdom”.

The difference here is that modern day Israel was carved out of Palestine, a colonial “protectorate” which was itself carved out of the Ottoman Empire and awarded to the British following World War I. As a spoil of war, formerly-Ottoman Iraq, with its vast oil reserves, had greater value to the British. Palestine had ports on the Mediterranean - “the center of the world” - but was otherwise an afterthought.

Not, however, to the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. We must remember that the rest of the world didn’t want them. Jews attempting to flee the atrocity they and everyone else couldn’t help but see coming were turned away by everyone else, including the United States.

This in no way justifies what was done in Palestine in the 1930s and 40s, it’s just to place it in context. By turning Jews away, by attempting to forget them and their suffering, the world gave weight and power to right wing groups within the refugees.

Starting in the 1930s, those groups began to engage in terrorism against Arabs to force their position into Palestine and against the British to force them out. Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) and later the Stern Gang carried out assassinations and killed hundreds of Arabs and British with bombs.

After what the Nazis did to the Jews in Europe, memorialized in newsreels for all the world to see, who would take the Arabs’ side? Who could? The British were in no position to hold onto their colonial possessions anywhere, so they gave up and pulled out and in 1948 the state of Israel was born. Palestinian Arabs were forced from their homes and stripped of rights they had held under the Ottomans and even the British.

Again, this was not Judaism. As the name “Irgun” suggests, those terrorists were a right wing, nationalist militia doing what right wing, nationalist militias have done before and since, using an ethnic or religious identity to justify committing atrocities to take land and property.

After standing by and allowing the Nazis to do what they did, the world vowed never to forget; part of the price they were willing to pay - that they were willing to allow the Palestinian Arabs to pay - was to forget what Irgun and the Stern Gang had done, and to turn a blind eye to anything the Israelis did going forward.

There was a racist element to it, to be sure. This is part of the pattern of colonial withdrawal, negotiating a partition of land and possessions among the colonized groups, pitting them against each other, and then letting them fend for themselves. Nothing like creating a power vacuum to draw out the worst of us.

The British did the same thing in South Asia in 1947, pitting Muslim and Hindu groups against each other, erupting in spasms of violence before settling into a Cold War, complete with nuclear weapons. Even in their most secular eras, religious nationalism has defined the politics and leadership of each nation.

The result of this, naturally, has been an increasingly corrupt leadership exploiting religious hatred and mistrust to gain more power and wealth for themselves. It should be noted, yet again, that the political entities of Pakistan and India, though led by religious nationalists, do not represent Islam or Hinduism.

Their actions and failures do not represent those religions in any way. They are the actions and failures of men and women seeking power, seeking to acquire it and seeking to hold onto it. They are no different than the Netanyahu regime or Hamas, or our own right wing leaders in the United States.

For all of them, it is in their interest to cling to memory of conflict as a means of manipulation; in Israel and Palestine, nationalist leaders preach as if 1948 or 1967 are now; in India and Pakistan, it’s still 1947; and for America’s white nationalists, it’s either 1865 or 1965, take your pick. For the Serbs slaughtering thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica twenty-six years ago, it was 1389, the year the Ottomans conquered the Balkans.

The wars, cold or hot, can never end because time is never allowed to change. This, again, is a function of proximity. By freezing themselves in the increasingly distant past, the leaders and those choosing to follow them do not have to accept the changes facing them in the present. Their fantasy is to return to that idyllic, earlier time, when they possessed everything and did not have to be accountable to anyone.

And they will all fail for the same reason: in the present or near future, we will have reached a point at which we can no longer allow ourselves to ignore those suffering and in doing so forget them.

That is what we have done to the Palestinians. What has been done and what is being done now is in no small part because we forget them, routinely and systematically and purposefully.

The videos sent from Gaza of children being pulled from rubble should help us remember. They should. Ideally, they will have the same effect as those of last year’s Black Live Matter protests, but the people of Gaza remain far away. For many of us, it will be enough that the missiles and rockets have stopped.

Videos sent from India’s emergency rooms and crematoria should help us remember, but they, too, remain far away. Already, we’re starting to put India’s crisis behind us.

Will we remember either of them a month from now? Two? Or will they fade into the background, as the imprisoned Hong Kong democracy protesters have, or those dying of Covid-19 in Brazil, or those shot down in the streets fighting police brutality in Columbia, or those caught between warring factions in Ethiopia’s Tigray region? Or, for that matter, those half a century ago in Argentina who were simply “disappeared”?

What about the coup in Myanmar? Remember that? How about the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya people, supported by the now-deposed and jailed regime of fallen-hero Aung San Suu Kyi? What was done to them was no different than what was done to the Armenians in what is now eastern Turkey by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. That genocide was recently recognized by President Biden, an act of official, international recognition that took over a century and which itself is already being forgotten. The Rohingya may have to wait as long to be remembered themselves, or longer.

The point of all this isn’t that we forget, try as we might, but that despite it we find ways to remember. That Biden recognized the Armenians came because they did not forget and did not allow that crime to be forgotten. 

If this sounds like what nationalists all claim to do themselves - always demanding that everyone remember this date or that insult - remember that actual justice never seems to be their goal.

Justice requires memory, full memory. For us to remember anything fully, we must take the good with the bad. We must recognize the good and bad in each of us and in each group and in each series of actions. We must understand that for the worst act done by anyone in the name of any group or religion, there remain those within those groups and religions who stand against it.

So, let’s end with this: George Floyd 

George Floyd was a man, a human being, and like any of us he had hopes and dreams and memories. He died one year ago today in no small part because we forgot him. 

We remember now, today especially, because of what was done to him on this date, but we should recognize the role that forgetting him and people like him played in the events that led to his murder. We as a society have looked away from the suffering of minorities in this country, and from the violence done to certain groups within our society.

The easiest thing to say, certainly as we watched that video and the countless videos of police brutalizing non-violent protesters all last summer, was that “all cops are bad”. They aren’t. Hard as it may be to hear, they aren’t.

They are, however, led by men and women who push an adversarial culture, who encourage violence and racism, who are corrupt, and who thrive on the failure of reform. And most of them, far, far too many, stand by in silence as men and women are murdered in that culture’s name. In that silence, they have failed us all.

If we want to change that culture, we need those who would stand for justice to stand up and speak. They are there, just as they are in Israel and Palestine, and in Pakistan and India and elsewhere: intimidated, ostracized, and struggling to be heard.

Of course, May 25th, 2020 wasn’t just any other day in America. It was Memorial Day. That is a cruel irony. Another is how little we do to honor that day. It was created to honor those who died for this country, to remember not only them but what they did and what they supposedly did it for. Instead, we grill meats and drink beer and forget our troubles for just one day.

Few deaths may have the lasting impact on this country that George Floyd’s has had and will have, and he died in no small part because he, too, had been forgotten. This coming Memorial Day, let us take a moment to remember him and all of the others everywhere in this world who have died and deserve to be remembered.

- Daniel Ward

OnS Theories (S5) - Fifth Theory - Mahiru and Guren. A promise that will last in eternity, and the sacrifice required to save humanity. Warning: Long theory

This will be one of the longest theories I'll share or update. I've been quite dull or not motivated when it comes to theories (honestly I should be motivated, the story is going to reach a new phase but well, let's proceed!)

The last 3 chapters of the manga made us understand that Guren plans to do something in the dark in order to achieve this "betrayal". The most common thing to see or especulate is that Guren ends up being possessed by Mahiru and ends up attacking others or perhaps that he might end up making an alliance with the first progenitor; even so, knowning Kagami, he's probably giving another direction towards this "betrayal". I could be wrong but well, this is a theory.

To begin with, let's start diving this huge theory in parts, first Guren and Mahiru's relationship; so far, their relationship is quite awkward but at the same time there's trust between them, there's love and sacrifice; therefore, what kind of relationship do they have?

Well, this will be in base to the Light Novel; which is the point on which everything started; Mahiru and Guren were two beings from different worlds; until someone decided to oppose or reject the decisions the first progenitor made against humanity; therefore that person decided to weaken the Hiragi family and after 500 years, that person ended up making two kids meet each other; that person is obviously Rigr Stafford. Even if he sought to divide even more the Hiragi family he never expected that love would bloom between them; therefore Guren and Mahiru started to meet up in secret until Tenri Hiragi discovered them and ended up separating them for 10 years.

After that, we know so far that Guren tried to look for Mahiru, he tried to understand her plans; he wanted to save her; even so, he couldn't grasp to a certain extend what Mahiru's plans were until he started looking up her research materials mainly because Mahiru left them specially for Guren to find out the truth slowly.

To give more focus on their relationship (not love but more like partners in crime, more like two souls that trusted each other) Guren and Mahiru trusted on each other in a way no one else does; even so, there was something that Mahiru never told Guren and that was her destiny; thaat she was living in order to die.

With this, Mahiru looked and experimented with the Hyakuya sect's help in order to give humanity the tools to fight the apocalypse or the catastrophe; just like making Guren and Shinoa survive the catastrophe; still, Mahiru never told Guren that she needed to die, that she needed to sacrifice herself thanks to a superior being and the fact that she only had someone who could call her family, that being Shinoa; Mahiru gave everything for her in order to make Shinoa live a "peaceful" life in a way the Hiragi family wouldn't bother with her lifestyle.

With this, Guren ended up wondering why he couldn't catch Mahiru no matter the effort he gave; and this is related with the previous parragraph, if Mahiru told Guren about her life, Guren would have done something worst in order to stop her from dying even so, if this had happened, Guren would have ended up dead.

Therefore, the relationship between both of them can be described as one of the purest even if the current Mahiru is a demon, there's trust; Mahiru is not a demon, she might be selfish but, there's something that lingers her to remain and keep herself from being a total careless demon. Now relating with the light novels; the reason why Mahiru killed Guren's friends...it is quite the dark story even so, if she didn't kill them, the JIDA would have killed them without mercy, therefore in order to leave Guren in peace, Mahiru ended up killing and commiting atrocities; and something the fandom tends to forget is that; before Mahiru died, she was a vampire, not a demon; she wasn't a namanari or anything; she was a sired vampire by the third progenitor Krul Tepes.

Now, with all of this, ¿what does Shinoa have to do with their relationship?

To begin with this, we know Mahiru loved Shinoa to no end; to the point she gave up her life with the sole purpose to allow Shinoa have a normal life, in order to make Shinoa have a certain amount of freedom or getting her rid of their own father, Tenri Hiragi. This is mainly because Tenri would have ended up using Shinoa as a human weapon if Mahiru didn't come up with plans or strategies. But focusing to the main point; Mahiru knew that she wasn't going to be able to give Shinoa the best future, because she knew that Shinoa's demon would return with her, therefore, Mahiru focused on teaching her sister how to close up her heart, how to hide her emotions even if it hurt; even so, there was a sole feeling Mahiru couldn't erase or erradicate, that being "love".

Why love?

Love is one of the feelings that holds a huge weight in the story; and this is mainly because it makes humans do a lot of actions, making them stop thiking about the danger, putting their lives at stake in order to reach their loved ones.

Even so, Mahiru knew that if Shinoa kept loving her or kept having this feeling for her; Shikama Doji would end up taking possession of her sister before she could grow up and develop; therefore, in the light novel when Kureto warned Guren about killing Shinoa; Mahiru told Kureto to do whatever he pleased, making Shinoa's feelings break into peaces and making her doubt about the truth of everyone's words.

Now, how does this affect Guren?

Guren was the 2nd person Shinoa trusted in; and this is mainly because so far, Shinoa didn't hold any affective feeling towards Guren even if she knew he was someone close to her sister; even though she knew Guren seeked to save her sister no matter what; at the same time, Mahiru shared secret information about Shinoa to Guren; giving as a result a certain amount of trust between Guren and Shinoa; asides from this, after the catastrophe, it could be expeculated that somehow Guren ended up taking care of Shinoa and this is mainly because Shinoa was used to live up by herself, therefore after the catastrophe, it can be said that she was left alone again; making Guren to check on her from time to time.

Returning to the main point; what's the eternal vow between Guren and Mahiru?

Their promise mainly focuses on giving hope to the human world; to the destroyed world, which means, they would follow up their schemes in order to restore humanity, even if they needed to commit dirty acts, betrayals and so on.

This can be proved mainly because of how Guren ends up making people turn around, making them feel confused and everything; mainly because he learnt this from Mahiru but also with the same reason he seeks to protect those he loves even if it means to hide the truth from them.

At the same time, that vow would focus as well on Mahiru's family, that being Shinoa; which means, no matter how hard the path was, they would find the way to put an end to everything.

Now, about that sacrifice, how does this relate with their eternal vow?

Guren is known as an anti-hero, which means he took the path of darkness with the sole purpose to see that glorious day; even so, Guren is tired, he has lost a lot of things mainly due to stuff of the past; and this is something we could see in chapter 56; Mahiru noticed that Guren's heart was at his limit, Guren couldn't stand holding the secret, seeing how time was running out.

Therefore, inside of that sacrifice; Guren will focus on reaching the place Rigr and Shikama are; that being said, Guren won't focus on killing Shikama, because even at the currrent time, Saito believes that Guren will be in Shinjuku; even so, their main focus is that, once Mahiru takes Guren's body, he'll find a way to have a short distance with the first progenitor; of course that'd surprise Shinya and company but, the result of this is with the sole purpose of one thing, to sacrifice everything in order to seal or at least to stop Shikama for a certain amount of time once again; meaning that Guren's body might end up being lost in the process.

Now, what does this suggest?

So far we know that Shikama is almost God, he was resting inside Tenri-s body until he died by Kureto-s hands< even when Mahiru was alive, she adquired or at least assimilated Shikama inside her body with the sole purpose to make Guren and her erradicate a certain amount of his part while the other was confined in a cursed gear; what does that mean? It means that Mahiru looked for a way to seal Shikama, that way he wouldn't be able to contact Shinoa easily; which is something that can be seen in chapter 73; since he wasn't able to enter in Shinoa's heart, he focused on another subject that he could invade.

Therefore, it's possible that Guren and Mahiru might end up facing Rigr, and after that, these two end up facing the first progenitor in a way to proceed to make a ritual or something similar to a seal in order to keep him restrained. On this point, it could be possible that Guren might end up losing a lot but at the same time, this will allow Mitsuba's squad to find a key to face up the first and finish up with Shinoa's possession.

With the sacrifice, is also possible that Guren might end up saying goodbye to Yu and even it might be possible that he ends up revealing how to save Shinoa in base of Mahiru's research.

What do you think?

This is based on canon stuff. I’m not focusing on any shipping attemp. Love is taken as a non romatic feeling but instead, a feeling that gives hope, kindness and friendship

Crescent Chapter 8

Chapter 8: Doing the Right Thing

Chapter Summary:   Virgil couldn’t believe he was saying this, but he missed his cold, lumpy bed. He missed his purple fleece blanket that he draped over himself like a cape. He missed his workplace, manager from hell and all. Anything was better than facing a lifetime stranded in the pit of a basement by three werewolves.

Pairings: platonic lamp

Chapter Word Count: 4680

Warnings:  minor character death (mentioned), entrapment, sensory depreviation

Previous | Present | Next Chapter

AO3 

I’m sorry for the late update, this just kinda ran away from me. But the good news is that I’m releasing the chapter for Gibbous, the next part of the series, tomorrow meaning you kinda get double updates in a row for this week. I’ll be updating Gibbous once a week on Sundays ;)

Once again thank you to @theeternalspace for beta’ing this chapter and if you hadn’t had a chance to check out @finiteframe3‘s amazing art that they did for this story as part of the TS Big Bang, you should definitely do so now!

Patton was born many moons ago, during the night of a full moon. He was the eldest of three, his sisters Rieka and Rudi were born mere minutes later. The elders of the pack said that they were blessed at first to be born on a full moon. While werewolves respected all cycles of the moon, the full moon was respected above all. The full moon was a symbol of rebirth and new beginnings. It was a reminder of the night that those chosen homines had been reborn into werewolves.

As new life, it was a sign of a good luck for babies to be born under the gaze of a full moon. It signified a life full of promise; a life full of prosperity. Some new mothers forced labors specifically for their child to be granted this blessing. That practice was looked down upon, and it was said that children born from those labors were cursed for their mothers’ trickery.

Which why it was no surprise when others accused Patton’s mother of committing the taboo when his sisters died not long after birth. Why else would they die so easily? Werewolves weren’t weak like humans; they could survive diseases that decimated humans in droves. But his sisters’ immune systems had been too weak to fight off the illness that was circulating the pack.

Unlike his sisters, Patton lived. Throughout his life, others accused him of surviving through unnatural means.

“Your mother must’ve paid a visit to a witch,” They sneered, “You shouldn’t be alive—you should’ve died as a baby alongside your sisters.”

Some stood in his defense, proclaiming that he was spared the same fate as his sisters by the Moon for a reason. Surely the Moon took pity on his mother and spared one of her children from punishment.

Still, no one believed his mother’s pleas that the birth had been a natural one. No one except Patton, who hugged his mother’s weeping figure in the depths of her inconsolable anguish. His mother never cried in public. She refused to show weakness nor be pressured into admitting a falsehood.

Oh his mother believed it was a punishment from the Moon alright, but in her eyes it had to be for a slight from earlier in life.

She went to her grave with that conviction. Her body was found in the woods, with a twisted piece of silver stabbed through her heart. Patton was told humans committed the atrocity. As much as humans were a bogeyman to Patton at the time, he didn’t believe it.

Patton and his mother lived on the fringes of the pack, nearly ostracized from everyone. Patton’s father refused to speak to him, let alone acknowledge his existence. They were always given the smallest servings at mealtime. Others spoke cruelly behind his mother’s back, to which Patton did his best to defend his mother’s honor. He stopped after his mother discovered the bruises lining his arms and legs.

Most importantly, he saw how their eyes gleamed with mirth and their lips twitched to suppress a smirk. The rest of the pack went into a frenzy over the news. As much as his mother had been hated and despised, humans had still killed one of their own. Her death broke the tentative peace that was reached between the pack and the human community that lived nearby.

Later in life, Patton would realize that his mother’s death had been a political move to destroy any trust built with the humans. There had been an undercurrent in the pack that refused to see humans as equals, as anything other than evil. His mother was the perfect target. While her death would incite the pack’s rage, no one cared enough to investigate her death close enough.

Patton didn’t know the exact year in which he was born. Werewolves didn’t follow the same calendars as humans. But he lived long enough to see that evil existed in all beings alike, whether they’d be humans, werewolves or vampires and so on. But just as there can be evil in everyone, so can there be good in everyone.

That was why he refused to believe Virgil was evil just because he happened to be a human. From his childhood alone, Patton ran across enough werewolves who committed as many atrocious acts as humans. They refused to acknowledge that their actions mirrored those that belonged to cruel humans.

Roman’s former pack held many of the same beliefs as the one Patton grew up in. He was indoctrinated to see humans as lesser beings and to regard werewolves to be the superior species. It didn’t help that Roman was hurt badly by humans, further cementing those beliefs. Patton couldn’t fault him for that. He could only hope that with a few helpful prods Roman would come to the same understanding that Patton came to.

Logan hated recognizing he once was a human himself. He never said it out loud, but Patton knew it was because he was ashamed of how humans treated supernatural beings. How he treated the supernatural before he came one himself. Logan conceded logically that there had to be humans who treated beings like werewolves justly. But he was quick to assume the worst when he saw Virgil’s reaction to Patton’s transformation.

Both of them believed it was near impossible for humans to see their kind as anything but monsters. They didn’t seem to realize that their actions only served to confirm that view to Virgil.

Human or not, locking somebody up in your basement was wrong. It made Patton’s stomach churn just thinking about it. He’d only wanted to protect Virgil from other humans the way he wished someone done for him and his mother. He didn’t think that he’d have to protect him from his own packmates!

He sighed as he stood in front of the basement door, a sandwich on a plate in hand. Roman and Logan were going to hate him for this. But he had to right a wrong. He couldn’t sit back and pretend that keeping Virgil prisoner out of fear was right.

He unlocked the door before turning the doorknob. He expected the dim lights of the basement to greet him; instead a wall of black awaited him.

-

Terrified didn’t even begin to cover the extent of what Virgil was experiencing at the moment. Time had no meaning as he sat there, pitch black as far as the eyes could see. He stumbled around for a while, attempting to find a light switch or a weapon. Anything heavy he could lob at his hosts turned captors. He gave up after he stumbled over something in the dark and nearly sprained his foot in the process.

Out of all the ways he imagined his life ending, eaten by werewolves was not one of them. Sure, they said they didn’t eat humans. But Virgil didn’t have any reason to trust their words than they were trusting of him. He hoped Roman and Logan choked to death on one of his bones. Patton? Not so much.

He groaned, hitting his head against the post of the stairway leading to the basement door. Of course, Patton and the others happened to be werewolves. It couldn’t have been furries or some illegal gang thing, because apparently the universe hated him.

Virgil couldn’t believe he was saying this, but he missed his cold, lumpy bed. He missed his purple fleece blanket that he draped over himself like a cape. He missed his workplace, manager from hell and all. Anything was better than facing a lifetime stranded in the pit of a basement by three werewolves.

Virgil heard the floor above the basement creak, and his heart started pounding. Any moment now, the door could open. He wasn’t sure if he was ready for that to happen. He was barely holding it together with his trademark sarcasm and self-deprecation.

After all, he spent the whole night lying in a puddle of his own tears. He was so exhausted, but he couldn’t sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, a nightmare awaited him. It was made worse by the fact he didn’t have his regular coping mechanisms. He couldn’t play on his phone or climb up onto his apartment’s rooftop and stare at the light polluted sky. Instead, he started quoting the Black Cauldron, knowing all the lines forwards and backwards.

When that became boring, Virgil switched to singing softly underneath his breath. Virgil wasn’t fond of singing—he grew insecure of it ever since a foster family teased him mercilessly about his voice. But he found nothing really mattered in the black nothingness of the basement.

If the purpose of the basement was to punish him for attempting to escape through sensory deprivation, it was definitely working. He felt like he was floating inside an empty void. Was he really sure that he really existed? Maybe he’d always been here. Just when he started to resign himself to living in complete darkness, the door opened, causing the light of the outside world to flood in.

He hissed, immediately covering his vision from the emergence of bright light. He shoved the hood of his hoodie over his face in an attempt to combat the light. Black spots dotted across his vision as his eyes adjusted to the vision.

“What the?!” The voice muttered, as something clattered to the floor. He heard a flick, and suddenly light shone from up above.

Virgil stayed huddled by the bottom of the stairway, shaking like—well like a leaf. He couldn’t think up a better simile at the moment. With each step the person took closer to him, his breaths grew shallower. Until at last, the person stood in front of him. He could hear their breathing, almost as erratic and noisy as his own.

“L—look, if you’re here to kill me, just get over with it already.” He muttered, his voice hoarse from screaming at the door for a whole hour before giving up.

“Kill you?” The person sucked their breath in, “Oh I’m not here to kill you, I promise!  I might kill Roman, though.”

That did little to reassure Virgil, who shook harder.

“Not for real! Just give him a really stern lecture about leaving you all alone in the basement like this!” The person withheld a sob, “I’m—I’m so sorry, Virgil. I never meant for any of this to happen!”

Virgil knew that voice. He lifted his head, squinting upwards to see Patton standing in front of him. A few feet away was a plate with a sandwich on it. The others must’ve sent him in here to feed Virgil. It seemed they cared enough to make sure Virgil was fed. Or maybe they were feeding him just to fatten him up.

“Go away, I’m not hungry,” Virgil growled, turning his back on Patton.

His stomach growled right after saying that. Traitor.

“Listen, you have every right to be upset,” Patton said, “but I’m here to fix things.”

“With what, a sandwich?” Virgil scoffed but he had to admit the sandwich was starting to look really appealing. He refused to give in that easily, however.

“Well, I figured you should eat something before I get you home.”

“Home?” Virgil looked up at Patton suspiciously.

Patton wrung his hands together, “Yes home! Logan and I talked last night, and we decided it’s wrong to keep you prisoner here, so we’re going to let you go home!”

Virgil rose an eyebrow, “You’re a terrible liar.”

“Darn, you got me kiddo,” Patton shook his head as he sat down beside Virgil, “Logan and Roman don’t know about this—both of them aren’t here at the moment. Look, I mean it when I said I want to fix things. You don’t deserve to be locked up in the basement. You deserve to be at your home with your friends and family.”

Virgil remained quiet for a moment, choosing to ignore that last bit about friends and family.

“Is this a trap?”

“What?” Patton questioned, looking startled by the accusation.

“Last night, I overheard you saying something about wanting me to join the pack, which I’m guessing that meant you wanted me to stay. Well, I’m stuck here!” Virgil did jazz hands, “You got your wish. So why help me escape?”

“This isn’t what I wanted,” Patton repeated his statement from earlier, “I wanted you to have a choice. A pack is all about choice. Roman, Logan and I stick together by choice. I didn’t want you to be forced into staying with us. That’s why I want to help you get home.”

“Won’t Logan and Roman get mad at you when they find me missing?”

“Well I tend to be really forgetful,” Patton smiled precociously, “It wouldn’t be the first time I forgot to lock the basement door.”

“You’ve had other prisoners here before?”

Patton’s eyes flashed with alarm.

“Oh no! That’s not what we use the basement for at all!”

“Then what do you use it for?” Virgil countered, as his eyes scanned the room.

He’d been too busy adjusting to the light to get a good look at the room now that he could see its contents. The basement appeared to be just like any other basement at first. The walls were a plain white with a grey cement floor. It was one gigantic room that ran nearly the entire length of the house. But instead of being stuffed full of storage boxes or being used as a bedroom or an office, it appeared to be something else entirely.

A variety of dog toys were scattered around the premises. Such as a large bone that Virgil was certain was the object he had stumbled over earlier in the dark. A few extra large dog beds were lined up on corner of the room.

“Both Logan and Roman…struggle with their transformations, so it’s safer for them to stay down here when it happens,” Patton explained sheepishly, “That’s why the door locks from the outside.”

“Makes sense I guess,” Virgil muttered before swallowing, “but seriously, won’t they be mad?”

“Oh, most definitely!” Patton hummed cheerfully, “but this is about doing the right thing, and sometimes doing the right thing has its consequences.”

Something flashed across Patton’s face before he covered it up with a smile. There was something the way he muttered that last line as if he’d bore those consequences before, and he wasn’t afraid to face them again. Virgil didn’t know if that type of conviction was foolish or admirable. He couldn’t say if he’d be brave enough in Patton’s shoes.

“You sure about this?” Virgil still asked, mentally berating himself for the question. Here he was, on the cusp of freedom, and still he hesitated. Fear gnawed at his chest. What if the others caught Patton helping him escape? Would they hurt him? Would they decide Virgil wasn’t worth the trouble to keep alive and kill him?

“I’m sure,” Patton reassured him, “Trust me kiddo, I’ll be alright.”

“Okay,” Virgil mumbled as he stood up, “Your funeral, I guess,”

“Hey, I put the fun in funeral!” Patton grinned, “but you should eat that sandwich before we go, kiddo,”

“Fine,” Virgil rolled his eyes, making a show of taking a bite out of the sandwich for Patton’s sake. He clutched it in one hand while he followed Patton out of the basement. Truthfully, he was more grateful for the meal than he let on. Still, he preferred to nibble it, his insides too knotted up for him to truly enjoy the ham and cheese sandwich.

Virgil cautiously glanced around each corner, wary of Roman or Logan popping up unannounced. Patton said that both of them wouldn’t be home for some time, but that did nothing to soothe his nerves. As they made it to the front door, Virgil noticed there wasn’t any cars in the driveway nor did Patton make a move towards the garage. Well, he noticed this right after his eyes were assaulted yet again by sudden bright light.

“Er, sorry!” Patton said upon catching his confused gaze, “It’s not that long of a walk—promise!”

“Okay,” Virgil shrugged as he took another bite of the sandwich.

He didn’t really have a choice in the matter, after all. If there were no cars, then there were no cars. It was either walk or stay imprisoned in the basement forever. Since Virgil wasn’t particularly fond of the latter option, he went with the former.

If Virgil could, he’d run all the way back to his apartment. But he had nowhere near enough stamina to accomplish that. He’d be lucky if he could run ten paces before collapsing. Especially after being bedridden for the past few days. As much as he wanted to be home quick as possible, walking was fine.

Walking was more than fine, in fact. Walking was great because he didn’t have to confine himself in a vehicle. Cars made him nervous. It was why he chose to move to the city where he could reach everything on foot or by train.

Patton and Virgil remained quiet for about half a mile down the road. Patton sung underneath his breath, too soft and low for Virgil to make out discernible words. It sounded like an old lullaby, but he didn’t recognize the melody. Virgil was content to stay a few steps behind him, as he finished eating the last bits of his sandwich.

“Hey Virgil, do you know where your apartment is from here?” Patton said, turning back to glance at him.

“Wait, you don’t know where we’re going?”

“It’s kinda hard to know if you don’t tell me in the first place, kiddo,” Patton laughed.

Shit. Virgil looked around their surroundings, but he’d never came through the city this way before. He was terrible at directions in general. It took Virgil weeks for him to be able to navigate his little slice of the city with ease. His phone was dead, so it wasn’t like he could just plug his address into the GPS app and follow its’ direction. They were screwed.

“Virgil,” Patton said, interrupting Virgil’s inner turmoil. He looked up to see Patton looking down at him with concern, “are you alright?”

“I—I—I just,” Virgil shut his eyes as he breathed deeply, “I don’t know where it is. I mean, I know where it is, I just never been this way before and I—”

Patton squeezed his shoulder, “It’ll be okay, I promise. I won’t leave you until we find it, even if it takes all day.”

“Thanks,” Virgil said, for once using the word for it’s correct usage instead of a sarcastic remark. Such as when he found himself stuck in the pouring rain without an umbrella.

A jingle erupted from Patton’s jeans pocket, causing him to retract his hand from Virgil’s shoulder to retrieve his phone. Virgil embraced himself for the incoming onslaught of bad news. It had to be a text from Logan or Roman about his disappearance from the basement.

However, Patton squealed happily which he took to mean that it was a good sign.

“My egg hatched!” Patton exclaimed, “here look at it! Isn’t it cute?!”

He shoved an image of a rainbow-colored baby dragon in front of Virgil’s face. The dragon rocked back and forth in a cutesy sprite animation.

“Definitely cute,” Virgil readily agreed.

“I know right? I think all the dragons look especially cute when they’re just babies!”

He tapped on the right-hand corner of the screen, giving treats to the baby dragon until it grew into an adolescent form. As Virgil watched over his shoulder, an idea hit him.

“I just realized something,” Virgil said.

“What’s that?” Patton asked, still busily feeding the now happily grown-up dragon.

“We can use the GPS on your phone to help us get to my apartment.”

“What’s a GPS?”

“You don’t know what a GPS is?” Virgil stared at him incredulously.

“Nope, I just use this to talk to Logan and play games!” Patton grinned.

There was a gleam in the man’s eyes that made Virgil unsure if he was completely serious or just pulling his leg. Regardless he held out his hand towards Patton.

“Fine, I’ll just show you it. Can I have a look?”

Patton handed the phone to him without any hesitance. Unlike Virgil, who would’ve sooner broke his phone in half rather than let someone hold it.

Virgil scrolled through the pages of apps on the phone. Patton really wasn’t kidding when he said played a lot of mobile games—dozens of them cluttered the phone. It made him wonder how he had the storage for them until he saw the absence of social media apps on the phone. After about a minute of searching, Virgil finally discovered the Maps app tucked away in a folder.

He clicked on it and turned to look at Patton to give him an explanation when the man’s eyes lit with recognition.

“Oh I know this one!” Patton said, “it’s the game where you put in an address and you have to follow the lady’s directions until you reach the destination!”

“It’s not really a game,” Virgil murmured under his breath as he entered the address into the GPS.

He sighed as he gave the phone back to Patton.

“Alright! It looks like we need to keep going forward for about a mile and then hang a right!”

“Okay,” Virgil said, biting back a groan.

It would be okay—it had to be okay. He just needed to focus on getting back to his normal dumpster fire of a life and he’d be okay. He can manage a mile or two to avoid becoming werewolf chow. He’d suggest taking the subway, but his five-dollar bill certainly wasn’t cover their tickets. Nor was he about to burden Patton any more than he already was doing. Virgil mainly tuned out Patton’s chatter as he focused all his energy in moving forward one step at a time.

The werewolf slowed down to match his pace with Virgil, which meant he was forced to take shorter steps than his usual long strides. It was a subtle gesture that Virgil appreciated. As the owner of short legs, he hated having to quicken his pace to match practically everyone else.

The GPS kept steadily giving out directions in a robotic feminine voice. Occasionally Patton switched the screen from the Maps app to check on one of his mobile games. One of his absolute favorites was the Dragon game. He showed every one of his dragons, explaining their names and history to Virgil.

“This one is named Conan, after the—”

“YOUR DESTINATION IS ON THE LEFT.” The GPS droned, interrupting Patton in the middle of his speech.

Patton and Virgil glanced at one another before staring up at the apartment.

“Well, I guess this is it.” Virgil drew in a shaky breath, before giving a lazy two-fingered salute.

He moved to turn his back away from Patton, when the other pulled him back into a hug. He found himself crushed against Patton’s frame, unable to wiggle away.

“I’m sorry, I should’ve asked before I hugged you!” Patton sniffled as he withdrew from the embrace, “I just—you better be safe out here. Don’t go wandering through dark alleyways by yourself again!”

Patton’s reprimand reminded Virgil of a worried parent trying to sternly reprimand their child. There such a warmness hidden there behind the façade of a severe rebuke. Despite his multiple strings of foster parents, Virgil truly hadn’t heard that from anyone except his own parents. Patton barely knew him, yet he already cared for him in that fashion.

Virgil swallowed a lump in his throat. It didn’t matter. This would hopefully be the last time the two interacted. Patton was just trying to be nice by pretending to be concerned for his safety, that was all.

“Oh, believe me I’m not gonna be stepping foot in an alleyway for a long time.” Virgil said as he ran his hand through his hair.

“Glad to hear it!” Patton forced a chuckle.

The two stood there in front of the apartment, fidgeting, as both scrambled to find words to say. What more could they say, two strangers brought together by the strangest of situations? Goodbye just didn’t seem to cover it.

Patton cleared his throat, “I should head back—”

“Thank you,” Virgil interrupted, his cheeks growing warm, “I mean, I would be dead right now if it wasn’t for you. So um, thank you for saving my life.”

He shoved his hands in his hoodie pocket, groaning inwardly at his awkwardness. Why did he have to make everything worse?

Patton’s eyes grew misty.

“No problem, kiddo,” He whispered, “You take care, okay?”

“I’ll try.” Virgil shrugged before entering the apartment building.

As he entered the lobby, a wave of exhaustion hit him. It felt like decades since he last roamed the premises of the apartment. He was thankful not for the first time that his apartment possessed an elevator. He didn’t think he could take ten flights of stairs at the moment. He nearly collapsed in the elevator as it was.

He was sure he looked like a zombie to his floor neighbors as he made his way to his apartment. But again, it wouldn’t be the first time. Nate, one of said-neighbors, called out a greeting to him but Virgil strolled past without returning it.

He fumbled for his key when he reached his door, before sliding it into the keyhole. As he opened the door, he was greeted to the site of a trashed-up apartment. Same old, same old. Music roared from one of the bedrooms letting him know that his roommate was home.

“Jerad,” He croaked out, “What is this mess?”

“Oh hey dude!” His roommate popped his head out from his bedroom, “I was wondering if you skipped town or something!”

He could tell from Jerad’s stupid goofy looking smile that he was drunk. His roommate tended to be a volatile drunk. It was hard to gauge when he’d grow from happy to angry because it happened within a heartbeat.

“Nope,” Virgil said, “Look it’s a long story and I’m tired and I’ll probably have to explain things to you in the morning again anyways. Just, why this?”

He gestured vaguely towards the state of the living room, with the numerous beer bottles and broken lamp and the couch torn apart.

“I had a party,” Jerad said, taking a swig from something that was definitely not water.

“Of course, you did,” Virgil let out a frustrated groan. He did not have the mental capacity to deal with this.

“I thought we agreed at the signing of the lease that’d there would be no parties?”

“Well, that was before yOU DECIDED TO SKIP TOWN!” He yelled, throwing his drink down on the floor in a fit of rage.

Virgil winced, holding his hands up. He learned the hard way before that there was no reasoning with Jerad when he was like this.

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry, I won’t do it again, alright?”

Jerad studied his face before breaking into a smile.

“You better not, buddy!” He laughed, slapping Virgil on the back as he staggered towards the kitchen. His previous cup laid on the carpet, abandoned.

“I—I won’t. I’m just gonna go to my room now.”

When his roommate didn’t say anything, Virgil let out the breath he was holding and darted to his room as quick as he could. He locked the door, flung onto his bed and pulled the purple fleece blanket over his head. Underneath the blanket he attempted to control his breathing.

Tomorrow he’d have to figure out a way to cover his share of the rent. Tomorrow he’d have to come up with a story to explain his disappearance to Jerad. Tomorrow he’d wonder if he really spent time in a house full of werewolves.

But today wasn’t tomorrow just yet. As much as he was prone to lying in bed and anxiously weighing out his dilemmas, it didn’t happen tonight. Nestled in the comfort of his own bed, he drifted off into a peaceful slumber.

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“An Inquiry Needs to Take Place”: Jeremy Corbyn on Afghanistan & Preventing the Next War

— August 26, 2021 | DemocracyNow.Org

Jeremy Corbyn! British member of Parliament who served as leader of the Labour Party and leader of the opposition from 2015 to 2020.

We get reaction to the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan from British member of Parliament and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, one of the leading critics of the Afghan War in Britain. He says critics who warned against invading Afghanistan, and later Iraq, have been vindicated, and calls for an official inquiry into the war. “It’s horrible to read back to 2001 and 2003 and say all the worst predictions that any of us ever made have all come to pass,” Corbyn tells Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

As we continue to look at the crisis in Afghanistan, we turn now to one of the leading British critics of the U.S. war: former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. In 2001, he helped form the Stop the War Coalition to campaign against the U.S. invasion. This is Corbyn in October 2001 questioning then-Prime Minister Tony Blair in the British Parliament, two weeks after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.

JEREMY CORBYN: Does the prime minister not recognize that the continued bombing campaign, including the use of cluster bombs, in Afghanistan is forcing large numbers of people to seek refuge in Pakistan, that it’s bringing devastation and poverty to the people of Afghanistan, and it seems to be directed, in part, against conscripted soldiers and against civilian targets? Does he not accept the call of the aid agencies last week for a halt in the bombing to allow the humanitarian aid to get in, rather than more death and more destruction?

PRIME MINISTER TONY BLAIR (WAR CRIMINAL): Mr. Speaker, I just answered, a moment or two ago, about the humanitarian program, and I drew attention to comments of spokespeople for the World Food Programme that it is not the bombing that is preventing the food getting through. In respect of the campaign itself, there are no civilian targets at all. We do everything we can, unlike bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network, who set out to kill as many civilians as they possibly could — we do everything we can to minimize civilian casualties.

But, as I was saying earlier today, there is a simple choice in this respect. We either decide, after an atrocity like the 11th of September, that we are going to act against those responsible, against those sheltering those who are responsible, or we don’t. And I can’t see, in the light of that atrocity, the fact that we know that that network of terror intends committing further such atrocities, how we could possibly stand back and do nothing in those circumstances. So, I respect entirely his right to disagree with the course that we are taking, but I believe that course to be right.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Tony Blair responding to Jeremy Corbyn just after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. Corbyn would go on to serve as Labour Party leader in Britain from 2015 to 2020, during which time he continued to be a leading antiwar voice in Parliament. He’s joining us now from Greece.

To continue the debate, Jeremy Corbyn, if you could respond to Blair, the former British prime minister, blasting Biden recently, saying the U.S.'s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan is “imbecilic,” saying the move has “every jihadist group round the world celebrating”? Your response to what's happening now and what has happened over this 20 years?

JEREMY CORBYN: I was simply saying to Tony Blair, and to George Bush, “You took us into a war that made no sense whatsoever in 2001. You exacerbated the problems there. You created the poverty there. You created the poppy production.” The only people that have benefited from all of this have been the world’s arms dealers and the real estate of Middle Eastern cities, particularly Dubai and other places. The corruption, as Sarah pointed out, is rife in Afghanistan. And we are now reaping that whirlwind.

But I think we also have to look at this in the slightly longer historical context. It was the obsessions of Cold War politics of the 1970s that encouraged the U.S. to fund the mujahideen, which eventually formed into the Taliban, working with Pakistan, because they felt they had to oppose what they believed to be the Soviet continued occupation of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union was driven out by those forces. And then 9/11 happened. They decided that the whole purpose of 9/11 had come from Afghanistan, rather than that bin Laden had gone back there — and, in fact, he was found in Pakistan anyway eventually. And we’ve then been involved now in 20 years of war.

Two years after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, we had the absurdity of the Iraq War, in which Bush and Blair claimed that Iraq was both harboring ISIS and was also developing weapons of mass destruction, neither of which were true. There were very few of us in the British Parliament who consistently spoke up against the human rights abuses in Iraq before 2003. I was one of those. We went into that war in 2003, and we warned that this would create the wars of tomorrow, the terrorism of tomorrow, the poverty of tomorrow and the refugees of tomorrow. It’s horrible to read back to 2001 and 2003 and say all the worst predictions that any of us ever made have all come to pass.

I was on a call last night with the U.K. defense secretary. A lot of MPs were on that call. And we were making desperate pleas on behalf of individual people from the communities that we represent. I have Afghan people living in my community. They have family back in Kabul, in Kandahar and other places, and they’re trying to get out to get to a place of safety.

We’ve just created this terrible situation. And it’s now a question of, one, making sure that those people that are most at risk are brought out safely; secondly, that the food problem, the aid problem, is dealt with very rapidly; and what kind of engagement there’s going to be with any government that’s formed in Kabul in the future, because if there isn’t some form of engagement, there isn’t some form of recognition and some huge pressure on human rights, on women’s rights and all the other issues, then I fear yet another conflict will break out in Afghanistan. It is a terrible situation.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Jeremy Corbyn, you’ve called on Prime Minister Johnson to start an inquiry into the Afghan War. Could you explain what you want that inquiry to include?

JEREMY CORBYN: After the Iraq War had started, many of us continually asked for an inquiry into the way the decisions were made. And eventually, after three or four attempts, there were various parliamentary inquiries and so on. Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry was set up, and he produced a huge and very lengthy report which indicated the inefficiency of decision-making, the way in which the intelligence reports had been messed about with and the inaccuracies of many of the decisions that were made. And as leader of the party, I formally apologized for Labour’s role in promoting the Iraq War.

I think we did exactly the same over Afghanistan — what decisions were made at the very beginning, why so many British troops went in, why Britain accepted the role of being the custodian of Helmand province, with the loss of hundreds of British soldiers in that particular conflict, and what has happened to the vast amounts of aid that Britain and other countries have sent to Afghanistan. I’ve met soldiers that have came back from Afghanistan. Indeed, quite a number have — or, in fact, a small number are now members of the British Parliament, and they’ve described what the situation was like there. And Clive Lewis, in particular, a Labour MP, is very concerned that we might be about to make the same kind of mistakes again in the future.

And so, I think an inquiry needs to take place, because those that have lost loved ones in Afghanistan, soldiers — British, American, German, Afghan, many, many others — all the thousands of lives that have been lost, their loved ones, their families need to know: Did that person die in vain? Was this necessary? Could this have been avoided? Otherwise, we’re just going to march into one war after another. And the only beneficiaries are those that are either after the mineral riches of Afghanistan — and they are huge, as even the Russians indicated in the 19th century — or it’s going too be the arms dealers, that do very well out of it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Jeremy Corbyn, you talked about your own constituents whose family members are Afghan Brits, whose families are still in Kabul. What do you think the U.K. government can do to allow refugees safe access to the U.K., I mean, given the scenes at the Kabul airport, and also the fact that when Prime Minister Johnson was the mayor of London, he actually advocated for giving undocumented people residence in the city?

JEREMY CORBYN: Yes, Boris Johnson’s politics are a wonder to observe. I remember him contacting me, when he was mayor of London, asking me to support his campaign that undocumented refugees should be given right of permanent residence and eventually citizenship in Britain. I agreed. I supported it. I supported it then, and I support it now. He then went on to become prime minister and has led a horrible campaign against refugees, and his government is now trying to push through Parliament a piece of legislation that will make it a criminal offense — a criminal offense — to assist a refugee at sea in getting to safety at shore, contrary to the international law of the sea.

Now, as to the British people in Afghanistan or the Afghan families who have a family member in Britain, or some who have British passports and are in Afghanistan, they’re obviously all entitled to come out. And the RAF has been doing its best to get people out, and quite a lot have got out. But not everybody has got out. There is chaos around the airport, as everyone can observe at the present time. And it is a desperate argument that’s going on: Who has got the greater priority, this person or that person?

Fortunately, the government has relaxed quite a lot of the rules on entry to Britain. In other words, biometric tests are no longer required. And it appears to be that if one family member has a right to enter Britain through holding of a U.K. passport, then the rest of the family can come, as well. But they’re not all going to get out through Kabul airport. There is no other, as I understand it, international airport in Afghanistan that works or people could get to, anyway. Or they’ve got to try and get across the border into Tajikistan, into Iran, into Pakistan, or wherever else. It is a humanitarian crisis.

But, interestingly, the U.S. sent the director of the CIA, it is reported, to Kabul to discuss matters with the Taliban. It seems that we’re now having, through the U.S. and, presumably, through other countries, as well, direct negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan. There has been a contact point for a long time in Qatar. Surely, all this could and should have been done years ago, and all the lives that could have been saved and all the misery that has happened since then could have been reduced, if not completely avoided. Surely, there’s a huge lesson for us all here. But, obviously, the priority at this very moment is to bring safety to those most vulnerable people in Afghanistan from the excesses of what the Taliban have done in the past, and —

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Corbyn, we’re going to have to leave it —

JEREMY CORBYN: — there are reports of doing on the ground [inaudible] — I’m sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we thank you so much for being with us, former British Labour leader, one of the leading critics of the Afghan War in Britain from the beginning. And that does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Stay safe.

Short Story: Eight Months After the Trial...

“Quite frankly, your honor, the man my client was convicted of murdering is alive and well. I demand you release him from prison immediately,” the man asserted, straightening his suit coat and giving a final nod, now waiting for the judge’s response. The man’s name was Jenson Highwater, an attorney who Garreth Hayes had been working with over the course of the eight months that had passed since the trial of The Collective vs Garreth Hayes. The trial where he had been convicted of murdering the Collective’s very own Eldritch Knight, Harkin Saldorek.

It had been a long eight months, but Garreth had been holding his wits about him. He was placed in the Black Desert Maximum Security Penitentiary, located in the desert country in the southern region. It was where the worst of the worst were held, and they were more than eager to get their first draconic prisoner within their walls.

Now, as Garreth stood behind the defendant’s table in his prisoner’s suit, with his salt-and-peppered hair and beard grown out and frizzled, and dark bags under his eyes, Garreth couldn’t help but feel a deep loathing for those who had put him in the position he was today. However, unlike the monotonous days spent within the confines of prison, today he did not vanquish those thoughts as easily.

When Garreth had heard of the atrocities committed by the Collective’s members over the course of their founding year, he pled his paladin order, the Shield of Light, to take up arms against the Collective, and hold them accountable for the lives lost because of them. They called him paranoid, and when he continued to look into it, they called him obsessed, but no one pointed a finger at the Collective.

Using his undercover identity as the Greensword within the criminal organization, the Web, which he had created by order of the Shield of Light, Garreth sought to do what his order refused, and bring the Collective to justice. He spent months assembling some of the most horrendous and despicable people, people who wouldn’t say no to taking down the “good guys”, and created the Circle. All with the sole purpose of leading the two groups to a head, and taking both down in one fell swoop. But this was not how things would eventually fare. Garreth lost control of the Circle and, when the time came, could not bring himself to take down Raide, Lydia, and Ro-el’tai. Instead, he saved them during the third wave and turned himself in.

Everything he had done had been for the good of the people. He took up arms with criminals and murderers, he let his name become tarnished by the Circle, and he even gave away his freedom at the end of it, without ever seeing a single member of the Collective brought to justice. Still, they brandished him a war criminal while the Shield of Light disavowed him and turned him to the wolves, claiming he had inexplicably gone rogue. But here Jenson was, the only one on his side, demanding his freedom. Garreth honestly didn’t even know how to feel.

“There is, Mr. Highwater, still the charges of tax evasion within his businesses,” Judge Hilder replied. He was an aging man who had held the title of judge since before most of the people in the room were even out of diapers.

“Of which my client pleads for time served and no more than the maximum 150,000 gold fine,” Attorney Jenson said, shooting Garreth a hopeful look. Only a fraction of a second later, the judge’s gavel slammed against his booth.

“Agreed. The defendant is sentenced to time served and a 150,000 gold fine. The court is dismissed,” Judge Hilder said, slamming the gavel twice more, then feel back into his seat as the audience simultaneously stood up.

Jenson swung around and looked at Garreth, but couldn’t refrain and lunged into him for an embrace. “We did it, buddy, you’re free!”

Garreth blinked once. Then again. He searched for the proper words but came up blank. “Holy shit.”

emotional about jaime | cersei parallels yet again: tywin’s death. this episode - dealing w grief for prominent figures they aren’t 100% sure how to deal w their own emotions about. main focus on cersei b/c this is a cersei lannister blog, but i have feelings abt jaime i’ll try to contain for the sake of clarity / focusing on the muse. jaimes feel free to @ my w/your thoughts

“The queen felt strangely calm. [... ] And my father. My lord father. Should I scream and tear my hair?** (see readmore) They said that catelyn stark clawed her own face to bloody ribbons when the freys slew her precious robb. Would you like that, father? She wanted to ask him. Or would you want me to be strong? Did you weep for your own father?” - cersei, affc

“It was queer, but he felt no grief. Where are my tears? Where is my rage? Jaime Lannister had never lacked for rage. “Father,” he told the corpse, “it was you who told me tears were a mark of weakness in a man, so you cannot expect that I should cry for you.” “ - jaime, affc

so, i’ll start off w/ the man himself. the paradox with tywin is he’s obsessed with ‘family’ but does not actually care for his individual children beyond their purpose to propagate lannister power-- by forming alliances through marriages, increasing their renown (and thus the family’s), etc.  he is pragmatic, yes, but to the point he fucks his kids up so much that they hate him, or at least cannot decide how to feel about him.

just from these quotes as they stand, you can see both twins struggle plainly with connecting any grief to the death of their father. “he felt no grief / the queen felt strangely calm”. how can you mourn someone you grew to hate? when, some part of you, though you can’t quite acknowledge it (isn’t it wrong? aren’t you supposed to be sad when a parent dies?), is glad that this immense shadow has faded, the eyes that made you feel “weak/worthless/ugly” are closed forever? their reactions are great examples of kids trying to deal with their emotions towards an abusive parent. they made your life hell, but they’re your parent. that’s meant to mean something, right? but tywin was never a father in the conventional term. he never cuddles his children or tells them they’re doing good. he starves them of any attention and projects his own hypocrisies and fears onto them. despite his icy facade, tywin lannister is a hypersensitive dick. he has a guy locked in the bowels of casterly rock until he starves to death for making a joke about his shit being gold-flecked. insecure much????? and he projects this onto his kids, primarily his ‘’’’golden twins’’’’’ because they hold all the hopes for house lannister, in his eyes. cersei is to be a queen, and jaime is to be the pinnacle of Man ; but both quiet and subordinate as far as concerns their father’s wishes. but also never cowing to the sheep. but also aware of the sheep. but also not caring what they think. but also you’re better than all of them anyway. he highlights his disgust of certain virtues and implies to his kids that they suffer from the same ‘ills’ when they displease him. peak manipulation! and people wonder why cersei and jaime are the way they are.

there is some relief, for both of them. of course it is a terrible event for the sake of their house, as tywin is believed to be the main power of the lannisters throughout the seven kingdoms ( though i have to talk sometime about how that idea is FAKE NEWS! and tywin is not this infallible mastermind everyone thinks he is, he is a huge hypocrite---- back to focus ). cersei fears the brightest star in the west has fallen, but she also revels in the idea of never being forced into a marriage again. never having to take someone into bed again that she does not wish there. she feels like with her father’s death some of her own agency has been restored to her-- a pipedream, of course. this is westeros, and we see in the latter part of the book and the next just how much she will suffer at the hands of patriarchal ideals ( fuck kevan lannister! ). they revere him, but they hate him. a perfect example of this love/hate is exemplified by cersei here:

“Such a man deserves a retinue to attend his needs in hell.” - cersei i, affc.

like?? this?? speaks for itself?? she believes tywin deserves accompaniment in the afterlife akin to a king. and i can’t help, personally, thinking of the ancient rulers ( especially in egypt ) that had servants buried with them to aid them beyond the grave. it shows her idolisation of tywin, but also how she views him. he’s not going up, he’s going down. and i don’t just believe it is because cersei is aware of the atrocities he has committed; it’s how she feels about him. tywin makes his children yearn for that pat of the head, but always withdraws the hand an inch further, forcing them to chase after these impossible ideals he puts in place for them! tywin gets his wish with cersei, she becomes a queen: but it’s still not enough. jaime becomes a renowned knight with many accomplishments: it’s still not enough.

“would you want me to be strong?” / “you told me tears were a sign of weakness in a man”

they even question how their father would want them to process grief!!! he has fucked his kids up so badly they can’t even be sad about his death, nevermind deal with it. the twins don’t even know if crying is ‘correct’, or if their father would be glaring down on them, disgusted with the show of ‘’’’’’weakness’’’’ (SUCH a toxic concept). it’s more Lannisters Bottling Up Emotion, and it isn’t healthy. 

talking specifically of cersei: own father kept her locked up in a tower from the age of twelve to fifteen when he sent for her to join him at court. he denied every suitor because he wanted his daughter to be queen no matter what. jaime even talks about cersei growing more beautiful and ‘womanly’ locked up there; i can’t help think of rapunzel in her tower, locked up and barred by some patriarchal ideal that she has to be kept pure and untouchable until her [parental figure] finds her a husband suitable (in their eyes) for her.  ( then she burns her tower, her PRISON FOR YEARS, in affc..... my emotions ). and tywin makes a prisoner of cersei in more ways than just the literal. his control over his daughter is immense, and i believe he is a huge factor in her paranoia, her overreaction, her constant self-checking------ -- - and, of course, her internalised misogyny. his gaze pins her to her chair, and even tyrion feels pity for cersei. TYRION. “you are the queen, he should be begging your permission to leave” or w/e the quote is. cersei is the most powerful person in the room, but she turns to a child every time her father is near. a huge indicator for an abuser; i don’t believe tywin hit his children, but the emotional abuse... i’m not even touching on tyrion here, but think tysha. tyrion certainly gets the ABSOLUTE WORST of tywin’s treatment, but i don’t think cersei and jaime got off anywhere near scot free. tywin uses her as a pawn, and blatantly does not give a shit that his daughter was constantly r/aped and a/bused by her husband. women were made to smile and reproduce. as long as cersei did not make a fuss about it  ( and i hc part of her silence is the idea that her father would condemn her for being so weak as to either let it happen (disgusting), or to complain about it to him as if she cannot deal with it herself. which, she does. but how horrific is it that his own daughter didn’t feel she could come to him with her abuse? instead, she turns to jaime. but that’s a whole other meta. )

talking specifically of jaime: tywin disowns his own son for not acquiescing to his desires!!!! he tells his prized son that he is not a member of this family anymore, for not obeying Orders. as he should, because tywin’s children should be wrenches and hammers, tools for exercising his will. and tywin usually gets what he wants, by whatever means necessary. his brutality is legendary; his kids are no exception to this rule. jaime, it could be said, suffers the worst of all three from his father’s endless (impossible) expectations. he is to rule the rock, but also be an infallible knight, but also a commander, but also loyal to tywin/TheFamily alone, but also have wives and produce heirs, but also never complain about any of it and have any desires of his own. also let’s just mention how tywin uses his knowledge of jaime+tyrion’s closeness to manipulate jaime into aiding with the whole tysha scheme, leaving jaime with immense misplaced guilt and troubling memories. his father tells him at the age of ~eight that love is worthless because you cannot feed a horse with it, or keep a house warm with it. 

he wants control of them, and to get that control, he makes them compete for his approval / ‘love’. this obviously creates resentment, discord; and is another example of why i think tywin isn’t all the tactical mastermind people believe him to be. his tactics are all very well short-term, but long-term... there are many examples and fgs i’ll write this later, but in terms of his kids: they don’t know what parental love is meant to feel like, they idolise this abusive prick who is a hypocrite of his own ideals (married for love/has whores/is hugely insecure/ACTUALLY MAKES BAD DECISIONS SOMETIMES??) and places such high expectations on his kids that they break their backs trying to reach them. he wants his children to be empty little vesicles for his own desires, and by ignoring their individuality and pitting them against one another, he creates the downfall of his own house! i love this house of self-destructive idiots! i hate this house!

below: for me it is further evidence of how fucked the children of tywin are that they can’t even process SADNESS because what is an attachment beyond each other, as one another are the only love each has ever come to know? forget conventionality, forget the realm, forget what other people think. no one matters but each other, because, FAMILY IS ALL THAT MATTERS. ANYONE BUT A LANNISTER IS LESSER, right? thanks for the life fuckery lessons, dad.

“He was curiously calm. Men were supposed to go mad with grief when their children died, he knew. They were supposed to *tear their hair out by the roots, to curse the gods and swear red vengeance. So why was it that he felt so little?” - jaime asos

just had to highlight this Cool Comparison between cersei and jaime’s povs and how the parallels reiterate what i’m trying to say here about difficulty processing grief. and also, vague sidenote, about tearing hair out and how both twins lose their hair as a symbol of death/rebirth and the various literary implications of that------- but focusing on grief:

this quote is jaime finding out about joffrey’s death. he explains his difficulty feeling sadness, telling himself that it is because ‘joffrey was more robert’s than his’ as an excuse. he had no attachment to the boy, bc he didn’t feel like he should have one. cersei told him early on how that could endanger them, and he didn’t care. ‘robert was welcome to him’-- though this might be bias of hindsight-- he dislikes joffrey in the present-- but it is also seen in jaime’s jealousy colouring his view------ jaime lannister is inherently selfish, especially when it comes to his twin, and joffrey “took up too much of cersei’s time, cersei’s love, and cersei’s breasts.” ( still laughs 100 yrs later at jaime getting jealous of a baby breastfeeding ). 

Reports come in from the Outer Rim. Generals Kenobi and Skywalker and the heroic 212th and 501st take another system for the Republic. 

 Once we were their heroes. 

Then they forgot us.

In other news, more pardons were issued by the government of the New Republic to Imperial officers involved in the governing of the Outer Rim territories… 

I glanced at Appo, sitting across from me in my office, his expression unreadable, the only light in the room coming from the HoloNet flickering between us. I wondered what he was thinking. Pardons? What would there be in the way of pardons for us? Would they leave us alone? Or would they come knocking our door down to arrest us? 

“Don’t worry about it, Commander.” He said, as if reading my thoughts. “Cross that bridge when they get here.” 

I huffed. “I almost hope they come back. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life here feeling that its because they granted us the dignity of their word. I don’t want to owe them that.” 

Appo nodded mutely. He was far away already, I realized. Away with the rest of his company. Did they get pardons, out there on Coruscant? He missed them, I realized. Who could blame him? The only thing that stung harder than feeling isolated from them was the memory of mistreatment. 

Systems flock to Coruscant to join the New Republic… 

I used to wonder, during the war, what would happen. Especially after the shit show that was Umbara. How could we not be wondering that after Umbara? Even Rex, arguably one of the most loyal among us was wondering that. But I didn’t begrudge him that. How could you go through what he did, and not wonder? I wasn’t there, not in person, I was on the other side of the planet with my general and didn’t hear about what happened until it was too late, and I stopped to wonder. 

Did the Jedi care about us? Were we just a means to an end, the weapon through which they would achieve peace for their Republic? A Republic that we would not have any place in, since we would either be dead, or on our way to dying of old age. Ask any shiny off the ship from Kamino, and they would give you a prepared answer, one they had practiced for all eleven years of their lives, one that they had been reciting since they could talk. It had only been around three years, and I couldn’t remember what that felt like to be a shiny. 

“Appo, go make sure the south wall is patrolled.” I said, absently reaching for my teacup. Tea. I was getting old; I could hear Wolffe’s laughter from our Acadamy days. A memory came back, that time the Wolfpack invited me to join them for contraband whiskey. In those early days, Sinker’s whiskey tasted less like alcohol and more like rat poison. Wolffe had laughed at my reaction to it, clapping my back “You get used to it.” I hadn’t had tea once in my life until that one time at the beginning of the war when General Kenobi offered me some as we prepared to ship out that first time. Once in the field, they said that we spent so long around our generals we adopted their quirks, and they ours. I wondered if Wolffe ever thought about what he might have picked up from General Plo. Now I barely touched alcohol, tea was usually the first line of defense against stress. Old habits from the Empire die hard.

Appo saluted; it was a slightly crooked gesture with a subtle dramatic flair that could only have started with Skywalker. 

In the end though, it didn’t matter, if they had cared about us. I just knew that we cared about them; enough that when I saw my general fall from the side of the cliff and I felt the pounding in my head subside, and the whispers (Good soldiers follow orders, good soldiers follow orders, good solders…) died down, I just felt raw pain. The same raw pain I felt when Waxer, or any of my men, or even any of my brothers died. The one that I had learned to swallow like bitter bile because somewhere, my brothers and men were dying of grief and they would look to me (What do we do, sir? What now, Commander Cody?) and I had to have a composed face and an answer waiting for them. I remember that day, when Order 66 went out. I have been unable to forget it, which is good, I suppose, because years later General Kenobi turned up alive and everyone turned to me, and from then on, they would ask me “Which was it, Commander? Deliberate miss or terrible aim?” 

I don’t miss. Not then, not ever. Palpatine must have known that. I hit exactly where I was aiming for. It didn’t change the fact that both options were downright insulting. The first implied we had a choice when Order 66 went out, and the second implied that I was bad at what I did. Neither were true. 

Rex wasn’t there for any of that though. After Fives died, he couldn’t bear it. Wolffe had commented that I was cold, and detached but I was that way because it was the only way I could survive taking them into battle with me. I kept friends outside of my legion. Apart from being professional, I already felt responsible enough when they died on my watch. Rex however had taken Echo and Fives when they were just shiny and had seen them advance to ARC troopers, only to watch them die at the height of their careers. I think that he believed Fives to be untouchable; the brother had survived the worst academy scores, the Rishi Moon, the Citadel and Pong Krell. And he went out killed by his brothers in the Courscant guard. I had to admit, when he described it to me, there was a moment when I was transported back to the Rishi Moon station as I saw two rookies taken into the 501st moments after seeing the rest of their squad die. All I could think was that I was thirteen years old, and had lived long enough to personally watch the rise and fall of an entire squad.

Shot by your own brothers. I couldn’t think of a worse way to go. I didn’t tell Rex that though. He knew. Of course, after Slick, neither of us were really in a position to judge Fox. After all, good soldiers follow orders. 

The Empire pushed us aside, and we were ultimately forgotten by most of the galaxy. Oh, there were some that knew us, some that remembered Order 66 and the end of the war as well as we did. How they hated us. Hated us for existing, for being born, for fighting in the war. We had outlived our purpose and our punishment for surviving the impossible was the hatred and scorn of the galaxy for a crime that we were forced to commit. Some of us ended up here, on the prison of Raxus Prime. Others scattered to the corners of the galaxy. Rex, Wolffe and Gregor joined the rebels. I couldn’t bring myself to feel invested in the civil war. The Empire was built on oppression and darkness but the Alliance represented the Republic that had enslaved me and my brothers. At least with the Empire, I was a warden and I could pretend I was the one calling the shots. 

“Satisfied, Rex? Because I’m not.” I thought bitterly, not for the first time. 

It didn’t occur to me to be outraged at the injustice of our fate until the civil war was long over. That they could take me and use me and throw me away. That they could do that to me, to my brothers. To Rex, who fought their wars for them, survived. What life did he have with the new Republic? I didn’t know. Wolffe shared my fury, I knew, but unlike me, he was ready to forgive. Years in exile had pacified his temper while it only fed mine. At that point, outrage was useless; the galaxy moved on, the new Republic leaders forgot about us, or didn’t care. After the atrocities of two wars, what rights could I demand? I would be lucky to get a pardon. And I didn’t want that anymore. I was tired of my life depending on the mercy and goodwill of natural borns with power. So I turned away from it all. I took my refuge on Raxus Prime, and took in any of my brothers that wanted peace. Peace away from the Republic, and the Empire and their fighting. Just my brothers, our family together.

Another memory came as I stared at my empty teacup; Rex stepping off the ship from Kamino. I knew him in the Academy, his first year in leadership training had been my last. Anyone looking at him would have thought he was totally confident, but I knew by looking that he was nervous. Nervous, but hopeful. He wanted to make a difference and this was his chance. I never would have imagined then that he would desert, and join those trying to rebuild the system that had kept us down. I had been angry with him, when he reappeared with the rebels. How could he do that, to his brothers in the 501st? How could he do that to me? 

I don’t think it stopped me from missing him and even Wolffe though. These days, I couldn’t bring myself to be angry with them, not anymore. How could I? They forgave me for staying with the Imperials. If he could forgive himself, and me, for Order 66, how could he not forgive the New Republic for how they treated us? But still, they were hope, for us. Hope that we could be forgiven, hope that we could be absolved, with time. While most of us hid away from the galaxy in our people’s shame, they continued to build history and repair what we had done at the end of the war. Nobody would know but that’s what it would be. They would be our voice and they would tell our story. 

They would remind them who we were.

Justice Belongs To God!

PERSPECTIVE MATTERS...

“Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” ~ Romans 12:19 ESV

From time to time I read in the media and often hear people posting on social media about reparations due to the victims of crimes against humanity. Such banter rarely ever fails to get my attention. Certainly, the descendants of Jews who suffered in the Holocaust demanded reparations and received them. The granting of the land formerly known as Palestine to Eastern European Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to become the nation of Israel in 1948, was in large measure reparations for Great Britain, the United States and their allies turning their collective backs on European Jews victimized by the Nazis through the Holocaust during World War II. The descendants of Japanese families who were mass-interred into concentration camps in America during World War II demanded and received reparations. More recently, Native American tribes who have demanded reparations for the pillaging of their descendants land by European invaders centuries ago are now receiving reparations in the form of tribal gaming contracts being awarded to Native American tribes from coast to coast. From the Pacific coast of California to the Atlantic coast of Connecticut, tribal gaming casinos have been opening across the country providing a growing revenue stream to the descendants of Native Americans displaced and nearly erased by the colonialization of North America by European invaders that history gently and innocently refers to as “settlers.”

But most notably, as a Black American, I am attuned to hear most of the chatter surrounding the call for reparations for the injustices of multi-generational racism that has targeted blacks in America in the form of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, socio-economic discrimination, and mass incarceration. Coming from the perspective of a Black American, I can totally understand and am sensitive to the call for justice, for wanting to undo the societal wrongs that continue to hamper the educational, judicial and socio-economic progress of blacks, upon whose descendants backs and shedding untold volumes of blood, sweat, and tears this, the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, was built. It is amazing to many of us, myself included, that after 399 years of oppression faced in a multiplicity of forms, not even a sincere public apology, much less the notion of reparations, has been paid to the descendants of slaves. This current generation experiencing the unprecedented persecution of mass incarceration and violent police brutality appears to have been left out of the reparations sweepstakes that have anted up to everyone else but us.

History has witnessed the paying of reparations to Eastern European Jews, to Japanese Americans, and now even to Native Americans. But history seems to have forgotten besieged Black Americans waiting in vain for reparations due for the high crimes committed against us for generations. Oh, how easy and so very understandable it is for us, the descendants of slaves and current victims of its sinful fruit: the painful prison pipeline of mass incarceration, to get into our feelings on the matter of reparations. It is only a natural response to desire to seek justice for the plethora of wrongs committed against us that go unpunished and undealt with. To feel otherwise would cut totally against the grain of human nature. It is only a natural reaction to want to right such a perversely evil wrong as racism and all of its rotten fruit. 

Yes, left to reside in the feelings of my own flesh, I concur conclusively with its compunction to seek reparations and even demand it be paid. But what amount of money or ceding of power on this earth could possibly begin to compensate blacks for the litany of damage done to us past and present that would be able to reposition and repurpose our collective future? There isn’t enough tea in China or currency that can be printed nor precious metals or gemstones mined that could adequately repay blacks for what we have collectively endured these nearly four hundred years in America. But as a follower of Christ and citizen of the kingdom of God, rebuking the feelings of my flesh whenever it comes into conflict with the dictates of God is precisely what I am called to do. We must choose to cut against the grain of our human nature if we are to live by the Spirit of the Living God.

Seeking God’s perspective on the matter of reparations and revenge, God speaks with precision and clarity on the subject of justice. First, we are reminded before seeking anything or anyone to “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33). “What things will be added to me,” you ask? “For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all,” Jesus said in the preceding verse (see Matthew 6:32). Jesus was specifically referring to “all these things” that pertain to the needs of your life that drives the ungodly, pagan Gentiles to naturally desire and seek after. Justice is as human a desire as there is on this earth. The seeking of justice for wrongs committed against you is a natural response of the very human feelings of your flesh. 

“17 O LORD, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear 18 to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.” ~ Psalm 10:17-18

One of the sovereign promises of God includes: “Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). God knows the desires of your heart. For if you truly belong to God and have given yourself over to His sovereign rule, then it is God who rules both your heart and its desires. God put the desire for His justice and His righteousness inside your heart. When Jesus Christ becomes your Lord and Savior, when His Holy Spirit comes in to reside in your heart alongside your spirit, a heart change takes place. In the very place where your will once reigned, God begins the process of transforming your heart and its desires according to His will.

When we come to salvation through Jesus Christ, one of the most critical aspects of our conversion is that of our perspective - the way we see and think about things. Our conversion includes the change of our former opinions to the adoption of a brand new God-perspective on our view of the world we live in past, present, and future. We who are born-again and are made brand new, become a new creation in Christ. We now have access to a brand new perspective made possible by the mind of Christ given to us the moment we sincerely say, “I do” to make Jesus Christ the Lord and Savior of our lives. It now becomes possible to live as the Lord prescribed: “But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16). That includes the fleshly desire for revenge.

It has only been through the grace that came by way of my seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness on the matter of reparations and justice that I have been personally able to quell the compunction of my flesh to act out and act up vehemently in outrage and righteous indignation to the atrocities that have occurred in the past and continue presently. These unspeakable atrocities have gone virtually unabated against blacks since the landing of that first English slave ship carrying African slaves into the port of Jamestown, Virginia in August of 1619. Seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness in the matter of reparations and justice, my stirred spirit is quieted, calmed and made to be put at peace from its former agitated state. God’s Word is so very true: “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You” (Isaiah 26:3).

The first above-captioned verse which begins this blog sums up God’s perspective on the matter of reparations and justice so very well: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” Reparations and revenge belong to God. It is only meant for Him to repay and only He can sufficiently meet what His own perfect justice demands. All it takes is our implicit trust in Him to do what He Himself has explicitly promised to do. When and where is all up to Him. The faith and trust placed in Him to do it are all up to us. 

13 “Then the LORD said to Abram, "Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years.14 But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.” ~ Genesis 15:13-14

We are reminded in the above-captioned Scripture that God has a purpose especially in the things we cannot control. We do not have control over what occurred in the past to our ancestors. Neither do we have control over the response that a notoriously wicked nation has when confronted with the sins of its past and present. But we do have complete control over how we respond to injustice and unrighteousness. “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4:26) is the Word of the Lord to us. 

God wired us with feelings. He outfitted us with emotions. But your feelings and emotions left to the dictates of your flesh will lead you into more trouble than you can possibly imagine. The feelings of your flesh can often be your very own worst enemy. But when you place your feelings under the sovereign control and authority of the Holy Spirit, His control becomes your “self-control.” Self-control is the very last of the fruit of the Spirit referred to in Galatians 5:22-23. “22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.” The sincere move of the Holy Spirit within you can be implicitly trusted, whereas the feelings of your flesh cannot. Nothing leads more people astray than their feelings. But nothing leads us to the truth like the Holy Spirit.

The truth of the Word of God prophesied in Genesis 15:13-14 is that the offspring of Abraham, the original Hebrews of the Bible, not their imposters nor imposers, would be sojourners and servants in a foreign land and be afflicted there for four hundred years. What’s interesting is that with all the specific detail of this prophecy that is provided, listing the specifics of time, people and outcome, there is no detail surrounding the identity of the nation in question. We assume that God is referring specifically here to Egypt, of course. Egypt fits the prophecy perfectly. But so too does ancient Babylon, with the exception being that the Hebrews were sentenced to servitude there for only seventy years, not four hundred. The only other similar prophetic fit is modern America. All we know for certain is that the nation in this prophecy will come under the direct judgment of God and the oppressed people of God, the direct genetic descendants of Abraham, would eventually emerge from their specified four hundred years of affliction with “great possessions.” If I am correct, the prophetic clock is now at nearly 399 years and counting on our time of affliction here in America. Our time for deliverance is coming nigh!

Now, those “great possessions” spoken of in God’s prophetic promise to the offspring of Abraham could be manifested in the material realm as well as by the spiritual realm. Perfect peace is a possession few actually possess. Perfect peace is prosperity perfected. Its presence is likely coveted best by those who lack it: the despaired, the despondent, the discontented, the discomforted, the discombobulated, the disheartened, the disturbed. Those seeking first reparations rather than the kingdom of God and His righteousness will likely miss what the King promised to bring: perfect peace and vengeance for those who put all their trust in Him. Trust God to restore what Satan through his co-opting of human flesh has stolen from you! God’s great restoration of great possessions should be your expectation. Consider this: It may very well be that the sole reason why reparations have not been received is that it has always been God’s plan to repay the unrighteous for their wickedness and the righteous for their suffering.

“And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.” ~ 1 Peter 5:10

When restoration and reconciliation truly become your expectation, you will be able to forgive those responsible for wronging you. Your trusting and knowing that justice is in God’s hands is activated when you exercise forgiveness. Trust God to remember the former things that He told you to forget when you forgive. “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old” (Isaiah 43:18). The deliverance to come will make the suffering of the past pale in comparison. It is the purpose and plan of God to transform you from victim to victor!

“But they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” ~ Isaiah 40:31

The vengeance of the Lord includes the promise from God revealed to the Psalmist David that “[God], You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies” (Psalm 23:5). God promised that He would bless and vindicate you in front of your haters. Now, that’s a reparation promise only God can afford to pay. He’s God the Father, the Creator of the heavens and the earth. He is not some deadbeat dad without the resources to back up His claim. God is faithful to do exactly what He promised. So wait on the reparations of the Lord, not the world. Trust and believe, justice belongs to God and He will repay! You have His Word on it. Perspective Matters...

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Complicit disobedience .......

For a few days I have had the band, Disturbed’s, ‘Sound of Silence’ song, going round in my head. (From their album ‘Immortalized’) And then this title came into my brain. I have long realised that one the most dangerous sins on this planet is complicit disobedience. Why? Because it draws innocence’s into doing what it is wrong.

And one of Jesus strongest words, ever, after the warning of the Pharisees was this, ‘If anyone of you teaches one of my innocents to sin, it would be better for that person to have a millstone around their neck, and for them to be dropped into the deepest part of the sea.’(Matthew 18v6, Luke 17v2, Mark 9 v42) What a fearful warning! The person is being told they are better off drown, so far down in the sea they can never, ever be found, rather than face God, if they have committed this sin!

In Luke 17v1 Jesus said it is INEVITABLE that some people WILL be stumbling blocks to others, but that if you are one of them, better to be dead and lost, than found by the Living God.

Sound harsh? On one level yes. Surely we all make mistakes? But on another NO! Who of us, if our small child was encouraged to do a huge wrong, we had warned them against, would cheerfully batter the person responsible? If our child, whom we have protected and nurtured, is exposed to evil, purposely, by someone else, what would we want to do to the person who did it?

Because once innocence is gone, it is gone FOREVER. Once the cancer of exposure takes root, it can spread until it kills. That is why God was so upset when the Israelites married into other nations. Because the innocence they had with Him was destroyed. They were introduced to other ways, other gods, other things, and became separated from Him! And they, their children and grandchildren were contaminated by the sickness of the loss of innocence. Because what WE do, we teach our CHILDREN to do! And what we teach others to do, they do so much BETTER! That is why Jesus said, to the Pharisees, ‘You go half way around the world to make a convert, then make them twice as bad as you!’(Matthew 25 v15)

We all know the saying, ‘Don’t do what I say, do what I do,’ We tell our children not to do something. But WOEBETIDE us, if we are doing it ourselves, in one form or another! Because they will do what we DO, not what we say! Why? Because we are living a lie. Saying one thing doing another. And they know it. Because our boundaries are open, they see that, and copy it. They are not CONVINCED we are right, with what we say, because they SEE us DO it, so no longer TRUST what we are saying! It’s only lip service! That is why James said faith without WORKS is DEAD. Because it means nothing. There is no substance!

And others watching us, copy and justify it, BECAUSE they see us do it! Which is why countries at war justify atrocities by saying the other side did it too! So they do it even more diabolically.

When we want to do something, we are unsure of, what do we all do? We go to others and ask! And often, we have ALREADY made our decision inside, so we go to others who will JUSTIFY our choice!

I know a man who wanted to have an affair. He knew it was wrong. So he steered clear of all of his friends who would have disagreed and tried to warn him. He only went to those who would SANCTION the choice he made! And actually, he lost everything. His wife, his family, AND the woman he left them for!

So what happened here? He aligned himself with people who would stand with him, in his choice to do wrong. Do you know what that meant they were doing. What they are guilty of? Complicit disobedience. They stood with him, in his crap. And egged him on. This person also had a girlfriend who was very innocent. And he loved tartiness and porn. So he persuaded her to wear unladylike clothes. To do unladylike things. Because it turned him on. And he damaged her. She eventually left him, but the filth he had sown stayed. He has marred and scarred her spirit, with his own filth. She was innocent, until he came along.

In China, at the time of the revolution, and in nazi Germany, some would encourage others to do what they were doing, because it made them guilty too. And if you are also guilty, you will not do what is right. You have allowed yourself to be tarred with the same smear as them. You have entered into complicit disobedience. So it was encouraged. Because then everyone needed to hide the truth of what they had all been doing.For a harrowing example of this, read Jung Chang’s book, The three swans, three daughters of China. It’s horrific in how it describes complicit, silent evil. All being drawn in and egged on, encouraged, even threatened, to do evil together, so all are guilty.

Those who refused imprisoned or killed. And their families punished and hurt.

I am wondering, if this is why, Jesus told Pilot, ‘Whoever handed me over to you, is guilty of a worse sin.’ (John 19v11) Because He knew the Pharisees were forcing Pilot into complicit disobedience. So they could blame him, for their own actions! Pilot was INNOCENT. He didn’t know who Jesus was! He knew nothing of Jewish law. But he was also part of a mighty empire where complicit disobedience ran rife!

In the Verse at the beginning, Jesus is warning about anybody being a stumbling block to one of HIS children. And that is a very serious thing. One where, for our own best interest, we need to make sure we are always on our knees respecting of God. Because a stumbling block is often a form of one or another type of pride. Pride in our own interpretation. Arrogance we must be right. Satan is a stumbling block. It is what He actually IS. Causing all of humanity to fall, and causing them to stumble right at the birth of our creation. ‘Did God say? Don’t eat….’(Genesis 3v1) the block Adam and Eve fell over was the biggest, evil, stumbling block ever, in history. It still reverberates and will continue to do so, until God stops it.

Paul warned us not to become stumbling blocks, to those weaker in faith than us, by not doing things in front of them, that they could not do, because they believed it was wrong. Even if it wasn’t. (Romans 14 v 15,20,1Corinthians 8 v 9-13) We can fall into sin, and wound or even turn one of Gods children away, by the way we behave. As my friend Martin, and my pastor Pete, always say, ‘Relationship is more important than principles.’ Because principles can destroy, if used in the wrong way. God always puts principles second. You can see an amazing, out of the box, mind blowing testimony of this, on my blog post, ‘A story of personal redemption.’ Remember, our God came to seek the lost. To help the sick.

Our God also said HE is a rock. And He is a stumbling block! We can fall on Him and be saved, or we can have a Him fall on us and be crushed. (1Peter 2v 7-8, Matthew 21 v44) Satan had thought he was the victor. That He would reign on and over earth forever. With humans as his creatures. But Satan was foolish. He forgot, that God IS THE rock. His pride blinded him. Satan did not fall on the rock that IS God. So the Rock who is God, fell on him. And crushed him under foot. And Christ also gave US power to do the same! (Colossians 2v15, Luke 10:19)

Just as complicit disobedience harms, so complete obedience saves. (Philippians 2v8) We have a choice. Everyday. We can choose complicit disobedience with the world. Or complete obedience with God. One rewards to the utmost. One takes us into Hell itself. The world loves its own. It encourages them to do what it wants. To be the children of Satan. To stand together in sin. Which is why Jesus said, the world hates those who love Him, because we are not like them. (John 15v19)

We are Gods children. That is how He sees us. And His love for us, like any parent, is protective. He also knows how frail we are, How how easily we can fall. And that is why He is so stern in the warning. It is hard enough for a child to learn obedience. Obedience is not easy, and needs to be taught. And learning it can hurt! We put our toddlers on the naughty step for a reason! We ground our children and remove their toys to teach them obedience. This hurts them and us! Jesus was obedient even unto death and death on a cross at that! (Philippians 2v8) So to be encouraged into disobedience is wickedness. Not only for the fault that is committed, but the damage done to the spirit/emotion/mental part of a person, that could be irreversible.

It is one of the reasons Jesus hated the Pharisees. They live in disobedience, but claim to see. They follow darkness, but claim they are in the light. They say they are Gods children, but actually are the devils. And the worst part? They teach others to do the same. (John 9v41, John 8v44,Matthew 23v15) They take innocence, and lie to them. Just like their father. (John 8v44) Ultimately we will be known for whose children we are. (1John 3v10)

Yes, we make mistakes. And if we turn away from them, go to God and ask Him to help us, He is faithful to do this. Because that is who He is.(2 Timothy 2v13) but we must be aware and awake, as we know we have an adversary who, at every step of the way, tries to persuade us that complicit disobedience is okay. That the world loves us and understands why we do this. He soothes our consciences with lies. And by listening to these lies, we fall. (Its okay, it’s not your fault, she shouldn’t have done that; he deserved what was coming to him; Of course that’s ok, they are going to learn it at one point anyway! It’s your RIGHT to tell them that, or to do that….) If we listen to him, we are aligning ourselves with the father of all lies. (1John 5v, 1Timothy 4v2, Ephesians 4 v17-24)

The song, sang by Disturbed, also talks about ‘complicit silence’ And that is another facet of it. We can choose NOT to do the wrong a person or people, are doing, but choose to say nothing. That is also complicit disobedience. Why? Because we have passed it by. Jesus tried to explain this to the Pharisees in his parable of the Samaritan. (Luke 10v 25-38) The Samaritan had been beaten and robbed. Left for dead. And the priests and levites passed him by. Ignored the man. And by ignoring him, became complicit with the robbers. Because they did nothing. That is why in our law, if you say nothing, but later rely on it in court, it can get you into trouble.

Or, if you do not report a crime, and it is found out, you knew it happened but did not report it, you could be charged. Because you have chosen complicit silent disobedience.

We can choose to break this. But it can be hard. Often, if just one of us chooses, it opens the door to give others freedom to do the same. Once, Many years ago, I was at a beach. On the promenade a man was lying on the ground, in the middle of the path. Everybody was looking, but passing him by. Nobody wanted to get involved. They knew something was not right. But were afraid. Until a person did go up. Then, suddenly three or more people became involved. But it took the courage of the first person. To break the complicit behaviour. And allowed others to choose to act. We must learn, never to be complicit, like this! We must be on our guard against complicity. The riots in London, five years ago, were complicity on a huge scale! People who were normally upright and honest, became no more than robbers and thieves. Copying criminals, stealing and looting. The complicity had become a cancer. Growing. People feeding on it, following others blindly and so stumbling and falling themselves.

The media are HUGE in the sin of complicity. Encouraging hate, fear and bias. Feeding people a diet of complicity. Getting people to agree without thought! This is such a dangerous thing! We must be awake! We must discern what is going on in the world around us, and pay ATTENTION to working at being close to God.

This world worships complicity. It all hides in the dark. Justifying and denying sin. Allowing and rewarding evil. The krays were evil. They tortured and committed extortion. But what do we do? Make movies glorifying it! Thinking villains are romantic and even justifying what they did. The film about the great train robbery is disgusting. With Phil Collins. It portrays the man who escaped to Rio after the robbery, in which a man was killed. The film made the escaped man out to be a caring man! How did that make the dead mans family feel? They were still alive, still hurting! Yet the film industry were complicit in allowing a convict and a thief to be made more important than a man who was murdered, leaving a family. We worship shit. Making wooden idols out of evil. Feeding on it, revelling in it. How? Posters, photos, copies of the dvd, download, telling everyone how amazing it was. Buying and looking out for more of the same. Immersing ourselves in the whole shit of it. Kidding ourselves it’s just entertaining. There is nothing nice about the krays, or anyone else who murdered or commits a crime.

This then deceives us. We get into wrong thinking. Feeling sorry for the offender, rather than the victim. Does that make us complicit? On a very feint way, I would say it does. You know, it took me years, to realised films like that glorified wrong and evil. Made it seductive and desirable. Made doing right seems wrong. Made the strong seem weak. Villains were cool. No they are not. They are cruel. The person that chooses to say no, is the person who shows strength.‘ The person who does not pass by is the hero! Not the coward with the gun. We worship such CRAP. Such LIES. It’s no wonder society is on its head! We are complicit in so many things. And we don’t even know it! How dangerous for us. How vulnerable we are, if we do not sort this out.

We must remember WHY Jesus compared humans to sheep! It is because we all have a tendency to follow, SOMEONE or SOMETHING. We must remember this. If we always remember this, we always know we have a choice about WHO we follow! The world follows blindly. And if we follow blindly too, we will get lost! Whose voice are we listening too? Whose actions are we copying?

Bessie Ten Boom, who died in Ravensbruck concentration camp, for hiding Jews in WW2; said exactly what we need to do, to make sure we are not ever in complicit disobedience, but always allowing our heavenly Papa to show us how to walk in His steps, and His steps only. She said, ‘The centre of Gods will is the safest place to be, let us pray that we always know it.’