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variousqueerthings · 2 years

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Weird that they are placing so much emphasis on having bio kids as the ultimate form of happiness and legacy, when Mr. Miyagi is like, right there. Do the writers think of him as different/a tragedy because he would have had it if his wife and son didn’t die, or did they just forget?

I answered and I deleted and I answered and I deleted, because I agree so much with you and I don't want to ruin the enjoyment for anyone, so let's put this below the cut:

THE ANSWER/VARIOUS RAMBLES STUCK TOGETHER WITH TAPE THAT I ACKNOWLEDGE DID NOT STICK WITH YOUR ORIGINAL ASK APOLOGIES (we did start there though):

maybe miyagi was actually secretly evil the whole time........ 🤔🤔🤔(joke)

that family structure is suspect dude, sounds queer to adopt a kid who's being bullied, years after your wife and child died and then not even knock up his mom, what are you gay?

at the very least don't pretend it's a real family you've got there, you'll always be a tragic sad man, without your biological progeny, which is the only kind that matters, and only if done in the Correct way (single parents need not apply)

weird we had the "tanmee" line in s3, but this season just straight up forgot a lot of its own building blocks in favour of some weird aggressive and regressive heterosexual bullshit -- the more I think about it the more discomfort I feel, which isn't to make this deeper than it is, I don't think there was bad intent. I think there was a tragic lack of imagination and it coincides with some real-world Politics that the show doesn't care about and is tacitly conservative about, but I sign onto the show not to be reminded of that world

a lot of people have mentioned that the show bears very little resemblance thematically to the core of the original (two) movies -- it's always been conservative in its depiction of military and war and violence, and simplified an actually incredibly complex, and yet incredibly clear-cut messaging that positions Miyagi (and his ideals) on one side and Kreese (and his ideals) on the other, with very clear reasoning as to why one is right and one is not

the show has been antisemitic, it's been racist, it's had a lack of queer characters that is all the more obvious in a story about a group of outcast kids with found family themes (first produced in 2019), and it's been sexist/underwritten the value that women have in a story about legacy and toxic masculinity and gender roles

and in fandom there have been interesting bits of analysis and writing from very talented and clever people to acknowledge these unexamined prejudices and flaws. they have been challenged in art and in narrative, and there has been plenty of discussion about where we can suspend disbelief and what we (individually) won't take onboard in our own various tellings of the story

up until s5 I have been able to hold that tension, because I truly enjoyed the story and the underlying themes and characters and was baseline expecting those themes and motivations to still matter

but oof the way that this season became entirely divorced from any of the show's own grounding themes, hasn't only made the characters hollow to me, but it's also made me realise (and hey, maybe I should realised this sooner, more fool's me) that they really don't give a shit about Miyagi

which is crazy because the story's about him.

EDIT: and i do still feel deeply uncomfortable about the final fight, and generally how daniel “defeating” anything was done totally absent of miyagi’s ideals -- the only way to solve anything is violence now. beat the other guy into submission to beat your fear i guess. meaningless to what daniel’s journey was, but good to know he’s also manly enough now

and more importantly than anything in a story that's just about liking or disliking trajectories and reads... I am deeply uncomfortable with its politics now

I think how I felt about s4 was that it had some moments I didn't like, but the trajectory made sense to me. with s5 there are moments I do like, but it's empty. I don't know why anything in the last episode happened. I feel intense discomfort about the treatment of women and girls. And to be clear I don't think that there was an intentional drive to make the messaging... that about queerness versus dominating toxic heterosexuality, but honestly I'm living in a pretty shitty world these days with a lot of backsliding in equality and I don't think that I can happily shut off my brain and watch something that conservative anymore

it's not technically anything deep as such, it's not real life. I've really enjoyed the show, I've made some lovely friends through it, and read some of the best fic, and gotten to hype up some wonderful artists and I'll stay in fandom, but I think I might be done with the show itself

but hey, miyagi adopting this skinny little punk from new jersey and giving him some valuable life lessons only for this kid to adopt him right back, that I can rewatch a million times and like I said -- the story is all about that (and it most certainly isn't a tragedy)

#ck negativity #cobra kai #ck #i didn't touch on johnny in this because it would have gotten long #longer*#but i think i covered how i feel about That in the post about queering the villains through childlessness #spoilers #cks5 #cobra kai s5 #cobra kai season 5 #cobra kai spoilers #although i could say more about the queering of johnny lawrence followed by the backlash #and how that does a disservice to tkk johnny as well #rambleramble

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oinker-33 · 2 years

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A Little Bit Of History: Old Country Humans!

(Heads up - I cannot find the tag for this, so I'm gonna say, trigger warning for Nazi symbols - don't worry, this blog post is just for educational purposes! I have done my best to blur them, however I'm not a very attuned seeker.)

Hey guys, this would usually be a Twitter thread but Elongated Muskrat wants me to pay and I ain’t doing that! So we’re making a Tumblr blogpost!

I don’t know how alive the countryhumans fandom is on here, but I thought I might make a post about something I find cool: this idea is actually pretty old!

See, back in the olden days, after World War 1, political cartoons changed - people began to experiment with new ways of expressing themselves and how they felt, beyond just redrawing what was happening.

This era, which I like to call the experimental era, was from ~1930-1980. Nowadays, political cartoonists are back to being unoriginal little shits, which gives them their grotesque impression in people's minds. But no, there's more to this art form!

There used to be characters used to represent countries. The most popular example is Uncle Sam, we know him, we love him, you even see him in countryhumans art today. And wow, is he old! Look at him in this cartoon from 1947! (Image credi: KB2 - that's all we know about this artist, other than they were from France)

Here, the characters, from left to right are Marianne for France, Gretchen/Germania for Germany, Uncle Sam for the United States, and John Bull for the United Kingdom.

There are two characters for Germany, one is Gretchen/Germania, which is a cruel old woman and I personally dislike because of her misogynistic under tones - German women were disliked for their assertiveness and stereotyped as mean or bitchy. Not their fault particularly - after World War 2 Germany began to shift over to more matriarchal society over a patriarchy, which had been their structure on and off over the years. (Image credit: Pol Ferjac - once again, that's all we know about the artist except their French nationality)

The other one is Michel, who is a chubby, sweet, short, and submissive little man who wears pajamas constantly, keeps having kids with uncooperative mothers (does he birth them himself?), and is a bit lazy. (Image credit to the Saar section of the European movement - most likely multiple artists worked on this)

He was every definition of a wife guy for Marianne, worshipping his lovely woman even if she rejected him. He rarely fought with her, except on the matter of his children, which he would get very defensive about.

Their gender roles were entirely reversed - Marianne took on the role of a man at the time, and Michel, a woman. Why this was collectively decided is not clear to me - perhaps it was what was appropriate to their geopolitics at the time, or a reflection of German societal expectations. Either way, they're the couple (I drew this one on a card for my French teacher)

They fell out of usage after the De Gaulle and Adenauer days as they were thought to be their couple, their children, not appropriate for Giscard d'Estaing and Schmidt, though in the 80s they would be used again with Kohl and Mitterrand because of their relationship making people nostalgic.

Admittedly, there aren't a lot of other countries that I have seen. Some rarer ones include Meisje, who represents the Netherlands (Image credit: Ernst Maria)

Or, this interesting cartoon by Hanns Erich Köhler where he designs people for Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

So, why did they exist?

Well, some people didn't have access to the information we do. It wasn't easy to find out who ran what, and what they looked like for that manner. They were especially useful during the 50s because governments were in chaos, and having someone just be the entire country saved the headache of figuring out who was ruler at the time. They were often adapted from children's characters as well, bringing nostalgia and kinship.

But then pictures of people became much more wildly available as news networks got back on their feet. After De Gaulle and Adenauer, Marianne and Michel, who were the most utilized outside of Uncle Sam, were laid to rest with their real life equivalents, never brought up again except for nostalgia purposes. Even the Greeks, who lagged behind their German idol, found Kohl and Mitterrand to be much more engaging.

I made my own, by the way. I will probably make another blog explaining each one, since this one is getting much too long.

Thanks for reading!

#antisemitsm tw #countryhumans #history #european history #art history #countryhumans germany #countryhumans france #countryhumans usa #countryhumans united kingdom #german history #french history #germany #france #united states #rant #politics

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lambourngb · 3 years

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day 1 who do you think you are - character recs

Creator’s Week 2021 for @roswellnewmexicocreate - Day 1 : Character Recs

This is my favorite fandom event, and my third year doing it. The last year was really difficult, and fanfic more than ever was my escape from it. Shout out to all the writers, commenters, and lurkers who kept fandom going during it.

Rosa Ortecho:

heal it or break it all apart by @adiwriting : (7,600) All Rosa’s ever done is break things. Her entire life she’s destroyed everything she’s ever touched. So it’s really no surprise when she comes back that her powers do the same. Alternatively- 4 times somebody tries to get Rosa to seek help with her powers and one time she decides to help herself. GEN

why i like it: I pretty much love whatever Britt writes, but in the light of how season 3 is going, I found myself returning to this fic more than a few times. She really captures the fierce but vulnerable Rosa in this beautifully.

Kyle Valenti:

at every occasion i’ll be ready for a funeral by @bydayornight (1,330) Kyle goes on a vacation after the events of 3x04 and meets an unlikely beach companion. GEN

why i like it: Christine has become one of my new favorite writers, and has been a season 3 coda writing machine. Here is where we all would like Kyle to be - lounging on a beach without a care in the world (with that RNM twist! lol) She also does a brilliant job with the Kyle and Michael vibes here.

Maria Deluca:

Butter(bar)flies by @andrea-lyn (4,447) When all of Maria’s people fly away for new opportunities, she needs to find new ones. The lost decade and what should have been. MILUCA

why i like it: Manda has written some of my favorite stories, and even has dragged me into Ted Lasso, but this little lost decade AU is one of my favorites. She captures the flirty vibe of season 1 Michael/Maria, and inserts it into a time when it really makes sense to me for that a friends-with-benefits-relationship should have begun, to give weight to a choice for Michael. Maria is wonderfully characterized here, and it really makes it clear how a real love triangle should have been structured.

Liz Ortecho:

heart of lightning (a roswellian tale) by @bitch-ass-aliens (20,095) When Ser Elizabeth Ortecho of the Roswellian Court is sent by Queen Isobel to retrieve the heart of the missing King Maxwell from a fearsome lightning dragon guarding it, she knows success could bring her one step closer to completing a quest of her own. Ten years ago, a mage named Ophiuchus curse her sister with eternal slumber, and Liz has been searching for him ever since. Saving the king could be the key to learning Ophiuchus's true identity and saving Rosa. But the dragon is not what it appears to be. Soon Liz finds herself needing to guard her heart from feelings forgotten long ago as she and her friends journey back to Roswell, King Max by their side, with more than just the fate of Rosa hanging in the balance. For Ophiuchus's plans are bigger and more dangerous than any of them realize. ECHO

why i like it: This was part of the RNM Big Bang last year and as a fellow participant, I did my best to read and feedback the other submissions, which meant reading something that wasn’t Malex 😂🤯 - suz made it easy, writing a beautifully detailed medieval AU that retold the story of Rosa, Noah, and Max’s S1 sacrifice, through the amazing POV of Ser Liz. This story had everything I love about Liz- her devotion to her family, her bravery in doing hard things, and her love for Max.

Max Evans:

highway to the sun by @angsty-nerd (22,236) Noah’s heart is failing, and Max is on the verge of death. His final wish is to see Liz one last time, so he and Michael road trip to Los Angeles so that Max can say his goodbyes. ECHO

why i like it: Another part of the 2020 RNM Big Bang - Instead of a focus on Liz in this Echo story, we’re deep in the psyche of Max Evans, who is trying to tie up loose ends before he dies. I love the atmosphere of the road trip, the sadness of the clock that Max is trying to run out, and the whole Michael/Max brotherly bond in this story. It’s got all the sweet elements of some of my favorite romantic dramas - like “Beaches” or “Dying Young”, but mixed with the sci fi of RNM. Even though it was written pre-season 3, I really love how it ties up season 2 here.

Alex Manes:

i’m just like my mother, we both love to run @meneatyoghurt (5,211) After what his dad does, he runs and runs and runs. A look at Alex's relationship with running, from track and field to leaving Roswell. MALEX IMPLIED

why i like it: Alex is one of my favorite characters on RNM, mostly because of how hard he tries in spite of his flaws. I love a good story that focuses on why it’s a struggle for Alex to be present, and doesn’t shy away from the fallout of his actions. This is a gorgeous look into Alex and his tendency to run to feel safe, and how that affects his relationships, and why he wants to stop. I just have a lot of feelings about Alex, especially after reading this.

Michael Guerin :

looking for yourself out there by @haloud (6,670) It’s early; it’s a weeknight. Michael can only be here to get blasted or for Marco himself, and both of them know it.It’s been a while since this was a game, for Michael. The flirting he did with Maria was something else, a class all her own. Sex, and the lead up to sex, for the longest time was either life-or-death or it was a helpless, hopeless lashing out for any human contact. (It was either Alex, or it was Maria, or it wasn’t.)So this is nice. MICHAEL/OTHER

why i like it: I privately think hal understands Michael Guerin like no other, and their fic is just a delight for anyone who wants to look under that macho cowboy exterior to see him. One of the things we both agree on as Michael Guerin fans, is that Alex is not the male exception for Michael. And while the show will probably never deliver a Michael/OMC storyline like they have with Max/Jenna, Isobel/Blair, Liz/Heath, Alex/Forrest - that’s what fanfic is for and this story is so satisfiying. If you don’t come away from this story loving Marco and wishing he was real... I don’t know what to tell you. I was so inspired by it, I wrote my own Michael/OMC story.

Isobel Evans:

future starts slow by @foramomentonly (4,799) The bartop is sticky, but Maria's skin is clean and soft.This is how it starts. Brushes of fingers as Maria passes over a glass of wine; her cool, dry hand cupping Isobel's wrist as she reads her palm; Isobel's fingertips pressed to Maria's temples, wisps of curls caught around her knuckles as they practice combining their powers. MARIBEL

why i like it: It’s just facts that Maria and Isobel have incredible chemistry, their banter is off the charts, and I love this sexy story of Isobel approaching Maria for more after they’ve been circling each other for a while. It’s a gorgeous look at two strong women who very rarely let down their guards, but for each other, they do. The sex is really hot, but I think what lingers most with me is how this story rewards the swan dive of hope, Isobel after a lifetime of “being who she should be” becomes who she wants to be, a woman who loves fiercely but not destructively. Of course, Maria is no wilting flower here, which makes it all the sweeter.

If you like any of these recs, please leave a comment on the story- a ‘this was awesome’ is enough to propell an author into the stratosphere with happiness, so don’t worry about coming up with a unique, never before shared insight- sometimes a keyboard smash and emogi makes all the difference!

#rnmcreate21 #character recs day 1 #maribel #rnm-echo #gen recs #fanfic recs #roswell new mexico #RNM

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reachexceedinggrasp · 3 years

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Would love to hear about your beefs with Lucas because I have beefs with Lucas

(Sorry it took me three thousand years to answer this, anon.)

They mainly fall under a few headings, with the third being the most serious and the thing that I am genuinely irl furious about at least biannually (and feeling unable to adequately sum up The Problem with it after yelling about it so often is a huge part of why this post has been in my drafts for such a long time):

1. His self-mythologising and the subsequent uncritical repetition of his bullshit in the fandom. Obvious lies like that he had some master plan for 10 films when it’s clear he did not have anything like a plot outline at any point. We all know the thing was written at the seat of various people’s pants, it’s blatantly self-evident that’s the case. There’s also plenty of public record about how the OT was written. Even dumber, more obvious lies, like that Anakin was ‘always the protagonist’ and the entire 6 films were his story from the beginning. This is preposterous and every time someone brings it up (usually with palpable smugness) as fanboys ‘not understanding star wars’ because they don't get that ‘the OT is not Luke's story’... Yeah, I just... I cannot.

Vader wasn’t Anakin Skywalker until ESB, it’s a retcon. It’s a brilliant retcon and it works perfectly, it elevated SW into something timeless and special it otherwise would not have been, but you can tell it wasn’t the original plan and there’s proof it wasn’t the original plan. Let’s not pretend. And Luke is the protagonist. No amount of waffling about such esoteric flights of theory as ‘ring structure’ is going to get away from the rigidly orthodox narrative and the indisputable fact that it is Luke’s hero’s journey. Vader’s redemption isn’t about his character development (he has almost none) and has no basis in any kind of convincing psychological reality for his character, but it doesn’t need to be because it’s part of Luke’s arc, because Vader is entirely a foil in Luke’s story. It’s a coming-of-age myth about confronting and growing beyond the father.

All attempts to de-centre Luke in RotJ just break the OT’s narrative logic. It’s a character-driven story and the character driving is Luke. Trying to read it as Anakin’s victory, the moral culmination of his choices rather than Luke’s and putting all the agency into Anakin’s hands just destroys the trilogy’s coherence and ignores most of its content in favour of appropriating a handful of scenes into an arc existing only in the prequels. The dilemma of RotJ is how Luke will define ethical adulthood after learning and growing through two previous films worth of challenge, education, failure, and triumph; it’s his choice to love his father and throw down his sword which answers the question the entire story has been asking. Vader’s redemption and the restoration of the galaxy are the consequences of that choice which tell us what kind of world we’re in, but the major dramatic conflict was resolved by Luke’s decision not the response to it.

And, just all over, the idea of Lucas as an infallible auteur is inaccurate and annoying to me. Obviously he’s a tremendous creative force and we wouldn’t have sw without him, but he didn’t create it alone or out of whole cloth. The OT was a very collaborative effort and that’s why it’s what it is and the prequels are what they are. Speaking of which.

2. The hubris of the prequels in general and all the damage their many terrible, protected-from-editors choices do to the symbolic fabric of the sw universe. Midicholrians, Yoda fighting with a lightsabre, Obi-wan as Anakin's surrogate father instead of his peer, incoherent and unmotivated character arcs, the laundry list of serious and meaningful continuity errors, the bad storytelling, the bad direction, the bad characterisation, the shallowness of the parallels which undermine the OT’s imagery, the very clumsy and contradictory way the A/P romance was handled, the weird attitude to romance in general, it goeth on. I don’t want to re-litigate the entire PT here and I’m not going to, but they are both bad as films and bad as prequels. The main idea of them, to add Anakin’s pov and create an actual arc for him as well as to flesh out the themes of compassion and redemption, was totally appropriate. The concept works as a narrative unit, there are lots of powerful thematic elements they introduce, they have a lot of cool building blocks, it’s only in execution and detail that they do a bunch of irreparable harm.

But the constant refrain that only ageing fanboys don’t like them and they only don’t like them because of their themes or because they humanise Anakin... can we not. The shoddy film making in the prequels is an objective fact. If you want to overlook the bad parts for the good or prioritise ideas over technique, that’s fine, but don’t sit here and tell me they’re masterworks of cinema there can be no valid reason to criticise. I was the exact right age for them when I saw them, I am fully on board with the fairy tale nature of sw, I am fully on board with humanising Anakin- the prequels just have a lot of very big problems with a) their scripts and b) their direction, especially of dialogue scenes. If Lucas had acknowledged his limitations like he did back in the day instead of believing his own press, he could have again had the help he obviously needed instead of embarrassing himself.

3. Killing and suppressing the original original trilogy. I consider the fact that the actual original films are not currently available in any form, have never been available in an archival format, and have not been presented in acceptable quality since the VHS release a very troubling case study in the problems of corporate-owned art. LF seizing prints of the films whenever they are shown, destroying the in-camera negatives to make the special editions with no plans to restore them, and doing all in the company’s considerable power to suppress the original versions is something I consider an act of cultural vandalism. The OT defined a whole generation of Hollywood. It had a global impact on popular entertainment. ANH is considered so historically significant it was one of the first films added to the US Library of Congress (Lucas refused to provide even them with a print of the theatrical release, so they made their own viewable scan from the 70s copyright submission).

The fact that the films which made that impact cannot be legally accessed by the public is offensive to me. The fact that Lucas has seen fit to dub over or composite out entire performances (deleting certain actors from the films), to dramatically alter the composition of shots chosen by the original directors, to radically change the entire stylistic tone by completely reinventing the films’ colour timing in attempt to make them match the plasticy palate of the prequels, to shoot new scenes for movies he DID NOT DIRECT, add entire sequences or re-edit existing sequences to the point of being unrecognisable etc. etc. is NOT OKAY WITH ME when he insists that his versions be the ONLY ones available.

I’m okay with the Special Editions existing, though I think they’re mostly... not good... but I’m not okay with them replacing the original films. And all people can say is ‘well, they’re his movies’.

Lucas may have clear legal ownership in the capitalistic sense, but in no way does he have clear artistic ownership. Forget the fans, I’m not one of those people who argue the fans are owed something: A film is always a collaborative exercise and almost never can it be said that the end product is the ultimate responsibility and possession of one person. Even the auteur directors aren't the sole creative vision, even a triple threat like Orson Welles still had cinematographers and production designers, etc. Hundreds of artists work on films. Neither a writer nor a director (nor one person who is both) is The Artist behind a film the way a novelist is The Artist behind a novel. And Lucas did NOT write the screenplays for or direct ESB or RotJ. So in what sense does he have a moral right to alter those films from what the people primarily involved in making them deemed the final product? In what sense would he have the right to make a years-later revision the ONLY version even if he WERE the director?

Then you get into the issue of the immeasurable cultural impact those films had in their original form and the imperative to preserve something that is defining to the history of film and the state of the zeitgeist. I don't think there is any ‘fan entitlement’ involved in saying the originals belonged to the world after being part of its consciousness for decades and it is doing violence to the artistic record to try to erase the films which actually occupied that space. It's exactly like trying to replace every copy of It's a Wonderful Life with a colourised version (well, it's worse but still), and that was something Lucas himself railed against. It’s like if Michaelangelo were miraculously resuscitated and he decided to repaint the Sistine Ceiling to add a gunfight and change his style to something contemporary.

I get genuinely very upset at the cold reality that generations of people are watching sw for the first time and it’s the fucking SE-except-worse they’re seeing. And as fewer people keep physical media and the US corporate oligarchy continues to perform censorship and rewrite history on its streaming services unchecked by any kind of public welfare concerns, you’ll see more and more ‘real Mandela effect’ type shit where the cultural record has suddenly ‘always’ been in line with whatever they want it to be just now. And US media continues to infect us all with its insidious ubiquity. I think misrepresenting and censoring the past is an objectively bad thing and we can’t learn from things we pretend never happened, but apparently not many people are worried about handing the keys to our collective experience to Disney and Amazon.

4. The ‘Jedi don’t marry’ thing and how he wanted this to continue with Luke post-RotJ, so it’s obviously not meant to be part of what was wrong with the order in the prequels. I find this... incoherent on a storytelling level. The moral of the anidala story then indeed becomes just plain ‘romantic love is bad and will make you crazy’, rather than the charitable reading of the prequels which I ascribe to, which is that the problem isn’t Anakin’s love for Padmé, it’s that he ceased to love her and began to covet her. And I can’t help but feel this attitude is maybe an expression of GL’s issues with women following his divorce. I don’t remember if there’s evidence to contradict that take, since it’s been some time since I read about this but yeah. ANH absolutely does sow seeds for possible Luke/Leia development and GL was still married while working on that film. Subsequently he was dead set against Luke ever having a relationship and decided Jedi could not marry. Coincidence?

There’s a lot of blinking red ‘issues with women’ warning signs all over Lucas’s work, but the prequels are really... egregious.

#sw #salt #more unhinged rambling #anyway dowload the despecialised editions #unsubscribe from Disney+#be free #usually we'd be having a big family thing for Boxing Day but you know #so God bless us all at home separately #I hope everyone had as happy a Christmas as possible in keeping with the situation #I should see if I can drag my brother outside to build a snowman

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cosplayinamerica · 3 years

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Cosplay Over 40 group founders : Jae and Ana

Today I’m highlighting one of the Instagram share pages / theme pages, I followed, Cosplay Over 40. For the past few years, I’ve reached out to various pages asking about how their page got started.

Ana: We arrived at cosplaying via two different avenues. Jae and I were both into anime, comic-book, and science-fiction geeks growing up. He loved — still loves — Macross and Robotech, I was more Star Blazers, Superfriends, and Star Trek. In high school and college, my friends and I made our own Star Trek uniforms and attended Star Trek events in New York City back when it wasn't called cosplaying. It wasn't even called costuming. It was just being a Star Trek geek. I bought my first official costume — a Star Trek Next Generation science jumpsuit — in grad school, and that just opened the door to what would become cosplaying. I pulled together costumes of Ranma Saotome from Ranma 1/2, Jessie from Pokemon, and Kim Possible, and I'd wear them for Halloween, to library events, and to comic-book expos... what would eventually become the cons we know today.

Jae: I have always loved taking photos. I'd take photos of friends, of people at events I'd attend. I love photography. It's my way of being involved without being the center of attention and without being stuck on the sidelines. I became a sports and portrait photographer, but cosplay always called to me. It just appeals to my geek side. And with Ana getting more and more into cosplay, it only seemed natural for me to turn to cosplay photography.

Ana: At first, we were just thrilled to be part of the cosplay scene. I love fandom meet-ups. I love meeting voice actors and artists, especially those behind the anime and comic-book characters I love. When people come up to me and ask to take photos with my cosplay, it's such a deeply satisfying feeling. My cosplay made people happy, made people smile.

Jae: We got really caught up in that scene, seeing other people reacting to Ana's cosplays and to so many other amazing cosplays.

Ana: And then we started to notice a different reaction. I think I first started noticing it at some meet-ups. There's be the main group, and then there'd be a handful of us on the outside. This happened more and more often, and it took me a few years to realize that those of us on the outside were older than the central groups. Once I realized this, my eyes flew wide open. At cons, I started noticing that the photographers would ignore fabulous, intricate cosplays worn by older cosplayers and would flock to take photos of teenagers and 20-somethings in wigs and bikinis.

Jae: It really pissed us off. Here were so many people who obviously put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into creating armor and amazing sewing projects, and they were barely being given a glance. I started going out of my way to photograph these cosplayers... and all over them were our age or older.

Ana: It finally came to a head in 2019. We spent a weekend at an out-of-state con, and we — myself and all the other older cosplayers — might as well have been invisible.

Jae: One of the other photographers actually told me he only takes photos of "young, pretty girls."

Ana: I told Jae that we couldn't just let this kind of behavior continue. We had to stand up and do something about it, let the older cosplayers know how wonderful they are. I have a Master's in public communications and I've worked as a social-media specialist for various companies and organizations since the mid 1990s. Since cosplay is such a visual art, I went straight to Instagram and searched for "cosplay" and our age range: 40. There was absolutely nothing there.

Jae: We also checked 50. There was nothing. Then we checked 30. Two accounts came up, both dead in the water. One hadn't posted since 2015, and one hadn't posted since 2018.

Ana: Just to be safe, we also checked "old," "older," "geezer," all those types of terms. There was absolutely nothing. Given what we'd seen over the years at cosplay events, this really didn't surprise us, but it still hit us hard that there was no representation for the older cosplayer. I spent a couple of weeks outlining the guidelines we would follow. We looked at successful cosplay feature sites like @sharingcosplay and @women.of.cosplay. We knew we wanted to feature individuals, to give each cosplayer their time in the spotlight. We also wanted it to be structured. We didn't want to give one cosplayer a huge write-up, then give the next one just a few sentences. Everyone had to be showcased equally. After all, the whole reason we were doing this was because of the inequality we'd seen.

Jae: I felt we had to go beyond Instagram with this. I'd recently gotten into videography. I felt — still feel — that a multimedia market exists for the older cosplayer. I told Ana that we had to take this to podcasts, to YouTube, to even a magazine specializing in the older cosplayer.

Ana: I've worked as an assistant editor and managing editor for several magazines and I currently work as a contributing writer for two specialty magazines, so creating a magazine was something I totally agreed with. I also agreed with the podcasts and You Tube channel. That kind of thing is right up Jae's alley.

Jae: We decided that we would make this a multimedia venture, focusing on the older cosplayer and letting the world know how fabulous older cosplayers are. Older cosplayers have the discretionary income to dedicate to cosplaying. At this age, they're serious about their hobby and it's a true labor of love. It's not just something they do with their friends a couple of times a year. It's a passion. And the skill I've seen, the dedication... it all needed to be celebrated.

Ana: But we decided to start with social media first. We launched on Instagram on June 28, 2019, with Facebook and Twitter following shortly after. We did encounter a small glitch...

Jae: There was a Facebook group with a very similar name...

Ana: We checked them out and saw they were a community group that shared photos of themselves and events they attended, nothing remotely like what we were doing and have planned for the future. Having studied journalism law and having consulted with a copyright specialist, we knew we were in the clear to bring our dream to life: celebrating the magnificent, often-overlooked older cosplayer.

Jae: The reception has been incredible. Not a week goes by that we don't get a message or email from a cosplayer thrilled to have found a place that showcases people their age. Our age.

Ana: We also get messages from people letting us know they'll be turning 40 soon and can't wait to be featured. We get people who message us on their 40th birthday, eager to be featured. Or who message us just days before their 40th birthday, asking to be featured on their special day. It's been wonderful. It's been mind blowing.

Jae: We've gone to several cons, and the reception there has been amazing. We've spoken to so many older cosplayers, every single one of whom had experienced ageism at these type of events and who were absolutely thrilled to discover that our focus is them and only them.

Ana: And then the pandemic hit.

Jae: It really sucked, from the photography standpoint, to watch everything come to a halt. But this also gave us the push we needed to move forward with our plans.

Ana: We started producing cosplay video projects, open to any cosplayer over the age of 40. We figured that cosplayers were looking for ways to continue cosplaying — safely — during the pandemic, looking for ways to interact with other cosplayers. We'd present a theme and state a deadline for submission.

Jae: We had a tremendous response.

Ana: Jae took all the video clips and edited them into amazing montages that really showcased how amazing cosplayers over 40 truly are. For one video, our Fight Challenge, we had more than 50 cosplayers participate from all over the world.

Jae: We also held an online con in March 2020.

Ana: Yes, our "Con Together." It was nine days of scheduled fandom meet-ups and cosplay sharing. We even had an artist's alley.

Jae: But right now, we've moved on to the next stages of our Cosplay Over 40 plans.

Ana: Jae has been building a dedicated podcast studio outfitted with all sorts of live-streaming equipment. I'm sure I'm not using the right terminology for this. It's Jae's baby, and I trust him implicitly to have it ready to go later this summer. I've also started working on the inaugural issue of Cosplay Over 40 magazine. The editorial content has been decided, I've reached out to cosplayers and others in the cosplay community for interviews and photos, and I'm really looking forward to laying out the issue and getting it to print.

Jae: But even with these new platforms, we are not slowing down with our original presence on Instagram.

Ana: Absolutely not! We're still growing — we just passed 3,900 followers — and we are now actually part of the @SharingCosplay family of feature pages. We are always looking for new cosplayers to feature and we always invite those we've featured in the past to share more of their cosplays with us. We have cosplayers in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and even in their 70s sending in their photos. Like I said before, it's mind blowing.

Jae: There's a sense of satisfaction that comes from showcasing cosplayers in our age demographic and beyond, of showing the world how awesome cosplayers over 40 truly are.

https://linktr.ee/cosplayover40

youtube

#cosplay page interview #cosplay interview #cosplay over 40

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ink-and-flame · 5 years

Text

Kinktober Day 6: Intensify

Kinktober Day 6 Prompts: Hair pulling || Nipple clamps || Genital sex Fandom: [None] Original Tags: Exophilia, Hair Pulling, Nipple Clamps, Rough Sex, Size Difference Pairing: Human(f)/Orc(m)

Living in a new place was never easy and neither was trying to build up a new social life. It wasn’t just about meeting new people, but finding people with shared interests that it was easy to connect with. Lia had not lived in the town long and had struggled to make any kind of connection. It was an interesting place, that was certain. It was why she chose here to move of all places. The people were so diverse, humans mingled with all the other races and lived in what seemed like harmony here. Yes racism was still a thing, but it seemed far more subdued. Most the people that lived here chose to live here and so had no reason to attack one another.

Her apartment building was set up to take many races, different styles and sizes of apartment were available based on need, race, and size. Smaller races like goblins could have apartments scaled down to their size if they wanted. Same for larger creatures living in buildings that supported their height. Lia’s building had all sorts living in it as the owners clearly took diversity seriously. She loved her apartment, it was a little bigger than she probably needed but it was perfect.

Lia had ended up selecting an apartment previously rented by orcs. Everything was just a bit too big, but she had dealt with situations like this before. The struggle was worth it due to the location. It was a nice corner apartment with big windows and a balcony. The owner offered to make changes to the structure for her, but Lia didn’t want to make the apartment unlivable for others. So she just got a few step stools. The other added benefit was all the extra space since most of her furniture was smaller. She did keep some of the larger orcish items such as the couch and comfy chairs.

Of course after a few months Lia felt lonely. She had made nice with a few neighbors and hung out at the coffee shop with a lovely fae girl. It just still felt like something was missing. Sitting around at home obviously wasn’t going to help, but Lia was frustrated so spending time on the internet helped. At least on line she could make connections, she had friends she could talk to, and if nothing else, vent about her loneliness.

It wasn’t just emotional loneliness, there was physical loneliness too. The most surprising thing about the move was how much Lia missed her friends with benefits. She used to complain about being a booty call, but after all these months with nothing. Which for Lia 6 months was a long dry spell, she was starting to go a little crazy. Her toy budget had increased and while it kept the edge off it also frustrated her because it always felt like something was missing.

Browsing local hang outs Lia decided to see if maybe there were any clubs around. Bars were an acceptable place to meet people if she was careful. Nothing wrong with a one night stand even if it wasn’t her usual cup of tea. To her surprise not only did she find a club that had potential, it was one that spoke to her interests. Finding a BDSM club within driving distance had been a shock. Normally she only found those in the larger cities, but it was pretty clear that is what this place was all about. They did require that people buy memberships, but there didn’t seem to be too many restrictions on who could be a member.

Feeling excited Lia contacted the customer service for the club asking about memberships and was surprised at how quickly she received a response. They had a trial membership option that allowed for people to pay for a day so they weren’t paying for something that ultimately didn’t work out for them. Lia agreed and filled out the attached form sending it back and was excited. She would have to pay when she got to the club and bring her ID, but they already had her information so it would just be to check and make sure she was who she said she was and that she was actually as old as she claimed.

When the weekend rolled around Lia was a bundle of nerves. She was excited but she had spent all week imagining and fantasizing about what the club would be like. Choosing what to wear had not been easy. She didn’t want to overdo it on her first day. Settling on a simple outfit, one of her more form fitting dresses and some heels, Lia smiled at herself in the mirror. She had pinned her hair up wanting to look a bit classy since she was hoping to attract attention.

Arriving at the club Lia was surprised at the size of it. The bouncer gestured her to where guests could sign in. She showed her ID and got her temporary membership card and went inside. The music wasn’t too loud, which was nice. This wasn’t a dance club, people wanted to have conversations. There were several booths around the room and curtained doors that lead to other rooms. The main room had a stage in the center where dancers performed, similar to a strip club but these girls were in costumes and all looked so interesting in their masks.

Finding an empty booth Lia sat down, ordered a drink, and just observed for a while. She watched as people went in and out through the various curtained off areas. There didn’t seem to be any restrictions on who was allowed wherewith one exception, the V.I.P. Lounge. Which made sense. Feeling adventurous, Lia finished her drink and headed off to see what was behind curtain number one. Eventually she wanted to see what was behind all the curtains, but it was as good of a place as any to start.

The first room was simple enough. It was set up like a lounge, instead of tables it was small circular beds around the room with curtains around them that could be left opened or kept closed. Couples were in various stages of undress and sexual activity around the room and Lia found it quite arousing. Moving to the next space this was clearly an area for public punishment. Submissives were tied up and displayed, some being spanked, others just bound and left to be viewed by those around them.

Towards the back there was a door with another bouncer in front of it. Curiosity getting the better of her Lia walked over to ease her curiosity. The bouncer didn’t try to stop her but did look at her curiously. She showed her day pass and he nodded with a smile, gesturing for her to go on in. This door lead to a hallway filled with doors. Each room had a sign over it either lit up green with the word VACANT, or red with the word OCCUPIED. It didn’t take Lia long to figure out that this was where people would go to do private and probably more intense scenes.

Peeking into some of the vacant rooms they were set up to invoke different scenes. Some just had equipment in it, sort of dungeon looking. While others were mocked up to look like specific locations. There was a hospital room, a classroom, an office setting, a few different bedrooms with some interesting furniture choices, and those were just the ones she could actually look in.

Turning around and leaving the hallway she smiled at the bouncer on the way out, he smiled back and nodded. Clearly this was common, new people being curious. It was probably why he allowed her back there without her actually participating in any kind of scene. From there she moved back to the main room sitting down at a different table and looking thoughtful. There was more to see, but right now she was horny and needed another drink.

Lia wasn’t alone long when an orc sat down at her table after asking if it was ok that he join her. He was handsome, tall, and quite muscular. He was in a nice suit, but there was something wild about him. His bluish black hair stood up up in a wild sort of mohawk that looked soft to the touch. His large ears were pierced and he had the greenest eyes Lia had ever seen. His tusks had rings around them and he had a few facial piercings.

He reached out a hand, a well manicured hand at that, introducing himself as Darnok. Lia blushed when she shook his hand, hers was so small compared to his. She was so small compared to him. She wasn’t tall for a human regardless, but next to this orc she felt down right miniscule. She knew his kind could get big, but he had to be over 7 feet tall. His voice was so deep she could feel it vibrate through her with every word he spoke which only affected her more and it was clear that he could tell. Her arousal was beyond obvious.

“I haven’t seen you here before, I would very much like to get to know you little one.” Darnok smiled gently. He had quite the charming smile, but he simply didn’t want to frighten her.

“My name is Adalia, Lia for short. I just moved here about 6 months ago. I didn’t even know this place was here, I found it online. So this is really my first time here. I just wanted to see what it was all about, see if I fit in, if I like it.” She took a sip of her drink.

“And?”

“I do, I think I want to get a membership here. Not sure what I will do with it at first, but I hope if I come here enough I could meet people and well, go from there.” Lia smiled at him and tried not to scoot closer.

“You’ve met me, if you are willing.. I can show you some of the ways you can enjoy yourself here?” Dar wasn’t being subtle but he wasn’t saying anything outright either.

Lia knew what he was offering, what he was asking. Honestly, he was sexy, intelligent, and seemed nice. He was also patient and wasn’t pushing her to answer. Something she appreciated, but despite not really doing the whole one night stand thing, her hormones were overriding her and made the decision for her. “I would love to.” She offered him her hand and allowed him to lead her away. Back towards that hallway of doors.

Darnok chose one of the bedrooms, it was more simply in design and it made sense to Lia since this was their first encounter. She was pretty sure that they were really only going to have sex and that kink wouldn’t be entering into it much. Though, he was attractive and she wondered if things went well, if he would want to meet up again. He seemed nice enough, gentlemanly, well put together, but it was really just his kind eyes that struck her the most. He didn’t set off her creeper vibe the way some men at clubs like these did. So why not give him a chance, give them a chance to see what could happen.

Stepping over to the bed Lia looked up at him. She was short, but this orc made her feel positively tiny. “Just so I understand, we are going to be having sex, yes?” She had to check, because if he was looking for a kink scene she felt they needed to negotiate.

“Yes, I apologize for not making my intentions more clear. While I would love to do a more intense scene with you, something about you just interests me, I am aware we just met. I thought it might be better if we started simple, see if we are even physically compatible. That being said, I can be an intense and demanding lover, and I do have my kinks that come out regardless of how simple I like to keep things. I need to know if you have any hard stops now, any lines that could be crossed that would ruin the experience.”

Dar had made it simple for Lia to understand and she appreciated his desire to just get to know her a bit. Even if they were skipping several usual steps. “Hard limits for me are anal, permanent damage, and excessive pain. Other things can be negotiated, but I feel like those are the only ones that might come up in this situation. What about you? I am assuming you are going to be in control, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have limits.”

“Fair of you to ask.” Dar had already slipped off his shoes and suit jacket, laying the jacket on the chair behind him. He was unbuttoning his shirt revealing his muscular and quite hairy chest. “I don’t do degradation usually, don’t call me a beast or a monster. No racial slurs, things like that. Also, I prefer if you didn’t struggle in any way that made it seem like you don’t want what is happening. This needs to be consensual and I want it to feel that way. A little struggling can be fun, but not until I know you, know your real body language. Other than that, we won't be getting into anything that would come close to my other lines.”

Lia nodded, watching as he revealed more and more of his body. He was the largest, and strongest male she had ever seen naked like this. He wasn’t built like a body builder, a little softer than that, but he still looked strong enough to pick up vehicles and throw them. Kicking off her shoes she unzipped her dress and moved it to a free chair, the bedroom was well set up and she was glad not to have to toss her clothes on the floor. “I don’t know if I could say anything truely horrible to someone while having sex, I dont think we have to worry about that.” Undoing her bra Lia blushed a bit.

“You are so lovely, I don’t suppose you will indulge me?” Dar asked.

Lia looked curious as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a velvet bag. Inside was a pair of decorative nipple clamps, a lovely silver, with little bells on them. Holding them out to her, he gave her the opportunity to choose if she took them, and Lia did. Placing them on herself to show her willingness. They pinched a bit, but in a good way, and the bells made such a sweet little sound, the bells having a delicate chime to them, musical in a way. They made her nipples look larger and harder, she actually began to like the way it felt to have the extra weight there.

“Exquisit.” Dar breathed as he looked her over. “Would you let your hair down? Are you comfortable with a little hair pulling when things get rough?”

Lia had to think a bit before nodding. “Just, not too hard ok? I haven’t really done it so I don’t know how painful it is.” Reaching up she began unsecuring her hair, setting the pins and clips on the bedside table and letting her hair fall down her back in waves. Turning she moved to get on the bed and sat there looking at him, patting the place next to her.

“I promise, I will keep my strength in check as much as I can. Please let me know if anything becomes too much.” With that his pants and boxers were off leaving him nude before her.

Lia was shocked by the size of him, thick and uncut, but not even fully hard yet. She scooted back on the bed as he climbed up next to her. His hand grabbing her wrist to stop her as she tried to remove her thong.

“Let me, give me some time to warm you up, get you used to me. I can smell your fear, I promise I am not going to hurt you. I can be gentle to start.” Dar leaned in nuzzling at her neck, his form looming over hers as he pushed her back onto the bed. The nipple clamps chiming delicately as he positioned her.

Using his mouth and hands, Dar slowly worked Lia through her nerves. Showing her how soft he could be, showing his gentle side, letting her feel safe with his touch. He brought her pleasure through gentle teasing, and enjoyed each of her orgasms as they came upon her. The muscles of his body were tense as he held back his own desires so that he could ease her nerves and prepare her body to take him. When she was ready he smiled down at her as he loomed over her.

“You are so perfect in your pleasure Lia, I wish I had a whole weekend to play with you. There is so much more I want, but I can’t hold back my own needs any longer.” Leaning up to kneel between her legs, Dar grabbed a condom from the bedside table, as they were offered for free by the club. Sliding it on where Lia could see was just one more gesture to prove to her she could trust him. He always used protection with new partners, but if Lia enjoyed him as much as he was enjoying her, perhaps they could move to a different arrangement that no longer required one.

“Thank you, some people don’t want to use them.” Lia wanted to help and reach for the bottle of lube, helping to pour it over him and stroke him to lube up the condom. She could feel him throbbing in her hand and it was clear he was eager.

Dar smiled and waited for her to finish, though his jaw was clenched. The feel of her hand on him was so good, he almost didn’t want to stop, but he desperately wanted to be inside of her. Grabbing Lia by the waist he lifted her and flipped her over, placing pillows under her to help support her body. Holding her down he used one hand to guide his cock to her entrance, rubbing slowly to work her up and get her used to the feel of him against her. Soon he couldn’t resist any longer and he was slowly pushing into her tight heat. The sensation almost overwhelmed him and he felt himself tensing as he tried to control the rush of pleasure that threatened to push him over the edge far too quickly.

Lia squirmed beneath him and Dar thought he might lose his mind as her wiggling was driving him to distraction. It felt too good, far too good, and he was pushing in faster and harder than he had originally intended. The sounds of her moans and whimpers driving him on as he managed to get halfway in before having to pause. “Are you ok?” His voice was strained but she had made a noise that sounded like she wasn’t.

“Y….” Lia swallowed and tried again. “Yeah, just.. So intense. You’re so big Darnok.” Lia whimpered and squirmed as she felt her core stretched beyond what she felt were her limits. Yeah she had a few larger toys, but nothing like this. She had never taken anything like this and it was both terrifying and glorious. It burned but in a way that made her want more. “Don’t stop, please?” She pushed herself back against him to try and take more of him as she heard him groan above her his grip on her tightened.

Dar was losing control. The heat of her, how tight she felt around him, her eagerness. He had calmed down some until she begged him not to stop and tried to push more of him into her. It was enough to drive anyone mad. Growling deep in his chest Dar’s hips snapped forward pushing more of his cock into her as she cried out at the sudden stretch and invasion. Her body was taking him so much better than he had imagined and he didn’t want to stop.

“Can you take more?” His voice was tense and he lost himself for a moment and growled down at her. “By the gods I just want to rut you girl.” His thighs shook slightly with the effort of holding still. She was trusting him, and that meant more to him than he wanted to admit. Looming over her small frame Dar felt strangely protective of Lia, and didn’t want to ruin this experience or her opinion of him by fucking her like a savage.

“Please, I want it Dar. Please fuck me. I need it.. I need to know what it is like..” Lia was desperate for more. He had promised a level of roughness she was sure she had never known. This was her first time with an orc and she wanted to experience what it was like. She wanted him to enjoy it too, and a part of her, a darker more submissive part of her, just wanted to be thoroughly ruined by him.

It was her begging that broke some of his resolve, the sweet sound of her voice, the clear need in her tone. Dar couldn’t hold back any longer and he thrust forward into her hard, burying his cock the rest of the way until his heavy balls slapped up against her. Watching as her body surged forward from the impact, the jingle of the bells of the nipple clamps making his cock twitch inside of her. Feeling her surrounding him, Dar was lost.

Lia cried out as Dar began fucking her in earnest, his cock pushing deeper into her than anything had ever been. Her body was at its limit if not past it, and yet, having Dar balls deep inside of her only made Lia want more. She pushed back against him, moaning loudly and begging for him to go harder, begging him to fuck her, to use her. Something in her snapped as the orc looming above her became more and more feral in his fucking.

Soon Lia was lifted off the pillows, held up in the air as Dar pounded into her. The bells on the nipple clamps ringing constantly as his hand found a grip on her hair and yanked her back, holding her in place as he thrust up into her, his balls slapping lewdly against her wet cunt. The feel of his hand in her hair, the tugging, the power he had over her, the helplessness she felt only made Lia more wet and more needy for him.

She lost track of what she was even saying, begging for things that weren’t possible and made no sense. She was overwhelmed with pleasure and felt her orgasm building wild and out of her control. The tight coil of pleasure ramping up more and more, each time she thought she had reached that peak ready to crash over, it just kept ramping up, that burning pleasurable sensation growing more tense.

Dar began to fuck Lia with almost complete abandon, surprised that her body could handle so much and that she just wanted more. He could feel her tightening around him and knew she would cum soon. It was a miracle he had not released yet himself as he rutted up into her in exactly the way he had promised himself he wouldn’t. Then he felt it, that flutter in her core followed by a scream and she was cumming around him.

Grunting Dar hunched forward sinking his tusks into her shoulder as he thrust up hard into her spasming pussy, his own release spilling into her, blocked only by the condom he had remembered to put on. He could feel her shaking in his arms, her orgasm just as intense as his own as his balls throbbed and pulsed with each pump of his release.

It had felt like many minutes had gone by for both of them as their bodies slowly relaxed, orgasms subsiding. Dar became aware of himself first and pulled back slightly to survey the damage. He had broken her hard limit, his tusks had dug into her flesh and broken the skin. There would likely be a scar and she was already bleeding from it.

Carefully pulling out Dar moved to the cabinet in the room and grabbed the first aid kit, cleaning and bandaging the wound as Lia lay there. “I am deeply sorry, I lost control, that is no excuse. I understand if you want to press charges and never see me again.” Dar was surprised when Lia began laughing.

“You just gave me the best orgasm of my life, the most intense and fulfilling fucking I have ever had, and you think I am mad because you bit me?” Lia tried to sit up but couldn’t yet.

“But.. you said no permanent damage?” Dar was confused but helped her sit up, holding her gently as he massaged her body, knowing her muscles had to be sore.

“Promise me you won’t walk away. Promise this isn’t just a one time thing, and we can forgive the bite..” Lia knew she was pushing, reaching, asking for too much.

Dar smiled gently at the little human in his lap. She really was perfect. “Then perhaps you should mark me in return, and make this official.” He leaned in pressing his forehead to hers. “When you have the strength, of course.”

#exophilia #orc dom #orc x human #orc boyfriend #kinktober 2019

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lesbiansforboromir · 5 years

Note

Thots on aragornXboromir? BUT, it's movie!Aragorn and Book!boromir.

I was wONDERING when this ask was gonna come around so lets HAVE AT IT.

Upon just initial consideration, I’m not really for it. Their personalities and compatibility alone don’t seem promising. Boromir and Gondor as a whole is full into dadaistic and nihilistic humour whereas movie!Aragorn seems to take everything so seriously. I feel like Boromir’s sardonic joviality would fall on kinda deaf ears and leave a lot of awkward silences. Meanwhile Boromir just doesn’t find Aragorn’s more intellectual humour very funny. Like! Was he really gonna kill Boromir on top of that mountain? Were you gonna stab Boromir on this mountain in broad daylight, Aragorn. Also could you not have been even mildly less weird when you met film!Boromir in Rivendell like what the fuck was that bit honestly.

Admittedly if it’s book!Boromir we’re adding in here, the dynamic will be changed significantly. No angry outburst at the council, no bitter rejection of Aragorn’s kingship. Boromir remains a reliable, calm and confident leader whilst Aragorn is still umming and arring about whether he wants to be King at all. Which I think would cause a different kind of conflict between them, because Boromir’s fully content to lead or be lead, either one will do. He just needs to know which it is, and whilst book!Aragorn is very very clear who the leader is, film!Aragorn is kinda... soft spoken, quiet and not overly dominant. He’s one of the types who are good at leading but they also don’t like it and avoid it if possible. Which I think would annoy Boromir to no end.

He tries to lead, and Aragorn disagrees with him or casually undermines his authority without meaning too. He tries to follow, and Aragorn doesn’t step up to fill the role. Gandalf is only partially a leader and Boromir needs STRUCTURE and CLEAR LINES. And since the elf can’t take anything seriously and Gimli thinks himself too young and inexperienced, it has to be one of them! But this wouldn’t really manifest in anything specific, he and Aragorn work alright together most of the time, I’d say it’d just make Boromir annoyed and generally not amenable to any romantic feelings.

Of course, this changes with the film’s narrative, Aragorn steps up to a more leadership role when Gandalf dies, but if we’re going with canon then we’re very close to Boromir beginning to fall thoroughly under the ring’s control and I don’t think he’d have time or space to appreciate this sudden change. SO LIKE. Just going by likelihoods and chemistry, I don’t think there’s much there. They have a nice friendly manner with each other certainly, and I like the sense of easy teamwork they get in the books, but more than that I can’t see realistically.

Then again... I do really... QUITE like the concept of the ‘Boromir makes Aragorn see his humanity in a different light and Aragorn inspires the hope in Boromir he never imagined he could find again’ themes the film gave us being played out romantically... like I do feel that neat dynamic. Like what better way to scrub Aragorn of his elf fetishism than to have him swoon over literally the least elven man imaginable? He doesn’t realise how much he’d come to value and depend upon Boromir’s girding and pushing presence until he’s gone ect ect

It would have to be in a Boromir!Lives AU, since there really just isn’t the time otherwise, which gives some nice reunion elements to it and-... I am basically planning out a slow burn fic that spans the entire damn story aren’t I. Look I’m not gonna half ass thinking about anything Boromir related.

WITH THAT IN MIND I have other issues with this pairing and, indeed, with any mlm pairing that Aragorn’s given. What do you do with Arwen? If it’s film Aragorn, I suppose he assumes they broke up when he left Rivendell, but does that mean it’s just really goddamn awkward when Arwen arrives to find her fiance’s just gone and found a bear instead? And yes I know, Aragorn has two hands, but I really can’t imagine Boromir being amenable to some kind of poly hinge situation, especially with it being Aragorn, his lawful wife and Queen vs the Steward he keeps as his... secret lover? Boromir’s too proud for that. And I always have issues with mlm ships that get rid of a Lady to make it work.

And t h e n if I’m being honest and stepping out into the fandom rather than canon for a moment, all the boromir/aragorn fics are... w i l d. Boromir is either a 41 yo stroppy man-child that Aragorn has to top into submission or a rough barbarian who Aragorn ‘tames’. All the fics I’ve seen that try to consider a more complex dynamic still end up just saying ‘Aragorn tops the pride and King-suspicion right out of Boromir’ and like... lmao... ok you’re a numenorean and all Aragorn but dick ain’t that good. And of course it assumes that Boromir’s just automatically distrustful of the Kingship because of pride and power hunger alone which is false on literally every possible level, including the premise itself. Boromir doesn’t gIVE a shit about Aragorn being King, he doesn’t care! They’re all about to die he really doesn’t care, Aragorn can wield a cool sword and is willing to help OK great lets gooooo.

... SO. YEAH. As with everything about Boromir, I have mixed feelings and a lot of opinions, but here with this one thing I think I’m pretty much against it. Merry/Boromir and Gimli/Boromir are way better fellowship ships in my opinion.

#boromir #tolkien #erran vs tolkien #chats #lotr #lord of the rings #Anonymous

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claroquequiza · 7 years

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*takes deep breath and then a sip of water*

*bangs fists on table to hype myself up*

you know, i really love afterdrop and it’s one of my fave fics on ao3 and the issues i have with hanzo-genji reconciliation don’t necessarily ascribe to it but i really need to discuss my thought i have with the bros in depth

i have two main points about it

1) people tend to assume that genji is completely blameless and innocent in this scenario……like he was going about his business, bothering no one and one day, out of the blue, hanzo comes out of the left field and murders him. that can’t be it. it’s very headcanon-y but he must have known something was up. like he was part of the yakuza (even if he wasn’t participating in it)……what did he think the yakuza *did*????? [genji, part of a gang of criminals murdering people: i never thought that criminals would murder *me*!] he can’t have been completely clueless about that situation and yet he did………nothing in terms of conflict resolution????? what???? like he severely underestimated the clan and the seriousness of the situation???

2) people tend to dismiss and invalidate hanzo’s feelings of the matter. even genji and zenyatta partake in that behavior. i’m not saying that hanzo was justified in doing that but……….what it took genji to enlightment was acceptance of his situation and yet he tells hanzo that what he’s feeling is…..wrong???? that he should get over himself and that’s……….the complete opposite what *he* did. hypocritical much????

addendum) it’s genji’s line of “i have accepted what i am and i have forgiven you” what takes me to this conclusion but it seems to me genji hasn’t *really* forgiven hanzo. he’s come to terms with his trauma and so the crime committed against him doesn’t seems that great anymore and that’s what took him to such conclusion and not that he understood why hanzo did what he did. that he really doesn’t want his brother back, he wants the illusion of hanzo from before…….buddy, that hanzo is dead. he may have never even existed. you’re trying to reconnect with a ghost and that’s not gonna work.

thank you for you time.

Everything before now is @whyllastorch’s, everything following is mine.

Thank you very much for the submission, and thank you for the compliments, I appreciate them very much!

Afterdrop will be delving into these very subjects! But let me address them here just a little bit!

1) I agree that Genji was by no means innocent or completely blameless. I don’t like Young Genji very much at all, in point of fact--he strikes me as a fratboy on the lower end of the spectrum of likeability. I’m not too impressed with YG in most of fandom, either, even when people sidestep the whole yakuza thing in AUs--he’s usually one of those annoying party boys who expects his family to bail him out of any consequences, and he tends to torment Hanzo and revel in his discomfort, making jokes at his expense and pushing him way, way out of his comfort zone. It’s usually excused as being for Hanzo’s benefit or to take him down a few pegs, but it often comes off as more for Genji’s entertainment than anything else.

And when you don’t ignore the whole yakuza thing, all of it, the partying and the bailouts, is financed with blood with his full knowledge if not at least partial complicity, given his training. So Genji is not a good person, or at least not a moral one. People tend to excuse him with the “boys will be boys” attitude, too, even though he was 25 when Hanzo confronted him.

Now, this isn’t to imply that Genji deserved what happened to him, or to excuse Hanzo at all. Hanzo was not only yakuza, he was the head of the yakuza, so everything the clan was doing was in his name. People tend to excuse him by blaming the elders for it all, but, again, Hanzo was an adult--he was 28 when he murdered Genji, and had been “in charge” when he did it.

I’m relying on this post here when it comes to “assigning blame”. Genji was failing in his familial duty and knew it full well, but relied on passing off the responsibility to his family while taking advantage of their status for his own selfish desires. Hanzo was fulfilling his familial duty, but was executing a man whose “crime” was partying instead of assassinating. In the end, I think Hanzo is still by far the guiltier party, but Genji is not entirely blameless, and I don’t think he was stupid and clueless about the situation, either.

2) Hanzo’s feelings about Genji and the duel are a tricky thing, because the fact that he was 28 when he murdered Genji both absolves and condemns him. He was a fully grown adult in full possession of his faculties, he’s a smart man, and he was the head of the clan. He really should have been able to figure out something other than killing his brother, but he did it anyway.

However, most of us in the English-speaking fandom are judging him by Western standards, and Western standards not only assign far more individualistic responsibility, but also tend to assume far more simplistic power structures. Just because he was the head of the clan doesn’t mean he was in charge--Japanese history and culture especially illustrates this with the Shoguns, who ruled Japan for a full seven centuries even though the Emperor was the “leader”. The Emperor was, in fact, given a carefully controlled ceremonial role as he was shuffled back and forth in the machinations of the shoguns, and this seems to be the role that Blizzard intended Hanzo to be in, more or less.

So what were Hanzo’s feelings in all this? I don’t know if even Hanzo himself would be in a position to know. He was probably carefully prepared for a role that could very well have been ceremonial rather than authoritative. I think Shimada Sojiro (or Hanzo and Genji’s mother in the case of Afterdrop) is meant to have been a particularly skillful and charismatic head of the clan who was able to seize more power from the elders than was usual OR he was old enough to be the head of the clan in both position and seniority. I tend to think the latter is more likely in Overwatch canon (but that’s not how it’s going to go down in Afterdrop). Whatever the case, he apparently did not or could not pass that same level of authority to Hanzo.

So what were Hanzo’s feelings? I don’t think they mattered. To anyone. So I’m not sure if Genji and Zenyatta are invalidating Hanzo’s feelings as much as they’re trying to goad Hanzo into considering his own feelings and motivations rather than the teachings/machinations/slander of the clan. He was under their thumb for 28 years, almost three-quarters of his life, so it wouldn’t surprise me that he’s still at least partially their mouthpiece even after a decade. After all, as previously discussed, it wasn’t as though Genji was innocent, so it’s not a cut-and-dried thing for him to absolve himself or Genji, even after ten years.

Addendum) Genji’s intentions with forgiving Hanzo are not very clear to me. For one thing, it’s only implied, slightly implied that he’s seeking reconciliation at all, with Hanzo as he was or is now. Reconciliation is a theme of the Tale of the Dragon Brothers, not necessarily of Hanzo and Genji’s confrontation in Dragons. The only hint that reconciliation might be a goal initially comes from Hanzo, when he assumes that Genji is referencing the Tale. Genji only soft confirms it. From everything else in Dragons and their in-game dialogue, it seems to me like reconciliation isn’t something that Genji expects from the glib way he interacts with Hanzo. Or Hanzo either, for that matter, since he seems mostly cynical when he’s not outright accusatory. So to assume that reconciliation is a main goal of Genji’s is more an invention of fandom than of canon, I think.

So what are his main goals? I think he may have been showcasing a bit, because as you say, he mentions his self-acceptance, but accepting himself doesn’t mean he has to display himself the way he did, so I think there’s something to your thought that he hasn’t really forgiven Hanzo--he clearly wants to demonstrate something, but I’m not sure I know what it is from what little we have.

But that’s what fanfiction (and Afterdrop) is for.

Thanks so much for your submission! You raised a lot of good points!

#shimada bros #hanzo shimada #genji shimada #afterdrop #whyllastorch #submission

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melongril · 5 years

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K-pop Strongly Reinforces a Dominant Gender Ideology, but There May be Hope in the 4th Generation

by Jessica Ho

In their article, “Girls’ Generation? Gender, (Dis)Empowerment, and K-pop,” Stephen Epstein and James Turnbull argue that the explosion of the popularity of girl groups doesn’t necessarily signify a departure from patriarchy. While the writers admit there are exceptions, they demonstrate that the lyrical and visual content of girl group songs and music videos serve to reinforce a strong gender binary that underscores the power of male desire.

Meanwhile, in her article, “Queering spectatorship in K-pop: The androgynous male dancing body and western female fandom,” Chuyun Oh argues that K-pop males’ embodied “feminine masculinity” and androgyny queers their image in a way that empowers heterosexual female consumption in a manner that is absent in western media.

Both of these texts discuss a sort of reinforcement of consumption based in heterosexual desires, the former as traditional, and the latter as subversive.

I would agree with Epstein and Turnbull’s analysis of a majority girl group songs as reinforcing a “dichotomization of male and female.” In this case, I will draw upon massively popular 2nd generation girl group Girl’s Day and an early hit record of theirs.

Perhaps emblematically released at the height of South Korea’s “girl group craze,” Girl’s Day’s 2013 hit “Female President (여자대통령)” delivers a very heteronormative message under the guise of an ostensibly female-forward title. The lyrics have the members demanding a female in love to make the first move on a boy she likes.

“Go to him first And tell him you love him You can do it now, You start first Our country’s president is now a female So what’s the big deal? Why can’t girls do it first? Will we get arrested if we go first the guy first? Go to him first And you kiss him first You can do it now, You start first You can do it now”

I will credit this song as empowering women to make the first move; rather than reinforcing the image of women as submissive, this song frames them as owners of their own agency. However, this case’s lyrical analysis also further’s Epstein and Turnbull’s point of ascribing to gender dichotomy and placing power into romantic heterosexual desire.

youtube

In the music video, there is a heavy emphasis placed on the desirability of their bodies, made clear by their undulating silhouettes behind changing boards and closed blinds. There’s also an interaction between members Hyeri and Minah, wherein Hyeri cross-dresses as a man who courts Minah. While this may be read in a queer context, this primarily reinforces a gender binary, with suit-and-tie clad Hyeri (the man of the relationship) pursuing the coy and demure Minah (the woman of the relationship).

While I will credit Girl’s Day for their subversive elements of the absence of male music video actors, ownership of sexuality, and images of women in power, it still stands that this doesn’t challenge or overthrow many traditional conceptions of sexual desirability of women and male-motivated desire.

In the case of Oh’s analysis of western female attraction to the sexualized and androgenized bodies of male K-pop idols as “queering female desire against white heteronormative masculinity,” I am a bit skeptical of this claim. While I do believe that the more gender-fluid performances of male idols adds another dimension of heterosexual attraction, I doubt that it sends a subversive message of dominant power structures, as many of Oh’s analyzed YouTube comments still demonstrate a desire for male strength and sexual domination.

In response to the long-established capitalist reinforcement of heteronormative gender binaries, I would hazard the claim that K-pop does not become subversive merely through a female gaze; it may only become something that challenges dominant power structures through genuine queer spectatorship or platonic solidarity.

And the case I present for this argument is the new girl group, Loona (LOOΠΔ) (이달의 소녀). Dubbed a 4th-generation girl group, Loona has been promoted since 2016, but officially debuted as a 12-member ensemble in 2018. Although they’re still a rookie act domestically, Loona has achieved a huge international following, as the most demanded act at KCON LA 2019. Through mostly the influence they’ve attained abroad, Loona has snagged Best Korean Act at the MTV EMAs, Best Performance and Best Commerical Rookie at the Soribada Best K-Music Awards, and Most Anticipated Female Rookie Idol at the Korea First Brand Awards. They’ve been covered by Forbes and Billboard. My point is, they are potentially the face of the nebulous 4th generation.

What is very intriguing about Loona is their huge LGBT fanbase. Around the time of the release of member Kim Lip’s song “Eclipse,” the music video made its rounds among drag queens and Twitter’s gay community. Then, LBGT solidarity exploded with member Chuu’s song “Heart Attack,” which features a non-sexualized romance line between two women.

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The lyrics declare a genderless declaration of love, and the music video queers the message as an unrequited love for another girl. While this merely fits into the larger “Loonaverse,” a cinematic storyline that connects all of their videos together, it is also explicitly and unabashedly non-heterosexual and non-sexualized.

Loona’s most recent song, “Butterfly,” is another female-driven song, sending a message of female empowerment without the context of romance or sexual power.

youtube

The song’s lyrics speak of the listener giving them courage to fly like a butterfly, and the music video depict the members dancing with strong, almost masculine dance moves, intercut with images of women from different locations and cultures running and dancing with them.

In my view, while previous generations of boy groups may have introduced a queer aspect to K-pop, and while previous generations of girl groups paved the way for the commercial success of potentially diverse messages, the stage is now set up for a 4th generation girl group like Loona to take the stage and send a truly subversive message through direct queer appeal and non-sexualized female solidarity.

#loona #girl groups #girls day #kpop #gender

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gkingoffez · 7 years

Text

Bravery and Faith

Fandom: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Words: 3,125

Summary: Bodhi Rook is not a soldier, or a politician, or an important man of any kind. He's just the pilot. He brought the message. / A Bodhi character study of sorts, tracking his life both before and through the events of Rogue One.

AO3 | FFN.Net

Bodhi Rook is not a soldier, or a politician, or an important man of any kind. He is nothing but an insignificant cargo pilot who will never make any difference to anything in his lifetime. Bodhi knows, understands and accepts this fact, mainly because he has no choice but to.

When Bodhi was a child, he’d been just another hopeless, naïve dreamer looking up at the ships heading for the atmosphere and wanting nothing more than to fly out among the stars beside them. He’d tried to become an Imperial Starfighter pilot for the thrill and adventure the propaganda had promised, and when that failed he’d ended up in cargo transport lugging official Imperial documents and crates of artefacts from planet to planet. Still among the stars, still flying through the vast coldness of space and the dazzling blue of hyperspace tunnels, but it was never quite what he expected.

Still, Bodhi follows his orders and does his deliveries without complaint like everyone else around him. It’s his job, but all the while a strange feeling brews itself in his gut, a feeling that tells him that something is, in fact, very, very wrong. The stars had seemed to shine so brightly when he was a child looking up at the night sky, but in the middle of an Imperial fleet they seemed dull, lifeless and drained somehow.

It takes almost a year for him to slowly but surely realise that the Empire is not a benevolent authority keeping peace and order in the aftermath of the Clone Wars (as he had been raised to believe), but rather a cold and bloody dictatorship that is enforcing its own strict rule on the galaxy. It takes another month after that for this realisation to fully sink in.

All the while, Bodhi starts paying more attention and sees the signs everywhere he looks-the Stormtroopers streaked with blood of every colour, the worlds bullied and beaten into submission or wiped out entirely, and even the artefacts that he transports, stolen from ravaged temples and holy lands, from the hands of priests and people desperate to preserve what remains of their cultures.

But worst of all of this, it becomes clear to him that the Empire is building a weapon.

The weapon, to end all others- a moon, that wasn’t a moon, but a space station, the other pilots whispered; a planet-killer that could fracture entire star systems in minutes. The whole concept seems universe-shattering, and sends chills deep into Bodhi’s bones whenever he thinks too hard about it. He tries not to, most of the time.

However, if he is truly honest with himself, (as he lies in his bunk late in the transport’s night cycle), what scares him most about the Empire is himself- he is a cog, one tiny, miniscule puzzle piece, but a part nonetheless, of the whole terrible whirring, ticking, complex design. How could he possibly hope to change anything? He isn’t important by any definition.

He’s just a pilot.

An Imperial cargo pilot.

And sooner or later he will be compliant in the slaughter of millions, billions. Blood on the Empire’s hands would transfer to his own soul. The longer he works, going through the motions of each work day, the more he feels a weight pressing in on his heart, stifling his words and suffocating him from the inside out.

But there is nothing he can do- they would kill him, he’s seen it happen before, and besides that, nothing he did would ever make a difference to anyone.

He is just the pilot and a coward, while the Empire is absolute and overpowering.

He finds himself on Eadu. There, he meets Galen Erso, and Galen sees right through him.

It becomes clear to Bodhi over time spent talking in quiet, unsurveyed corners that Galen is his opposite- brave, true to himself and capable of sending shockwaves through the Empire big enough that even the Emperor himself would feel them- and Bodhi can’t help but admire that.

Galen Erso is kind, persuasive and patient, and when he asks the galaxy of Bodhi Rook he does so not with a promise of reward but with the promise of chance- take a message to the rebellion and maybe you can still save your soul.

Go to Jedha, go to Saw Gererra.

Break from the Empire’s design. Find redemption. Maybe.

Bodhi isn’t sure he’ll ever truly earn it. He’s seen too many terrible things before his eyes, and done nothing to stop them.

He spends a lot of time debating with himself, frightened by either outcome. Desertion is a death sentence, but remaining promises a worser fate. And what if he fails? What if the message falls into the hands of the Empire? Would he doom them all?

Ultimately, though, Bodhi Rook decides to take Galen Erso’s message.

If I can’t make a difference myself, Bodhi reasons in his head, then maybe I can be the messenger to the one that can. Maybe be brave enough to do just that will be enough.

So, he defects- he leaves his ship behind and leaps right into danger and uncertain territory, terrified to go forward but more terrified to look back.

The imbalance in force propels him onwards.

Jedha is his homeworld (or, more accurately his homemoon).

He’d grown up on this soil; he knows the constellations in the sky by heart. He’d flown away from here long ago with big dreams, and he returns today with nothing the clothes on his back and a message for Saw Gerrerra.

He’d known about the Imperial occupation, but seeing it from the ground only makes him more determined in his mission. The temples are stripped bare of kyber crystals, the streets are crowded with displaced people and there are too many in the throng carrying worry in their eyes and weapons close to their chests. It is far from the moon he’d known as a child.

He hopes the Rebellion will be kind to him, as he anxiously walks through the Holy City, jumping at every too-loud sound. Something tells him they will be- after all, if the Empire and the Emperor are the villains, building superweapons and destroying hope across the galaxy, then the Alliance can only be the heroes- the exact opposite of what his superiors had always preached. Right?

If only the galaxy were so black and white.

Saw Gerrera is not kind at all. Saw Gerrera doubts him and forces him to his knees, and makes him choke out his words through a lump in his throat. The Bor Gullit leaves him drifting in his own mind, fuzzy, aimless and not tied to the ground beneath him, or the well-known stars above him either. They put him away into the shadows of a tunnel, behind metal bars.

Galen Erson had given him the message, and he had given it to Saw Gerrara freely. He had given it freely and he hadn’t been lying! The Bor Gullit had torn him apart for nothing, nothing, nothing. Was that fair, or wasn’t it? Bodhi is too out of it to ponder that thought too deeply.

Sometime later, he hears a man’s voice through the mist, asking urgently- “Are you the pilot?”

“I’m the pilot,” he replies, when he finally understands the words. “I brought the message, I’m the pilot.”

He is the pilot.

The Imperial cargo pilot.

The defected Imperial pilot.

He tells them where Galen is, and they free him as the world begins to shake and falling apart beneath his boots.

He follows them outside, and a flood of horror sends red hot awareness through his entire system. He looks to where the Holy City should have stood, and sees nothing; centuries of history, and sacred soil, all gone.

Bodhi had never lived there- he’d been born and raised in one of smaller settlements on another part of the moon, but he’d seen the city only days before. It had been teeming with life, from the smells and sounds of the markets to children playing in the streets and now all those people were nothing but dust.

They run from the catacombs, jumping on to a small ship that is tiny against the backdrop of terrifying destruction before Bodhi’s eyes. The ground ruptures beneath them as they fly away, and the shockwave of debris tears dirt up into the sky, blocking out the sun in its awe-some wake.

He is sure he’s going to die on that ship- the debris is falling around them and the situation appears hopeless. An entire city had been snuffed out like nothing, and they are just one speck against a monolith of destruction, just five people and a droid thrown together versus a world tearing itself to pieces.

Before they jump to hyperspace, he glimpses a white moon through the front window (that he knows is not a moon) hanging ominously in the sky. The planet-killer is already wreaking destruction and mass murder, and it is partly his fault.

On the ship is Galen Erso’s daughter. There is something of Galen in her jaw structure, and her eyes.

Galen had spoken of her like the early poets had spoken of the stars- beautiful and distant, but dearly loved whether they were alive in the sky at night or dimmed in the light of day. Bodhi had gotten the feeling from the sadness in Galen’s eyes and his fervour in talking about her to him that he’d spent so long staying silent, all the emotions of love and longing had built up desperately within him.

No one should live like that, separated from their loved ones and left alone in such fear.

Bodhi Rook has no loved ones to be separated from. He’d only had an old father, who had disagreed with his ambitions to join the Starfighter program and then died some time ago. It had made defecting from the Empire a far easier decision than it might have been otherwise- he had only truly risked his own life. There was something brave, or maybe selfish in that.

Bodhi has no idea how far the shockwave from the star-killer’s blast would travel across Jedha’s surface- perhaps it would eventually reach his home city, and everything he’d known there would be gone as well. He doesn’t let that thought weigh him down too much, although it does briefly paralyse him in his seat.

If anything, it helps propel him forward; not out of a desire for revenge, but a fervent wish to make sure no other worlds suffer in the same way.

Jyn Erso tells them Galen’s message, the one Bodhi had kept in his shoe for days.

There is a critical flaw in the Empire’s Planet-Killer, she says, a small, insignificant, catastrophic flaw. One hit to the reactor core, and the entire system goes down.

Get a hold of the plans, and the weakness is revealed, but first they need to rescue Galen Erso.

That feels right to Bodhi, like he is returning a favour.

It doesn’t feel right, however, leaving Cassian Andor on that ridge. Cassian had carried his sniper rifle like it was heavier than it needed to be, and was far too insistent that Bodhi leave him alone. Bodhi leaves anyway- a bit of him is just used to taking his orders without question, but he also has to trust that Cassian knows what he is doing. The man is part of the rebellion, and the rebellion is the Good Guys after all.

He’ll find a way to get Galen out, Bodhi reasons to himself, as he trudges back to the ship and K-2SO. After all, the Rebellion needs Galen alive. They wouldn’t have sent Cassian to kill him, right?

He later finds that trust to be misplaced. They leave in a stolen cargo ship, the world on fire behind them, with everyone except Galen. His blood soaks Jyn’s hands and seems to seep heavily into her soul.

He can’t help but hope, as his fingers dance across the familiar controls of the ship, flying them away, that Galen has finally found himself at peace. A better peace would, perhaps, have been seeing the monstrous star-killer destroyed- but at the very least, he’d seen his daughter again. Stardust, he’d called her once.

Bodhi knows now that as long as he is alive, he will stop at nothing to finish what Galen Erso had started.

If only the rest of the Rebellion had agreed with him.

The people on the Alliance’s secret base look at him with distrust. He can’t blame them, really, he has no other clothes than the ones he was wearing when he defected, still emblazoned with the Empire’s insignia. The uniform of an Imperial cargo pilot.

While they’re all waiting for the Rebel leaders to arrive for the big meeting, Jyn, Baze and Chirrut surround him, threateningly staring down anyone who looks like they might challenge Bodhi’s place on the base. He is grateful for their friendship, even if he feels like he deserves some of the hate coming his way.

After all, he had been compliant. He had been a cog in the Empire’s design, a cargo pilot blindly following orders. But he’d also been their pilot, his new makeshift crew’s, and maybe that counts for something as well.

He’d brought them the message. They’d brought him to the Rebellion.

Bodhi feels like he is suffocating as the Alliance council decides not to go to Scarif.

He’d once been at a welcome ceremony, in a line with his fellow pilots and standing as straight as he could as Darth Vader himself stalked past. Vader was as terrifying as the stories said- tall, shrouded in black, breathing haggardly through a respirator in his eyeless, shining black mask. Bodhi had had nightmares for weeks about that sound, and he’d never forget the image of Vader choking a mid-ranking officer to death without ever touching the man. That kind of darkness and tyranny had no place in the galaxy he knew to be full of wonders like brightly-coloured nebulas and love.

When he leaves the room, and the bickering politicians (who have no idea- no idea!), behind, following Jyn, his path becomes solidifies. He’d risked his life to bring Galen’s message to Saw Gerrera. Galen had died because the rebellion sent fighter ships to Eadu. Galen had died, and if the Rebellion didn’t get their hands on the plans on Scarif, he would have died for nothing.

Luckily, Bodhi’s new friends are already well ahead of him. They have a plan, hope, and twenty brave volunteers. There’s no question at all of Bodhi staying behind.

Bodhi Rook is not a soldier. He can’t fight like Baze, Chirrut, Jyn, Cassian or any of the other rebels squashed into the stolen cargo ship can (with their fists and their blasters and their brave, unrelenting desire for galactic freedom from the Empire) but he can still rebel in other ways: he can fly them to Scarif; he can get them past the shield, and into the complex; he can misdirect the Imperial Command center into sending troops where they don’t need to go.

Bodhi Rook knows he is going to die, that Rogue One is a suicide mission, even before the shield closes and seals them inside the planet-wide cage.

He knows this- and does it all anyway.

The other rebels have long stopped looking on him with distrust. None of that matters now that they are all here for the same cause, the right cause. They are all here to die for it, side-by-side on the sand.

He isn’t a fighter, he doesn’t take part in the battle- he doesn’t even have his own blaster, but he sees the fighters, his friends, die before his eyes, while the Starfighters go down overhead. He listens to their last screams over comms, and keeps going. The atmospheric shield is in place and there’s no escape, no hope for them on the planet’s surface.

But he still tries and tries and tries, because there is still hope- a new, bright, gleaming hope- for the rest of the galaxy. He believes in Cassian and K2-S0. Mostly, he believes in Jyn Erso. She would do what her father had done before her, and be brave and determined in the face of her mission, even if it ended in her own death. Today, she would send a shockwave through the Empire so great that both the Empire and Darth Vader would feel it. Bodhi feels this in his bones.

There is a critical flaw in the Empire’s Death Star, a small, insignificant, catastrophic flaw. One hit to the reactor core, and the entire system goes down. The entire system goes down- Galen Erso had made sure of this. Transmit the plans and the weakness is revealed, and billions of lives will be saved.

And maybe Bodhi Rook’s soul will be saved as well.

Connect the ship to the main communications system, and boost a signal through to the Rebel Fleet above. It’s the only way, the only hope.

Bodhi tries, his lungs screaming, his legs burning. A battle rages around him, the men who’d stayed on the ship with him all fall to blasters bolts. He is afraid, terrified. But Bodhi never once regrets what he has done or wishes that he’d never met Galen. Not once.

It takes every ounce of bravery he has, doing exactly what Jyn had told them- take every chance, chance after chance after chance- until it all ran out.

Bodhi had never been an important man, but right now he is the one sending the message.

Take down the shield so the plans can be transmitted. Take them, destroy the star-killer Death Star, destroy the Empire.

The Rebel fleet hears him. He breathes a deep, freeing sigh of relief at General Raddus’ reply. They hear him. They hear him! They got the message!

He thanks the Gods, the Force, and Galen Erso for it.

This is for you, he says. He hopes that somewhere out there, Galen knows Bodhi has found his bit of redemption.

It’s not over yet, but Bodhi has made a difference after all. Maybe he is more than just a pilot after all.

A grenade clinks to the ground beside him. His mind goes blank, but not with fear- there’s no time for fear. Not time for anything except to see a flash of his family- both the one he’d left behind years ago on Jedha, and the one he’d recently found in four strangers, a droid and a rebellion.

It all melts to pain, and then blackness.

Bodhi Rook can only hope he’s done enough.

My dudes, I loved Rogue One. It was amazing, and it actually spurred me into becoming a fully-fledged Star Wars fan. I grew up watching the movies, but it was Rogue One that made me truly and deeply invested in the universe as I’ve never been before.

It’s why I watched the Clone Wars and then Rebels, and subsequently why I’m on this current writing kick. I’m just having a whole lot of fun with it my dudes, and that’s Good!

My longtime friend and internet significant other Haley ( @notaverybigbat ) absolutely adores Bodhi, and so I meant to have this finished as a birthday gift and then I just… didn’t finish it. Haley’s birthday was back in January. OOPS. Sorry bby, I love you, here you are. <3

One last note, I haven’t read the Rogue One novel yet, but I did read up on as much of Bodhi’s backstory as I could. So if anything here is inconsistent with something in the canon, that’s why.

Thanks for reading!

#star wars #rogue one #bodhi rook #rogue one a star wars story #ya'll this has been in my folder for ages im so glad it's finally finished #my writing

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