#i literally wrote this so long ago but since my posting has become non existent here is a scenario
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Temporary Boyfriend~Mingyu
Okay, so... this is a Mingyu scenario I made about 3 or 4 years ago and never posted ‘cause I didn’t think that anyone would like it. But hey, here it is. I ased ig off of the manga Perfect Boyfriend if anything seems familar that is why. Hope you like it!
You should be used to this by now. But, somehow you managed to still feel surprised.
You had been stood up, again and you really thought that it could of worked out this time. But of course it didn’t.
The lonely table for two, nearly empty drink and sound of chatting couples around had now become somewhat familiar.
You waited at your table as you swirled your drink with as straw and took your last sip. Glancing down at your phone to check the time you realize that your date really isn’t coming.
Sighing ,you pick up your phone from the table and turn around to gather your jacket of the back of the chair. You take out the money to pay for your drink, when you see a small rectangular object on your table.
You pick it up and graze your fingers over it confused. It was black with gold writing and a gold clover in the corner of the card. It seemed to be…a business card?
“What is this you,” you mumble to yourself incoherently. You look around you to see if anyone was walking about but, everyone was seated and enjoying themselves.
That’s when you felt a finger tap your shoulder, You gasped in shock gripping your heart and twisting around to face a guy smiling at you. He had blond hair and an interesting sense of style.
“I can see that you’ve found my business card?” he tells you smiling. You gave him a confused look then you remembered the card that you hand resting in your hand.
“Oh, this is your business card?,” you asked.
“Surely is. I’m Hoshi by the way. So, I can see that you are having issues with guys.” he said whispering the last part.
You looked at him slightly insulted.
“No I am not!” you exclaimed a little too loud, which caused a few heads to turn in your direction. You quickly apologized and repeated yourself to, what was his name again. Oh yeah, Hoshi.
“Sure you aren’t,” he replied with a smirk. “Anyways that is my card and I believe that it will help you with all your boyfriend issues. There’s no need tp thankme,” he said with another big smile.
“But, there’s only a name on th-” you didn’t finish your sentence because when you looked he was already gone.
Once you reached home you quickly ran over to your laptop and pulled the business card out of your bag.
“Time to see what this is all about,” you tell yourself as you type in the name on the card.
Seventeen Sweethearts
The website read and the clover from the card appeared at the top. With further searching you found out that this website was one in which you could, order a boyfriend!
You looked further into the site and realized that these were all what seemed to be dream boyfriends. They were supposed to be people that were gaurenteed to be your soulmate. You skimmed over something claiming they were good at everything, reading something a long the lines of much better than humans. Whatever thats supposed to mean.
There was the bad boy, vampire boyfriend, the laid back boyfriend, even the typical sweetheart and quite a few more.
“Well I have nothing to lose you,” you said to yourself as you skipped the terms and conditions and placed your order already half asleep.
The next morning you woke up to the surprise of an extremely large package being delivered right to you. The people who delivered it seemed to be in quite a hurry to give you your package but, you signed the paper and brought your package inside.
You quickly open the package and the first thing you did was let out a scream when you saw a person inside. He looked..so..real!
You quickly examined his sleeping form and looked at the paper lying on his chest. You picked it up gently and it read:
Hello customer,
I’m glad that you chose to shop with Seventeen Soulmates. Please enjoy your soulmate to the fullest. His name is Mingyu. We hope you love him, even though he’ll already love you! To set him up you must kiss him. Sometimes it takes more than one kiss. Enjoy your sweetheart!
Good Luck,
Seventeen Soulmates
You look down at your boyfriend Mingyu confused and you began laughing to yourself. What have I gotten myself into.
You lean down and run your thumb against his cheek. His skin felt very soft and you were surprised that he was not human, or was he.
Disregarding this thought you leaned in towards his face, slowly placing your lips on his gently. Nothing.
You give him another short gentle kiss. Nothing.
“Why isn’t this working…” you ask yourself.
You decided to lean down for the last time and give Mingyu a gentle kiss but long kiss on the lips.
Still nothing.
“Well, I give up. Why isn’t he turning on. I guess that I’ll just have to carry him ba-.”
You heard a knock on the door of your apartment so you quickly rose to your feet. Leaving Mingyu behind and answering the door. You had not even opened the door fully before you were greeted my Hoshi stepping through the door.
“So how are you enjoying your boyfriend? Did you get him to wake up yet. Oh, it seems like you have.”
“No, I haven’t...” you turned around to see a yawning Mingyu, slowly getting up from his position. in the box. As soon as he saw you his eyes lit up and he jumped up running over to snuggle you in a warm hug. You slightly pushed Mingyu off of you and he motioned for him to sit down by the chair.
He obeyed and you sat beside.
“Um, Hoshi can you please explain to me. Um, well everything!”
“Hey, hey. Calm down. I said that I’d help you and I did.This is Mingyu, your perfect boyfriend. He is exactly how you chose him to be when you were describing what you wanted. He’s exactly what you think he is,” Hoshi said with a beaming smile. “He’s your temporary boyfriend!”
"Temporary boyfriend! What's that supposed to mean. I thought I was being set up for a date or something and this robot shows up to my door!" you wave your hands dramatically giving him an incredulous look.
It was his turn to look confused, "I thought you understood this when you signed up. You did read the contract and terms of agreement before you order right?"
You went silent. You were so quick to sign up last night that of course you didn't read the fine print.
"Back the look on your face it seems that you didn't. But don't worry I'll give you a recap of the most important information. According to Section 47.b of clause 76 "The customer who places the order must strictly adhere to the contract by choosing to keep their soulmate for the 1 month trial period in immaculate condition. This will allow for our compant to collect information on how succesful relationships can occur for people who were having trouble with love." As well as the most important part, Section 108.f of clause 52 "Any customer who fails to abide by this contract will have to pay $10 000 000 to the company for lost time and wages, wasted materials, labour." I could go on but you can read that yourself. That would be all you need to know. If you have any more questions or concerns please let us know. Here's a physical copy of the contract just in case you decide you cancel it." He beamed towards you as he pulled a stack of what has to foot thick stack of papers. Bowing politely he quickly exits through your front door.
"10 million dollars? How could I let this happen" You had to sit down to take in your new information. You looked over to Mingyu your temporary boyfriend and supposed soulmate. Placing a hand on his shoulder you look up at him with determined eyes. "Hi Mingyu, I guess we have a long 30 days ahead of us."
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This was supposed to have numerous parts but I've written it so long ago and abandoned it :( But if y'all like it I might make a second part.
#seventeen#seventeen scenarios#svt#svt scenarios#mingyu#mingyu scenarios#mingyu scenario#seventeen mingyu#mingyu seventeen#i literally wrote this so long ago but since my posting has become non existent here is a scenario
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Can you explain the appeal of Julian Blackthorn? This is a genuine question because I read the books and came away utterly bored by him and unconvinced of his moral greyness as opposed to like, Adam Parrish’s. He seemed so one dimensional to me but I want to know if I’m Wrong TM considering I tend to be very very biased toward my favourite characters and bored by the rest, and my favourites were Mark and Kieran. So maybe I just didn’t pay him enough attention??
it’s been a while since i wrote any earnest tsc meta but cringe culture is dead and the chance to infodump about my julian thoughts has me vibrating where i’m sitting so. yes okay.
technical stuff
(aka: things pertaining to How The Story Is Constructed)
cassandra clare’s characterization has become much stronger just in general since she first began writing the series like twenty years ago
perhaps most importantly: the more recent stuff i’ve read from her has involved characters who actually grow, change, and learn from their past mistakes
rather than repeating the same stupid decisions over and over again
and over and over and over some more
seriously take a shot every time someone in tmi miscommunicates or self-destructs in ways They Have Learned Not To Do for no real reason. u will die of alcohol poisoning
in tda this shines ESPECIALLY with the evolution of mark, kieran, and cristina’s relationship, but that’s a separate post
clare’s trademark is also the angsty traumatized jerkass love interest with a secret heart of gold
the woman is almost singlehandedly responsible for draco in leather pants and the proliferation of this kind of character type in fandom and teen lit. this isn’t a criticism it’s me marveling at how if you commit hard enough to a single trope you truly can change the world. follow your dreams
sad jackass with a heart of gold isn’t an Inherently Problematic Character Type
but poorly done it can lead to relationship dynamics in which one partner is constantly being hurt by and then forgiving the other despite them making no real effort to change, because they are narratively absolved due to being sad
(there’s a lot of this with earlier jace content. in some ways i think will was later created specifically to be a same-archetype protagonist who actually does get called on his shit and grow. that’s also another post)
also if all of your sexy male love interests are tortured jackasses with a heart of gold then people start calling you a one-trick pony
enter julian blackthorn!
from the very start everything about him is designed to be the INVERSE of the heart of gold jackass. which immediately makes him interesting just from a meta perspective
(mark and kieran are also both alternate angles on this time-honored archetype. mark gets the heart of gold and kieran gets the jackass and then they’re both much more deeply messy than that. yet another post)
julian is kind, self-sacrificing, empathetic, artistic, emotionally supportive, responsible, and favored by old grannies everywhere
so a completely nonthreatening milquetoast guy, right
immediately forgettable if you’re only here for the dramatic conflicts and shithead antics of clare’s other protags
except that he is A Mess
and that he has structured his priorities very carefully, and they are as selfless as you expect from The Hero (TM) but they are also Not Heroic (TM) and they do not align with the moral framework The Hero (TM) is supposed to use
moral ambiguity in characters always exists in relation to their narratives imo. you mention adam parrish - trc’s narrative already mucks around in different ethical shades of gray, and adam falls on the canon scale about where julian does on his canon scale. both more willing than the average pov character to do the ruthless thing or make the fucked-up choice if the ends justify the means; both with an intensely strong sense of internal priorities that they adhere to at all costs, both so unbelievably fucking down for murder; etc
i do think there are ways julian’s choices could have been pushed even further, but considering the number of readers who hate his guts already, i can see why clare opted not to go for the most controversial possible conflicts
so we’re flipping the narrative
instead of seeing this angsty bad boy and peeling back the layers of his trauma to find his heart of gold, we’re seeing the put-together selfless family man and peeling back the layers of his Responsibility Mask to expose the rotting husk underneath
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
THAT IS FUN AS FUCK
then when julian DOES lash out in hurtful, uncontrolled ways, he has significantly more narrative justification for it than most of clare’s protagonists (will elaborate in characterization thoughts)
julian is also interesting as fuck because of how his struggles allow for a more in-depth look at the failings of shadowhunter society, something that’s also sorely lacking in clare’s earlier work
his apparent amorality is simply the result of him making pragmatic and impossible choices because he has been faced with fucked-up ethical dilemmas since age 12 Because Society Has Failed Him
which opens the door for narrative exploration of how and why he’s been failed so badly & what needs to change
i also love that he has such a coldly calculated way of analyzing situations and allowing harm to occur when need be, bc a lot of clare’s early protagonists have such a bad case of Rush In And Get Myself Killed Because I’ve Got Feelings About Impulsive Heroism syndrome that i wanna push them in front of a truck
probably there’s other meta narrative stuff i could say but i’m stopping myself and moving on to character analysis
characterization stuff
(aka: reasons why i’m also attached to him in a vacuum)
i don’t read him as one-dimensional at all tbh
u may feel the narrative pushes “ruthless julian blackthorn” too much without delivering enough actual ruthless julian But i don’t think that’s the same as having only one dimension
from the get-go, the big question centered on julian is always “how far are you willing to go?” and the narrative pushes the stakes slowly higher and higher to continuously test julian’s “the price is always justified” mindset
he has a far more layered and realistic response to trauma than clare’s early protagonists - trauma affects every single aspect of his personality and how he conducts himself, and the effects vary depending on the circumstances
his conviction that he has to be the perfect parent to his siblings because they will fall apart if they see him show weakness?? rooted in how he feels like he’s fallen apart since losing the stable adult support he once relied upon
his willingness to hurt semi-innocent people, commit coldblooded murder, manipulate people using political leverage, allow harm to befall any stranger if it protects his family?? rooted in how he has already had to ask himself how much he’s willing to sacrifice, and how his family is his only source of stability when the world has never done Shit for him
his conviction that he has a darker heart than anyone else because he killed his possessed father, even though intellectually he knows he was saving his brother’s life?? rooted in having no means of processing this trauma and being unable to voice his feelings for fear of backlash from a deeply non-understanding society
the way he represses every single negative emotion he ever has, to the point where emma - his actual literal magic soulmate who can feel his emotions - is startled to find him hurting or angry?? once again all about how he has to be the perfect father or he’s failed completely
the way his anger is so totally disproportionate to different situations and the way his negative emotions can only come out in completely uncontrolled breaks?? all that repression baybey. this kid has not processed a single bad feeling in five years. every single real grievance and petty annoyance has been festering indefinitely inside him like a slowly spreading infection
julian’s arc involves him needing to get thru being his worst self to actually start to heal
as in, he has to actually learn to acknowledge his feelings, take care of himself, lean on his family, and let other people take some responsibility
he also has to learn that in his quest to be the perfect emotionally controlled authority figure, he has not actually learned how to control or deal with his emotions. like. At Fucking All. good god
the narrative setup is also about asking “how far are you willing to go?” until the answer is finally “not this far. not this far”
and once he reaches that point, he has to reevaluate everything about how he weighs his priorities and morals and plans, etc
(i also like that emma has a perpendicular arc in which she’s always the one tempering julian and telling him “no we can’t go that far” until she’s willing to do something horrific that he absolutely won’t and HE has to stop HER. very sexy)
it’s also just really nice to have a character who’s learned to relate so well to literally every single member of his family while still having a very detached ruthless interior consciousness. i have similar feelings about how adam teaches himself to love people, but with julian it’s spelled out more explicitly in canon & it’s a more central character theme
i’m sure i’m also forgetting stuff here but this post is long enough so i’m gonna say good enough
and like i said in the tags on my other post, there are things i’d personally write differently if it were my story - plot points i’d shift, character contrasts i’d up, themes i’d explore differently, pacing i’d adjust, etc. i have plenty of ways i could be nitpicky and editorial about the effectiveness of julian’s arc. but i also don’t feel like writing them out at the moment & none of my critiques on effectiveness have an impact on the core appeal of his character 2 me. he’s so fucking good
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Hey, d'you have any French book recs? I'm trying to work on my French, and rn I have downloaded one of my favourite book series' French translations, but I figured maybe books already written in French might work better? Also have you read the Ranger's Apprentice series? 1/2
RA's def flawed - the books' narration does like to point bright arrows at the protagonists' intelligence, and the last few books def have the tone of 'old white man trying to write feminism', although at least he's trying? - and it's aimed more to the younger side of YA, but it is still a very fun series, and I can ignore the flaws fairly easily, at least partly due to nostalgia? This rather long lol but I'm wordy.
I'll start with the second question: no, although every time the series is brought up I have to check the French title and go "oh, right, I've seen these books in stores". But I've never purchased or read them. It sounds like something I probably would have enjoyed as a teen but I just missed the mark, and these days I'm trying to drown myself in queer books, so that probably isn't happening.
As for your first question, geez, I haven’t read a French book in years, so this is gonna skew middle grade/YA, though that may not be so bad if the point is to learn the language. I will also say that as a result, these may read a little outdated.
I'll put it under a cut, even if Tumblr has become really bad with correctly displaying read mores. Sorry, mobile crowd.
It's also likely that old readers of the blog will have seen me talk about most of these. I don't feel like going through old posts.
One last thing: while I was curating this list I took the time to make a Goodreads shelf to keep track of those.
The Ewilan books by Pierre Bottero
(It's a testament to how long ago I read these books that these are not the covers of the edition I own, and I can't even find those on Google. I'm settling for a more recent cover anyway since it'll make it easier to find them, presumably)
There are at least three trilogies (that I know of) set in the same world.
The first trilogy is essentially an isekai (so, French girl lands in parallel fantasy world by accident) with elements of chosen one trope, though I find the execution makes it worth the while anyway.
The second trilogy is a direct sequel, so same protagonist but new threat, and the world gets expanded.
The third one is centered around a supporting characters from the previous books, and the first couple of books in it are more her backstory than a continuation, though the third one concludes both that trilogy and advances the story of the other books as well.
Notably these books have a really fun magic system where the characters "draw" things into existence. It's just stuck with me for some reason.
A bunch of stuff by Erik L'Homme
I have read a lot of this man's books, starting with Le Livre des Etoiles.
They also skew towards the young end of YA, arguably middle grade, I never bothered to figure out where to draw the line. They're coincidentally also using the premise of a parallel world to our own (and yes, connected to France again, the French are just as susceptible of writing about their homeland), but interestingly are set from the point of view of characters native to the parallel world.
It also has a very unique magic system, this one based on a mix of a runic alphabet and sort-of poetry. I'll also say specifically for these books that the characters stuck with me way more than others on this list, which is worth mentioning.
This trilogy is my favorite by Erik L'Homme, but I'll also mention Les Maîtres des brisants, which is a fantasy space opera with a pirate steampunk(?) vibe. I think it's steampunk. I could be mistaken. But it's in that vein. It's also middle grade, in my opinion not as good, but it could just be that it came out when I was older.
Another one is Phaenomen, which was a deliberate attempt at skewing older (though still YA). This one is set in our (then-)modern world and centers a group of teens who happen to have supernatural powers. I guess the best way to describe it is a superhero thriller? If you take "superhero" in the sense of "people with individualized powers", since they don't really do a lot of heroing.
...I really need to brush up on genre terminology, don't I.
The Ji series by Pierre Grimbert
This one is actually adult fantasy, though it definitely falls under "probably outdated". It is very straight, for starters, and I'd have to give it another read to give a more critical reading of how it handles race (it attempts to do it, and is well meaning, but I'm not sure it survives the test of time & scrutiny, basically).
If I haven't lost you already, the premise is this: a few generations ago, a weird man named Nol gathered emissaries from each nation of the world and took them to a trip to the titular Ji island. Nobody knows what went down here, but now in the present day, someone is trying to kill off all descendants from those emissaries, who are as a result forced to team up and figure out what's going on.
I'm not going to spoil past that, though I will say it has (surprise) a really unique magic system! I guess you can start to piece together what my younger self was interested in. Which, admittedly, I still am.
Once again, this one also has a strong cast of characters, helped by rich world building and the premise forcing the characters to come from many different cultures (though, again, I can't vouch for the handling of race because it's been too long).
The first series is complete by itself, though it has two sequel series as well, each focusing on the next generation in these families. Because yes, of course they all pair up and have kids. Like I said: very straight.
A whole lot of books by Jean-Louis Fetjaine
OFetjaine is a historian, and I guess he's really interested in Arthurian mythos especially, because he loves it so much he's written two separate high fantasy retellings of them! I'm not criticizing, mind you, we all need a hobby.
The former, the Elves trilogy (pictures above) is very traditional high fantasy. Elves, dwarves, orcs, a world which is definitely fictionalized with a pan-Celtic vibe to it. The holy grail and excalibur are around, but they're relics possessed by the elves and dwarves with very different powers than usual. Et cetera.
Fetjaine also really loves his elves (as the titles might imply), and while they're not exactly Tolkien elves, there's a similar vibe to them. If you like Tolkien and his elf boner, you'll probably like this too. And conversely, if that turns you off, these books probably also won't work for you.
This series also has a prequel trilogy, centered around the backstory of one of the main characters. I...honestly don't remember too much about it, but I liked it, so, there you go, I guess.
I said Fetjaine did it twice. The other series is the Merlin duology, which, as the title implies, is a retelling of Merlin's story. Note that Merlin is also in the other trilogy, but it's a different Merlin; like I said, completely different continuities and stories.
This one is historical fantasy, so it's set in actual Great Britain, and Fetjaine attempts to connect Arthur to a "real" historical figure...but, you know, Merlin is also half-elf and elves totally exist in Brocéliande, so, you know. History.
Okay, that's probably enough fantasy, let me give some classics too.
L'Arbre des possibles et autres histoires - Bernard Werber
Bernard Werber is a pretty seminal author of French sci-fi and I should probably be embarrassed that the only book of his that I read was for school, but, it is a really good one, so I'll include it anyway.
It's a novella collection, and when I say "sci-fi" I want to make it clear that it's very old school science fiction. It's more Frankenstein or Black Mirror than Star Trek, what we in French call the anticipation genre of science fiction: you take one piece of technology or cultural norm and project it into the future.
It has a pretty wide range of topics and tones, so it's bound to have some better than others. My personal faves were Du pain et des jeux, where football (non-American) has evolved into basically a wargame, and Tel maître, tel lion, where any animal is considered acceptable as a pet, no matter how absurd it is to keep as a pet. They're both on a comedic end, but there's more heartfelt stuff too.
L'Ecume des Jours - Boris Vian
(no cover because I can't find the one I have, and the ones I find are ugly)
This book is surrealist. Like, literally a part of the surrealist movement. It features things such as a lilypad growing inside a woman's lungs (and, as you well know, lilypads double in size every day, wink wink), the protagonist's apartment becoming larger and smaller to go with his mood and current financial situation, and more that I can't even recall at the moment because remembering this book is like trying to remember having an aneurysm.
It is also really, really fun and touching. Oh, and it has a pretty solid movie adaptation, starring Audrey Tautou, who I think an international audience would probably recognize from Amelie or the Da Vinci Code movie.
I don't really know what else to say. It's a really cool read!
Le Roi se meurt - Eugène Ionesco
Ionesco is somewhat famous worldwide so I wasn't even sure to include him here. He's a playwright who wrote in the "Theater of the Absurd" movement, and this play is part of that.
The premise of this play is that the King (of an unnamed land) is dying, and the land is dying with him. I don't really know what else to say. It's theater of the absurd. It kind of has to be experienced (the published version works fine, btw, no need to track down an actual performance, in my humble opinion).
The Plague - Albert Camus
You've probably heard of this one, and if you haven't, let me tell you about a guy called Carlos Maza
youtube
I'm honestly more including this book out of a sense of duty. The other three are books I genuinely liked and happen to be classics. This book was an awful read. But, um. It's kind of relevant now in a way it wasn't (or didn't feel, anyway) back in 2008 or 2009, when I read it. And I don't just mean because of our own plague, since Camus's plague is pretty famously an allegory for fascism, which my teenage self sneered at, and my adult self really regrets every feeling that way.
Okay, finally, some more lighthearted stuff, we gotta talk about the Belgian and French art of bande dessinée. How is it different from comic books or manga? Functionally, it isn't. It really comes down more to what gets published in the Belgian-French industry compared to the American comics industry, which is dominated by superheroes, or the Japanese manga industry, which, while I'm less familiar with it, I know has some big genre trends as well that are completely separate.
The Lanfeust series - Arleston and Tarquin
This is a YA mega-series, and I can't recommend all of it because I've lost track of the franchise's growth. Also note that I say "YA", but in this case it means something very different from an American understanding of YA. These books are pretty full of sex.
No, when I say YA I mean it has that level of maturity, for better or worse. The original series (Lanfeust de Troy) is high fantasy in a world where everyone has an individual magical ability but two characters find out they're gifted with an absolute power to make anything happen, and while it gets dark at times, it's still very lighthearted throughout, and the humor is...well, I think it's best described as teen boy humor. And it has a tendency to objectify its female characters, as you'll quickly parse out from the one cover I used here or if you browse more covers.
But still, it holds a special place in my heart, I guess. And on my shelves.
The sequel series, Lanfeust des Etoiles, turns it into a space opera, and goes a little overboard with the pop culture reference at times, though overall still maintains that balance of serious/at times dark story and lighthearted comedy.
After that the franchise is utter chaos to me, and I've lost track. I know there was another sequel series, which I dropped partway through, and a spinoff that retold part of the original series from the PoV of the main love interest (in the period of time she spent away from the main group). There was a comedy spin-off about the troll species unique to this world, a prequel series, probably more I don't even know exist.
Les Démons d'Alexia
Something I can probably be a little less ashamed of including here.
Some backstory here. The Editions Dupuis are a giant of the Belgian bande dessinée industry, and for many, many years I was subscribed to their weekly magazine. That magazine was (mostly) made up of excerpts from the various books that the éditions were publishing at the time; those that were made of comic strips would usually get a couple pages of individual scripts, while the ongoing narratives got cut into episodes that were a few pages long (out of a typical 48 page count for a single BD album). Among those were this series.
For the first few volumes, I wasn't super into this series, probably because I was a little too young and smack dab in the middle of my "trying to be one of the boys" phase. But around book 3 I got really invested, to the point where I own the second half of the series because I had canceled by subscription by then but still wanted to know more.
Alexia is an exorcist with unusual talents, but little control, who's introduced to a group that specializes in researching paranormal phenomena, solving cases that involve the paranormal, that kinda stuff.
As a result of the premise, the series has a pretty slow start since it has to build up mystery around the source of Alexia's powers, but once it gets going and we get to what is essentially the series' main conflict, it gets really interesting.
Plus, witches. I'm a simple gay who likes strong protagonists and witches.
Murena
There was a point where my mtyhology nerdery led me to look for more stuff about the historical cultures that created them, and so I'd be super into stuff set in ancient Rome (I'd say "or Greece or Egypt" but let's face it, it was almost always Rome).
Murena is a series set just before the start of Emperor Nero's rule. You know, the one who was emperor when Rome burned, and according to urban legend either caused the fire or played the fiddle while it did (note: "fiddle" is a very English saying, it's usually the lyre in other languages). He probably didn't, it probably was propaganda, but he was a) a Roman Emperor, none of whom were particularly stellar guys and b) mean to Christians, who eventually got to rewrite history. So he's got a bad rep.
The series goes for a very historical take on events, albeit fictionalized (the protagonist and main PoV, the titular Lucius Murena, is himself fictional) and attempts to humanize the people involved in those events. Each book also includes some of the sources used to justify how events and characters are depicted, which is a nice touch.
It's also divided in subseries called "cycles" (books 1-4, 5-8 and the ongoing one starts at 9). I stopped after 9, though I think it's mostly a case of not going to bookstores often anymore. Plus it took four years between 9 and 10, and again between 10 and 11. But the first eight books made for a pretty solid story that honestly felt somewhat concluded as is, so it's a good place to start.
#pierre bottero#la quête d'ewilan#erik l'homme#le livre des étoiles#phaenomen#pierre grimbert#le secret de ji#jean louis fetjaine#la trilogie des elfes#bernard werber#l'arbre des possibles#boris vian#l'écume des jours#le roi se meurt#eugène ionesco#albert camus#la peste#the plague#lanfeust#arleston#tarquin#Les démons d'alexia#ers#dugomier#murena#dufaux#delaby#ask#anonymous#st: other posts
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Holy Shit!
https://imgur.com/gallery/WKkli
https://imgur.com/gallery/j9OQylb
Beyond the proof that the guy who uploaded this is involved with Bad Robot that he provided at the end of his second post, these definitely seem legit because the first post was in 2018, before The Rise of Skywalker came out, yet the treatment contains some blatant concepts that ended up finding there way into that movie that I have a hard time believing anyone but J.J himself could have come up with (plus, the rest of the plot is very J.J-like, as I’ll get into.)
So these definitely seem to be the discarded Episode VIII and IX treatments. Thoughts?
- Luke’s reasons for coming to Ahch-To definitely seem more in line with TFA than in TLJ, seeing as if he wanted to just “go there to die” he wouldn’t have left a freaking map to the place behind, plus it seemed off that someone disillusioned with the Jedi ways would go to the site of the first Jedi Temple to begin with. His portrayal also matches what we saw at the end of TFA (seeming to be in mourning for Han), and fits the “kind but sad” description from the script. And far from cutting himself off from the Force, Luke has been influencing it from afar as part of his grand plan, explaining Rey’s vision when she touched his lightsaber.
- Luke has a wife and kids! Sadly for EU fans, the wife is not Mara Jade.
- It was Luke’s influence via the Force that explained the things Rey could do that fans deemed her a Mary Sue for, plus some other things that weren’t so routinely noted such as the remarkable coincidence that she and Finn just happened to run into Han and Chewie right after obtaining the Millennium Falcon. Not sure how well this would have gone down...
- Saccrum, Snoke’s home planet, is literally Exogol. Secret ancient Sith planet that is nigh impenetrable to all non-Sith, site of the final battle and (as we’ll soon learn) where Snoke is repeatedly cloned and where Palpatine is resurrected by Sith alchemists...it’s fucking Exogol.
- I recall concept art for Kylo Ren’s partly metallic face floating around.
- Dathan Naut seems cool, but she never really amounts to much.
- So it seems J.J Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan’s vision for the Sequel Trilogy always seemed to boil down to “All the generations of Jedi vs. all the generations of Sith reaching a climactic battle, with Skywalker vs. Palpatine at the heart of it, and the Palpatine who becomes a Skywalker as the key to victory.” That idea was always where they were going.
- Jedi/Sith Holocrons were always gonna be a thing, which is why Rebels worked them in.
- Live-action Ahsoka was also always an objective, it seems, and I bet the way they wrote her out in Rebels’ “Twilight of the Apprentice” was to potentially serve as a lead-in for her appearance in the Sequel Trilogy. But because that never came to pass, they brought her back toward the end of the series and set her on the new trajectory that she’s currently on. Honestly, I think that’s for the better, Ahsoka wouldn’t have really fit in the main film series.
- Not big on this Cfi-Xi character, she mainly seems to be here to “no homo” C-3PO. And her main role relating to the Sith Planet ended up played just fine by C-3PO in TROS anyway.
- BB-8 had the kind of fake-out death they ended up giving to Chewie.
- Wow, so Hux was supposed to die in Episode VIII and Phasma in Episode IX originally. Funny how that got totally flipped backward in the versions we actually ended up getting.
- OK, this “family time” that Rey’s getting is precious. It’s sad we didn’t get to see this.
- Hoo boy, “this is the bad ass Luke Skywalker we’ve been waiting for!” Really? Et tu, J.J and Kasdan? In light of the recent showing by Luke in The Mandalorian, I again question why this portrayal of the character is so widely beloved by fans when it has little to no basis in the OT.
- Rey vs. Kylo Ren in a raging ocean backdrop; here in Episode VIII rather than IX. Similarly, it’s a duel that Kylo clearly has in the bag, but a fluke in the Force allows Rey to survive, although I much prefer the fluke we got to the one this treatment proposes because....
- Goddamn it, J.J. You’re doing the time travel / time paradox shit again? Were Lost, Fringe and Star Trek not enough for you to explore that concept in? This is the biggest part of these treatment drafts that rubs me the wrong way, it’s just so needlessly convoluted and cliche.
- Also, yet another Mystery Box in Luke’s severed hand on Saccrum.
- No Jedi Leia in that flashback? Yeah, I can see why Kathleen Kennedy rejected this.
- Btw, Rian Johnson wasn’t the only one who was going to turn Luke into an asshole failure, it seems. Making this highly risky plan with Ben and not letting his parents know about it? Dick!
- Snoke is the one who destroys Luke’s academy, not Kylo Ren. And he does so as he is dying; another clue-in that there’s more to Snoke than it seems given that he’s still around.
- Lando would have been in Episode IX anyway, albeit still running Cloud City.
- The idea for this Episode IX is that the Skywalkers are a Jedi dynasty that long predated Anakin (Shmi being a descendant of it), and the Palpatines were their Sith enemies. Sheev Palpatine also would have died his first death generations ago and was being constantly resurrected via clone bodies made on Saccrum ever since, so the one that Anakin killed wasn’t the original; Palpatine can’t be stopped unless Saccrum is destroyed. While not as convoluted as the time paradox shit, I appreciate the simpler route they ended up taking.
- J.J and Kasdan always wanted Rey’s father to be a defective Palpatine clone.
- There was never a planned origin for Snoke in these treatments; wherever he came from the bottom line was that Palpatine brought him onto his side by promising to share his key to immortality (constant cloned bodies made on Sacccrum) with him. Again, this ended up being simplified into Snoke just being a whole-sale creation of Palpatine’s from the very beginning.
- Since these are treatments, the “love” part of the dynamic between Rey and Kylo Ren is highly underdeveloped and would likely have been fleshed out in screenwriting. The end result, with the deprogramming vision of Rey and Darth Vader, sounds pretty effective though, but I think I much prefer the Leia death / vision of Han version that we ended up with.
- LOL, the “droid way of making love”. I want to see this idea repurposed someday.
- That’s an interesting twist on Alderaan, although it really doesn’t amount to anything given that the planet Leia grew up on and called home still got destroyed by the Death Star.
- “Magic blood”, another J.J-ism. Again, I much prefer the simpler version TROS gave us.
- The climax’s structure is basically the same as in TROS, with Rey (and others) heading to the Sith planet from Ahch-To and then Leia’s Resistance forces going there from their base, with Rey and Ben facing Palpatine. The biggest differences is that we also have Luke vs. Snoke and Finn vs. Phasma battles going on, in addition to a Jedi vs. Sith ground battle.
- Yeah, I don’t really care for how Phasma’s death is handled: making her hideously scarred and treating her sympathetically don’t sit right with me. Rian Johnson did it better, IMO.
- No red stormtroopers here, but there are red Tie Fighters.
- Ben still gives his life to save Rey, albeit in a less literal manner.
- Palpatine still wants Rey to ascend to the Sith throne and rule by his side. Also: “he loves the smell of burning hair, it reminds him of home”!? Wow, that’s dark in what it’s implying...
- OK, so while not a Jedi, Leia is the Big Damn Hero in the end. That makes sense.
- WTF? Rey straight-up kills Palpatine with Sith lightning!? Yeah, that definitely wasn’t ever gong to fly with Lucasfilm, since it totally contradicts ROTJ’s message! It was inevitable that we’d end up with the more correct “Rey deflects Palpatine’s own Sith lightning back at him”.
- “Rey Skywalker” is the end point for the story here as well, but it ending on Tatooine is so much more emotional than ending it on Alderaan Prime, a place that only just now exists.
My final impression is that we probably could have had the best version of the Sequel Trilogy possible IF the right corrections were made when adapting these treatments into real screenplays, such as axing the more convoluted and pointlessly fanservice-y elements and making different choices for a few of the characters (Rey, Kylo Ren, C-3PO, Phasma, etc...also something more substantial for Poe since they clearly had no idea what to do with him). However, it was also an impossibility for it to ever happen due to many different factors, the biggest of which being Carrie Fisher’s passing in 2016. So as it stands, I am still satisfied with the version we got and am especially happy that J.J returned for TROS to provide the end of the Skywalker Saga with some of his original (mercifully fine-tuned and simplified) ideas.
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Characters Akimbo, and How to Create Them
A long time ago, I wrote an article called “OCs Akimbo and How to Make Them”. This was in the golden age of the internet when people still owned their own websites and we walked uphill, through the snow, both ways because it was good for our glutes. We didn’t need to be fed a constant stream of memes produced by bots in Malaysia because we were not yet living in a post-ironic, dystopian future where many are forced to work from home or not at all. The joy came to us naturally in those times, and a “meme” was a thing that saved bandwidth, so you couldn’t spam them – bad memes were a waste of money and a waste of good internets.
But that article has been lost, swallowed up like so many other web-ventures of old by the insatiable beast known on Walstreet as FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google; Netflix is in there because the acronym is rude otherwise). Also, people don’t write articles anymore. They’re too efficient and only run ads at the top and bottom of the page without interrupting what you’re trying to read, unless the author is one of the sub-human monsters that puts ads in the middle of his articles and makes you scroll past them just to get the rest of his insipid opinion. Rest assured, my insipid opinions come without ads in the middle. And likely without ads at the top or bottom, either, because maybe only a hundred people will read this and that’s worth about $0.01 today.
So characters! You want to make a character! Put your hands down, we’re not taking questions until later, so for now we assume you’re reading this because you want to make a character for something. I don’t really care what. Whether it’s for a roleplaying game, which has become more in vogue recently thanks to the show “Stranger Things”, I hear, or because you want to present yourself as a foxy cat-girl getting busy with a catty fox-man in your dirty, filthy Discord group.
If you’re designing a character for amorous roleplay, I assume the reality is that you are fundamentally playing yourself, with all the same excruciating hang ups and personal insecurities, except as an animal. But suppose you didn’t want to play as yourself? How to go about that. Well, there are several ways of thinking about it, but since I’m the author, I will use my tyranny of the mic to write as though my perspective is the only valid one.
You Choose Your Shirt, You Choose Your Life
We’ll start with the basic way to make any character and have it work. Figure out how they feel, and then play everything around coping with those feelings. No, seriously, it’s the simple banality of human existence and anything else you can think of is just going to be taking a back seat to whatever your personal psychosis is. That’s all you are – a wet sack of flesh with crippling mental problems and a strategy to overcome them.
To put this in terms you shouldn’t understand, think of how you choose to put on a shirt in the morning. Maybe you choose the shirt because it says something on it, or because you like a specific color, but how do you know you like that color? How do you know you like the band, or the terrible joke you should be embarrassed to wear in public? When asked these questions, many people will try to draw a string of logic. They’ll say that red is a dominant color, or they want to support their favorite musician, or they’re being post ironic and the point of their joke shirt is that it’s not supposed to make anyone happy.
But these are all falsehoods. Every time you put on a shirt, you don’t actually examine the whole wardrobe on an intellectual level and compare their relative advantages and disadvantages on factors as minute as color. People who do such a thing are considered to be obsessive compulsive, which is considered a disorder because they are barely able to make choices. The more time you spend trying to logically examine such a thing, the less able you are to do anything. The truth is, you pick your shirt on a whim because you feel like it, and you like the color red because it reminds you of succulent berries, or your monkey ancestor’s big red ass, or something. The insistence that red is a “power color” is just something people make up.
Many snap decisions come down to your lizard hind-brain and your feelings. People argue that their intellect is so huge, this is no longer true for them, but emotions actually control most of our decisions because emotions work quickly and easily. If you see something and it makes you scared, or angry, you react accordingly and right away. You don’t have ten minutes to evaluate the sight of a snake and determine based on its colors and head shape whether or not it’s venomous. If your kid climbs a tree, you don’t get to do a lot of math about their weight and the height they’re climbing at before you get nervous. Your instincts and your emotions are the same thing, and it’s how you make the majority of your choices.
There are some exceptions, when you have time, where you can try to evaluate facts and figures and try to let that shape how you feel about something, but in this day and age I’m sure everyone has had enough heated political arguments to realize that for many people, feelings can be difficult to change. In fact, much logic is only presented to specifically alter your feelings, and not necessarily to provide you with more comprehensible information. Ultimately, even things you spend a lot of time thinking about eventually get processed on an emotional level.
The Past and the Future are the Same Thing
So what does all this mean for making a character? Well, let’s divert into a little anecdote. I enjoy role-playing games as a hobby, and learned to play in a group that enjoyed a lot of theater and acting. We often shunned systems that were heavy on rules and templates, and focused mainly on having dynamic character personalities with clear motives, then playing those games around those characters. This made running games fairly easy for the guy in charge, because all he had to do was invent a colorful cast of faces for the group to interact with, and then see who they hated the most, then go from there.
But most groups are not especially fond of acting. Dungeons and Dragons is handily the most popular roleplaying system out there, and it’s no coincidence that it’s also one of the most restrictive in terms of describing your job within the group and telling you what you’ll learn as the game progresses. In D&D, the fighter fights, the wizard wizzes, the rogue steals everyone’s money and has to do everything in secret or otherwise the whole rest of the table declares a spot check every time he does literally anything.
And it was while running a game with a D&D sort of group that I first encountered a player who had written four pages of backstory for their character. Just to reiterate, I learned to play with a group that focused entirely on character motives and acting, and I had never been given a four page backstory before. Once we had enough experience, my old group could typically sum up a character backstory verbally, in a few sentences. It would be easy to remember and you wouldn’t write it down because all the important details were short.
There’s something to delve into regarding brevity, but to focus on this four page character – none of the backstory made sense or really conveyed how the character felt about anything. This character, as far as I can recall, obtained magic powers because he walked down an alleyway, was accosted by cultists, the cultists cast a spell, the cultists exploded, and then the character could cast magic. I think he may have also been some kind of zombie, but I don’t remember because it wasn’t an element that was integral, except, I believe, the player used it as justification to hide their magic powers. They were embarrassed about being undead, or something, and even though the rest of the group was doing magic, the character thought their magic would be linked to their lack of pulse. It wasn’t even useful magic – it was the ability to throw fireballs, so hiding it was the best possible way to make the character non-functional.
The rest of the writing was irrelevant. There was information about family history, past work, blood type – whatever – I barely remember it because it was frosting with no cake. The player never wrote a character. They wrote an expository list of events that were all linked to one person without any sort of personality. That is, the player never really understood how this character felt, or how that shaped their life, and it’s clear they hoped that by writing enough things, eventually a character might take shape. As though you might learn a lot about a man by listing what kinds of weeds were growing in his back yard, or by listing the cities he’s lived in, or by listing a chronological sequence of events the person was present during.
This player, and frankly nobody, should ever require a four page back-story for a character. When it comes to writing a character, the core element of who they are, the past, present, and future are all the same. If this person has anger problems, they probably have a pattern of lashing out, and solving their life’s problems by being too frustrating to deal with. If they’re timid, they probably have a history of conflict avoidance. If they’re smooth talkers, they think they can talk their way through everything. Whatever emotional way people engage with the world around them, they’re likely to behave like that through their past, present, and future. You can know who someone is in the present and know who they’ll be in the future without examining an in-depth historical report of their past. Indeed, how else could we interact with other humans if this weren’t the truth?
People get confused easily, and will quickly insist that the backstory makes the character because they see on TV, constantly, stories about the past. A show will say, “this man is like this because of something that happened to him years ago”. But what you have to realize is that when TV does it, and when it does it well, it’s not the past that defines the character. The past events being described are conflict. Say it with me: CONFLICT. Not character.
Conflicting Over Conflict
Conflict is what a character reacts to, and it drives the story forward. So let’s consider, if you were to show a character’s past, how is that story structured. Well first you begin with a character, right? Because without the character, how do you know how this person will react to conflicts? You don’t. So the character is designed before the backstory. So what is this story of the past? It’s a story about some conflict and how the character interacted with it.
If your character in the present is a knife-wielding maniac, then one plausible story about their past would be when they were confronted by a problem that was solved by stabbing the problem. What this shows you is that the character moved towards this behavior of violence, and it worked for them so they kept doing it. Over time, they came to believe that most problems could be resolved by stabbing things, and that’s just how they live now, but it still takes a specific kind of person to try stabbing something the first time.
If you imagine a violent person, you may also imagine they tried conflict avoidance and it didn’t work. Perhaps they tried being confident, and they were quickly ground down. Finally they resorted to violence and achieved success, but that may have been after a long progression of abuse, which is why they also don’t form personal attachments or trust anyone. These looks at the past can add a lot of flesh and explanation to why your character feels certain ways about certain things – why they feel their life’s coping strategies are the best ones. That’s why when you see them, a good story of the past gives the viewer the feeling that they’ve developed a better sense of who the character is.
Whether the past defines the character or the character defines their past is a chicken and the egg question, and something you as a writer would have to decide. There’s no one answer and there are good ways to go about both approaches, so long as you know who your character is before you start doing any writing at all. Because whatever you write, the event you describe will merely be a conflict, a moment, and how the character reacts to that conflict tells a viewer who that character is.
In and Out of Character
Speaking of role-playing games: you’ll find the overwhelming majority of players are on about the same level as those guys pretending to be cat-girls in their filthy, unspeakable Discord group. That is, most people just play themselves, but with a gimmick. They play themselves, but with a stutter, or they’re french, or a they’re a cat-girl, or a they’re a samurai, or they’re a robot; they can be anything, but not anyone.
This gets a bit more into acting, which actually does play in to every work of fiction. To act properly, you need to be able to put yourself comfortably in the mind-space of your character and behave as though you only know what your character knows. The generations-old story of the rogue that steals from the party is a great example of the challenge at work here.
Imagine you’re facing a lot of life-and-death situations back to back with somebody, but this person is also slippery and difficult to trust. They never let you down openly, but they’re constantly wrangling you into bad contracts that benefit them, and you think they might be embezzling the group’s funds. In terms of writing a story, this is a good opportunity for conflict. A good role-playing group can handle this on the fly, while a typical role-playing group absolutely can’t.
A typical role-playing group always has the same response. Whenever the rogue tries to skim a little money off the top, the whole table rolls “spot checks” to catch the thief in the action, and then prevent him from stealing there in the moment. This is what the people playing the game regard as an enforcement action to prevent stealing – as long as the whole table rolls, someone is usually going to roll high enough to catch the rogue before he gets away with it. But how does every character in the game know to be hyper vigilant all of the sudden? Well, they don’t, and just rolling dice at people isn’t how we solve conflicts like this in the real world.
A good group will actually start to develop suspicions they’re being stolen from only after it happens, as they do their accounting and realize they’re short some cash. They may suspect the rogue, but they rely on him to find and disarm traps, and he’s somewhat irreplaceable. So the conflict now becomes trying to solve that problem without simply executing the rogue on a mere suspicion. The other players have to go out of their way to try set some bait or catch the rogue in the act, and if they prove what he’s done, then there can be a punishment. If the rogue keeps getting away with it, perhaps the party starts establishing rules to try to cull the potential for stealing, and now the rogue has to work around these new restrictions.
The second group is more nuanced and more believable. They’re facing a conflict and trying to figure out a way around it, instead of just using game mechanics to stop it entirely. And while this may seem like it begins and ends with roleplaying groups, the logic here works for most every other medium. You can never just have characters behaving as though they know things they aren’t supposed to know, and the way your characters react should follow the fundamentals of how they feel. Characters react to what they know, not what the audience knows.
Another example that would follow closer to other fiction is the following: quite recently I played a super hero game as a “reformed villain”, which basically meant I was playing a villain. The main hero died, leaving a vacuum in leadership, and at the same time a new, young hero joined the group. My villain character quickly swept in and began mentoring this fresh, young recruit, introducing him to as many morally gray aspects of the job as possible. Using deception to get closer to villains, fighting people who were too insane to know better, sometimes even doing lasting harm to ordinary people in the heat of the moment.
As the game went on, the group demonstrated that being a super hero was a very fine line that was difficult to apply idealism to, but my villain never quite killed anybody. He maimed people. He once dressed as a pizza delivery guy and threw a pizza so hard it knocked somebody unconscious. He sold hotdogs on the street without a permit. All while mentoring this kid and showing him the advantages of tap-dancing on that fine line.
Until the villain did kill somebody. A super scientists who was building deadly “Iron Man” style suits for a gang of terrorists used an ejection seat to try to escape the scene, and the villain threw his shoe. The shoe was thrown so hard, it caused the scientist’s head to burst like it’d been hit by a cannon ball. It all happened in the blink of an eye, against the wind, as the ejection seat rocketed off at dizzying speeds, and the villain claimed the murder was not intentional, even though it was clear at the table that I, the player, the author, had killed the scientist on purpose. It’s something I’d done as a snap decision in reality, because I thought the scientists was dangerous and it seemed in character to make that choice.
What ensued was much less in character. The young ward my villain had been mentoring turned on him instantly and carried on, from that point forward, as though the villain had intentionally killed an innocent man. He used the justification that my villain was very accurate and “never missed”, even though my villain missed his aim plenty of times throughout the adventure. He did not respond to any argument about the potential threat of the scientist, or about the very real possibility of an accident in the heat of the moment.
The player knew it was on purpose. The player felt his naive young character was a fundamentally good person. Ergo, he and the villain were now at mortal odds and could never reconcile. It’s a delicate situation and something that some actual writers could fall into, where the audience is shown the intent behind an ambiguous situation, and somehow the characters come to the same conclusion the audience does even though the characters don’t have the same information.
In television, this is sometimes due to run time limitations. Perhaps the character was supposed to gather more evidence before coming to the conclusion the audience was given, but the evidence gathering was cut to save time. But in a book, or a roleplaying game, there’s really no excuse. Everything should be handled based on what the character knows, and not on what the audience – or in this case the player – knows. At least if you’re a purist. I will be honest and admit there have been some popular works of fiction where characters side with the audience in spite of, in narrative, not even having the same moral system as the audience, let alone their knowledge of the plot.
What you actually should have between the villain and the ward, is a major point of conflict. Not in that the ward knows the villain killed someone on purpose and has an issue with it, but that he doesn’t know if the villain intentionally killed someone. That, in and of itself, is a very real moment of awakening to anyone with idealistic opinions on a job that entails violence and apprehension. It requires soul-searching, and even coming to the conclusion that the villain did kill someone and that it was wrong revolves around a complex set of emotional and moral beliefs.
Such a moment is pivotal to a character. It puts them at their lowest point, where they question all they know and all they ever wanted. Where they doubt everything. And how they come out of that situation? That’s the character’s arc. Denying them of that arc, and simply using the audience’s knowledge to make a fast choice obliterates the character’s development and robs them of an opportunity to tell a story within themselves and to their audience. Using the audience’s knowledge is quick, and keeps you on the same page as the viewers, but it is dirty and tells a less interesting tale.
And Your Point Is…?
So like I mentioned at the start, none of this is actually universal. Some stories are more event-driven, and expository writing can be fascinating as well. You really could write a tale about a sequence of events so long as the events were interesting and kept the audience reading, so a strong character isn’t even always necessary. But for what it’s worth, I think knowing how to make a character in such simple terms makes the whole process of writing much easier. If you know your character, you know how they’ll respond to conflicts, so every story is as easy as thinking up a conflict.
But hey, it’s also true that in some settings, trying to follow the rules of a good character or a good story may hurt you. A lot of role-playing groups will shun that type of thing because they’d rather roll dice at the rogue, and they think the person playing the rogue is in the wrong for trying to skim money from the party, because these people aren’t playing characters, they’re playing a game. They don’t care about an opportunity to have a character conflict with the rogue, they want their money, damnit. The fact they have nothing to spend it on in 5th edition D&D is another matter entirely.
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The Clashing Storm of Shields - Fighting in the Shield Wall (Part 1: Background)
I think I promised @warsofasoiaf a write up on shield wall combat nearly two years ago now but, after several different versions that each took a slightly different approach, I’ve finally nailed down something that works for me.
As my small introduction has become a rather large post, I’ve decided to split the subject into two sections: a section on the background (introduction, recruitment and organisation, equipment) and a section on how the battle actually took place. I’m posting the first section now, and will post the second in a couple of weeks.
Introduction
I.P. Stephenson once wrote that “the single most defining ideological event in Anglo-Saxon warfare came at Marathon in 490 B.C.”. This comment, and all the assumptions that go with it, highlights the single biggest problem people have in understanding combat in the Early Middle Ages. The uncritical application of Classical scholarship to the medieval world, and a failure to up with the current academic consensus, has significantly distorted how many historians think about shield wall combat.
For example, Gareth William suggests in Weapons of the Viking Warrior that the sax was especially useful in a close order, rim-to-boss formation and compares it to the gladius:
Roman legionaries fighting at close quarters were armed not with a long sword, but with a gladius, or short-sword, which was primarily a thrusting weapon, requiring a minimum of space between the individual soldiers in a line.
The problem with this assumption, leaving aside the fact that weapon sized saxes were rare to the point of non-existence in 9th-11th century Scandinavia and that gladius length saxes weren’t particularly common in Anglo-Saxon England either1, is that the famous Roman short sword wasn’t used for thrusting in a close order formation. Instead, it was used for both cutting and thrusting in open order, with each man taking up 4.5-6 feet of space2. It’s not until open order fighting was abandoned completely and the long spatha was universally adopted by the infantry that we hear of the thrust being the preferred method of combat by the Romans3. An assumption, almost certainly based on scholarship from before 2000, has been made about how the Romans fought and how it might be applied to Anglo-Saxon warfare, but no examination of the different context or more recent scholarship has been performed, leading to the wrong conclusion.
(The Bayeux Tapestry)
Similarly, it’s common in historical fiction set in the Early Middle Ages to feature battles that rely very heavily on Victor Davis Hanson’s The Western Way of War4. For example:
We in the front rank had time to thrust once, then we crouched behind our shields and simply shoved at the enemy line while the men in our second rank fought across our heads. The ring of sword blades and clatter of shield-bosses and clashing of spear-shafts was deafening, but remarkably few men died for it is hard to kill in the crush as two locked shield-walls grind against each other. Instead it you cannot pull it back, there is hardly room to draw a sword, and all the time the enemy’s second rank are raining sword, axe and spear blows on helmets and shield-edges. The worst injuries are caused by men thrusting blades beneath the shields and gradually a barrier of crippled men builds at the front to make the slaughter even more difficult. Only when one side pulls back can the other then kill the crippled enemies stranded at the battle’s tide line.
Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King
Other works, such as Giles Kristian’s Blood Eye and Edward Rutherfurd’s The Princes of Ireland, follow the same pattern of a physical collision between the two formations and a shoving match where weapons are almost secondary. This is a core concept of the traditional model of hoplite combat - the literal othismos (”push”) - that has been likened to a rugby scrum since the early 20th century. Ironically enough, VDH is a great pains to emphasize the unique nature of the Greek phalanx due to the hoplite shield, so even without the doubts of A.D. Fraser, Peter Krentz and all the other “Heretics” it would be questionable to apply this method of warfare to the Early Middle Ages5.
When you examine the differences between the two periods, for example the early Anglo-Saxon shields are often no more than 40cm in diameter and featuring spiked or “sugar loaf” bosses6, it becomes clear that the use of Greek warfare to represent 5th and 6th century warfare is incorrect. Similarly, the difference in construction between the aspis and Scandinavian shields of the 9th and 10th centuries, the aspis having thickly reinforced rims while the Scandinavian shields either taper towards the edges or remain very thin (<10mm), should offer a similar caution7.
In spite of the litany of criticisms I’ve just provided, it’s still necessary to refer back to our understanding of Greek and Roman warfare when examining combat in the Early Middle Ages, for two main reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, the sources are much more detailed about how fighting was carried out and were very often written by men who had themselves fought. While authors of the Early Middle Ages were not necessarily unfamiliar with warfare, they were remarkably uninterested in recording much in the way of details and there’s frequently little useful information to be extracted from accounts of battles.
Secondly, a far larger body of work exists on the how of Ancient hand-to-hand combat. While re-enactors of the medieval period are certainly numerous, perhaps even the most numerous of the pre-modern re-enactor, the sheer output of Greek and Roman re-enactors and the scholars who mine them for insights dwarfs that of medieval re-enactors and, on the whole, is more likely to be up to date with the scholarship of the field in general.
My goal here is to make the best possible use of sources on both Ancient and Medieval warfare in order to present a picture that is as close to a plausible reconstruction as I can manage. I don’t mean for this to be authoritative, and my views do in some cases differ from those of some re-enactors or academics, but I do hope you find this post a useful resource in your writing.
(This? This is what not to do.)
Trees of the Spear-Assembly: Who Were the Warriors?
One of the most important things in understanding combat in the Early Middle Ages is knowing who was doing the fighting and why, since this has a big impact on the way in which they fight, and with how much enthusiasm. In particular, the question of whether they were just poor farmers levied en masse or wealthier members of society who had both military obligations and the culture of carrying them out is an important one, as quite often this is used to demonstrate the difference between two sides.
The answer to the question is that, by and large, men who fought were freemen of some standing, if not always considerable landowners, and wealthy by the standards of their people. I emphasize the concept of relative wealth for good reason, and I’ll get into that as we have a look at the basic structure of the “armies” of the period.
Generally speaking, armies of the Early Middle Ages, across almost all of Europe, consisted of two elements: the Household (hirð, hird, comitatus, etc) and the Levy (fyrd, lið, exercitus, etc). I use “levy” here as a shorthand for any force composed of freemen who are not regularly attached to the household of a major landholder, as they were not usually assembled into a single coherent force with 100% unified command, but I do want to note that there would be a significant difference in the unity of an army made up of regional levies and one made up of lið (individual warbands)8.
The status of those serving in the household of a powerful landholder could vary significantly, from slaves to the sons of major landholders (although militarised slaves, it must be admitted, were rare outside of the Visigothic realm), and the more powerful the landowner the more likely the men of his household would be themselves descended from someone of considerable status. A significant portion could still be made up of poorer freemen who were sons of older warriors or whose family had some close connection to the major landowner.
For someone who maintained a large household, it was important that they present an image of being a wealthy as possible, and the best way to do this was to outfit the men of their household with every piece of military equipment that displayed status. So, whether he was descended from slaves or was the son of a family who owned a thousand acres, once a man had sworn their oath of loyalty to their new patron, they could be expect to be equipped with all the trappings of a warrior. This might only be symbolic in poorer regions (a fancier sword, a specific type of ornament, etc), especially if the landowner already had a number of armoured retainers, but it bound the different levels of freemen together into a single group.
Generally this oath swearing would occur after a youth had spent several years in the household of their future patron, where they would learn all the necessary skills of a warrior, such as riding, hunting, shooting a bow, using a sword and fighting with spear and shield. These youths probably participated in battles as auxiliaries with bows and javelins and only joined the ranks of the shield wall when they were considered full warriors, but we have only have very limited information on this point.
The status of men of the levy or warband varied to a much smaller degree. They were, in almost all cases, free and relatively wealthy by the standards of their region, although you do see a bit more of a variation in warbands, which might have members from a half dozen regions and many more backgrounds. In comparison, any army raised in defence of a region or raised from a region is going to consist entirely of free men and the majority of these will be fairly wealthy.
Simply put, even basic military equipment was sufficiently expensive that farmers who merely had enough land to sustain their family9 weren’t going to be able to afford much more than an axe, shield and spear or, depending on their region, a bow and 12-24 arrows. This is consistent across the Carolingian, Lombard and Scandinavian world during the 8th-11th centuries and, given the mostly aristocratic nature of warfare in Anglo-Saxon England, was likely true there as well10.
Basic military equipment, however, was not what rulers looked for when summoning forces for external wars or internal defence. We know from the capitularies of Charlemagne that only a man with four estates was required to arm and equip himself for service and that, with one exception, only men with one estate or more were required to pitch in to help equip one of their number for service11. Moreover, these estates weren’t even all the land the freeman held, just the lands he held which had unfree tenants, so that a “poor” freeman who merely had his own personal land was excluded from military service12.
(The average Anglo-Saxon fighting man)
Much the same situation appears in mid-8th century Lombardy, where king Aistulf demanded that those who had 7 or more properties worked by unfree tenants should perform service with a horse and full equipment, while those with less than this, but who own more than 25 acres (40 iugera) of their own, were required to perform an unarmoured cavalry service. 25 acres is about half the land later Anglo-Norman evidence suggests is the minimum for unarmoured cavalry service, so possibly this was an attempt on Aistulf’s part to enfranchise the lesser freemen and get them to support his usurpation of the crown at the political assembly13. Note, however, that the minimum level for cavalry service is nearly double what a peasant family would need to subsist off and implies a man of moderate wealth in and of itself14.
England is somewhat different, as we lack any specific requirements for those being summoned to military service, but from at least 806 we can surmise that 1 man from every 5 hides of land was required for the army. By this point a “hide” wasn’t a measure of area but of value, approximately £1, in a time when 1d. was the wage of a skilled labourer15.
The implications of this aren’t immediately obvious, but when you consider that Wessex had a population of perhaps 450 000 people, across an area of 27 000 taxable hides, only 5400 men (1 man from every 20 families) were actually required for military service16. Many of these, perhaps even most, would have belonged in the retinues of major landholders as either part of their household or as landed warriors owing service to the landholder in exchange for their land. In the same vein, the one man from every hide who was required to maintain bridges and fortifications, as well as defend the burhs (not serve in the field!), was drawn on the basis of something like 1 man for every 4 families. These are heavy responsibilities, but still far from men with sickles and pitchforks making up the fyrd.
There are some exceptions, or else cases where the evidence is thin enough that it’s difficult to say one way or the other, and these typically occur in areas that a less densely populated and less wealthy. The kingdom of Dal Riada in the seventh century, for instance, raised about 3 men from every 2 households for naval duties, although it might also have called out fewer warriors from the general population of the most powerful clan for land warfare17.
(A replica of the Gokstad ship)
Scandinavia is somewhat trickier, since a lot of the sources are late and from a period where central authority existed. We know from archaeological evidence that, in Norway, large scale inland recruitment of men for naval expeditions had been occurring since the Migration Era, as the number of boathouses exceeds the best estimates of local populations18. These were initially clustered around important political and economic centers, but spread out more evenly across Norway during the middle ages as a central political authority arose. This system is likely at least one part of the origin for the leidang system of levying ships, which seems to have properly formed in Norway and Denmark during the late 10th or early 11th century as a result of royal power becoming strong enough to call out local levies across the whole kingdom19.
It seems likely, based on later law codes and other contemporary societies, that Scandinavian raiders during the 8th and 9th centuries were mostly the hird of a wealthy landowner (or their son), supplemented with sons of better off farmers from nearby holdings. Ships were comparatively small at this point, just 26-40 oars (approximately 30-44 men)20, and most had 24-32 oars per ship. This corresponds fairly well with what a prominent landholder might be able to raise from his own household, with additional crews coming from the sons of nearby farmers, although whether this was voluntary, coerced or some combination of the two is impossible to say21.
However, these farmers’ sons, while unlikely to wear mail in the majority of cases, should not be thought of as poor. The vast majority of farmers in 8th-10th century Scandinavia would have had one or two slaves and sufficient land to not only keep their slaves fed and employed, but also to potentially raise more children than later generations22. These farmers’ sons might have been “poor” by the standards of the men they faced in richer areas of the world, but they were rather well off by the standards of their society.
Later, after the end of the 10th century, the leidang was largely controlled by the king of the Scandinavian country and, particularly in the populous and relatively wealthy Denmark, poorer farmers were increasingly sidelined from any obligation to provide military service. Ships also rose in size from the end of the 9th/start of the 10th century, regularly reaching 60 oars for vessels belonging to kings or powerful lords, and even the “average” size seems to have gone from 24-32 oars to 40-50 oars23.
Slaughter Reeds and Flesh Bark: Arms and Armour of the Warrior
The equipment of the warrior consisted of, at its most basic level, a spear and a shield. For those who belonged to a poorer region, a single handed wood axe might serve as a sidearm, or perhaps even just a dagger, while in wealthier regions the sidearm would generally be a sword or a specialised fighting axe24. In an interesting twist, both the poorest and the wealthiest members of society were almost equally likely to use a bow, although I expect that the poorer men mostly used hunting bows, while the professional fighting men used heavier warbows25.
Spearheads, at least from the 7th-11th centuries, were relatively long (blades of >25cm) and heavy (>200g), but most were well tapered for penetrating armour. Some, especially the longest examples, weighed around a pound, but were probably still considered one handed weapons26. Others, however, weighed in excess of two pounds and must have been two handed weapons, possibly the “hewing spear” mentioned in some 13th century sagas27. Javelins, too, appear to have tended to feature long, narrow blades that would have made them a short range weapon, while also providing considerable penetration within their ~40 meter range.
Swords, for their part, were not quite the heavy hacking implement once attributed to them, but also aren’t quite as well balanced as later medieval swords would be. Early swords, before the 9th century, tended to be balanced about halfway down the blade, which might make for a more powerful cut, but didn’t do much for rapid recovery or shifting the blade between covers. However, from the mid-9th century, the balance shifted back towards the hilt, which made them much faster and more maneuverable28. This may indicate a shift towards a looser form of combat, where sword play was more common, or it might indicate nothing more than a stylistic choice. After all, the Celts of the 2nd-1st century BC preferred long, heavy, poorly balanced swords for fighting in spite of relying on the usual Mediterranean “open” style of combat29.
(The Ballinderry Bow)
Warbows, with a couple of exceptions, appear to have been short but powerful. Starting with the Illerup Adal bows, which most likely only had a draw length of 26-27″, we see a repeated pattern when very powerful bows are also much shorter than we expect them to be. In particular, the heavier of the two bows from Illerup Adal is very similar to the Wassenaar Bow, a 9th-10th century bow. A replica of the latter drew 106lbs @ 26″, making it quite a powerful bow, and similar bows have been found at Nydam, Leeuwarden-Heechterp and Aaslum. Only the Ballinderry and Hedeby bows break this trend, with both capable of being drawn to 28″-30″. In all cases, draw weights varied between 80lbs and 150lbs, although 80-100lbs is by far the most common30. The consequence of this is that the power of the bows is not going to be as high as later medieval bows, which were able to be drawn to 30″ and, as the arrows were also relatively light, suggests an energy of 40-60j under most circumstances. This is enough to penetrate mail at close range if using a bodkin arrowhead, but at longer ranges mail would have offered quite excellent protection.
When it comes to shields, there was evidently quite a bit of variation. Early Anglo-Saxon and Merovingian shields were quite small and light, about 40-50cm in diameter31, but later shields were generally 80-90cm in diameter. In particular, we have good evidence of viking shields generally fitting this description, although it’s less clear whether or not later Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon shields retained this diameter or reduced to 50-70cm in diameter (see f.n. 7). In all cases, however, the shield was fairly thin at the center, less than 10mm, and could be as low as 4mm thick at the edge. While thin leather or rawhide could be applied to the front and back of the shield to reinforce it, it’s equally possible that only linen was used to reinforce the shield, or even that the shields were without any reinforcement32.
Recent tests by Rolf F. Warming have shown that this style of shield is rapidly damaged by heavy attacks if used in a passive manner (as in a static shield wall) and that the shield is best used to aggressively defend yourself33. While the test was not entirely accurate to combat in a shield wall (more on this in the second part), it does highlight the relative fragility of early medieval shields compared to other, more heavily constructed shields like the Roman scutum in the Republican and early Empire or the Greek aspis. As I’ve said before, this means we have to rethink how early medieval warfare worked.
Finally, we come to the topic of armour. The dominant form of armour was the mail hauberk - usually resembling a T-shirt in form - and other forms of metal armour were far less common. Guy Halsall has suggested that poorer Merovingian and Carolingian warriors might have used lamellar armour34, and there is some evidence from cemeteries and artwork that Merovingian and Lombard warriors wore lamellar armour in the 6th and 7th centuries, but there’s little evidence to support lamellar beyond this. While it does crop up in Scandinavia twice during the 10th/11th centuries, it was almost certainly an uncommon armour that was used either by Khazar mercenaries or by prominent men who were using it as a status symbol35. Scale armour is right out, Timothy Dawson’s arguments aside, as there is no good evidence of it.
(Helmet from Valsgarde 8)
Helmets evolved throughout the Early Middle Ages, ultimately deriving from late Roman helmets that featured cheek flaps and aventails. During the 6th and 7th centuries, especially in Anglo-Saxon England and Scandinavia, masks were attached to the helmets, either for the whole face or just the eyes. The masks did not long survive the 7th century in Anglo-Saxon England, but the Gjermundbu helmet may suggest it lasted in Scandinavia through to the 10th century. Merovingian helmets of the 6th-8th century tend to be more conical and keep the cheek flaps, but do not have any mask36. Carolingian helmets of the 9th century appear to have been a unique style, more rounded but also coming down further towards the cheeks, and it’s hard to say if this eventually developed in the conical helmet of the late 10th/early 11th century or if it was just a dead end37. Regardless, by the 11th century the conical helmet was the most common form of helmet in England as well as the Continent.
And now for the controversial stuff: non-metallic armour. In short, I don’t think that textile armour was very common during the Early Middle Ages, nor do I think that hardened leather was very common either. The evidence from the High Middle Ages suggests that, unless someone who couldn’t afford to own mail was legally required to own textile armour, they generally didn’t, and we have plenty of quite reliable depictions of infantry serving without any form of body armour38. The shields in use were as much armour as most unarmoured men needed - since, as you’ll recall from the previous section, they rarely fought - and they covered a lot of the body. So far as I’m concerned, there wasn’t a need for it, and plenty of societies through history have fought in close combat without more armour than their shield.
Summing Up
This has been a very basic overview of the background to warfare in the Early Middle Ages, and I know I haven’t covered everything. Hopefully, however, I’ve provided enough background for people to follow along when I dig down into the actual experience of battle in my next post. I’ll cover the basics of scouting, choosing a site to give battle, the religious side of things and then, at long last, the grim face of battle for those standing in the shieldwall.
If you’d like to read more about society and warfare in the Early Middle Ages, then I’d recommend Guy Halsall’s Warfare and Society in the Barbarian Westand Philip Line's The Vikings and their Enemies: Warfare in Northern Europe, 750-1100, which together cover most of Western and Northern Europe from 400 AD to 1100 AD. While I have some disagreements with both authors, their works have shaped my thoughts over the years since I first acquired them. For the Vikings specifically, Kim Hjardar and Vegard Vike's Vikings at War is excellent, as much for the coverage of campaigns across the world as for the information on weapons and warfare.
Until next time!
- Hergrim
Notes
1 For the rarity of the sax in the viking world, see Vikings at War, by Kim Hjardar and Vegard Vike. For the Anglo-Saxon sax, see the list of finds here. Just 5 out of 33 (15%) had blades 44cm or more and, if you remove those longer than the Pompeii style of gladius (which is the point where some think the Romans changed to purely thrusting style), just two fit the bill.
2 Michael J. Taylor’s “Visual Evidence for Roman Infantry Tactics” is by far the best recent examination of Roman fighting styles, but Polybius has been translated in English for ages. See, however, M.C. Bishop, The Gladius, for an argument that the Romans changed to close order and preferred to rely on thrusting by the end of the 1st century AD.
3 See J. C. Coulston and M.C. Bishop, Roman Military Equipment: From the Punic Wars to the Fall of Rome, for the infantry adoption of the gladius. Any general history of the Roman military will cover the transition from open order to close order during the 3rd century AD.
4 Those of you with a copy of Victor Davis Hanson's The Western Way of War need to perform a quick exorcism. You must burn the book at midnight during the full moon and then divide the ashes into four separate containers, one of gold, one of silver, one of bronze and one of iron. You should then bury ashes from the iron container at a crossroads, scatter the ashes in the bronze container to the wind in four directions, pour the ashes from the silver container into a fast flowing river, and finally feed the ashes from the gold container to a cat, a bat and a rat.
5 A.D. Fraser “The Myth of the Phalanx-Scrimmage” is one of the earliest attacks on the idea of literal othismos. The debate reignited in the 1980s, with Peter Krentz’s “The Nature of Hoplite Battle” leading the charge of the heretics, and the conceptual othismos model is now the accepted version. Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities is probably the best revisionist work to start with. Matthew A. Sears, as attractive as he looks, should be avoided.
6 Early Anglo-Saxon Shields by Tania Dickinson and Heinrich Harke
7 Duncan B. Campbell’s Spartan Warrior 735–331 BC has the most easily accessible information on the best preserved aspis, which is ~10mm thick at the center and 12-18mm thick at the edge, but there’s also a good cross section in Nicholas Sekunda’s Greek Hoplite 480-323 BC. For Viking shields, see this page of archaeological examples by Peter Beatson. Note the similarity to oval shields from Dura Europos in thickness and tapering (Roman Shields by Hilary and John Travis). It’s also worth considering that Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon manuscript miniatures tend to show shields that rarely cover more than should to groin, implying a typical diameter of 50-70cm.
8 See Niels Lund’s “The armies of Swein Forkbeard and Cnut: "leding or lið?”” and Ben Raffield’s “Bands of brothers: a re‐appraisal of the Viking Great Army and its implications for the Scandinavian colonization of England” for an examination of how the lið was constructed, and see Richard Abels’ ‘Alfred the Great, the Micel Hæðn Here and the Viking Threat’, in T. Reuter (ed.), Alfred the Great. Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conference for a discussion on the nature of viking “armies”
9 10-15 acres depending on crop rotation and how close to subsistence level you want to peg this category
10 The Scandinavian Gulathing and Frostathing laws were only composed in the late 11th/early 12th century, but it has been argued that they were essentially a codification of earlier oral laws. At least with regards to equipment and service, I see no reason to doubt this.
11 Almost all of the relevant capitularies are translated in Hans Delbruck’s History of the Art of War: The Middle Ages, with the original Latin in an appendix.
12 Walter Goffart has made this incredibly clear in his recent series of loosely related articles: “Frankish Military Duty and the Fate of Roman Taxation,” Early Medieval Europe, 16/2 (2008), 166-90, “ The Recruitment of Freemen into the Carolingian Army, or, How Far May One Argue from Silence?” In J. France, K. DeVries, & C. Rogers (Eds.), Journal of Medieval Military History: Volume XVI (pp. 17-34) and ““Defensio patriae” as a Carolingian Military Obligation”. Although I think Goffart argues too strongly against the dominance and importance of aristocratic retinues in the Carolingian military - the great landowners had the most obligation, after all - he does do a brilliant job of highlighting both the universal requirement of service from eligible freemen and the fact that even a “poor” freeman being assessed for service was, in fact, far better off than most of society. This provides some extra context for the prevalence of swords in Merovingian burials, as note by Guy Halsall: it’s not that swords were cheap, it’s that the average Merovingian warrior was rich by the standards of his society.
13 For the text of the capitulary, see Delbruck. For Aistulf’s possible political motives, see Guy Halsall’s Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West. For Anglo-Norman minimum standards for unarmoured cavalry, see Mark Hagger’s Norman Rule in Normandy, 911–1144.
14 I think it’s worth addressing here the pessimistic low crop yields of older authors and their subsequent conclusion that 25-30 acres would be bare subsistence in the Early Middle Ages. As Jonathan Jarrett has proven (”Outgrowing the Dark Ages: agrarian productivity in Carolingian Europe re-evaluated” Agricultural History Review, Volume 67, Number 1, June 2019, pp. 1-28), these low yields are not supported by the evidence, and we should expect yields to be similar to High Medieval yields. His blog contains an early version of his thoughts on the matter.
15 For a recent exploration of the debate around the Anglo-Saxon military, see Ryan Lavelle’s Alfred’s Wars
16 See Richard Abel’s Alfred the Great for this although n.b. his reliance on old crop yield estimates
17 John Bannerman, Studies in the History of Dalriada. The suggestion that the Cenél nGabráin, being the most powerful clan, might have raised fewer men from the general populace for land combat is my own. They may simply have had the largest number of men in military households and, as such, not needed to rely as much on the general populace when on land. It may also be that calling up larger numbers of the free population for land service from the less powerful clans was in and of itself a method of dominance and control - the largest number of armed men left behind for defence/to suppress revolt would be those from the dominant clan.
18 “Boathouses and naval organization” by Bjørn Myhre in Military Aspects of Scandinavian Society in a European Perspective, AD 1-1300
19 That said, the political control of the Scandinavian kings over military levies should not be overstated - it could be very patchy, even in the 13th century. c.f. Philip Line, The Vikings and their Enemies
20 As suggested by Ole Crumlin-Pedersen in Archaeology and the Sea in Scandinavia and Britain, with the estimate of ~40 oars for the Sutton Hoo ship thrown in as a maximum size. Crew estimates are based on 11th century ships in Anglo-Saxon employ where, based on rates of pay and money raised to pay for the ships, there were only 3-4 men more than the rowers on each ship.
21 c.f. Egil’s Saga and the description of Arinbjorn’s preparation for raiding.
22 The Medieval Demographic System of the Nordic Countries by Ole Jørgen Benedictow. The speculation of larger family sizes is my own, based on other medieval evidence that wealthier families tend to have more children.
23 Ian Heath reproduces the leidang obligations of High Medieval Norway in Armies of the Dark Ages, although he incorrectly applies the two men per oar guideline that only became into being during the 13th and 14th centuries. Archaeological evidence only shows ships of 60+ oars or 26 oars, but from the lengthening of the largest ships and the 40-50 oar ships of the later leidang I feel it is appropriate to assume that the number of oars stayed the same from the 10th to the 14th century, it’s just that the number of rowers doubled as ships became heavier. This is similar to the evolution of the medieval galley.
24 I’ve covered saxes earlier in the notes. For axes, see Hjardar and Vike Vikings at War. Axeheads from western Scandinavia were often over a pound in weight, which is double the weight of specialized Slavic war axes and in the same weight range as the heads of broad axes. Even into the 13th century, these wood axes apparently kept turning up at weapons musters as sidearms.
25 Bows were considered an important aristocratic weapon in Merovingian, Carolingian and Scandinavian societies and, while not a prominent aristocratic weapon, it at least wasn’t shameful for a young English nobleman to use one in battle. The division between “hunting” and “war” bows can be seen in the Nydam Bog finds, where the most powerful bows tend to be relatively short (26-28″ draw length) and the longer bows (28-30″ draw length) tend to be fairly weak. Richard Wadge has demonstrated that civilian bows in medieval England were less powerful than military bows during the 13th century, and I’m applying this to the Nydam bows.
26 Ancient Weapons in Britain, by Logan Thompson
27 See “An Early Medieval Winged/Lugged Spearhead from the Dugo Selo Vicinity in the Light of New Knowledge about this Type of Pole-Mounted Weapon” by Željko Demo, and “An Early-Mediaeval winged spearhead from Fruška Gora” by Aleksandar Sajdl
28 Ancient Weapons in Britain, by Logan Thompson
29 The Celtic Sword, by Radomir Pleiner
30 Most dimensions are from Jürgen Junkmanns’ Pfeil und Bogen: Von der Altsteinzeit bis zum Mittelalter, although the information on the Illerup Adal comes to me from Stuart Gorman. Draw weights are only estimates based on replicas of some bows and a formula found in Adam Karpowicz’s “Ottoman bows – an assessment of draw weight, performance and tactical use” Antiquity, 81(313). Draw weights for yew bows in the real world can vary by as much as 40%, so these estimates are only general guidelines.
31 See f.n. 6 for early Anglo-Saxon shields and Halsall, Warfare and Society, for the early Merovingian shields
32 The shields from Dura Europos, constructed in the same way as Scandinavian shields of the 8th-10th century, feature either very thin leather (described as “parchment”), linen or else some kind of fiber set in a glue matrix. In contrast, two twelfth century kite shields from Pola. d, although constructed only with a single layer of planks like a Viking shield, had no covering at all. See Simon James, The arms and armour from Dura-Europos, Syria : weaponry recovered from the Roman garrison town and the Sassanid siegeworks during the excavations, 1922-37 and “Two Twelfth-Century Kite Shields from Szczecin, Poland” by Keith Dowen, Lech Marek, Sławomir Słowiński, Anna Uciechowska-Gawron & Elżbieta Myśkow, Arms & Armour, 16:2
33 Round Shields and Body Techniques: Experimental Archaeology with a Viking Age Round Shield Reconstruction
34 Halsall, Warfare and Society
35 Thomas Vlasaty has a great article that summarises this subject.
36 No real source for this beyond googling pictures of the various Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Merovingian helmets.
37 This Facebook post has some wonderful pictures of the original helmet, a reconstruction of the helmet and comparisons with Carolingian art.
38 eg. the Porta Romana frieze, the porch lunette at the basilica of San Zeno in Verona, the Bury Bible.
34 notes
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How would you go about a good Spyral Dick Grayson storyline? I like the idea but not the execution (if it was stated he was acting like an idiot I'd like it better). Also in the same vein how would you do DickTiger/how do you think it'd work?
I’m side-eyeing you a little anon, lol, because I’m not sure what you mean by it’d be better if it was stated he was acting like an idiot. Because see, as far as I’m concerned, nothing about Dick’s actions was out of character....so long as you center Bruce’s actions as the real driving force behind Dick ending up stuck undercover at Spyral. Dick’s actions make perfect sense....as the fractured attempts at recuperating from a massive trauma without any semblance of a support system or any time or space to actually dedicate to acknowledging and accepting what he’d just been through before leaping right back into danger.
It remains extremely troubling to me that even WITHOUT taking into account Bruce’s victim blaming him for his own death, emotional manipulation and physical beating...all of that only stacks on top of what should already have been the takeaway, IMO:
And that is that its absolutely ridiculous to think that Dick could have remotely been emotionally and mentally composed enough to make an informed, non-coerced decision about undertaking the Spyral mission AND keeping it from the rest of the family.....mere days after being extensively tortured and then briefly died.
He wasn’t in a sound state of mind to make that decision with full awareness of all the implications and repercussions like he would have at other times. Nobody would have been.
And the rest of his family might not have known about him dying, but they did know about him being tortured for days and then unmasked, since they literally saw that on TV....and they know, post Dick’s return, that Dick had been in place undercover before his funeral was even held...the same week he was thought to have died. It should have been obvious to a family of geniuses that all choices made in a matter of days after being tortured and unmasked and who knows what else might have happened offscreen that they could only know about by ASKING him about his ordeal instead of jumping straight to punching him for the choices he made while in the immediate aftermath of massive trauma....like, point is, even without knowing he died, there was always more than enough info they were privy to that there’s no real excuse for their response to his return being judgment instead of concern for how the hell has he been coping with all of that, out there all on his own without anyone he could fully trust, let alone unburden himself to.
None of them spared a single thought for what any of that had been like for him, because they were too focused on their own hurt, and I’m always going to be pissed about that, lmao.
Anyway, apologies if none of that was anything you intended with your word choice, but to be perfectly honest I need very little excuse to go off on a rant about how even the rest of his family’s response to that storyline was like, fundamentally flawed.
NOW. On to your actual question! Because I do have an answer as I’ve thought about this particular thing a LOT, and my ire at both the Spyral storyline and the amnesia storyline coalesced into conjoined seething frustration because of how EASILY they could have avoided making all of the Batfam seem shitty, EVEN BRUCE, and like, also avoided them driving Dick further away rather than bringing him back closer to the family.
All you gotta do....is smash those two stories together and do them both at the same time.
LOL, a few months ago I actually literally wrote out a whole post outlining it in detail here:
https://bigskydreaming.tumblr.com/post/187334221591/if-dc-had-just-combined-their-spyral-and-amnesia
And I’ve copied and pasted the content of that post below the cut here too, just to keep it all in one place for convenience.
As for Dick/Tiger - that’s a whole other post I don’t have time to get into at the moment, but in a nutshell, I’m hugely a fan of their pairing but in specific ways...I mostly see them as each other’s angsty kinda ‘the one that got away, that they could never shake how they got under their skin, but can’t find a way to actually be with, longterm.’ Because the thing is, so much of their dynamic and interactions with each other were clouded by the layers of deception they both wore at all times, and how many different lies they had to tell in service of their whole reason for being there, and how much of themselves they had to hide.
Like, I tend to picture them as kinda both wistfully thinking if they’d met in another life, in another way, without all the cloak and dagger and lies from the very start...they could absolutely be happy together. But as it is, there’s no getting around that they both feel in any kind of relationship, there’d always be some part of them, even if just deep down, that was always keeping an eye open for a crack in the other’s mask, a sign that once again, they were not what they professed to be.
So I see them as being very much that spy vs spy trope, even after Dick goes back to vigilantism and civilian life and even when he and Tiger are theoretically on the same side.....like, I could see them having very emotionally charged, physical, almost desperate kinda encounters in secret whenever they’re in the same city or whatever....because they’re past denying that there’s definitely something between them, always has been, probably always will be...but without even talking about it, just with mutual understanding and implicit agreement, they always know these encounters are just for the night....and then its back to reality. With them thus becoming a kind of escape and fantasy for each other, all rolled up in one and thus inevitably romanticized even further within their own minds...
But they’re also both very pragmatic people, and used to taking what they can get and making the most of it. Its nice to picture the could-have-beens in a world where they met under more honest circumstances, but they live in this world, and here, this is what they can make of what they have, this is what they can make work. So its not all terrible, because if they both ultimately decide this is one of the better outcomes resulting from where they began, which neither of them can change...then it becomes more possible to appreciate what they have for what it is. Even if its not ideal. Or conventional. Or even forever....because I think they both are prepared for it to end if either one of them meets someone who can give them those kinds of nights and still be able to be there in the morning...
But none of that means that what they do have isn’t real, isn’t significant, isn’t as powerful and worthy in its own way as any more conventional relationship.
After all, neither of them are conventional people. They wouldn’t even have met if they were, making a lot of those might-have-beens a moot point. Probably wouldn’t even be as drawn to each other if they were other than what they are, because so much of their dynamic is tangled up in their respect for each other’s skills and convictions and more along those lines.
To be honest, I imagine both of them value and prize each other’s acting ability, their skills with deception and subterfuge....even as those are the very things at the root of why they’ll never be that conventional, longterm couple.
Because it keeps things even between them, and thus even when lying to each other’s faces, there was still an honesty to their dynamic, a balance. Neither is burdened by excessive guilt for deceiving the other, because they both were doing it and they understand why. Thus even when outright deceiving each other, there’s a weird kind of balance there that wouldn’t exist in relationships they had with others who couldn��t match what the other brought to the masquerade, so to speak.
Idk. I have a lot of thoughts on them obviously, lol, and totally meant that all to be another post but got carried away as usual, but I’ll leave it on that note for now, lmao.
How To Make The Spyral Storyline Work (If You Ask Me, which someone literally did so I can get away with saying this).
Ahem.
So. If DC had just combined their Spyral and amnesia stories into one, instead of like the mess we got, we could’ve actually had a good story.
Like, literally all you gotta do is back during Forever Evil, find some way to separate Bruce and Selina from Dick’s body BEFORE Luthor revives him….so Bruce too is of the belief that Dick’s dead, and Luthor being heralded as the one who saved the day from the Crime Syndicate protects him from Bruce or the Batfam’s reprisals.
Then all you gotta do is…instead of Dick getting amnesia like a year later from being shot in the head by KGBeast….Dick gets amnesia from complications in how long it took Luthor to revive him. And of course Luthor capitalizes the HELL out of this.
And then, you can pretty much do everything the same….without it being ANYONE in the Batfamily’s fault, or anyone taking anyone for granted?
You can still have Dick go undercover in Spyral, be Agent 37….only now its on Luthor’s orders, because Dick woke up with no memories and all he knows about himself or like, anything, is whatever Luthor tells him.
And he knows SOMETHING’S not right about everything, like, something’s off about the person he feels like he is and the person Luthor claims that he is, but Luthor’s savvy enough that he’s not forcing Dick to do anything that might trigger some buried memories or built in moral resistance to an order, he’s invested in keeping Dick as fully cooperative for as long as possible, because he knows Dick will be way more effective if he’s on board with stuff than actively fighting things. So Luthor has Dick sold on the idea that he’s infiltrating Spyral on behalf of the good guys, like Dick thinks he’s fine with doing morally gray stuff but isn’t full on trigger happy so Luthor doesn’t force him to kill people on his behalf and thus Dick’s time in Spyral and his character conflicts with Helena, Tiger, etc, remain largely the same.
And meanwhile, Dick’s in the dark about his real identity and past because not having any clue he’s alive, the Batfamily reluctantly has been doing their best to bury details of the late Dick Grayson, no matter how much they hate it, because they have to worry about the living members of their family and try and distance themselves from Dick post being-unmasked, so nobody connects the dots to all of them.
And then of course, eventually one of them runs into someone who reminds them suspiciously of Dick on a case, like his face is still all swirly because of the Hypnos implants but he says or does something that’s so quintessentially Dick Grayson that they can’t NOT wonder. Because here, Dick doesn’t KNOW to tamp down on his natural quips and banter or mannerisms around the Batfamily, and so they give him away even as he remains faceless, and there’s not really any way Luthor could have seen that coming or prevented it, without like….scripting everything Dick says or does in every possible encounter he has, which of course is impossible.
And so THEN ultimately, you can have one or two Batfam members pursuing possibilities that Dick’s alive on their own, and then eventually comparing notes and realizing Dick really IS alive, what Luthor must have done, and that Dick didn’t come home because Dick literally doesn’t remember where or what home is…..
And then whammo ka-blammo, its Fully United Batfamily To The Rescue as they basically just invade Spyral and blow it to Kingdom Come whilst convincing Dick that he’s their brother/son/friend and belongs with them and Lex Luthor is a lying liar who lies, SEARCH YOUR HEART, FEEL YOUR FEELINGS, YOU KNOW WE SPEAK THE TRUTH and blah blah blah et cetera et cetera et yada yada.
And nobody ever has to read Tom King and Scott Lobdell’s like…..*gestures disgustedly in the general direction of their utter tripe*….That.
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ALL (supervillain laugh) take your time tho :D
Oh no WHY alright I submit *sighs, shakes my head, and briefly regrets all my life choices*
here we go! (#9 and #19 are pending specific opera submissions)
I wrote an overly long post here in response to this question a while back
Don Carlo!!!
Just started Halka. Not very far in, but I’m liking it so far.
In full, Cavalleria rusticana (yesterday)
Die tote Stadt (specifically the one recording conducted by Erich Leinsdorf)
Sopranos, with baritones in a very close second.
I will keep advocating for a Belle Époque Simon Boccanegra until it actually happens. Also Paris Commune Le prophète.
*see the 2017 Paris Opéra cast, except very reluctantly swap in Furlanetto for Abdrazakov*
pending submission of a specific opera
really tough...the ROH 1985 one was my first, so it may be my favorite for sentimental reasons, although I also LOVE the current ROH/Met coproduction (with the exception of some details), the Salzburg 2013, and that Liège production from not too long ago
well, based on several factors (including roles I’ve played in musicals, choir assignments, and stuff from voice lessons in the past), I’ll say Poppea (Agrippina), Zerlina (Don Giovanni), and Urbain (Les Huguenots)
Yes, my answer is Don Carlo
Depending on the day, either ‘Dio, che nell’alma infondere’, ‘Nuit d’ivresse et d’extase infinie’, or ‘Ô ciel! où courez-vous?’
my HOMEGIRL Princess Éboli
any really good rendition of ‘Depuis le jour’. that aria SLAPS.
I’m cheating and doing a play instead BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE IT anyway we need Ibsen-based operas and I nominate Hedda Gabler with Sonya Yoncheva and Lisette Oropesa as Hedda and Thea there I said it if you want further casting ask me again later
I don’t know if there’s any one character I have the same personality as??? although I was recently told by someone else on here that my personality is a cross between Figaro and Marguerite de Valois so... make of that what you will (and tell me what you think!)
we all know my answer to this (it’s Carlo/Rodrigo)
also pending a specific opera submission
depends on...a lot of factors, but I adore both Jonas Kaufmann and José Carreras (he is the best of the Three Tenors; no, I am not accepting criticism at this time)
going with Carmen for the sake of argument here, definitely Carmen
...I am not a fan of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut
probably Die tote Stadt, which is seriously bizarre but incredibly amazing (possibly because of its inherent bizarreness?)
not sure if this is in reference to characters or singers; I’ll assume this is about characters and say (of course) Carlo/Rodrigo, with Marie/Tonio and Fenton/Nannetta very close behind.
Renato needs love and hugs and just deserves so much better (he just needs to learn to not be a Jealous Baritone Husband). Other than that drama, he has a proven track record of being a good friend.
waaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy too many. for the sake of being concise, five I love: Callas, Popp, Benackova, Oropesa, Rebeka.
Verdi ❤️ no one else has written so many great operas I love so much over such a long period of time
waaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy too many (again). first one that popped into my head just now was Sophie from Werther, so we’re gonna go with her.
Act III finale, La bohème.
how has there not been a good opera version of Twelfth Night? that is operatic comedy gold WAITING to happen
a) I hate these singer questions because I have way too many, and b) among many, many others, Milnes, Gobbi, Zancanaro, Keenlyside, and Tézier.
I see a sweet trouser role, I adopt him. also Annina from La traviata deserves WAY more credit than she gets. love her to death.
since I try to be optimistic or at least neutral when going into a new opera, none
cannot gender swap names in my head at the moment, so Carlo becomes a standard mid-late Verdi soprano role, Elisabetta becomes a baritone (YOU THOUGHT SHE’D BE A TENOR BUT NOOOOO), Rodrigo is the Good Mezzo who gets the Basically Non-Existent Mezzo Death Scene, Éboli is a tenor, Filippo goes full dramatic mezzo, and the Grand Inquisitor becomes a nearly-impossible-to-sing contralto role with a few extremely powerful high notes thrown in because why not. Tebaldo remains a coloratura soprano.
slightly cheating, but Berlioz’s Les Troyens (not directly based on myth, but kinda?)
‘We really gotta hurry-‘ ‘But first, let’s sing about our feelings!’ or ‘death scene with lots of blood and sadness’ or ‘death by singing’ or party gone wrong (I’m a sucker for good opera tropes)
For baritones: Onegin, don’t go to the name day ball. Just don’t. For tenors: either Otello re: trusting Iago over Desdemona or...pretty much Hoffmann’s entire life.
Again, I hate these questions, but here are five anyway: Cossotto, Troyanos, DiDonato, Garanča, and Rachvelishvili.
FILIPPO (I would DIE to be able to play Filippo. also can I just say that bass and bass-baritone roles in (at least originally) French operas are...*chef’s kiss*.)
Éboli’s outfit in Act IV, Scene 1 of the 2017 Paris Don Carlos.
I really, really want to like Aida as much as everyone else seems to, but I still think that while the plot is good and the music is good, it somehow just doesn’t work and is also massively overrated.
so I don’t talk about Lucia di Lammermoor much but it’s awesome and the mad scene is one of my favorite things ever and ALSO THE OPERA SHOULD HAVE ENDED WITH THE MAD SCENE WHAT THE HELL CAMMARANO so yeah there’s that
well, I’ve been in love with Carmen since I was 7, so...
so many! Figaro seems like he’d be a pretty awesome BFF
Three words: Così. fan. tutte
La gioconda, which has okay music overall (although ‘Stella dal marinar’ is good and the Dance of the Hours is an absolute BOP) but I like the plot a lot better (imagine how it would have been if Verdi or even Boito wrote the music!). also ‘Cielo e mar’ is the third-most overrated tenor aria of all time and you can fight me on that.
way too many (again), but I gotta say it: especially in Verdi, Furlanetto simply cannot be beat.
so many ridiculous roles...you know what’s ridiculous? Hélène in Les veprês siciliennes. At least she gets a scene off, but other than that it’s *high notes* *low notes* *coloratura* *declamation over a huge orchestra and chorus* *sassing the French* *cadenza* *repeat for three hours*
I have been meaning to watch Boris Godunov in its entirety for a while and I WILL THIS WEEK (thanks, Met Opera!). Also literally any Wagner. I was going to see the Met HD of Höllander but you know what happened.
Tosca for tragedies, Barbiere di Siviglia for comedies, Don Giovanni for everyone.
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The Hemiola: Two sides of the same coin.
Y’all.
Y’all. I am so sorry. I literally have been non-existent for the better part of 18 months, and I’m truly sorry. I’ve sat down to write this meta like 8 times between December 2017 and now, and life has just been a LOT. But I’m here. It’s happening. Here ya go.
Sooooooo. For my non-music nerds out there, the word Hemiola probably means literally nothing to you so let’s try to all get on the same page first before diving into this music meta. There are a few videos out there that do a good job trying to explain the concept, but tbh, it’s a little difficult to grasp if rhythm and math aren’t your favorite subjects in the world, so don’t stress too much if you’re just giving this post a blank look, I don’t blame you.
In the simplest of terms, hemiola is a switch from an overall 2 beat division to a 3 beat division, or the other way around. This can either occur by actually stopping one beat division and changing to the other, or by using both divisions simultaneously on top of one another.
Imagine you have 6 pieces of candy and want to distribute them between friends, but you want to make sure that everyone gets the exact same amount. Mathematically, your only options would be 1 piece each to 6 people, 2 pieces each to 3 people, or 3 pieces each to 2 people. Or I guess technically you could say “screw you” to your friends, and keep all the candy yourself. You do you.
But for the purposes of talking about hemiola, we are most interested in the scenarios where the candies are divided between either 2 or 3 total people.
Musically, if you are given 6 notes, you can either choose to group them in sets of 2 or sets of 3. This grouping determines the “meter” of the piece. Meters which group notes in sets of 2 are called “simple” and those that group in sets of 3 are called “compound”.
This is why you may see music written in a 3/4 meter, but also music in a 6/8 meter, even though mathematically they reduce to the same fraction. 3/4 meter is the simple meter, the one where the 6 candies are shared equally between 3 people.
6/8 meter is the compound meter, the one where the 6 candies are shared equally between only 2 people.
Musically, each piece of candy represents 1 eighth note. A 3/4 meter puts the emphasis on every other note and a 6/8 meter places the emphasis on every third note.
Some of the most common instances of hemiola in musical literature will be totally switching from the 3/4 meter to the 6/8 one and continuing back and forth as often as you would like. The most popular of these examples is in “America” from West Side Story. Here’s a video. Visually, the pattern looks like this:
This can also be visualized by looking at the eighth notes more clearly.
The emphasis on the words “I” and “Be” establish the 3 note grouping, but then the punctuation of the syllables in “Me Ri Ca” establish a 2 note grouping. If you watch the video until around 3:35, the choreography has them clapping on all the unstressed beats and they change from sets of 2 short claps to 3 more spread out claps and back and forth. The lighter unlined boxes in each color represent those unstressed beats they are clapping on.
So, this video is super awesome and ties all this stuff together nicely. It gets a little jargon-y but the first 5 minutes or so are what’s really great to listen to. Especially the part around 3:50 where he talks about the implied hemiola that exists in the GoT theme, cause we’re coming back to that.
Ok, so, kinda getting it? Sorry this turned into a bit of a music theory lesson. But here’s the wrap up:
In a hemiola, there is no one side that is “right” or “wrong”. Both sides are mathematically equal to one another. They are perfectly balanced with one another and the power can either shift from one to the next, or they can operate simultaneously within the same duration of time.
They are two sides of the same coin.
Ah, there it is. Now you see where I’m going with this. =)
Ok, so, Throne Room battle. That’s where we at. The music here is genuinely really hard to analyze aurally. If I had some actual sheet music to look at, that’d be great, but I ain’t got that so we’re just going with our ears.
The normal type of music that we’re used to hearing out in the world is consistent steady-metered music. 99% of your pop songs are written in a simple 4/4 meter and never change. If they’re not in 4/4, they’re probably in 3/4 or 12/8 but still usually stay consistent the whole time. This feels good to our brains as background music.
Battle music? Not super effective if it’s nice and consistent. The constant fluctuation of meters and rhythms and tempos and all that jazz puts us mentally on-edge. If the battle music is too consistent, we as viewers will subconsciously think we already know what’s going to happen. We feel at ease and won’t be so anxious. (Spoiler alert: Composers can also use this for shock value by making you too comfortable when the on-screen action is juxtaposingly overwhelming and then use it to hurt you when there’s a twist. They’re sneaky. They enjoy your pain.)
The throne room battle music? Very inconsistent. Honestly, so much inconsistency that I genuinely cannot determine the meter for good chunks of it. But there are a few key points where Williams does actually bring enough stability back to determine some semblance of structure. We first really start to hear this structure after the room starts burning. When the battle first started, they were back to back fighting the same enemy from two sides, but as they get separated and things start falling apart around them, they are each fighting their own individual battles. This notion becomes most obvious when there is the moment we see Kylo look over as Rey gets hurt. We as viewers recognize that they are fighting for the same goal, but they each have to be strong enough individually in order to reach it. One of them can’t just carry the other on their back to get there together.
In this moment, the music is actually a bit difficult to hear over everything else happening on-screen, so the soundtrack is a bit more telling. The track for this is “A New Alliance”.
The barebones is this: There is an overall very pounding, berating feel; lots of heavy emphasized notes that are in “simple” meter. It’s worth noting that Rey doesn’t get as much battle screen time as Kylo, but seeing as she’s fighting 1 and he’s fighting like 6 at a time, that completely makes sense. The longest on-screen battle action she gets once the room starts burning is after she’s gotten hurt and we see the sequence where she’s kicked to the ground and she gets back up and keeps fighting. During her on-screen action, the music changes. But not just the music, we get a hemiola. It’s more of that implied hemiola in the GoT intro, but definitely still an overall hemiola. Her theme is played in a 2:3 ratio to the stomping simple meter music we’ve been hearing through Kylo’s screen time. After it cuts back to him, his stomp music comes back. It cuts to Rey again after Kylo is in the head lock, and we again hear her theme hemiolaed (Is that a word? It is now.) over the existing “simple” time, but it sorta dissolves back into the agitated music.
Overall, this is not a lot to dig apart musically because it all happens so quickly and not for very long, but the concept is very much there. We are hearing this musical ratio, this balanced relationship, and it is a clear development from what we’ve heard from their previous battle music. There’s a now REALLY old meta that I wrote about 238 eons ago (at least that’s how long it feels it’s been since early 2016) that dealt with the relationship of Rey and Kylo’s music during the Starkiller battle. The boiled down version of that meta was that each of their themes was being affected by the other’s. Rey’s got darker, Kylo’s lost its stability.
This however is a new kind of relationship between their themes. No, we aren’t hearing Kylo’s typical 5-note theme, but let’s be honest, the man fighting in that room back to back with Rey after murdering Snoke wasn’t exactly “Kylo Ren” anymore. I’m not saying that he was exactly “Ben Solo” at this point, but whoever he was, that boy don’t got his own theme yet. He does have a concept though. He’s primal, he’s basic, and he’s a bit emotional. The music we hear for him shows that concept. It’s sporadic, yet simplistic. Rey’s theme has never really changed all that much. We’ve seen other moods leech into it slightly, but she’s stayed pretty consistent within herself and how she handles life. She’s just learned how to hone in on stuff now.
So this new kind of relationship, this coexisting rhythmic beauty, is just lovely to my musical reylo ears. We are really getting this “two sides of the same coin” idea from every side. We’ve gotten it in costumes. We’ve gotten it in dialogue. We’ve gotten it in cinematography. And now we get it in music. Everyone is stepping up to the plate in their own respects to show this fantastic ying-yang concept that exists between the two halves of our protagonist, and John Williams is no exception.
For the many many of you who have been asking about a “reylo” theme, this is the best I can offer you for right now. I’m sorry that it’s music theory jargon heavy, and I’m really sorry if you have just been blank staring at this whole post and not following me at all. It really is honestly the PERFECT musical representation of these two, and my music nerd brain is loving it to death, even if it only lasted for like 6 measures out of the entire score of the film.
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Long Away
hey guys! so about a week ago I got so angry about the way Dear Sidewalk basically brushes off Gardner’s parents leaving him–rather than allow us the pain that we deserve–that I wrote a fic about it! just a bit of self-serving exploration, but I am really proud of it! and I just found out that posts with links don’t always show up in the tags, so I’m now posting it here for you guys to enjoy! you can also find it on AO3 if you prefer, my username is the same there, and it’s one of only about 3 Dear Sidewalk fics! anyway, enjoy!
Gardner’s 15 when it happens. It’s a pretty ordinary day, a Friday. School’s the same as always, and Gardner pretty much just goes through the motions, going from class to class, taking notes, chatting with Calvin during their lunch period. It’s all just incredibly mundane, no indication of what’s to come. Which is a lot.
Gardner’s walk home is also the same as normal. Calvin accompanies him most of the way, until they reach the corner of his street, where Calvin turns left while Gardner continues straight. He spots a mailman across the street as he makes his way through the neighbourhood, and he cheerfully waves to him. Gardner’s been thinking about it a lot lately, and he’s started to contemplate becoming a mailman himself. He enjoys walking through the neighbourhoods—especially on days like today, when the sun shines down on him brightly, warming the sidewalks and brightening his surroundings—as well as interacting with his neighbours. He thinks it’d really be nice.
Gardner reaches his house, a tiny split-level with gray siding and a little garden surrounding it. The flowers are just starting to bloom in the increasingly warm weather, and a few of them display bright petals as he passes them on the way inside.
In contrast with outside, the inside of the house is incredibly dark. All of the curtains have been drawn, casting the whole house in shadows. Gardner drops his backpack on the floor by the kitchen table and flicks the light on.
Except, there’s no kitchen table. It’s gone. In fact, all of the furniture is gone.
“What the…?” Gardner carefully moves through the room—not that there’s much in the way of his movements now—examining his surroundings. The entire room is empty, not a single sign of the life that had previously filled the home. Everything had been here just this morning when Gardner had left for school. Now the kitchen is empty, and it echoes with the sounds of his footsteps, heavier and louder in the abandoned space.
“Okay…” Gardner says. He’s a little bit weirded out, but not overly worried. Maybe his parents had been intending to paint and just forgot to tell him? Or else, it is completely possible he just forgot. Sometimes he gets distracted. It’s probably nothing.
For a moment he does wonder where his parents are. If they moved all this stuff, they definitely didn’t go to work this morning. But then he figures they’ve probably just gone out to get the paint, and the moment passes.
Gardner picks his bag back up and carries it up the stairs to his bedroom. When he opens the door, he is a little bit relieved to find everything exactly the same as he left it. Everything’s completely fine. Nothing to worry about. He sits down at his desk and starts on his homework, working for about an hour before he decides he wants a snack.
The fridge and oven have been removed, but Gardner figures there’s definitely still food in the cupboards. He’s thinking about the crackers his mom always buys, round ones with a garlic flavouring, and he’s excited to have a few when he opens the cupboard and finds it empty.
“Oh.” Emptying the cupboards just to paint definitely seems like overkill, but alright. Maybe it’s not even painting. Maybe it’s something else. Of course, if Gardner’s parents were doing a complete kitchen overhaul, certainly he’d remember something about it, right?
Gardner moves into the hall and opens the pantry door. Again, completely empty. And now he’s starting to get worried. He quickly moves into the living room, testing out a hunch, trying to quell the sinking feeling in his stomach. Certainly there’s an explanation for all of this. He just needs to stay calm until he figures it out.
Gardner enters the living room. It’s dark, and he can’t see the lamp—which is not a good sign, he’ll admit—so he carefully makes his way to the window and pulls the blinds open. The room is empty. Well, not entirely empty. There are still pictures of him on the walls, Gardner through the ages. But somehow, this is a not a comforting detail. Everything disappearing from the house except for traces of him is not exactly comforting. It’s ominous.
“Definitely not a great sign,” Gardner mutters. He leaves the living room and heads back up stairs, throwing open doors and starting to examine the rooms. Bathroom: empty. Guest room: just a bedframe and a mirror left behind. Master bedroom: heart-wrenchingly empty. He crosses the room in quick, somewhat frantic strides and pulls the closet door open. There’s a lone hanger lying on the floor, but that’s about it. Gardner feels his heart miss a beat. For a moment it struggles to regain its rhythm, and he feels like he’s going to die. Eventually it evens back out, but part of that feeling remains.
Gardner stands there for a long moment, just staring at that stupid hanger. He feels like his legs are about to give out. But he’s not done, so after a moment he manages to gather his strength and returns to the hallway. He throws the hall closet open for good measure, but he’s not shocked by what he sees. Empty.
He’s not exactly sure what he has to gain from doing this, but he storms down the basement anyway, just to see. No surprise, it’s empty. On shaking legs he makes his way back upstairs and is relieved to make it to one of the few pieces of furniture left—his bed—before he completely collapses.
Gardner tries to think of reasonable explanations. He’s wracking his brain, trying to come up with something—anything—that could possibly explain what’s going on. Why his parents would take every piece of furniture from the house except for his things. It has to mean something. There has to be a reasonable explanation. Unless—
Unless they’ve just run off without him.
He’s trying to stay calm, trying to cling to the rational possibilities that don’t involve a heart-breaking conclusion—as basically non-existent as they are. He thinks back to this morning. He ate breakfast at the table, as he always did, while his parents got ready around him. They were preparing for work, he recalls, and the memory feels like a stab to the heart. But what’s worse is what came moments after. He remembers finishing his cereal, quickly brushing his teeth, and as he passed his mom on the way back downstairs, she stopped him, giving him a kiss on the cheek and saying “I love you, Gardner”. He remembers how he had replied that he loved her too. Certainly a woman who was planning on leaving him wouldn’t have stopped to say “I love you”. Would she have? It seems a bit needlessly cruel.
People lie, says a nagging voice in the back of his head. Maybe she would’ve.
Tears start to form in Gardner’s eyes, his breathing becoming a bit more choked. Maybe they didn’t love him. And that’s why they’re gone. That’s why they took all their stuff and left his, even going so far as to make a point of leaving behind the pictures of him, memories of the son they left behind.
“No,” Gardner says. “No, that’s ridiculous. There has to be a reason.” He felt like maybe vocalizing these thoughts would make them feel more true, but that feeling disappears the second he tries it out. And now he’s started to cry, and he feels like he can’t stop it. He can never stop it. So, he just gives in, letting his fears wash over him as the tears start to fall from his eyes, landing on the comforter in dark wet spots.
His parents have left him. For whatever reason, they have decided that they no longer want to live with their son. They’ve left, they’ve taken all their stuff, and they’ve left him behind. Everything else was important enough to take, but he’s left behind. Forgotten, just like that damn clothes hanger. Unwanted, unneeded, unloved. He tries to think of why this is happening. What he possibly could’ve done to provoke this. It makes him cry even more to try to come up with an action of his that would lead his parents to literally run off without him, but honestly, he has nothing. Parents are meant to love their children unconditionally, aren’t they? Maybe they’ve just never loved him, and they’re just finally doing something about it.
Gardner cries for what feels like hours. When he finally calms himself down a bit—taking deep breaths and clutching a pillow to his chest for support—his throat feels like it’s actually been scraped from the inside, an awful raw sensation that leaves him with pain when he swallows. When he looks in the mirror, his eyes are red and swollen, the area under them shockingly puffy. The tip of his nose is bright red, but the rest of his face is shockingly pale. He looks a bit like he’s dying, or at least suffering under incredibly severe allergies. He eyes linger on his face for just a bit too long and suddenly he’s crying again, and it takes at least half an hour to get back to a calm-ish state. After that, he avoids looking in the mirror, turning to face the other way on his bed.
When his breathing is steady and he’s found some tissues in his backpack to wipe his face, Gardner carefully composes himself, sitting up in bed and looking around the room, trying to formulate a game plan. It’s about 7, the sky outside just starting to darken, so he figures he needs to act soon before it gets too late. His stomach growls a bit, and he remembers that he never did have a snack, hasn’t eaten since maybe 11:30. At the same time he truly can’t imagine putting anything in his stomach without wanting to immediately throw it back up.
A surge of anger suddenly flares up inside of him nonetheless. It wasn’t bad enough that his parents would just disappear, they couldn’t even leave him some food? He’s 15, he has no job, no money of his own, no way to support himself, and they would just leave him alone in this goddamn house without even some crackers to get by?
Gardner gets up and paces the room, the anger flowing through him. He spent 15 years thinking his parents loved him and they left without a warning, and they couldn’t even be bothered to leave him some fucking crackers or… something. Anything. Admittedly he still has his bed, and his clothes, but that’s not exactly going to keep him from starving, and eventually he’s going to have to leave this house because he has no money, and even if—if—his parents counted on someone taking him in they still left him alone, and—
Gardner catches his eye in the mirror. He looks crazed. His face is no longer pale, but bright red, flushed to match his nose. His hair is messed up, fluffy on one side and flat on the other, and his eyes are burning with anger. Without even thinking about it, he lets his fist fly across the room. It makes contact with the glass and his reflection shatters, tiny shards flying everywhere, one even scraping across his cheek.
Gardner feels the pain dully, almost as if he’s feeling it from afar, like he’s not quite connected to his body. He’s still angry, and now the adrenaline is pumping, and he thrusts his fist into the same spot again. Without the glass it just comes up against the mirror-backing unimpressively. He punches it again, and again, except that now his anger is fading a little bit, and the pain is taking over instead. He brings his fist up to examine it. Blood gushes from the cuts where his knuckles made impact with the glass, spilling onto the floor, and his feet—and the shards of glass around his feet that he’s going to need to watch out for—where it soaks into his socks.
Gardner carefully moves to grab the last of his tissues, trying to sop up as much blood as he can. He’s already starting to regret doing that, but it’s just that this whole situation has him so out of control, and the realization of that is making him angry again—or maybe ready to cry, or maybe both, he isn’t sure—and the whole thing is just one big emotional loop that he will never free himself from, so he may as well just sit here for the rest of his life and cry and punch things and cry because that’s all he’s ever going to want to do again.
The tissues aren’t doing a thing to stop the bleeding, simply disintegrating into nothing with incredible speed. Since there’s about a 0 percent chance there’s any paper towel or napkins left in the house, Gardner decides that he really only has one choice, and he yanks his dresser drawer open, looking for an old article of clothing. He finds a blue t-shirt that he no longer wears and uses it to wipe at the trickle of blood he feels pouring down his face before tightly tying it around his hand. Then he lays back down on his bed. He notices his backpack sitting on the floor, a few broken bits of glass on top of it. He wonders if he should grab it and do something, maybe shove a few things into it like a change of clothes and go figure out what he’s going to do? He could always go see Calvin, he supposes, though he hates the idea of being a burden on Cal’s parents, hates sticking them with the responsibility of taking care of him just because his own parents couldn’t do it. The Bensons don’t deserve that.
Still, Gardner thinks, as he rolls onto his back and stretches his legs out, it’s really his only option. Other than staying here, of course, which really isn’t much of an option at all. At the very least, they might know what he needs to do.
Gardner stares up at the ceiling and lets out a yawn. Yeah, he should probably just go do that, before it gets too late. The sky’s already darkened quite a bit since the last time he checked. But his mattress is comfortable, and between the crying and the punching and the loss of blood and the not eating, Gardner can’t help but feel a bit sleepy, all the adrenaline and emotion drained out of his body, leaving him drowsy. Still, he’s going to get up. He has to get up. Any moment now, he’s going to…
When Gardner wakes up, it is now fully dark out, only the moon shining in through the window, casting a small patch of white light that slides over his stomach. For a moment he feels peaceful, the events of earlier that day forgotten. But then it all slams back into him and he groans with the memory. For a moment he wonders if maybe it was all just a vivid dream, but the way his right hand aches confirms that this nightmare is in fact his real life.
Gardner rolls over onto his side, where the bedside clock says 10:30. Shit. So much for leaving before it got too late and being as little of a burden as possible. Still, he has to admit that he does feel a bit better after his nap. His head aches a little bit but his emotions have kind of evened out, at least.
Gardner gets up fairly quickly, resolving that if he can leave soon, it still won’t be too late. Apparently he moves too quickly, though, because he almost collapses the moment he stands up, feeling incredibly light-headed, his vision spotty. “Right,” Gardner mutters to himself as his vision slowly reforms. The combination of blood loss and not eating is definitely not a good thing. But at this point there’s nothing he can do to fix it but make the journey to the Bensons’. And hope that if he happens to pass out along the way, someone will at least find him and take him to the hospital.
Gardner makes his way slowly across the room, turning the light on as he nears the remains of the mirror. He carefully walks through the shards of glass and reaches his backpack without feeling anything stab into his foot, which he takes as a good sign. His socks offer some padding, at least.
After Gardner grabs his bag he considers adding in the homework he started on earlier, which lies on his desk under the former mirror, but it’s covered in spots of blood and he figures if there was ever a situation that homework could be excused, it would probably be this. Instead, he carefully makes his way back to the other side of the room and quickly shoves in a few shirts, some underwear, and a pair of pants. That’s all he really needs right now. Anything else he needs he can come back for later.
His hand has started to throb with pain and he carefully unwraps it. It’s stopped bleeding, for the most part, but the skin is red and raw, with a few strips of skin still clinging on. Gardner resists the urge to pick at them and wraps the shirt back around his hand. Shrugging on his backpack, Gardner makes his way out of the room, brushing the soles of his feet to make sure there are no bits of glass stuck to his socks.
Gardner stops in the kitchen as heads outside. His throat is still feeling raw from earlier, and he figures it’s the least he can do for his body to actually drink something. He looks around for anything he can use for some water, but all the cups in the house are gone, of course. He thinks back to if there’s anything in his room, but he’s pretty sure there isn’t. Eventually he just settles for putting his mouth under the tap. It hurts a bit to swallow, but Gardner hadn’t been aware just how dry his mouth was, so it definitely helps. He stands under the faucet for maybe a minute before he decides to move on.
It’s cold outside when he opens the front door, and for a moment he wonders if he should go back and look for a coat. He can’t remember for sure if he opened the hall closet, so there may still be something of his in there. But he’s already standing outside with the door locked—if that’s truly necessary—and he’s tired and at this point actually very interested in eating something, so he just focuses on the walk ahead. The Bensons only live about a 5-minute walk away. He can do this.
As Gardner turns away from the house, something catches his eye. The boat, still sitting in the driveway, as if nothing’s even changed. His parents kept promising him that one day they would take it on the water, one day they would do something with it. But now it’s still here and they’re gone, and it seems that that’s never going to happen. Gardner’s always loved the boat. It has a bed below deck, and sometimes his parents would let him sleep out there, pretending that he really was on the water, an adventurer out at sea. It holds nice memories at least, even as Gardner fights down a bit of anger at the fact that they never kept their promise. He wonders if they left anything behind in cabin and resolves to check it out at some point.
Right now he focuses on the road ahead. His nap definitely helped, but Gardner still feels tired, and the light-headed feeling isn’t helping too much. He just focuses on one foot in front of the other, and when his stomach growls he just tries to ignore it.
The trip feels like it takes hours, but eventually Gardner finds himself standing in front of Calvin’s house. He can’t really see his watch in the dark, but he estimates it’s probably 10:45, and prays that’s not too late. His one saving grace is that at least it’s a Friday, so maybe they haven’t gone to bed too early.
Gardner knocks on the door with his good hand and waits a few moments. He thinks he can see a light on inside, but after what feels like a few minutes, still no one has come to the door. He guesses he can’t exactly blame them for not wanting to see who’s at the door when it’s nearly 11 PM. Still, he tries again, a bit harder, and when that still doesn’t illicit results, he rings the doorbell.
He’s about five seconds from collapsing onto the front step and just staying there for the rest of his life when finally someone comes to the door. It’s Calvin’s mom who answers, and she adopts an anxious expression when she sees him.
“Oh, Gardner, hi sweetie,” she says, clearly trying for warmth but still sounding worried. “Are you alright?”
Gardner can only imagine how he looks right now, but he’s certain it’s not alright. He glances down at his hand, and Mrs. Benson’s eyes follow.
“Oh sweetheart, what happened to you?” She gently takes his arm and unwraps his hand, examining the damage. When she meets his eye again, the level of concern on her face makes Gardner tear up a little.
Gardner isn’t really sure how to answer her question, and after a moment Mrs. Benson ushers him inside. “Please, come in,” she says, leading him to the kitchen table, where he numbly takes a seat. He’s working up to asking if she has anything to eat when she hurries out of the room, saying that she’ll go get some bandages and fix him up.
While he waits, trying not to pass out but starting to feel very close—the walk really took a lot out of him, and it’s not like he had a ton to give—he stares at his hand, blinking every few seconds. While he’s distracted with that, he doesn’t notice Calvin enter the room.
“Gardner?” he asks, concern colouring his voice.
Gardner’s head jerks up, and he’s rewarded with spotted vision and nausea. Too fast, apparently.
“What happened to you?”
Gardner opens his mouth to respond, but he can’t bring himself to say anything. It all feels so real. It was always real, of course, but sitting in this brightly lit kitchen, full of warmth and family and a lot of things he no longer has, and having to actually say, out loud, what’s happened? It’s all just so much. So, Gardner just lets out a few choked little sobs and looks back down at his hand instead.
Calvin is still hovering, clearly worried, but luckily Mrs. Benson returns at this point, carrying alcohol and bandages and Polysporin. She quickly gets to work tending to Gardner’s wounds, and no one says a word, the room quiet except for Gardner’s intake of breath at the sting of the alcohol.
When his wound is properly bandaged, Mrs. Benson looks up at Gardner, and he feels like he has to face her. Calvin’s since taken a seat at the table, and he watches the two intently.
“Gardner, sweetie, what’s happened?”
Gardner starts to answer, but as simple as it is to say “my parents left me”, his head feels incredibly fuzzy, and he can’t organize his thoughts. Besides, if he gives her the answer, it will only lead to so many more questions. He needs to eat something first. Drink something. Try to get himself back together.
“Could I have something to drink, please? Maybe some juice?” he adds. He can’t think of where he’s remembering it from—not that it matters too much right now—but there’s a part of him that knows he should get some sugar in his body to make up for the blood loss.
“Of course, hon. Is orange juice okay?”
Gardner almost nods, and then thinks better of it. “Yes, that’s great.”
“Is there anything else you’d like?” Mrs. Benson adds as she heads to the fridge. “We have some cookies.”
Not exactly the best dinner, but better than nothing, so Gardner quickly gives his assent. “Yes, please.”
While Mrs. Benson pours Gardner’s juice, Calvin watches him intently. Gardner keeps his eyes on his hand while he waits. He needs to drink something first, eat something first, before he can do this. Even then, it’s iffy.
“Here you go,” Mrs. Benson says, setting down a glass of orange juice and a plate of some store-bought cookies in front of Gardner. He immediately picks up the glass and drinks about half of it before starting in on a cookie.
“So, Gardner,” Mrs. Benson starts. She seems a bit nervous to pose her question, and considering Gardner’s already brushed it off twice, he can’t blame her apprehension. He quickly finishes his cookie and starts on a second one, glancing up at her as he does. His head still feels clouded, but at least he feels more confident that he won’t pass out. That’s a start. “What exactly…” she trails off for a moment. “What happened to your hand?”
Gardner sighs and takes a long sip of juice. “When I got home, after school, the house was empty. Completely empty,” he adds. “Everything was gone, except for my stuff. Every trace of my parents had just disappeared.” Mrs. Benson’s eyes are wide with shock, and the concern on her face brings a few tears to Gardner’s eyes. He focuses back down on his hand. “So… I sat in my room, and I just felt… a lot, and at one point I just got so mad, and my reflection was just so crazy, before I knew what was happening, I’d punched the mirror.”
“They just left?” she asks, and Gardner can swear she has a hint of anger of her own in her voice.
Gardner shrugs. He feels like his emotions are precariously balanced and he doesn’t want to get set off again. “I guess so,” is all he says in return, picking the chocolate chips out of a cookie and eating them.
“Oh sweetheart.” Mrs. Benson stands and wraps her arms around Gardner. It’s a nice gesture, but it reminds him of his own mother, and soon he’s crying again. He’d thought for a moment that maybe he had no more than a few small tears left, but here it is, real, full-on ugly crying, once again, and he’s not sure if it’s going to stop—if it’s ever going to stop, or if this is just his life from now on, a constant, drowning sadness that threatens to swallow him whole, intercut with periods of violent anger and the occasional trap of feeling calm—so he just leans into it, but he’s feeling so much, feeling too much and he kind of just wants to sleep for the next 5 years, and then maybe after that he’ll finally be okay.
Except that he won’t be. He’ll never be okay because his parents clearly don’t love him and how do you get over that? The only people in the world who are always supposed to be there for you, to love you unconditionally and to take care of you and they didn’t want to do that and now they’re gone and how is Gardner ever meant to do anything more than cry about that?
Gardner’s breathing is becoming more and more laboured. He doesn’t feel like he can catch his breath, feels like the more he tries the less he’s able to, until eventually he’s just going to suffocate. He’s acutely aware that he’s probably hyperventilating, maybe having some sort of panic attack, and he needs to get a grip, but he just can’t do it, and he’s mad at himself for not being able to, but he can’t. He can’t fix this.
“Gardner.” He’s suddenly aware of Mrs. Benson’s voice, breaking through his sobs. “Gardner, please, deep breaths,” she coaches. He tries, but he’s still not sure if he’s getting there or not. The room suddenly feels so tiny, like it’s closing in around him. “You just need to slow your breathing,” she tells him. She no longer has her arms around Gardner but is now kneeling in front of him. She demonstrates how to take a proper breath, and Gardner attempts to follow along. After a few of these he’s back to breathing normally, though he hasn’t exactly stopped crying. Mrs. Benson stays there, rubbing his back, for however long it takes him to actually stop crying, if not for good then at least for a little bit. Then she stands up and looks down at him. “Do you want me to make you anything? Did you have dinner?” Gardner shakes his head. “Alright…” she glances back at the kitchen, searching for something. “Um… what do you think of a sandwich? Would that be nice? I could do ham and cheese, or peanut butter and jam.”
“Ham and cheese sounds nice,” Gardner tells her, and she smiles.
“Great,” she says. “And I’ll get you some more orange juice too,” she adds, grabbing the empty cup before heading back to the fridge.
“Gardner?” Calvin asks. Gardner had almost forgotten that he was even there.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry. That’s a really shitty thing to have happen. You don’t deserve this.”
“Thank you,” Gardner says. It’s a nice bit of reassurance to have. Although at least if he had done something to deserve it, he might understand why it was happening, be able to trace it to something he had actively done to ruin things. As is, the idea that it wasn’t his fault, that nothing he could have done would’ve stopped this… it just makes him feel so powerless.
They sit in silence after that. Calvin seems a bit uncomfortable with the whole situation, and Gardner honestly prefers not to talk about it right now. Or maybe ever. Who knows? Maybe one day he’ll be able to talk about it a lighter, detached sort of way. But not right now.
“Here we go,” Mrs. Benson calls, placing a sandwich in front of Gardner, along with his glass of orange juice.
“Thank you,” he tells her, taking a bite of the sandwich. For a second, he kind of feels like his stomach is going to reject it, but he chews slowly and he’s slowly able to kind of ride out that feeling of sickness.
“So, Gardner, of course you’ll take the guest room tonight, but I just want to let you know that you are welcome to stay with us as long as you like. Or else… I don’t know if you have any family you’d like to me to call?”
Gardner shakes his head and takes another bite. “It was really just me and my parents. All of my other family’s out of state, and I don’t even really know them.” Gardner keeps his voice as steady as he can, and has to admit he’s pretty proud of how calmly he manages that information.
“Then you’ll live with us, of course,” Mrs. Benson says brightly. Gardner isn’t sure how he feels about that statement—he really doesn’t want to be a burden, and especially to make them deal with him just because his parent didn’t want to—but he figures that’s a conversation for when it’s not almost midnight. He thinks back to his parents’ boat. If worst comes to worst, maybe he could just live there. He likes boats. Of course, he’s not exactly sure if the reminder of them would be more comforting or heart-wrenching. Another conversation for later, he supposes. For now, Gardner just nods and focuses on his sandwich. He’s felt tired for a while, but it suddenly hits him that he’s exhausted, the side effect of feeling so many emotions all in one day.
“I’m sorry that this happened to you, Gardner,” Mrs. Benson adds. She sweeps a bit of Gardner’s hair out of his face; the bangs are constantly falling in his eyes. “But I want you to know that we are here for you, alright? We’re going to take care of you. You’ll be okay.”
Yet another tear slides down Gardner’s cheek, but it seems to be all his body can manage at the moment. He nods his appreciation to Mrs. Benson and finishes his sandwich. All he wants now is to sleep.
Calvin guides Gardner upstairs to the guest bedroom, and he simply pulls off his socks and jeans before collapsing into bed.
Gardner was worried at first that as soon as he got into bed he’d no longer be tired, but instead forced to lay awake all night, running through all the ramifications of what’s just happened, what his life is like now. Mercifully, however, that doesn’t seem to be an issue, and he’s asleep within five minutes, though his dreams are confusing, an unexplained sense of worry looming over them, and they jerk him awake every few hours, though he quickly falls back asleep each time. It may not be the best sleep he’s ever had—or anywhere close—but it’s something, at least, and his body seems pretty grateful for that when he finally pulls himself out of bed the next day, the bedside clock announcing that it’s around noon.
When Gardner enters the Benson’s kitchen, he finds Mrs. Benson sitting alone at the table, drinking some tea. As soon as she notices Gardner she jumps up, offering to make him some breakfast, whatever he’d like. Gardner doesn’t want to put her out too much, so he just asks for cereal, and she returns a moment later with a bowl and some milk.
“So, Cal and his father had to go out for a little bit, but I thought after you had your breakfast that the two of us could get gather the rest of your things?”
“Sounds good,” Gardner replies, even though there are about a million different reasons that the proposal does not, in fact, sound that good. Namely that the idea of facing that house again makes his heart start to speed up, but Gardner does still need his clothes, and he wouldn’t feel right about Mrs. Benson buying him new ones.
“Great,” Mrs. Benson gives Gardner a bright smile. She really is the sweetest woman, and Gardner’s beyond thankful for that.
After Gardner finishes his breakfast and changes into a different outfit, he and Mrs. Benson make their way back to his house. Or his former house, Gardner mentally corrects himself. Each of them carries a few moving boxes with them to help pack up his stuff. It’s been decided that they’ll remove the furniture once Mr. Benson is available to help them, but since there’s already furniture in the Benson’s guest room, Gardner tells Mrs. Benson just to do whatever she wants with the old stuff. She seems sad at this dismissal of his belongings, but eventually formulates a plan to sell the furniture and give him whatever money they get, so that he can have a little bit of cash for himself. Gardner likes that idea a lot, liking the small amount of control it gives him in his own life, a little bit of independence to take care of himself.
As Gardner makes his way through the house, he can just feel Mrs. Benson’s shock behind him, the way that she keeps looking around at the empty space. While they don’t need to pass through the living room to reach Gardner’s room, she wanders in anyway, and Gardner can literally feel the outrage radiating off of her as she takes in the pictures on the wall. After taking them in for a moment she starts pulling them all down, snapshots of Gardner throughout his life so far. Gardner when he was maybe 8 or 9, dressed in a baseball jersey and beaming up at the camera, a few of his teeth missing; Gardner as a baby, wearing a onesie and cuddling a stuffed bear; Gardner at the beginning of this school year, hair falling across his forehead and covering one of his eyes. She carefully places them all into a box before moving back onto their mission.
“You know…” Gardner starts nervously. “You really don’t have to take those.”
Mrs. Benson gives him a sad look. “I’d like to, Gardner. Besides, if you’re going to be staying with us, it only feels right to have a few reminders of you throughout the house. Make you a real part of the family.”
Gardner works very hard not to start crying at that, and just barely manages to succeed. He’s so sick of crying.
Mrs. Benson audibly gasps when they reach Gardner’s room, despite the fact that he’d tried to prepare her beforehand for the state it’d been left in. Broken glass glitters in the light pouring in from the window, some of it smudged and stained with his blood, which has since dried into flaky brown spots dotting the floor and the desk. Gardner’s hand aches a bit as he thinks about what happened there the day before.
“Yeah, I’m sorry about the mess,” he says.
“It’s okay, sweetheart. I understand,” she tells him, and she kneels down to start cleaning up the mess. She’d packed a little hand broom and dustpan when Gardner had mentioned the glass earlier, and she uses it to clear the floor.
“I can do it, if you want,” Gardner offers. “It was my fault, after all.”
Mrs. Benson smiles at him and stands up. “Thank you, sweetie. It is a bit rough on my knees.” She hands him the broom and dustpan. “I’ll get started on the closet, alright?”
Gardner nods, and sets to work sweeping up the glass. Normally he might find it to be rather boring work, but right now the simplicity is calming, and even the scrape of bits of glass against the floor is somewhat soothing.
Once Gardner’s cleaned up the glass the best he can, he dumps the shards into a garbage bag that Mrs. Benson brought with her and starts placing books into a box. By the time he’s finished, Mrs. Benson has managed to carefully fold and pack all of his clothes, and has started packing away some of his miscellaneous belongings. The total comes to about 5 boxes, none of them all that big. It’s a little bit sad to look at his life that way, narrowed down to 5 small boxes. He grabs a box and starts carrying it down to the car, trying to ignore the thought.
Once everything’s packed up and Gardner’s sitting in the car, he notices the boat again, still sitting in the driveway. “Oh!” He turns to Mrs. Benson. “The boat. Um…” He’s suddenly a bit nervous to ask the question, in case Mrs. Benson doesn’t want a giant boat sitting in her driveway. Gardner briefly considers if it would be a good idea to ask her to help him sell it, but as nice as the money would be, he thinks he wants the boat itself more. It’s a reminder of his parents’ broken promises, yes, but it’s also got a lot of good memories behind it. “Do you think we could move it to your house too?”
“It’s important to you?” she asks. She seems a bit shocked.
Gardner nods. “Very.”
“Then of course, sweetie. We’ll get it later when we come back for the furniture.”
Gardner smiles. “Thank you.”
Gardner settles in pretty easily after that. The Bensons are incredibly kind, and basically treat him like another son. It’s nice to live with Calvin, too. They’re both only children, and the feeling of having a brother is incredible to both of them.
Gardner still wakes up from awful dreams some nights, confused about the exact content, but feeling incredibly unsettled. Overall though, things are going rather well. He feels peaceful here, and accepted. It’s still hard, sometimes, thinking about his parents, how they left him. But it’s getting a lot easier. He even talks about them sometimes with Calvin, reminiscing on things they did together, and he mostly doesn’t cry anymore. Occasionally it gets to him, usually sneaking up when he least expects it, so that one minute he’s fine and the next he’s crying so hard he can barely breathe, but the Bensons are very supportive, and he’s getting better at calming himself down.
Gardner waits about three months before he finally goes out to the boat. The cabin is just how he remembered it, with a little kitchen area, some seating, a bed, and a few random books lining the shelves. It’s nice in there, and it reminds him of how things used to be, when he would sleep out there in the warmer weather. Gardner hasn’t realized how much he missed that until he’s sitting on the bed, staring around at the achingly familiar surroundings. As grateful as he is to the Bensons for taking him in, he has to say admit that he hasn’t exactly gotten used to his new room. He’s decorated it with the things from his old room, but it just doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t feel like it’s his.
This boat, on the other hand, is his. A place that really feels his own.
After that first visit, Gardner starts bringing some of his stuff out to the boat, slowly filling it with his belongings. He leaves a few things behind in his bedroom inside, but the majority of his belongings end up the boat, including maybe half his wardrobe.
Gardner also starts sleeping in the boat more, rather than staying inside the house. The first time Mrs. Benson realizes this she seems a bit alarmed, but Gardner tells her that it helps him sleep better, and as much as she seems to want to argue it, she lets him have this. People have been gentler around him lately. He’s not sure how to feel about that, but in the cause of being allowed to sleep in the boat, but decides to just embrace it.
It takes a while, rebuilding, and healing. But the Bensons are there for him, kind and caring and embracing him with their love. And eventually, Gardner starts to think that he might just be okay. Maybe.
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Dear Future Deanna,
You are about to go off to college, and afterwards starting your great big life. Therefore you may never see this message future Deanna. But I won’t lose hope because maybe you’ll have this with you without knowing it. Anyways, good luck in college, hope you make the most of it because you only get once chance in college. Make good choices, but at the same time take some risks or else you will forever regret not being bold. It’s okay if you make any mistakes because I’m sure you’ll learn from them and become better. And another thing future Deanna, live in the moment and don’t think too far ahead.
-Deanna Wong June 1, 2015
Dear past Deanna,
Well 2 years later I managed to find this mini notebook and see what I wrote to myself awhile back. Past Deanna, I have certainly made some mistakes and done things I couldn’t imagine myself doing 2 years ago! I have met some of the most important people in my life these past couple years, especially this past school year. I hit the gym pretty often which is a very necessary thing in my life but I don’t exactly have access to a gym at the moment. I’ll make do this summer with @ home exercises and probably running in the mornings hopefully starting tomorrow. I kind of hit a big wall at the end of my 1st year at UCSD, I failed 2 classes and passed with a B and I’m waiting to take the other class still. My gpa definitely tanked but now I have above a 3.0 again which is my goal gpa to maintain for the rest of my years here. I see my handwriting hasn’t changed too much so I’ve reached my max as far as writing legibility. I’m cleaning out my desk right now and there are definitely a lot of old Deanna history hidden in these drawings. Hmm so I’ve left my college journal at school, but I only wrote in it probably twice this whole school year. Way to keep record of what’s happening. So something that has definitely changed my life was starting my rave life. EDM really has had an impact on me and I decided to give ecstasy a go. It is quite the euphoria, but in great moderation. Gave me the happiest feeling in the world. I’m so glad my friends have been gracious enough to let me have this experience. So I’m not saying drugs are good, but they’re sure really fun. This past spring quarter I tried shrooms and that trip definitely gave me one of the weirdest days of my life. Everything just felt sort of off, but I saw everything a bit differently visually. And then more often than not I had those nights of being drunk, stoned, or crossed af. Like I knocked out pretty hard on some nights. Next year I definitely need some self control over these type of nights. IDK if my body can handle such tough treatment anymore. Anyways I joined a frat, and now I have 2 littles in my frat. They’re super cool but I need to find a way to connect all of us next year because they’re kinda polar opposites. I don’t wanna think about this too hard though so I’ll just continue on this much needed spheal. Also an update on my love life: non-existent. I’ve been single for a solid 20 years since I’ve been alive. Also I’m 20 what... how dis happen. Going off on a tangent, I think I have found that photos are very important to me. All the memories I have captured, I can’t even begin with how blessed I feel forever with such great memories. I would say my second year of college was definitely better than my first year. I wanna stop here past Deanna since I’ve given you the gist of my college thus far. Now to write to future Deanna again.
-Deanna Wong July 12, 2017
Dear Future Deanna,
So what past Deanna said, keep living in the moment, take lots of pictures, and make more new friends, but remember to keep your old ones. Maybe try dating someone before the end of college, or not but you need a person in your life I think, or maybe I’m wrong and it’s better that you’re independent all through college. Whatever happens, happens. Also keep living your healthy life, go gym, hike, eat right, and so on. And don’t feel so bad on not so good days, stress eating gets to everyone. Try to say no to people, you can’t be influenced all the time. Otherwise you’ll never learn to have things your way. You can be helpful to people too, but sometimes you should make sure you get your own shit together first. I think you have all the tools needed to succeed in the rest of college and life, so make your choices wisely.
-Deanna Wong July 13, 2017
Dear past Deanna,
I think I’ve gotten college life down, better than my first 2 years for sure. I still am making mistakes though, kind of had some bad incidents as far as my behavior record with UCSD, but on my way to fixing that. Nothing that’ll put me on hold for graduating, I just have to deal with business and this should all be over next quarter. Long story short I passed out at an on campus event and I have some consequences to deal with but it’s all on me, I have to fix things. On the bright side, everything in my academics are right again. Above a 3.0 and I am on track to graduate by next spring. It’s really hard to write into this tiny notebook. I’m writing very intensely I’m sweating a little. It’s also not the coolest temperature. Sacramento brings the heat. In terms of my social/party life, this past year of college, and within the last quarter, has exceeded my first 2 years. Well part of the reason has been because I turned 21 this year. Legal drinking is a whole new game. You would think I can control myself at this point, but I still can’t some nights. I’ve definitely opted out of drinking a lot more this year. Self-control is getting better. A lot of seniors I grew close to this year are graduated now. It makes me really sad but I need to learn to get through this year without them. They are all going on their own paths for the future, and I wish them all the best and to visit me next year! My love life got a little bit spicier this year, but nothing drastic happened where I need to announce it. Still no girlfriend and I really want to have one more and more. Still actively using dating apps. Well just more recently since its summer now and I don’t have much else to do. Just trying to recharge myself mentally. I think a lot of things that happened this year has given me a bit of a mental drain. I think i actually like attention but I may have gotten more than I need for a year. My 21st birthday is the most extra day I’ve had in my life. Everything was funny, everyone was dressed up, and there were a lot of gifts. The best thing was all my friends being there just to celebrate my friend Nat and I turning on year older. Like it shouldn’t be that huge of a deal, but it became a big deal just because we wanted it to be. This really should be more of advice for future me like the 2 past me’s, so I’m gonna do that instead of blabbing about my life. i’m supposed to do that somewhere else. Alright it’s there, peace past me.
-Deanna Wong July 5, 2018
Dear Future Deanna,
Not sure what to say. Well if past Deanna has been able to accomplish all she has up to now, future Deanna can keep up this level of excelling life plus more. You’re literally about to enter the actual adult world after this year. You need to figure out your plan even if you don’t want to. You gotta make moves to get where you want. Such as staying home or moving out as soon as possible. Get a woman, it’s time to be more proactive about your love life because if you don’t make moves, no one’s gonna do it for you. Maybe tell people how you actually feel if you feel for them. Still have to take risks. I don’t think past Deanna has taken any REAL risks. Like a risk that makes you sweat and super anxious beforehand but could be very worth it. But you’ve always had a logical side, so maybe listen to it if it’ll make your life better in the long run. I’ll continue later but I have to eat first. You are your own grown ass adult now, speak up for what you want. You can’t let other people dictate your outcome of situations. Take control of you situation. Take control of your situation. Be a good friend. You’ve gotten better at it by leaps and bounds, but there’s always room for self-improvement. Be appreciative of how far you’ve come. Don’t beat yourself too much, you still tend to do this from time to time. Take your own advices? I don’t think you’ve had to apply this yet, but you could try giving yourself a few pointers. Keep yourself tidy. Clean your room more often when you’re at school. Things pile up, and a cleaner space tends to give you a clearer mind. Keep in touch with those you don’t see as often. You tend to spend all your time with one group of people instead of reaching out more. This is why you don’t see some people enough. Develop this skill now and it’ll translate in the future. I think I’ll keep it to this for now, you’ll gain more wisdom as you endeavor into your final months at UCSD. Stay lit, stay safe, and be you. :)
-Deanna Wong 7/30/18
This is just some back and forth between myself that I had for the first 3 years of my college life. I’ll save my last year for another post. I feel like between each year I had some improvements, but a lot of the stupid stuff I did more or less are from all my non-sober nights in college. It’s kind of the same thing over and over but just with different people and different circumstances. Looking back at everything now, I’ve really become a lot more of a stable person. I don’t regret a single moment of undergrad. Although I find it really strange I felt like I needed to have a girlfriend at some point. I honestly with so occupied with my own life that I really did not need to add someone else to the equation. And even now I’m still kind of ok with my independence, maybe a bit too ok with my independence. I think honestly the right person will just come at the right time. I really think I need to give the meeting someone in the real world a shot. Well not now since California is in a lockdown but after this pans over I’ll try to go out there and find the love of my life.
Stay safe out there y’all and don’t go spreading too many germs. I’m out gonna be raving in my house haha.
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Fun times: that literal motherfucker of @hominishostilis wrote a response to a post that I made all the way back in 2017. Except that I discovered it just now, because he blocked me a long time ago because I dared to point out that he defended literal Nazis.
Anyway, since I hate him, here’s my reply to him.
1) You’re lying, lol. Not only did you call basically anything “repetition” without actually making any sort of argument, but you also called basically anything “false” without actually making …. any sort of argument.
This is completely false, by the way. For example, Hominishostilis claimed that me calling Richard Spencer “the father of the alt-right” was the funniest thing they ever heard anyone call Spencer. In response, I...
Linked to Wikipedia’s page about Richard Spencer, which describes his views in detail.
Linked to Wikipedia’s page about the Alt-Right movement, which explains where the movement came from and specifically cites Spencer’s webzine “The Alternative Right” as one of the sources of the movement.
I pointed out that Spencer was the one who coined the term “alt-right”.
I pointed out that Spencer is a speaker and organizer of many alt-right meetings.
I pointed out that Spencer promotes the same ideals as the alt-right.
I pointed out that a good chunk of alt-righters looks at Spencer as a leader.
This is NOWHERE near “calling basically anything “repetition” without actually making any sort of argument”, or near “calling basically anything “false” without actually making any sort of argument”.
Kind of like when you ignored huge swathes of things that factually proved you wrong in leu of presenting any actual rebuttal to them.
Note how Hominishostilis will never - and I mean NEVER - actually mention one single thing that 1) was supposed to factually prove me wrong and 2) I ignored without presenting any rebuttal.
2) It’s my post, on my blog - why would I need to link to it?
This requires some context.
You see, in this post, I answered one of Hominishostilis’ posts... without reblogging said post, because Hominis’ post was utter shit, and I didn’t want that shit on my blog. However, I always quoted the bits that I was addressing, without altering them; most importantly, at the beginning of my post, I placed a link to Hominis’ post. That way, if someone wanted to see Hominis’ post in full (for example, to see if I represented his post accurately, or if instead I deliberately omitted important stuff from his post), they could’ve done so.
Hominishostilis threw a shitfit, as you can see in this thread. He claimed that I edited his reply (I did not), then smashed what’s left together, out of context, as some kind of “gotcha” (it wasn’t a “gotcha”). He claimed that I cut out HUGE sections of his argument (because they were useless repetition), snapped up the quotes I figured I could use to misrepresent his argument (I represented his argument accurately), and then blocked him so that he couldn’t even reply (HE was the one who blocked ME). He also claimed that I was wrong to not reblog his post, because apparently I knew that lazy people would just read my response and agree with me (this doesn’t explain why I linked to Hominishostilis’ full post...).
The hypocrisy comes from the fact that not only Hominishostilis did NOT reblog my post; but, unlike me, he didn’t quote anything from the post that he was responding to, and didn’t link to the post he was responding to.
3) You literally can’t prove that, but you continually assert it as some kind of fact.
This refers to my claim that Trump is a fucking bigot. And yes, I did prove it. I asserted it as some kind of fact because it IS a fact.
You present it as a black/white situation while ALSO asserting there’s no other options besides the ones you present,...
That’s because there literally weren’t any options. Trump is a bigot; that is an undeniable fact. People who voted for him either knew that fact, or not; in the former case, they either considered Trump’s bigotry a positive trait, or a negative one. There are no other options. If you voted for Trump, the only possibilities are:
You didn’t knew that Trump was a bigot. You voted for him.
You knew that Trump was a bigot, and considered it a positive quality. You voted for him.
You knew that Trump was a bigot, and considered it a negative quality. You voted for him anyway.
...and that “by all evidence Hillary would have been better” - another assertion you can’t prove, lol.
Note that he never proved that Hillary would’ve been worse.
4) Bigotry “literally” doesn’t kill people.
This claim is completely and utterly absurd, not to mention contrary to all evidence and reason.
It’s also not an excuse to assault people because you *think* they might *eventually* hurt someone.
Yes, it is. If you have reason to believe that someone will harm other people, you’re allowed to act to stop them. It’s that easy.
What people label “hate speech” and “bigotry” has also been stretched over opinions that aren’t even hateful.
This is hilarious, considering that he constantly defends bigotry.
That’s the point you keep conveniently ignoring - you’re still pretending that only the most evil of evil people are the ones being attacked when it’s not. You’ve ignored all evidence of this and dismissed it because that would require you to think critically for two seconds.
No, I did not ignore that. However, I know the following:
One: only a relatively small minority of people on the left attacks inncoent people for no reason.
Two: Hominishostilis is an unreliable narrator. He actively defends neo-Nazis and denies that they did anything wrong. When people correctly called the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville “Nazis”, Hominis falsely claimed that they called innocent non-Nazi people “Nazis”. So, his word isn’t valid evidence. This means that, when he claims that we’re attacking innocent people, we cannot accept his word as evidence.
5) http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Trump+supporter+set+on+fire , you are a moron.
Hominishostilis is trying to rewrite what happened. The context is that he linked me to a video, claiming that it showed “Trump protesters literally sett[ing] a Trump supporter on fire”. I pointed out (correctly) that the video did NOT show what he claimed.
6) He really isn’t. I explained that rather thoroughly, but you again chose to ignore that whole argument and circle back to your “well he DOES STUFF VAGUELY LIKE NAZIS!!”,...
This is false, by the way. Both the claim that Spencer is not a Nazi, the claim that I ignored his “arguments”, and the claim that my arguments bioled down to “well, he does stuff vaguely like Nazis”.
then accused me of “defending him” (LOL) He’s a white nationalist, he’s a racist, but he’s still not a “Nazi”. You’re the New McCarthyists, but instead of The Red Menace it’s “errebody is a NAZI!” Not every racist nationalist is a Nazi.
Presented without comment.
7) Addressed this - it’s not just “Nazis” being attacked, it’s not even mostly “Nazis” being attacked. It’s mostly ordinary people, fellow leftists, and anyone who seems even vaguely conservative these days.
I’m cutting out this bullshit because, besides having been already disproven a million times, there’s the fact that the evidence that he brought to support his claim (his own word)... simply isn’t enough.
8) Nope. Debate them, mock them, show people how indefensible and stupid their arguments are. We’ve gone over this twice now, my guy - it’s not “Nazis” being suppressed.
Blah blah blah, I’m cutting out more bullshit.
Also, fun fact: this entire thing originally started when tumblr user Slimetony wrote: “how dare you advocate violence against people who advocate violence. let them advocate violence in peace. who are you to suppress their right to advocate violence.” Which highlights the hypocrisy of certain people (alt-righters included), who have no problems with bigots advocating violence for no reason; but have big problems with people who advocate for violence against bigots.
Slimetony mocked alt-righters, and showed how indefensible and stupid their arguments are.
Hominishostilis got pissed. He couldn’t accept it. He couldn’t accept the fact that Slimetony highlighted Hominis’ hypocrisy.
9)Until someone acts on it, that’s exactly what they are. They’re just words.
You know, I issued a challenge to all those who claim that hate speech - including advocating in favor of discriminating against / deporting / harming marginalized groups for no reason other that they dare to exist - is protected by “free speech”. The challenge is to:
Find one space (an online community, a country, a political party, an organization...);
Where hate speech (described above) was freely allowed;
Where bigotry did NOT quickly spread within said space, becoming more common and worse as a result.
Literally nobody who tried my challenge has ever succeeded. Ever. Which leads to the following conclusion:
When a space freely allows hate speech, it ALWAYS leads to said bigotry spreading within that space, becoming more common and worse as a result.
So, yes, hate speech, despite being “just words”, leads to violence unless challenged. If challenging it requires fists, I don’t have any problems with it - because it means that said hate speech is quickly leading to causing violence, at which point I’ll have to use my fists anyway.
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Coldflash - “Far from Helpful” (Rated PG13)
After a blast meant for Leonard Snart knocks Barry out cold and wipes his memory, Len follows the team back to STAR Labs to make sure he's alright. Of course, not being entirely welcome, he has to sneak in. But after one small slip of the tongue, Len might find himself watching over Barry permanently. (2359 words)
Written for @sparroet
Notes: This is the first iteration of the story I wrote for @coldflashweeks Valentine’s exchange 2019 prompt - Barry suffers a permanent injury that affects his work as Flash and Len helps him to work out where to go next. Warning for a serious injury involving blood.
Read on AO3.
“Hey, Red. I’m telling ya, we have to stop meeting like this,” Len says in a low voice, gruff from barking orders that didn’t matter worth dick since no one listened to him anyway. If they had, maybe Barry wouldn’t be lying on a gurney down in the med center of STAR Labs, slipping in and out of consciousness.
Maybe he wouldn’t have had the ever-loving shit beat out of him … again. Even the fights Barry does win usually end up with him getting bashed in the head or kicked in the stomach.
Just because he has the power to super heal doesn’t erase the fact that Barry Allen gets beat up a lot.
Len is also a bit worse for the wear – a gash on his right cheek that might require stitches, a blackened left eye, an arm he’d thought was broken wrapped tight in an ACE bandage. But that’s nothing compared to what happened to Barry – slammed in the gut by a high-intensity photon blast that was meant for Len and thrown over two hundred feet straight up. Had Barry come back down the way he went, Len might have been able to break his fall, plus his whole body in the process. But Barry had traveled, and Len abandoned the fight, abandoned his team, to go on the search. Halfway out of town, Len found Barry skewered on an iron fence post, the spear-like tip protruding from his chest and covered in blood. When Len saw him - bent impossibly backward with arms and legs limp - his heart stopped.
He thought his boy was dead this time for sure.
Then along came Cisco and Caitlin, and boy, do they have a convenient sense of timing. They had nothing to do with Len finding Barry, but they sure did rush in and scoop him up as if he was theirs and theirs alone. They barely gave Len a thank you, barely looked him in the eyes.
When it comes to him, Len has discovered, even when he’s fighting on their side, they don’t consider him on their side.
Perhaps that’s the way it should stay.
Caitlin did take a second to check out Len’s arm and wrap it up, but that was a consolation prize. A token.
The literal least they could do.
But it was also a message. In their eyes, it made them square. Now Len’s job was over, and it would be best for everyone if he stepped back and left Barry alone.
Right. Like that was going to happen.
Caitlin and Cisco packed Barry up in their ‘Flash-mobile’ and left Len alone out in the middle of nowhere, probably all sorts of assured that he wouldn’t make it back to STAR Labs anytime soon.
And, as usual, they were wrong.
Not only was he fifteen minutes behind them the whole time thanks to his newest acquisition – a beat-up old Indian motorcycle he’d spied quietly rusting in an otherwise vacant driveway on his way out of town – but he’d managed to let himself into STAR Labs super slick and steal away into Barry’s room the second the Wonder Twins ducked out. Sure they’ll be watching Barry like a hawk so of course they’ll find him, but now that he’s in, he’d like to see them try and kick him out.
Len gives Barry a once over, head shaking with disgust and disappointment.
And guilt.
Barry looks okay. Aside from a few scratches, he’s the same as always … on the outside. From what Len could make out while Caitlin and Cisco were talking, the blast scrambled Barry’s brain like an omelet, hence his constant waking up and knocking out. From the times they were able to talk to him, Barry didn’t know his name, didn’t know where he was, who they were, or that he was The Flash. They hooked him up to a dozen or so machines monitoring his brain waves, his temporal lobes and whatnot, but when he finally comes to for longer than a minute, they have no idea what he’ll remember.
Or if the memories he’s lost will ever come back.
They also can’t tell with absolute certainty if Barry is still a meta. The blast doesn’t appear to have eliminated his power to heal, but it slowed it to a crawl. Hence why he’s down here while the net that is the Speed Force sews him back together, albeit at an infuriating rate.
And why it hasn’t worked on his brain? That’s another mystery altogether.
Len moves sections of Barry’s blankets aside to assess the damage for himself. Large hematomas mar Barry’s skin like a battle-scarred landscape. Len’s gaze falls on the blood-stained bandages covering the hole in Barry’s chest and sucks a breath in through his teeth. By rights, any man who sustained an injury like that should be dead. Since that blast was aimed at Len, that means he should be dead right now – dead and gone while a still young and vibrant Barry Allen mourns for all of fifteen minutes the twisted, dysfunctional non-relationship they have, one where Barry constantly reminds Len that there’s good in him as if that means something, and Len spends his nights seething because the good Len wants inside of him is Barry.
“Jesus Christ, you know, you gotta stop taking the blows that I’m supposed to take. When it’s my time, it’s my time. Nothing you can do is going to change that, Red, no matter how good you think I am.”
“Wh-why … do you keep calling me … Red?” a gravelly voice struggles with as Barry turns his head to look Len’s way.
Len shrugs, taking a seat in the chair beside Barry so he won’t have to move anymore. “It’s just a nickname I have for you. That’s all.”
Barry relaxes back into his pillow now that the object of his attention has conveniently moved into view. Eyelids narrowed, he stares at Len, soaking in the particulars of the man in front of him. “Who ... who are you?”
“Who do you think I am?”
“I … I don’t know, but … you seem so familiar.”
“I should. I’m your husband,” Len teases without thinking, sarcasm stepping in when the alternative means revealing too much at an inconvenient time. Why not? It breaks the tension. Barry is more than likely not going to remember this conversation. Besides, Len is dying to see the look on the kid’s face as he tries to comprehend that this tired, filthy, broken old man is his spouse.
And Barry doesn’t disappoint. His head jerks back a hair. His eyes widen. His jaw works around wordless questions.
In short, he looks thoroughly confused by life.
“You … you are?”
“Yup.”
“But … but the doctors that were in here … they didn’t tell me.”
Len pats Barry’s hand. “They don’t like me. I sometimes think they’d like to forget I exist.”
“Oh …” Barry’s eyes dart back and forth, scanning his brain for any nugget of a sliver of a memory of him being married to the man sitting in the chair next to him. Several long seconds tick by. Len watches Barry’s face with an intense curiosity and mild amusement, waiting for his inevitable surrender back into unconsciousness that will herald the end of this charade. Then Len will sit and guard over Barry for as long as he can before his obnoxious wardens return. But Barry doesn’t surrender to sleep. He smiles, an unexpected realization overwhelming him that adds color to his pale cheeks and light to his blank-slate eyes. “Oh … my God! We’re … we’re married?” Barry laughs before Len has a chance to answer. “Wh-what … what lottery did I win to get you?”
A vision of the fight they were in not two hours ago rolls through Len’s brain, how Barry got hit, then flew so hard he blinked out of sight like a cartoon character.
“Let’s just say I swept you off your feet.”
“I thought … I thought it was a dream …” Barry continues. “I didn’t think it could be real.”
Len chuckles, assuming Barry is thinking of that same take-off moment, until he keeps going.
And then Len’s heart stops a second, longer time.
“We met in a theater … didn’t we?”
“I guess you can say that.”
“We had a wedding on the beach … and our honeymoon … camping at the Grand Canyon …” A spark twinkles in Barry’s eyes that Len has never seen. It’s not the lightning that lives inside him, that erupts to mirror his emotions. It’s different – just as supernatural, but more inexplicable. It sends chills down Len’s spine, and that’s something that doesn’t happen too often.
“Ho---honeymoon?” Len’s legs go numb. He turns at the waist, looking for a place to sit until it dawns on him that he’s sitting already.
“Yeah.” Barry’s smile grows and takes a bashful twist. “You and me in a two-person tent on the South Rim, drinking champagne and watching the sun set …”
Voices echo in the hallway. Urgent voices. More than just Cisco and Caitlin. It sounds like Joe might be with them, along with a few other members of the CCPD. Len doesn’t hear what they say, but he has his suspicions that they’re talking about him.
“Shoot!” Len hisses, wishing the oncoming invasion could take a powder for about five minutes so that Barry can finish telling him about that honeymoon. From the shade of red Barry’s cheeks have become, it must have been good. But it would probably be a good idea if he retreats to his favorite air vent for the time being. “Look, kid, I’m going to have to …” He springs out of his seat but Barry grabs his hand with a speed that confirms that yes, he definitely still is a meta.
“Wait, what are you doing? Where are you going?”
“I need to bow out for a minute. But don’t worry. I won’t go too far.”
“Go? What … no! Don’t … don’t leave! Please?”
The voices become louder, accompanied by hurried footsteps, and Len curses under his breath. Before this little adventure began, weren’t they all allies? On a temporary basis, but playing on the same team? “Barry, I’m sorry, but I have to.”
“Why!?”
Len looks into Barry’s pleading eyes and sighs. Yup, leave it to him to take a joke too far, and now here he is - married to The Flash and sixty seconds away from being locked behind bars.
“Remember those doctors I said don’t like me?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, they’re coming back, and from the sounds of it, they’re bringing the police.”
“But, why does that matter?” Barry scans the room, searching frantically for help. “You’re ... you’re my husband!”
“They may not see it that way.”
“I’ll make them see! Just … wait here and we’ll get this straightened out. Please? Please stay?”
Len opens his mouth, but even though he has to, he can’t say no. He shakes his head, taking a step away, and Barry goes into full blown panic mode.
“They said I could have whatever I wanted! Have whoever I want in here with me! Whatever would make me comfortable! If you’re my husband, then I want you! We’ll tell them that I’m … I’m not staying here without you! I’ll … I’ll get up and leave!” Barry plants his hands on the mattress pad beneath him and tries to sit up. “I swear!”
“Shhh, easy now, kid. Don’t get carried away.” Len puts his hands on Barry’s shoulders and in an instance feels him relax, which makes Len want to punch himself in the throat. He did this – him and his frickin’ inability to not make a joke out of everything. Maybe he and Barry don’t always meet on the same side of the law, but he’d never want anything bad for Barry.
Which is why he keeps his distance on the day to day. If Leonard Snart is anything, he’s bad for Barry.
But for some reason, Barry seems to believe wholeheartedly that he’s married to Leonard Snart. And not just believes it, but has memories of it. But where those memories came from, Len doesn’t know. He didn’t say enough to plant any subliminal thoughts in Barry’s mind, nothing as detailed as a wedding on the beach, or a honeymoon. Where did that all come from? Could it be a side-effect of the memory wipe? Cisco specifically said ‘scrambled Barry’s brains like an omelet’. Those were his exact words. Barry’s mind manufacturing a wedding that never happened sounds like the kind of thing a scrambled brain might do.
Or is there a chance that those thoughts were there in Barry’s mind already? Fantasies hidden that the accident unlocked?
Does Barry, on some level, have feelings for Len that venture outside of the hero-villain dynamic they’ve so masterfully cultivated?
As much as Len would like to investigate that possibility, he can’t. They have a situation here that he doesn’t have an easy fix for.
But maybe he doesn’t want one.
Len knows that this can’t go anywhere but downhill, for him and for Barry. But he also knows he can’t back out on Barry now. Not with those eyes staring at him as if he’s the only thing keeping Barry tethered to planet earth.
No one’s ever looked at him that way, with that level of need. Not even his sister.
It’s also not lost on him that this is the longest Barry has managed to stay awake since he arrived at STAR Labs. That in itself is a reason for Len to stay.
What Len doesn’t know is how the hell he’s going to pull this off.
Make a plan. Execute the plan. Expect the plan to go off the rails. Throw away the plan.
Welp. He seems right about on par.
He squeezes Barry’s hand gently. To his own surprise, he leans forward and gives him a kiss on the forehead.
“All right, Red,” he whispers. “I’ll stay. We’ll … figure this out.”
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@seananmcguire i just finished The Girl in the Green Silk Gown and, as a writer myself, im reasonably certain my takeaway wasnt the intended one, but i know for a fact that if someone had this kind of reaction to something i had written, i would want to know about it, so im tagging you. call it professional courtesy
this book crystalized my heretofore nebulous understanding of how i view the world. not in the sense that i now believe the ghostroads are the literal truth of the world, but the way magic accumulates rings truer than anything else i’ve read. so much so that it allowed me to put my preexisting beliefs into words
someone asked me, once, not long after my first forays into the world of queer shit, cripple shit, and people who are neither christian nor ex-christian atheists, whether i believe in magic. ii gave some carefully measured answer about how i believed that belief has power and i recognize that people who believe in magic perceive effects from it. i was very careful to avoid claiming that their religious practice was hokum while also kicking the can wrt my own spiritual journey. that non-answer was my go-to until i realized the applicability of a mantra from homestuck to my beliefs: “magic isn’t real, but if you believe in it hard enough it becomes slightly less fake.”
at some point (time is fake) i pieced together my own religious framework, centered on the idea that religion and fandom are different words for the same thing, differentiated only by how much validity the general public affords them. most rennaisance paintings are bible fanart, The Divine Comedy and the Left Behind series are bible fanfic, and churches all over the world hold weekly meetups where people find community and build culture around their shared experience with a book that’s important to them. finding/constructing my own religion from scratch was, first and foremost, an exercise in recognizing the divine as it already existed in my daily life and acknowledging my worship for what it was. but for some reason, i never quite put that together toward magic.
then i met rose marshall
for the life of me, i can’t tell you which umpteenth discussion of the idea that distance has power made everything click for me, or even for sure if that was the concept that put me over the tipping point, but at some point, late-ish in the second book, i had to put it down for a moment. i realized that i had just passed an epoch in my life and that i had a new answer if someone asks me whether i believe in magic:
it’s a preposterous question. it’s better to ask what kind of magic someone puts their faith in, and whether they acknowledge it as magic. just about anything a person can do can be full of magic if they acknowledge it. there’s power in repetition, in community, in distance, in time, and in plenty of other things but they’re all the same thing if you look at them from the right angle.
i used to consider science and magic at odds with each other, reasoning that if magic existed it would be studied and subsumed by science. but the scientific method is just a ritual, practiced and occasionally refined by billions of people since aristotle put it forward over 2300 years ago. that brought humanity from the bronze age to capturing an image of an celestial body billions of times as massive as the sun and quadrillions of times as far away, which just happens to be defined by its invisibility, with no signs of slowing down
in the london underground, rose took note of the “mind the gap” signs all over the place and wondered “whether these people understand that this is how you craft a god.” i wrote this post because i wondered whether you knew that publishing a novel does the same thing, and to thank you because the snarky little psychopomp you put into the world got me exactly where i needed to go
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reaction post typed while watching SPN 14x05 “Nightmare Logic”
oh, what a perfectly soft and emotional Destiel-parallelly piece of Meredith Glynn artwork. so precious, so loved~
03:47pm
things i know about this: meredith glynn wrote it
LET’S WATCH
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03:50
noooo maggie don’t do things like this alooooone
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i like the music as she enters... kinda weird and sparkly and awkward
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03:53
sammy...... you know what you need
someone to do the night shift
if only...... you had.............. someone else........................
*looks pointedly at dean*
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03:55
where does sam get the financial resources for shit like body cams
we never see them running credit card scams any more so........ ???????
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03:57
i love these cable things by the roads
so aesthetic
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03:58
even more spooky pretty music as dean and sam enter the tomb
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03:59
dean and sam lie so effortlessly and so in sync
i always enjoy seeing them do this, ever since dean told a firefighter he needed to go back into his apartment because he has a yorkie who pees when he’s nervous
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04:01
aw man i thought the “colleagues” would be cas and jack
bobby and mary’s cool too
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04:02
bobby’s wearing a cap like michael’s
and mary’s wearing a coat like cas’
..does this mean this story’s gonna be about dean’s war between those two things, like the two worlds he knows
bobby’s parenting vs. mary’s parenting
michael’s need for him as a vessel vs. cas’ love for him as a bestest buddy bro friend
not sure how bobby = micheal / mary = cas but i’m sure there’ll be some kind of explanation later
OR maybe they’re just costumes and they mean nothing
but......is that ever true? trenchcoats are automatically a cas thing now. and that cap is so iconic as michael now???
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04:09
i relate to this lady in the suit who has had Too Much Of Everything
i enjoy seeing people know their limits and expressing them to others rather than continuing past breaking point
sam’s doing great but also....... no
take a page from this lady’s book, sammy
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04:11
mary’s walking with sam
and i just wanna take a minute to appreciate how EASY meredith glynn’s episodes are to watch
her scripts flow so gently and everything makes logical sense
and her characters are coherent
there’s just this nice touch of emotional human realism cloaking all the supernatural weirdness and i so, so appreciate that
like.. for me personally, there’s not a single writer on the current team whose writing comes close to glynn’s
i want her to write more episodes with cas though, i know she’d write him just right
i honestly feel like i’m being hugged by someone as i watch this
so soft around my heart
is good
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04:16
sam: “you [and bobby have] gotten pretty close lately”
mary: “i thought so too”
OH WAIT I GET IT
I GET THE COAT AND THE HAT NOW
IT’S A DESTIEL THING
OH MY FUCKING GOD HOW DID I MISS THAT
IT’S SO BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS HOLY FUCKING FUCKDISAFKDSHGF
even the casual viewers will probably have noticed this one. i know it took me a second but as soon as this discussion happened it clicked
this is probably the most obvious parallel they’ve ever done i think
i didn’t see it before because i didn’t EXPECT it, you know?? ugh this is so validating
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04:22
now every word mary says, i’m just envisioning how it applies to cas’ perspective too
“he’s been hunting all the time, he won’t take a break even for a second. there’s something on his mind”
yeah, that mICHEAL HAT, quite literally sitting over his head like a dark halo
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04:26
the music in this episode is just so pleasing to my ears
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04:31
things i appreciate:
normal people being all “wtf you hunt monsters” and just being present while dean and sam talk about their shit
sam’s reference to “hunteri heroici” (my all-time fave episode besides “scoobynatural” jdgd that was five years ago what the hell)
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04:35
me: takes screenshot of this very pretty, very anxious lady because i want my hair to do what her hair does
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04:36
oop we just found the dean mirror and now we get to hear someone talk about the things he feels and offer advice that ultimately helps himself
god i love this
AND THE FACT I CAN UNDERSTAND THIS PARALLEL AND WHY IT’S HAPPENING
AGAIN SOLIDIFIES THE DEAN/CAS THING WITH BOBBY/MARY
because what mary said about bobby = what cas thinks about dean = what’s true about dean = this lady being overworked = dean not taking time off from hunting
(although it does seem to specifically apply to sam as well ?)
and sam mentioned earlier about how the dad he knew and the dad mary knew were different people, plus the earlier mentions this season about john’s problematic parenting (i forget when)
yeah that really makes a point of saying john abused his kids, for sure
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lady: “he was gone all the time, working for us, he said”
yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep
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lady: “i worshipped him when i was a kid. didn’t know any better”
oh deanie
please take notes
please know it’s okay to be angry at john and not continue to love him in a way that excuses his behaviours, even 14 years after he died
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wait wait wait
dean tells her to let it go, it’s the past, there’s nothing you can do about it now so it’s just baggage
WAIT
THAT MEANS
THAT MEANS HE LET THAT SHIT GO ALREADY???????
WHOA
OKAY COOL. COOL COOL COOL I’M PROUD OF YOU
now go be gay with cas
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“i try. every single day.”
hell yeah dean winchester giving good mental health advice to people and also millions of depressed people with various traumas watching this
ngl this legit just helped me a tiny bit with my issues with my own dad
urhgutguugb meredith glynn you are the good we need in this world
..............suddenly getting real emotional because goddamn i wanna meet her someday ;~; i wanna meet 1. misha and 2. meredith glynn, maaaaybe 3. jensen idk
mEREDITH GLYNN IS MY KINDRED SPIRIT
and DEAN WINCHESTER HELPS ME BE A MORE SELF-ACCEPTING PERSON
yay
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04:49
no but like.......... everyone seemed to enjoy last week’s episode, i only saw people posting good reviews. and i felt bad not not enjoying it, even though all the things people pointed out should’ve been right up my alley, something about the overall thing just fell flat for me
but this one
this one speaks to my heart
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04:53
maggie: “i didn’t mean to get caught--”
sam: “no no no, stop that. you did nothing wrong. okay?”
sam being a better dad to maggie than john ever was to anyone
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04:57
OH NO BOBBY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OH NO!!!!!!!!!!!
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05:01
dean: “you’re giving him transfusions?”
nurse: “keeps up his iron”
suddenly i don’t trust the nurse
trying to take over the property maybe? a la scooby-doo, it’s always about real estate
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05:02
dean: “sasha, could you go....... make me a ....sandwich ?”
DEAN NO
(i type, in pain, as i laugh)
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/rewatches that interaction because it was actually really sweet the way dean mouthed “go” to sasha and she understood
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05:05
i’ve wanted a djinn story for SO LONG
(even wrote one myself - Prince of the Ether Realms)
trust glynn to be the one to re-weave the exact threads of this 14-year saga that also interest me specifically
also kudos for the fact she’s so obviously knowledgeable about the ENTIRE HISTORY of the show, as opposed to certain other writers who seem to contradict previous facts and re-reference things that were used differently before to make an important point, thereby nullifying the first point when used a second time
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05:11
hunter with the shaved head 10/10 style
headcanoning them as non-binary and into girls because of reasons
also there was a slight continuity error, this hunter hugs maggie twice in the two consecutive shots
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05:15
bobby: “it ends the same” [with bobby dead, i guess?]
mary: “no. you are not allowed to give up on me”
seeing this as dean and cas again
yeah i saw someone mention how at the end of last episode, dean suggesting they drive off a cliff and sam being like NOPE kind of reflected the wrongness of the they-all-die-at-the-end for the finale of SPN
and i think this brings it back to that again
i agree that the best ending is the one where they live to fight another day, not go out guns a-blazing
and this is cas telling dean he’s not allowed to give up and die because he wants to live side-by-side for as long as they can
i just really really want cas to say that to dean in a soft emotional scene like this. we don’t really get those unless they’re parallels??? and i wANT MORE DEAN AND CAS TALKING ABOUT THEIR FEELINGS DAMMIT
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05:20
DEAN AND CAS PARALLELS um i mean BOBBY AND MARY GOING OFF TO HANG OUT ALONE IN A CABIN OF LOVE AND HEALING
GDI LET DEAN AND CAS DO THAT TOO
but also awwww i actually kinda like the mary/bobby thing? because at the core, they ARE dean and sam’s parents, really
family don’t end with blood etc
bobby was the dad john never was
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05:23
sam: USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM
this is so satisfying
next up: hula hoops of salt and iron knuckle-dusters
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05:25
i love love love that dean can have a healthy mental approach to this shit, finally
i’m so fucking proud of him you don’t even know
i just......... i really wanna see him not only return to baseline mental goodness, but then overcome that and become greater at his zen thing, and then AT LAST be ready to accept cas’ love for what it is: romantic and everlasting and epic, and not have to interpret it into something else or ignore it to protect himself
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05:28
that light over dean’s shoulder is the angel on his shoulder
but is it michael or cas?
i’m going with cas, given that michael is a dark-hat-halo
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05:30pm
it’s over
that was amaziiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing ;u;
bless meredith glynn for existing and bringing us such beautiful stories
BUT WHAT HAPPENED WITH THE GARDENER
WHY WAS HE THERE besides to ~add some colour~??? and i guess a red herring for viewers, so we have someone to suspect?
(idk. i never suspected him, because he was black and meredith glynn is better than that - unless she was trying to trick racist viewers?? (i know there's a lot of them, i saw the super-toxic comment section on instagram when jared, jensen and misha posted a “vote beto” thing the other day. and there was a poll mentioned at comic con once, half the american spn fanbase are republicans??? guess they really love guns and fascism))
i don’t really have anything to add here, i said it all as i went along
that dean/cas parallel....... oh boy
just please please please pleASE can we have Actual Destiel and not just parallels and hints. like. they barely talk???????? HOW IS THIS A SHOW WHERE TWO OF THE MAIN LEADS ARE CONSTANTLY FRAMED TO BE IN LOVE, WE’RE TOLD THEY’RE BEST FRIENDS, BUT WE ALMOST NEVER EVEN SEE THEM TOGETHER ANY MORE
HOW IS THIS HAPPENING
anyway the costuming was just so very UNSUBTLE and obvious and i think a lot of people would’ve caught that parallel even if they weren’t looking for it
music was good, directing was good, sasha’s hair was good, nobody we know actually died, that was good too
10/10
ten thumbs up
yeee
#WHOOOO WHAT A GOOD ONE#Meredith Glynn#14x05#nightmare logic#spn spoilers#season 14#Elmie watches things#post of postiness
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What ever happened to the other TQftL one-shot? I know one of them ended up as chapter 76, but the other one? I remember you posted the first few sentences from it on the quest blog since those were non-spoilery (which the server ate years ago along with a bunch of other good stuff), but is this still a thing or did plans change or something? This has been bugging me for a while now.
One-Shot A ended up as the first scene of chapter 75, the one with Mitch! One-Shot B was parts of chapter 76. Technically later there was a third one, ‘chaletwo.docx’, about Chaletwo and Mew shortly after Chaletwo’s creation, half of which became the inspiration for the final scene of chapter 76 and the other half of which (unfinished) never made it in as I deemed it unnecessary. I talk about that one a little in the chapter 25 commentary that’s going up tomorrow.
I think you may actually be referring to the QftLverse creation story that I wrote, though, because I did post an excerpt from that, but I don’t think I ever posted an excerpt from One-Shot A (it would’ve given too much away, I think). That would be this thing here. I was originally going to make that an extra at the end, but ultimately I pretty much just fit the really relevant information into chapter 76, so I didn’t feel it was needed.
I guess I can post the rest of that, though, for the hell of it! It’s a poor attempt at mythical writing last edited in 2008, so please excuse the general badness, but. (Serious spoilers if you haven’t read the fic.)
“Far, far backin the mists of time, there was no world. There was just chaos and, in itsmidst, an egg, or something like an egg in any case.
“And the egghatched, and out of it came Arceus, the Original One. And two others he made tospring out from himself, Dialga and Palkia, and with them came the fourdimensions of existence. And the third sprang out of him too, Giratina, and itbrought about the law that everything must perish.
“And when thedimensions had come into being, a little grain of potential began to expandinto the nothingness to fill it; and thus was formed the universe with all ofits laws and elements; and because the dimensions never ended, so it is stillexpanding to this day.
“But whenArceus saw the universe, he could see more potential, and wished to createLife. And he created by his will a being into the universe and named it Azelf.And it had will as he did.
“But Arceusshook his head and said: No, this will not do; and he used his knowledge andexperience from the previous creation to create another being and named itUxie. And it was wise, but it still lacked.
“So Arceusagain shook his head in despair and said: No, I must try again. And he createda being and called it Mesprit, and it could feel emotions as he did. But it wasstill lacking, and Arceus was exhausted.
“And theOriginal One had nearly given up when he realized what he should do. He toldthe three living beings he had created: I am unable to create a living soul;for Dialga and Palkia are not living, and none of you has the full makings of asoul. But I was selfish: I worked alone, and now my power is exhausted. No, youshall instead create a living soul: work together, and you shall manage what Idid not. For I was a fool.
“And the threebeings nodded, and they linked their paws in a circle and closed their eyes toconcentrate. And together, they created the perfect being that had a fullliving soul: it had knowledge, will and emotion all in one. It resembled thembut was still different, and the warmth of its heart gave it a light pink colorunlike their cold blue.
“And it openedits eyes, and they were brilliantly blue; and Arceus told it: Welcome to theworld, young soul; I shall call you Mew, and you shall be the Creator. Youshall now be able to create living beings from yourself, for you havecreativity and imagination; and the first you shall create shall be thePreserver who will protect life from evil and destruction, and then you shallcreate many beings like yourself to watch over your creations, while you shallcreate other beings who will be mortal and eventually die. And to the threebeings who had made it he said: Well done, and now I shall entrust you withwatching over Dialga and Palkia for me, for I am exhausted and will now go tosleep.
“And Arceuswent to sleep, and Mew rose up and began to create the Immortals; and the firsthe created he called Celebi, and Celebi could travel through time to help guardlife from evil. And many other Immortals Mew created, and many Mortals hecreated as well, and the Immortals would each watch over a portion of theMortals.
“But theImmortals grew arrogant, and began to rule over the Mortals to make them dotheir bidding. And their selfish thoughts manifested themselves in a being,Darkrai, which injected their malice into Arceus’s dream as he slept. And hewoke up, knowing that a nightmare of such evil could only be born frommalicious feelings, and saw what the Immortals were doing.
“FoolishPokémon! he said: he was angered that they had not known better, and grievedthat they could harbor such emotions, and afraid for what this might mean abouttheir intentions. Were you not created to watch over and help the Mortals, notto enslave them and make yourselves superior to them? With this action, youhave forgone your right to immortality.
“And Arceus’sanger, grief and fear shattered his soul, and they manifested themselves in abeing: Chalenor, the Destroyer, the True Immortal, whom even the Immortalscould not harm. While the soulless and powerless Arceus returned to sleep forall eternity, Chalenor would teach the Immortals that they should have to knowweakness and fear death.
“Chalenor’spresence, expressing the last will of Arceus, would slowly strip all Pokémon oftheir power, bit by bit, and then make them destroy one another until only one wasleft, who would become a new Creator and start the cycle anew. But because theMortals were mortal, the generations passed one by one, and slowly but surelythey grew to resist the draining of their powers; but the Immortals did notevolve and remained as vulnerable as they had ever been: their immortality wastheir curse.
“But theImmortals blamed Chalenor for their fear, and they tried to attack him manytimes; but they would always fail, because Chalenor was a True Immortal.
“So manycycles passed; but when Arceus’s soul had shattered, it had planted a seed of asoul in the depths of the Destroyer’s heart: he began to feel the sufferingthat he brought upon the Immortals, and to long for the company of another, butthe Immortals feared and despised him, and in his eternity of life, the livesof the Mortals seemed to pass as merely a drop of water in an endless stream.
“Chalenor waslonely, as no being since has ever felt loneliness.
“But then, atlast, one of the many incarnations of Mew – for the Creator’s first work wasalways to honor his predecessor and create another Mew – felt pity forChalenor. They talked and began to understand one another, as no being sincehas understood another being; and Chalenor felt joy and calm and love for thefirst time. But the thousand years that Mew was destined to live passed like abreeze, and though Chalenor wanted to save Mew from the fate of hispredecessors, he was unable to control the effects of his power, and Mew’s strengthwas drained day by day.”
I’m actually kind of impressed with the degree to which this thing is still accurate, for being last edited in 2008; I didn’t think I’d realized Chalenor’s emotive color-changing thing was rooted in being made of Arceus’s out-of-control emotions until later than that. But as the actual events are told in chapter 76, I ditched the bit about Darkrai that didn’t really add much of anything beyond hey look here’s how Darkrai comes into it, there’s more intentionality to Arceus creating Chalenor (the myth makes it sound like Chalenor just sort of happened when his soul shattered, although it does go on to say his presence was “expressing the last will of Arceus”, so it may just be a more mythlike way of saying the same thing), and Mew isn’t literally the first person ever to sympathize with Chalenor because come on, really.
The “and they understood each other MORE THAN ANYONE EVER” is a bit over-the-top too (and not really accurate, actually, what with them each managing to conceal their massive issues from one another), but I think we can chalk that up to the mythical writing.
(But they absolutely were the bestest BFFs.)
(Also why does the myth go on this long. Why does the myth go into Mew and Chalenor’s personal relationship and not just stop at Chalenor developing a soul. I guess the reason I cut it off so abruptly there was that I realized oh whoops this myth shouldn’t actually be going this far along the timeline at all, this is One-Shot B material now, let’s stop.)
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