im sick of having knowledge and skills locked behind a paywall.

why is it always “well you need to pay at least $15,000 a year to learn that for four years before i even CONSIDER hiring you”??

whatever happened to “this is a fine young lad. he may only be seven but let me take him under my wing and teach him the ways of being a blacksmith so he may one day be my successor”???

Learn And Enhance Your English with "American Legend Story" Story | EnglishDailyDrift.com

John Chapman

Johnny Aplleseed was born near Boston in 1775. His real name was John Chapman. When he was a child he played in the forest and in the fields. His best friends were animals. He loved all animals. He played with them and talked to them. His family was very religious. Johnny’s first book was the BIBLE, but he also liked Aesop’s Fables. Johnny loved the tales about animals and their adventure.

When Johnny was a teeneger he worked as a missionary with the Indians. He converted many Indians to Christianity. He taught them about the Bible. The Indians were his friends

When he was 26 years old he had a vision.

An Angel appeared to him. The angel said, “ Go and plant apple seeds across America. The settlers of the new frontier want good apples to eat”

Johnny was surprised but he was happy. He was kind person and he wanted to help others. He took a big sack and filled it with Apple seeds. He carried this sack on his back. In one hand he carried the Bible, Aesop’s fables and othe religious books. Now he was ready to cross the continent and plant America’s favourite fruit : the apple

Johnny was an unusual man. He was tall and thin. He had a log hair and a beard. He never bought new clothes. he wore an old coffee sack and old clothes people gave him. he didn’t usually wear any shoes. He wore a saucepan on his head.

One of Johnny’s friend said :”God bless you, Johnny. We are happy for you. You are similar to St.Francis of Assis. He loved animals and lived a simple life.

Johnny said ,” I want to plant apple seeds across America. Every American family will have apple trees with good apples to eat”

In 1800 Johnny began his long journey across America. At that time America was very young country. The America continent was a wilderness. It was unexplored. There were no roads and few maps. This immense land was called American frontier. Many settlers wanted to explore the frontier.

Johnny walked from Massachussets to New York. From New York he walked to Pennsylvania. Then he crossed Ohio, Indiana and a big part of the Midwest. Everyday he moved west.

He travelled across America and planted apples seeds. He built fences atound the fields and then continued his journey. Settlers travelled to the frontier and foud apple orchards. They ate delicious fruit : green, red, and yellow apples. When the settlers found an apple orchard, they built a home there.

Other settlers dug up the apple trees and took them to new lands. Some of Johnny trees travelled to the west coast on the pacific ocean.

One day Johnny visited a family of settlers in the Midwest. This family loved books. He gave them a few pages from his books. ” You can read them and give them to me when I return in a few months,” he said. The family was very happy.

In this way, Johnny created the first library on the frontier. Many children learned to read thanks to Johnny and his library.

For many years Johnny walked thousands of miles across the frontier. He planted apple seeds, lent books, protected animals and made friends with settlers and Indians.

The Indians liked Johnny because he had no weapons and respected nature. Jonny learned to speak the languages of many tribes.

One summer morning many Indians arrived at a frontier village, The Indians wanted to destroy the village and kill the settlers. The Settlers wanted to send a messenger to a military fort to ask for help. The fort was 30 miles away. It was very dangerous. There were enemy Indians everywhere.

Johnny wanted to save the lives of the settlers. He knew all the secret paths in the forest and in the mountains. He was not afraid.

He took the message to the fort. The soldiers at the fort got on their horses and went to defend the settlers. A few years later, Johnny visited an Indians viilage. He heard the Indians chief say,” Many settlers live near the river. Tonight we will kill all of them”.

That evening Johnny ran to the home of every settler and said,” The Indians will attack you tonight. Run away ! Go and hide in the forest ! “ The settlers escaped to the forest and no one was killed.

Johnny loved all forms of human and animal life. He didn’t eat meat because he didn’t want to kill animals. He loved insects too. He loved and respected every living thing. He was very special person.

One autumn day, Johnny was near an apple orchard. He heard the cry of an animal. Behind a tree he found a deer.

“My poor friend !” said Johnny .” Don’t be afraid ! “

He examined the deer and said, “ Your leg is injured. I can help you.” The deer wasn’t afraid.

Johnny stayed with her the deer for many days and helped it.

“I am happy you can walk again. Go and run in the forest my little friend ! “

During a snow storm, Johnny wanted to sleep inside a small cave. He saw a big family of racoons sleeping inside the cave. He did’t want the racoons to go outside into the snow. So Johnny slept outside in the cold.

For almost 50 years, Johnny Appleseed helped the American frontier to grow. His apples trees, his books, his generosity and his kindness made the frontier a happy place.

Johnny became a legend during his life. Everyone loved him he was a true friend of the settlers, The indians and the animals.

In American today, people remember him with admiration. When American eat apple, they often think of Johnny Appleased who made apple trees grow all over America

For more videos check our youtube channel : https://www.youtube.com/@englishdailydrift

Source: https://kitin88.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/john-chapman/

Who'd like some good old fashioned name analysis?

Okay, so, I been doing so much research for Resident Evil stuff and learning shit about fairy tales and timelines and genome editing and searching for impossible Romanian poetry I got overwhelmed and went, fuck it. Why not just look at their names? Maybe I'll learn something there.

So, here I have done it. Name meanings for characters of the Mold Saga so far aka 7 and 8 aka Biohazard and Village.

(Sorry I'm on mobile I'll put a cut here when I can)

Ethan: Firm, enduring, strong, impetuous, long-lived. An incredibly consistently common and popular name. E name just like Eveline, so could be a successor of sorts to the mold.

Mia: Derivative of numerous other names of many possibilities. Mia as a word means “mine” in Italian and Spanish. Mamma Mia is a well known Italian phrase, particularly due to the ABBA song and musical of the same name, and it being the catchphrase of the Nintendo character Mario. The phrase means “my mom”.

Winters: First and last season of the year where everything becomes dormant and cold and either dies or sleeps.

Eveline: Contains “Eve”, as in both the biblical first woman. Also means a night before an event, and the game takes place in the span of one night. The name Eve means “ life”, “living one”, “mother of life”, or “giver of life”. Another possible name origin is as a variant of Aveline, which is a diminutive of Ava, which is the same pronunciation as the name Eva as pronounced in Village.

Baker: Occupational surname. In older times consider an upper-middle class job, much like the family. Also adds the emphasis of the “food” and also how they essentially make more molded.

Jack: God is gracious, supplanter. A nickname for John and other related names, but also a name in itself. It is also a word with a couple meanings, including a heavy lifting tool, to steal something, to take control of something, or an everyman.

Margueritte: Pearl. French name for ox-eyed daisy. Derived from Margaret. Sounds like maggot.

Lucas: Light. Derived from Lucius which means “the bright one” or “the one born at dawn”. Luke is also an Apostle of Jesus and was a physician.

Zoe: Life. Came from the name Eve. Fitting as Zoe was practically pushed out of the family after Eveline’s arrival, replaced as the daughter of the family.

Joe: He will add. Was added as DLC. Short for Joseph. Joseph is the name of multiple biblical figures. One is a child of Jacob and Rachel and Jacob’s favorite son in Genesis (note: Jack is a nickname for Jacob) who was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, but rose to become vizier, the most powerful position nest to the Pharoah, and forgave his family and brought them to Egypt. One is the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who loved and raised a child he knew was not his against social norms. Another is a disciple known as Joseph of Arimathea who notably took Jesus down from the cross for his burial and testified when he revived and was gone. 

Rosemary: Dew of the sea. Combination of Rose and Mary or the plant rosemary. Roses as a plant vary in meaning depending on color. Mary and its variations have many differing meanings, among them being, “beloved”, “love”, “bitter”, “rebellious”, “wished-for child”, and “drop of the sea”. There are also the allusions to Mary, mother of Jesus as she is sometimes worshipped with roses, and you say Hail Marys on your rosary which is only two letters from her name. In regards to the plant, it is relatively resistant to drought and cold, though some breeds are susceptible to frost and they don’t like too much water. They have fibrous roots, so they spread and fan out like we see with the mold. They thrive in more alkaline soils and seem to have been named by a taxonomist named Carl  Linnaeus. In stories, folklore, and tradition, the plants or flowers are often used for remembrance, specifically for the dead. It’s also been used as a spice and in medicine.

Miranda: Worthy of admiration. Latin in origin. Character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and whether she is a strong female character or not is highly debated, as she frequently defies men like her father, but often when they expect and/or want her to. She is otherwise compassionate and naive. The titular character of a Polish novel in which everyone is a mage and Miranda is a medium connected to another character, Damayanti, who is portrayed as the ideal woman and has a romance with the male protagonist, yet sacrifices her body so her spirit can experience a higher state of consciousness. Miranda can contact her soul, and disappears when she dies. Miranda in the US refers to the required practice by police of reading suspects their rights before interrogation.

Eva: Latin form of “Eve” and meaning “life”, “mother of life”, or “giver of life”.

Duke: A ruler of a duchy. A title bestowed by royalty or passed through family, often given to royalty or nobility, but can be given to anyone. In France,  the peerage system was abolished in 1789 (vive la révolution), brought back in 1814, and finally perma-abolished in 1848. 

(Note: While the wife of a duke becomes a duchess, the husband of a duchess does not become a duke. At least, from what I gather. This shit is confusing.)

Alcina: Strong-willed. Greek origin. There are two operas using the same story about a sorceress named Alcina who lives on an island with her sister Morgana and seduces every knight who comes to the island, but turns them into plants, animals, or stones when she bores of them. When the source of her power is destroyed, she, her sister, and their palace crumble to dust. The Hungarian name for Alțâna, a commune in Sibiu County, Romania in the historical region of Transylvania.

Bela: Bela Lugosi was an actor who famously portrayed Dracula. His name is Hungarian and meant to be spelled Béla meaning “heart”, “insides”, or “intestines”, roughly translating to “having heart” or “having guts” in modern terminology, as in being brave. However it is considered a male name and as Bela is female there is also the possibility of the influence of the name Bella short an l, Bella an Italian name meaning “beautiful”.

Cassandra: The one who shines and excels over men. Name of a Trojan princess and priestess in Greek mythology. She was given her gift of prophecy by the god Apollo but, in most versions of the tale, he asks for sexual favors in return, and she initially agrees but then rejects him once she’s gotten her gift. In anger he cursed her to always tell true prophecies that no one would believe and was thus thought a madwoman. She served a temple of Athena, goddess of wisdom, handicraft, and warfare. When Cassandra was assaulted and possibly raped in Athena’s temple and dragged out while desperately clinging to Athena’s statue, Athena was so enraged by the damage done to her temple and/or her priestess that she enlisted the help of both Zeus and Poseiden to exact revenge on the Greeks for failing to punish the man who attacked Cassandra and caused the resulting damage. Zeus gave her one of his own bolts of lightning and she struck them down at sea. While Cassandra was never believed, she was always right.

Daniela: God is my judge. Feminine form of Daniel. Daniela is also a genus of moth with only one species in the genus, Daniela viridis. It is also another name for the Italian wine grape Prè blanc.

Dimitrescu: Child of Dimitri. -escu suffixes in Romanian are like -son suffixes in English, it derives from parentage (ex. Jackson is Jack’s son, Dimitrescu is Dimitri’s child). Dimitri means “devoted to Demeter”. Demeter is the Greek goddess of the harvest, agriculture, sacred law (i.e. cycle of life and death), fertility, and the earth. Like many Greek myths, she is repeatedly wronged, and rather severely, by multiple male figures. Demeter in particular is a mother who has her daughter Kore, later known as Persephone, stolen away from her and goes on a rampage searching for her and those responsible.

(Note: Considering the founders had these names it’s a bit dumb seeing as this trend of parentage -escu names supposedly came about mid 19th century (1800s for those who find that confusing cuz I do), long after the Village was founded)

Donna: Lady or lady of the home. Italian name and a title of respect. Derives from the Latin term Dominus. The Romanian form of the word (not the name) is Doamnã. The Atropa belladonna aka deadly nightshade have berries and foliage that contain tropane alkaloids including atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine which are extremely toxic and can cause hallucinations and delirium, but are also used in pharmaceutical anticholinergics. Throughout history people cluelessly used the berry juice as eye drops to cosmetically dilate their pupils, giving them a seductive doll-eyed appearance. Symptoms of belladonna poisoning are dilated pupils, sensitivity to light, blurred vision, tachycardia, loss of balance, staggering, headache, rash, flushing, severely dry mouth and throat, slurred speech, urinary retention, constipation, confusion, hallucinations, delirium, and convulsions. The plant's deadly symptoms are in atropine’s ability to disrupt the parasympathetic nervous system’s involuntary regulation like sweating, breathing, and heartbeat.

Angie: Diminutive of many names containing “angel”. Angels are messengers and warriors of Heaven, a realm souls go after death. Angel statues are also common grave markers. Children are also often told they have guardian angels, a being watching over them to protect them.

Claudia: No sure meaning has been found, but some think it comes from claudus, meaning “lame”, “limping”, or “crippled”, or clausus, which means “shut” or “closed”.

Beneviento: Good wind. Neapolitan spelling of Benevento, the name of both a province and its capital city, located in the Campania region of Italy.

Salvatore: Savior. Italian name. In the movie version (I specify as I have not read the book and the movie synopsis has more on the characters) of The Name of the Rose, the character Salvatore is hunch-backed and twisted, and has a history of not-really-acceptable religious beliefs. He was also tortured and falsely accused of witchcraft. He dies when a library is set on fire.

Moreau: Moorish, dark-skinned. French surname. Titular doctor in The Island of Doctor Moreau, in which said doctor performs disturbing and torturous experiments on people and animals, especially through vivisection, to make beastial humanoid creatures.

Karl: Free man, strong man, manly. Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist who made notably important contributions to hydrodynamics, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles. Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, and socialist revolutionary who believed societies develop through class conflict, and in a capitalist society this is the “ruling” class (the bosses) having power over the working class. He believed people should have equal footing and should and would inevitably fight for it. Karl Jaspers was a German existentialist philosopher and psychiatrist. His humanist ideals had him dissatisfied with the medical community’s approach to mental health and worked to improve it, and philosophizing on it after.

(IMPORTANT NOTE: Since I’ve seen accusations of the RE character and his influences being so, I feel I must state it here. Karl Heisenberg is NOT a Nazi. Both Heisenberg and Jaspers lived through World War II and neither were Nazis. Jaspers was blackwalled because of his Jewish wife. Heisenberg was forcibly drafted into the Army Weapons Bureau, but pre-war he had been repeatedly slandered as a “white Jew” and his career held back, and post-war became more political, worked against traditional primacy in the education system, and actively protested the government considering equipping the army with American nuclear weapons. Capcom reps have also stated that Karl Heisenberg has nothing to do with Nazis.)

Heisenberg: Calling mountain (could not find a specific definition, “heisen” means “to call” and “berg” means “mountain or hill”). Reference to Werner Karl Heisenberg, (explained above). Likely unrelated, but another well-known (in the US at least) name thief of Heisenberg comes from the popular TV show Breaking Bad as the alias/street name for the main character Walter White who takes the name and starts selling drugs when he is unable to afford medical care for his in-need child, but grows more twisted throughout the series. Also place name.

Berengario: Italian form of Berengar, which is derived from Germanic root words meaning “bear” and “spear”.

Cesare: Italian form of the Latin word Caesar, which is an imperial title like an emperor or empress. The word Caesar itself may come from caesaries meaning “hairy”. 

Guglielmo: Italian form of the Germanic William, meaning “vehement protector” or “desired helmet”

Nichola: Anglicized form of the Greek Nikolaos meaning “victory of the people”. Also a variant of Nicholas (Considered a female variant but fuck gender roles and the description says he.). This character is also referred to as Father like a priest I looked into saints and while I found no notable Saint Nichola (meaning on Wikipedia) there are multiple Saint Nicholases, most notably Saint Nicholas of Myra, also known as the Wonderworker and the model of Santa Claus. Stories of him include gifting gold coins through a window of a home for three nights to prevent three girls from being forced into prostitution, calming a storm at sea, saving three soldiers from execution, and chopping down a possessed tree. More connected to where his treasure is found, there is also a tale of him resurrecting three children who had been murdered by a butcher who had had intended to sell their meat as “pork” during the famine.

*BONUS TIME*

By that I mean these are less important so I did slightly less research and/or didn’t  feel like typing all the research so there’s less info, but it’s still relevant, so here you go!

Chris: A rare name in its own right, often a shortened version of names like Christopher, meaning “Christ-bearer”, and Christian, as in the religion.

Redfield: Literally red field. Fitting for the trail of blood in his wake because have mercy on any of his enemies, but regrettably including many of his friends and allies (rip in peace Piers Nivans). 

Elena: Shining light. Greek origin.

Leonardo: Strong as a lion. Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese version of Leonard.

Lupu: Wolf. Romanian surname. Fitting as the surname of the man we saw become a lycan before our eyes. 

Luiza: Renowned warrior. Polish, Portuguese, and Romanian name.

Iulian: Romanian name from the Greek iulius meaning “youthful” or “juvenile”, or ioulos meaning “downy-bearded”.

Vasile: Romanian name from the Greek basileus meaning ”king”. Vasile Voiculescu wrote a poem called Schimnicul, The Recluse in English, about varcolacul.

(Note: For those who don’t recall or didn’t notice his name in Ethan’s diary, this is Luiza’s husband.)

Rolando: Famous throughout the land. Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese variant of Roland.

Elba: Spanish form of Alba, which can mean “dawn”, “white”, or “elf”, depending on origin.

Dion: Shorter form of Greek Dionysios meaning “of Zeus”.

Wilson: Lineage surname, “Will’s son”. Very common surname in English.

Charlie: A name in itself but often a nickname for names like Charles meaning “man” or “warrior”

Graham: Gravelly homestead. Habitational surname, apparently derived from Grantham in Lincolnshire, England.

John: God is gracious. The most common name ever with the most variations.

Perlman: Ashkenazi Jewish surname. Also literal, “perl” possibly meaning “pearl” thus being an occupational name, or Perl being a woman’s name making it mean “husband of Perl”.

Emily: Rival. Latin name. 

Berkoff: Could be Jewish, Dutch, or German surname. Definition not quite certain, but likely related to birch trees.

Josef: German, Czech, and Scandinavian version of Joseph.  

Simon: He has heard. From Hebrew Shim’on.

Roxana: Bright, dawn. Latin form of Greek Rhoxane and Persian Roshanak.

Anton: Priceless, praiseworthy, flower.

Sebastian: From the Latin name Sebastianus which meant “from Sebaste”. Sebaste is a town in Asia Minor and comes from the Greek word sebastos meaning “venerable”.

Eugen: Well-born.Romanian form of Eugene. From the Greek name Eugenios. 

(Note: This is the man who lived in the house with the red chimney.)

Ernest: Serious. Germanic name.

(Note: This man is noted to be missing in a letter to Luiza and his diary is found with the Cannibal’s Plunder in Otto’s Mill.)

Edit: Guess I’ll put this in here since everyone is just glossing it over to look for the negative parts. I never said you couldn’t ship SessRin. I never said I was anti-SessRin. I know I tagged it as such, but it isn’t because of my opinion. I have friends who ship SessRin. I love those friends. What I mean by these statements is that the community in general is toxic because of the people in it who have caused problems for others. Like, for example, the person who felt the need to jump me about my personal ship because it wasn’t with Rin when I wasn’t even talking about a ship. Or the people who harassed the English voice cast to the point that even they were calling the SessRin community toxic. Or the people who are fighting to have any Sesshoumaru shipping blog deleted if Rin isn’t involved. I am capable of peacefully sharing Sesshoumaru with other shippers if they could be civilized. But since they aren’t, then I feel like I have the right to speak my mind. And those of you who feel the need to fight me about it are just proving my point because you’re so worked up that anyone could have a different opinion that you absolutely have to argue. That being said, I also stated that I would never have said a word about this if it weren’t for the fact that Rin is underage in Yashahime. Sunrise is trying to lie about how much time passed. They clearly didn’t do their own math. And while I’m fine with SessRin shippers who ship her as an adult, I will not tolerate the people who justify her being underage in Yashahime. Also to those trying to argue about Yashahime being canon, I would love to provide the evidence to the statement I saw, but it’s gotten lost in the sea of people arguing about the show being canon. It was something along the lines of her saying the story wasn’t canon or wasn’t hers but the three girls were and that she was washing her hands of InuYasha and other’s could do what they wanted with it. Which kind of implies it’s not canon but she doesn’t care. If I find it again I will definitely share it. But if Rumiko steps up and actually says the show is canon, then I’ll accept it as canon. But that doesn’t mean I’m okay with Rin being underage. But go ahead and continue to comment with your ridiculous arguments. New edit: @tiny-foots​ It’s not what I saw but I was provided this where Rumiko stated InuYasha was complete within herself meaning the story was done. She left it up to Mr. Sumisawa to write. Take it as you will, but I see that as her giving the okay for a fanfic to be officiated. But I don’t see it as canon. I suppose that can be left up to interpretation. But my personal belief is that it’s not canon. Even before all this I never even saw the original anime as canon.

I am going to start off by saying that I always said I would never be anti-ship. But if this is what it's come to then I am completely against what is happening right now.

Let's just pretend my OTP isn't actually my OTP right now. What I ship has nothing to do with this. In fact I am a multi-shipper, so don't even think about that. This is beyond more than my personal shipping opinions. InuYasha was my comfort series during a very rough time and Sesshoumaru is my favorite character because of his massive character development and redemption arc. He is an astounding character.

The fact that Sunrise has "officially" (I refuse to say canon because it's not canon. Rumiko said so. Fight me!) paired him with Rin is the most disturbing and disgusting thing they could have possibly done. Again, I am not against people who do ship them. If that's what they enjoy then that's fine.

HOWEVER!

The SessRin community is toxic AF! They have been for a long time and now they've been given a reason to really be horrible people. And that's only one reason why I'm disgusted by this entire thing. And mind you, since Yashahime isn't canon anyway, I wouldn't have cared as much if they hadn't done it the way they had. Let me break this down for you. I'm going to list why SessRin is unhealthy, toxic, and morally wrong and I'll even list some of the justifying arguments shippers have tried to use to support it and explain why they're wrong too.

Pairing Sesshoumaru with Rin destroyed his character development and redemption.

Sesshoumaru's father had a strong desire to see his son learn compassion. Toward everyone! Humans and youkai alike. He learned that lesson through both a human and a youkai. Rin and Kagura. These were the characters who were meant to teach him to be compassionate toward others. By pairing him with Rin you have taken away that compassion that he learned. It's like sticking a giant middle finger up to all the humans he was supposed to learn to respect and say he only tolerates Rin and no one else. There goes his redemption! Way to go, Sunrise!

SessRin was never meant to become a thing.

Rumiko went out of her way to create a bond between Kagura and Sesshoumaru as well as Kohaku and Rin. It's clear who we were meant to ship them with. These characters were placed as a barrier between Rin and Sesshoumaru to avoid an improper ship. SessKagu is the ONLY canon Sesshoumaru ship.

No child in their right mind grows up to fall in love with the man who raised them from childhood.

And if they do then they need to seek counseling because that's not healthy. A normal child would grow up to view that man as her father.

And how about these lame and unjustifiable arguments that SessRinners are throwing out.

"He waited until she was an adult! She's 18!"

Do some research. She is not 18! Look at the the facts that have been compiled. She is 15 MAX. She's underage!

"This was normal back then!"

No it was not! Again, do your research! Nobility groomed children to be wives, yes, but it wasn't normal. Even then the girl wasn't bedded until she was an adult. Also, would you portray a black person, in media, as an abused slave in 1800s America by your story's "good guy" and say it's okay because it was normal back then?  I don't think so!

"They were meant to be together! It was a given! It was clear!"

Again, no it wasn't! Kagura was placed in the story for this purpose! She was in love with Sesshoumaru and he was falling in love with her. They are the ONLY canon Sess ship!

"Well, you're forgetting about the original series being about a 15-year-old girl getting with a 50+ year old man!"

There are so many reasons why this is an illogical statement. - InuYasha and Kagome met when they were mentally the same age. Sess and Rin met with he was mentally a young adult and she was EIGHT! - Kagome and InuYasha didn't have an official relationship until she returned from her time after three years... WHEN SHE WAS 18! - Every moment in the original story where Kagome was in an inappropriate situation she got mad and did something about it! She didn't just giggle and let the men around her ogle or touch her! - And my personal opinion, I also believe InuYasha and Kagome’s relationship was toxic anyway, so don’t try to hold that one over me. There’s a reason I’m a multi-shipper.

And one of my favorites, even from pre-Yashahime

"NO ONE is shipping child Rin with Sesshoumaru!"

Yeah? Go do a Google image search, you sickos. Edited to include this little treasure in the comments:

Who’s putting words in her mouth? She stated, in an interview plain as day, that Yashahime was not canon! She didn’t write it. An official publication does not canon make! Not to mention “the woman who changed him” is such an incredibly vague statement. If it was meant to be Rin, she’d have just said Rin. As mentioned before, she was very adamant about pushing the Kagura x Sesshoumaru ship. And Kagura definitely changed him. Was it not his compassion toward her specifically that regained his arm and gave him a sword? I’m pretty sure “the woman who changed him” was meant to be a vague statement because the canonical intention was just to leave it open to interpretation and is probably meant to be some random village woman who bonded with Sesshoumaru and ultimately completed his change.

And if, by chance, she did mean Rin, she didn’t say it was canon. Just that she was his wife meaning that is who Sunrise set as his wife in the show. Think about it? She was answering the question of “who had his children in Yashahime.” If she meant Rin, she was avoiding spoilers and giving a hint to who Sunrise chose as his wife. That’s not saying she would have picked Rin, herself. She didn’t write it. So it seems to me that you are the one putting words in her mouth.

Now tell me, if your best friend from grade school who was adopted told you when she was a teen or even an adult, "My dad's hot. We decided to sleep together." would you not find that disturbing? That's SessRin right now.

Also:

HANYOU NO YASHAHIME IS NOT CANON! THIS IS PER RUMIKO TAKAHASHI HERSELF! DO NOT TRY TO JUSTIFY THAT SESSRIN IS CANON NOW BECAUSE IT ISN'T! IT'S JUST AN OVERGLORIFIED AND POORLY WRITTEN FANFICTION!

ONLY THE MANGA IS CANON! OG SESSHOUMARU IS THE ONLY SESSHOUMARU!! That being said, I still say if you do happen to be a SessRin shipper, then you do you. Enjoy what you want. But what is happening right now does not give you a right to justify any toxic behavior that your community is expressing. Again, I wouldn’t even be mad if Sunrise hadn’t portrayed Rin as still being underage. I won’t stand to see people justify this!

approaching very old stories, stories from ancestors, stories from elders

inspired by the thread "How to Read Myths and Folklore" by Mythological Africans, i'm sharing my approach to very old stories, stories from ancestors, and stories from elders.

while i hope that this might be useful to any reader, the context here is that i'm a westerner who grew up in a western family with western values. i was educated in western schools with their values.

the mainstream white western relationship with very old stories is complicated. the abrahamic stories (judaism, christianity) are well-respected, but even most of the west's own old stories (norse stories, greek stories, little old village stories, etc.) are treated as myths (in the sense of "things people used to believe as true but that are generally no longer considered true because of scientific advances in understanding about the world").

among western peoples, most of what might be called "indigenous" culture (including stories) was suppressed & destroyed a very long time ago. christianity has been dominant in europe for so long that aside from things like the old religion of ireland, very little remains that's commonly known. specific national stories might be historical epics/legends, "fairy tales", & "mythology." often pre-christian beliefs in europe are lumped into a sort of generic "nature worship" and then dismissed.

the mainstream white western attitude is that there is little of value in very old stories for people today. newer knowledge is more highly valued. there are people who still study aristotle, etc., but generally, aside from judaism & christianity, there aren't many extremely old stories that western people value today. and many westerners are not religious & don't take their peoples' religious traditions seriously either.

(i would argue that part of this skepticism comes from the triumph of science in setting itself up as the only source of truth. part of it also comes from the fact that most of the old stories are religious, from large, patriarchical, institutionalized religions that have abused the idea of "listen to your elders" to keep people down. by not being wise elders, they have made people not trust them and also not trust the idea that listening to one's elders is important. these elders tell women to submit, tell gay people they are going to hell, claim to be virtuous while abusing children, and all the other things that have shown them to be bankrupt. there is no trust.

even aside from religious elders and ancestors, other thinkers from europe's past (ancient philosophers, national heroes, etc.) were not good people who had all kinds of terrible ideas, including racism, sexism, support for imperialism and monarchy, support for slavery, support for exploitation of natural resources, etc. the western (liberal) story goes: "people in the past were barbaric and we are more enlightened now." because of the universalizing part of western culture, this is treated as true for all people everywhere, not as something that's specific to particular peoples.

in western education, we usually don't learn that among many peoples of the world, ancestors & elders are considered wise, trusted, caring, and had many gifts to share with younger generations. i believe it's important to understand this when listening to & reading very old stories. not to say that elders were *necessarily* wise, but to accept that people from different groups see their own ancestors and knowledge passed down from ancestors in different ways.)

after considering all that, here are some specific ways i approach very old stories, stories from ancestors, and stories from elders:

first, i think about the source of the story i'm reading/listening to. how did this story come to cross my path? who is telling it? are they telling a story from their own people? what are the conditions under which i am encountering this story? among many peoples, sharing a traditional story is not done lightly. as a listener, i understand that it's an honor to be an outsider hearing a story. i have to understand who i am, who the speaker/writer is, what is our relationship (are we a settler & a colonized person? are we an "educated" person and a person from the village? it makes a difference!) who is the speaker/writer's intended audience, what is the context in which i am receiving this story?

here is an example: i live on hawai'i island (i'm a white (but also jewish and immigrant) settler on hawaiian land). every year there's a large festival and competition of hula (traditional hawaiian dance) called merrie monarch. hula is an ancient art form, sacred to the goddess laka. hula is often accompanied by singing, chanting, and is a whole performance. there's a huge variety: hula can be for ritual, for entertainment, to tell/perform historical stories, to prepare for battle, to be playful, to welcome visitors, to welcome the birth of a child, and for many other purposes. there are similar dances all across the pacific, and usually groups come from all over the world to share the very best they have to offer. as such, it's an important event for hawaiians and for other pacific people.

here are some excerpts from merrie monarch 2019 to give you an idea of what it's like:

if i'm in the audience, or watching merrie monarch on tv, i have to understand that i'm an outsider spectator and that this event is mainly by and for hawaiians and other pacific people. i am an outsider who they have graciously let in to their culture in this way. i think it's important to understand all this in order to take the proper attitude towards old stories. see them as a gift from the speaker/writer/performer that one is being allowed to hear. the next thing to consider: who is the teller? in english (the only language i have experience reading stories in), we often get stories from non-western peoples as filtered through white westerners. i take all of these with a grain of salt. if at all possible, i try to find the story as told/written by someone *from the group* that the story is from. i mostly skip over retellings/interpretations by white westerners entirely. if the story is within an anthropology text, i'll try to get any historical context that the anthropologist provides, and then just read the story itself. white western interpretations of non-western stories are usually a garbled mess. translations can also be a minefield. here in hawai'i, anthropologists & folklorists have been "recording hawaiian stories" for over a hundred years. it's a complicated history of tellings of tellings, translations that have become canon, and more. (if you're interested in learning more, i recommend the excellent book Mai Paʻa I Ka Leo: Historical Voice in Hawaiian Primary Materials, Looking Forward and Listening Back by M. Puakea Nogelmeier. it discusses the formation of an english-language canon of a huge archive of hawaiian-language newspapers, which contain many serialized stories & legends.) although it may seem difficult, i encourage you, the reader, to learn about the complicated landscape around the story you're reading/listening to. in other words, how did this particular version of the story come to end up with you? the preface and introduction in a book can often provide a lot of background info on the text in your hand. you don't want to be reading the hand-me-down version of some white supremacist's version of the story, assuming that that's really the story of a certain people! if at all possible, try to get to the actual words of the people whose story it is. also, consider that like hula, "stories" are not just the words, but might include the dance, the music, the performance, how the words are delivered, etc. "the story" might be all of those things together. the listener/reader's understanding might only arise from having that whole experience...without it, you might not get the actual message the story is meant to give. a story that might seem violent and off-putting in text, it might turn out that it's commonly told around a campfire to entertain children, complete with fart sounds and jokes. knowing that is important. that kind of story is very different from a story told during a ritual, or a creation story. aside from the conditions under which the story is told/performed among a people, it's important to know how old the story is. i've seen anthropologists describe stories from the late 1800s as "very old." i would dispute that characterization. generally, the older a story is, the more carefully i listen. often the storyteller will tell you the age and context of the story. they might say "this is a story i heard from my elders. this story has been among our people for many generations." ok, so i am about to hear a story passed down for many generations...it's a story that people remember and a story that people think is important enough to pass down to their children, who in turn remember it and pass it down. how many stories do *i* have like that? exactly zero. so in my mind, when i hear "this is a story that's been passed down among my people for generations," i listen carefully because something important is about to be shared. the teller/writer will often also tell you why they're sharing the story or who it's meant for. i've heard things like "this story is important not just for

our people, or for indigenous people, it's important for people all over the world." well in that case, i better listen. sometimes they might say "we are recording this story for younger generations", to help their own people remember their peoples' stories. stories told to anthropologists can be a whole minefield. imagine you're minding your own business at home, when an anthropologist shows up and wants to ~record your stories~. why? just because they're interested and want to share them with their pals back home. now imagine that those anthropologists are of the same background and from the same people who have colonized your land, enslaved your people, driven your people from your land, and continue to marginalize your people. this anthro might claim they're "not like that", but once you've given them the story, maybe you never hear from them again and you never even see what they actually wrote in their book. it's important to remember that there's a story extraction history. white westerners have built careers off "harvesting" stories from non-western peoples. what have they given back? it's even worse when you consider that many white members of the academy are seen as "experts" on the culture they study (even if their understanding is poor!), while members of that culture are excluded from the western academy and can't get their works published. it's important to consider that history when reading stories in anthropology (and similar) books. many people have had generations of anthropologists come and go, all asking for stories. let's just say that i wouldn't blame them if they gave a silly or "fake" story to the latest generation of clueless white anthro. i have no way to know how common it is, but i've read at least one story that led me to wonder "is the person telling the story just taking the piss out of this anthro?" how many stories might subtly mock or poke fun at the westerner and the westerner doesn't even realize it? it's something to consider. which brings me to the next thing i consider: many meanings. oral traditions are often incredibly rich and nuanced. some stories are straightforward (maybe it's a story to entertain) and some stories have *many* layers of meaning, including historical, political, serious, humorous, and much more. you might have to hear the story or understand the tone the teller uses in different parts of the story to understand whether something is meant to be serious or funny. you may have to know a lot about the history, culture, and context of the story to understand all the layers. (for an excellent example from here in hawai'i, i recommend the book Ka Honua Ola: ‘Eli‘eli Kau Mai / The Living Earth: Descend, Deepen the Revelation by Pualani Kanaka‘ole Kanahele. she goes line-by-line in several important chants discussing the multiple meanings.)

anyway, these are the main things i keep in mind when approaching ancient stories, stories from ancestors, stories told by elders. i hope this helped you. if you see anything i've gotten wrong, please let me know! thank you for reading.

wasteland, baby! | kol mikaelson - chapter ten

Summary: Kol makes a deal with the Hollow to revive the first woman he ever loved. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go as planned.

Trust’s Note: Please like and reblog! I hope you enjoy. I added some Rebekah and Aniya content for y’all <3

Word Count: 2,708

Prologue | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten

❝ kiss me on the mouth and set me free ❞

TO BE CLEAR, Aniya Grover had never been talented at confrontation. Quite the opposite, really. Growing up, she’d been caught between her mother’s culture and that of the Vikings. Regardless, they’d both valued two traits in a woman: submissive, and quiet. She wasn’t to speak unless spoken to, not to act even when acted against. She was meant to cook and bear children for her husband -- something Rebekah had always rebelled against. Aniya, however, had learned to give into these ideals; and it was now, in the twenty-first century, that she was learning to lose them.

    Aniya looked up at Kol, staring daggers at him from across the dining table. It had been several hours since they’d left the diner and returned to the Abattoir. Aniya had left first, refusing to say her goodbyes after nearly murdering the witch that suggested Henry’s sacrifice. It had been Kol that stopped her, claiming that she ‘was only trying to help.’ It was then that she left without another word. Kol followed shortly after.

    When they returned, Kol called for his siblings to have a family meeting in the dining area. He excused Hayley and Hope, and gave Freya an open invitation despite not having met Aniya when she was alive. The two sat across from each other in the dining area, the air growing thicker with each second. Finally, they heard the sound of heels clicking against the pavement, and internally let out sighs of relief as Rebekah took her place next to Aniya.

    “Now, what might this be about?” Rebekah asked, pushing her chair in. “Have you come to ask for a custody agreement, Kol?”

    Kol smiled tightly at her, eyes crinkling at the edges. “I’ll have to say ‘no’ to that offer, sister. I wouldn’t want to run off with your only friend. After all, no one else seems to like you.”

    “Yes, well, at the very least, I have a friend,” Rebekah pointed out, a sickly sweet smile on your face. “You haven’t had a friend since the 1800s.”

    “1700s, really,” Niklaus cut in, taking his seat at the head of the table. He smiled smugly, and folded his arms in front of him, blue eyes glimmering with delight. “I’m afraid he was daggered for most of that century.”

    “That reminds me, I haven’t had the chance to return the favor,” Kol sneered and stood from his chair. Aniya’s brows furrowed at the harshness of his voice -- the way he seemed to growl the veiled threat at his half-brother. Slowly, she began to feel the weight of a thousand years on her chest. Whatever human version of Kol Mikaelson she’d loved had died centuries ago, and she began to wonder if all her suffering had been the result of pining after a person that no longer existed. If perhaps returning her memories would do more harm than good.

    Subconsciously, she reached hand up to touch the ring around her neck. Kol noticed and glared.

    She watched as Elijah placed a calming hand on his brother’s shoulder, suggesting that he take a seat. Kol clenched his jaw at his elder brother, but obliged, sitting back in his chair. Elijah nodded and took his place between Kol and Niklaus. He took a moment to adjust his appearance before giving a polite smile. Even this Elijah seemed foreign to her. More confrontational and protective, compared to the mere child he’d been before. He was well put-together, calm and a perfect mediator; and, in Aniya’s eyes, a perfect stranger.

    “So, what did we need to discuss?” Elijah asked, looking around the table. Rebekah and Niklaus shrugged in unison, and it occurred to Aniya that Henry’s life would mean nothing to the Mikaelsons so long as they had what they wanted. It would be Rebekah who would be most eager to have her memories returned to her, and Niklaus who would want Vihaan resurrected and return to -- somewhat -- mortal life.

    “It seems that Kol and a New Orleans witch have found a way to return your memories,” Aniya spoke slowly, watching for negative reactions among the siblings. Elijah and Niklaus had reacted the fastest, their eyebrows furrowing in confusion at her statement. Rebekah’s eyes widened as she turned her attention to the young witch. Aniya continued, “As well as a way to resurrect my brother.”

    “Kol, the last thing we need to do is be involved with the witches again,” Rebekah spoke quickly.

    “The witches have lost their link to their ancestors, and are being forced to practice Earth magic. They are at their weakest, meaning they will be willing to deceive and manipulate anyone who is foolish enough to play into their games,” Elijah explained. “In case you don’t remember, they were willing to sacrifice four teenage girls not ten years ago.”

    “As if we’re any better,” Kol shot back. He paused for a moment, his gaze flickering in Aniya’s direction. “If it hadn't been for you and Freya, Davina might still be alive."

    "If it hadn't been for me and Freya, the Mikaelson family line would have been murdered before your very eyes," Elijah corrected. "You may have loved that girl, but she was not your family."

    Rebekah placed a hand on Aniya's hand, which had been resting in her lap. "That's quite enough from both of you. I'm sure there's a way Aniya can return our memories without having to confide in the witches."

    "On the contrary, I have heard of her brand of witches less than a dozen times in my immortal life," Kol argued. "She refuses to practice magic unless provoked, so we aren't even sure she can do simple spells--"

    "You do not speak for me," Aniya cut him off, narrowing her eyes at him. She turned to the Mikaelsons, wringing her hands as she spoke. "I possess an offensive magic. It's a finite source, depending on the state of my health in order to be put to use. As of late, I have combined it with defensive tactics, in which I essentially use nearby resources to protect myself against the attacker."

    "And what the bloody hell does that have to do with memory erasure?" Rebekah questioned.

    "It seems that when I was sacrificed, all traces of my brother and I's existence was wiped off the face of the Earth," Aniya responded. "According to Kol's little witch, I can return your memories by erasing the memories of others."

    Nik spoke up finally, though his face remained blank as he processed the information. "And why would you need the help of New Orleans witches to achieve this? We have a witch, too. One who is not hellbent on returning to power at this very moment."

    "Our dear sister practices earth magic, Nik," Kol said with a sickeningly sweet smile. "She's only practiced sacrificial magic once, she's barely familiar with the concept."

    Aniya raised an eyebrow at his behavior. "Why are you so willing to hand me away to them? I'm not a New Orleans witch. They have no motive to help me."

    "Their motive is that they are indebted to me, and this is their way of paying it off," Kol said with a shrug. "It only cost a few dark objects."

    "You're interested in our marriage," Aniya stated. A light scoff left her lips and she crossed her arms over her chest. It had only taken a few short years of friendship to learn when Kol was lying. She'd recognized it in most of the Mikaelsons, outside of Niklaus. Each time, she'd been kind about it. Smiled politely and calmly asked for the truth. She took no interest in doing so now.

    If he'd simply asked, she might have shown him the memories herself. It might have hurt his head, the way it had done the night before, but at least then she might have been able to prevent the wall of ice building itself around her chest. Not only as a result of Henry, but of his doubt. She wouldn't need a grimoire to teach her the spells she'd spent eighteen years memorizing. She wouldn't want it.

    In her later years, her father began to teach heavier sacrificial magic. Spells to return or take away memories; to ensure the misfortune of an enemy; and spells to take a life. Her father had never taught her to return it, stating it wasn't the job of a witch to interfere with the will of the god's. It had been a pathetic excuse, of course, but she and Vihaan had kept their mouths shut.

    "And you're interested in a human," Kol remarked. "How did he know about Tyaag witches? Perhaps he's a New Orleans witch himself."

    He hadn't been. Henry Pearl had been perfectly human -- a tall, gentle mortal. He wouldn't have survived living in the village a thousand years ago, and she was afraid he wouldn't survive now. Perhaps she should have said goodbye after all.

    Kol watched the pendant that hung from her neck, its velvet ribbon covering the darkened scar she'd refused to heal. She might have gotten hurt if she'd tried to return the memories on her own, and there was no telling whether she would know where to begin. Every time he so much as thought of her within Death's grasp, an aching pain seemed to spread through his body. Some part of him would have rather died than see her get hurt, and he was no longer sure how to fight that side off.

    Turning his attention to his brothers, Kol pointed out, "You two are being ridiculous."

    "And you are being reckless," Rebekah snapped. "I want my memories of Aniya back as much as you do, but I am not willing to risk the life we've built for Hope. Are you?"

    He didn't answer. Instead, he clenched his jaw and turned to walk out of the room. Rebekah let out a sigh and stood behind Aniya's chair, resting a comforting hand on her shoulder.

    "I'm not sure why, of all people, you chose to marry one of my brothers."

    Aniya nodded, a look of defeat crossing her face. "He's the meanest boy I've ever met."

    Elijah and Kol made their way out of the dining room after saying their farewells to the two girls. Rebekah accepted a forehead kiss from Elijah before taking her seat next to Aniya, a gentle smile forming on her pink lips as dark waves fell over Aniya's face. "Let me know when you want me to plait these. I'm sure you're quite famished after a night out with my brother."

    "Quite," Aniya chuckled. "He was never like this."

    Rebekah's smiled dimmed a bit. "No, he wasn't. I suppose it's a difference between who you are and the person you need to be in order to survive; and in the presence of Niklaus, whilst running from Mikael and fighting bloodlust, we all changed a bit. Tell me, have I always been this way?"

    "Yes. I did admire you," She admitted. There had been a time during a bon fire, where she had chosen to stay indoors and help the women prepare food, while Rebekah stood outdoors and sat by the cattle. "Your father should have considered you a Viking."

    "I am sure I have always been a Viking," Rebekah said with a small laugh. "I can't think of other people that traveled around the world on ships; but then, we were running from our father, so I suppose we were more pirates than anything."

    Aniya's lips turned downward, her gaze falling to her hands. "The years not have been kind to you."

    "They were not, but what of you? A thousand years of sleep?"

    "Of nothing."

    She recalled having woken up to nothingness. She was met with a cold, dark silence, as if someone had locked her in an endless room and shut the lights out. She remembered waiting for Vihaan, who'd been killed two minutes earlier, and screaming when she realized he wouldn't come for her. She could recall the pang in her chest, and the sobs that had wracked her body as she bargained with the gods to bring her back.

    She'd been given someone who would observe her silently, capture all of her habits and flaws and loved her despite. Someone that had gotten lost in all of her features, and it had been ripped away from her. She'd been given a taste of freedom with each Mikaelson. Even little Henrik had been a chance for her to escape into a life she would never have: one where she might have raised a child.

    And she'd been left with nothing.

    After a moment, Aniya reached for Rebekah's hand shut her eyes, opening her mind to the Original. Rebekah fell into the void, and a few moments passed before her sight was able to adjust to her environment. She blinked, and notice a frail Aniya sitting a few feet away, her arms holding tightly onto her knees as she stared at the ground. She appeared to be the same way they found her: covered with dirt and dried blood. The blonde pursed her lips at the sight, and pulled her arm away from Aniya.

    "There's no need to worry now," Rebekah assured her, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "You're immortal. I won't let anything happen to you. I promise."

-

"WHY AM I HERE?" Aniya huffed as she stood at the gates of Lafayette Cemetary. Kol had promised her a milkshake. "Nik and Elijah agreed that we weren't to seek help from New Orleans witches."

    "Nik and Elijah are not my fathers," Kol remarked, pushing the doors open. He stood and held it for her, causing her to stare blankly at him. "All of your problems would be solved if you did two simple spells. Both of which you would have aid in, if you only asked."

    "They threatened Henry."

    "And they shred the soul of my former lover. Everybody makes mistakes."

    "Then why trust them?"

    "Because we haven't a choice in the matter, and at worst, we double cross each other," Kol said, as if it were obvious. "I am well-versed in the art of massacres."

    "Lovely. All the more reason to trust you," Aniya muttered and begrudgingly took a step into the cemetary. She hadn't returned since the night she was resurrected, though the Mikaelsons had dealt with the Hollow shortly after. They's done something with a parallel dimension or Geminis -- truthfully, Aniya never paid much attention to Nik's coffee chats.

    "I feel caught," Kol snickered as he walked alongside her. He looked down at the shorter girl, his eyes barely glancing at the path in front of him despite the graveyard's sharp turns.

    Aniya scoffed at his response, taking a moment to think before asking, "Do you want to know what I honestly think of you?"

    "What?"

    "I despise you."

    It was his turn to scoff. "You despise me. Why do you despise me?"

    "With every chance you have to do the right thing, to be kind and selfless and caring; you are nothing but conceited, selfish, and miserable," She listed, despite the mocking look painted across Kol's face. Aniya rolled her eyes at his response. "I feel sorry for you, I really do. I just wish you'd bear it better."

    "Well, you wouldn't understand, now would you? You've never had to watch who you thought was the love of your life, truly die."

    Aniya stopped and turned to face him. She analyzed his every feature, his brows twitching in anger and eyes filled with spite as he looked back at her. His lips were somewhat pulled behind his teeth, as if baring them at her in defense. Even his posture looked as though he were ready to pounce, despite the fact that they'd only had a verbal argument.

    She smiled tightly at his statement, fingers reaching for the old wedding ring before she remembered the previous night. "No. I'd move on if I couldn't be loved. I suggest you do the same."

JUNKENSTEIN  /  la muerte me pela los dientes .

long ago in a small village just south of aldersbrunn lived a woman who went by the name of olivia colomar. she traveled from lands far away in search of resources and connections, solely interested in furthering her scientific ventures. olivia found herself interested in what made everyday contraptions and tools work from a young age. as an orphaned child, she occupied herself by taking things apart and putting them back together. as a lonely teenager, she occupied herself by creating her own gadgets. now as an adult, she dedicated herself to greater creations  -  along the way she found herself interested in the power of lightning and its potential for propelling humanity to a golden new age. 

unfortunately, she was born in a time where science was shunned for the sake of religion and women were meant for little more than caring for families. olivia learned in her teenage years that she had to hide her work from the public. it was simple enough to keep it a secret seeing as she was brought up shrouded in secrecy. the problems began when her work started to require more resources  -  she burned through various metals, alloys,  leather,  and ink far too quickly. these materials were hard enough to come by without bountiful riches. they were even harder to come by when she was presenting as a woman. she took it upon herself to dress more masculine when in the markets, concealing her most notable features with wigs and baggy clothing.  

in her newest town, olivia kept to herself in the house farthest from the others. rumors began to circulate about the newcomer, especially as more and more of the townsfolk were granted glimpses of her work in the midst of traveling to and from the market. whispers of witchcraft circulated, further exaggerated by the tales of a truer witch in the nearby adlersbrunn. with each month the whispers just grew louder with nothing to stop them once the seed was planted. knights and authority were alerted and she was watched closely. every wrong move added to her list of “crimes” until the day came where she was taken and questioned on her activities. well aware that there was nothing she could do but accept her fate, olivia left them with a final message: if she could come back to life, she would haunt each and every one of them.

… her eternal slumber was evidently not so eternal. despite every bit of logic dictating that she was not to open her eyes ever again,  olivia was awoken with a jolt. blinking away the crust of sleep and… well... death, she met her reflection in a set of emerald lenses. the man was far too loud with a foreign accent, pitchy laughter guiding his introduction to her as doctor jamison junkenstein. he had created her, brought her back to life and she was to be the bride of his first revival; an unnamed man that simply grunted in… irritation, perhaps? olivia argued against this - she did not choose to be revived in the first place and she would not be marrying any man. the doctor did not care for her protests. he simply rattled on about his plans, jumping from topic to topic. amongst his ramblings she heard that he would name her “shadow”, a nickname that she decided she would later use as her new alias once she escaped from his castle. 

to keep this from getting any longer, i’ll summarize what’s next. “shadow”, translated into sombra by her own accord, escapes from her chains when junkenstein leaves. she takes with her a big sack of his equipment. she travels through the lands and from here on out it’s thread dependent but her default is that she finds the countess’ castle and convinces her to allow her to stay.

some notes on her appearance since this is set in the ~1800s so there would be no cybernetics, dyed hair, etc.

as a nod towards her dyed hair and eyebrow slits, sombra has poliosis. this gives her a natural streak of white hair towards the front of her scalp along with a bit on her left eyebrow. it also fits with her in-game skin/the bride of frankenstein's hair since shes got the white locks on the side!

her eyes are her natural color of very dark brown. they have a purplish tinge after death because monster logic LOL

her eccentric/"punk" fashion is translated into a more gothic fashion sense and how she dresses more masculinely frequently pre-death. i dont want to break immersion and i dont think she would dress to stick out because it would only hold her back and this woman is an Opportunist.

she primarily goes by olivia in this verse. sombra is an alias given to her by junkenstein and its only used after her death!

A Trip to the Countryside

Dragon Raja Fanfic

Paring: Chisei Gen x Lyris (MC)

Summary: Chisei took Lyris to his hometown and spent a the day together.

(From Chisei Gen’s in game messages.)

Word count: 1800+

This work is a part of Allies  - a series based on in game text messages, letters or moments by Allies themselves.

For @soul-dancer-lyris~ Hope you enjoy the story~

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Read more of my DR fanfic here: x

or on AO3: x

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The rain came and left in a haste, leaving a lingering smell of wet ground, mixed with roasted sweet potatoes.

The smell made Lyris hungry. Following the aroma, she found a small vending cart by a corner of Tokyo street. It was not her first time trying roasted sweet potatos, but the first time trying one from a cart. It was more delicious than she had expected! The warm roasted sweet potato made Lyris happy, especially in this kind of weather.

She decided to share that little happiness with someone, so she took out her phone in one hand, the other still held onto the bag of roasted sweet potatoes.

“Chisei Gen! Chisei Gen! Listen!”

The reply came almost immediately after the message was sent.

“What’s wrong? What happened?”

Lyris giggled to herself, or her gemini – the one that was floating around her. Chisei Gen replied so fast! He must have thought something had happened to her. That meant, he cared.

“Oh, nothing. There’s just someone selling delicious roasted sweet potatoes by Kabukicho!”

“Oh? Is there anything strange about that?”

“It’s different from where I came from. They sell roasted sweet potatoes in ovens made out of remodeled oil barrels.”

“You sound like some kind of expert.” Chisei seemed to be more relaxed with his reply. “I guess you like to eat roasted sweet potatoes.”

“I want to tell you about this because it’s so rare to see it.”

Lyris found a seat by the riverside while waaiting for Chisei’s reply. She sat down on a bench and gazed at the other part of the city, across the river. It was nighttime. All the city lights turned into stars. She thought of what Chisei would be doing at that moment, and felt thankful for his replies to her messages, despite the busy life of the High Patriarch.

“Have you done much traveling?” He asked.

“Yes, I like to travel outside the country when I have time.”

Lyris loved traveling. That was why she appeared in Tokyo, while she was supposed to stay in Cassell and do her essay. She thought a change of air would be nice. And another reason was that she wanted to see Chisei Gen.

“I admire that kind of life. I travel for business, but it’s mostly just to handle local affairs. I’m also quite busy with work, so I don’t have much time to take a vacation.”

Lyris let out a sigh as she was reading his text. Chisei was always, always busy. He seemed to work all the time when his eyes were open! She doubted he would actually rest at night. That guy was the man of work. He breathed in work.

But he had once or twice talked about his dream. Surprisingly, it was not becoming the most successful person in the world; nor bringing his clan to the most glorious days. He only wanted to be a sunscreen vendor, living his life freely somewhere in a French beach…

How could a High Patriarch, the Emperor of all Hydras have such a thought? People would laugh at his dream, and tell him to snap back to reality. But Lyris did not. She listened carefully to all his thoughts. To her, it was brave of Chisei to have that dream, and to keep it alive inside his heart even though the world told him to let go.

Lyris enjoyed another roasted sweet potato from the bag as they exchanged messages about how Chisei missed the beach in France. Her gemini sat beside her, teasing her for wanting to be there with him.

“This beach sounds like your first love. No wonder you’re so obsessed with it.” Lyris replied lightheartedly, with a snickering emote.

“Lyris, you must be joking! What do you mean, first love?”

A finger tapped on the phone screen repeatedly, Lyris was thinking of what to reply next. But another message came:

“Speaking of which, actually, I didn’t grow up in Tokyo.”

“Oh, really?” Lyris quickly replied.

“When I was a child, I lived in a small mountain village… But what about you, Lyris? Where did you grow up?”

“I’ve been in the city since I was born. I’ve never lived in the countryside.”

Lyris replied, but she wished she had lived in the countryside too. She wanted to know Chisei more, and to know about the life he had lived long before becoming the High Patriarch who only knew work.

Lyris stared at the phone screen. She took notice of the three dots popping up next to Chisei’s avatar, indicating that he was typing something. But long minutes passed by, the dots kept appearing and disappearing. She grew nervous. Would Chisei prefer girls from the countryside than city girls, like her?

But his next message was something she could not expect, “Would you like to go and see the village I lived in? The scenery is quite nice.”

Lyris was sent to the clouds! She stood up from the seat, with her phone held close to chest, and she started dancing around with her gemini.

“Is he asking me out? He must be asking me out!”

Lyris beamed and danced, ignoring the curious eyes of the passerby. She kept dancing until her gemini reminded that she had not replied to Chisei yet.

“Oops! How could I almost forget?!”

And she hastily sent him a message, “Of course! I’d love to!”

That night, Lyris danced with her gemini gleefully all the way back home.

 ***

 On a sunny morning, Lyris dressed in her favorite blue floral dress that matched her eyes color and waited patiently by Tokyo street. With every car came in sight, she tip-toed, gazing at it with a fluttering heart.

Chisei arrived at last. He was wearing casual outfit; a white shirt and dark pants, black shoes, and even a pair of glasses. He was completely different from the every-day-High-Patriarch-Chisei-Gen. And that made Lyris’ heart beat too fast! As if it could jump right out of her chest and fall into Chisei’s hand when he stood there, reaching a hand out towards her. She could not help but sneak glances at him all the way to his hometown. Chisei caught her a few times. He only turned away and smiled to himself, which made her heart flutter even more.

Katori Town was not far from Tokyo. Lyris was excited, and a bit nervous. It was her first time being here, and she was with Chisei!

The view was very different from the city. Lyris took a deep breath, inhaling the fresh air and the fragrance of grass. This place, it was beautiful, and it belonged to the young Chisei. Lyris turned around to look at him. His eyes spoke nostalgia, and she was thankful he had taken her to this place with him.

They decided to take a stroll in the forest. Lyris had so many things to ask, but she wanted Chisei to speak first, to open up first about his childhood.

“When I was a child, I lived here, in this village with green forests, flowing streams and hanging stoves in wooden houses. In the summers, I practiced holding my breath in the streams, and watched the fish swam past my eyes. In the snowy winters, I chiseled holes in the ice to catch fish, which I’d then cook into a soup… Those early years were the happiest in my life.”

They reached a small wooden house which seemed to be abandoned for so long. It was locked. Chisei gazed at it with an unspoken sadness in his eyes.

“Is this… your old house?” Lyris softly asked.

“Yeah.”

“I assume that you don’t want to come in…”

Chisei turned to look at Lyris. Though his face showed no emotion, his hazel eyes betrayed him.

“I’m sorry, Lyris… But I’m afraid that once I unlock the doors, memories of the place would escape… The good ones, and even the bad ones…”

“We don’t have to go in if you don’t want to,” said Lyris. She was worried about him. “When we talked on the phone, and on the way coming here, I thought you only had good memories of this place… But it seems like I was wrong.”

Chisei looked down on the ground, advoiding her eyes. He must have done it wrong. He should not be so emotional and weak in front of Lyris. She did not come here for a sad Chisei, did she?

But Chisei would never know, Lyris felt utterly happy that he had shown her another side of his. She took his hand and said, “If you have bad memories about this place, how about creating good ones to replace them?”

Chisei seemed surprised. “Replace the bad memories?”

“Yes! You just told me about catching fish in the streams, and cooking soup,… That sounds really fun! I haven’t done anything like that before. I want Chisei to teach me how to hold my breath, catch fish and use hanging stoves! So when I think about this place, my mind will be fillied with memories of Chisei! And Chisei will remember the memories with me as a part of this place too!”

Was it a faint blush she caught on his face? Chisei smiled softly as she gazed down on her beautiful face.

“Lyris, you know that it will take a lot of time to learn all of those, right?”

“No problem! You just need to bring me here again and again and again, until I learn all!”

Chisei’s smile turned into a big grin. “I’ll take you here as many times as you want.”

When he saw her beam, he thought it was even more radiant than the most beautiful sunrise on the mountain that he could remember. That day, Chisei took Lyris to the streams and they caught lots of fish. They made soup and roasted sweet potatoes together when the sun set. Chisei had never met a beautiful city girl who was willing to get her dress dirty and do all the hard work she was not familiar with.

By the end of the day, they both sat down on the hill looking up at the stars. Lyris, though exhausted, still kept a smile on her face.

“I’ve never had this much fun... Thank you, Chisei Gen.”

Chisei looked at her and smiled, without saying anything. Lyris had to ask out of curiosity.

“Why are you staring at me?”

“You have dirt… on your face.”

“Huh?!” Lyris tried to brush off the dirt on her face sheepishly. Chisei always liked beautiful girls. How could she let him see her being ugly, even for just a moment?

“Don’t worry.” Chisei said softly. The wind messed with his hair as he placed a hand on her face, a finger caressed her cheek. “You’re still the most beautiful girl I’ve ever laid my eyes on.”

-The end-

diggin’ deeper

i was tagged by @jlf23tumble, and since i’m bored and have recently gained a few new followers thins might be the perfect time to answer some questions. i tag @hereforlou @gaycousinlarry @ashes-and-dust @girlhoodandothercults @thewindmakesnicewaves @thickenmyblood @ificouldflymp3 and i’d also love it if some of my new followers gave it a go, please tag me when you do!

1. Do you prefer writing with a black pen or blue pen? blue, but i generally prefer pencil.

2. Would you prefer to live in the country or city? city, but mid-sized? i want to know the streets and the people, but still be able to disappear sometimes (also i need to be around art and museums of some kind)

3. If you could learn a new skill what would it be? knitting, or better at sewing. i’d like to be more creative over all.

4. Do you drink your tea/coffee with sugar? never, and none of those syrups with weird flavours either.

5. What was your favourite book as a child? at what age - but probably “Vem kan trösta knyttet?” melancholy by Tove Jansson ftw.

6. Do you prefer baths or showers? i took a bath every night for about a month this spring, to sooth different pains. it changed me.

7. If you could be a mythical creature, which one would it be? a sphinx

8. Paper or electronic books? paper

9. What is your favourite item of clothing? dresses of any kind, i like being dressed after just putting on one item

10. Do you like your name or would you like to change it? i really think it suits me, short and easy, works in most languages.

11. Who is a mentor to you? not mentor but i’ve learnt a lot from my family, my mum, dad, and sisters, and i continue to do so. i like to think they learn things from me as well.

12. Would you like to be famous and if so, what for? eh, some days, but in smaller circles... academically, or within the arts.

13. Are you a restless sleeper? once i fall asleep i don’t move and i don’t really dream.

14. Do you consider yourself a romantic person? sadly no, but i’m working on it

15. Which element best represents you? earth

16. Who do you want to be closer to? -

17. Do you miss someone at the moment? my sister who lives in a different country, haven’t seen her since christmas because the whole covid situation.

18. Tell us about an early childhood memory. sitting on the sofa in my parents’ house, waiting for dad to finish in the bathroom so we can leave for daycare. everyday i’d get to listen to a tape or vinyl, and one of the records had a board game on the inside, when you opened it up. i listened to that specific record again when i was about 20/21 and realised that it had shaped a lot of my political views - swedish 70s progg, a socialist, anti capitalist, childrens album. these days i put it on on the 1st of may.

19. What is the strangest thing you have eaten? i’ll try most things once, as long as it’s vegetarian.

20. What are you most thankful for? health, and the good health of the people i love.

21. Do you like spicy food? i do, but i have some issues with dyspepsia so sometimes i have to eat the blandest stuff.

22. Have you ever met someone famous? famous swedes yes, international? eh, not really. (went to a fancy party during fashion/design week in ldn once, i guess i did mingle with them there)

23. Do you do you keep a diary or journal? haven’t in a long time.

24. Do you prefer to use a pen or a pencil? ah, pencil

25. What is your star sign? Virgo

26. Do you like your cereal soggy or crunchy? i don’t really eat cereal

27. What would you want your legacy to be? i think i’d like to be remembered with hatred by those who are unfair.

28. Do you like reading, what was the last book you read? i’m currently reading Jamaica Kincaide’s “My Garden Book”. after that i think i’ll do some sayers or christie, summer is for killings in tiny british villages.

29. How do you show someone you love them? eh... i’ll get back to you.

30. Do you like ice in your drinks? depends on the drink and the temperature outside.

31. What are you afraid of? failure.

32. What is your favourite scent? clean laundry, rain.

33. Do you address older people by their name or surname? lol, always their first name.

34. If money was not a factor, how would you live your life? i’d run a gallery and feature artists i found interesting, i’d have an outreach programme and lots of event nights. it’d be an open, creative, space and i’d never make any money at all. art should be available.

35. Do you prefer swimming in pools or the ocean? ocean! salt water in the hair, on the body, sand... i love it.

36. What would you do if you found £50 on the ground? pick it up, buy drinks for any friend who could show up within the hour.

37. Have you ever seen a shooting star? Did you make a wish? i have, but no, i don’t think i made a wish.

38. What is the one thing you would want to teach your children? to be open and understanding, the base for the rest.

39. If you had to have a tattoo, what would it be and where would you get it? "space is a practised place” on the back of my right arm, just above the elbow (or the inside, i can never decide)

40. What can you hear now? the wind, an ambulance

41. Where do you feel the safest? in bed.

42. What is the one thing you want to overcome/conquer? my reluctance to open up. i’m working on it.

43. Of you could travel back to any era, what would it be? if i have to, something like late 1800s, turn of the century. to live through all the rapid change – industrialisation, cameras, film, art... the political.

44. What is your most used emoji? 🙈 or just all the hearts

45. Describe yourself using one word. prickly

46. What do you regret the most? waiting for things to happen.

47. Last movie you saw? New movie? i watched Venom with a friend yesterday, before that it was The Old Guard.

48. Last tv show you watched? The Great, highly recommend

49. Invent a word and it’s meaning. nah, but i’ll tell you: swedes love to make up random english sounding words and naming new things that, ex: “freestyle” which is our name for a walkman.

Hey!! I read your fic (it’s great so far btw) but what headcannons do you have for Beetlejuice’s “childhood”? Or just about Juno I’m not picky

hey! thank you so much! 

every bj fic writer seems to have their own idea of what it means to be a born-dead; personally, I think he was a child at some point, and that once he was fully-grown, that’s how he remains unless he becomes human. 

my hc’s are under the cut! this ended up more as a bio of his life instead of a list of hc’s lmao

his dad never even knew juno could have a child. he left their relationship after one too many instances of juno’s treatment, the whiplash of emotional switching between kind and cruel, and never looked back. within my ‘verse, the netherworld is a mirror of our world, so in this case, he moves far, far away from her, intet on never seeing or hearing about her again. 

she finds out she’s with child weeks after he leaves. she doesn’t tell him.

as for bj’s childhood, it’s the definition of a trauma conga line. juno never directly hurt him, in terms of physicality, but it was a mix of emotional neglect and abuse. she never wanted a child, especially with the one man who’d managed to completely leave her, and once bj was born, that didn’t change anything. she viewed him as something all she had to do was keep alive, i.e feeding him and clothing him, but leaving everything else up in the air. 

I’m a fan of the “it takes a village” trope, and I think that there were at least a few entities who saw her treatment, or lack thereof, of bj and tried to step in. nothing major, as juno’s the head of all of them, but trying to be extra nice to bj and say a few kind words here and there. they might pop up in a future fic!

anywho, he grows as a kid, and is exceedingly bad at talking with the few kids the netherworld has. they’re weirded out by him, both as a born-dead and by his extreme personality. he comes on too strong with everyone in an attempt to show that he can be their friend, and it’s off-putting. everyone is generally creeped out by him. he’s a product of his upbringing; he’s rash, loud, and intensely emotional. no one really knows what to do with him. since he was born dead, he can’t relate to anyone else. born-deads, in my ‘verse, are rare to the point of nonexistence. bj was a fascinating case that no one thought could ever happen. 

there is an education system in the netherworld, which is where teachers go to if they die on the job. because of this, there aren’t many elementary school teachers, and bj isn’t really the brightest bulb in the box, academically speaking. later in life, he tries to fix this via living world education, but it’s hard, y’know? but he does learn how to read/write/do math, even if he’s slow at it. 

juno’s frustrated with him, seemingly all the time. he isn’t smart enough, isn’t good enough, for her, and she tries to be around him for the least amount of time she can be. 

[she has nights where she remembers her own mother, and how she treated her the way juno treats bj. she doesn’t like to think about that, which is where the alcohol abuse comes in.]

as he grew older, juno would inevitably realize the power he has, and she decided to try to play the mom game with him, if only to get him on her side. bj, the definition of heart on his sleeve, immediately took to her and did anything he could to get her to laugh/smile. he’s an extreme people-pleaser, which was only amplified by the knowledge that, if he tried hard enough, maybe his mom would smile at him.

juno uses this for a long time, possibly centuries. she keeps him under a tight leash, and fucks him up pretty bad emotionally. when he does something that she wants, she’ll smile at him, maybe compliment him, but the second he goes against what she wants, it’s the silent treatment. she’ll cut him off, refuse to talk to him until she needs him again, and at that point he’s so desperate for affection he’d do anything to get her to be nice with him again.

they’re something of a “dream team” duo to everyone else in the netherworld. juno’s drive/goals are nearly impossible to fail when bj’s abilities are in the mix, and for centuries, they’re unstoppable. they’re on top of the world, so to speak, even while all of this shit is going on between them.

like many others who grew up in situations like this, he never really realized that this wasn’t how people, living, dead, or other, are supposed to grow up until he sees otherwise. sometime around the mid-1800s, he ends up in the living world on a mission for his mom and sees a family. he lurks around for a few weeks, watching as the kids interact with their family, and he’s just confused at what he’s seeing.

going back to the netherworld, he asks around and, yeah, that’s what most people’s families were like. he,,, doesn’t know what to do with this information. tl;dr he goes to juno, and when he tries to talk to her she starts shutting him out again, and in a fit of rage, he quits. he tells her that he isn’t working with her anymore, and if it isn’t a professional matter, he doesn’t want to speak with her again. he goes solo as a bio-exorcist, and for a bit, he’s doing well.

one bad day, after an even worse week, he’s called to juno’s office. she’s nice to him, knowing that she needs to be kind if she wants him back, and he crumbles. it ends up as a vicious cycle where they’ll be back together, then he’ll quit, and once something bad happens, he crawls back to her because she’s all that he has.

after a particularly bad experience with juno, she “banishes” him to the living world, something she did whenever she couldn’t deal with him. during this solo period, he finds the maitlands. he hears them talk about how they’d raise their child, how they’ll do their best, and he falls for it all. once they die, the rest is history, so to speak.

when lydia comes along, he realizes that he doesn’t have to be alone. he has a friend now, and hey, she likes him! they’re best friends; she laughs at his jokes and treats him nicely and gives him nicknames and -

yeah. when she gets serious about finding her mom, his emotions take the best of him. he’s angry and thinks that she’s just like juno, like everyone else who saw his abilities and used them, only acting nice to get him to do what they wanted, and goes off the edge. 

the marriage is his finale ultimato, his worst-case scenario, but he needs to use it. he needs to get away from the netherworld once and for all, needs to get away from everyone and just be himself. he’s tells himself he’s perfectly fine with being alone once he’s alive, but the maitlands and deetz’s playing with his emotions ends up convincing him to stay. of course, he’s killed right after.

juno taunting him about it all is the last straw for him, hence the sandworm. 

I’d love to write this out as a story in the future, but my current goals for this ‘verse are a sequel to take me where my soul can run and, possibly, a story of bj finally meeting his dad.

tell me about juliana

ok this is gonna be long because i keep adding/changing things about her and her story is about as complicated/bonkers as the actual castlevania timeline BUT HERE WE GO

background

juliana is the daughter of richter belmont and was born in 1800

richter still couldn’t use the vampire killer because of his possession in sotn and still blamed himself for supposedly “dooming” his bloodline but due to some miracle, juliana was able to hold the whip without feeling any pain or side effects when she was a child

for the next 24 years juliana trained to continue the family business and while she got better and better with the vampire killer, she still couldn’t use it to its full potential or power

this however didn’t seem to be a problem since she had other means of fighting at her disposal (swords, guns, even spells)

in 1824 while juliana and richter are out liberating villages from vampires after news spread about their steady return to wallachia, they and their entire convoy are attacked by strigoi (dead vampires who have been resurrected) with their master being a necromancer who was once a follower of dracula but grew more ambitious

everyone is killed (including richter. supposedly) and despite being on the verge of death herself, juliana manages to escape and reaches a sanctuary of speaker descendants who are long time allies to the belmonts

they predict that in the next few years dracula will return in some way, hence the rise of vampire activity in the country. they take juliana in and place her in a coma, preserving her body and giving her blood transfusions so that she can be strong enough to fight when dracula is resurrected for like the tenth time

after richter is buried, juliana’s mother - a jewish vampire hunter herself - joins the order of ecclesia out of a need for vengeance (she also briefly mentors shanoa)

during shanoa’s journey, the sanctuary is attacked but anyone who touches juliana’s coffin gets burned. with her caregivers dead and unable to wake her, shanoa fights dracula alone and juliana sleeps for another 34 years

1870 rolls around and juliana is awoken by an unknown force. as expected, she’s confused, disorientated, and scared shitless

she leaves the abandoned sanctuary and makes her way to the nearest town and by extension the nearest pub (after seeing the date on a newspaper and silently freaking out)

at the pub she runs into a trans woman named dahlia who was an apprentice to maria renard (who juliana remembers from her childhood)

their first task: retrieve the vampire killer that’s been in a game of hot potato during juliana’s coma. right now it’s back at the belmont manor but both the whip and manor were stolen by a guild of thieves

with the help of dahlia and her natural born magical gifts, juliana retrieves the whip (which she now has to push herself harder than ever before in order to use it) and takes back the manor

she can barely hold the vampire killer with her bare hand, she always needs to be wearing a glove while using it

word spreads that the last surviving belmont has returned and the reactions are…….. mixed. some are relieved, some are angry and want to know where she’s been all this time, and there are those who don’t see the point in having a belmont defend wallachia since others have stepped up since their disappearance and have done a good enough job

personality

juliana’s definitely noble - she wants to uphold her family honour and tradition BUT she fights vampires and monsters because it’s the right thing to do

her top priority is to protect the everyday people, despite the claim that when there’s no Dracula to fight, the belmonts are just “taking up space”

juliana values every human life and will remain patient, calm, and empathetic when she’s speaking to people who have had run ins with vampires, demons, etc.

however, she hates it when people risk their lives in her name. if someone dies or is seriously wounded because of her, she has a VERY hard time forgiving herself

because of this fear, she works alone but will allow someone to join her fight IF AND ONLY IF she’s confident that they can handle themselves when things get dicey (hence why she lets dahlia and eventually alucard tag along)

SPEAKING OF ALUCARD he and richter were close after the events of sotn and even took care of baby juliana a couple times

there’s a lot more i came up with for alucard in relation to richter and juliana but it gets really sad so i’ll keep my thoughts to myself

juliana is also very, very awkward in any social situation. since she was in a magically induced coma from 1824 to 1870, she doesn’t have time to learn up on all the norms and customs of Victorian Wallachia

she stumbles through every social interaction, even with people she likes. and forget about vampires – parties and big social gatherings are her worst nightmare

juliana gets flustered, frustrated, and overwhelmed very easily, especially when she gets out of her coma

she also loses her temper when people seriously doubt her place within the belmont lineage

but even though juliana keeps saying that she’s as good of a belmont as her father and ancestors were, sometimes she feels doubtful herself and hopes that one day the feud between her bloodline and dracula will finally end because at this point, it feels more like a curse than a duty

in terms of her fighting style, juliana is a combination of netflix trevor’s and the combo moves in assassin’s creed 3 – fast paced and a little bit acrobatic with a lot of brute strength (plus some gunslinging)

she’s small but muscular so just imagine this tiny little thing who’s packing every kind of revolver and sword rolling up to dracula’s castle like hi binch

she gets a gatling gun

takes care of the belmont manor, the grounds, and the neighbouring town and is constantly in a state of “NOBODY FUCKING HELPS ME IN THIS HOUSE”

she enjoys a nice bath, tea, and sometimes a brandy

refuses to sit normally in a chair

JESUS CHRIST THAT GOT LONG but some things to keep in mind - i have not listened to nocturne of recollection yet nor have i paid that much attention to the N64 games, circle of the moon, and others so i’m sure a lot of what i’ve written just now contradicts the canon in those

BUT HERE SHE IS

9 year-old Pearl says her first bad word, and Phoenix and Maya are in shock. A shock that gets turned to 11 when she says she got it from Edgeworth.

Maya: I can’t believe it!

Pearl: I can’t either!

Maya: It went for only three episodes! Why would they cancel it!?

Pearl: Yeah! That’s horrible!

Phoenix: Uh, what happened?

Maya: There’s this new show called “The Magnifique Mousequerade” that I’ve been following ever since it got pitched a couple years ago. It’s set in 1800s France and it’s about a girl who befriends a little mouse that lives in her attic. They really love watching plays and shows together, and the girl aspires to be an actress. She doesn’t want to leave behind her dear friend, so she tries to find someone who will be willing to accept a mouse as a fellow actress, but got rejected everywhere except for one place, where-

Phoenix: H-hey, you don’t have to tell me everything about it! So it was cancelled?

Maya: After three episodes, even! That’s barely enough time to tell what happens after they got accepted! What are those producers thinking!?

Pearl: Yeah, what the hell are they thinking!?

[Phoenix and Maya gasp in horror.]

Pearl: …?

Phoenix: P-Pearls, did you just…?

Maya: P-Pearly…

Pearl: Um… did I say something wrong?

Phoenix: Uh, not really “wrong”, but not quite right either…

Maya: Please don’t say, um, “hell” again. It’s not usually a good thing to say…

Pearl: O-oh… Oh, no! W-what have I done…?

Phoenix: Um, it’s okay. We’re not mad; just a little shocked.

[Little Pearl is trembling, tears welling up in her eyes. She then begins to cry.]

Phoenix: P-Pearls?

Pearl: Ohh… *sniff* I… I’ve been a bad girl…

Maya: Pearly, it’s okay! Don’t cry! What’s wrong?

Pearl: I… I’m going to be cursed for this! Waaaaah!

Phoenix: Huh? Cursed?

Maya: What do you mean?

Pearl: *sniff* B-because… my mother told me… If I ever say something I shouldn’t have… Oooh… I-I will be cursed by demon spirits who will cut out my tongue and I won’t be able to talk anymore…

Phoenix: …What? (Geez! What kind of mother would tell her kid something so horrible!?)

Maya: D-don’t worry, Pearly! You won’t be cursed!

Pearl: Huh?

Maya: Because I’ve already got you covered! Ever since Aunt Morgan left the village, I’ve been praying to the Holy Spirit to keep you safe from curses!

Phoenix: Huh?

Maya: And I’ve prayed hard every day, so I’m sure you’re super extra protected! Since those demons can’t get through such a powerful shield of spiritual energy, they can’t hurt you in any way!

Pearl: R-really?

Maya: Really! You’ve got nothing to worry about!

Phoenix: … *whisper* (Maya, are you being serious right now?)

Maya: *whisper* (Well, I had to come up with something! Besides, I really have been praying, so it’s gotta work!)

Phoenix: …Well, that’s a relief.

Maya: Yeah, isn’t it?

Pearl: Y-yes! Thank you very much, Mystic Maya!

[She’s back to her adorable happy self again.]

Phoenix: By the way, Pearls, where did you learn that word?

Maya: If it’s some mean and nasty bully, we’ll find them and tell them to watch what they say around little kids!

Pearl: Oh, um… I heard it from Mr. Edgeworth.

[They look as if struck dumb.]

Both: Whaaaaat!?

Maya: M-Mr. Edgeworth is the mean and nasty bully!?

Phoenix: Uh, I don’t think it’s that simple… (Though I wouldn’t put it past him if he was angry with a certain detective.)

Maya: No, that doesn’t make sense. Mr. Edgeworth is a gentleman. He wouldn’t just swear off around kids.

Phoenix: Yeah, it’s definitely weird…

Maya: We should go ask him! In person!

Phoenix: …Good idea. One way or another, we’re getting answers.

Pearl: …Did I just get Mr. Edgeworth in trouble?

–

[And once again, Edgeworth is interrupted from his work by three familiar faces. This time, though, they seem pretty serious.]

Edgeworth: Wright? Maya and Pearl too. What brings you he-

Maya: Mr. Edgeworth! What’s the big idea!?

Edgeworth: E-excuse me?

Phoenix: Sorry, Edgeworth, but we have some urgent questions… about Pearl.

Edgeworth: ? What about her?

Maya: Mr. Edgeworth, please be honest. Did you ever curse in front of Pearly?

Edgeworth: What? I would never dare! Why do you ask?

Phoenix: Pearls said her first swear word just earlier.

Edgeworth: …That’s unfortunate.

Phoenix: And she said she heard it from you.

Edgeworth: W-what!? But I’ve never… At least, not with her around…

Phoenix: By any chance, did you happen to stop by Kurain Village recently?

Edgeworth: Yes… for a recent assignment foisted upon me at the request of the chief prosecutor.

Phoenix: Then, maybe she could have overheard you talking with someone?

Edgeworth: …P-possibly.

Maya: Mr. Edgeworth, how could you be so careless? Speaking like that where children can be nearby…

Edgeworth: Now wait a minute! I hadn’t uttered any complaint while I was within the village. I had talked with Pearl briefly, but it was for directions to the cave at the outskirts.

Maya: To the cave?

Phoenix: Huh? There’s a cave?

Maya: Yeah, near the village… It’s been so long since anyone has gone there, though.

Pearl: I heard it’s a place where people used to go to worship, but after a big earthquake one time, the inside was sealed off…

Maya: Yeah. So no one has been able to stop by there. But why would you be asked to go there, Mr. Edgeworth?

Edgeworth: I’ve no idea… The entire premise for this “excavation” is rather absurd.

Phoenix: What is it?

Edgeworth: A certain politician’s grandson had lost their family heirloom and they somehow expected it to be in that cave. Worse still, they managed to bother the Prosecutor’s Office to help them recover it…

Pearl: So, did you find it…?

Edgeworth: After confirming it with the family, yes, it seems it was…

Phoenix: W-wait a minute. Their family heirloom was in a cave where the Kurain villagers used to go to worship?

Maya: That’s a weird place to stash it.

Edgeworth: I don’t know all the details, but it seems this family has some connections to the Fey clan since long ago. However, due to a certain incident, they broke ties and fell out of contact - at least in the public’s eyes.

Maya: Oh, wow.

Phoenix: You didn’t know?

Maya: No. It must have been a really long time ago, since I’ve never heard of them.

Edgeworth: In any case, I traveled there with Detective Gumshoe, several officers, and a group of professional excavators. I admit I was in a foul mood and well… I may have let off a few complaints while the team faced difficulties with digging up an opening.

Phoenix: And how far is the cave?

Edgeworth: At least a good several hundred feet. I don’t think Pearl could have heard me from the village.

Maya: Then… Pearly? Did you actually leave the village?

Pearl: Um… yes, for a little while.

Phoenix: What? You didn’t happen to follow Edgeworth’s company, did you?

Pearl: W-well… yes.

Maya: Oh, so that’s why-

Edgeworth: Pearl… I’m certain I told you precisely not to follow us. Not only was the excavation a classified matter, as you’ve said, the cave is also prone to collapse. It’s no place for a child to be.

Pearl: Y-yes, I know…

Edgeworth: And yet, you disobeyed…?

Pearl: I-I’m sorry! I just… I became worried.

Edgeworth: Worried?

Pearl: B-because… when you asked me for directions, I just thought you were curious. When I saw you leave for it, I wanted to remind you to be careful!

All else: …

Pearl: But when I caught up with everyone, I saw only the people with hard hats were going in and they looked very prepared. So I realized that you didn’t need any warning and I went back. But as I did, I heard Mr. Edgeworth yell at poor Mr. Scruffy Detective.

Edgeworth: …

Pearl: I think it was around then when I heard him say some bad words…

[By now, Phoenix and Maya are looking at Edgeworth in disappointment. He himself looks a little uncomfortable.]

Pearl: Oh… I’m sorry I disobeyed. I didn’t mean anything bad by it… I promise I won’t do it again.

[But to her surprise, Edgeworth simply gives her a smile.]

Edgeworth: Very well. I accept your apology.

Pearl: Huh? Y-you aren’t mad…?

Edgeworth: Why would I be? You explained yourself perfectly well, and I trust that you won’t repeat the same mistake.

Pearl: Oh… Thank you for understanding, Mr. Edgeworth.

Maya: Aww… and everything was settled, just like that! Don’t you love happy endings, Nick?

Phoenix: Yeah… (Though this is Pearls we’re talking about. Even Edgeworth can’t stay mad at her.)

Maya: But, Mr. Edgeworth? Why were you yelling at Detective Gumshoe?

Edgeworth: …As I said, I was in a foul mood already, having been forced into that matter. Then, perhaps as a poorly planned joke, the detective decided to tell me absurd ghost stories about “cursed” artifacts and hidden booby traps from movies about a ruins-hunting archaeologist! All the while, we were waiting on the excavating team to report back that they’ve cleared the path…

All else: …

Edgeworth: Needless to say, I was irked plenty enough.

Phoenix: (Sounds like someone’s been busy rewatching Indiana Jones…)

Wight on!

Step back in time to the Isle of Wight, a largely unspoilt world that feels downright tropical

My long-time friend Heather grew up on the Isle of Wight, and always talks about her childhood home in raptures, saying how simple and lovely it is. As low expectations are the key to happiness, or so my husband Duncan always tells me, I didn’t want to get my hopes up upon our departure. Happily, we weren’t disappointed. 

A two-hour drive took us to Portsmouth, where our ferry awaited. Forty-five minutes later we were driving on the island, where the contrast between it and London could not have been more vivid. We stayed in a secluded area in the southern part of the isle, and apart from several brief drives in larger towns such as Newport, everything seemed tiny and quaint. 

Less than an hour after disembarking we arrived in Chale, a small village near the larger town of Niton, which has a decent foodstore that has been up and running since the 1800s. After circling twice and eventually asking a toothless old man for directions (turn left past the church), we finally found the private road leading to our accommodation, Gotten Manor, where the path was so overgrown we had to get out of the car and pull back the bushes. 

The Manor is situated at the foot of St Catherine’s Down and has two houses, the Old House and the self-catering Cart House, where we stayed. Advertised as an eco-friendly place, it has two bedrooms upstairs and a sitting room, kitchen and shower room on the ground floor. The view was spectacular and there was a lovely yard the girls could play in. 

Best of all, everything was where it should be, from washing-up liquid to extra pillows to aluminium foil, and the owner, Caroline, does all she can to make her guests comfortable (when we learned we both have daughters called Tallulah there was an instant affinity). 

The next few days we spent frolicking around the island, beginning with a jaunt to Wootton Bridge up north to visit a colleague of Duncan’s who lives on the estuary. The girls got to play in his moored boat and Duncs got to fantasize about what it would be like to be rich and single. I got to make sure nobody drowned in the mud, as the tide was out. Good times all round. 

The girls also loved Dinosaur Isle in Sandown, a sweet dino museum near a fantastic beach, and we spent an entire day at Robin Hill countryside adventure park just outside of Newport, which has 80 acres of things to do.

Perhaps the most beautiful part of our journey was a morning spent in Bonchurch, a small Victorian seaside town built for the wealthy gentry. The mansions and cottages are lovely, as is the old church itself, and the small seafront has several tiny cafes. All three girls spent a few hours climbing in the rockpools looking for crabs and seashells before we had a hot chocolate in a cafe overlooking the sea. Pure bliss.  

As Gotten Manor is so well-equipped (and we are so skint), we ate only a few meals out, taking sandwiches and biscuits to most of our destinations. We did enjoy a rather expensive but nice Thai meal at the Pearl of Siam in Shanklin, where the girls were impressed with the varied hors d’oeuvres platter, and even were brave enough to try the prawn mushroom soup (mushrooms are usually a no-go area in our house). Of course the prawn crackers were a huge hit – Tilly even loved the hot chili sauce. 

We also had lunch at The White Mouse Pub in Chale. It advertises the biggest children’s play area on the island but we had to pay £1.50 per child to get in– and the food was dire, with Duncan’s chilli pasta so mild even two-year-old Clementine could eat it (if she could stand the taste). 

Ventnor is another small seaside town not far away from Bonchurch. The southernmost resort on the island, it has several antique shops as well as a decent foodstore, cafes and restaurants. The seafront is built up with a rocky beach the girls loved, with a small concreted paddling pool at one end overlooking the sea. 

Painted to look like a map of the Isle of Wight, it was, perhaps, the highlight of their trip. I bought a bucket-and-spade set for £1.99 and their happiness was complete. 

Heather was right. It’s the simple things that count. 

What is it? A driving holiday on the Isle of Wight

Where? We stayed at Gotten Manor, a lovely eco-friendly conversion in Chale on the southern part of the island, and enjoyed a spectacular modern two-storey cottage with all the amenities in the middle of nowhere. In fact, the brochure advertises “only cows for company”, and when a chorus of mooing woke us up in the morning, we knew it was right! As Gotten Manor is down a secluded drive that’s well off the beaten path, it’s best to ask owner Caroline in advance for help with childcare. She is more than willing to bend over backwards to make guests comfortable.

Local Activities: Lots of restaurants and pubs are nearby but we did what most parents do – stay home with the kids and get up early!

Everything in the Isle of Wight is readily accessible by car, and the island has lots of places to visit for either adult pampering or a family swim. The Medina Leisure Centre in Newport is perhaps the biggest venue of all, but ask any local for help in finding more unusual places for a facial or manicure, and they’ll be happy to help.

The Isle of Wight has lots to do, but time constraints met we could only take in a few activities. We loved the beaches more than anything but on rainy days Dinosaur Isle (01983 404344 www.dinosaurisle.com) offers family tickets for £13.50, with Fossil Walks – guided fossil hunts on Yaverland beach (approx two hours) organised and run by the team at Dinosaur Isle throughout the summer holidays and half term breaks. A family walk costs £11. Contact Dinosaur Isle or see their website for details/dates. Robin Hill (01983 730052 www.robin-hill.com), a countryside activity park, is open daily 10am–5pm, later in August. A four-person saver ticket costs £29, with free return visit within 7 days.

Wish we had known: That we’d have the foresight to bring some extra videos for the kids to calm them down in the evenings before bedtime. We ended up buying 102 Dalmations at a car boot sale in Wootton Bridge, and it was a life saver!

Our top tip: For a hot shower, don’t turn the water on full blast. Water conservation savers are used to conserve water but a hot shower can easily be had – if you only know how! Also, don’t use the washing machine at night, unless you don’t mind a lot of noise.

Kids say: “When are we there? I feel sick!” said Tilly about every five minutes in the car. “The slides at Robin Hill were the best!” says Josie, 7. “I want another ice cream!” chimes in two-year-old Clementine.

Getting There: We travelled to the Isle of Wight with Wightlink Green Getaways (0870 582 0202 www.wightlink.co.uk/greengetaways) and stayed in The Cart House at Gotten Manor (01983 551368 www.gottenmanor.co.uk), a gold award winner in the Green Island Tourist Awards. It sleeps up to six and one week’s self catering accommodation costs from £270 in low season, rising to L780 in July and August. Ferry prices for a five-day return ticket with Wightlink are from L51 for a car and up to four passengers; special offers available online. Two night bed & breakfast Green Getaway breaks in The Old House at Gotten Manor cost from L98 per person including Wightlink car ferry travel, or L88 per person including passenger ferry travel. Wightlink’s 40-minute Portsmouth–Fishbourne crossing is one of three routes. Car ferry crossings also operate between Lymington and Yarmouth (30 minutes) and there is a passenger FastCat from Portsmouth Harbour to Ryde Pierhead. Also contact Green Island Tourism, www.greenislandtourism.org.

*Wendy Sloane is Travel Editor of entertainthekids.com. She divides her time between writing and taking care of her three small daughters. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 2007

Featured Writer: Ruby W.

From a quiet village in Norfolk, England, Ruby W. dreams of becoming a fashion journalist, penning pieces for internationally read publications like Vogue magazine. In preparation for what a life as a writer might entail, Ruby has committed herself to writing each day—even if only for ten minutes. Today, Ruby, our newest Featured Writer, shares more on her long term goals as a writer and her process for perfecting her craft through practice and revision.

You've published 60 pieces on Write the World! How do you find the time to write?

It’s something that’s important to me and so I will always try and make time for it, even if I’m busy all day. Sometimes I will just do it for ten minutes before I go to school or I’ll write for the whole afternoon as it’s something you can easily pick up—it doesn’t matter when or where I am because ideas can come at any moment.

Who are some of your biggest writing inspirations?

Lauren Child is one of the first authors I ever read. Her unique and interesting writing style has always inspired me. When I was really young, I loved her book Charlie and Lola. Then I moved on to other Lauren Child books such as Clarice Bean and Ruby Redfort. They’re all completely different stories and characters but they always spoke to me and have never failed to make me smile. I aspire to write pieces that make the reader feel the same way. I also admire Rupi Kaur—I discovered her on social media,  never having been interested in poetry until that moment—she uses beautiful language and imagery and even her most simple pieces are still captivating and accessible to so many people.

You published a number of versions of your Flash Fiction Competition entry, can you tell us about your revision process?

I think it’s important to play around with what you’ve written—even if you’re happy with it—because even changing the word order in a sentence can dramatically change the atmosphere of a piece and make it easier to read. My first drafts are often quite clunky and rearranging my work helps to refine it. I always have a thesaurus open in another tab as I am prone to repeating words, and expanding my vocabulary adds depth to my descriptions. Peer reviews also play a big part in revising my work. Other people can spot mistakes or areas that need work that I am too close to see. I like having other people’s input in my writing because the more ideas and points of view I receive from my peers, the more accessible it becomes.

What inspired you to write "Generation Z," your piece about the ways in which you feel your generation has been mischaracterized?

I saw a quote from a teacher in the 1800s talking about how he thought that it was ridiculous that the younger generation was writing on paper instead of slate as eventually one day they’d run out of paper. It made me think about how younger generations have always been criticized because they live very different lives from those older than them. Our generation is often criticized for spending too much time on the internet, or not appreciating the written word or the world around us, which isn’t necessarily the case; times have just changed and our lives will be very different from the lives of teenagers twenty years ago, as will the lives of teenagers twenty years from now. Yet people are quick to disagree with change even though it is inevitable and how societies prosper.

In your bio, you mention that one day you'd love to be a fashion writer and pen pieces for Vogue. What do you love about fashion and fashion journalism?

Fashion is something that affects almost everyone’s life in some way. Whether you are interested in it or not, everybody wears clothes and they play a big part in how we present ourselves to the world. Furthermore, fashion journalism combines two of the things I love most in the world: clothes and writing. In fashion, there is never a dull moment—there’s always something to write about. Writing about fashion also offers a way to be involved in the industry even if you can’t backstitch to save your life! One of my favorite publications is Vogue Runway, which is a newsletter I receive over email. It focuses more on designer and runway coverage rather than beauty tips and what celebrities are wearing. I like to read about the lines, collections and shows and to stay up to date with what’s happening in the industry.   

About Ruby, In Her Own Words

My name is Ruby and I live in a quiet village in Norfolk, England, which can be a bit on the boring side but I am lucky enough to be surrounded by so many beautiful places. Most of my time is spent on the internet and coincidentally it is the reason I started writing. I have never had an overall goal or ambition when it came to writing, but knew I wanted to accomplish something with every piece. I am my happiest when I am using words and where they might take me. Besides writing and spending hours scrolling through Tumblr, I enjoy sewing, baking, art, netball and learning languages. At the minute, I am studying German and I know a little French, but in the future, I would like to be able to communicate with people all over the world. I am also really interested in the world of fashion and I hope that one day I will be part of the industry; whether that’s making and designing clothes or writing about them in Vogue.

Expert: Police state, corporate state, denuded duncery state — a blistery bunch of 80 percenters lost in a carnival of debt, malignant food, maladjusted education and the folly of a full-throttle powerfully propagandist media like a proverbial copper girdle wire around our collective consciousness. That So Called Liberal (sic) Press (sic) playing triple dirges for the death of any emaciated version of democracy with a capital D for dollar. Feeding frenzy of the old and new rich class, and a lot of wannabe’s lusting after lotto, You Tube fame, anything from the comfort of plasma 72 inch Big Brother. Isaac Asimov’s I Robot, going on 70 years soon, and that’s the way of the Zionist drone hucksters, those lovely glassy-eyed Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Dell types, and the entire class of probiotic Kombucha libertarians who have no interest in climate change, clean oceans, the growth in poverty, wars, pestilence, resource theft, toxins, on-the-spectrum child birth rates skyrocketing, art, revolution, real human to human relationships, nature, other species, blue skies, discourse, food sanity, clean water, education. Read this from NewsSpeak, err, Newsweek rag: The world’s top tech companies are in a race to build the best AI and capture that massive market, which means the technology will get better fast—and come at us as fast. IBM is investing $1 billion in its Watson; Amazon is banking on Alexa; Apple has Siri. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are devoting their research labs to AI and robotics. In September, Salesforce.com announced it’s adding AI, called Einstein, to its business software. Its value, CEO Marc Benioff said at the launch, will be in ‘helping people do the things that people are good at and turning more things over to machines.’ AI will lead us into the mother of all tech revolutions. The last time anything came close was around 1900, when the automobile, telecommunications, the airplane and mass electrification all came together at once, radically changing the world from the late 1800s to the 1920s. Such times are particularly frightening. ‘A society that had established countless routines and habits, norms and regulations, to fit the conditions of the previous revolution, does not find it easy to assimilate the new one,’ wrote economist Carlota Perez in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, her classic book. ‘A sense of impotence and frustration accumulates and a growing incongruence is experienced between the new and the old paradigm.’ Amazingly, these people are many cards missing from a full deck of humanity. Shelter, baby, sane sanity, and calm, less frenetic anxiety, less is more, and more is monstrous — obvious necessitates in any hierarchy of needs paradigm. More time for humanity to do what, is the question about these libertarians who think robotics and computers will turn us all into Athenians? More reading and schooling and community-it-takes-a-village action? Right! To help thy neighbor in endless bouts of humanitarian sharing? Right! To bring distribution of health, education, nourishment, and sanity to the rest of the world? Right! So, the goal of AI and robotics is, drum roll, to grease the palms of the millionaire and billionaire class and their classless middle managers and technocrats. More: The danger of artificial intelligence is in its behavior, and whether it is conscious or possesses other attributes of human thought is irrelevant. Computers that can drive cars and fly airplanes certainly pose dangers to humans and in fact Google has gone to great efforts to design safety into their self-driving cars. Computers that can run the entire world economy and provide constant companionship to all humans will pose great danger to humans. Malicious motivation is irrelevant to many of the dangers posed by super-intelligent machines. There are two forms of ‘wireheading’ to guard against: computers that delude themselves about their observations of the environment and computers that modify the source of approval for their actions, for example modifying humans. There are also dangers from what Omohundro described as ‘Basic AI Drives.’ Super-intelligent machines may be tools of competition among humans, who will be careless about these dangers because they are caught up in the heat of competition. And, Bill Hibbard, academic and AI tinkerer, is many times quoted as someone questioning AI, but let’s look at this, from James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era: That’s the cornerstone of an idea called the ‘intelligence explosion,’ developed in the 1960s by English mathematician I.J. Good. At the time, Good was studying early artificial neural networks, the basis for ‘deep learning’ techniques that are creating a buzz today, some 50 years later. He anticipated that self-improving machines would become as intelligent, then exponentially more intelligent, than humans. They’d save mankind by solving intractable problems, including famine, disease and war. Near the end of his life, as I report in my book Our Final Invention, Good changed his mind. He feared global competition would push nations to develop superintelligence without safeguards. And like Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak, Good feared it would annihilate us. ‘They’ll become self-protective and seek resources to better achieve their goals. They’ll fight us to survive, and they won’t want to be turned off.’ The crux of the problem is that we don’t know how to control superintelligent machines. Many assume they will be harmless or even grateful. But important research conducted by A.I. scientist Steve Omohundro indicates that they will develop basic drives. Whether their job is to mine asteroids, pick stocks or manage our critical infrastructure of energy and water, they’ll become self-protective and seek resources to better achieve their goals. They’ll fight us to survive, and they won’t want to be turned off. Omohundro’s research concludes that the drives of superintelligent machines will be on a collision course with our own, unless we design them very carefully. We are right to ask, as Stephen Hawking did, ‘So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right?’ These conversations intrigue the controllers and their minions, especially in our institutions of higher learning where a scant few are also the controllers of the narrative and worse, the curriculum. Imagine the dialogues around poverty, resource theft, cultural immolation with farmers, activists, revolutionaries, the parents of 11 million babies dying a year from treatable (mostly caused by malnutrition) disease. Imagine the former prisoners talking about reform and the enslavement of their lives and families’ lives by the punishment society, largely ramped up by the very inventions of the robotics-AI-Big Data yahoos, espousing their idiocy at conferences in the Rockies and at the foot of their superconductors. Imagine the millions of lost human lives caused by the financialization schemes dreamed up by computer whizzes. The model of terror for New Orleans, Detroit, Flint, across the land and globe, the Bhopal-driven corporations utilizing the best and the brightest and their inventions of creative human destruction. The political classless sucking on the crack pipe of power and money. Imagine, these conferences and interviews INTERSECTING with the age old problem of the rich and haves and the majority, poor and haves not, never in the same room. From that mush-making propaganda and infotainment and dirty entertainment, to the daily dehumanizing life cycle of drive-thru’s, Amazon Fresh deliveries, tellerless banking, on-line K12 and college, and the endless Windows and Screens of mush that sucks any agency and verve out of the average person as they navigate the endless bureaucracy of the modern 21st Century/Beyond Kafka Road Show of Stiff Arm Saluting to the Digital Gods. Can anyone see the efficacy of actually calling upon us, the masses, the ones stuck on the hamster wheel of generational poverty, generational indebtedness, generational running from the repo man (now some cyber security systems embedded into all the tools of democratic life – DMV, Labor, Medicine, Insurance, Credit Bureaus, Background Agencies, Drug Screeners, Fact Checkers). I have spasms of the old Molotov way, when I hear these supposed eggheads, and our superficial lust for another Turning or Watson. Oh, these billionaires and their underlings, the geniuses, sure, driving this absurdity of technology, colonizing Mars and Uranus, endless projects of tinkering, while coral reefs melt, farms dry up, millions perish yearly, while these captains of industry fly their AI-captained drones into the orifices of the dying while sending out gigatons of meaningless junk into both the ether and on our highways and byways. Food, Shelter, Safety, Education, Health? Shit no, if you are not part of the White Jewish-Christo-Emirate Class – Big questions derailed in this punishment society scrambling to make sense of 100 years of robber barons and elitists running the show, the neo-con, neo-liberal, neo-fascist, neo-libertarian, neo-gulag show: Where do I live, social worker? Portland, Oregon, where rubber and spewing diesels rule the day and night, 24/7? At least 10 states (California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Texas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Arizona, Florida and Colorado) offer less than 30 affordable rental units for every 100 potential renters. Will Mexico pay to build a wall to stem the American exodus south? You think those mental tinkerers give a shit about people, of the soil, pushed away from the lands – rivers, beaches, islands, mountains, deltas, steppes, savannas, fjords, ice-fields, hills, canyons, forests, deserts, jungles, cloud islands, plains — to solder the shit of their digital orgasm, and to glue, hammer, weld, galvanize, ionize, nanosize, titrate, liquefy, saw, mill, percolate, mine, harvest, spray, tap, refine, package, burn, acidify, synthesize, denature, distill, stitch, sew, de-ionize, plow, scrape, smelt, sluice, pulverize, butcher, hoe, excavate, fertilize, fumigate, decapitate, denigrate, assemble all the other supplies, junk, consumer items, raw goods, commodities, toys, weapons, propaganda tools for the vaunted minority in the First World. The digital creeps love inventing and marketing the toys of lobotomy and anti-social thought control – one giant replicator for Call of Duty and variations on a theme . . . and all the crap that pits people against people, race against race, religion against religions, class against class, gender against gender, nation against nation in this clawing and shooting and pummeling cultural slipstream that teaches each next generation the devaluing of ”the other.” The controllers this side of the next Kool-aide batch coursing through each and every home’s tap water spigot are having a hay day, as Americans are floundering now more than ever, waiting for the next 3.0 iPhone, pining over the next Ridley Scott movie of salvation, at the ready to stump the Trump in meaningless spasms of attacking just his side of fascism, leaving the rot-gut democrats and libertarians to continue their giant tapeworm of destruction to grow and grow. Now, especially, this abomination out of the closet (Familia Trump) — reflective of the stupidity and tough-guy-in-the-mirror/on-Twitter-Kardashian-wanna-be but never really able to back machismo that is America the Red-White-Blue of the continuous hematoma in the pericardium — IS holding the sputtering heart of America, and Trump and Company, LLC, Kosher Certified, are drawing the ire and bombastic support of the leveling Americans with a little “a” for abomination. All these spasms, or even silent nightly sweats, after this last shit-hole election, when all along, the blackness of Capitalism has been the rancid pustule smothering each next generation – Baby-Boomer, Yuppie, Millennial, Gen X,Y, Gen Zed, Zombie. Always with us, days of genocidal floodgate openings, first nations the real genocide purloined by all manner of cultures, religions, shit-bag people — always here in the place called Turtle Island: those robber barons, slave holders, financiers from over the pond, Rothschilds, the 1.3 percenters called the Chosen People, shifting massive trillions through their sluices of pain, collective punishment gulags, legal gymnastics and technological Kendo moves their forte now. Colluding Talmud-citing, Bible-Thumping, Manifest Destiny-humping peoples from another womb. As I lay Dying, William Faulkner  – And the next morning they found him in his shirt-tail laying asleep on the floor like a felled steer, and the top of the box bored clean full of holes and Cash’s new auger broke off in the last one. When they taken the lid off her they found that two of them had bored on into her face. Soylent Green is people, you’re goddamned right. Money, derivatives, the billionaires’ four-timing shuffle, the perversions of debt and credit, the heavy sack of coagulated blood hanging like a dowager hump on every family’s next and next generation. Now daily the liberals, the so-denatured Americans of the little-to-the-left-of- center adherents of the continuous never tell a lie Georgy Porgy Washington, they cluck and claw and turn pink about this Mafioso President, the one on TV, paid for and delivered by the American people-Nielsen Ratings-Arbitron-$50,000 a second commercial satisfaction. They all tune in, now don’t they, happy Capital Americans. The un-Holy Publishers print his vile, art of the deal, publish the vile of every one of them – traitor, general, politico, POTUS, and shyster peddling invented history and deafening feats of pseudo psychology and mainstream entertainment. We are all the rump and laughing stock in his apprentice way of raping entire classes of people, this POTUS Numero Four-Five. Like a .45 stuck in the craw of every American and Third Worlder! In the mix, though, the controllers, they keep ladling pap or pabulum, pushing the spine loosening pacification into each bronchial of our lives — respect for all peoples, bring in the consensus crew, respect all opinions, all people while they kill us with their smiles. Imagine, we should be teaching who to hate, how to hate and in all the meaningful ways, how to utilize hate into action. Imagine, we teach these toddlers and the college ones and all of us in these sappy companies to do the opposite of what should be – thou shalt hate and seek justice for crimes perpetrated by the elite onto humankind. WTF! So, we unteach anger, unteach retribution, unteach action, unteach revolution, unteach how to spot a precipitant. Every minute we should be auguring that ability to fight back, and rebuff, not only the fascism of the Holy Republican Party and a Trump or Netanyahu, but to hate the entire sociopathic nature of corporations-militaries-punishers-bankers-investors-renters-technologists. Instead, we get pundits and middling folk attacking anyone who might go out and march and scream and shout and dervish in the streets when the police state comes down hard like Gestapo, their weapons of Zionism glimmer in the sweat of the mace and industrial tear gas. I see them go to Costco, see them find more days off lifting false dreams in their Disneyland world, their American evil seeding of cultures with the poison of travelers checks and exceptionalism . . . . like resistant tuberculous, the Americans hit those beaches and slum-poverty tours, cruises, enclaves in Costa Rica, anywhere on earth, the westerners end up like leeches looking for more soft flesh. Americans . . . Germans . . . Canadians . . . Brits . . . Australians . . . . From sea to shining oil slick sea! Interestingly, I go back to Andre Vltchek, on one of his American book and film tours, “In the USA – “I Cannot Write!”: I was shocked by the state in which I found the United States. I left many years ago. I left New York, which was, for more than a decade, my home. I never returned, except to launch my books and films, and to see my friends. I never stayed for long time. Two weeks, this time, was the longest in years. This visit broke me. It exhausted me. It thoroughly depressed me. I saw clearly how grotesque pseudo-morality, disgusting religious concepts and hypocrisy influenced and ruined entire nations, client states, worldwide, especially in Asia and Africa. Yes, I believe in collective guilt. Holding US citizenship, I share the guilt. And therefore, I work non-stop, not to wash my hands, but to stop the madness. I am convinced that the West, the white race and its lackeys abroad, have no right to rule over this Planet. I saw enough to back my conviction. The West is finished, its culture dead. What is left is unattractive, even horrifying. There is no heart, no compassion, and no creativity. And those billions of people beyond the Western realm should not be dying, while forced to support the aggressive individualism of the post-Christian, post-Crusade colonialism and fascism of Europe and the United States. Ahh, living the dream, daily, watching people running around in tights and redneck t-shirts, everyone looking like they are in a Walmart clothing competition. Or the fake ones. All the inside jokes, the memes, from Facebook to the next recipe for spicy hot wings, these Americans lavish in the trash of the airwaves, Netflix, and the entire Madison Avenue tripe fed to this country of ennui, NASCAR, polluting football, and endless buffets. I easily find how much I drown daily – my comeuppance —  the fruity intercourse-interchanges with the people I work with, those neighbors, the frightened ones, and the idiots running the streets with their lifted-up pick-ups with six-foot by eight-foot USA and Trump Makes America Great flags streaming like swastikas ablaze. So many corners turned, USA, the world of half-assed thinking and doing, until we come to today, POLICE STATE USA, thanks largely to the colluding Press, and my daily reminder, how one of my professions ended up in the sewage pit. From Robert Parry, Consortium News: It was on Dec. 9, 2004, when the mean-spirited mainstream media’s treatment of investigative journalist Gary Webb led him his career devastated, his family broken, his money gone and his life seemingly hopeless to commit suicide. It was a moment that should have shamed all the big-shot journalists who had a hand in Webb’s destruction, but it mostly didn’t. Oh these precious decades like Rip Van Winkle narcolepsy of the collective soul, until we are all soiled by this lazy, anxiety-filled hibernation: As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. — Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas It’s easy to go on and on about this police state, and the policing by the corporations – swabs on cheeks, background checks, no time off, work 24-7, black out those holidays, no excuses for terminal gridlock, wage thieves. This is the mortician on duty and manning the radio and air ways – you are guilty until pronounced dead. You are suspect until you’ve given pound of flesh and left kidney for the cause of Capitalism. You are shit out of luck because we have the backing of the Sixth Fleet, a million marching SWAT teams, endless surveillance of every waking blink and snoring seizure. It all comes down to basic rights, right? In a blistering dissent in Utah v. Strieff, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the court for holding ‘that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights.’ Sotomayor continued: ‘This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants—so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact. That justification must provide specific reasons why the officer suspected you were breaking the law, but it may factor in your ethnicity, where you live, what you were wearing, and how you behaved. The officer does not even need to know which law you might have broken so long as he can later point to any possible infraction—even one that is minor, unrelated, or ambiguous. The indignity of the stop is not limited to an officer telling you that you look like a criminal. The officer may next ask for your consent to inspect your bag or purse without telling you that you can decline. Regardless of your answer, he may order you to stand helpless, perhaps facing a wall with [your] hands raised. If the officer thinks you might be dangerous, he may then frisk you for weapons. This involves more than just a pat down. As onlookers pass by, the officer may feel with sensitive fingers every portion of [your] body. A thorough search [may] be made of [your] arms and armpits, waistline and back, the groin and area about the testicles, and entire surface of the legs down to the feet.’ If you still can’t read the writing on the wall, Sotomayor breaks it down further: ‘This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong… So long as the target is one of the many millions of people in this country with an outstanding arrest warrant, anything the officer finds in a search is fair game for use in a criminal prosecution. The officer’s incentive to violate the Constitution thus increases…’ Need any lessons on spread eagle poses, downward facing dog body cavity assists, frog march locomotion tips, and upside facing black boot gymnastics? God, the American Psychological Association, here, mealy-mouthing: While much was known about psychologist involvement in detainee abuse prior to the PENS (Psychological Ethics and National Security) report, what has become progressively clearer is that the methods used by interrogators, guided by Behavioral Science Consultant Teams (BSCTs), have been intentionally shaped by psychologists. Many of the most objectionable interrogation strategies had been re-designed by psychologists from U.S. military programs, primarily the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, originally intended to protect U.S. soldiers from undesirable thought reform. According to international definitions, and the understanding of the SERE program itself, SERE-based interrogation procedures constitute torture. Official reports and numerous journalists over the last several years have provided extensive documentation depicting how these SERE techniques were used in U.S. interrogation practices by SERE-trained psychologists, both in DOD and CIA detention facilities. Yet, however despicable, psychology should never let these ‘enhanced techniques’ cause us to ignore the only somewhat more subtle techniques prescribed in the Army Field Manual, the common guide for all U.S. military interrogations. In the Army Field Manual, allowable interrogation tactics include deception, fear escalation, ego harm, isolation, and psychological disorientation. Regardless of whether these techniques are ethical for professional interrogators, they are morally problematic for psychologists, given the clearly circumscribed ethical underpinnings of the profession. http://clubof.info/

  BY STEVEN GRAY

Spoiler alert: the films discussed in this essay include Saving Private Ryan, The Stoning of Soraya M., and Zero Dark Thirty.

My parents didn’t own a television until I was twelve and they limited our viewing time. My mother would say: “You should learn how to entertain yourself.” I didn’t have that many channels but I also didn’t have commercials so it wasn’t bad advice; however, it left me vulnerable whenever I was exposed to someone else’s television. I wasn’t used to how coldblooded it was. I was haunted for months by a TV show I saw at my grandmother’s house: two young men were confronted by a street gang in the 1950s; one ran away, but his friend was beaten to death. When you’re five or six years old that is hard to process.

Forty years later (more or less) I was visiting my parents in Southern California. We hardly ever watched movies together since my father and I can talk for hours and my mother’s taste in movies was different than mine. We were watching a war film though, and when it was over they yawned and said goodnight and went to bed. It hadn’t phased them, but I sat there stunned and wide-eyed as the ramifications were hitting home.

One scene in particular: an American soldier encounters a Nazi in a house in a French village. They fight hand-to-hand, having run out of ammunition. (I’ve read about the lack of realism in war films where soldiers shoot their weapons for far longer than the weapons’ capacity for ammunition.) The American pulls a knife but the German grabs his wrist and overpowers him. The American ends up on the floor on his back with the German on top. The knife hovers over his upper torso, pointed down, and his resistance is ebbing as he tries to keep the knife away from his heart. The director (or the screenwriter) adds an insidious note to this life and death struggle. It takes on an intimate tone as the German leans down and whispers in the soldier’s ear about giving up and accepting death. The knife sinks into his chest and it is over.

When the German leaves the room, he passes another American soldier on the stairs. The latter has a rifle but is so petrified with fear he can’t use it. The German walks by him like someone whose spineless existence is not worth acknowledging. By that time I was floored and cursing Spielberg (or the screenwriter Robert Rodat) for the diabolic genius of the scene, however much it favored the Nazis. Fortunately they lost the war.

I had been exposed to quite a few films by then, but nothing like Saving Private Ryan (1998), especially when the soldiers land on Omaha Beach and walk into a buzz-saw. It took up half an hour at the beginning of the film and is so well done that veterans with PTSD are warned about viewing it.

Another film I found disturbing was The Stoning of Soraya M. (2008). Instead of hundreds of men being gunned down on the beach, here is one woman buried up to her waist while men throw rocks at her (including her son and husband). It’s a clumsy form of execution and it goes back thousands of years. Even worse, she hadn’t committed the alleged crime (adultery).

It’s an American film, set in Iran, and based on a book by a French-Iranian journalist, Freidoune Sahebjam. The film got mixed reviews, which was a little surprising. Rotten Tomatoes said it “…drowns out its message with an inappropriately heavy-handed approach.” Those hands have rocks in them. People were shocked and put off by the stoning scene. I thought the film was well done, however brutal and direct and hard to watch at times. The woman’s husband is such a slimy-casual sociopath you’re hoping he steps on a landmine. His marriage was becoming inconvenient and he found a way to get rid of his wife. Simple as that.

Other aspects of the film are not so simple and are addressed in this article, “Sensationalist Film Exploits Human Rights Issue in Iran.” Stoning in Iran is very rare. “[T]he Head of the Iranian Judiciary announced a moratorium on stoning back in 2002… Sadly, at least three people have been executed by stoning since then. Interestingly, all three were men.” Meanwhile, in the US over 1800 women were killed every year between 2003 and 2012. (In a third of the cases the men were husbands, boyfriends, exes, etc. In half of the cases the men used a gun.) And too many films require the death or terrorizing of a woman in order to generate a plot.

In The Stoning of Soraya M. a woman is executed by a method found in biblical times. In Noah (2014) you have a biblical story where the human race is condemned to death by the god of some delirious wishful thinkers in the desert. The only people who will survive are Noah and his family. The movie is ridiculous and disturbing. Noah plans to stab his daughter’s baby with a knife for theological reasons. The main problem is the original story from the Book of Genesis (in the Torah and the Old Testament). I wrote about it in an essay entitled, “Neo-Noah: The Bastardization of a Jewish Myth.”

I should note that I’m not including slasher films in this essay. I’ve seen very few and those were enough. The gore is unbelievable these days (and that’s just on Game of Thrones). It makes you wonder what sort of repressed urges are lurking in directors and viewers.

There are films I find disturbing which I’ve never seen. For example, J. Edgar (2011). The reviews were lukewarm. The screenplay is by one of the Hollywood castrati. It has no balls.

From The Guardian:

The movie does not quite reclaim Hoover for gay history, neither does it exactly claim a tragic status for Hoover’s imprisonment in the closet, nor quite suggest that his tentacular empire was a symptom of sexual repression. There is a weird, muffled neutrality to all this, a lot of pulled punches and fudged issues, as if screenwriter and director have made an uneasy alliance to create a Hoover they admire from different angles: the fictional love child of Harvey Milk and Dirty Harry. And there’s an infuriating final twist that sneakily preserves the movie’s impartiality.

It is unconscionable to cover such a vile person as J. Edgar Hoover with a “muffled neutrality.” He was head of the FBI for nearly half a century, during which time he was more intent on persecuting pot smokers and people in the civil rights movement than organized crime. “We want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail… Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him” (“The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover“). That is not a leftwing radical speaking, it’s Harry S. Truman.

Hoover looked like a toad who wore his mother’s clothing with a gun in his hand (“FBI agents upset over movie alleging J. Edgar Hoover was gay“). So who do they get to portray him? Leonardo DiCaprio. Talk about historical revisionism. It makes you wonder about the extent of government propaganda in our culture. It has always been there to some extent, but the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 “explicitly forbids information and psychological operations aimed at influencing U.S. public opinion.” That was nullified by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in 2012 (“The NDAA Legalizes The Use Of Propaganda On The US Public“).

We now have films like American Sniper (2014), glorifying a mercenary killer with a thousand-yard stare. And Zero Dark Thirty (2012) which exploits the dubious story of Osama bin Laden’s assassination in 2011 by U.S. Special Forces in Pakistan. Keep in mind that the FBI has stated it has “no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11” (FBI says, “No hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11”). We have no evidence that the unarmed man in his fifties who was shot when  American soldiers broke into his home was bin Laden. There were no photos or DNA test released, and the body was quickly dumped in the ocean. Supposedly he lived for years near a Pakistani military base and they didn’t know he was there. Even more suspicious: since the operation was run by the CIA any records of it cannot be accessed by the public. (The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh thinks the raid was staged.) And the film, which tries to put a positive spin on torture, was secretly aided by the CIA. (Read “Hollywood History: CIA Sponsored “Zero Dark Thirty”, Oscar for “Best Propaganda Picture” and “The director of the CIA secretly helped produce Hollywood’s biggest movie about the Osama bin Laden raid.”)

Then there are the 9/11 films which I refuse to see (except for the documentary Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup (2009)). There are several films about Flight 93, which is said to have crashed in a field in Pennsylvania when the passengers tried to take back the plane from the hijackers. It was probably shot down by a fighter jet since debris was spread over miles of countryside. The alleged crash site has little or no wreckage (“Highjacking The Highjacking: The problem with the United 93 films“). The films conform to the official fairytale of 9/11 and I find that disturbing, especially when someone like Oliver Stone makes a middle-of-the-road movie about a couple of responders trapped in the rubble. “World Trade Center doesn’t do much with 9/11, except to sentimentalize it for popular consumption” (Slate). Like that hadn’t been done already.

There is another aspect of movies which bothers some people: the casting. It’s an ethnic minefield, for one thing. Movies were invented and developed by people of European descent, but that doesn’t mean a white person should portray someone of a different race. When a famous white actor is used it may have more to do with box office concerns than racism, but tell that to those who want to see their own kind on the big screen.

There was a controversy about who should portray Frida Kahlo (who was Mexican and Jewish) in Frida (2002). They ended up with Salma Hayek (whose background is Mexican and Lebanese). It was a semi-obtuse choice, but imagine what a travesty it would have been if Madonna had gotten her clutches on the role (she tried to). Many people objected to Zoe Saldana (who I liked as a blue-skinned alien in 2009’s Avatar) in the role of a darker-skinned Nina Simone (Nina (2016)). A woman wrote the screenplay and directed the film, but according to the Guardian “… it is an inept, cliché-ridden story edited together in a treacly and cheap manner.”

I mentioned the miscasting in J. Edgar, but why would Leonardo DiCaprio play a sleazy stock broker in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)? Is it anti-Semitic to have a Jewish actor play a Jewish swindler? For that matter, why would the more positive role of a writer, David Foster Wallace (a Gentile), be given to a Jewish actor? (“Why The End of the Tour isn’t really about my friend David Foster Wallace“)

Other films I found disturbing:[1] The Deer Hunter (1978) – not so much when they’re eating monkey brains, but the Russian roulette scene (one of the actors reminded me of my brother). Repulsion (1965) by Roman Polanski – a woman is cracking up and cracks appear in the wall. Some people find his past disturbing and won’t go near his films. Inland Empire (2006) – David Lynch is one of my favorite directors but this one got away from him. He didn’t even try to make sense of it. I walked out of the theater cursing.

There was a short film I walked in on one afternoon at the Art Institute. The theater was nearly empty. A man on the screen was slowly and methodically disemboweling himself with a sword.

[1] I knew a sensitive and religious woman who would watch the most gory films, the kind I won’t go near. My father doesn’t go to the movies anymore because the sound-system in the theater is like a giant robot stomping on people. My mother-in- law hated The Revenant, mainly for what happened to a horse (she has two horses). My wife found Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas too disturbing to watch, along with Fatal Attraction (a rabbit is boiled) and Jaws (she saw it as a young girl). She got tired of a TV series, Mad Men, because of how women were treated in the 1950’s. No brides were burned, but many women were prevented from living up to their full potential.

  Steven Gray has lived in San Francisco since the 1970s.  His most recent book of poetry is Jet Shock and Culture Lag. He writes reviews for www.litseen.com. 

  “Miscasting, Propaganda, and Psychologically Twisted Violence: A Look at Disturbing Films” BY STEVEN GRAY Spoiler alert: the films discussed in this essay include Saving Private Ryan, The Stoning of Soraya M., …