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atom-writings · 4 months

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hetalia axis & allies (+ canada) xmas headcanons

1.6k words ~ gender neutral headcanons

tw: uhhh christmas obviously. mention of religion and underwear?? uh... i think that's it

a/n: this is my first christmas as a jewish convert so that's been weird. anyway I just wanted something quick, so its mostly a list of gift ideas (:

America

Alfred is SUCH a huge Christmas fan. I mean, canonically he dresses up as Santa, so he goes all out for the entire month of December. He's been working on a huge holiday home display for decades, and it shows.

He plays Santa at his local mall during the weeks leading up to Christmas; and on the night of, he hands out hot cocoa outside his house. It's fun, but it also means he's a little distracted when it comes to you.

What he would get you: Posters of your favourite movies, super comfy pyjamas, expensive figures of characters you like, candy you like but never get for yourself, model planes or Legos for you two to build together, novelty pens, a stupid cowboy costume so you can match <3, those handmade coupons because he 1. Loves you and 2. Forgot about Christmas until yesterday

What he would want: Any video games, Funko Pops, vinyls of music he likes, those big packs of shirts (he is constantly running out of shirts because he rips or irreparably stains them,) Marvel comics, anything with an eagle on it, those mini wacky waving inflatable tube men things, bulk pens and pencils because he also breaks those constantly-

England

Arthur is not big into Christmas and never has been. He'll celebrate with you, but he's not going out when it comes to any aspect. If anything, he finds it a little exhausting getting gifts for everyone

But, he does adore walking around and looking at all the lights. He'll do that a couple times with you in December.

What he would get you: Any novel you’ve mentioned even once, tickets to a concert both of you will enjoy, classy jackets that fit you perfectly, cute keychains, fancy art supplies, fragrances that remind him of you, bags/purses that fit your style, CDs

What he would want: Sewing supplies (thread, new needles, new fabric scissors,) framed photos of the two of you, Doctor Who merch, foreign tea, a book on how to take care of your eyebrows properly (he will not learn otherwise,) slippers, those sarcastic magnets that all millennial women have at least one of, any ridiculous piece of merch with the union jack on it

France

Francis has very mixed feelings about Christmas. On one hand, he hates how consumerist it has become, but on the other hand, nothing makes him happier than seeing the joy the season brings to others.

Plus, he does enjoy giving and receiving presents. The music too? Wonderful. As long as you don't get too stressed out, the holiday should be perfect.

What he would get you: Tons of clothes; stuff that's already your style, and completely new stuff, room decorations (NOT posters,) a reservation at a nice restaurant, bracelets that he made for you, makeup (if you like that kind of thing,) candles that smell like his cologne, CHEESE

What he would want: Fancy fabric, any clothes (he doesn’t care what they are as long as you think they’d look good on him…) paintings or photography, literally ANYTHING creative you’ve made, hair ties (he loses at least 5 a day,) bird stuffed animals, (Basically anything! Francis is not picky)

China

Christmas is a new occurrence for Yao, and he isn't the biggest fan. He'll buy you stuff for it, but he would do that normally. The lights and the music aren't anything special to him either. Basically, he won't celebrate unless you want to.

What he would get you: Elaborate, very expensive jewellery, huge stuff like a car, Chinese cookbooks, traditional clothes that he made specifically to represent you (: luxury handbags (that he got at SUCH a good discount,) tons of weird off-brand merch of your favourite show, probably a nice meal too!

What he would want: Yao is hard to buy for. Soft robes, stuff to help with back pain, face masks, Hello Kitty keychains… reading glasses maybe?

Russia

Although he isn't as excited about Christmas as he is about the New Year, he still loves the holiday. It's a nice excuse to see family, and everyone is just so happy around the season! He's especially excited to celebrate it with you.

He's not the best at giving gifts, but he could be worse. Regardless of whether you like all of it, you're gonna get a lot of stuff.

(Also, he plays Santa for the kids sometimes. It's so cute-)

What he would get you: Random knick-knacks he probably found at a local market, knitted hats and gloves in your favourite colour, a scarf to match his, tickets to go somewhere warm on vacation, stuffed animals! books that made him think of you (usually philosophical or religious novels,) pretty rocks (:

What he would want: SUNFLOWERS! (This works for every occasion,) baked goods, clothes that aren’t 250 years old- new doilies and paintings to decorate his house, pictures of yourself, friendship bracelets, stuffed animals, if you can make a scarf somehow, DO THAT

North Italy

Feliciano cares about Christmas in a more religious way, but he's never mad about getting presents. So, he'll probably spend most of the day in church, but he still did put a lot of effort into getting you stuff you love.

What he would get you: Pajamas & bath robes, shitty romance novels that he wants you to read, weird hand-made knick-knacks, makeup, strange mugs that he found at a thrift store, a painting of you (: probably a pair of his boxers-

What he would want: New paint brushes, novelty pasta shapes, fancy jackets, any art that you’ve made (regardless of quality,) cat stuffed animals, The Ability To Get A Grip, skincare products, shiny garbage (For art purposes, duh,) those handmade coupon things

Germany

Ludwig does not enjoy Christmas particularly. He's terrible at giving gifts but he wants to so desperately that he spends all of winter stressing out about it. Yes, he's excited to see your reaction to his gifts, but at what cost?!

Although he does still like all the decorations at least. Maybe he just likes re-decorating though.

What he would get you: Puzzles you can complete together, soft sweaters, practical stuff you need (like book bags, lens cloths, that kind of thing,) stationery, reservations for private tours at museums you would find interesting, a subscription to whatever silly service you want (:

What he would want: Books about city planning, nerdy card games, a fun lanyard, a new coffee machine, those aroma-therapy diffuser things, household tools like vacuums and stuff (Get him an air fryer. He’s going to be fascinated.) stress balls, pens (He is boring.)

Japan

Kiku really has no particular feelings towards Christmas. If you weren't there, the most he would do was put up a mini tree. He's stressed out by both giving and receiving presents and is only willing to do that kind of thing if you want to.

What he would get you: Electronics, merch of your favourite Sanrio character, books that he thinks you’ll like, stickers, a bento box, comfy sweatpants, cute hairpins, plushies from your favourite media, a bunch of pillows, some obscure Japanese snacks too!

What he would want: Miku figures, posters, video games, manga, general nerdy stuff, history novels (he likes to correct them,) blackout curtains, cute face masks, a Polaroid camera, a guide on socialization (Seriously.) a knit scarf, if you can knit (:

South Italy

Romano desperately wants to care about Jesus more than getting gifts. He's a devout catholic, g*ddamnit! But... he does just really love eating baked goods and getting gifts more than anything. Getting together with family, the music, the lights, he just ADORES the holiday.

What he would get you: Blankets and pillows, your favourite snacks, clothes that are a little more revealing- cruise tickets (if going on wouldn’t be hell for you,) a journal where he wrote down all of the things he loves about you (completely honestly,) religious items, fancy perfumes

What he would want: Paintings from local artists, post-its (so he can finally remember SOMETHING,) anything with the Italian flag on it, stupid bumper stickers, pictures of the other nations that you’ve written insults on, fancy patterned scarves and fabric

Prussia

Like Alfred, Gilbert loves Christmas in a very childish way. He embraces that side of himself during the holidays and he'd love it if you joined him in that. He constantly insists on going out to see the lights, and he just can't get enough of Christmas movies. Even the bad ones (He's a Hallmark girlie.)

What he would get you: A vintage music box, hair dye, DVDs of your favourite movies (just to have,) stationery, random snacks he picked up from a gas station an hour ago, weirdly sentimental jewellery? Vintage journals, pictures of himself

What he would want: Coupons (???) goofy temporary tattoos, metal CDs, tea (he’s weirdly embarrassed about liking tea and doesn’t buy it for himself?) vintage maps that he can frame and hang up, probably like, WD40? DC comics, novelty trophies, Pokemon cards, video games

Canada

More than anything, Matthew loves winter. So, therefore, he loves Christmas! Seeing you smile when you open your gifts, he looks forward to it all season. It seems like the only time of year when everyone else is either as miserable or as happy as he is, so it's his favourite holiday.

Cuddling up in front of the fireplace with hot cocoa, watching some old Christmas movie, its all he wants.

What he would get you: Comfy hoodies, comfy slippers too, hot cocoa packs, big stuff like a new PC or fridge or smth- decorations for your room, face masks, fidget toys, novelty Canadian keychains, figures of your favourite characters, festive sweets (like candy-canes and stuff.)

What he would want: Anything with a maple leaf (yes, he wants MORE of that,) boring stuff like socks, wood-working tools or like a new snow shovel, fairy lights, DVDs (because he still uses them? Why.) a new phone case, gift cards (HES BORING,) pre-packaged crafts, lotion and cologne that smells like pine

merry christmas if you celebrate! this'll probably be the last full thing I post until 2024, so thanks to all you readers for sticking around this year (: you have no idea how much it means to me. i love yall. and to all a good night or whatever santa said

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rigsbywi · 9 days

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Today is weed day, and if you’re looking for ways to celebrate, might I suggest ordering the first book in my comic series about gay millennial teens smoking weed? It’s only $15 and I promise you will like it

You can read the whole thing here:

#rigsbywi #webcomic #crowdfunding

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the-bar-sinister · 20 days

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Fandom | Fanfiction | Self Ship | Whump

👉 he/they | queer | married | adult | elder millennial

👉 plural | fictionkin (serious/spiritual)

👉 Muti shipper | Poly shipper

Our Website | Our System Directory | Our F/O lists

Archive of our Own account

No DNI we block at will 🫡

Frequent tags:

Selfship

Villain f/o

whump prompts

text post meme

blog updates

friend mail

Current Fixation: Ace Atttorney.

Source fandoms: Resident Evil, Metal Gear, Marvel Comics, Persona games, Slayers anime, GTA V, Great/Ace Attorney, Homestuck, Danganronpa, Fire Emblem Three Houses, Urusei Yatsura, Digimon, Girls Frontline, Steven Universe, Pathologic, Jem & The Holograms, Peter Pan, Welcome to Demon School, Disgaea, Sherlock Holmes media

non-source fandoms: Invader Zim, ABC’s Lost, Twin Peaks, Silent Hill, Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Vampire Chronicles (books), Doctor Who Labyrinth, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Final Fantasy (4-9), Pokemon, Black Lagoon, Miami Vice, Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite, Prey 2017, Dishonored, Call of Duty, Red Dead Redemption, Frankenstein, the Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Gargoyles, Fallout New Vegas

Favorite genres: horror, mystery, thriller, noir, crime fiction, psychological thriller, supernatural horror, sci fi horror, gothic lit

previous icon:

Shipping, plurality and squick explanations under the cut.

Our ships: We are a polyshipper and a multishipper. We ship multiple characters together in the same context, in the same relationship, in the same fics etc.

A "ship" for us does not equal in OTP or an ideal relationship. We use the word "ship" to denote any romantic or sexual relationship between two characters, even when that relationship is unhealthy, toxic, twisted, and bad for one or both participants. Ships are a narrative tool, not something aspirational.

Plurality: We are a plural system– many people living together in one body. We have been plural since we were children, and we have been blogging about our plurality for 15+ years.

Please do not use psychiatric or pathologizing terminology for our plurality. We do not refer to ourselves with terms like DID, alter, or introject, and our system members do not have defined roles.

Our preferred terminology is: plural, system member, and fictive.

System members tend to sign or tag posts and refer to one another with a two emoji 'signature' rather than a name. Unsigned posts are understood to be a product of multiple members or a joint consensus.

squicks / tropes we prefer to avoid

non-con of any kind (but especially underage non-con and non-con incest)

pregnancy & babies (especially as the joyful and expected result of a romantic hetero-presenting relationship)

nonbinary or trans characters deciding it's better for them to perform their assigned gender at birth

Characters submitting to the will of a lawful aligned god.

Parental control and discipline being shown as narratively positive and correct

characters giving up their careers and aspirations and 'settling down' when they fall in love

prophecies that are unavoidable and/or narratively depicted as inherently good and just

characters following the life-path set out for them by their parents/following in their parents footsteps

filial duty and filial piety in general

pretty much anything to do with traditional family structures, gender roles, and lawful aligned religion, honestly

wing whump / characters having their monstrous or inhuman traits harmed

monstrous or inhuman characters becoming human (especially when presented as positive)

soul destruction / soul death

characters being metaphysically kept apart for all time

any kind of 'conversion therapy' or metaphorical conversion therapy (especially being portrayed as positive)

We are:

non-christian | magical practitioner | chaotic neutral

polyamorous | largely aplatonic

trauma survivor | abuse survivor

Weird | Freakish | Monstrous

on sibling coded ships

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yourneighbortoasty · 2 months

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I love how much your Sinkdog comic looks like it's from some controversial but highly acclaimed picture book that lodges itself in your brain permanently when you're 7, it's got great Maurice-Sendak-as-a-millennial-furry energy

;w; you're very sweet, thank you

#3dspacejesus #asks

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jakface · 4 months

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How did u come up with the name jakface? Just wondering :) love ur art

it's from a very old online nickname that was a sonic the hedgehog comic book villain, except I took the "jak" and added face to the end because I am a cringe millennial and said "your face" to everything in 2009. That's literally it lol

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hussyknee · 2 years

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Watching Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 and realizing all the ways the MCU has robbed us of art, superheroes, comic books and cinema.

This movie could be set any decade the last century. There's like six different genres in one movie. I can FEEL every single texture on the screen. Every time something goes flying or shakes or teeters I want to duck out of the way. Every single thing lands with the full weight of its mass. Alfred Molina eats every scene he's in. I would kill for Aunt May. Ted Raimi! Bruce Campbell! Jonah J. Jameson! Peter being the personification of ADHD and being a Millennial. From a lower middle income family struggling with the loss of breadwinner! Real people who look like people. Uncle Ben's absence and presence a wrecking ball in your rib cage the size of a fist. Cinema clearly peaked in the mid-aughts.

#anti mcu #movies #spiderman #spider-man #sam raimi #marvel #tobey maguire #kirsten dunst #james franco #knee of huss

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mappingthemoon · 3 months

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Artifacts from my dumb youth that I am still regretful about selling YEARS ago when I desperately needed money to make rent :(

Mindless Self Indulgence: Alienating Our Audience CD signed by the entire band, either at Nick's Fat City in Pittsburgh on 12/6/03 or the Downtown in Farmingdale NY on 12/21/03. I probably made $50 on this in 2007 and at the time, that was a Lot of money (and my rent was only like $200/month ffs).

Johnny the Homicidal Maniac #2, purchased from Hot Topic at Century III Mall ca. 1997. Later, in 2006, the comic shop where I was working hosted a book signing with Jhonen Vasquez, and I asked him to sign my favorite page, "OH, MY GOD!! SOMEBODY PUT SHIT IN MY PANTS!!!!!!!" (entire issue available here; scroll to "Meanwhile" for the poop story). I had early printings of all the issues from 1997, sold them all in 2007, then repurchased later printings in 2018, like the ageing millennial dumbass i am

I still scour ebay for these specific items sometimes, even tho nowadays they would probably be way out of my price range. Yeah yeah yeah, I know, it's not so much that I want to own the Thing as I wish to grasp and hold tight a moment that is forever lost to the sands of time, BUT STILL. To be able to touch the same copy of the edgy comic that nearly got 13yo bby goth me kicked out of church youth group meetings bc I was reading it in secret in the back row and couldn't stop laughing about diarrhea... ah yes. A time of pure innocence.

#end of history illusion #shopping is a feeling #JTHM #Mindless Self Indulgence #goth

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shironezuninja · 1 year

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Nope, I still need a longer nap.

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thestormthatrises · 1 year

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#moshang fic idea

The one where SQH practices shibari daily:

It started out, as most things do, as a drunken idea. It was the end of a long week. That was preceded by a long month. To say nothing of the year that came before that! And his life? Ah! SQH really needed a drink. Or two. Or three. He was lonely. He was drunk. He wanted to do... Something. ANYTHING! Anything else than just work and despair about his unfair lot in life.

SQH remembered all those sexy images from comics and magazines lost to time and another world. How beautiful and content those women seemed to be, all tied up in beautiful webs of satin and silk or dark rope. It had all been so... Pretty.

Hell, he even put much of what he'd seen in this damn book he was now living in.

But he never tried it out on himself before.

Well, be it by boredom, distress or the sheer alcohol in his system, he was gonna do it now!

...

It wasn't a great start.

As a millennial taken away before kinks had how-to *safely* blogs, he hadn't know exactly what type of rope to try or how to make it pretty like the pictures.

He just found some scraps of rope he had lying around and went to work, drunken fingers Tightening messy knots all over his body untill his torso was hugged completely by the coarse rope.

And...

And it felt quite nice, actually.

Yeah, the rope stung and bit at his flesh. Yeah, the knots were ugly and bad. But... It felt. Nice. Secure.

Like a hug.

He felt centered and put together. Something was holding him in place in this mad existence. He could focus on his body, his breathing-- his breathing evened out.

It felt... Nice. Good. Great, even.

He liked it.

He liked it a lot, actually.

And so it began that SQH experimented with his new... Discovery.

He really wanted to say kink - the poor lonely, *aging* virgin in him was desperate for some sort of sexual mark stone -, but the truth of the matter was that it wasn't even sexual.

He just... Kinda liked it.

He liked how it felt. He liked how it made him feel and think. He liked how it made him look.

(He was the ugly duckling of CQM but the ropes... He looked pretty with the ropes)

So why not find the best way to feel and look good?

He tried so many different types of rope. So many patterns. So many knots. He'd just popped open a bottle of wine and went to town with rope and his notebook, detailing every part of the experience.

Self-shibari was becoming his metaphorical best way to spend a Friday night!

(Not that he had 'friday nights', of course. He couldn't have that type of consistency in his life. Always working. Always busy busy!!

But when he did have a rare moment to himself. A fleeting instant of peace where he wasn't exhausted and stressed, he'd unwind with the little Rope he had and...

And breathe.)

And after many, many nights and even more bottles, Qinghua found what he liked best.

For relaxation, he liked silk black ropes, with heavy knots and constriction on his chest and waist. So tight that he could feel it when he breathes.

For work, he liked to use leather ropes, that dug into the meat of his body and bit at him when his posture was bad or when he felt exhaustion almost take him. He liked it around his neck and chest and upper arms.

It felt good. Great. Perfect, even.

It felt like an embrace from a lover he'd never have, that would never leave him.

Nobody... Actually cared for or about SQH. Not back *then.* Not as a child. Not here, in this goddamn sect..

Nobody cared for the bruises on his arms. He was always filled with bruises for one reason or another anyway.

Nobody cared if he was hurt.

Nobody cared if he was well.

Nobody even saw him. Not really.

The ropes sometimes felt like his only lifeline to sanity, tethering him to this god forsaken world.

...

SQH started wearing shibari under his clothes as a mistake.

He'd fallen asleep on night with it still on; too fascinated, drunk and melancholic to give up that embrace just yet, and had woken up late the next day.

The knots had been too intricate to undo in a timely fashion And he was loathed to just cut it all up.

So he put layers on top of layers of clothes on top of it all and hoped for the best as he dashed to the meeting he was late for.

It was, hands down, the best work day of his whole life.

It should've been the most stressful, he knew. He should've been freaking out that someone was going to find out his dirty, not so dirty, secret.

But the ropes weren't visible under his Peak Lord costume.

And, again, no one gave a shit about him.

They all looked past him with a vague look of annoyance or dismissal on their Faces and that was that.

The ropes were also doing their magic, grounding him in a way that made his brain all fuzzy.

It was wonderful!

His Martial siblings even saw him smile. Genuinely. For the first time.

There was no turning back from this bliss.

...

MBJ found out about his servant's indiscretions when, when he had moved to beat him (badly. Qinghua had been late. MBJ didn't like to be kept waiting. He needed to be punished); as he picked up that sneaky little cultivator by the scruff of his collar...

A flash of black came to Full view.

The demon prince growled, his sharp nails tearing at the yellow silk of An Ding.

"My king!!" There was an attempt of modesty on Qinghua's part, holding the tathered clothes close to his chest.

MBJ didn't stop though. He was driven. More layers were ripped More black he could see.

And intricate, inky web of diamonds all over SQH'S back.

He turned the cultivator forward, pushing his hands out of the way. The dark lines came together around an empty heart shape over Qinghua's sternum before plunging down and hugging his soft, pale Waist and then further... Further...

"...What is this?" He demanded, the urge to punish completely gone. It had given way to an alien sense of wonder, a hungry sort that made him want to-- need to touch.

And then SQH went and knelt before him.

And begged.

"I'm so sorry, My king please! This servant is dirty! He's a degenerate! Forgive this worm, my king! I'll never do it again!" He was shaking.

*Beautiful.*

"I asked you a question, Shang Qinghua"

He was crying.

"It's... A technique, my king. A... Well, it's used sexually. A sexual Technique for lovers. The binding of one's love.... To make them beautiful and helpless..."

MBJ got mad again. Shang Qinghua had a lover?!

"But but but not me, my king! Never me! Who would even want me? Ha ha no! I I I just do it because it helps me"

"Helps... You?"

"yeah, yeah-- I mean, it--" god, how to explain?? This was so embarrassing! But MBJ looked like he was going to kill him. He needed-- "It helps me think."

Oof...

"It's nice, ok? It feels nice to be held! It helps ground me in my task. I know it's dirty and ugly but it helps"

Fuck! Why was he crying again??

Why was he crying when he was going to die all over again??

Why couldn't he have a dignified death for once??

Why was life so cruel that he couldn't have one good thing?! Just one thing for himself that made him feel nice and pretty and good--

Death didn't come.

MBJ just stared at him for what felt like an hour and then kicked him down so that his chest hit the ground.

"Don't be late again" he said and then proceeded to expect SQH to go on as if nothing happened.

He... Couldn't do that.

The ropes weren't working anymore.

His chest was too tight. He couldn't breathe. His sling felt too hot. Even the soft silk felt too rough in it. He couldn't stop crying. The shame and the despair were too great.

Why had MBJ felt the need to know?!

Why couldn't he just leave SQH alone??

Why couldn't he just have this?! This one thing?! His own thing?!

He wasn't hurting anyone! He wasn't doing anybody harm?!

Why did his king have to go and find out and become disgusted and dismissive and angry at him?!

He would never be able to look MBJ in the eye Again!

His hands clawed at the rope, trying to be free of this shame.

"What are you doing?" Came low and dangerous from above him.

SQH couldn't answer. He didn't have enough air inside him to make into words. He could only claw at his chest and try--

"Answer me!"

"You hate me!" Came out choked, strangled. "Why do you hate me?! I love you so much! Why do you hurt me and hate me and humiliate me?!"

MBJ stepped back, utterly shocked, confused, angry and... Concerned.

"What did you just say to me?"

"I just wanted to be good--I just wanted to be good for one thing. Why do you hate me?! Why do you do this to me?! Is it because I'm weak? Because I'm ugly?! I try so hard for you"

SQH was hyperventilating.

He felt like he was having a panic attack.

No.

No, actually it felt worse than that.

He felt like he was dying.

"why do you hate me?" He whimpered, gasping for air. "I love you so much... Why did you do that? How could you do that?? I love you so much-- I just wanted to be good--"

The air was thick with distress, sorrow and pain. Hot and salty with scent of SQH'S tears and sweat. But unlike earlier, his tears and his pleading did not arouse... Whatever it was in MBJ.

They sickened him in the worst way.

They sickened him with guilt.

Poisoned him in a way that he couldn't even feel elation for the human's confession.

He could just stare at the broken form SQH made on the ground and feel...

Guilt.

He was bare now, torn open by the demon's claws. Red from pain and shame and his own blunt nails running down His sides in a manic attempt of freedom. He was frantic, humiliated, mad--

Because of MBJ.

Who he loved.

MBN wasn't good with emotions. He had forsaken them with his uncle's betrayal. He had only just begun to feel things again because... Because of the human at his feet.

This insane little rat of a person that was the only one he could rely on. The only one that was for him. The only one for him...

He didn't know what to do.

(Twitter poll decided their fate)

The ropes came undone as he stalled. SQH tore at them, pulling away messily at dark webs as he tried to breathe. He cried. He choked. He shuddered. He broke.

Again and again. Like a wave against a stormy beach.

And it was...

Well, it was scary.

There was no other way to put it.

MBJ had been through and seen many many awful things. Theirs was not an easy or kind world. You had to be either as strong as him or as resilient as Qinghua to make it thru it all.

If not, you were dead.

But this wasn't death.

This was shattering.

The high that had kept SQH together ever since that fateful night was gone.

He was crashing hard.

Crashing at his king's feet.

Crashing... Because of MBJ.

And in such a way that... That he didn't seem he would recover.

And that was so... So scary. Terrifying.

(MBJ didn't want to think of a world without Qinghua in it. A future where his servant wasn't by his side. A life were he couldn't have the human--)

Qinghua hugged the tatters of his robes to his chests, shaking at the cold of MBJ'S displeasure. It was all he could do. His strings, all that had been keeping him together, had just been brutally and abruptly cut.

He didn't even feel strong enough to fly away.

However, as the cultivator felt his thoughts spiral, a heavy weight fell again on his back.

A strange, unfamiliar, *soft* weight.

MBJ had draped his fur cloak over his servant's shoulders.

SQH lifted his watery, incredulous eyes up from the ground and found that demon was so Much closer than he had last noticed.

MBJ was still unreadable to him but... He looked a tad less murderous than before.

"My..--"

"This king will touch you" MBJ warned.

"Y-you don't have to" Came automatically. Help seldom came without strings attached and he had already Made such a fool of himself. Already tested out whatever patience MBJ had for pathetic things. Already shown himself disgusting and ugly and--

A cool finger pressed against the middle of his feverish forehead.

"Qinghua" that deep, rich voice was hard to ignore.

A cool feeling rushed thru his aching head, his burning lungs, his red, abused skin.

"My king..."

"Yes" and it was almost like a purr. Fuck, since when was Airplane shooting towards the sky a cat person? "Focus on this king" MBJ ordered, calm, measured, honest.

And SQH obeyed, focusing on How good that cool touch was against his skin as MBJ placed his full palm over his tear stained eyes. He focuses on the qi circling his stressed meridians. He focused on MBJ'S even breathing, trying to match it with his own.

And, as the tears dried up, he was made to focus On the way MBJ'S chest felt. The demon prince picked him up from the ground and hugged him, tight, and--

And--

And it felt nice, ok?

It felt... Good.

It felt *perfect.*

SQH buried his face against MBJ'S chest and tried really hard not to cry again but it was difficult.

He couldn't remember the last time someone had ever hugged him out of their own volition.

"I'm sorry" he whimpered, lost and heartbroken.

Why did it have to be like this? When he was like this? When he was this? Why now?

Strong arms tightened around him.

"...This king was the one in the wrong" MBJ rumbled. "You needn't apologize"

"But... But I'm disgusting."

"Qinghua is not"

The cultivator whimpered again, burying himself even further into the demon, as if trying to burrow a way into his chest cavity.

"I'm a bad person" SQH said, his words muffled against the mounds of MBJ'S breasts.

"..." He was. A little bit. His servant was petty and vengeful and a traitor. But MBJ liked him that way

SQH was *his* petty, spiteful, vengeful little rat.

"Qinghua isn't that bad."

"You... You hate me" the human sniffed, looking up at the demon who held him so tight it was wonderful.

MBJ met his gaze and shook his head. "This king doesn't hate Qinghua."

"..."

"Promise?"

"I swear it."

SQH closed his eyes and allowing himself to clutch tightly to MBJ'S solid frame.

"Ok..." He conceded. "I believe you, my king"

"Hm"

A beat of silence. SQH sighed.

"...Thank you"

Another beat of silence. MBJ laid his chin against the crown of Qinghua's head.

"...You're welcome."

(SQH doesn't let go of MBJ.

MBJ takes him home and the poor man just can't let his king go. MBJ is forced to bathe with SQH, eat with SQH, lay down next to SQH and keep hugging him tight as he does it too.

And...

It's nice.

It's good.

It's perfect.)

(Eventually - THANK ALL THE GODS AND SAINTS - SQH does start doing shibari in a sexual way too.

He teaches MBJ his favorite knots and MBJ ties his consort up when he sees that SQH is overworking himself.

He likes to tie his husband's arms behind his back and Have him kneel on a cushion beside him on the throne, where he can pet Qinghua's hair and feed him delicious morsels and delicacies and then fuck him brainless after royal duties are done 💙)

THE END.

#saving shit from my twitter #mxtx svsss #SVSSS #Moshang #mobeijun #mobei jun #airplane shooting toward the sky #shang qinghua

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thephantomcasebook · 11 months

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How fucking gross is it for the casting director to make sure that the gut who plays Blood has a comical sense of humor? I'm just going to drop this show. If they keep pumping up the awesomeness of Rhaeneryas fam.....I'm fucking done. Hopefully the Greens skewer him alive if they find him.

Well, according to the book, Blood is captured alive and brutally tortured till he gives up the entire conspiracy and who hired them. While Cheese gets lost in the tunnels under the Red Keep and starves to death. In "A Storm of Swords" Jaime and Tyrion find his skeleton and the gold that Daemon paid them.

From what I understand from hearsay, Criston catches Blood and Aemond is going to be the one that tortures and breaks him, in the show.

Like I've said for years and years, the ASoIaF Universe is a litmus test of a writer's ability to tell a coherent story without getting distracted by the more nihilistic elements that exist in the world of Westeros. And how quickly, even good writers, end up coming out like edge lord eighth graders whenever they're given a chance behind the wheel.

Just because the world sucks, just because anything bad might be possible, doesn't mean that it has to happen. The glee and joy that too many people have taken in the Nihilism of the world of Ice and Fire shows, to a point, the superficial understanding they have of storytelling.

In a world where all things terrible is permitted doesn't mean that all things should be in your story.

The "Blood" with a sense of humor has several distinct possibilities.

1.) They want to shock the audience by building him up to be likeable and goofy, only for him to show a really dark and evil side once he's got Jaehaerys and Maelor.

2.) They are trying to balance out the horror by making a strange David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino type of surreal farcical comedy within the violence and dark deeds. In the hopes of either making it artistic or providing levity to the scene.

3.) They want to make him bumbling and stupid in order to frame the entire incident as an accident or a dark comedy of errors.

Either way, I feel that the writers are just trying to find a way to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have the hard core dark violence and tinge it with cringe level millennial style irreverent, tone breaking, meta humor.

Mark my words, this isn't going to go down the way they think.

It sounds like the kind of unfunny meta jokes that D&D tried every once in awhile to put in "Game of Thrones" that never landed but for a some stuck up ultra rich liberal jerk offs chuckling to themselves as they discuss the latest "New Yorker" article.

And making "Blood" and "Cheese" some British comedy double act is fucking armature hour writing.

#House of the Dragon #Aegon II Targaryen #Helaena Targaryen #Alicent Hightower #Aemond Targaryen #Criston Cole #jaehaerys targaryen

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mariacallous · 8 months

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If you’ve heard of political astrology, you probably believe it’s for fascists.

The 20th-century far right was invested in occultism, and fascists of many kinds were ardent occultists. As George Orwell noted, “A year before the war, examining a copy of Gringoire, the French Fascist weekly, much read by army officers, I found in it no less than thirty-eight advertisements of clairvoyants.” The Nazi interest in occultism was not just fodder for pulp movies and comic books, but a meaningful aspect of their politics.

Beyond fascism as such, political astrology has been associated with the broader right throughout the 20th century, where it shaped political decision-making in powerful and unsubtle ways. Past examples abound: Nancy Reagan’s astrologer set her husband’s schedule. When it became known that former South Korean President Park Geun-hye was in thrall to a self-proclaimed shaman, the ensuing scandal toppled her government.

The critical theorist Theodor Adorno wrote several analyses of the linkages between occultism and the political right, which were published in 1975 as The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, including a critical reading of the astrology column of the Los Angeles Times. According to Adorno, astrology supports the right wing because it promotes an “ideology of dependance,” which views a fundamentally irrational status quo as fated and unchangeable and presents the reader’s responsibility as adjusting to it, thus internalizing their own oppression. Since astrology gave its consumers a false sense of their own power while persuading them to in reality do nothing, it obviously supported the right wing in this analysis.

Political astrology is returning today—but not on the right. Instead, astrology is booming among largely progressive millennials and Generation Z, especially in LGBTQ+ circles, where it is so popular that people who don’t like it can feel like outsiders.

For some people in this milieu, queer astrology is explicitly left-wing. In an article published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Alexa Winstanley-Smith has written about the possibility of explicitly instrumentalizing astrology’s popularity for far left politics: “It might be asked: perhaps can we help ourselves to the interesting potential of astrology if we simply clean up our ideological commitments and clarify the role of astrology as a methodological resource?”

But astrology’s politics are more complicated than any simple link to left or right. Explaining this means a deep dive into the history of astrology’s relationship to power and modernity. In Europe’s past, astrology could be used for many political aims, whether to support or attack the status quo. In contrast, modern left-wing astrology has not escaped the limitations that Adorno identified generations ago for astrology on the right.

Perhaps the most noticeable feature of contemporary leftist astrology is that many of its practitioners do not believe in it. Adorno noticed that astrology was already ironic in his analysis: “so many followers of astrology do not seem quite to believe but rather take an indulgent, semi-ironical attitude towards their own conviction.”

Instead, the adherents of modern astrology see it not as a set of true statements, or even its ostensible purpose, a generator of predictions about the future, but as a way to articulate meaningful narratives about the world and their place in it. Astrology, in this sense, functions similarly to political ideologies. Whereas politicians on the campaign trail promise more an approach to current affairs than a set of accurate statements about them, horoscopes promise a cosmos in which the individual human life has literally cosmic significance. Both are an articulation of aspiration and potential—a guiding promise of how the world or the individual should or could be.

Astrology, not unlike party affiliation, is a narrative we tell ourselves. And thus, its myths and symbols can be reappropriated for political ends. The political gadfly Sam Kriss argues that for astrology to be a leftist force in modern politics, it must be unreal, since only then is it capable of indefinite manipulation: “The night sky has always been the terrain on which we make and unmake our own social reality,” and “[i]f astrology has been pressed into the service of mundane power, to represent a world that can never change, our task is not to do away with it, but to fight for its liberation.”

But in its current state, left-wing astrology lacks the real-life application to be up to the political—let alone revolutionary—task. Adorno argued that astrology is conservative precisely because it expected “from the transfigured shape of society misplaced in the skies an answer that only a study of real society can give.” Astrology inscribed the U.S. social order onto the cosmos without actually analyzing it. Although modern left-wing astrology claims to provide this analysis, it is no less toothless than its conservative predecessor: Instead, it merely asserts that it’s left-wing and leaves the rest as an exercise for the reader. The rhetoric is maximalist, and it leads to no action.

In contrast, Winstanley-Smith writes that the left needs an organizing metaphor robust enough to compete with the right-wing concept of political theology—and she posits queer political astrology as the left’s best bet for it.

Yet Winstanley-Smith looks for a political astrology that is both left-wing and queer in the same milieu where fascist astrology flourished: the hothouse of ideas that was Germany between the wars. Her quixotic search for a “useable history” of queer political astrology takes the form of a close reading of a book by Karl-Günther Heimsoth (1899-1934). Heimsoth was, simultaneously, a Nazi, an astrologer, a communist spy, a gay rights activist, and a friend of Ernst Röhm; in the words of Flann O’Brien, “it was the sort of thing one did at the turn of the century.” This profoundly 1920s Type of Guy was shot and killed during the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler’s purge of the SA. It is ironic, but also telling, that the best representative of a queer astrology in this paper turns out to be a literal Nazi, and Winstanley-Smith concludes by wondering if the search for a left-wing political astrology is, in fact, futile.

However, unlike Adorno, I am not willing to say that astrology is inherently conservative—or inherently anything else. Both in theory and in practice, astrology can align with both left-wing and right-wing values and objectives. Some of the best examples of this multivalence come from European astrology’s last hurrah.

Astrology was not primarily medieval in Europe; its last great age—real, nonironic astrology, astrology as serious intellectual heavyweight—was the Renaissance, the beginning of the modern world. During this time, astrology also had political functions, which cannot be narrowed down to simply left or right.

It is perhaps because of astrology’s ubiquity in early modern Europe, at all levels of society and politics, that it functioned not only to support power, but also to undermine it.

Astrologers served as advisors for princes and heads of state, extending their power over ordered nature to guide their clients’ power over other people. Astrology was an essential element of the way the Holy Roman emperors of the 15th and 16th century upheld and exercised their power. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were imperial astronomers and astrologers for Rudolf II, Matthias, and Ferdinand II. Kepler also advised the general of the imperialist army under Ferdinand, Albrecht von Wallenstein.

Astrology was not only important for governance because it gave heads of state a way to see into the present and predict the future, thereby guiding their own actions. It was just one part of an entire worldview, the ideas of which had influenced European thought since the late classical period. In this worldview, nature was an ordered system, in which what was larger or more important (the macrocosm) and what was smaller or less important (the microcosm) were similar in form and influenced each other.

The idea was that the elite could improve their mastery over larger entities, such as states, by improving their mastery over some smaller part of them, such as the cultivation of their own persons or handicrafts. This informed a few otherwise unusual and difficult-to-explain activities, including the fad for creating lathe-turned sculptures in ivory. Some early modern beliefs about the cosmos used ideals of a celestial monarchy to make earthly monarchs sacred, ranging from beliefs about Charles V and Elizabeth I to practices such as ritualized dances in which Louis XIV portrayed the sun.

However, in contrast to 20th-century right-wing uses of the occult, which were inherently supportive of the state’s power, early modern astrology was used not only to support earthly power, but also to destabilize it, whether deliberately or by accident. Astrology inspired the Italian heretic Tommaso Campanella to rebel against the Spanish authorities in Southern Italy and write The City of the Sun, a treatise describing a communitarian, egalitarian theocracy. Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II’s mystical practices are well-known, but far from making him a despot, they weakened his ability to actually govern or indeed know what was going on outside his own palace. (Eventually, his brother deposed him.)

The Holy Roman Empire was fractious and heterogeneous, and astrology preoccupied both its emperors in the first decades of the 17nth century and their enemy Frederick V. Rudolf II and Frederick V both used mysticism as one element of their politics, but one sought to protect the status quo and the other to disrupt it. The culture that Frederick and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Britain’s James I, fostered at their court in Heidelberg combined alchemy, astrology, a keen interest in scientific advances, and devout Calvinism. They were “progressive” in the literal sense of this word: they believed in ideas that were modern to them. This mixture of intellectual influences helped contribute to the development of modern science to the development of modern science.

Early modern astrology was used for many political projects. It was neither solely progressive nor conservative because it was so pervasive: Astrology was an organic element of the cultures of early modern Europe. It was intellectually serious, and its seriousness came with complexity: An individual astrological chart was a complicated affair that took days to draw up. Astrologers themselves were political actors, men of the court, and core players in Europe’s self-transformation who took their beliefs as seriously as Calvinism or Catholicism.

In contrast, the modern left’s approach to astrology is ill-suited toward political ends because it is inextricable from the consumer culture it should be criticizing, one steeped in the approaches of fandom. Many modern, first-world astrologers don’t believe in astrology; they’re roleplaying being the kind of people who believe in astrology. In Postcolonial Astrology (2021), Alice Sparkly Kat calls this shaping of something that everyone involved knows to be false but makes the foundation of their identities anyway a kind of fanfiction:

“We look for identity from it. The reason why astrology, as a subculture, creates beautiful community and spiritual validation is not because there is anything special about such an occult language or because it has the ability to glimpse into one’s being in a way that’s different from other identity languages; it’s because astrology’s practitioners and fans have made it our own.”

Adorno noticed this too, arguing that astrology offers “the pleasant gratification that he who feels to be excluded … nevertheless belongs to the minority of those who are ‘in the know.’”

This false empowerment of the excluded is the seductive appeal of astrology for leftists and the LGBTQ+ community, but the formation of one’s identity through astrology is also a profoundly early modern idea.

Historians use the term self-fashioning to refer to constructing your persona and behavior based on admired cultural models. This is related to the influential late 20th-century philosopher Foucault’s analysis of classical and early modern practices as examples of what he referred to as the “care of the self,” the introspective attempt to live according to aesthetic and ethical rules of conduct. Astrology in the context of these ideas is a technique of the self, like asceticism, meditative prayer, or bodily practices such as fencing and dancing: It describes your personality, the situations around you, and your relationships with others, and it provides guidelines on how to shape yourself by living.

In contrast to early modern self-fashioning, modern left-wing astrology exists within a socioeconomic and cultural context in which consumers build identities and communities around shared participation in aspects of popular culture, which Grinnell College professor Ross Haenfler calls “participatory culture.” In this context, it’s probably most accurate to describe astrology as a fandom, a type of self-fashioning based not only on the consumption of commodity goods, but also on their active transformation through activities such as making fanart, going to conventions, or writing fanfiction. In the most pessimistic reading, fandom finds a consumer good and consumes it, and in consumption the consumer finds their self in it, because they put it there. As Kat wrote in Postcolonial Astrology, “I’ve seen queers” laughing with their friends about “being a Leo rising because it makes them feel so seen.”

The use of sun signs as identity types, that you can “be” a Leo rising like you can “be” a Gryffindor, is an excellent example of the consumption of astrology as a product. The modern sun sign system was expressly constructed to be consumed in this way. (The sun is one of the astrological “planets.” The positions of these planets against the constellations of the zodiac are important, as well as their relationships to one another.)

The use of sun signs as a source of identity was inadvertently developed by British astrologer R.H. Naylor when he published the newborn Princess Margaret’s nativity in August 1930 in the Sunday Express, along with some vague predictions of crisis. This Caesarist unification of the masses and the royal was so successful that the Express offered him a weekly column, the world’s first newspaper horoscope. At first Naylor offered advice to people whose birthdays fell within the week each paper came out, but he devised the sun sign system in 1937 because it was faster and easier to give advice to one-twelfth of the population at a time. Sun signs were more profitable because they were mass producible.

A sun sign horoscope is a mass-produced consumer good, and so is any identity you get out of it. According to Walter Benjamin, once the aura (authenticity, one-of-a-kindness, the sacred) vanishes from the work of art, art’s value is based on the demands of revolutionary politics. But modern leftist astrology demands no revolutionary politics; instead, it praises the apparent authenticity you feel from participating in the astrology fandom.

This “feels like” authenticity because it is manufactured: It’s profitable when fandoms enjoy the consumer goods they’re fans of. To the author of Postcolonial Astrology, your sun sign feels more authentic even than class: “Rather than talking about ourselves within the typical categories of race, gender, and class, people want to build community around identities that feel authentic and close.” If I were a leftist, I would argue that your sun sign “feels authentic and close” while your class doesn’t because the culture industry has sold one of them to you.

Today’s leftist astrology rests on the implicit beliefs that the universe is essentially meaningless, astrology’s tropes are projections of the human mind, and they therefore both can and should be rehabilitated for leftism. “As above, so below,” the catchphrase of astrology since the classical period, meaning that the macrocosm reflects the microcosm, where the things that are “lower” are controlled by the things that are “higher,” also implies “as below, so above.” Different leftist astrology fans express this in different tones, from whimsical to edgelord:

From Kay: “As a pseudoscience, astrology is a communal practice and a silly one. …The meaning of the sky comes directly from us. You are the thing that animates heaven.”

And from Kriss: “As above, so below. Those in power have taken this as a normative principle. What is below will have to conform to what is above…through force if necessary, But a liberated astrology, far from discarding this doctrine, should instead take it very seriously.”

The writers of both these examples are consumers: They participate in the astrology fandom by saying that astrology is leftist, that it should be more leftist, or that they are performing leftism by being fans of it, but all this talk—this fanfiction—accomplishes little to nothing. Leftist astrology has no practical leftist function. Adorno’s observation that astrology provides a false sense of empowerment still holds.

If astrology is a technique of self-fashioning, what are leftist astrology fans fashioning themselves into? Postcolonial Astrology divides its audience into categories like this: “millennials or boomers, white or other, queer or cisnormal.” LGBTQ+ people have historically been excluded from the mainstream in many times and places, but they nevertheless want to find sources of meaning in their lives or a sense of community.

Yet the claim that astrology should appeal to LGBTQ+ people (because it is countercultural and LGBTQ+ people are not “normal”) assumes that the queer community is a powerful oppositional political force, around which political astrology might coalesce. Instead, in the modern United States, the LBGTQ+ community seems divided politically. While queer people are embattled in some respects, in other respects they seem to be a part of the U.S. political mainstream—something they’ve fought hard to achieve over the centuries.

Writers such as Winstanley-Smith, who argue that queer political astrology should be appealing because it’s a way to live for groups of people who do not want to occupy “determinate conventional status among the general public,” ignore all this. For these authors, queer political astrology is necessary because it’s not mainstream. But they do not consider that for some gay people, an oppositional political identity may not be productive for its own sake.

Dividing human beings into the “cisnormal” and the “queer” assumes that a dichotomy between cisgender, heterosexual, white, adult, able-bodied, upper-middle-class men and everyone else exists in the first place, and that it is, in the words of Claude Lévi -Strauss, “good to think with.” In this way, these calls for radical queer astrology perform the post-early modern gender binary by claiming to reject it.

Ever since about 1750, astrology’s romantic appeal is precisely that it has been seen as nonscientific. The charitable reading of the claim that astrology is or should be queer is that rejected forms of dealing with the world can be seen as a queering of knowledge, a deliberate embrace of a belief that is marginalized by a people that is marginalized. We could argue that the embrace of astrology, magic, or occultism is another way to accept lived experience—especially marginalized lived experience—as an antidote to the conventional.

This argument fails to take two things into account, and they are important. In the first place, it is referring specifically to modern astrology, which is primarily a consumer product or kind of fandom, ignoring astrology’s rich and fascinating early modern history.

In the second place, and more seriously, it relegates women and LGBTQ+ people to an intellectual ghetto in the name of empowering them. Not every form of marginalized knowledge is marginalized unjustly; some of them are factually incorrect. The argument that astrology is a form of queering knowledge portrays a world in which only straight men can grasp reality, and women and queer people, like children, operate in the realm of whimsy. Men and women, the cisnormal and the gay, are framed as fundamentally different kinds of intellect. This is as rigid and stifling a discourse as anything produced in the previous two centuries. The only difference is that the values have been inverted—this time it’s good to be stupid. What’s worse, the non-cisnormal, in this line of thought, perform their outcast status by winkingly adopting beliefs that are known to their practitioners to be false.

The full implications of this argument’s contempt for the human spirit are probably unknown to its adherents, or else they would not posit it. Radical queer astrology is neither radical nor queer; it’s a hundred thousand pages of “maybe gay men are like women.” Fortunately, it’s also largely powerless.

The astrology that Adorno analyzed generations ago was right-wing. It discouraged conflict, encouraged its female readers to identify with those in power by imagining they were powerful, and shunted all impulses that might be used to create meaningful social change into a focus on the self.

Modern, left-wing, queer astrology is not a radical departure from this past. It does not challenge late capitalism except on its surface level but lives symbiotically within it. Left-wing astrology cannot provide a coherent account of power because the subcultures associated with it are forms of consumer culture, which means that they only thrive within the liberal social order they claim to oppose.

Early modern astrology was an authentic element of cultures that were different from our own. Europeans of that time used it to shape their lives and their conceptions of themselves; to uphold their social orders or to challenge them.

In contrast, modern leftist astrology claims to be a form of dissent. But in the end, it—like the modern sun sign—is a consumer product.

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isfjmel-phleg · 6 months

Text

October 2023 Books

Tales from the Oakenwyld by R. J. Anderson

A collection that makes me want to revisit these series! I'd read two of the stories before in other forms, but it was nice to have them all in one volume, and the additional material involving earlier versions of the novels was a fascinating look at how the world and characters evolved during the writing process.

The Ages of the Flash: Essays on the Fastest Man Alive edited by Joseph J. Darowski

Some of the articles were more interesting than others, and the book could have been more carefully proofread, but I really enjoyed getting to read a scholarly take on these characters, especially the discussions of them in context with the eras in which they were written. (The concept of the YJ kids and their contemporaries as innately Gen X--with Bart as an anticipation of a Millennial--is a concept I'd like to explore more, especially in light of why the current fanon versions of these characters seem almost nothing like the originals.)

Not All Supermen: Sexism, Toxic Masculinity, and the Complex History of Superheroes by Tim Hanley

An interesting overview of the history of some very relevant and persistent issues in comics. I don't see eye-to-eye with Hanley on everything, but it was refreshing to get an acknowledgement of how poorly both writing and art has depicted female characters, for instance.

The Invisible Boy by Alyssa Hollingsworth

Maybe the most Rebekah Bait book I've read in quite a while. It's told from the POV of a twelve-year-old military child with a very active imagination, a passion for journalism, and a love of comics (specifically for Lois Lane, who is her hero). She initially supposes that a mysterious boy in her neighborhood must be some kind of superhero, but as she gets to know him and pieces together more about his situation, the truth turns out to be quite dark, and she must take some difficult steps to do the right thing. The book addresses a real-world issue that is quite dark for a middle-grade novel, but Hollingsworth handles it in a way that is both informative for young readers while remaining age-appropriate.

There are well-drawn characters, and themes of misjudging others on first acquaintance, and themes of child exploitation (not only of the mysterious boy, but the protagonist herself, whose mother runs a popular blog and sometimes uses her daughter for content in ways that are invasive or embarrassing), and it sounds dark but it really is a hopeful book, and I enjoyed it a lot.

(Also the combination of the Superman motifs with the themes of child exploitation really made me want to reach into the book and ask the protagonist if she was familiar with Superboy, unintentional poster child for exploitation--the themes would interact with each other so well, and that got me wondering if what Cadmus is doing with their cloning is basically human trafficking, and...well, I have questions. And thoughts. I'll stop now, thanks for humoring me.)

The Refuge by Monica Hughes

I heard about this one from an article that discussed it alongside The Secret Garden. It's a middle-grade Canadian novel from the late 1980s that has its own take on the young-person-in-difficult-circumstances-experiences-growth-through-interaction-with-a-secret-place (in this case also a garden), and goodness knows I fall for that plotline every time. This one took a turn that was a bit unusual for this sort of story, but on the whole I enjoyed it.

The Ogre Downstairs by Diana Wynne Jones

I don't think this one is quite as well executed as some of Jones' other works, but it was enjoyable overall, and I appreciated the angle of the initially dreadful-seeming stepfamily turning out to be not so villainous after all.

The Monsters of Rookhaven by Pádraig Kenny

Creepiness warning if that's a concern, but what a delightful monster book. The world and people are dark and scary and full of hostility, but the answer is compassion and understanding, and that's beautifully portrayed.

(I don't know how you'd like the book, @brown-little-robin, but there was one character in particular--the most monstrous and yet the most human and sensitive of them all--who really struck me as the one you would like.)

Quicksand Pond by Janet Taylor Lisle

I have liked other books I've read by this author, but this one didn't do much for me. It felt incomplete, not fully developed, like reading an early draft.

The League of Regrettable Sidekicks: Heroic Helpers from Comic Book History! by Jon Morris

Exactly what it says on the tin. A light-hearted overview of the bizarre choices in sidekick-creation that comics have made over the years. A lot of what on earth.

(Apparently 1950s!Superman had a plotline in which he adopted a child who became his sidekick but for...reasons? the adoption wasn't feasible longterm, so the poor kid got left on a street corner, fate uncertain, tearfully parting ways with Superman, who tells him, "I'll never *choke* forget you, Jimmy!" ...which would have been a lot more effective if the boy's name weren't Johnny. The Silver Age was wild, guys.)

Robin and the Making of American Adolescence by Lauren R. O'Connor

You've probably already heard me rant about this one, but the short version is that O'Connor chose to examine the character/role of Robin primarily through the lenses of sexuality, gender, and race--mostly ignoring three of the Robins altogether (even if some of them would have relevant to her points), and glossing over Damian's ethnic background because it would have complicated a point she was trying to make about race with someone else. I didn't personally find this approach interesting or incapsulating of what makes these characters so effective, and I would love to see further scholarly discussion from others that would explore the Robins as characters, not just symbols of social concerns.

The Battle of the Labyrinth and The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan

I was satisfied with the ending but have nothing intelligent to say about this series and no particular interest in venturing into the spin-offs.

The House in the Square by Joan G. Robinson

A weird story, I guess, but atmospheric and compelling. I need to track down my own copy someday.

Secret of the Missing Footprint by Phyllis A. Whitney

Unlike the others I've read of Whitney's middle-grade mysteries, this one is told in first-person by the teenage protagonist, who has a bad case of I-can-fix-him with a troubled neighbor boy, and I love that Whitney absolutely demolishes that mindset, while still allowing both characters to be nuanced.

[Two books that I am omitting from naming in this list because they weren't really my taste but I know the author and don't want to give her any negative publicity]

Comics

Wayne Family Adventures Vol. 2

I read these online quite a while ago, but it's nice to have them in volume form. Don't go into this expecting characterization and relationships that accurately reflect those in the source material (these versions of the characters tend to talk more like they want to get a good grade in therapy than their comics counterparts), but it's good fluffy fun.

Stop drawing Bart as looking exactly like a young Wally, though. They are not interchangeable.

The Ray (1992 miniseries, not to be confused with the longer-running 1994 series, which I haven't read much of)

I plan to read all of DC's 90s teenage hero solos eventually, so after finishing Damage, I started this one. I'm acquainted with Ray from Young Justice and appearances in other things, and he kind of rubs me the wrong way (slapping and yelling at Bart for something trivial, repeatedly asking what's in it for him and acting put-upon when Grant turns to him for help, that sort of thing), but I was prepared to get perspective from his solo.

...and I was left with more questions than perspective. Ray has an utterly bizarre backstory--raised to believe that he had a condition that made him deathly allergic to sunlight and growing up hidden away indoors and only active at night, only to learn at age eighteen after his father's death that he has light-activated powers and his real father was a superhero. There's a lot to unpack there. But the narrative was more interested in the action and Ray's adjusting to his powers than his adjusting to life in the real, sunlit world and how his upbringing would have lingering effects to live with/work through. Maybe this gets explored more in the other solo, which I'll get to eventually. But for now I'm still in the dark on this guy.

Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E.

I know Courtney Whitmore from appearances in other things I've read. Loved her in Stargirl: The Lost Children. But in this series, which introduces the character, she is...a lot less likeable. In fact, she's rather a jerk, going beyond ordinary teenage angsty orneriness to being just plain malicious and spiteful (everything from trying to deliberately sabotage her mother and stepfather's marriage to generally being rude to everyone, even people who are on her side). Clearly character development does happen eventually, but it doesn't unfold very believably in this series, which made it a difficult read for me.

The Flash 1987 #62-118

I'm in the process of reading Mark Waid's take on Wally, and it's overall very good! Waid has an almost literary style that's atypical for similar comics and which is delightful to read. His Wally is a flawed but human and likeable character, and the stories feel grounded despite bizarre premises (for instance, Wally's backstory, as established in the Silver Age, is that he acquired his powers the same way as Barry in a massive coincidence--but Waid finds a clever way to justify even that) because characterization and emotion are handled realistically. So far, some plots have been better than others, of course, but I've been enjoying this and will keep up with it as far as it goes whenever I find time.

#random personal stuff #lots of reading. lots of opinions. hopefully you're up for that.

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