#number two. instead of like ... a fully fleshed out character with his own life town job family ect ect
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The Ballads of Rebirth (Arthur Morgan x Reader)
Chapter 17: Epilogue
Masterlist
Tag list: @rollyjogerjones
A/N: This is it. This is the end. I wrote a little message for all of you to read, it would mean a lot if you did.
When I began this story a few days after Christmas, I wrote it on a whim. The story brewed in my mind for perhaps a max week before I began writing it. The original idea was inspired a lot by Big Fish the Musical, the musical I was in, in early December. I remember I used to write day after day and could get a chapter up daily, until around the sixth or seventh chapter. I can’t quite tell you how I did it, but I know if I hadn’t gotten that far so quickly, I would have never finished this story, it would have been added to my never ending pile of unfinished WIP’s. The Ballads of Rebirth was supposed to go in an entirely different direction that I had planned, Lee and Arthur’s feud was supposed to be way worse and bitter, and would have ended up with Arthur beating up Lee. Lee was supposed to be much more of an antagonist in the final chapters, a way worse of a person, but I couldn’t do it to him. In many ways, he was flawed, he was selfish at times and quick to judge, but he was still loving and goofy. I know people were not going to like him, they were rooting for Arthur after all. But I still love Lee, he was my first official rdr2 oc, my first fully fleshed out character. Quite frankly, I didn’t really ‘know’ who he was until I continued writing it, I had no personality built out for him until I began writing, and I just chose what felt right. That’s what happens with a lot of my stories, I write what feels right (which usually leads to plot holes because I don’t write shit down). But regardless, I love Lee, and I hope you’re satisfied with the ending I gave him.
There were a few times that I thought about giving up, that my story was absolute shit, that my plot holes were too confusing and my narrative was weak, and I was close to quitting. Until people began asking me when the new chapters would be out, what would happen next. While the numbers may be small, the dedication is what kept me going. And yeah, maybe my story isn’t the biggest rdr2 fic, maybe it’s not talked about in discord servers, but I don’t care, all that matters is that the fans that have stayed have shown me that I should continue writing, that there are people rooting for this story. I know, my story is full of plot holes, I know people don’t like Lee (which I’ll forever be bitter about), I know my story has grammatical errors, I know maybe I shouldn’t have killed off Mahala, I know there’s a lot I could have done, but there’s a lot I still did. As much as I think my story is weak, I’m still proud of the fact that I made it, that it is my own, that I created it and stuck through.
Sometimes, it’s not about what you could have done, it’s what you did. And that’s more valuable in many ways. Creating anything is powerful, and The Ballads of Rebirth taught me that.
So thank you, to every commentator, every person who left a like or kudo, every person who left an ask in my inbox, and especially everyone who complimented my writing style (which is apparently unique? and also these comments are a huge ego boost to me so if I’m cocky, it’s those peoples fault). Thank you for sticking with me, and I hope you enjoyed what I made.
I know I did.
••
Here Are Some Songs That Inspired This Story
1. Setting Sun - Lord Huron (Main inspiration)
2. Prologue - Starry (What I consider to be the main theme)
3. Sunlight and Storms - Starry (Inspiration for Lee and Reader’s relationship)
4. The Road - Starry (yeah.. I know there’s lots of Starry, but regardless, Arthur’s arc inspiration)
5. After The War - Stars (wow lots of star-esque things, Epilogue inspiration, I recommend listening to it while reading this)
•••
PS. The AU ending will be posted with the main story, as I realized many of you may not see it otherwise.
•••
Time passed quickly and solemnly. Life was peaceful and quiet. And you loved every second of it. After you and Arthur had left Richfield in search of the life you had lost, you and your husband had found it with Charles, in a small cottage down the road from him. Charles was happy to see you and Arthur returned to him.
And life was quiet, for a long time it was. You heard nothing of Micah and Dutch, the Pinkerton’s had stopped searching, it seemed the outlaw way had died out long ago too. You were scared Arthur or you would somehow slip back into it. you would blink and suddenly be pulled back into the life you so desperately tried to avoid, but the pull never came. The older you got, the lesser and lesser that percentage became.
The people of Wapiti had long since moved. You visited Mahala’s grave frequently, and thanked her for bringing Arthur back to you. You were sure you would have liked her.
You thanked Charles too, for being quick to find him. It was strange to think that without Charles’ swift action, Arthur would not be here today. Instead, you would be visiting his grave instead of Mahala’s.
John was exceptionally pleased to hear Arthur was still alive. Abigail wrote frequently to you for many years, you missed her dearly, but you had faith you would be reunited once more.
“Honey?” You called out to the doorway behind you.
“G’morning. I got what you asked me to pick up,” Arthur replied. You looked over your shoulder and smiled at him. He placed the box down at the table.
“Thank you. Breakfast is almost ready,” You said, scrambling some eggs on top of the stove. Arthur came up behind you and wrapped his arms around your waist.
“Someone’s touchy today,” You laughed, shaking your head.
“Missed you.” He nuzzled his face into your neck.
“You were gone for a day.”
“I’m not allowed to miss my dear wife?” He pretended to sound hurt.
“Not when you’re distracting me,” You replied nonchalantly, continuing to prepare the omelettes.
Arthur laughed heartily in your ear. “I give up then,” he said, removing his hold from your waist and putting his hands up in defeat.
“It’s almost ready, sit down.” You put the finishing touches on the omelettes and put them on plates. Arthur sat down at the small table while you fetched some forks. You stared through the window while your hands grabbed two forks, seeing the daffodils on the window, Arthur had bought for you a few days earlier.
You walked over to the table and set down the two plates, taking a seat across from Arthur. He grabbed at the plate hungrily and began to eat.
“You sure are hungry.”
“Starvin’. Been a day since I’ve had your lovely cooking,” Arthur smiled at you. You picked up your fork as well and began to eat.
“I forgot the coffee, hold on.” You realized after a few moments and walked over to the countertop to fetch the pot of coffee, pouring two cups for Arthur and you. You made yours how you liked it, and brought cream and sugar over to Arthur.
“Thank you,” He replied to the gesture, grabbing his cup. He put in a few spoonfuls of sugar and some cream, always the one with the sweet tooth.
You sipped your coffee while you ate your breakfast, glancing out towards the front windows. It was a nice day out, clear of clouds with a nice breeze. The garden still needed tending to, but at least later you could sit on the porch with Arthur.
“I invited Charles over for dinner tonight, by the way. I’m making roast beef and potatoes, and maybe an apple pie, I haven’t decided yet,” You shrugged.
“Make blueberry.” Arthur replied, picking up a newspaper from yesterday that was on the table.
“Blueberries aren’t in season.”
“Okay, then raspberry.”
“Not in season either.”
“Really? Well shit. Apple will have to do then.”
“You don’t like my apple pies?”
“What? No, I do! You just make them a lot. I feel like we’re having them every week,” Arthur laughed nervously.
You pretended to glare at him, “Then I’ll never make another apple pie again. You’re getting pie with no filling in all of them now.”
“Now I didn’t say that! I’m just saying, you make apple pies a lot, I like variety sometimes.”
“You lived with the gang for 20 years and ate the same stew for every meal but you’re complaining about me making apple pie once a week?” You raised your eyebrow at him.
“That’s why I like variety now. Couldn’t have it for so long, that once I get it I’ll never go back to eating the same thing.”
“Mhm.” You dragged out the sound, nodding sarcastically.
You stared at Arthur, he stared at you, a slight smile on his lips. “Just admit you don’t like my apple pies.”
“Would it make you happy if I said that?”
“No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know!”
“Listen, I like your apple pies, honestly. I just like some variety, that’s all,” He said, attempting to quell your fake anger.
“I’m never making an apple pie ever again,” You replied dramatically, slumping onto the table, reaching your hands out to hold his.
Arthur chucked at your dramatics.
“Just eat your omelette.”
•••
You thought of Lee frequently. Not that you yearned for him, or missed him, you simply wondered how he was doing. And in a way, he had heard your thoughts, after about two years of silence from him, Lee sent a letter.
“You have a letter,” Arthur had said one night when he came back from town, placing the letter on the table in front of you.
“Who’s it from?”
“Lee.”
“Lee sent me a letter?” You asked in disbelief, grabbing the envelope and examining the name on the front. Leroy Rinascita. Clear as day.
(Y/N),
It’s been quite some time since you left Richfield. I hope this letter finds you well. I took a chance and sent a letter to Valentine, a city Arthur had mentioned to me before, so if I don’t hear from you, I assume you’re somewhere else off in the country.
I hope you’re pleased with the choices you made. How is Arthur, by the way? I know we started off on the wrong foot (for good reason) but overall I found him to be a good, kind man. I can tell Arthur makes a good husband. I pray he’s not too angry with how I acted earlier towards him, water under the bridge, right?
I apologize for not sending a letter sooner, or perhaps I’m sorry for even writing this, in case you find this letter strange. I just wanted to know how you are doing. I’m doing well too. I’ve found someone as well who I enjoy very much, they live with me now. I guess you can say we got married, about two months ago actually. It wasn’t a conventional marriage of course. You actually already met them. I’m not sure you would expect who, but for the sake of prying eyes, I won’t reveal who they are in this letter. Other than marriage, life’s been pretty normal. The general store is doing well, there’s some new projects in the city too. A new candy store opened by the pier after the old one unfortunately burned down a few months after you had left. Richfield is bigger now, I feel like it’ll never stop growing. More and more people show up everyday. I barely even know the neighbors names these days.
As for my father, I’m pleased to say he’s still kicking. Somehow, the cancer went away, I couldn’t tell you how, the doctors can’t either. I’m really grateful for you convincing him to stay alive, to stay for me.
Your locket is still with me, I found an old family photo of my father, my mother and Anastasia as a newborn. It was strange to see my mother’s face after so many years, I had nearly forgotten it. I have an older photo of Anastasia too on the other side, my partner isn’t in the locket, only because I see them daily. I don’t need to be reminded that I love them.
But enough talk of me, how are you doing? I know it’s been a while, but I still care about you, and hope to know you’re doing well. Give Arthur a hello for me as well.
Regards,
Lee
You were happy to know Lee still cared, in some horrible nightmare you imagined that he despised you, that you were simply a dark phase in his life. And you were even happier that Lee had found someone and was truly living the life he had wanted. In a way, you were the same as him, both yearning for peace and quiet.
“Lee’s been doing well. I’m glad he sent this letter, he says hello to you, Arthur,” You told him, setting the letter down on the table.
“Good. I’m glad Lee’s doing okay.”
“Yeah, me too.”
•••
Even though Beecher’s Hope had many people living off its land, it did not feel crowded. Perhaps it was the sky that made it feel that way, the sky was endless, and when you and your family worked underneath it, it did not feel so small. The sky was infinite.
“Jack, will you go get Anne for me? She’s out by the chicken coop,” You had told the teenager.
“Sure thing, Aunt (Y/N),” He replied, walking towards the front door to fetch Anne for dinner. Although the Marston and Morgan houses were separate, the two families had practically lived in both. Jack was eating over for dinner, John and Abigail claiming you as his babysitter. Not that he needed one — or perhaps Uncle did.
“Arthur? Will you set the table for me, please? I have to go get Anne washed up once Jack brings her in,” You called out to Arthur behind you.
“Sure.” Arthur responded, he picked up the dishes next to you and began placing them on the table.
As you finished up cooking, you heard the shrill voice of Anne calling out to you. You immediately swiveled around as her tiny legs bounced up to you.
“There’s my little one!” You said joyously, she wrapped her arms around your leg and giggled. She was a near carbon copy of Arthur. She had his nose, his eyes, his mouth shape, but she had your hair and complexion. Regardless of who she looked more like — she was yours.
“Mama! I brought you a feather from the chicken coop!” She reached into her tiny dress pocket and pulled out a white feather. It was bigger and heavier than a chicken feather, you wondered what type of bird it was.
“Sorry, Uncle Arthur, she kind of made a mess in the chicken coop,” You heard Jack say to Arthur.
“You did? Oh thank you, sweetie.” You beamed at her, she watched you take it with big proud eyes. You placed the feather in your pocket, it’s long feathers sticking out.
“You’re welcome, mama.” You noticed the dirt on her face and on her knees as she said that. You scooped her up in your arms and took her into the bathroom to wash up.
You set her down next to the sink and began washing her knees with a wet washcloth.
“Mommy?”
“Yes?” You hummed, continuing to scrub the dirt off her knees.
“When is the baby coming?”
“Not for a couple more months.”
“Daddy thinks it’ll be a boy,” She told you matter of factly.
“Daddy thinks lots of things.”
“He told me he’s sure about this one.”
“When did daddy say that?” You asked, dipping the washcloth under the water, beginning to wipe the dirt off her cute face.
“Today. He told me while we were looking for flowers for you.”
“Okay, well, what else did he say?”
“He said he wants to name the baby Henry Hosea.”
You blinked at the name. Henry Hosea did sound nice. After all, Hosea was technically your adoptive father, as well as Arthur’s. Neither of you had really ever brought him up, avoiding that painful topic entirely. And Anne knew nothing of your past occupations, it was a story for another time, when she was older.
“I like the name Hosea,” Anne responded after being met by your silence.
“It’s a nice name,” Your voice nearly breaking. You subdued the tears in your eyes, after all that conversation was for another time.
When you finished cleaning Anne up, you brought her to dinner and sat her down next to Jack. You brought the food out to the table, making sure to put the apple pie right in front of Arthur.
•••
In many ways, time had been kind to you. It had been patient and nurturing, time allowed you a second chance at life.
It had given you the life you had wanted, one full of peace, love and family. Your life was quiet at Beecher’s Hope, filled with no revenge story. Time had dragged out your lesson for many years, but now you were reaping the fruits of your labor.
So now, as you cradle your newborn son, watching Anne and Arthur play in the field, her giggles dancing over the grass. You thank time for being there for you. For giving you what you wanted, for letting you learn to grow. For giving you a family. For returning Arthur to you.
In many ways you were thankful, thankful for the lessons you had learned, thankful for the house you lived in, thankful for the food on your table. Thankful for Mahala, thankful for Lee, thankful for Anne, thankful for Arthur and thankful for your son, Henry Hosea.
A cool breeze swept over the field, causing the grass and flowers to dance in the wind. Anne began to pretend she was a bird and Arthur raced around trying to catch her, both laughing in unison.
You looked down at your newborn son, his eyes closed over his resting face.
“One day I’ll tell you where your name comes from. I’ll tell you all about the life your daddy and I lived. And I’ll tell you about the life I had after that, and I’ll tell you about why I’ll never go back to either. One day I’ll tell you all about it,” You said quietly to your son, a promise to him and time, and no one else.
And in the end there was a man and a woman, and a daughter and a son, living to the world, thankful for every moment they get to spend with each other.
And Mother Nature rejoiced, for the man on the mountain and the woman in the city had found each other.
••• The End •••
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Fic: Haven (24/50)
Summary: They say Resembool is a haven, and they’re right. Lush pastures, quaint country town, farmers’ markets on Saturdays: a bucolic paradise.
But it’s more than that. Resembool is a haven for the runaways, the deserters, the people who don’t want to be found…
The Resembool community knows there’s something odd about Hohenheim, but they’re not going to let that stop them helping him out. This is Resembool after all, a place where no one has to hide and neighbours help neighbours, be they building a fence, chasing a sheep, or trying to save the country from an evil they inadvertently helped release centuries ago…
Or: A series of slices of life in an AU in which Hohenheim never leaves, and several broken state alchemists find hope and home in Resembool.
Rated: T
==
Haven
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18][19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [AO3]
Summary: A traumatised young alchemist on the verge of a nervous breakdown leaves Ishval in the middle of the night. Through a mixture of providence and sheer stubbornness, Roy Mustang finds his way to Resembool entirely by accident.
Characters: Roy, Hohenheim, Trisha
Content Warning: Suicidal thoughts and PTSD.
I kind of… broke Roy a bit here. Don’t worry. He’ll get better.
==
Roy Mustang was eighteen years and two days old when he was deployed to Ishval as a very newly-licensed state alchemist.
He was not ready for what happened after that.
He knows that if he’d been able to follow the path that he’d originally set out - enrol in the military academy and graduate there, complete his apprenticeship under Berthold Hawkeye within the normal length of time instead of getting swept up in the whirlwind of fast-tracked licensing - then things would be different. He would still have had to do all the terrible things he’s had to do, but he likes to think that he would have been slightly more mentally prepared for them. Even just a couple of years as a buffer would have been enough. He would have been fully prepared for everything that he would have been expected to do, and he would still have felt horrible, but he wouldn’t have broken down. He doesn’t think so, at least.
As it is, Roy is now a couple of months shy of twenty-one and it feels like he’s clinging on to his sanity by a thread. The smell of burning flesh won’t leave his nose and he’s lost count of the number of times he’s woken up screaming with Hughes’ concerned face hovering above him.
Things had been just about manageable until Lieutenant Colonel Sherman vanished. Roy wishes he knew what happened to her. She’d always kept an eye out for him and the other wet-behind-the-ears alchemists barely out of short trousers. Then she’d had one argument with General Abrams too many and then she was gone. He doesn’t know whether she deserted or whether she was shot for insubordination behind a tent somewhere.
All Roy knows is that if he doesn’t get out of Ishval right now, he’s going to steal someone’s sidearm and blow his own brains out, because he can’t go on like this any longer. He curls up in his bedroll, looking over at Hughes and thinking about Hawkeye just a couple of tents away. He can’t leave them here in the middle of this hell, but at the same time, he can’t stay here either, and surely it must be better to vanish like Sherman did rather than leave them to deal with the aftermath of his very final departure from the world.
The bombardments are heavy tonight, and Roy wonders privately if it’s artillery or just Kimblee on a spree.
Still. Whoever it is, they’re providing good cover, as Roy very quietly gets out of bed and pulls his boots on, filching Hughes’ sand overcoat because Hughes is taller and his coat comes down to Roy’s ankles.
He leaves everything else behind. Uniform, spark cloth, pocket watch, anything that could identify him or slow him down. Roy sneaks out of camp wearing boots, boxer shorts, an undershirt and someone else’s sand coat, and as he continues to creep away, he thinks that he really has tipped over the edge into insanity. Someone’s going to find him gibbering in a ditch in the morning. Maybe he’d get discharged and sent home then.
Maybe not.
He has a choice between heading east into the desert or heading west back towards Amestris, and he’s got enough sense left to know that wandering into the desert isn’t a good idea despite how incredibly inviting the notion is.
He keeps ploughing forward through the contested zone, keeping to the shadows, keeping out of sight, but in reality not caring too much if he’s caught and shot. He’s not sure what sense of innate self-preservation keeps him going whilst his thoughts are spiralling, but he keeps going nonetheless, not knowing or caring where he’s going, as long as he keeps moving, and keeps out of sight.
X
Roy doesn’t know how long he walks for. It feels like years.
Once he’s crossed into Amestris proper, it starts raining. Roy can’t bring himself to care. In books there’s the idea of the rain being a purifier, washing away people’s sins and leaving them clean and fresh. Roy can’t see it that way. The rain is just turning the dust and sand of Ishval into mud, making him feel even more stained and broken, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever feel properly clean again, not after everything that’s happened.
He pushes on, not even sure where he’s going or what direction he’s going in anymore. Maybe wandering out into the desert to die alone would have been a better option. At least it would have been warm and dry rather than cold and wet.
Maybe dying face down in a muddy ditch is what he deserves, but despite the dark thoughts running through his head, he keeps moving nonetheless, trudging on through the night into the dismal day and back into darkness again, keeping to fields and hedgerows, away from the main roads.
It’s only when he sees a little house on the top of a hill in the distance that Roy receives a new lease of life, remembering that he hasn’t eaten for a couple of days, and he’s suddenly ravenous, knowing somewhere deep down that if he wanted to die he should have just given up and done it by now.
He can't really ask for shelter when he’s a deserter and a traitor and probably wanted by the military already, but he’s not thinking that far ahead right now, and as he approaches the house, he can make out an expansive vegetable patch outside it and the smell of ripening tomatoes. They won’t notice a few missing, surely...
Roy crouches down behind the tomato plants as a light comes on in the house upstairs. He can see shadows moving around and curtains twitching, and he stays as still as he can, hoping they can’t see him. With any luck, the pale sand coat is now dirty enough not to be noticeable in the moonlight.
There’s no luck. More lights are going on and the door is opening, and someone is coming out into the rain.
On instinct, Roy snaps, but he left his gloves miles away and it’s pouring with rain anyway. The figure comes closer, holding out an umbrella over him, and Roy makes out a man with long hair wearing a raincoat and rubber boots over pyjamas. He holds out a hand to help Roy up off the ground.
“You’ve come from Ishval, haven’t you?”
Roy looks down at the drenched sand coat and military issue boots. He can’t really deny it.
“Well, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last. Come into the dry.”
Roy finds himself in a warm kitchen with a woman in a dressing gown making tea.
“There’s no need to hide under the tomatoes,” she says, pouring hot water into the pot. “We don’t bite. How long have you been out there? I’ll go and run you a bath, you’ll catch your death. Just leave your wet things in a heap by the door, we’ll deal with them in the morning and Edward, I told you to stay upstairs.”
The woman bustles out of the kitchen, and Roy gets a glimpse of a tousled golden head around the door before she chivvies him away and up the stairs.
Roy just stands dripping in the doorway for a few moments, not entirely sure he’s not actually lying in a ditch somewhere and this is all a fever dream.
The man brings over a couple of blankets and goes to pour the tea. Elsewhere, Roy can hear hot water pipes clanking and hissing, and he finally realises that he’s very cold and very wet. He strips down completely, reminded that he was so out of it that he managed to walk here from Ishval in little more than his underwear, and wraps up in the blankets, taking tentative steps towards the kitchen table.
“You seem very calm about all this,” he ventures. “Has this happened before?”
The man shrugs. “You’re the first person we’ve ever found in our vegetable patch, but you’re by no means the first person that the village has taken in on the run from Ishval. Both Ishvalans and military runaways; we get them all and we take care of them all. We always have. War is a horrible thing and we do what we can to mitigate it.”
He looks like he must be in his late thirties, but there’s something in his unusual golden eyes behind his glasses that gives Roy the impression that he’s seen centuries’ worth of violence in his time.
He gives a tired smile. “My name is Van Hohenheim. Welcome to Resembool.”
X
Whilst Roy has always firmly claimed not to believe in God, and that Ishval only strengthened that lack of belief, when he looks back on his first night in Resembool, he thinks that something outside of normal human power must have happened to have provided this safe haven just at the moment when he was on the knife edge of despair.
Hohenheim and Trisha let him into their home with no judgement and no expectations, giving him tea and food and a hot bath and spare pyjamas. They give him a makeshift bed in Hohenheim’s study, and when he wakes up screaming from nightmares of Hughes and Hawkeye paying the price for his desertion (Hughes was shot point blank in a phone booth, of all places, and Riza had her throat cut with a sword that looked suspiciously like Bradley’s), Hohenheim just gives him a knowing look from where he’s working on something at his desk. They talk about nothing of importance until the sun comes up and the rest of the family start to stir.
He meets Trisha and Hohenheim’s two boys in the morning, and they’re obviously intrigued by the stranger who turned up under their tomatoes in the middle of the night. Alphonse is more reserved, but Edward has no fear whatsoever.
“Are you an alchemist?” he asks. “We get a lot of them coming here from the east.”
Roy looks down at his hands, remembering everything his alchemy has done and his stomach churns with the memory of that awful stench that still won’t leave him behind.
“I was.”
Whether he’ll ever be able to use it again without needing to throw up afterwards is another matter entirely.
“That’s enough, Edward.” Trisha’s tone is firm as she flits around the kitchen, getting ready to leave on some kind of errand. Edward opens his mouth to protest, but a look from his mother silences him.
The other alchemists who’ve arrived in the town probably didn’t arrive in quite as dramatic a fashion and in quite such a hopeless state. He can understand Edward’s curiosity - he could tell from the moment he set foot in Hohenheim’s study that he’s a master of the craft to rival Berthold Hawkeye and Basque Grand - but at the same time, he’s grateful not to have to talk about it, and Edward dutifully doesn’t ask anything more.
A couple of hours later, Trisha returns with a familiar face that Roy has never really entertained the hope of seeing again.
At least he now knows the identity of at least one of the other alchemists who made their way to Resembool.
Alex Armstrong smiles at him, a smile that’s both sad and sympathetic at the same time.
“It’s good to see you, Mustang.”
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do u have any fob fic recs?
HEWWO YES i have a fuckton of fics to rec, i mostly just read peterick ones (i can’t find a lot of wentzporta or the rarest of rarepairs: stumporta, but i wanna start seeing if i can find any good trohley or joetrick fics) but i have an INSANE amount that i can suggest, i’ll link them and then offer a summary and tags for the content.
disclaimer: i don’t know if you were asking for nsfw fics but that’s like. all that i ever read unless it’s a REALLY good fic or character study or things like that. i’m also gonna warn that some of these are very dark because i like stories that tackle dark themes and a lot of them uh. let’s just say i like tttyg and futct a lot because i love the lore and dynamics surrounding the band in its early days so the eras i like to read fics about will reflect that
there are some in this list that are decidedly more normal than others, and even if some of the tags i mention sound like the fic is gonna be messed up, i can assure you there are way more fics lighter in tone than others in this list. like if a fic is BAD i mention it
I APOLOGIZE IN ADVANCE IF THIS ISN’T WHAT YOU WERE ASKING also these are in the order that i was able to find them so the quality/how much i like it isn’t in order
https://adellyna.livejournal.com/358618.html this one is about pete letting patrick drink for his seventeeth birthday, warnings for underage up the wazoo
https://adellyna.livejournal.com/355836.html patricksitting is like, THE peterick fic it’s about pete being patrick’s babysitter while his parents are out of town, again underage tag
https://adellyna.livejournal.com/350184.html ANOTHER fic about pete letting underage patrick drink but this time? pete’s recording him. warnings for underage shit and potential dubcon (i wouldn’t call it that bc it’s not how i interpreted it but the author tagged it, so)
https://archiveofourown.org/works/254157 this is a dance dance au where patrick fucks nerd!pete
https://archiveofourown.org/works/1045467 this fic is SO good it’s about the time where pete and patrick got into that really bad fight behind the convenience store while on tour, the one where pete choked patrick so hard he couldn’t sing the next day, this one has like. fight sex i guess is the term. i guess you could call this a darkfic
https://archiveofourown.org/works/522666 this is one of my favorites, it’s about pete kidnapping babystump and patrick developing stockholm syndrome but i PROMISE it is way more heartwarming than that, it’s not a hardcore kidnapping darkfic i swear. underage warning WOW THERE’S A LOT OF THESE
https://archiveofourown.org/works/239403 this is one of the funniest fucking fics i ever read, the premise is that pete pretends to be patrick’s boyfriend to piss patrick’s parents off. underage warning yet again
https://archiveofourown.org/works/25420678 this one is short but literally anything by this author is great, this is @castleinthsky here on tumblr. wilson is a fantastic author and i wish she wrote more, i’d literally read a novel if she wrote it, same with adellyna on lj. this is about pete lusting after patrick but it’s all just him masturbating to the idea of him, underage warning YET AGAIN
https://archiveofourown.org/works/158907 this one is about pete and patrick right after a show fucking in one of the hallways
https://archiveofourown.org/works/1069202 OH GOD THIS ONE IS SO FUCKING HOT this is one where pete is super controlling over patrick during sex he acts like a fucking scumbag it’s SO sexy but The Ending Will Warm Your Heart. i know this one is van days so it MIGHT be underage because i’m just a fucking creep i guess
https://archiveofourown.org/works/443472 okay this is one of my favorite fics of all time, this is part two in a series the author wrote about the idea of patrick having a twin brother, the first one is shorter and just introduces you to the idea but the second one is a fully fleshed out story and i love it so fucking much, you should seriously check this one out because this is one of the best fics out there period. warning for underage and incest YES I’M AWARE OF WHAT I’M LINKING PLEASE GIVE ME A BREAK
inb4 “nyan do you read any fics that aren’t weird as shit” PLEASE I JUST WANNA BE HAPPY
https://archiveofourown.org/works/9871037 this is also by castleinthsky and it’s a lot more tame than what i linked before, this is just a cute 2008 fic where they’re on their way to the next town at night and patrick is drunk in the back with pete
https://archiveofourown.org/works/4373366 okay this one is a double whammy and also one of my favorite aus, this is 2011 patrick and 2007 pete. i LOVE the idea of different eras with each other, like i love the idea of post-hiatus pete and patrick ganging up on one of their younger selves and this one specifically is 2011 trick with 2007 pete. the same author ALSO wrote...
https://archiveofourown.org/works/4168323 this, which is literally just post-hiatus pete and patrick fucking babystump. it is so goddamn good warnings for selfcest and underage yaddah yaddah you get the point by now
https://archiveofourown.org/works/24333673 this is like the creepiest fic on this list, it’s straight up just pete being a creep (i loooove creepy pete so much if you haven’t noticed) and hypersexualizing van days trick and i feel like at this point i don’t need to warn you what’s in it
https://archiveofourown.org/works/1163036 this is just really rough peterick sex but i also like stories where patrick is a fucking violent bitch so i’m throwing it in here. i love brattystump so much
https://archiveofourown.org/works/4307196 this is a two-part series that is also, that’s right, about patrick starring in a sex tape but this time instead of his consent being very dubious, he’s doing it intentionally as a gift for pete. i think patrick is 17 in this
i am deeply considering not even posting this list at this point because of how many times i’ve used the term “underage” to describe one of these. i swear to god it’s not how it looks
https://archiveofourown.org/works/20685 OKAY. BEWENTZED. THIS IS MY NUMBER ONE FAVORITE PETERICK FIC AND IT’S ONE OF MY FAVORITE FICS OF ALL TIME it’s like this REALLY long form bewitched au sort of thing where pete is the literal devil and he gives patrick seven wishes, but each wish patrick makes is turned into a lesson about how he can’t force friendships or fame or success and pete twists them in a way that backfires in his face. this is seriously one of the best fucking fics i’ve ever read and even though patrick is in high school in this PLEASE ignore that if that squicks you out because this fic is fucking legendary. this and patricksitting are CRUCIAL to the peterick extended universe
https://archiveofourown.org/works/32760 this is a short one where patrick needs to get laid but the only person around who can do it is pete because joe won’t make a direct offer and he’s pretty sure andy is far from interested
https://archiveofourown.org/works/335389 eden burns is another legendary fic that’s about pete treating patrick like shit as the two are growing up together, this has triggers up the fucking ass so i’d really suggest reading the tags and summary before reading this but it deals heavily with the psychological aspects of molestation rather than just as a kink thing. it’s THAT kind of dark fic i fucking love it i love looking completely insane
https://jamjar.livejournal.com/99731.html OKAY A FIC WHERE IT’S NOT PATRICK THAT’S IN HIGH SCHOOL FOR ONCE this is an age reversal fic and while it doesn’t explore the potential of the idea as much as i’d like it’s still a really good read, it’s about patrick and pete switching ages and it builds an entire setting around that, where pete goes to high school with joe and patrick is trying to establish himself as a musician with andy. pete is a very angsty and emotional teen in this it’s so good
https://swear-jar.livejournal.com/697877.html OH THIS IS A FIC I SERIOUSLY JUST DISCOVERED this one is sooooo fucking hot it’s so weird, it really elaborates on when pete was unmedicated when he was younger so the logic in this one is super fun to figure out. i love fics that try their own interpretation of pete when he was unmedicated and unstable because it’s so fascinating trying to explore his psychology in a safe and creative environment, and i relate to a lot of stories like these because i have bipolar like pete and when it was unmedicated while i was younger it destroyed my fucking life so i understand a lot of the things he used to do or say about himself, anyway in this fic he jerks off to patrick in his sleep without him knowing so warnings for that and for vomit. i wouldn’t call this a darkfic just really bizarre and i love it for that
https://giddygeek.livejournal.com/138523.html and this is the last rec i have for now, it’s another dance dance au where both pete and patrick gang up on nerd patrick and it’s very cute
please don’t be mean to me i pay my taxes on time and i vote democrat and bernie should have won the nomination instead of biden
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Jake Reviews Amphibia: Handy Anne and Fort in the Road
It’s finally here... the second time i’ve said that in three days but hey, Amphibia is back! After a years hiatus due to the show being shoved out in a month to get it on disney plus faster (Yet they STILL don’t have wonder over yonder so I can finally watch season 2. God damn. ), one of the best new shows of a year stuffed with them is back!
I was excited about this one from the start. A great premise, a gravity falls pedegriee, and the wonderful Brenda Song, who I had a crush on when I was younger despite not really watching the first suite life that much, though I will admit what I saw was pretty decent and had a wonderful cast especially song and Phil Morris as Mr.Mosby.. it was just overshadowed by i’ts two leads being really sterotypical (the cool but dumb hustler and the stick in the mud nerd) and I was more of a nick middle schooler anyway so I barely touched it. Granted if I could go back in time and trade which shows I watched i’d trade it for Zoey 101 in a heartbeat, another show with awful leads but the rest of the main cast was really good concidentally.
Anyways I did watch more of on deck to kill time and absolutley hated it. Seroiulsy the show really sucks: Zack and Cody were turned into basically worse versions of Zack Morris and Ross Gellar, worse because while their just as douchey as those two, Mark Paul Gossler and David Schiwmer can actually act and Cole Sprouse could not yet. I do say yet since Cole Sprouse has grown because he wasn’t half bad in the one season of riverdale I watched. Riverdale, what happens when you have the entire writers room snort a line of coke and then tell them to write the most insane archie fanfiction they can and stitch the results together. Just with Archie alone from what i’ve seen in read he’s started a vigilante posse ala homer simpson, nearly joined hte mafia, been framed form murder, had the local cheerleaders do a number for him while he played prison football, escaped prison to hide in canda from both his former mafia boss whose also his girlfriend’s dad and the cult based on a DnD knockoff, got mauled by a bear and LIVED, and now is a superhero apparently. WHy I haven’t gone back to at the very least review this clusterfuck is a mystery.
But the point is the twins were really terrible at the time, and if the fact Dylan’s only major role recently is in the sequel to After, that film based on self insert one direction fanfiction, which somehow got a sequel while Birds of Prey probably won’t because god really does hate me. So it was bad and she deserved better, got better with the social network but hadn’t done much i’d seen, so a new cartoon starting her in her elment and in a great show for once had me pumped.
And.. my faith paid off. The show is beautifully animated, ahs a wonderfully morbid and fully fleshed out world, top notch voice acting (including BIll Farmer who is so unreconizable as hop pop I thought he was voiced by charlie addler), great jokes, action and storytelling. Just a slam dunk that left be jonesning for me. And now in one of the best weeks for animation in a while, more is here. I do mean that: 3/4 of disney’s major animated shows returning and close enough finally airing it’s a good time.
When we last left our heroes: Hop Pop buired the box that brought anne there and lied to her about it which even a year later I think is a terrible decision.. one made for understandable reasons as he clearly knows something more about it than she does, but one that’s bound ot backfire whens he finds out her new grandpa lied to her and betrayed her. The plantars also spent the season preparing to leave wartwood.
Soon after, Anne was forced to finally stand up to her manipulative, if to my utter shock still caring about her and possibly being into her? I mean it’s not like I haven’t seen the “villian whose overcompensating for a terrible past and likes manipualting people redeemed and ending up smooching the somewhat reckless but good hearted heroine” before.
Anyways Sasha ends up nearly falling off a giant tower, Anne tries to save her, with the rest of her new family pitching in, and Sasha, realizing just how terrible she’s been just.. let’s her self fall, only saved because Grime caught her. And just remembering that sequence god dman.. the fact they actually got the rights to lean on me for it really dosen’t help. But the day was saved and while Anne had a huge bundle of trauma, the family was ready to finally set out soon. And now a year later i’ts time. Now i’ve gotten all the personal stuff out of the way, let’s hop to it and see what the new season has to offer. Full review with spoilers under the cut!
Handy Anne
So the Plantars are finally setting off. We don’t touch on the Sasha thing much, just a quick bit at the begining to show that while Anne is insiting she’s fine it really traumatized her. I do like kids shows starting to show more that sometimes heroes just DON’T bounce back after something like this, especially young ones. While it’ isn’t nearly to the extent of Steven Universe spending an entire season having his lack of thearpy and unresolved issues slowly destroy him, it’s still nice to see.
But the main thrust of the episode is it’s vacation time brother!
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Yup after a few episodes of build up last season with the valley clear, Hop Pop has bought a suprisingly nice and affordable wagon (As Polly excitedly explains someone died in it) so they can finally set out to hopefully find Anne a way home. Their going to Oregon! I mean To newtopia, the beating heart of Amphibia: a bustling metroplis built on knowledge where they can hopefully find a way to get Anne and friends back home, while Anne hopes to find Marcy. The rest of the kids are also excited just to get out of the valley for the first time.
Everyone’s pumped.. but Anne starts to worry when she finds out Hop Pop has asked his friend Chuck, the “I grow tulips” guy from the bug ball episode last season who I forgot about but was reminded why I love him and am glad to have him back, to watch the house as given Amphibia is hard enough to surivive on a good day, let alone if your a stationary building. And Chuck dosen’t insprie confidence so Anne decides to fortify the house. And her reasoning.. is actually really sweet and shows how much she’s grown: Instead of like most times where her impulsivness is the reason shenanigans and life thretaning situations happen here.. she’s hit with the hard relization her new family is basically risking everything, their home, their farm, their chuck, to help her get home.
So Anne decides to armor up the house, getting a fuck ton of shovels and a ton of suplies from the blacksmith guy who suprisngly for once DOES have what she needs for her veggies, to the point his not backtracking weirds anne out, and gives her a tub of goo. This can only end well!
Meanwile the rest of the family pack. Polly having maybe 3 possesions gets done quick, Hop Pop is being anal reteitive as always with his ascots (hilariously done and Bill Farmer really is the MVP of this series), while Sprig’s gone half insane just picking out which slingshot to take as he never left, which polly of course exploits.
But things natrually go wrong as the goo creates veggie monsters the family fights (with sprig even calling fight time because this is normal to them at this point) the next mornign and then one colosus that destroys the house... and Anne’s anger and heartbreak over it .. awakens something. See something I hadn’t heard about and didn’t notice at the ebgining of the series was anne’s eyes flashing blue while fighting the mantis in the first episode. Many couldn’t tell if it was leading somewhere or just an animation error. Here though her eyes go bright blue in close up with it being clear this is part of her.. the question what is it and why? Just what power does she have now? And will it save the world or destroy it?
Questions for later Anne saves the day, an admits she screwed up but Hop Pop is understanding: He’s touched by her actions but also explains their not just doing this for her: their with her all the way and any sacrifice is worth it. And I like that part of hop pop: while he can be overbearing, just see next episode.. he does genuinely mean well and has genuine wisdom, something they sometimes forget with grandparent characters in animation. He’s crotchety and a stick in the mud, but he’s still throughly nice and understanding and it shows here: He’s going to get his daughter back whatever it takes.. almost.
Hop Pop calls on chuck who in a whilrwind of tools and tulips fixes the place.. and proves to be every bit the legend I thought him. He sells tulips and he’s great. We’ll miss you chuck. But as they get ready to leave Anne brings up the box and Hop Pop, remembering what he did, hastily says it’s better with their contacts. WHich again just seems short sided: while he is trying to protect her, especially since next episode confirms there was some sort of apocalypse once so odds are her being connected to it might not be the best, he can’t dance around her connection to it forever, and hiding the fact some apolcaypse was caused by it is only going to backfire when some vilian reveals it or anne finds it out for herself. Taking her to a place full of infomration where he’ll now have to work to hide the truth is just asking for this to backfire. Not bringing it is one thing, dangerous people could still get the box and use it for their own ends.. we’ve seen female newt sabertooth in the promos and we’ve met Grime. But not telling her is just setitng himself up for a big and deeserved fall soon. But with that settled our heroes set out!
Final Thoughts I:
Overall this was a good start to the season: my one real complaint is the town didn’t really see them off or anything, so the large and loveable supporting cast is just.. absent unless the series returns to wartwood at some point and it would’ve been nice to see them once last time. Even star vs, as bad as season 3 was, knew we wouldn’t be seeing most of the earth cast for a whie and had marco have a meaningful sendoff before he left. But.. given how tight the phacing seems to be this season judging by episode titles alone, and they only had 11 minutes here. I do think it could’ve been in hte next episode, but it dosen’t ruin a decent, fun start to the season really rooted in character stuff. Not the series finest 11 minutes, but still really good and a good way to start us off.
Fort in the Road:
First off your welcome for that episode screencap. Now this one’s also simple, but ends up having a rather sizeable revelation nestled inside. The Plantars are going down the road and while the kids want to you know explore, see places, actually enjoy the trip especailly since Sprig and Polly have never been anywhere else before, Hop Pop, being hop pop, instead just wants them to sit and be quite and follow his rules. I mean it is hte grind but you can at least make it FUN for htem; Just look at this guy.
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It took an episode longer than I thought to refrence the trail to oregon given this season is about a wagon trip, but I’m glad to do it .. and do it again. I will fit pays to be an animal in here somewhere I swear it. WE’ve got time left in the road trip.
Anyways this goes down terribly, though some rules like not posing dramatically as it smacks of hubris and never ends well. But understandably the kids are annoyed about it: Anne can’t even compallin because i’ts not in the rules.
So naturally as Hop Pop should’ve seen coming at the first opprotuunity Anne fakes being cart sick and they run off to see a weird looking ruin with Hop Pop chasing them and leaving the cart to polly because that can’t end well but he’s on a short time.
And this is where the season drops a 10 ton atomic bombshell. Anne being kinda magic in the last episode and it being fully part of things now is intresting and shocking.. but this is miles ahead of it and casts Hop Pop’s actions: Turns out whatever the clamamity box did set techniology in amphibia back to a little above the dark ages. I mean they have full light thanks to lightning bugs, but their still leagues behind.. but were once up to at least mid 2000′s levels of technology. The machine seen requires a disk to stop, but it’s still far beyond what I expcted from this world. Naturally Hop Pop shows up furious, then gets stuck on the assembly line with the kids deseprate to save him, with spirg ending up doing sow ith the rule book. Also we get Anne’s wonderful repsonse to Sprig asking what a disk is:
“I don’t know! i’m from another dimension not the 90s!”
They surivive, the factory blows up and the kids apologize and agree to go back to the boring way things have been going.. but Hop Pop thankfully realizes he’s been a bit overbearing and actually gives a good reason why: He’s never taken then out of the valley before and simply got overprotective. This is his family after all, all he has left of his kid and all he really has left beside Sylvia and the farm. It’s understandble he’d go a bit overboard. But Hop Pop decides to compromise a bit in a nice moment: while the impalment fields are obviously a non starter, he does get the kids ice cream (Anne even admits at this point she dosen’t pick the bugs out anymore), and they genuinely enjoy the trip while Sprig (in a hilarious bit of lampshadng as he does it repeadtly) wonders jsut what they were making.. and as I spoiled it was robots.. one of whom is now following them. Wether this means new doom or the plantars getting a new robot family member I don’t know i’m hoping for the latter. Everyone needs a vision in their life.
Final thoughts II:
While having a bit of an obvious conflict with an obvious resolution the character work combined with the MASSIVE plot bombshell really make this enjoyable and I hope to find out more about just what the hell happened and what these robots are for. Just another good solid episode and an excellent duo to start the season.
Next week: Things take a turn for the western and Anne learns to hunt and more about the glow. And with the glow you need to grow to glow... until then i’ll likely have mor ereviews on this channel, I recently reveiwed all of season 1 of close enough if your curious, and until next time.. play us out Willie!
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I love what i’ve seen of this throughly stupid movie. Bye ya’ll!
#amphibia#handy anne#fort in the road#season 2#brenda song#bill farmer#the suite life on deck#disney channel#disney xd#disney plus#anne boonchuy#hopidiah planter#sprig planter#polly planter#sasha#lord grime
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Oc-tober Day 22: Good/Evil
Hooray for more old ideas! This one is one of the very beginnings of me thinking bigger stories. Believe this time when I say there's not much plot-wise for these two chars. I just haven't come around to actually fleshing out the story; instead I always just zero in on these two's personalities and chemistry.
So let's call the first character you see Baddie, and the gal offering to buy tacos Scruffy. They meet just like my comic details but I'll backtrack and give them context.
Baddie is an alien test tube baby, experimented on his whole life to become a weapon. He's basically feral with how little human interaction he's had, and after his van crashes and his chains break, he goes on a rampage hurting people.
Then comes Scruffy.
Scruffy is a kid from the streets, a pro at minding her own business and forcing others to do the same with her. But when she finds this kid that can lift a man up whilst only growling as he tries to bargain, her interest is piqued. He puts the man down but goes after her, and after running around for a bit, dodging his lunges, she manages to pin him, all the while poking fun at him by calling him "Bad dog!" She manages to calm him down, and treats him all night to food, fun and good company. He's smitten.
While out, some cute stuff happens, but here's something in particular. The whole night, people would scream slurs at her as she passes by, but she ignores them. When someone throws trash at her, Baddie responds. She holds him back by his shirt collar and drags him away. Once they sit down in a park she lays over his lap and explains her situation somewhat. Some people will just never like her. But it's alright by the end because she's living for herself. As a girl. Feral alien boy doesn't understand her dilemma at all, but he listens. To him, she's made it clear she's a girl. Why is everyone treating her like she's not?
Nearing dawn, just as she settles on the idea of bringing him into her broken household, he's swept away from her watch in just a millisecond, carried away by another unmarked van. And not seen again until years later.
He's finally been civilized. He can speak and he knows social norms. But he prefers to stay quiet and doesn't get close to anyone. He's been transported job to job, used as a mercenary to the highest bidder. The next big job takes him back to the familiar town he misses... Realizing this, he runs from the car into the streets. He visits all the places he remembers. They've all changed. He doesn't find her. He's devastated. He returns to his job's office by himself, where his new partner, a girl with eyes on him, is already being breifed. They are to take down anarchists with a peculiar set of powers. Among the photographs of their victims is hers.
In all those years, Scruffy missed the bugger, but she's also been busy surviving. She made a name for herself helping others. One day, she helped a weird-looking dog. It was dying in her kitchen, and with its final breaths it spoke to her. She must be the next defender of the earth...
With the dog's final word, it dissolves into sparkles, and they crowd around Scruffy. That's right. This is a magical girl story XD Though a less flashy one, so the sparkles and colors are a bit toned down.
Can't give too much details because I always gloss over this, but she gets a team (though I can only remember two lol, my very first fuckin lesbian couple!!!) and she starts fucking shit up for the big bad companies trying to take over the world for a bad alien's gain.
Needless to say she will run into Baddie in the field, but while he knows its her, she won't know it's him (cuz he fully transforms).
He'll still secretly help her sometimes, and she'll start to notice. She has hope he's not a bad guy.
He gets annoyed by his partner in crime's infatuation with him, doubly so when she makes fun of Scruffy. Needless to say, her fear of him outweighs her big mouth. She learns to shut up, though she still doesn't like Scruffy.
On an off-night, Scruffy will go to her favorite taco truck that's switched locations. That same hour, Baddie will be 'patrolling the streets' only for his nose to catch a whiff of the food he ate that faithful night. And wouldn't ya know it, they go to order at the same time.
Cue fireworks huehehue.
She's overwhelmed with joy at seeing him, she was always worried she failed him that day. He, who finally learned words and even traversed into multiple foreign languages, has his heart stuck in his throat. After getting their food, she drags him along just like the night they met, and they have a great time visiting the same spots. He already knows how much they've changed, but he loves hearing her talk about all the renovations and history of the spots. He stays mute the entire time. They end the night on that bench where she lays down at his lap again, and laughs at the end of a story of hers. He can't stop looking at her, and as she runs out of talk, she's beginning to notice. She smirks at him and lightly punches his cheek.
"What's so funny, punk?"
His first words to her.
"You're still as gorgeous as when I first saw you."
Ahaha, that sends her smile back and her face aflame.
So this guy can talk now.
And such a nice voice.
And not to mention..... He's hitting on her?
She hides her face and gets up. She's not used to this. That came out of nowhere!
He's terrified at her sudden movement, and grabs her arm.
"I-Im sorry, please don't leave! That night..."
She turns around and peeks through her fingers to see the same shy boy stuttering over his words.
"Means the world to me..."
Ah, well. He's fucking cute.
She stays and they talk some more before she has to leave. But they get eachother's numbers and promise to hangout more... Which they will.
They'll continue meeting in the battlefield and they'll make lame excuses the next day over brunch on why they have bruises.
He knows the truth, but he's afraid to come out. The best he can do is keep her safe in the fights.
Until the day she figures it all out.
#Oc-tober#October#Oc tober#Sketches#traditional drawing#traditional art#Bad Dog#Das the name od this story#Trans#Trans Girl#Aliens#Original story#Romance#Lol
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OC Masterpost
I keep a list of my OCs and the tags that I use for them here but this list is going to be a bit more in-depth.
This thing is long so I’m gonna put everyone under the cut.
D&D Characters — What it says on the tin.
Lulrin Malmun — A fallen aasimar wizard with a tragic past. Lulrin grew up as a protector aasimar in a happy community but he felt extremely isolated in his teenage years. This lead to him being manipulated by a tiefling named Nirza. Lulrin fell in love with her and she lured him into doing terrible things in the name of his love. Because of this, Lulrin fell and became something of an emotionless puppet for Nirza. She died a few years later, leaving Lulrin lost and conflicted and overwhelmed. He ended up removing his soul from his body to cut himself off from his emotions. He’s gotten a lot better since then—his soul has been returned to being inside of him and he’s made a good number of friends! He loves knitting and hot chocolate.
Haedus — Full of restrained anger and passion, Haedus is a bladesinger wizard. His rapier and his magic are potent weapons that he uses efficiently. He’s typically silent and wears a mask to hide his face. I’m still fleshing him out fully but he’s a very fun character.
Sly Silvervale — Sly is a half-elf monk who is doing his best to amass funds so that he can fulfill his dream of opening a tavern that can provide a good time, quality food and drink, and a place where others can find rest and general merriment. While he does his best to act polite, calm, and collected, he is inclined to make sarcastic quips towards friends and enemies alike and can be somewhat oblivious. He loves to cook for himself and for others and he also enjoys bartending and mixing drinks.
Stefan — A revenant NPC in my Curse of Strahd campaign(s). Stefan is crude and hotheaded, eagerly seeking out enemies to slay but quick to make friends. He can’t remember much of his time before being a revenant, but he’s pretty okay with that.
Sorina — She grew up as an orphan in her home town but was raised in a very loving and caring community. She’s kind and witty but won’t hesitate to tease her friends or fight her enemies. Stubborn and strong, she’s a brilliant guard.
Marek — He grew up alongside Sorina as an orphan. Marek is charming and flirtatious, preferring to keep all his shirts unbuttoned when he can and never passing up on a good time. The only thing he loves more than fun is his friends.
Jamila Shani — A sun soul monk and cleric of Ra. Jamila is an agent of violence and chaos, though it’s been directed in a more productive direction as of late. She grew up alone and on the streets, fending for herself. She approached an order known as the Monks of Ra and wished to join them. She was mocked and ridiculed instead. She then taught herself to read and stole (and later returned) scriptures so that she could learn the ways of the Monks. She then ran off where she became an assistant to Hemaka, a newly-illiterate scribe for the pharaoh. The two of them have since taken to adventuring and stopping the end of the world.
Heroes of Two Galaxies — Characters in a sci-fi campaign (based on Endless Space 2).
Laurence Verity — Laurence grew up on an Unfallen planet as a citizen of the United Empire. He was encouraged to pursue his interests and curiosities by his parents and community. He soon became dedicated to doing the right thing and ensuring that everyone was treated fairly. From there, he decided to become a lawyer, more intent on making sure that the truth came out rather than necessarily winning the case. When he moved to Raia, the capital planet of the United Empire, he was aghast to find that the government and judicial system were rife with corruption. He did his best to play within the parameters of the law but it quickly became apparent that no true justice was going to take place with the current state of things. Over the years, with encouragement from his mentor Runo and his husband Blaise, Laurence set out to find a way to reform the government so that it was truly fair. His actions earned him an invitation to the Academy, a collection of influential figures throughout the galaxies. Laurence accepted and has since graduated as a Hero, working with his current team while trying to fulfill his own goals.
Blaise Annora — Laurence’s husband and a semi-famous actor. Blaise grew up as an orphan who quickly fell in love with theatre and dedicated his life to becoming an actor. After a rough start (a failed television show and lots of commercials) during which he met and began dating Laurence, Blaise got his big break and has shown no signs of slowing down since then. Blaise is charismatic and fun to be around, someone who is lively bright. He donates incredibly frequently to charity due to his own childhood. He loves Laurence dearly and is the only person who Laurence likes being called “Law” by.
Runo Batin — An affable and outgoing man with a penchant for the dramatic. Runo is regarded as one of the best lawyers in the United Empire and is a mentor to Laurence. He’s kind yet distant and Laurence is determined to unravel the mystery that is his mentor.
Jared and Co. — Sometimes a family can be a group of magical misfits in a cottage in the woods. Traditional high-fantasy aesthetic. The main rules governing magic is that mages all have certain powersets that can be built upon but the kind of magic that an individual has is luck of the draw.
Jared — Jared is a very unique individual for a variety of reasons. His magic is some of the most powerful that any modern mage has ever seen before—energy manipulation and teleportation. Because of this, Jared is a force to be reckoned with. However, Jared abhors violence and he’s much happier to spend his time in his cottage, taking in all sorts of people, offering them tea, knitting them scarves, and being an endearing goofball. He can’t help but offer others assistance and has a heart of gold.
Damien — Damien was unlucky enough to be born with magic that is classified as necromancy. Necromancy as a field of magic is heavily disliked and makes it incredibly hard for anyone with that class of magic to be accepted for just about anything. Thus, Damien jumped at the chance to work for a guild, underpaid and unfair as the work was. He was originally assigned to neutralize Jared for taking away business from the guild. However, he was quickly defeated and offered a drink and a place to stay. Damien was wary but accepted. He has yet to regret it. He’s somewhat cold and stiff but cares fiercely for his newfound friends.
Seraphima — Seraphima is a half-human half-dragon hybrid who is one of the residents of Jared’s cottage. She was abandoned early on in life, unwanted by the dragons for her human half and feared by the humans for her draconic heritage. She was found by Jared after a nasty encounter with some particularly cruel humans. Jared immediately took her back home and recruited the help of Anica to heal her. The two of them were able to patch Seraphima up and Jared offered up his home. Seraphima eventually accepted. She’s a free spirit who enjoys a good challenge and isn’t afraid to tackle her problems head-on. She has taken up the role as the protector of Jared and his “strays” and guards them just as fiercely as any dragon protects their hoard.
Anica — A wood nymph who lives near Jared’s cabin. She is one of Jared’s oldest friends, though she has avoided the title of “stray”. She is calm and collected, offering food and healing to whoever she can. She is soft-spoken and has a great love for all of nature. She and Seraphima are wonderful friends, despite the vast differences in their magic and personalities.
Siri — Siri is a nomadic mage who has ice and snow manipulation magic. Because it drains her magic greatly to take water and turn it into ice or snow, she travels with the cold so that she can always use her magic. She stays at Jared’s cabin during the winter. She’s excitable and patient, delighting in new experiences and telling stories of her travels. A generally warm person despite her powerset.
Helen — A former assassin mage who used to belong to the same guild that Damien once did. When Damien failed to return from his mission, Helen was sent in his place. She’s cold and professional, rarely letting her emotions get the best of her. Her magic allows her to turn the blood outside of her body into incredibly potent acid, making her a dangerous foe. However, Jared was able to tire her out and then heal her, treating her with great kindness that she could not help but be moved by. She has since become another resident of Jared’s cottage.
Two Assholes in a Handbasket — Not so much a story as it is these two characters for the moment. Once I work something out I’ll update this more fully. They’re definitely in a modern-day setting without magic, though. Likely in high school.
Jason “J” Stone — J is something of an asshole with amazing computer skills. He doesn’t care for other people (with the exception of Derek) and has been living on his own ever since his parents left and never came back home around when he was 15 years old. He’s cold and sarcastic and independent, viscerally hating people who try to take away his freedom. He’s calm and aloof and it’s generally challenging to get him really, truly angry. Fairly apathetic to most others and gives no shits about school. Derek is his best friend and J is sure to help Derek get through his problems by using logic or calming him down.
Derek — A delinquent through and through. Derek is large and intimidating. He never starts a fight without a reason, but at times the reasons can be petty at best. He used to be more of a bully in middle school and the start of high school, but that fizzled out when he became friends with J. Derek officially lives with his foster parents, both of whom are not kind or pleasant people, but in truth he lives in J’s apartment, helping to cover the price of rent. J is his best friend and Derek is sure to help J remember to eat, sleep, and generally take care of himself.
Demons, Magical Contracts, and Other Disasters — A world where humans need all the edge they can get against other, more magical societies. Thus they have turned to forging contracts with demons for magic in exchange for their life force.
Silas & Caleb — A two-in-one sort of deal. Silas is a human host and Caleb is the illusion demon that he made a contract with. Though the relationship started off normally enough (at least, normal between a demon and a human) it soon became one of mutual respect, then friendship, then romance. The two of them Bonded (the demonic equivalent of a matrimonial contract) and have this achieved something akin to immortality and unlimited power. They’re incredibly powerful but they care more for stirring up trouble than doing anything truly nefarious or ambitious. They’re definitely not going to be the main character of the story, but they’ll definitely show up a few times to cause mischief.
Pokemon
Rowan — A pokemon trainer(?) who I am still fleshing out a personality and backstory for, but whose design I love. I’m going to have a lot of fun with them.
Supernatural Apartment Complex — An urban fantasy setting where supernatural beings live alongside our society, though they are vastly outnumbered. Their existences are ones that are kept secret. All of the characters here are all part of the same supernatural apartment complex.
Galen — One of the few humans in the apartment complex, Galen is a Magician (human magic-user) and an incredibly proficient one at that. However, Galen wishes to inspire awe in the world through stage magic and illusionary, not his actually real magic. Thus, Galen is training to be the greatest stage magician that the world has ever known without the use of his magic. He’s dramatic, mysterious, and more than a little silly.
Seth — Galen’s werewolf boyfriend. Seth is a fashion designer for the supernatural, creating all manner of comfortable and stylish clothing. He’s intuitive and has a brilliant eye for design. He’s fun to be around but he’s much calmer than Galen, not to mention more straightforward and blunt.
Conni — Seth’s older sister. Both she and Seth inherited lycanthropy from their parents. She’s reckless and stubborn and never passes up an opportunity to mess with her little brother. She’s a personal trainer at a local gym and takes pride in her strength and muscles.
Lonan — Conni’s roommate. Lonan is a harpy that works as an editor for the local paper. She’s somewhat shy and quite diligent in her work ethic. She’s a sucker for staying up late watching all sorts of shows and videos. Conni often teases her by saying that Lonan would go fully nocturnal if it weren’t for her job.
Killian — A vampire who is the landlord of the apartment complex and runs the coffee shop that makes up the first floor of the building. Killian is always wearing at least semi-formal wear and always acts perfectly calm, respectable, and polite. He’s a great landlord to all his tenants. Despite all of this, no one really knows that much about him.
Faye — A lazy laidback faerie who typically spends their day lounging about their room, making cryptic statements, or creating art. Faye tens to not talk with the other residents when they can help it. Their history is largely unknown since they don’t talk much in the first place and tend to avoid the topic. With Killian’s permission, they’ll put up some of their work around the coffee shop for customers to marvel at or purchase.
Reyes — Faye’s roommate who co-owns a shop with Jira. Reyes is typically loud and outgoing with a penchant for mischief and challenges. He gets along fairly well with Conni when the two aren’t engaged in a prank war. Even Faye has admitted that Reyes is likable, “regardless of how annoying he is”. Reyes is a tattoo artist who takes great pride in his work and uses Faye as his own personal critic.
Jira — Jire is a dryad who owns the flower shop half of the shop she co-owns with Reyes. Jira is quick to lose her temper and take petty revenge, but she doesn’t really hold grudges. She’s lively and fun to be around and is constantly giving out flowers as gifts to her friends. She takes great pride in her shop and works well with Reyes.
Marina — Jira’s wife and roommate. Marina is a mermaid/siren. She’s a marine biology professor at the local community college who deeply loves her subject area and educating others. She’s gentle and helpful but will never stand for someone being rude or disrespectful. When she gives lectures, she’ll use her magical voice so that people are enchanted to pay better attention and recall the material more clearly.
Star Buds — A tale of Void and Nix, two beings that are of a race of essentially sentient, humanoid stars known as the Vanithen. They’re looking to make as many friends as possible.
Void — Void is sweet and kind and just wants to be friends with everyone. They’re incredibly empathetic and a people-pleaser. Be kind to them or they’ll cry.
Nix — Void’s best friend. Nix is the more logical of the two and is the skeptic to Void’s open trust and belief. Nix has steered them both out of trouble many times.
Hollow Knight OCs — OCs for the game, Hollow Knight.
Heart — A vessel OC with a major case of Corvid Brain who adores cute and shiny things. To find out more about them, check here.
Plum — A kind and spunky gal who loves to knit. She dual wields her razor sharp knitting needles. To find out more about her, check here.
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Compromises
John Kelly, the White House Chief of Staff, seriously got my attention the other day when he suggested that the Civil War could have been averted had people on both sides been more willing to compromise, which thought he then followed up with a wistful observation about the consequences of parties in opposition being unwilling to meet each other halfway: “…men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand [as a result] where their conscience had to make their stand.” In other words, Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, was putting forth the notion that the deaths of almost a million people (including soldiers on both sides, free civilians, and slaves) could have been averted, possibly even totally, had people with opposing views only been willing to reach a compromise that would have been at least marginally satisfactory to all sides without requiring that anyone on either side compromise his or her own principles unduly…or at least impossibly. But is that really true?
There are two ways to approach that question. One is to note that the decades leading up to the Civil War were filled with so many compromises set in place to hold the union together that it’s hard even to remember their precise chronological order. (The correct order is as follows: the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise Tariff of 1833, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. There were also any number of lesser-known, unnamed efforts and initiatives intended to defuse the tension between slave states and free states, each of which too was some sort of compromise.) So to say that these people simply couldn’t compromise isn’t quite right: in a sense, all they did was compromise. But, in the end, because each of these compromises ended up permitting slavery to continue, even if managing in one way or another to delimit its extent (and particularly outside of the traditional South) or its terribleness, they all came to naught. And that was because people who loathed the “peculiar institution” could never truly be content with any compromise that allowed men and women in bondage to be treated as chattel that could be bought and sold rather than as actual human beings possessed of inalienable human rights. To suggest, therefore, that the responsibility for the bloodiest of all American wars rests equally on the shoulders of all concerned because their shared disinclination to compromise led inexorably to war—that is the viewpoint I’d like to write about this week.
Time has not been kind to our founders with respect to their inability to see slavery as a pure evil to be eradicated, not tolerated…and regarding which compromise aimed at making slavery less bad was therefore impossible.
Some readers may have come across an extremely interesting essay by Noah Feldman, a professor of Law at Harvard, that was published in the New York Times last week. (For readers who didn’t see it, click here.) In it, Feldman writes about James Madison, our fourth president, and suggests that people trying to unravel the racial politics of modern-day American start by contemplating his willingness to compromise. Madison was a principled man. He regularly referenced the inherent right to liberty of enslaved individuals, including his own slaves. At one point he suggested—apparently entirely seriously—that Congress sell the western lands acquired through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 to raise the $600,000,000 he estimated it was going to take to purchase every slave in the United States, all 1,500,000 of them, and grant them their freedom. (His plan was for Congress to find the money to send the newly-freed slaves back to Africa, where he felt they could flourish best absent the inherent “prejudices of the whites” that would have made it unlikely that they could simply live as free Americans in this country.) He left clear instructions to his wife, Dolley, to free all his slaves after his death, which instructions she for unknown reasons did not obey. In other words, here was the man among our founders who truly understood the perniciousness of slavery…and who wished, not only for the slaves he personally owned, but for all slaves held in bondage in the United States to be freed.
In other words, here was a man whose middle name was Compromise. He understood the badness of the institution and he came up with suggestion after suggestion to seek the kind of compromise that would end it permanently without wrecking the economies of states that were built on slave labor. Yet he went along with the idea of prolonging the slave trade for decades after independence (the importation of slaves from overseas only ended here in 1808) as the price for bringing Georgia and South Carolina into the union. It was Madison who first proposed that each individual slave be considered the equivalent of three-fifths of a free person for the sake of determining how much each state owed the federal government. That specific proposal was not accepted, but the Constitutional Convention of 1787 did indeed adopt Madison’s proposal in order to determine representation in Congress based on the population of each state. Was that the specific kind of thoughtful compromise that General Kelly wishes men like Madison had been around to implement in the 1850s?
Is compromise always a virtue? In the years leading up to the Second World War, compromise after compromise was reached with Nazi Germany in an attempt to head off war. But if, instead of offering up other people’s land to the Germans in 1938, France and England had gone to war, it seems at least possible that a swift victory, followed by regime change, could have been attained. If the United States had been involved from the beginning, victory would have been not merely possible, but more than likely. Compromising with evil—with the fascism behind Nazism or the racism behind pro-slavery sentiment—nothing too good can ever come of that kind of compromise.
I have a special relationship with James Madison, but I’m guessing no readers will be able to guess what it is. Do you give up? You might as well: my relationship with our fourth president is rooted I the fact that the apartment house in Queens that I grew up in was called, of all things, “The James Madison.” (Most of the six-story red-brick apartment houses along Yellowstone Blvd. and 108th Street in Forest Hills were named after some historical figure from our nation’s past. Before we lived in the James Madison, we lived up the hill from there in the Benjamin Franklin, also known as 103-26 68th Road.) So I grew up feeling some sort of strange kinship with the man. And he was, in many ways, one of our nation’s most worthy founders. As Jefferson’s Secretary of State, he managed to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase that expanded our nation’s borders far beyond the Mississippi. He successfully guided our nation through the War of 1812, which resulted in the firm establishment of the U.S among the family of nations and made of us a naval power to be reckoned with. He personally wrote the Bill of Rights. But he was willing to tolerate slavery even though he clearly believed the institution to be morally indefensible. In other words, he was prepared to compromise…even if doing so meant abandoning one of the most basic of all principles upon which our national ethos was and is based, the inalienable right of every individual to live free.
Is it fair to look down on people for accepting as givens the basic beliefs about the world that “everyone” simply believes to be true? A few years ago, I remember reading and slightly liking Markus Zusak’s 2005 novel, The Book Thief. The plot was a bit contrived and the writing, I thought, easily betrayed the book’s origin as a so-called “young person’s novel.” But what interested me was the framework itself in which the story unfolded: set among eleven-year-olds in 1943, the plot concerns children who have in their lives only known Nazism as their nation’s guiding philosophy. All the figures of authority in their lives are openly anti-Semitic and fully subscribed to the principles of Nazi fascism—and that list includes their teachers in school, their minister in church, the policemen in their town, the mayor and his town council, all the shopkeepers, the librarians in the public library, and their doctors and dentists. In other words, the characters in the book are children who have never known life other than under the Nazis. Mostly, they accept as obvious truths the lies they hear from all the authority figures in their town. But not all do, and in particular one specific girl, the so-called “book thief” herself, does not—and so comes to understands the perniciousness of Nazism without anyone explaining it clearly to her, rebelling against a philosophy so pervasive in her time and place that her friends barely even notice its existence as a thing that even could be evaluated, let alone rejected.
We tend to lionize people who somehow find it in them to look past what everybody just “knows” to see a truer, clearer version of reality—like those in antebellum America who somehow knew to reject all those quasi-scientists and ardent theologians (including rabbis) who felt certain that slavery was a reasonable institution because black people were intellectually and emotionally inferior to white people. Today we laugh at that kind of “scientific” justification of racism…but what of people who lived in a world in which everybody just “knew” that to be true, the same way we today just “know” that it is reasonable to own and trade animals—and to eat their flesh and wear their skins—because they presumably exist in the first place solely to serve humankind?
General Kelly was wrong when he argued that the Civil War could have been averted by compromise not because yet another compromise could not conceivably have been worked out between free and slave states, but because any compromise that ultimately left chattel slavery intact was almost by definition doomed to collapse eventually. Those possessed of a clear moral vision understood that easily, and also that enduring compromise is only truly possible when both parties to it can respect the other side’s opinion and its proponents’ right to hold it. But when the other side favors something openly evil and wrong, compromise is impossible…and reprehensible. The Civil War could have been averted by abolishing slavery in all states and working out a way to keep the economies of the slave states from collapsing. That would not have been labeled a compromise—it would have been labelled a bold stroke to preserve the union not by compromising its most basic values but by affirming them.
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I think this article makes a bit too much of specific circumstances just after the trough of the worst recession since 1937. It references a mainstream economist worried about jobs, which was reasonable in 2010, but now the job market has more or less fully recovered.
Unemployment in May was down to just 4.3%, which outside of a brief period in 1999 and 2000 was the lowest on record since the 1960s. The number of unfilled positions has risen to record highs, nearly 6 million, higher than it was in December 2000 at the tail end of the tech boom. Wages are rising, and incomes for married couple households with two incomes have never been higher - if you and your working spouse earned $100,000 in 2015, then you were in the poorer half your demographic’s income distribution.
I understand that training people for new lines of work isn’t simple easy for them, but I think in a modern, developed economy that is probably unavoidable. Note that the author argues against free trade not only between other nations, but even within the United States itself. He’s right, but that’s not exactly a costless proposition. Free trade does provide increased competition, but it also reduces various input costs. It does not seem probably that economic activity would be higher with reduced trade opportunities.
In Capitalism, the availability of jobs is controlled by the whim of monopolies and large employers. History has clearly shown these companies will readily close down factories and offices in one area to open new ones where they can get cheaper labor.
This isn’t accurate. The vast majority of American jobs are created by small businesses, not large ones, the availability of jobs is driven by the business cycle.
The ability for a single employer to devastate a large region gives that employer the ability to control its economic life, and even its government.
Outside of small towns, this doesn’t appear to be true. It simply isn’t the case that a single large employer could devastate Texas or New York or even a moderately large city like Milwaukee. I agree it can be a problem for small rural towns a long way away from major cities, but is the solution really to prohibit free trade and business between individual cities?
The value of our currency is controlled by banks that charge usurious interest rates while creating special financial packages to enrich each other.
Usury is not related to the rate of interest (which may or may not be unjust) but the type of loan. A mutuum loan cannot licitly charge *any* interest (i.e. where the recourse for being paid back falls on the borrower alone). A commercial loan and a non-recourse mortgage are not properly understood as usury, whereas student loans and credit cards are, because the former are backed by a specific asset (those of the business or the home) whereas the others are backed by personal pledge alone.
Banks do control the value of currency, with the Fed setting the overall pace, but the value of currency has been relatively stable. Inflation has been low and positive for many years now, and some positive inflation might help with wage adjustment through money illusion (i.e. with 2% inflation, you can hold wages flat for 3 years and reduce your wage bill by 6% and avoid layoffs, since workers hate nominal wage cuts, 0% inflation might lead the employer to fire some employees rather than cut wages - see chart below which shows huge proportion of wage changes at exactly 0%).
Many people are forced to invest their retirement funds in that great gambling institution called the stock exchange.
People are not forced to do this, but rather choose to do so because returns in equities are highest. Would distributists make investing in stocks illegal? What investment would they choose to replace equities for retirement saving? Moreover, buying stocks is not gambling, but rather investing, taking ownership shares in businesses and receiving a share of the future profits through dividends and capital appreciation. Sure, stock prices go up and down (and are uncomfortably high right now), but if you invest over 40 years it’s difficult not to make a nice return as you buy in at both low and high periods.
Considering the recent great failures of our banks and markets, is it any wonder that even the large businesses are hoarding their assets?
This is an illusion that was admittedly a prominent concern back in 2010, the notion that big businesses were hoarding cash. All assets must be held/hoarded by someone. If large businesses put that capital to work, they would have to sell those assets to other entities, and those other entities would now be accused of hoarding assets. The growth in hoarded assets largely reflects an increase in government and corporate debt, which when purchased by businesses show up as assets. More here for a description of this phenomenon in detail.
That great boondoggle mislabeled as a “stimulus package” poured billions of borrowed dollars into the very banks that led us into our current crisis, leaving not only us, but our children and future generations of tax payers to cover the bill.
The stimulus package, ARRA, was separate from TARP, or the bank bailouts. The bank bailouts were actually capital investments by the federal government that, combined with the other bailouts (e.g. AIG and auto manufacturers), have reduced the government’s debt by nearly $100 billion as of 2017, as the government made a profit on its investments.
ARRA may have been unwise or unnecessary, and perhaps there are other costs of TARP (e.g. there might be an increase in moral hazard, the idea that banks might behave in a more risky manner if they expect a bailout), but future taxpayers were better off from TARP.
Imagine instead being economically independent. What if you owned your job, either independently or cooperatively, instead of a huge company?
People can always start their own businesses, or if they work for a public corporation they can buy stock (though I wouldn’t recommend it). Isn’t that a lot of risk to bear if your independent business fails? Wouldn’t it not only mean the loss of income, but also most of your assets as well?
Are we abolishing large corporations? What about people who don’t mind working for them, and who wouldn’t want their assets tied up in a business that might fail?
What if the goods and services you need for your daily life were produced locally by people who also owned their own jobs.
It depends. Diversification reduces risk. What if the local economy crashes? Can I move? Is free trade prohibited, or are there exceptions if the producers of what I need are no longer operating? One of the biggest problems of the Great Depression was that banks weren’t allowed to have branches throughout much of the country, so that it only took a few business failures to destroy a town’s banking system.
Imagine if the government was required to provide a stable currency.
I’m not convinced that 0% inflation is better than 1.5%-2.0%. This article merely asserts it as if it were a good thing rather than defends the claim.
Imagine if there were still dozens of car manufacturers across the country who worked together on innovating new technologies, instead of the “Big Three” who bought out their competition.
Is technological progress in the auto sector too slow? I’m actually quite amazed at the pace of progress in that sector. For example, a 2016 BMW 340i 6 speed sedan is about the same size as the 1998 BMW 540i sedan, it is more comfortable, has better technology, better sound system, is faster, gets better fuel economy, handles better, brakes sooner, is probably more reliable, and the 340i base price of $46,795 actually costs less than the 540i which was $55,678 - not adjusted for inflation either. It actually just costs less.
What about economies of scale? The R&D, for example, of dozens of small car manufacturers would have to be spread across a far lower number of cars, and what about free trade? What if the best cars are in New Hampshire? Can I buy them if I live in Texas, or do I have to make do with relatively mediocre Texas vehicles?
The overall national economy would be more stable because each local economy would be stable. The failure of one company would not have the ability to devastate an entire region. The common man would be economically free because he would own the means of producing his livelihood. This is what Distributism aims to achieve.
I see a lot of assertion and not a lot of demonstration. This is my problem with full-throated distributism. There’s a lot that needs to be fleshed out, and often times I see claims I feel have limited support, or for that matter are simply false (like the bank bailouts being a net cost to taxpayers). It really needs an Adam Smith or Karl Marx type character to come along and address these things.
My preference at this time is still to improve things at the margins for capitalism (especially with respect to debt and usury, cracking down on slave labor in foreign countries, etc.)
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Wow, So Supportive!
So, you might be able to tell, but I’ve been kind of figuring out this series as it’s gone along. The first had more behind the scenes info, the second more comparative analysis, and now this topic comes along which requires something entirely new.
Well, not all that new, but enough that it’s an honest to goodness challenge to tackle a topic so terrifically tremendous in size: the entire population of the planet that we’ve been introduced to so far.
I could just spend this time geeking out about my favourites, and I will warn you now, it will probably come to that, but what I want to know is what this pretty pony populous does for the show.
And, I mean, with such an expansive cast that will no doubt only grow in the coming season, there’s quite a lot of characters to cover! But, as sure as I’ve overdone it on the alliteration already for no particular reason (I’m in a mood), there’s certainly something to be gained by examining what the background cast has to offer!
World-Building
Aside from giving our main characters other personalities to play off of, supporting characters give a greater depth to the world they live in. To the audience, the variety of viewpoints and personalities isn’t just fun, but indicative of a living, breathing environment.
It’s part of the illusion. If there’s characters out there besides the protagonists that are fully fleshed out or even just feel like they could be, it adds to the believability that this is a whole world. In fact, with a good supporting cast, not only can other characters with conflicting viewpoints to the main characters be in the right, but they can have their own lives that don’t feel like they’re in service of a plot of the main character(s)’ story at all!
It tells you more about the world the main characters grew up and currently reside in. Seeing what characters outside the main six value and how they conduct their lives gives us context for how they act, what makes them so special (or in some ways, not special).
And in a world this big, you can even get perspectives from outside the country. We might’ve assumed everyone was as friendly and kind as the ponies, but in fact they’re known for being soft and weak among the dragons and having a “typical pony hero complex” and a weird tendency towards singing and hugging among the griffons (who via contrast show us what the rest of the world is like, more on this soon).
So, yeah, finding characters who’ve had their own experiences apart from our favs helps the world feel more real, and certainly more interesting.
The season 6 finale is the perfect example of that fact in action. Watching these side characters approach something that’s usually only handled by personalities we’re all very familiar with was refreshing---plus, there were character dynamics we never dreamed we’d get to see (Trixie and Discord being the big example)!
To use a pretty specific example of how cool this is, check out how terrified Trixie is again:
Throughout the entirety of this two parter, Trixie’s constantly showing the audience how terrifying this situation actually is to a normal citizen of Equestria.
And that’s so cool! We get to see by contrast how brave and well-worn our favourite heroines have become---even Fluttershy can mostly handle herself these days (at least, with her friends by her side) without too much panic.
At one point Trixie even refers to a possible changeling invasion as “princess level stuff.” Even better, the second Starlight tells her about it, she immediately says they need to tell Twilight---which both shows the character development from No Second Prances (as the two of them grew to respect one and other), but also shows the audience this is serious to her: in a crisis Trixie’s first instinct was to get help from her rival.
This kind of perspective on things can only come from a source outside the main cast: contrast.
Parallel Characters
Here’s something you’ve no doubt noticed MLP loves to do: base entire characters around the antithesis of one of our main character’s traits.
This is pretty obvious when it comes to Sunset Shimmer and Starlight Glimmer, and how they operate as warped versions of Twilight (you can’t spell it out better than following the same naming scheme). In various ways, both of them demonstrate by contrast how well Twilight understands friendship and Harmony, among other things.
Discord is the same way.
It’s kinda like how Lex Luthor is the perfect counter to Superman: the mild-mannered boy-scout that will always try to do the right thing meets the embodiment of greed and capitalistic folly. Lex is the self-made man lead astray by his own desire for power, and yet Superman seems to prove that despite being alien, his down-to-earth morality is what ends up representing the best of humanity.
You can compare quite a number of iconic villains to their heroes that way, by seeing what each of them represent. Hans Gruber and John McClain from Die Hard. Ganondorf and Link from the Legend of Zelda. Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker from Star Wars. That’s one part of what makes them so memorable---a perfectly fitting contrast to the forces of good their meant to fight.
In the same way, Discord’s very obviously the counterpoint to our Element of Harmony wielding heroes. Not just the whole chaos and harmony thing, but because of how their values clash. Discord only ever cared about getting a laugh and shaping the world in his own nonsensical image, whereas the girls only care about each other and the ponies of Equestria. The conflict is natural from that point on because Discord’s character was constructed to make it so. More than that, though, his defeat isn’t just good triumphing evil, but instead the things the Mane six value triumphing over the view that directly opposes them.
Tells you they’re in the right by showing you how awesome it feels for them to win, essentially.
Lightning Dust is yet another easy example of a character that exists just for contrast. She’s been likened to season one Rainbow Dash many times, and it just goes to show you how far season 3 Rainbow Dash had come in comparison.
So, side characters won’t just give you different perspectives about the main characters verbally, but through their actions. Even when they only get a wee bit of screen time, relatively speaking.
Minimalism and Imagination: A Writer’s Greatest Tools
That’s sort of how an episode like Slice of Life happens.
Filler background characters with interesting enough superficial attributes (like designs, occupations, or implied character traits) give us just enough personality to work with that our imaginations can fill in the rest. To an extent, all side characters function in this way.
It’s the same way a non-main character can go through an arc off-screen. I know, off-screen development sounds terrible---for important characters, who get a lot of precious screen time.
What happens, essentially, is we’re presented with the bookends to an arc: the beginning and the end, and in between is mostly filled with our imaginations.
The example that pops to mind first is Trixie, between her first appearance her second.
Last we see her, she’s leaving Ponyville with her ego bruised.
Next we see her, she’s acquired an evil amulet and is ready to not only humiliate Twilight in kind, but take over the entire town and turn it into Trixieville.
So... a step up from embarrassed.
The reason we buy that elevation has to do with both the story Trixie tells about hitting rock bottom (at a rock farm, no less), and the amount of time in between.
We’re not given very many details other than her career being impacted and her perception that she was humiliated everywhere she went, but it’s been two seasons since we’ve seen her---there’s enough of those little details and time in between for us to imagine a gradual change that made her decide to seek out straight up revenge, no matter the cost.
In a similar vein, I also find it interesting to see how characters differentiate themselves, with such little screen time.
For some, it’s definitely a matter of great design and/or voice acting that really makes them pop out at you. In addition, there’s usually either some adherence to an easily digestible archetype, like the (...*grunts*) tsundre Dragon Lord Ember or the timid Coco Pommel (which sounds bad, like I’m saying they’re cliched, but archetypes can be pretty useful for side characters yet-to-be-developed because it tells us a lot about their personality instantly). Or, a twist on archetype.
For an example, let’s get fancy: Fancy Pants and Filthy Rich both should be greedy and/or power hungry, or just generally thoughtless based on the rich, money-focused business character stereotype. Instead, seeing how Fancy Pants will make conversation easily with anyone and warmly accept those of a lower class than he is, and how Filthy Rich will be a tough but loving father to his daughter (as opposed to spoiling her) and will go out of his way to be nice to the Apples makes them feel like more complex characters.
Playing to our expectations and then twisting them even just slightly makes them feel less like cardboard cut-outs there to fill the insert snooty rich character here role, and more like well developed characters---all just with a few small actions.
Don’t even get me started on characters who say one thing one time, and we fixate on it to the point that it’s central to their identity. Sometimes, it’s because we treat it like a meme; like, Sonata kinda liking Tacos is a thing the same way Derpy like muffins is a thing. And let’s be clear, Sonata also talks about punch at some point in the movie, concerned with the fact that she added too much of one flavour. But the juice thing isn’t a big thing tied to her character in the fandom like tacos are, and why? Tacos are funnier, I guess.
And let me clear: it’s not some failing of the writers that they haven’t developed these characters, or the fandom getting too obsessive over small details. It’s intentional. Of course, there’s quite a few side characters that do get on-screen development (Big Mac, Thorax, the Wonderbolts, etc.), and still others that remain a mystery intentionally.
Zecora remains a character I’d LOVE to see explored, for instance, because there’s still a number of questions surrounding her. Did she have a family once? How much magic does she really know? How did she learn all of it?
Sometimes the answers aren’t as fascinating as a lack of answers. The MLP staff knows this full well apparently, since they’ve always had a policy about leaving things open-ended just in case they want to develop them later, thereby letting us fill in the blanks.
Which reminds me of another great example: Applejack’s noticeable lack of parents. From literally nothing, we created entire personalities, stories, and character motivations---to the point that when it’s explored in canon now, they have HUGE expectations to live up to.
The role of imagination in developing this world is intentional. That’s what good writers do---give you just enough to let you fill in the blanks.
But that’s what’s so wildly inventive about all these characters. So many of them are so memorable---either through what they tell us about the world, the main characters, or even just as characters in and of themselves (whether that be developed through a bit of trickery with our imaginations or actually developed in the show). There’s so many I’d love to see again, and so many more I’d love to meet in the future!
And, because of them all, like the Mane 6 at the end of Slice of Life, I feel quite lucky to know who I do.
Editorials? What are those? I don’t know, but I’ve written a bunch over here for you. Maybe the three most recent ones will jog my memory (check out the other Elements of MLP posts with the Year of the Pony link):
Derpy Editorial, Top 10 Redeemed Villains, and Starlight Editorial
Year of the Pony
Header Image Wouldn’t Be Possible Without:
Trixie Vector by Comeha
Elements of Harmony by SpiritoftheWolf
Elements of Harmony by TechRainbow
Chiggity-check out those hard-working artists, yo!
They’re All Main Characters in My Heart, Dammit
#year of the pony#yearofthepony#mlp editorials#mlp#starlight glimmer#trixie lulamoon#discord#thorax#sunset shimmer#octavia#vinyl scratch#derpy#ditsy doo#dr. whooves#doctor whooves#braeburn#cheerilee#big mac#big macintosh#lightning dust#my little pony#friendship is magic#mlp:fim#mlp: fim
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3000 Followers!
So the current campaign I’m DMing has been a fun one so far. This is my fourth full campaign and my first one for 5th Edition. (I’ve done like 4 more minor ones that fizzled out) Since I’m really enjoying this campaign and this page just hit 3000 followers! I figured I’d share the premise and the PC’s that play in it.
First off the premise for it is something I’ve been playing around with running for years now but I was always hesitant because I don’t think it fit the role-play style of my original play group . Basically the ‘players’ at my table have been magically transfered into their player characters by ‘me’ the DM and they have to figure out a way to get back home while having to deal sharing a mind with their PC and dealing with the characters past dealings that they have no memory of.
I borrowed from several sources to develop this idea. I straight stole the premise from The Guardian of the Flames book series, than continued to borrow ideas from the Wizard of Oz, Quantum Leap, Land of the Last, The Sword of Truth Book Series, Doctor Who, Tron: Legacy as well a number of other sources.
I’m using my own custom campaign setting which I was developing already from the novel I’ve been writing off and on for years but with that on hold for now I figured I’d take advantage of my dnd group to flesh out my world more and develop it more than I ever could. Anyways here’s our starring line up.
Amelia Ravenscroft (Ava) - Imagine Khalessi from Game of Thrones meets the Evil Queen from Once Upon a Time and that is Amelia. She’s the 'Evil’ Queen whose also a human draconic sorceress from the Southern Isle of Thelum who narrowly escaped being executed and ran from her kingdom after her niece Joandanna Ravenscroft usurped her and took the throne. Not being able to claim her throne Amelia/Ava being 'their’ fiery self’s have made the best of a bad situation, with a foggy memory of things of things back home both have agreed to work together instead of against one another to help Amelia take her throne while searching for a way home.
So far she’s managed to acquire her father’s former knight Walter who is fiercely loyal to her and has already proven he’d kill without question at just the whim of her order. Mingled with the nobles of different towns and has recently started a small rebellion in Alexandria, the largest city on the continent after it became apparent that she wasn’t going to be able to get the return in fealty from the ruler of the city that her father once gave in a war that happened in decades before.
Azazel Ebonnova (Daven) - Being our Satyr Bard Azazel is literally the Swiss army knife of skill checks to our group. Much of his childhood is shrouded in mystery still and the transfer of essences has made their memory a bit foggy. Piece by piece though their memories have been coming back especially as the in game version of Daven realizes that in the land their in no one has heard or seen of a Satyr causing both to assume they’re the only Satyr in existence.
Azazel/Daven have had some unique encounters though in their shared time. Azazel is wanted by a hobgoblin tribe known as the horned riders for skipping out on the wedding of the tribal chiefs daughter because he realized it was gonna be too hard to loot the tribes crown gem on his own, he’s successfully robbed the governess in the first town the group encountered and not only that but after one his many drunken nights, won at gambling against a shephardess and acquired the woman’s daughter as a prize which he is now training to be a wizards apprentice.
Enna Nailo (Rachel) - Being a Half-Elf Thief isn’t easy but it’s something Enna makes look like it is. Being raised by humans of a more lower class Enna has been thieving since she was just a small pointy eared girl. At times she’s let her inner kleptomaniac loose by just going down the streets and helping herself to whatever she can grab off a person. Her biggest accomplishment is stealing a prized greataxe off a minotaurs back without a single person noticing.
Being Azazels woman is far an easy task as well but Enna/Rachel manage the satyrs often at times large ego and reckless drinking behavior. Even if the goal to get home seems impossible at times the urges she has with her sticky fingers and borderline narcissistic lover keeps her going.
Evette/Alison: The relationship between Evette and Alison is often a tricky one. Since the point of the groups arrival. These two were the only ones to fully integrate as one vessel. While Evette remains in control the genius but rogue Wizard has full access to Alison’s memories. Which caused some tension for Kaid since he’s married to the half whose not in charge.
While she is in full control Evette is often quiet and mysterious. Her motives are unknown and it hard to tell whether or not she’s working with the group or for some personal cause. One thing that is known is time and time again her knowledge of the arcane arts have been indispensable and she wants to see Amelia return to power for the Thelumian bounty from rival wizard Tharkun the Grey can be pardoned.
Kaid Wither (Brent): Born and raised along the borders of Freelands and the Elven Forest Kaid was raised by his Uncle Kirk in the arts of being a Gunslinger which in this campaign world is the only knowledge that remains of what an Artificer was or use to be. Though things were tricky at first with Evette; things have settled down now as he is now focused on getting home and freeing Alison away from the wizard.
Being at times the moral voice of the group is probably one of the hardest jobs considering the group is far from beacon of shining light. Since arriving he’s clashed with a number of the members of the party over their decisions and actions and more recently faltered on his own when his uncle and mentor came back into his life and proclaimed that Kaid and the group need to stay out of his and his employers (a Necromancers Guild) way. Racked with guilt over the past and what has transpired between him and his Uncle, Kaid is torn between doing the right thing and stopping his Uncle or letting his past mistakes stayed buried. Either way the newly named 'Elemental Slayer’ has his choices ahead of him.
Nelg 'TwistedLimb" Wahi (Glen): Nelg is big… well big is an understatement for the groups Goliath Eldritch Knight. The hulking Goliath who I’ve teased calling him a giant because he stands over ten feet tall which for a Goliath is huge with their race being an average of eight. Though he isn’t the most graceful of the group Nelg is definitely the most imposing and his shield and axe in hand has stood toe and toe with Scions to Ancient Elementals, Champions to the Arch-Duke of Alexandria and yes even more recently a Mummy Lord
Since 'Glen’ has transferred into Nelg’s body the two have have quite a ride together and gotten themselves into a fair bit of trouble as well everything from pinning a dwarf head to a Tavern sign out of anger . For every bad thing he’s done he’s made up for it with something good. Such as saving a young boy from being executed for stealing bread. Nelg is the prophesized one known in prophecy as “The one bonded to the shield” and is foretold to become a great hero as well as figuring out a way to get back home so Glen can see his new baby boy and woman.
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[RF] The Arc of a dream
Lhotsa pushed open the door with a fling of her arm. Exiting the cold, conditioned air of the library, she stepped out into the bright rays of the mid-day sun. The heat seemed to penetrate her body causing an uncontrollable tightness in her chest and limbs. She was not one to complain about the sudden change in temperature. She took pride in her presence of mind to notice how her body acclimated to the outdoors, having spent most of the morning wandering through the climate controlled library. It was her favorite place to go after all. Being amongst the books filled her with wonder and joy. There were so many voices, so many stories - some true, some fantasy - each of them windows into the minds of their authors. What an incredible life it must be to craft a story with such depth, color and wholeness; a universe imagined in the mind. To Lhotsa, the most powerful thing a person could do was use their words to pull a reader out of their daily life and put them in the middle of a story imagined by someone else. Even the most mundane non-fiction works required the author to cultivate a sense of setting. After all, the words that tell a story are nothing more than black letters arranged on a contrasted white page. With the exception of children's books, the stories had no visual to force the reader to see the world exactly as the author intended. Each person brings their own imagination, built upon a lifetime of unique experience to the book guided by the author's creativity.
Lhotsa pushed ahead into the heat. Her feet pounding the sidewalk in a confident, headstrong pace. Her top, loose and billowy, flared behind her in a sail of pastel colored silk. Her frantic pace pulled the front of her blouse close to her skin, now dampening with sweat. She held her head high with a smile of contentment and subtle mischief. Across her right shoulder she held a large canvas bag emblazoned with the now faded logo of the 1999 International Book Fair. The bag was filled with the spoils of her library visit; books weighing the bag down until the straps dug into the flesh of her shoulder. It wasn't uncomfortable for Lhosta to carry a load like this. She was energized by what lay ahead. The anticipation of curling up on her couch, tattered and stained from her college parties, overpowered her sense of discomfort. In fact, she drew strength from the thought of pouring her body, mind and soul into a new book. It was a wonderful feeling for Lhotsa when she completely engulfed herself in a good story. She could disassociate from the banalities of daily life. Wether she was reading of swordsmen and wizards or crafty, if not a little disturbed, detectives hot on the tail of their criminal prey, Lhotsa felt the absorption of her existence as a welcome relief from responsibility.
What most fueled Lhotsa was escapism from her beige life. Born to middle-class Midwestern parents she grew up in a forgetful suburban town in a forgetful suburban house. A forgetful suburban childhood eventually gave way to a forgetful suburban life. Her parents weren't exciting. Lhotsa's mother got pregnant and never finished college. She married Lhotsa's father and settled into whatever mindless work would allow her to spend a few more hours tending to her kids. Lohtsa's father was a dreamer but lacked all ambition to do anything about it. He grew up with his nose buried in National Geographic magazines, drawn to the world that existed too far away to see. While his wanderlust never faded, he ended up parking those plans for another day. He worked too many hours as some sort of accountant, or was it in purchasing? Lhotsa never truly understood what her father did for a living and she never cared to know more.
It was her father who gave her the name Lhotsa. He saw the name pop out from the well worn pages of a National Geographic he was reading for the hundredth time. This particular issue was one of his favorites. In it was a full two-page spread of the Himalayan mountain range. He immersed himself in the photos of snowy, bearded faces of Sherpas peeking out behind the layers of their coats. Her father could transport himself away from his meager life to the highest peaks of K2, Everest, and Everest's sister peak Lhotsa. To be climbing the last few steps towards the summit of these mountains at the top of the world was the farthest place he could possibly be from his suburban life and his suburban wife.
Lhotsa eventually grew to accept her name and eventually found pride in it's uniqueness. That's not to say she didn't have her share of frustration as a child. Her teachers would look at her pale skin and strawberry blond hair and wonder if their roster somehow was wrong. It wasn't everyday that the "All American Girl" had an ethnic name. When she was out, inevitably someone would assume her darker skinned friends carried her name. As she entered college the world opened up. The constraints and stereotypes rampant in suburbia hell fell away to an uncomfortable liberalism. The tolerance of all backgrounds felt more like an undercurrent of anxiety. Were people genuine in their acceptance or were they simply too fragile to accept they might offend someone that they shielded themselves behind political correctness? Lhotsa couldn't tell but in the end she accepted the change in setting. It was in college that she also found her place amongst the books.
Lhotsa was a fair student at best. Her mind wandered aimlessly through most of her classes. The large lecture halls were particularly painful for her. She felt stifled, claustrophobic, despite the relatively large space. She was alone in a sea of faces, untethered, afraid she would float away if she didn't hang on tight. The anxiety of anonymity overwhelmed her. Lhotsa needed grounding.
Story was important to her, she could relate to a subject if there was story behind it. History was easier for her even if it wasn't her favorite subject. At least history was full of characters, action, and a sense of setting. Math made her skin crawl. She was overwhelmed, anxious, and stressed when faced with numbers. Of all of her classes, Lhotsa was drawn to literature most of all. It was in her literature class that she finally felt free. Her mind found a place to rest within the books they were reading. Finally, found what she was unaware she was searching for. The light pierced through her mental fog, casting it's beam on a life she wanted to live fully within. And so, in her freshman literature class, Lhotsa's dream to become an author bloomed from the seed planted within her soil so long ago.
It seemed to her that these thought came poking up whenever she visited the library. As much as Lhotsa loved her books, it was always a reminder that she left her dream to write her own books behind as life moved forward. Lhotsa shook her head to clear the clouds of doubt rolling through her mind. She realized she was about to step off the curb. She had spent the last few blocks completely inside her head again. Her spirit was full of stories, especially those that guide her perception of herself; often negative and critical. How many times had she peered up to realize the clock shifted ahead by hours? How many times did she retreat into her mind while riding the subway to work? Her instincts and muscle memory the only guides to ensuring she didn't miss her stop. It was the gift she inherited from her dad, to forever lost in thought.
Lhotsa criticized herself for holding childish dreams. Writing wasn't a way to make a living unless you were someone famous like Stephen King. Or was he rich and famous because he put the work in and struggled early in his career? It was a dichotomy Lhotsa immediately felt uncomfortable with. How could she realistically step away from her life to pour herself into writing and find a way to survive? How else could she achieve her dream of becoming an author if she didn't start by giving herself the freedom to begin? It is risky to step into the unknown. Instead, Lhotsa lived as a successful writer in her head where it was safe to exist away from the constraints of reality.
As she waited for the crosswalk signal to change she listened to the sounds of the city around her. Underneath the layers of car horns, honks and the constant roar of traffic she found the subtle song of a bird cheerily sharing its voice with the world, unaware and uncaring of the stress of human life. To the bird there was no dream left unfulfilled, no life to escape from, there was only this moment, full of its own beauty, to which it could contribute its song. As Lhotsa focused her attention on the bird song she released the tightness that had found its way into her shoulders. She repositioned the bag of books and gently rubbed the spot where the strap had pressed into her skin. If I could only find the peace of presence the bird has, then I would be happy, she thought to herself.
Traffic slowed and the crosswalk signaled it was safe for her to cross. Lhotsa's pace had slowed. Her feet shuffled across the sidewalk. The confident spring in her step was left behind her. Somewhere along her path, the energy and excitement she felt as she stepped out of the library stopped as she marched on. This happened occasionally to Lhotsa. She would lose touch with joy when she retreated inside her mind. It was an easy slip if she wasn't paying attention. She had convinced herself that her dreams were not practical. They remained safe as dreams, tucked into the recesses of her heart where she could shield them from failure and criticism. Left unrealized, her dreams slowly ate away at her. Lhotsa would never climb her Everest. Instead she let her dreams slowly wilt.
Lhotsa pressed on, finally reaching her building. Along her path she let her inner voice convince her yet again that she couldn't become who she wanted to be. She resigned herself to a life of guessing what could have been. The air slowly leaked out of her as had happened too many times to count. The lobby door felt heavier than normal as she meekly opened it. Her physical strength flowed out with the receding tide of her strength of will. The cold air blasted her skin causing a chill to radiate over her body, stinging her chest and back, now slick with sweat. The shock of the temperature change shook her out of her sadness. Life wasn't bad after all. She remembered that just upstairs was her lovely small apartment, her cozy warm couch and an escape into the fantastic imaginations of the authors who's books she carries. Her dreams may have blossomed and died on her walk, but they will bloom again. Maybe next time she will grab hold and not let go.
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