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confused-pyramid · 2 years

Text

It's Always Been You

pairing: bradley 'rooster' bradshaw x fem!reader

summary: As Iceman's daughter, you and Rooster grew up together, but your friendship transforms when you are assigned to train for a dangerous mission that's never been accomplished before.

word count: 5.7k

warnings: SMUT, p in v, oral (f!receiving), Top Gun: Maverick spoilers, mentions of illness

a/n: I watched Top Gun: Maverick twice (once for the plot, once for Miles Teller lol), so here's the Rooster fic that emerged from that

You push open the door to The Hard Deck, wiping away the droplets of sweat that are forming along the back of your neck in the dry California heat. Two weeks ago you got the call that you were being sent back to North Island to train for an urgent mission with an elite group of aviators, and you were excited for the opportunity to see pilots from your class at TOPGUN again.

The Hard Deck was the place you went for a cold beer and a hearty game of pool when you were still in training, and you knew that this was the best place to look if you wanted to find the rest of the team. You don't see them at first, but you immediately hear the arrogant timbre of Hangman's voice, carrying across the busy bar. Smiling to yourself, you stroll up to the pool table that Phoenix and the guys are crowded around, announcing your entrance with a "So who's winning?"

Fanboy and Payback grin at you from across the table as Hangman shoots you a cocky smirk, "Who do you think, darlin'?"

Rolling your eyes, you grab the pool cue from his hand and line up a shot, feeling his presence still behind you. Taking a breath in, you slide the cue back, whacking him in the gut, before shooting it forward and sinking your ball into the pocket.

You hear a groan behind you and you smirk, holding out the cue for him to take back, "Call me darling again, and I'll stick this somewhere you'll never find it."

A series of ooh's ring out around you, but you barely notice because another voice cuts through the chaos, "Come on now, Falcon. That's no way to make friends."

You spin around at the sound of your call sign, your jaw dropping as you take in the aviator-clad man grinning at you.

"No fucking way!" you gasp, launching yourself forward and into his arms for a barreling hug. "Rooster!"

He looks good, you think, when did that happen?

Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw wraps his large arms around you, squeezing you tight before letting you go with a husky laugh. "Good to see you too, y/n."

"Well, if it isn't the other half of the nepotism duo," Hangman quips, souring your mood almost immediately. "You know, some people had to actually work their way here, instead of being handed everything."

Rooster doesn't react, but you don't have the self-control he does, "You don't know what the hell you're talking about."

"We'll certainly see about that, won't we?" he smirks, cocking his head in a condescending tilt. "Admiral Simpson assembled us all here for a reason, and there's no way in hell he needs all of us for one mission."

You know he's right, but before you can think of a witty response, you hear a bell ringing, and cheering erupts from around the bar. You turn back to see Rooster grinning at Hangman, his finger pointing at the sign hanging above the bar, "You disrespect a lady and you buy a round for everyone."

Phoenix smacks Hangman on the back, laughing as she ushers him towards the cash register where Penny is waiting, her eyes twinkling with amusement.

You're still trying to shake off Hangman's comment when Bradley sidles up next to you, his hip checking yours as he crosses his arms over his chest. "Don't let him get to you. Iceman was a legend, but we both know you did this all on your own."

You would think that having an Admiral for a father would have made your life in the Navy much easier, but the moment you showed any interest in flying, your dad, Iceman, had stopped supporting your dreams. When the diagnosis came in, everything else fell to the back burner and the only thing you could concentrate on was how much you loved him and wanted him to fight. But sometimes, the hurt was still there. You knew he was just scared for you, especially after what he had seen with Rooster's dad, but his efforts to keep you away from the career he had successfully built had strained your relationship.

It was Bradley who pulled you two back together. After his dad died, he became a staple at the Kazansky household, always welcome for holidays and pretty much every other day too. He managed to toe the line between pushing you to become the best pilot you could be, and helping you regain your relationship with your father. He was your best friend growing up, and even though you split off in the naval academy, he was still a pillar in your life that was never going anywhere.

~~~

With Hangman buying, the night passes quickly, and the next morning you are sitting with the rest of the team, waiting on your instructor to show up. You tap your foot on the floor of the hangar, impatience building up inside of you, until the sound of footsteps alerts you.

Turning around, you spot the man walking towards you and your eyes widen with surprise and then concern. You sneak a glance at Rooster, trying to gauge his reaction to seeing Maverick for the first time in years, but the only response you get is the tightening of his jaw. The lesson starts off well, but when Mav begins the air drills, the tension between him and Rooster comes to a head.

He starts you off first, giving you a few minutes to get settled in the air, before he's right on your tail. You try to shake him, but your wingman is too far back and you don't have eyes behind you, so it only takes him a minute to "shoot you down". Payback and Fanboy's excellent idea to get some skin in the game has the three of you on your hands with Hondo, sweat dripping from your face onto the tarmac as the California sun beats down on you.

After what feels like an hour, you are hobbling back into the control room, listening to the radio as Rooster takes off. He starts off strong, managing to evade Maverick's maneuvers, but you don't miss the quiet snipes that shoot back and forth across the comms as they zoom through the air. You zone out for a moment, but you must've missed something important, because the next thing you know, Mav and Rooster are engaged in a dangerous maneuver that has been spinning towards the ground.

"They passed the hard deck," Phoenix gasps while everyone stares intently at the radio, as if hoping that this will somehow convince them to pull up their control sticks. You feel like you're under 10 Gs of force with how heavy your body feels as Bradley spins down to the earth, neither of them giving up even an inch of their pride.

It feels like a million years before he finally gives in, the nose of his jet a mere kilometer from the ground as he pulls out of the downward spiral. The weight on your chest finally lifts when he lands back on the base, and you don't wait for him as you head back to your cabin. No doubt Admiral Simpson will be chewing him out for his idiotic stunt today.

~~~

You're heading out to grab dinner that night when you run into Bradley, who is just getting back from the hangar. You're so angry that you can barely look at him, but he stops in front of you, forcing you to confront him.

"I get that you're mad at Mav," you grit out, "but why the hell would you put yourself in danger just to prove whatever the hell you were trying to prove to him!"

He's all you have, your thoughts spiral against your will, doesn't he know that it would kill you to lose him?

His brows furrow with frustration as he straightens his back in an unconscious effort to size you up. "Don't patronize me. You wouldn't understand, y/n."

You scoff. "The hell I wouldn't. We grew up together Bradshaw, I know you inside and out."

"Yeah, well your dad isn't fucking dead."

You stop in your tracks, his words a slap in the face. Fluorescent hospital lights flash across your mind as you are unwittingly brought back to the early days of your dad's cancer diagnosis.

Rooster's expression falls immediately and you see pain flash across his eyes as he takes a step forward and says, "God, y/n, I'm so sorry, you know I didn't mean that. Iceman was like a father to me. What he's going through now is killing me too."

He pulls you into a hug and after a moment, you reciprocate, your arms winding around his waist. You take a deep breath, breathing in his familiar musky scent that reminds you of home.

You both stay in the embrace for a minute before he whispers, "You were right. What I did up there today was stupid. I won't do it again."

You can hear the sincerity in his voice as he says it, and you believe him. Bradley Bradshaw has never lied to you, even when it hurts. But you would take his steadfast honesty over all else any day.

~~~

You wake up the next day to a note on your door that says to 'dress light and head to the beach behind The Hard Deck'. You pull on a sports bra under a tee shirt and denim shorts, before meeting up with the rest of the team outside of the base. You all head over to the beach and find Captain Mitchell grinning, two footballs in his hands.

"Welcome to dogfight football!" he yells over the lull of the waves crashing against the shore. "Form two teams and line up."

Hearing his directions, you and Rooster look over at each other, an implicit agreement in your eyes. You both line up on one side with a few of the guys, as Hangman and Coyote grab the rest and form a line in front of you. Rooster and Hangman take the balls, crouching down into position as they get ready to start the game. Mav whistles, signaling the beginning of game play, and suddenly the makeshift field becomes a flurry of motion.

At first, you lose track of where your team is compared to the other guys, but as the game progresses you slowly realize Maverick's genius. This game is perfect for honing your precision and focus, which will be absolutely vital when a select few of you are bombing the uranium enrichment plant in a couple of weeks.

Rooster catches the ball as Fanboy hikes it to him, falling back to get a better view of the beach and find open targets. He sees you slanting out to the side, but Coyote keeps getting in the way, so he turns his attention over to Payback, who sprints across the shoreline, losing his defender in the process. Bradley slings the ball across the sand, but just as it's about to reach Payback, someone from the other team swats it down.

Clapping his hands to shake off the initial defeat, he swings his finger in the air to round up the team for another shot. He is scanning the beach, trying to locate everyone on his side, when his eyes land on you, all the way across the sand. He opens his mouth to call out to you, but then your hand grips the hem of your shirt and every thought flies out of his mind.

You lift the edge of your shirt, pulling it over your head, and he knows he should probably be looking away, but he can't take his eyes off of you. He's barely paying attention as Phoenix presses the ball back into his hands, but then he regains his focus when you start sprinting to the opposite side. You swing around the side and dodge Hangman's arm as you yell, "Rooster, over here."

Blinking a few times to get re-oriented, Bradley zings the ball over to you, relishing in the satisfying thud as it lands in your waiting hands. Cheers break out all around him, and he grins at your success, but his mind is still stuck on the smooth expanse of your tanned skin that glinted at him under the harsh sunlight.

The game continues for a while, and eventually you see a ball flying way over your head, zooming into what looks like no man's land. You start running but then it thunks into Bob's hands. Everyone pauses for a moment of shock, before you all erupt into cheers that end up in Bob being lifted into the air like he just shot the winning goal in the World Cup.

You pat him on the back, laughing at the proud look on Bob's face. As if pulled by a magnet, your eyes travel down the pile until they land on Rooster's. His eyes meet yours instantly, a bright grin plastered on his face. You're already sweating buckets under the hot sun, but one look from Bradley has a warmth spreading across your chest that you haven't felt since you were young.

This was Bradley Bradshaw, the valiant knight who graced all your childhood dreams. He always is and always has been the face you search for in a crowd. He's never been fearless, but he's your rock. Whenever you look at him, you feel like the world is at your fingertips.

Stepping back as the boys jostle him around, you can't help the grin that crosses your face. For the first time since you started here at TOPGUN, you actually feel like you're part of a team. A family.

~~~

Everyone heads back to the cabins covered in sweat and sand, and the showers are filled up before you can even grab your clothes. As you're waiting for one of the stalls to open, you get a call from Mom that sends a jolt of panic down your spine.

"Mom?" you answer, trying to keep the apprehension from your voice. "What's going on?"

"Oh, honey, it's nothing sudden," she says kindly, clearly sensing your worry from miles away. She always knew what you were thinking, even when you tried your best to hide it. "It's just what we've seen coming for a while now, sweetheart."

You can hear the wetness in her voice and you know she's been crying. The image sends a dagger through your stomach. "It's getting close to the end. You should come see Dad."

Mom hid a lot of things from you growing up - always to protect you - but the one thing she never could was your dad's illness. The signs of his weakening state were ever-present and although he tried to ignore them, you never could.

"I'll come today," you say, your voice hoarse from the tears building in your throat. "See you soon, Mom."

The call ends and you open your phone again, the need to text him almost a gut instinct.

You going to see dad. come with?

His response is immediate.

Bradley🐓 always. i'll meet you outside in 20

You take the fastest shower of your life and head out front to see Bradley already outside on his motorcycle, helmet in hand. He must see the look in your eyes because he doesn't say anything as you hop on behind him and wind your arms around his waist. Your fingers dig into the hard ridges of his stomach as he zooms down the quiet streets of Fightertown. The cool breeze brushing past your face helps clear your head as you pass by the houses neighboring the glistening water.

Bradley takes the turns carefully, but you were never much of a biker, and your arms stay tightly wound around his hard abdomen. You can feel the muscles in his back flexing against your chest, and not for the first time, you are struck by how much of a man he has become. You grew up with him, so you never really noticed how he was changing, but all of a sudden, he has become this gorgeous, hardworking man who's a far cry from the young boy who used to pull your pigtails on the playground.

It's not long before you arrive at your childhood home, Rooster's bike pulling to a stop by the front lawn. You haven't even made it fully up the porch when the door swings open, your mom's melancholy expression greeting you from the doorway.

When you two make it inside, she pulls you both into big hugs, remarking on how glad your dad will be to see you both again. The walk to Dad's study feels like a marathon, and by the time you get the door open, you can barely breathe. But then you see him, and the weight on your chest disappears.

He looks worn down and tired, but he's here. He's alive, and he's okay, and even though it's taking everything in him to fight this illness, he's doing it. You fight back tears as he smiles at you from his desk, bundled up in a sweater even though the sun is shining brightly through the bay windows.

"Hi, Dad," you smile, kissing his forehead and pulling out a chair, before Bradley shakes his hand and takes a seat next to you. "You look great."

"You really do, Admiral," Bradley nods, meeting your eye for a moment in a quick show of moral support. Just the one look from him settles you, and you turn back to your father, excited to fill him in on your mission.

You and Rooster tell him about the grueling training you've undergone this past week and he listens intently, smiling brightly as you talk about Maverick and how he pushes every boundary and limit he can find.

After about an hour, the sun starts to set and you know you have to get back to the base before it gets dark.

"It was great to see you again, Iceman," Bradley says, giving your dad a quick hug that you can tell means a lot to the both of them.

When you guys start to leave, your dad beckons for you to stay back a moment. Bradley murmurs that he'll be waiting for you outside, and pulls the door closed behind him.

You take a seat again, turning to face your father, who has a look on his face that you don't recognize. He opens his mouth to speak, and you try to stop him, knowing that it just hurts him, but he waves away your concern, pressing your hand into both of his.

"Y/n, you know I didn't want you following in my footsteps in the Navy after I saw how it affected my closest friends," he whispers, his voice raspy with disuse. This isn't what you wanted to talk about with him today, but since he brought it up, you can't help the nerves that bubble up inside of you before he continues speaking. " But you have become such a strong, beautiful, independent woman, and I am so grateful that I got to see it."

You had long since come to terms with the notion that your father wasn't going to be in support of your life choices, but to hear him finally express what you've been trying to show him for years makes up for everything. Your eyes well up with tears and you exhale slowly, "I love you, Dad."

He stands up, and you rise with him, pulling him into a big hug that makes you feel like a kid again. You're about to pull away, when you hear his gentle rasp by your ear. "He loves you, too. I can see it."

~~~

You are still thinking about your father's words when you walk out front and see Bradley on his bike, waiting for you with a bittersweet smile on his face. He hands you your helmet and helps you onto the motorcycle, before turning back to look at you again.

"He's fighting so hard to stay here for you and your mom," he says, his voice bringing a welcome warmth to the pit that is slowly forming in your chest with each strained breath your father takes. "I'm so lucky that I got to know him as well as I did."

Leaning forward, you pull Bradley into a hug that he reciprocates immediately. Your body is small and warm against his, and he presses his face into your neck, enjoying the subtle scent of vanilla and hazelnut that wafts up from your skin. He lost both of his parents before he even got into the naval academy, but when he was with you, he never felt like he was missing his family. Over the years, you had become the family he needed, and with his arms around you, he knows he could stay like this forever and it wouldn't be long enough.

~~~

When the Pentagon receives new intel that the shipment to the uranium enrichment facility is coming early, the mission gets moved up, increasing the already monumental odds that are going against your team's ability to finish this and come home.

The intensity of your training is amped up and every night you are so exhausted that you sleep like a log. The week passes by too quickly, and before you know it, its the day before the mission. Maverick assembles all of you back into the training facility and takes a few moments before finally opening his mouth.

"You all have worked incredibly hard, and the choices I had to make when selecting the pilots for this mission were difficult ones."

You've heard this kind of speech what feels like a thousand times, and you find yourself tuning him out as you try to calm your nerves. After a minute, you pull yourself back into the present and realize that he's naming the teams.

"Dagger 1," Mav announces, "Payback and Fanboy."

You nod, agreeing with that pick completely. Fanboy was an amazing WSO and he complemented Payback well.

"Dagger 2," Mav continues, "Phoenix and Bob."

Another great pick. You shoot them a small congratulatory smile, before turning your attention back to the Captain. This is it. Who's it gonna be?

"And my wingman will be...Rooster."

The air feels like its being sucked out of the room. A spike of fear jolts through you as his name ping-pongs inside of your skull, unable to fully sink in. This mission would take not one, but two miracles, and only then was there even going to be a consideration of trying to get home in one piece.

You barely hear Maverick explain that the rest of you are on standby, before everyone is standing up and filtering out of the room. You feel like you're sleepwalking, your feet moving of their own accord as they take you back to the cabins to turn in for the night.

You take your time getting ready for bed, but even as you lay down, the exhaustion so strong you can feel it in your bones, sleep doesn't come. You try everything from counting sheep to meditation, but something nags at the back of your mind, keeping you from falling asleep.

It's not just something. It's Rooster.

Groaning with exasperation, you throw off the covers and pace around your room, trying to calm your racing mind. You try to turn your thoughts away from the mission tomorrow, but after a few minutes of walking back and forth across the small room, you know you have to get out of here.

Desperate for fresh air, you push open the door and step into the hallway. Just as you are considering breaking curfew, another door opens down the hall and Rooster's head peeks out from behind the doorframe.

He's shirtless, only clad in a pair of cotton sweats, and you almost forget to feel ashamed as you ogle his beautiful body. He looks back at you, amusement filling his eyes, before its quickly replaced with something that fills you with the urge to wrap your arms around him and squeeze until you are bonded as one.

Deciding against the fresh air, you cock your head towards your door and leave it open as you walk back into your room.

The door shuts behind you and you sit on your bed, legs crossed under you, as Bradley plops down next to you, his head hitting your pillow as he makes himself comfortable. You are both silent for a while before he whispers, barely audible, "I'm scared."

You turn to look at him, and he sees the understanding in your eyes. In that moment, he immediately knows that you are his person; the person he always wants with him when he gets bad news or good news or whatever else life throws at him. He knows you like he knows the inside of an F/A 18F Super Hornet, and that will never change. Not if he can help it.

"I'm ready," he continues, finding his voice again, "but I'm still scared of what could happen out there. I trust Mav, I do. I mean, I didn't always, but I think I finally see what my dad saw in him, you know. But..."

"It's okay to be scared," you whisper, your voice low as if you're afraid that being any louder will break this spell. "But you're the best aviator I know and if anyone can complete this mission, it's you, Rooster."

He sits up slowly, his eyes never leaving yours and you become acutely aware of how little clothing separates the two of you. The thin material of your shirt is light against your skin and you can barely breathe as Bradley lifts his hand, threading his fingers in your hair as he cups the side of your face with so much care you think you might melt right there in front of him.

Neither of you says anything as his thumb lazily runs down your jaw, stopping right at your lips. "Bradley." your voice is a soft sigh that makes him stiffen.

His hand doesn't move as he looks at you intensely, his eyes seeing you in a way that no one else does. "I can go. Just say the word and-"

"Don't," you whisper, scooting forward slightly on the bed as confidence fills you again. "Don't go."

You would be lying if you said you weren't afraid of the consequences of what was happening between the two of you. Of how this could affect your long-held friendship and your ability to function properly as a team. But in that moment, all you can think about is how his lips would feel against yours.

You lean into him, your palms flat on the mattress beneath you as you press your mouth to his. The moment your lips meet, sparks crackle behind your eyelids, and you let out a small whimper that has his fingers tightening in your hair. His mouth is warm against yours and the prickle of his mustache against your nose feeds the ache between your legs at the thought of it bristling somewhere else.

Bradley's hands move from your hair to your waist as he lowers you down onto the bed, his body hovering over you. His eyes never leave yours as he reaches down to the hem of your shirt, toying with the edge in an implicit question that you answer with a frantic nod. He pulls your shirt over your head, tossing it to the ground, before peppering kisses down your jaw and across your neck. The wet heat of his tongue against your skin has you gasping beneath him and you dig your fingers into the ridges of his back, your eyelids fluttering closed with pleasure.

You grip his shoulders as he returns to your mouth, sliding his tongue along the seam of your lips in a teasing pattern that has you squeezing your legs together to get some relief.

"Bradley," you gasp, feeling him pull back slightly, "stop teasing."

He chuckles softly, wrapping his arms around your back before lifting you up and forward until you're straddling him. "Yes, ma'am."

With one deft movement, he unhooks your bra and sends it falling to the floor. You don't have time to be impressed, because the next thing you know, his mouth is on your breast, his lips closing around your nipple with awe-inspiring precision. The warm wetness of his mouth on your sensitive skin snaps something inside of you and suddenly your hips start rocking against his, desperate for some sort of release. Bradley switches to your other breast, and when his teeth brush against you, a sound you don't recognize rips from your throat.

Your hips grind against his faster, the rough material of his sweats creating a delicious friction that has you gasping. He's rock hard against your core, and although there are multiple layers of fabric between the two of you, the feeling of his arousal under you sends waves of pleasure rolling up your spine.

"Y/n, darlin', you gotta stop doing that," Bradley groans, lifting his face from your chest. "I'm not finishing until I'm inside of you."

His words leave you breathless, and you nod frantically, making him laugh brightly. He tugs off his sweats as he moves down your body, kissing down your abdomen until he's at the waistband of your sleep shorts. Bradley takes his time pulling them down your legs, delighting in the small noises of impatience you make from above him.

"Bradley, hurry up," you complain, the ache between your thighs getting worse with each second.

He just flashes you that infuriatingly perfect smirk. "Patience, baby. We have all the time in the world. I'm savoring you tonight."

You can't ignore the jolt of heat his words send straight to your core, but that doesn't make you any less eager for him. When he yanks your shorts and panties off, you're finally bare in front of him, and the sight of you here, with him, has his mind dizzy with desire.

He opens his mouth to make some witty quip like he always does when he's with you, but instead what comes out is, "You're so fucking beautiful."

You've always been beautiful and strong and stubborn, and if he's being honest, he's always loved you. He just didn't realize it.

He wants to be inside of you more than anything, but with your dripping heat right in front of him, he would be remiss to not have a taste. His tongue darts out, licking a stripe up your core, and you gasp loudly, feeling the ache start to dissipate with each ministration.

The sounds that escape your mouth encourage his movements and he presses your stomach down to the mattress as you try to arch off the bed. Your body is overheating and you can't seem to get enough as his mustache scrapes infuriatingly against your thighs. When his lips close around your clit, you're already so close that you come barreling to your release, crying out something that sounds like his name as he works you through your orgasm.

His lips find yours again and your fingers dig roughly into the hard ridges of his muscles as he doesn't wait before entering you slowly, the stinging stretch quickly turning to hot pleasure. You moan into his mouth as he pulls out fully before sinking back into you, his hard length reaching the deepest parts of you.

Bradley's body shakes with a pleasure that overwhelms him as your slick heat tightens around him like a vice grip. His thrusts get faster and faster and your head falls back, arching off the pillow as his name rolls off your lips.

"Y/n, fuck," he grits out as you contract around his cock, bringing him closer and closer to finishing.

Your body starts to shudder, signaling your impending release, and Bradley quickens his thrusts to get you there first. His hand reaches down between the two of you, and he rubs fast circles on your clit that send you flying over the edge in seconds.

You cry out with the force of your release, and the tightening of your pussy around his cock has him following you soon after.

~~~

The next morning, you wake up to an empty bed and a note on your nightstand that reads 'you're it for me. I'll be back in no time.'

You smile to yourself, but then your expression falls when you remember where he's gone. You quickly change into your gear and head up to the base to join Hangman and the rest of the reserve team.

Admiral Simpson has you all waiting by the tarmac, supplied with a radio that allows you to listen in to the mission. The flight over to the canyon is largely uneventful, but when the aviators reach the inverted dive, your heart seizes in your chest. They manage to achieve the first miracle, and then the next, and with each piece of good news, the tightness around your heart loosens up, but then you hear Rooster's frantic voice and your lungs refuse to work again.

When Maverick's plane gets hit by the missile, the whole base falls silent, except for the anguished sounds of Bradley's voice over the radio. When Rooster's comms go silent too, Hangman is sent out to do an assist and you can feel your heart in your throat, beating wildly as your lungs try to force air in and out.

You and the rest of the reserve team wait for what feels like a year, but then you see an old F-14 Tomcat enter the skies above you and all the tension finally leaves your body. When Rooster and Mav land, you let everyone else rush forward to cheer for them, seeing as how your feet can barely move because of how relieved you are.

But then Bradley steps out of the plane and finds you in the crowd. You smile at him, tears glazing your eyes as he saunters over to you and stops in front of you. "Told you I'd be back."

You let out a watery laugh before he lifts you into a big hug, your feet flying off the ground as he pulls you tightly against him. It feels like no time at all before he puts you down, and you're about to put a professional distance between your bodies when he plants a big kiss on your mouth.

You're staring at him, mouth agape, when you hear Hangman's voice behind you, "I fucking knew it!"

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haleigh-sloth · 3 months

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Alastor, the wild card

Okay, I have to get this out because it's driving me nuts not having it written down.

I watched Hazbin Hotel. I watched the pilot 4 years ago, immediately liked Alastor. 4 years go by and he gets put on the back burner, but now that the main series has begun, oohhhhh boy.

This is basically just me laying out everything I think is going on with/going to happen with Alastor--the seeming wild card--and then what I ultimately think his end game will somewhat look like. Alastor has a lot of different little plot points going on with him, that all point in different directions, but I believe will all end up pointing at one specific ending. I'll go through the different plot directions tied to him in a list but not in the particular order I think they will occur, because I'm really not sure of that yet other than the last:

Beef with the Vees, Vox specifically

Lucifer

His deal, in other words his "leash"

His relationship to the hotel and everyone in it

His relationship to Charlie

Not a long list but a lot of thoughts altogether so here goes.

The Vees and Vox:

I'll start here, but this ties into other stuff later. The Vees, very much MOSTLY Vox and Valentino, are problems. They're these media industrial overlords who own people (it's such a mystery what type of modern-day issues these 3 characters are touching on), and they exploit, take advantage of, and harm people. They're clearly antagonists, even if not the main ones at this time. Now for the sake of keeping this about Alastor, we're gonna focus on Vox, because obviously they have past beef. We don't know ALL the details of what it is (aside from Alastor rejecting Vox's offer), but we know it resulted in a fight in which he "almost" beat Vox. And it seems they were on decent terms at one point, evidenced by what looks like Vox's head in this torn out photo that Vox had pinned to his board in the finale:

Alastor has an ego. He's an overlord. A highly regarded one, and he's obviously strong. He writes off pretty much everyone around him. He doesn't seem to be afraid of anyone, or even remotely bothered by people who show up to attack him or the hotel. He only shows any kind of acknowledgement of someone else's strength when he goes to the overlord meeting in episode 3. But outside of that, he does not seem to give anyone else the time of day.

So that's really funny considering that when Vox starts trash talking him on TV, he takes the bait and gets competitive. He goes on the air, he trash talks back, he gets personal with it. And when Vox loses signal, Alastor continues sending a final, very sinister warning.

And he's not being his usual joke-y self. He's being serious. He's turning into his Wendigo-looking form, which is quite scary looking. We're supposed to take him seriously here because he's not writing Vox off. He is, for lack of a better way of putting it, taking Vox seriously as an opponent. He's being usually egotistical, but he's still putting more effort into this little social media battle than he has for (almost) any other opponent. And not to mention, Vox was shown in the pilot:

So, while this was pretty much shelved for the reason of season 1, it's coming back. And it's going to be an issue for everyone, including Alastor.

Lucifer:

This is going to be my second favorite section of this post. Because it's hilarious, and also somewhat endearing to me how he reacted to meeting Lucifer. I'm sure people noticed, but when Lucifer walked in and hugged Charlie, the frame moved up to show Alastor's face, and his eye was twitching in that moment.

Then a moment later they shake hands, and he wipes his hand off on his coat. And later Lucifer bumps into his arm when walking past him and he brushes his arm off-again. Clearly, Alastor does not like Lucifer. Now, I'm like 100% sure there are yet-to-be-revealed reasons for this that have not even been remotely touched on (Lilith), but there are some obvious guesses we can make based on what we now have in season 1.

There's the fact that Alastor's ego is present here. He points out Lucifer's height, in a condescending way. So that's a thing, but I think it goes beyond that. I'll dive into Alastor and Charlie toward the end, but I do think Charlie is part of the reason for his behavior in episode 5. Alastor is showing off his additions to the hotel, but he isn't really boasting about himself at this point. He's being very pointed about giving Charlie all of the credit, and he is very intentional about saying what an "impressive young lady" she is and saying how "VERY proud" THEY (meaning him and the others there) are of her. It's very odd and hilarious that he's pulling all of this out in front of her dad. I mean, I have my guesses, but given that Alastor then starts challenging her dad in a sing-off, saying he's a dud of a parent, and just straight up saying he could be her dad--I'd say Lucifer's lack of effort in Charlie bugs the shit out of Alastor. I'll explain more on that later, though.

The last point I'll make here to transition into the next section is that I'm sure Lilith has something to do with this disdain for Lucifer. However, I'm really not sure what side of Lilith Alastor knows. My guess is it isn't a good side though.

Which brings me to Alastor's "leash", the handler being Lilith.

I mean, this feels as on the nose as the Dabi is Touya theories. Alastor's been gone for 7 years. Lilith has been gone for 7 years. Vestial said he heard a rumor Alastor fell into "holy arms". We know Lilith is chillin in heaven (but other people don't..so again, mystery). Alastor won't tell anyone why he was gone. We know someone owns Alastor in some way right now. I mean....it's gotta be Lilith. It could be a red herring and be a complete surprise later, but it feels like something very obvious that we just won't get to see for a while and will have to wait in anticipation. Lilith is not painted in the best light right this second, but honestly it's impossible to tell whether she's actually Not Great or if there's layers to this. My guess is probably a little of both.

Alastor being involved with the hotel could be because of Lilith. That also feels somewhat obvious, though again, I'll dive into Charlie in a second.

Hazbin Hotel:

Things start to somewhat all tie together here.

Okay let's take this back to the pilot when Alastor introduced himself to the show. He said he views the hotel as an investment for entertainment, and a lost cause, and something to laugh about. He repeats this in episode 1 to remind everyone that he still views Charlie's vision as something impossible to achieve and something to laugh at. Howeverrrrrr--

We shouldn't ignore the fact that ever since he showed up to "help", under the guise that he thinks the hotel is a joke, he has given a lot more than he had originally stated he'd intended. For someone supposedly who enjoys watching others fail and fall into misery, he sure does put a lot of effort into something he considers to be a massive joke. And the funny thing is that he says in the pilot that redemption is impossible, but we literally KNOW IT'S NOT. Sir Pentious immediately brings Alastor's motive for involving himself with the hotel into question. Of course we have no idea how much Alastor actually knows about redemption, but we can't disregard the very real possibility that he's involved with Lilith (holy arms) and the very real possibility that he's aware of her whereabouts (heaven). We don't know all of those details yet. But what we do know is that all of Alastor's efforts are fueling something that is working. SO HIS EFFORTS ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE..

So I guess that brings me to--what does he actually think of the hotel? Like reeeeaaallly think of it?

His behavior throughout the 8 episodes shifts significantly from the pilot and episode 1 even. He repeats it's a joke in episode 1. And then continues to put genuine efforts into keeping Charlie from giving up even when things get tough and she feels really beaten down. (I'll tie this into why I think he dislikes Lucifer in the Charlie sections).

I also am questioning his real vision of the hotel because it is certainly not something to be ignored that he put Husker and Niffty into the hotel--the hotel about redemption and salvation. Yeah, he's an overlord. He owns their souls. But he's forcing them to stay in a hotel that we literally already KNOW is going to save them in some way. Husker and Angel have their thing going, which will be a good thing. Niffty has a group of people who will protect her, evidenced by episode 6. So, again, Alastor's efforts are all leading to Charlie's hotel being nothing but successful (in the end). But yet he says it's all a joke.

And I think the biggest hint at there being something more here is that Alastor willingly put himself against Adam. And we KNOW that Alastor is leashed somehow. His wings are "clipped". And he ran off to go have a quick little break down in private about almost being killed because of this. Obviously his powers are shackled per his deal.

And yet? He still pit himself against Adam. Knowing this about himself. He also DID almost die for them--his friends, if we can assume he really meant that (I think later on that will be the case). This notion obviously bothers him, a lot. He went to his broadcast station and freaked out over the fact that he really did almost die for them. And then he still went back, knowing that they know he lost his fight. What a blow to his ego! He's the only one who lost and they all know it because they had to deal with Adam after he left.

I won't write off the possibility that he has to be there per some deal (assuming it's Lilith), but that doesn't negate the fact that his demeanor toward the hotel and everyone there changed from beginning of season 1 to the end.

We don't know yet what Alastor really thinks, yet. That's internal and won't be shown until later. But I don't think it's wise to take his word for it from the pilot and from episode 1, and then ignore everything that came after when it's obvious his behavior shows something else entirely.

Lastly, his relationship to Charlie ties everything together.

Again, this started off as a joke to him. He SAYS that he thinks Charlie is working for something impossible. And yet throughout the season he's been shown to be really endearing toward her.

I think my favorite part showing this was him telling her in episode 7 that "It's not like you've ever failed to inspire before." He meant himself. Because in that same sequence Charlie says she usually sings to get her point across but it never works. Except it did, because that's literally what brought Alastor to her doorstep.

That, plus Alastor's obvious disdain for her father that he shows when she isn't looking (the eye twitch), him trying to motivate her from giving up when she's all depressed, him singing about her with Rosie. I think he genuinely admires her and finds her inspiring, and genuinely likes her. Which is really interesting when you look at how he reacted to the presence of her father, and when you consider the very real possibility that he's very much indebted to her mother. Their dynamic is by far my favorite because Alastor is just very NOT easy to read.

However there is a problem that will come up later, and it's the deal he made with Charlie.

So now I'll try to tie everything together:

Alastor has this unsettled business with Vox. He isn't going to let it go. It's going to be a problem somehow. Alastor is stuck in a deal with someone, it's going to be a problem somehow. Alastor now has an unfulfilled deal with Charlie. It's going to be a problem somehow. Alastor hasn't made any vocal admittance that he doesn't view the hotel as a joke, so his front about it being impossible is still kind of there, and that's coupled with the fact that we know he's wrong. All of these things are obstacles to what I'm PRETTY SURE is going to be the hotel's final and biggest obstacle and success:

redeeming Alastor.

Before I go further I'm going to touch on the pilot here.

There are three very bold statements made in the pilot:

"Inside of every demon is a rainbow."

"Inside of every demon is a lost cause."

"He can't be redeemed."

Who is right?

Well, CHARLIE is the heart of the show. The core of what the show wants to portray--redemption and salvation. (Hams is probably right that she is a Jesus figure). I think the odds are in her favor. ALASTOR made a statement that we now have very solid undeniable evidence disproving, now that season 1 is over. So he's out. VAGGIE ended up having a dark and painful secret that she's done unforgivable things to Charlie's home. And yet, she's making the judgment call about Alastor? I think she's out. And also, her statement is the introduction to one of the biggest challenges in the show for Charlie. Because Charlie believes in the opposite of what Alastor and Vaggie are saying. And like I said, the odds are in Charlie's favor.

Now, Alastor obviously doesn't seem like the type to want redemption, or strive for that. Because I'm pretty sure he's not. For now, on the surface. There are a lot of negative things in his way. His beef with Vox and his deal shackling his powers that he wants freedom from. And I'd honestly bet money that those things will all stand in the way of Charlie redeeming him because he'll be focused on these things that keep him from wanting to do better and change--even though throughout season 1 he already showed slow but undeniable signs of changing, whether he wants to admit it or not.

But I think the point of his arc is to end up being someone who does want better. I think his obvious liking for Charlie is something that will save him from a dark and desperate place, a place we've kind of already gotten a peak into. And I think that at the end of the day, every ounce of effort he put into the hotel for Charlie, under the guise of it being for his entertainment, will all end up helping him the most out of everyone in the end.

And I'm very excited.

#Hazbin hotel #hazbin alastor #alastor

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hardcore-gaming-101 · 2 months

Text

EOS: Edge of Skyhigh

This article is part of our Japanese Obscurities feature. We put out a whole book about them, which is available as both a full color hardcover and a Kindle ebook from Amazon! If you’d like to see more of these features, please check out the book and if you enjoyed it, leave a five star review so we can do a follow up with even more interesting, offbeat, or historically important Japanese games!

Taking after arcade classics like Space Harrier and After Burner, EOS: Edge of Skyhigh is a 3D rail shooter where you pilot a transforming mecha, using both a rapid fire gun and lock-on missiles to destroy hordes of enemies. The jet plane form is a little weaker but its smaller size makes it easier to dodge attacks, while the robot form is slightly more powerful but also makes it a bigger target. The robot form also features a powerful burst attack, a volley of powerful shots which is useful for taking down larger foes. You can use the shoulder triggers to speed up or slow down, but the difference in speed is often imperceptible.

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catherinetheprincessofwales · 1 month

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Kate is not your drama queen Her self-possession drives people wild - Jenny McCartney UnHerd.

Just over a decade ago, the late novelist Hilary Mantel delivered a lecture to an event at the London Review of Books and triggered national outrage. In the course of a talk on “Royal Bodies”, which ranged widely across royal women from Anne Boleyn to Marie Antoinette and Princess Diana, she had made what many perceived as disparaging remarks about Kate Middleton, then the Duchess of Cambridge. The Duchess, she said, appeared to have been “designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished”. Indeed, Mantel said, Kate “seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character”.

At this, the newspapers were soon in uproar. The prime minister David Cameron called the comments “completely misguided and completely wrong” and the Labour leader Ed Miliband agreed they were “pretty offensive”. Mantel doggedly refused to back down, saying that her remarks had been twisted out of context, and that she was in fact writing with sympathy about the perceptions that are forcefully projected on to royal women, the cage in which they are held to be goggled at. That was true, but also perhaps not the entire truth, for there was still a perceptible trace of authorial vinegar in the portrait: which of us would be happy to learn, even in sympathy, that we were held at low risk for “the emergence of character”?

Royals are public as well as private figures, of course, and authors are free to hang intellectual ideas on them to try out, as designers do with clothes. Yet while much of the lecture was sharply perceptive, I didn’t agree with the portrait of Kate. That word “selected” had rendered her passive, when in fact her behaviour thus far had suggested both an active intelligence and an unusual degree of self-discipline. The context of her entry into “The Firm” was different from that of other royal brides. Unlike Diana, who had barely emerged from the fractured chrysalis of her troubled aristocratic family when she first met the much older, more worldly Prince Charles, Kate was a contemporary of Prince William’s at the University of St Andrews. Her family background, which appeared warm and supportive, was comfortably middle-class. She seemed generally cheerful and unruffled, even when the press was at the barbed peak of its “Waity Katie” hysteria, trying to goad Prince William into a proposal or abandonment.

After the wedding, in her approach to royal duties, she clearly took the role she had inherited with marriage seriously. The royal whose attitude her own most resembled was the late Queen Elizabeth II, who had long understood the essential nature of the job: to turn up to public events looking the part, intuit precisely what was needed — gravitas, fun, consolation or reassurance — and deliver it while keeping one’s personal emotions on the back burner. This is what a monarchy demands, and the ability to act as an impeccable interpreter of the public mood, year after year, is a particular and testing art. A few have a natural aptitude for it, but most of us do not, and would quickly find its scrutiny and restrictions intolerable.

Grace under consistent pressure is an admirable quality. Were a ballet dancer to execute a string of flawless performances, or a pilot to conduct numerous flights without incident, it would not be deemed evidence of an absence of character: quite the opposite. Yet in Kate — especially for those who increasingly conduct their lives online — serene self-possession seems to drive a proportion of onlookers insane: what lurks behind it, what dark secret is waiting to destroy it, how best might it be disrupted? The uncomfortable truth is that what many people deeply crave in a young and beautiful royal wife and mother is not competence, but crack-up

The increasingly bizarre treatment of Kate, or the idea of Kate, is connected to the most dominant phenomenon of our age: a cultural prioritising of drama over duty. The supply of drama has spilled beyond the confines of the novel, theatre, cinema or television to become a commodity on which our public figures are judged. When Mantel spoke of Kate’s apparent absence of emerging “character” she was assessing her primarily through the hungry eyes of a novelist. In books, central female characters often generate dramatic tension by chafing against their circumstances, by the intensifying dazzle of their discontents, something that Kate refused to transmit. In contrast, Mantel described Diana as a “carrier of myth”: Diana, publicly trapped in the disappointments of her marriage, certainly carried more plot twists than any author had a right to expect. Unfortunately for her, the final one was her shockingly premature death.

Set against this artistic conception of “character” — distinctive qualities or flaws that, one way or another, deliver drama — is the societal judgement “of good character”, meaning someone who is broadly reliable and respected in relation to their behaviour to others. In recent years the electorate, in line with Neil Postman’s warning in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, has proved increasingly ready to select the former over the latter, even to the marked detriment of our civic health. The former prime minister Boris Johnson instinctively understood it as his job not to deliver the detail of workable policy, but to satisfy the public’s appetite for story: “People live by narrative,” he once told UnHerd’sTom McTague. In the US, Donald Trump — that relentless generator of low mockery and high fury — is now running for a second term as president, after his first one ended in his supporters storming the Capitol building.

Men are often permitted to survive the frantic generation of drama: it is everyone around them who suffers. Yet women — in art and life — have a greater tendency to be destroyed by it. There is no strutting female equivalent of the male “hellraiser”, but rather a woman who, soaked in the crocodile tears of the tabloids, is tragically “causing concern” among friends. Art and its audiences have always relished the restless struggle and disintegration of female characters who are, or become, unmoored from the harbour of marriage and children. Flaubert’s Emma Bovary — her imagination inflamed by reading novels — is bored with her marriage and disenchanted with motherhood; she seeks solace in affairs and excessive spending, the consequences of which hasten her suicide. Zola’s Nana, a courtesan who ruthlessly captivates Parisian society, has her beguiling face eaten away by smallpox. Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse, immolated on their blazing talent, are hung posthumously high in the musical hall of fame, next to Sylvia Plath in the poetry section and Marilyn Monroe in cinema.

In Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight,a middle-aged English woman called Sasha Jansen, mourning an unhappy marriage and a dead child, finds herself in Paris, a vulnerable drifter seeking solace from stray men. Rhys herself, who died at 88 after a precarious but surprisingly long life, had much in common with her literary creations. As the writer and editor Diana Athill crisply put it: “Jean was absolutely incapable of living, life was just hopelessly beyond her. When she was young, she floated from man to man in a hopeless way… by the time she was old, she floated from kind woman to kind woman.”

In Rhys’s latter years — hard-drinking, irascible and impoverished — Athill and a small group of female friends formed what they called “The Jean Rhys Committee” which met regularly to ask “what should we do next?”. Rhys’s claim to such loyalty, I suppose, was the weight of her literary talent, her ability to exert an odd kind of fascination, and the fortunate soft-heartedness of her friends. The dramatic collided with the dutiful, and was kept alive by it.

From what I can see, the Princess of Wales exists at the opposite end of the feminine spectrum from Jean Rhys. Pinned firmly in place by her royal obligations, her wealth, her marriage and three children, she belongs to the realm of the respectable and dutiful rather than the erratic and dramatic. She is not a “character” in the artistic sense, nor does she desire to be, but both a survivor and upholder of an institution: hers is the territory of the prompt thank-you note, the kept promise, the commitment to public service, the uncomplicated pleasure in children, the stoic endurance of difficult times in the hope that better ones will come along soon. The public senses an emotional solidity in her, and it is partly why she is held in broad esteem. In this age of insistent self-definition, duty to others might be an unfashionable concept, but it is nonetheless one that keeps families and institutions from chaos and collapse.

With the advent of the internet, however, anyone with a keyboard can become a form of author, with the freedom to insert a toxic form of drama into real-life situations. What was extraordinary, during the Princess of Wales’s recent health problems, is how speedily and carelessly such speculations overrode the bounds of decency. It was already known that she had undergone major abdominal surgery, and was taking time to recover. And yet — egged on by the participation of silly celebrities and malicious US comedians — conspiracy theories about cosmetic surgery and affairs and nervous breakdowns spread like knotweed. According to social-media researchers, these were also vigorously introduced and amplified by fake accounts set up on Twitter and TikTok, some associated with Russia-linked disinformation eager to spread the termites of mistrust and doubt in Western institutions. Only the Princess of Wales’s revelation of cancer, which carries a testing drama all its own, served to shut up the majority of them.

Unlike these callous gossips, Mantel recognised her own complicity in dehumanising royalty. Upon encountering the late Queen, the novelist said: “I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.” The Queen looked back at her, she said, briefly hurt. Mantel warned of the way in which “cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty” precisely as it has done in recent weeks. Her talk concluded with a prescient instruction for those who comprehend monarchy mainly as a source of entertainment: “I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes.”

In the midst of treatment and recovery, the most hitherto stable of royal women could be forgiven a keen sense of injustice: her job description, it seems, must now include the ability to weather the online public’s fits of brutish mania for drama. With its contempt for duty, and its savage appetite for story, it is hungry to chew up far more than just the Princess of Wales.

#ktd #kate middleton #british royal family #brf #princess of wales

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thepastisalreadywritten · 1 month

Text

Just over a decade ago, the late novelist Hilary Mantel (6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022) delivered a lecture to an event at the London Review of Books and triggered national outrage.

In the course of a talk on “Royal Bodies,” which ranged widely across royal women from Anne Boleyn to Marie Antoinette and Princess Diana, she had made what many perceived as disparaging remarks about Kate Middleton, then the Duchess of Cambridge.

The Duchess, she said, appeared to have been “designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished."

Indeed, Mantel said, Kate “seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.”

At this, the newspapers were soon in uproar.

The prime minister David Cameron called the comments “completely misguided and completely wrong” and the Labour leader Ed Miliband agreed they were “pretty offensive.”

Mantel doggedly refused to back down, saying that her remarks had been twisted out of context, and that she was in fact writing with sympathy about the perceptions that are forcefully projected on to royal women, the cage in which they are held to be goggled at.

That was true but also perhaps not the entire truth, for there was still a perceptible trace of authorial vinegar in the portrait:

Which of us would be happy to learn, even in sympathy, that we were held at low risk for “the emergence of character”?

Royals are public as well as private figures, of course, and authors are free to hang intellectual ideas on them to try out, as designers do with clothes.

Yet while much of the lecture was sharply perceptive, I didn’t agree with the portrait of Kate.

That word “selected” had rendered her passive, when in fact her behaviour thus far had suggested both an active intelligence and an unusual degree of self-discipline.

The context of her entry into “The Firm” was different from that of other royal brides.

Unlike Diana, who had barely emerged from the fractured chrysalis of her troubled aristocratic family when she first met the much older, more worldly Prince Charles, Kate was a contemporary of Prince William’s at the University of St Andrews.

Her family background, which appeared warm and supportive, was comfortably middle-class.

She seemed generally cheerful and unruffled, even when the press was at the barbed peak of its “Waity Katie” hysteria, trying to goad Prince William into a proposal or abandonment.

After the wedding, in her approach to royal duties, she clearly took the role she had inherited with marriage seriously.

The royal whose attitude her own most resembled was the late Queen Elizabeth II, who had long understood the essential nature of the job:

To turn up to public events looking the part, intuit precisely what was needed — gravitas, fun, consolation or reassurance — and deliver it while keeping one’s personal emotions on the back burner.

This is what a monarchy demands, and the ability to act as an impeccable interpreter of the public mood, year after year, is a particular and testing art.

A few have a natural aptitude for it, but most of us do not, and would quickly find its scrutiny and restrictions intolerable.

Grace under consistent pressure is an admirable quality.

Were a ballet dancer to execute a string of flawless performances, or a pilot to conduct numerous flights without incident, it would not be deemed evidence of an absence of character: quite the opposite.

Yet in Kate — especially for those who increasingly conduct their lives online — serene self-possession seems to drive a proportion of onlookers insane: what lurks behind it, what dark secret is waiting to destroy it, how best might it be disrupted?

The uncomfortable truth is that what many people deeply crave in a young and beautiful royal wife and mother is not competence, but crack-up.

The increasingly bizarre treatment of Kate, or the idea of Kate, is connected to the most dominant phenomenon of our age: a cultural prioritising of drama over duty.

The supply of drama has spilled beyond the confines of the novel, theatre, cinema, or television to become a commodity on which our public figures are judged.

When Mantel spoke of Kate’s apparent absence of emerging “character,” she was assessing her primarily through the hungry eyes of a novelist.

In books, central female characters often generate dramatic tension by chafing against their circumstances, by the intensifying dazzle of their discontents, something that Kate refused to transmit.

In contrast, Mantel described Diana as a “carrier of myth”: Diana, publicly trapped in the disappointments of her marriage, certainly carried more plot twists than any author had a right to expect.

Unfortunately for her, the final one was her shockingly premature death.

Set against this artistic conception of “character” — distinctive qualities or flaws that, one way or another, deliver drama — is the societal judgement “of good character,” meaning someone who is broadly reliable and respected in relation to their behaviour to others.

In recent years, the electorate, in line with Neil Postman’s warning in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, has proved increasingly ready to select the former over the latter, even to the marked detriment of our civic health.

The former prime minister Boris Johnson instinctively understood it as his job not to deliver the detail of workable policy but to satisfy the public’s appetite for story:

“People live by narrative,” he once told UnHerd’s Tom McTague.

In the US, Donald Trump — that relentless generator of low mockery and high fury — is now running for a second term as president, after his first one ended in his supporters storming the Capitol building.

Men are often permitted to survive the frantic generation of drama: it is everyone around them who suffers.

Yet women — in art and life — have a greater tendency to be destroyed by it.

There is no strutting female equivalent of the male “hellraiser,” but rather a woman who, soaked in the crocodile tears of the tabloids, is tragically “causing concern” among friends.

Art and its audiences have always relished the restless struggle and disintegration of female characters who are, or become, unmoored from the harbour of marriage and children.

Flaubert’s Emma Bovary — her imagination inflamed by reading novels — is bored with her marriage and disenchanted with motherhood.

She seeks solace in affairs and excessive spending, the consequences of which hasten her suicide.

Zola’s Nana, a courtesan who ruthlessly captivates Parisian society, has her beguiling face eaten away by smallpox.

Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse, immolated on their blazing talent, are hung posthumously high in the musical hall of fame, next to Sylvia Plath in the poetry section and Marilyn Monroe in cinema.

Rhys herself, who died at 88 after a precarious but surprisingly long life, had much in common with her literary creations.

As the writer and editor Diana Athill crisply put it:

“Jean was absolutely incapable of living, life was just hopelessly beyond her.

When she was young, she floated from man to man in a hopeless way… by the time she was old, she floated from kind woman to kind woman.”

In Rhys’s latter years — hard-drinking, irascible and impoverished — Athill and a small group of female friends formed what they called “The Jean Rhys Committee,” which met regularly to ask “what should we do next?”

Rhys’s claim to such loyalty, I suppose, was the weight of her literary talent, her ability to exert an odd kind of fascination, and the fortunate soft-heartedness of her friends.

The dramatic collided with the dutiful and was kept alive by it.

From what I can see, the Princess of Wales exists at the opposite end of the feminine spectrum from Jean Rhys.

Pinned firmly in place by her royal obligations, her wealth, her marriage, and three children, she belongs to the realm of the respectable and dutiful rather than the erratic and dramatic.

She is not a “character” in the artistic sense, nor does she desire to be, but both a survivor and upholder of an institution:

Hers is the territory of the prompt thank-you note, the kept promise, the commitment to public service, the uncomplicated pleasure in children, the stoic endurance of difficult times in the hope that better ones will come along soon.

The public senses an emotional solidity in her, and it is partly why she is held in broad esteem.

In this age of insistent self-definition, duty to others might be an unfashionable concept, but it is nonetheless one that keeps families and institutions from chaos and collapse.

With the advent of the internet, however, anyone with a keyboard can become a form of author, with the freedom to insert a toxic form of drama into real-life situations.

What was extraordinary, during the Princess of Wales’s recent health problems, is how speedily and carelessly such speculations overrode the bounds of decency.

It was already known that she had undergone major abdominal surgery and was taking time to recover.

And yet — egged on by the participation of silly celebrities and malicious US comedians — conspiracy theories about cosmetic surgery and affairs and nervous breakdowns spread like knotweed.

According to social-media researchers, these were also vigorously introduced and amplified by fake accounts set up on Twitter and TikTok, some associated with Russia-linked disinformation eager to spread the termites of mistrust and doubt in Western institutions.

Only the Princess of Wales’s revelation of cancer, which carries a testing drama all its own, served to shut up the majority of them.

Unlike these callous gossips, Mantel recognised her own complicity in dehumanising royalty.

Upon encountering the late Queen, the novelist said: “I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.”

The Queen looked back at her, she said, briefly hurt. Mantel warned of the way in which “cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty” precisely as it has done in recent weeks.

Her talk concluded with a prescient instruction for those who comprehend monarchy mainly as a source of entertainment: “I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes.”

In the midst of treatment and recovery, the most hitherto stable of royal women could be forgiven a keen sense of injustice:

Her job description, it seems, must now include the ability to weather the online public’s fits of brutish mania for drama.

With its contempt for duty, and its savage appetite for story, it is hungry to chew up far more than just the Princess of Wales.

NOTE: Additional photos have been included in this article.

#Princess of Wales #Catherine Princess of Wales #Catherine Middleton #Kate Middleton #British Royal Family #cancer #chemotherapy #preventative chemotherapy #disinformation #misinformation #fake news #trolls #bots #click farms #targeted attack #malicious gossips

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