#plays a key role in how she's currently perceived | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hirenest · 2 years

Text

Emotionally Intelligent People

Are emotionally intelligent people better at their jobs? If you want to get hired, would you rather hire someone who is good at reading other people or someone who is good at themselves?

Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the ability to perceive emotions in oneself and others and regulate them effectively. EI has become a hot topic in recent years because of its potential impact on our personal lives and careers.

Research shows that emotional intelligence plays a key role in determining job performance. In fact, some studies suggest that hiring managers prefer candidates with high levels of EI over those with lower scores. This means that hiring managers tend to look for employees who are able to read situations accurately and respond appropriately. Learn more: https://blog.hirenest.com/emotionally-intelligent-people-tend-to-be/

There are many different types of emotional intelligence tests available. The most common ones include:

• The Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), developed by Dr. Daniel J. Mayer, which measures four domains of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, social awareness, emotion management, and motivation;

• The Big Five Inventory (BFI) was created by psychologists Paul Costa Jr., Robert McCrae, and Richard P. John. It consists of five subscales measuring extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness.

In addition to being able to predict whether someone will develop schizophrenia, researchers believe that they may also be able to identify people who are at risk of developing it before symptoms appear. This would allow them to intervene earlier than currently possible.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

The ability to understand our emotions and those around us is known as emotional intelligence (EI). It has three main components: self awareness; social skills; and motivation.

EI is one of the most important predictors of success at work. People who score highly in EI tend to be happier, healthier, better leaders, and perform better than people who don’t.

Emotional Intelligence is not just about being able to read someone else’s mind. It’s about understanding what makes them tick and using this knowledge to motivate them to do things they wouldn’t otherwise want to do.

Why to Hire Emotionally Intelligent People

The first step is to understand what emotional intelligence actually means. It's not just being nice to people; it's knowing how to read others, empathize with them, and communicate with them. Emotional intelligence helps us navigate our relationships better, which leads to greater happiness and success.

In fact, the most successful leaders tend to be those who are able to connect emotionally with their employees. They're able to see things from their perspective, so they know how to motivate and inspire them.

The best leaders don't just tell people what to do; they listen to understand what motivates them. They ask questions to find out what's important to their team members. And they help them develop strategies to achieve their goals.

Emotional Intelligence: The Most Overlooked Candidate Skill

“I don’t know what I would do without her,” says one client who has worked with me for years. She’s referring to her coach, not her therapist. Her relationship with her coach has changed her life. It’s helped her find purpose and direction after she lost her job and was struggling to figure out where to turn next. You can find out more in our article: https://blog.hirenest.com/emotionally-intelligent-people-tend-to-be/

Emotional intelligence (EQ) refers to our ability to understand ourselves and others, manage emotions, communicate clearly, resolve conflicts, and build relationships. EQ is like a muscle—the stronger it gets, the better we perform at work, school, home, and in all aspects of life.

In fact, emotional intelligence is so important that some researchers believe it should be taught in schools alongside reading, writing, math, science, history, and geography.

The Benefits of Emotional Intelligence. People who score high in emotional intelligence tend to do well in every area of life. They're more likely to succeed academically, earn higher salaries, enjoy greater health, and live longer.

High emotional intelligence helps us deal with stress, stay calm during difficult times, and focus on what's most important. It also makes us happier overall.

How to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

The first step is to recognize what emotional intelligence means. It’s not just being able to read people’s emotions; it’s understanding why we feel the way we do and using this knowledge to improve our relationships.

There are many different ways to develop emotional intelligence, but one of the most effective is through mindfulness training. Mindfulness involves paying attention to the present moment without judgement. This helps us notice our thoughts and feelings, which gives us insight into our behaviour.

Mindfulness has been shown to help reduce stress levels, anxiety, depression, anger, fear, worry, and negative thinking. It improves self-awareness and empathy, helping us understand others better. It also increases our ability to focus, concentrate, and manage our impulses.

A study published in 2018 found that mindfulness meditation could significantly increase the size of the hippocampus — the part of the brain responsible for memory formation and consolidation. In addition, the researchers noted that the practice had positive effects on mood and cognitive function.

Conclusion

In one study, researchers found that emotionally intelligent people tend to be more successful in business than those with lower emotional intelligence. They also tend to make better hires. This may seem counterintuitive since we often think of emotional intelligence as being something that makes us less effective leaders. However, when it comes to hiring, emotional intelligence actually has a positive effect. It allows candidates to see past superficial differences between themselves and potential employers. Instead, they focus on what each person brings to the table.

The same goes for our relationships. Emotional intelligence helps us understand others and ourselves. It gives us insight into why someone might act a certain way. And it lets us know if we need to change our behavior to improve communication. If you want to know more about Emotionally Intelligent People Tend to Be Better Hires? 10 Behaviors, read this article: https://blog.hirenest.com/emotionally-intelligent-people-tend-to-be/

#hirenest blog #hirenest #human resources #soft skills #pre-employment tests #Emotionally Intelligent People #Emotional intelligence

2 notes · View notes

reincarnated-villain-princess · 2 months

Text

Flirting with the Villain's Dad

Source: Tapas

Creators: via, dalseul

Synopsis: Ack! I'm trapped in this webnovel, "Brigitte Wants to be Happy!" No prob, I KNOW what's gonna happen so I'll just—wait. I'm not Brigitte? I'm her aunt, Princess Yerenika?! Uh-oh. I'm stuck 20 years before the main plot... and everyone in my generation ends up tragically dead! Her parents, dead. Me, dead. Villain's dad, King Euredian, dead. A-ha! That's the key. I just need to prevent the villain from being born... time to break out some seduction schemes and flirt like my life depends on it!

Status: On going (march '24)

My rating: 4 - 🍓🍓🍓🍓

Images: Soleia (villain), Laurus (???) and Terry (priest)

Our FL, Yerenika, is reborn in a world she got to know about in a story she read in her past life; only she gets there twenty years before the story she read about begins. Her sister is currently pregnant with Brigitte, the future protagonist of that webnovel she liked and the girl who will be the one sided love of the future villain, the son of the King of Bellacourt and the dark mage Soleia. To save her new family, one of her favorite characters –Euredian King of Bellacourt– and herself from a tragic ending, she decides to take her sister's place in a nearby event that sets the horrible future into motion. Like that, Yerenika prepares to be kidnapped instead of her sister by the Euredian and be taken to Bellacourt as a hostage due to both Yerenika's father and Euredian having an unsolved political issue. Her plan? Use her time as a hostage to make Euredian, the future father of the original villain, fall in love with her and prevent the villain from being born.

I love this story for two reasons. Number one, Yerenika's character is very strong, and doesn't allow anyone to intimidate her. She's a woman on a mission to save the world, and she doesn't care how dense or annoying she has to be because there are more important matters at hand right now, people will die if she doesn't succeed. She's very determined and a little bit strategic, it's fun to see her try and try and try again without falling despirited to Euredian's cold heart, she's not after his love because she's enamored with him after all.

I will admit that later in the story there are things about the way she refers to others that I don't like as much, there are points where she becomes a little bit mean maybe. It doesn't happen as often so I just ignored those particular parts and kept going, but I thought maybe it would be necessary to point that out since I don't seem to be the only one who perceives it that way. I think it's part of her strong character, I just think it could have being approach differently.

The second thing that I really liked about this story is the two main character's dynamic. There is a third party in play, Soleia –who I really liked too–, Euredian's fiancee and the mother of the future villain. Soleia needs to marry Euredian as part of a plan of revenge against the empire, so of course when Yerenika comes around trying to steal his attention she has to be wary of her, but I personally never saw her as the main obstacle for Yerenika's and Euredian's relationship.

Euredian could be seen as the typical ML with a heart to defrost, but the reason he can't let his heart waver is because he takes his role as the king very seriously. Even when he comes to like this silly princess that is also very suspicious as to why she insists so much on marrying him, he can't just drop his responsibilities to his empire and its people, all the things he was taught since childhood, because of her. Not to mention that he's aware of the danger it would represent for her if he ever showed he cared for Yerenika. Euredian needs to marry Soleia as part of his responsibilities, and he's aware Soleia might harm the princess if he tried otherwise. So what makes the main obstacle for these two people to be together is how their stubborness and goals collide: Euredian wants to be a responsible and dedicated king, Yerenika needs him to to give that up to save the future. It's fun because the conflict that keeps their wills fighting it's presented in a way that feels genuine, and also because it eventually evolves in this dynamic where both are conscious that they like each other, but Euredian can't give everything up for the sake of love and they both begin to feel powerless about the situation.

I like Soleia as a villain. She has a story behind her that led her to a bad path, she made bad choices but she doesn't regret it, she's too filled with anger to regret anything. Laurus, a deity of this universe that comes into play later on, is someone I find very entertaining as this all powerful being that just wants to be left alone but suddenly cares too much about this random princess from another universe.

I would like to add that in this story in particular the fact that the FL comes from another world is important to the plot. Not only does her soul not completely align with her body, causing her to be sick most of the time, but it also comes to be a problem later on when her body starts to reject her, which was also very interesting to read about.

I like the story, the illustrations and the side characters. I didn't feel it was boring at any point. I will give it four strawberries. The story is still on going but I can feel it being close to the end (I'm about on chapter 140). I fully recommend it!

#flirting with the villain's dad #via #dalseul #manhwa #manhwa recommendation #yerenika #euredian #on going #tapas #review #romance #royal fantasy #magic #transmigration

1 note · View note

benjisbytes · 5 months

Text

The New Supreme Court doesn't follow it's own ideology

The confirmation of Amy Coney Barret to the Supreme Court of the United States constituted the final act of its purported shift rightward. Now, with a 6–3 majority, the conservative wing will be able to alter the judicial landscape of the United States, likely moving toward restricted abortion, traditional values and the striking down of Obamacare.

This however is not without precedent. Very recent precedent in fact. The court held such a majority just 20 years ago, famously playing an out sized role in the 2000 presidential election.

When the court first gained a conservative majority, there was an outcry from liberal activists that Roe v. Wade et al would be struck down, and abortion would become illegal in America.

As we all know, that did end up happening. Roe v. Wade has been overturned. This is all the more difficult to understand when you consider what many of the right-leaning justices purport to believe in; non-interventionist judicial review.

To examine this aspect of the Court, I'm going to turn back to the first female Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Sandra Day O’Connor was nominated by Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court on July 7 1981. At the time, and for many years afterwards, she was considered to be firmly on the conservative side of the court. In fact, she had even served as the Republican majority Leader in the Arizona State Senate in the early 1970s.

What changed, or rather, what came to be seen to have changed, was that O’Connor, like Justice Kennedy after her, and Chief Justice Roberts after him, represented a type of conservative judiciary that adhered more and more to a fluctuating position on many issues. They each became, in their own time, a swing vote that was born out of an inherent respect for the role of the judiciary in government.

None believed explicitly in judges becoming activists, advocating for their own ideological views and legislating from the bench.

Instead, a key part of adherence to so called ‘conservative jurisprudence' is that it requires constitutional interpretation to be as minimal as possible. Originalism and textualism as espoused by Justices Scalia, Thomas and now Amy Coney Barrett, are often seen as the most extreme form of right wing court views, but are actually the least interventionist of all.

It is in light of this view of a hands-off approach to government and judicial review that the striking down of long-term precedent is all the more damning for the modern court.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade demonstrates the extent to which the court is willing to adjudicate hypocritically.

This arrangement is not set in stone. Biden's presidency is unlikely to have the opportunity to appoint any more than the new justice he already has: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. This means the current makeup of the court will stand for probably the next decade or more. How it functions will set the course for how the third branch of government will fundamentally exist after this point.

As the only non-political branch of government, it is incumbent on the justices to ensure their own credibility is not undermined by blatant political maneuvering. If they cannot reign in their own persuasions and inclinations, the more extreme resort of 'court packing' may well be necessary in the eyes of the left.

A perceived wrong step or a failure to appear impartial, akin to Bush v. Gore, will most likely lead to the overt politicization of the court and an increasingly expanding number of partisan justices.

If this occurs, it will appear more and more like the stuffed British House of Lords; a rubber stamp on the current majorities priorities, rather than the constitutional check and balance that has served the United States for nearly two and a half centuries.

The court must now prove itself worthy of its impartiality label, or risk impeding its own legacy, respect and fundamental function in the twenty first century.

#politics #democrats #president #history #writing #joe biden #donald trump #ronald reagan #sandra day o'connor #supreme court #justice #ruling

0 notes

mc-critical · 3 years

Note

Okay hi its me again💜 i enjoyed your answers to my questions but im here again lol

My Question now is probably annoying or hard but i asked another page a while ago and they said it was too hard (had to re search a lot for it) but i find it very interesting.

Ranking All Imperial Sultanas from MC/MCK by how Influental/powerful they were,would be very happy if u made a list with reasonings i love yours blogs and how well they're formulated.

I'll have to agree with the other page you've asked this question that it's going to be hard answering to it when it comes to history. There's still stuff we don't know for sure (we don't even know precisely how much political influence Hürrem actually had historically!) and there is a lot of research to be done in order to give a full perspective.

That's why I'm going to limit myself to the show. While I feel the hierarchy is even more of a mess there, the conclusions one can drive are far more clear cut, especially when it comes to the evolution of power being explored on a thematic level through the Sultanate of Women.

That said, for me, the most powerful and influential sultana in the show is Kösem. She got the most from the power as a sultan's favourite and the power as a valide. She had the support of both the people and the Jannisary. She was a regent during the early years of Murat's reign and even after Murat took away her regency, she could run her foundations and had meetings that were her making decisions about the state. She represented the state almost her whole life to the point she went as far as to remove every single threat that stood in its way. Out of all the sultanas, she was the one who had the most chance to utilize and extend her power, yet she was the one with the most opposition from people who were capable of anything to take her down. She fought with enemies that put her under constant pressure, but also had their fair share of power and it was a lot more possible for the odds to turn in their favor when it came to it. Kösem managed to overcome all of them not only through sheer force of will, but also through the sheer confidence in the amount of power she wields (and the way she uses it).

The two most important "branches" of Kösem's power that make her stand out among the rest are the reach her power has and her experience. Kösem's touch of power was relatively early - Ahmet and Mustafa, the the most important people in the whole empire, were in their death beds, Handan, the Valide Sultan, didn't know what to do when everyone else was only seeking their own benefit, and the only one who could stand up to the people in what was a massive revolt, was Kösem. By expressing the confidence that the sultan was okay, she represented the country as early as episode 7, she gained another, new wave of respect in the harem and it all unraveled from there. She was starting to "lose" her innocence, she clashed with arguably the most powerful people in the harem (Safiye and Halime + Dilruba), Ahmet, for all he was, acted very "loosely" with her, in terms of what he permitted her to do when it came to the boundaries of her power in the harem and his heart, he relied on her to make decisions when he couldn't, he looked up to her, he sought her advice, he even left the state in her hands in the end. Thanks to the evolution of the SOW, now that very powerful and influential women are the norm in the harem rather than the exception, Kösem was both in a precarious, yet very powerful position, she grasped what the ones before her had and yet got to lengths no one else before (or after her, show-wise) did. Her power spread everywhere, she had so many areas of influence, to the point Murat, the padişah himself, felt overshadowed by all that. But most importantly, she reached out to the people, they all loved and respected her. No sultana was as close to her people as Kösem and I feel that's the most valuable power one could have.

I would put Safiye as second. She's been in power for so many years and she perceives her own power as so massive it's hard for her to let go of. Her dresses, morning routines, material possessions, servants were exemplary. She was so influential in the harem that she was still pretty much perceived as a Valide, even when she already wasn't. She was apparently close to Queen Elizabeth in the show, as well. She also had foundations, even though reaching to the people was far from her first priority. What brings her down for me, is that her influence began to waver slowly, but surely, ever since she was imprisoned in that tower. (yes, she still had a concubine to poison Ahmet, but still...) She lost from Kösem eventually, but she still had very strong presence and was a remarkable member of the SOW. Something from her was left even when she was at her "weakest" - the person manipulating Osman.

I don't know where to put Turhan, to be honest. She was certainly very influential, because she could amass people to her side and staged this massive coup and what helped even further, is her being in a high position from the very beggining and her thematic role in the evolution of power in the SOW, that while everyone else there had their power from their positions as favorites to some extent, at least, Turhan got it solely from herself and what she achieved on her own, because the love and favor from the padişah in her case, was absent at best. But.... her achievements and early apparent upper hand at first only stemmed from the fact that she was Kösem's shadow, she was essentially fooling her and playing with her trust. That is surely bold and the amount of time she succeeded to win in her hands is definetly something, but that facade could last only so far and when it dropped.... Kösem and Turhan were pretty much on equal ground. They were doing move after move and Turhan won only because she used Kösem's weakness. And her weakness.. wasn't the amount of power she wielded. Turhan manipulated her to let go of her personal restraints, which was what she thrived in, but that wasn't really related to power. Power was what Turhan wanted to get, not what she fully had. The same goes with influence. The spheres of Kösem and Safiye's influences were also much bigger than what Turhan ever got and no matter how well she twisted her words, her stunt could even become ineffectual later on, because she has neither ideals, nor principals, but we cannot deny she went way beyond her predecessors for the thing she craved, so I guess she could be here for now.

The Halime and Dilruba (+Davud) faction is not to be underestimated at all. Despite that, similarly to (one aspect of) Turhan, most of their power came from their ruthlessness and how much they were willing to use it. It's interesting, because Halime's most "powerful and influential" was her at her most desperate point, when she seemed to be losing control, because when everyone (the Jannisary especially) learned about Mustafa's condition, no one wanted him to be their sultan, and when Mustafa was dethroned and Osman was the one who ruled. The faction being ready to do anything to be in power and win caused them to beat Kösem in certain instances and were the reason for one of her biggest losses. As far as I recall, they were setting people against Osman and they were also fueling the fire around him, as well as the other stuff. Their opportunism is also a key thing in their power, while it could be also Halime's flaw, when it was her strenght, it fully showed. Knowing when to act (post-E25 Halime and especially Dilruba) and circling around all sides (pre-E25 Halime) is important and advantageous, compared to those who are more direct in their motives. However, when that ruthlessness of the faction is gone, they end up believing way too much in their own victory, hence they let themselves get off guard. Which is what, as well as their ruthlessness that caused Kösem to act even more against them, brought them to their end. And Halime herself could act very irrationally when the opportunity finally seems to come for her, which made her fall under Safiye's traps.

Nurbanu had enough power to guide Selim, hide his mistakes and win him supporters in a way, even though I'm sure she could also be pretty independent of him. She also ended up defeating Hürrem, all things considered. She was cunning enough and she gained influence considerably fast, judging by MC's themes, of course. However, we didn't see much of her influence outside of Selim in the show and seemed to have opposition quickly after her supposed victory was approaching, with the Safiye case she didn't have the upper hand in, in the end. (though it hadn't been such an easy battle, I'm certain of that.) Nurbanu is definetly the most powerful and influential concubine of a prince, but would she be more powerful than the current/future valides before her? I can't say for sure.

While I don't see her as the most powerful and influential sultana of the franchise, Hürrem definelty brought something new to the table, especially in regards to all the traditions she broke, her more extensive foundation work and her getting in contact with the statesmen, along with vast political allies. Hürrem was the sultana whose power stemmed from her favorable position, but that alone. And thanks to both SS and the themes and the time period, that also could only go so far. Her fatal flaw (the fixation of her enemies and her taking the more opportunistic political allies instead of truly testing their loyalty) made her political alliances become unstable in the end. She had her severe amount of influence, but that influence... seemed to disappear little by little when she seemed to be losing, especially when it came to Rüstem. Her power comes from Süleiman and if/when he dies, Hürrem loses absolutely everything. She has her fair amount of legacy, of course, especially with the favorable treatment and her marriage and how far could one start going on the road of power (though that was more on the themes that set Hürrem as a trendsetter for similar character arcs, not so much on Hürrem herself, but it's stil there), but there're sultanas more powerful than her.

I don't think I'm going to go through all the dynastic sultanas when it comes to power, because their characters and arcs are very rarely connected to power. Still, I find the most powerful and influential dynastic sultanas of MC to be Şah and Mihrimah, and of MCK: Hümaşah. Şah is especially there when it comes to influence and how many things she succeeded to pull off, to the point she could beat both Hürrem and Mihrimah, if she truly wanted to, and Mihrimah had SS's favor and her own growing confidence in her own capabilities, which is also very important. Hümaşah has her power as Safiye's daughter and then, very loosely, as a harem ruler, even though she's not more powerful than her or most of the MCK sultanas.

Ayşe Hafsa had her own fair share of power as a Valide Sultan. She wasn't that massively influential and she didn't weave political plots, but she was very strong in the harem, which she ruled with grace and poise. She had everyone there obey, respect and at times even fear her and she didn't give up so easily in her fight with Hürrem. She was a tough opponent precisely because of the power she had in the harem and even Hürrem admitted she was looking up to her to an extent. Everyone listened to her sound advice and SS considered her his conscience, even though she slowly lost her influence of him in S02B. (and even then SS still cared for her enough, of course)

A bit of a bizarre opinion maybe, but I put Gülbahar and Mahidevran next to each other when it comes to the power they wield in their respective shows. That's mostly when it comes to the vast amount of supporters they both have gained whether it's thanks to their sons or their own personalities, which could put them a step above their rivals at times. (the "Mahidevran is dependent on others" remark.... could actually be as much her advantage as is Gülbahar's seek of supporters and how she uses that.) Both have sons they strive to advice in their own beliefs and while sometimes they may not listen, they respect their mothers a lot. Both gain their strength and power without being favored by their respective sultans. Mahidevran's power shows much more when she rules her harem in Manisa, as she she shows decisiveness and justice and yet can use the same firm hand Valide Hafsa once used with her when necessary. Gülbahar's power shows much more in the castle with all the reach she has thanks to her supporters, along with her big ambition to get what's hers. I would put Gülbahar before Halime and Mahidevran after Ayşe Hafsa in this list.

In theory, Handan had a lot of power as a Valide, but she could by no means adapt to it. She was trying to exert it as much as possible, yet she never discovered how exactly to do it, and when she seemed close to discovering, someone either worked behind her back or everything just went all wrong. Nearly everyone's lack of respect thanks to Safiye's influence was even harder to get over. Handan wasn't suited for this harem life and her only solaces were her son and Derviş. Power wasn't Handan's thing at all, still she was an awesome character.

Farya and Ayşe are a tricky case. While Farya was the closest person to Murat ever being favorable to someone (besides Atike, actually no wonder they're besties!) and he married her, she didn't have the safest position in the castle, because she couldn't have children for the longest time. What Farya got in the end was only a slightly more favorable position that could end at any given time and Kösem becoming her enemy didn't help, either. Ayşe practically ranked above Farya as a mother of Murat's children, but her relationship with Murat was strained, at the very least, and that could pretty much cost her her life. Gülbahar only took advantage of her. The girl was stuck in an abusive and toxic relationship and all she could do to end it, was take her own life and that of her children. Thing is, we're talking Murat and he's as abusive and toxic with all his women as he can get, along with his fear for someone to betray or outshine him, so there's only so much power you can get during his unpredictable and (both direct and deep-seated) anger induced reign, so both Ayşe and Farya are on equal terms when it comes to power. Murat screwed both of them over so hard, I don't think there was ever time or a chance for them to seek such power and influence like others have and I don't blame them for it one bit. It's really, really heartwrenching, actually.

#magnificent century #muhteşem yüzyıl #muhtesem yuzyil #magnificent century: kösem #magnificent century kösem #magnificent century kosem #ask #therealhaseki #am I missing someone? (who isn't a dymastic sultana and isn't Sah Hüma or Mihri)

17 notes · View notes

theboywantscoffee · 3 years

Text

The Handler is really a fascinating character to me as is her dynamic with Five and how alike they are. Get ready because I’m gonna go on a tangent about them.

I think it goes without saying that in many ways The Handler and Five are very similar people. They’re both pragmatic, goal orientated, cold, and quite simply, both willing to do absolutely anything needed to achieve what they want despite the repercussions others might face at their expense. They both lack a significant level of humanity, something that clearly is a requirement to be able to do the work they do/did at the Commission. They are constantly at a battle of wits and attempting to one up the other, both proving to be a formidable foil to the other consistently throughout the show.

Where things start to contrast between the two is how they grew to be the people they are now. With Five, well, we know why he is the way he is. Five isn’t simply just a product of his childhood. Yes, he still retains a good level of characteristics from his youth into adulthood (arrogant, brash, sees himself as better than everyone else) but Five ultimately was sculpted into the man he is today due to his time subjected to the apocalypse and then shortly after, the Commission.

The apocalypse did a number on Five. It isolated him for over four decades. It tore layer after layer of humanity away from him until he was left so distanced from other people that segueing into becoming an assassin was like second nature. It forced him to become entirely dependent on himself for survival in every aspect of the word. Physically, of course, he had to take care of all his basic survival needs; food, water, shelter, first aid, etc. Mentally and emotionally? He created a whole ‘nother person in the form of a mannequin to help him retain any semblance of either of those things. It damaged Five so deeply that afterwards he was left almost entirely incapable of empathy (key word, almost), unable to ask others for help/acknowledge he needs help, and able to see assassination as a reasonable means to justify an end.

Five was left broken by the apocalypse. He is a product of it. And after going through that traumatic ordeal, he was offered a way out but only through accepting employment at the organization that sat by and allowed his suffering to go on for decades. (I’d love to go into the body modifications/DNA manipulation but that isn’t canon compliant for the show anyway (yet) so I won’t). He was transformed into the perfect killing machine. He took the lives of anyone and everyone who stood out of line by the Commission’s standards. Many who I’m sure weren’t actually bad people (ex, Lila’s parents), but because they were deemed irregularities in the timeline (or they were someone who The Handler could benefit from their death, ex Lila’s parents), they had to go. One doesn’t complete a task like that regularly without lacking a level of morality or connection to fellow humankind.

But The Handler? We don’t really know her back story at all, so perhaps this is going out on a limb here, but I can at the very least say that she did not go through what Five did. There is really no one in the series whose backstory can equate to Five’s. And while I am not entirely excusing Five for being a shitty person sometimes, he and The Handler are very different in the fact that while he was sculpted into one, I think The Handler was just born an awful, monstrous human being. Actually worse than Five. And you know why?

The Handler isn’t even capable of love or empathy or putting anyone else before herself. We don’t see this at all, not even once. The Handler does things strictly for the benefit of herself and no one else. Even when her own self proclaimed daughter asks her if she ever loved her, The Handler doesn’t answer and then proceeds to murder her. Que sera, sera. (Whatever will be, will be). No remorse. No regret. Nothing.

Five, for all of his faults and flaws and uh, murder, still remains more connected to humanity than The Handler. Despite everything he has experienced, everything he has lost, he still has an inkling of heart that’s still beating for others left in him. Because Five still does love and care for people - his entire life purpose is to keep those people, his family, safe and alive, even at the expense of his own happiness and life. Five puts his family before himself every episode, every damn step of the way. He survives 40+ years alone and then works as an assassin for an unspoken measurement of time, all to save his family.

The Handler throws up the front of being a people person and charming. And she does it really damn well. But in reality she is not morally gray. She doesn’t do some good things and some awful things. She is just all around horrible. She employs Five, again, to work for the organization that tore so much away from him. She dangles the idea of a new body before him, gives him a suit with the claim, “clothing make the man, Five,” as if he isn’t something to be taken seriously in his current physical state, as if he still isn’t the man who survived a lifetime in the end of the world and becoming an assassin. She claims that Five owes her because she ‘saved him from a lifetime of being alone’, which in actuality she watched and allowed him to suffer exactly just that. (I have another meta on here about that scene in particular, which you can read HERE). She tricks Five into murdering the board so she can assume power, all under the guise of claiming to help him get his family back to 2019, only to then use him as a scapegoat in their assassination. She literally kills him (almost) and all of his siblings. She writes the kill order on Lila’s parents, lets Five kill them, and then kidnaps Lila all for her own benefit. She continuously lies to her, ultimately betrays her, and kills her too. She sees zero wrongness in kidnapping a disabled boy from his mother so she can transform him into her weapon just like she did Lila. There isn’t a single instance in the entirety of the show where The Handler shows even an ounce of regret, only shock and anger when things don’t go her way. She is power hungry, merciless, and quite possibly even deranged with how unemotive she is towards other human beings.

And one more thing I want to touch on with The Handler that is a bit of a controversial topic in the show - her handsey-ness with Five. Her unnecessary touching and closeness. I am a firm non believer of the idea many have that her and Five used to be involved romantically or physically in any way. I think it’s quite a reach to imagine Five trusting her whatsoever at any point during their time knowing one another. Five is observant as hell and smart - I just can’t see him ever having an ounce of trust in her, especially with again, how she blatantly admits to him when they first meet that the Commission has been watching him for some time. So no, I don’t think her creepy touches with him have anything to do with a former fling (even if Kate or Aidan play into it that way or claim they might have in the past - sorry, headcanon not accepted lol).

I view her behavior as demeaning. I see it as her being condescending towards him, like, “Oh, see how you betrayed me and now look at how you fucked up. Small and weak and nothing to be taken seriously.” She treats him like the tiny child he has physically become and she does it to make him feel inferior and like he has no control of the situation he is in or his life. It’s a slap in the face, a reminder of what he has done to himself because he left the Commission, and she does it because she knows how much it bothers him to be perceived that way. Everything she does and says around Five, she does to make him feel small.

All in all, I really do love The Handler. Do I love that she played a larger role in season 2 than Carmichael? Absolutely not. I don’t love what her character did for the writing or the plot of the show and how it backburnered a lot of things. I think they missed out greatly on a character who was already a fascinating antagonist to Five (Carmichael). However, Kate Walsh is an absolute delight to watch on screen. Her and Aidan have great chemistry and play off one another very well and their scenes are certainly some of my most favorite to watch. I think The Handler is an amazing villain and keeping her as a female as opposed to a male Jon Hamm esque actor as they originally were intending to do was a great idea IMO. I love a female bad ass, even if she is a villain. I’m sad we won’t see more of her purely because she is so fun to watch (and her wardrobe is utter goals) but I’m definitely ready to move on to the next set of antagonists for our favorite dysfunctional family.

#the handler #five hargreeves #number five #tua #the umbrella academy #meta #kate walsh is still a fuckin queen

55 notes · View notes

letterboxd · 3 years

Photo

In Focus: Interstellar.

Inspired by Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar placing high across three notable Letterboxd metrics, Dominic Corry reflects on how the film successfully hung its messaging around the concept of love—and what pandemic responses worldwide could learn from its wholehearted embrace of empathetic science.

“Love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, it’s powerful. It has to mean something.” —Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway)

This story contains spoilers for ‘Interstellar’ (2014).

Although it is insultingly reductionist to both filmmakers, there are many reasons Christopher Nolan is often described as a modern-day Stanley Kubrick. The one most people usually settle on is the notion that both men supposedly make exacting, ambitious films that lack emotion.

It is an incorrect assessment of either director, but it’s beyond amazing that anyone could still accuse Nolan of such a thing after he delivered what is unquestionably his masterwork, the emotional rollercoaster that is 2014’s Interstellar.

In the epic sci-fi adventure drama, Nolan managed to pull off something that many filmmakers have attempted and few have achieved. He told a story of boundless sci-fi scope, and had it be all about love in the end. It sounds cheesy to even write it down, but Nolan did it.

That Interstellar is such an overtly cutting-edge genre film that chooses to center itself so brazenly and unapologetically around love, is frankly awesome.

Love informs Interstellar both metaphorically and literally: the expansive scope of the film effectively represents love’s infinite potential, and love itself ends up being the tangible thread that allows far-flung astronaut Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) to communicate with his Earth-bound daughter Murph (played as an adult by Jessica Chastain) from the tesseract (a three-dimensional rendering of a five-dimensional space) after Cooper enters the black hole towards the end of the film.

Matthew McConaughey as Joseph ‘Coop’ Cooper, Mackenzie Foy as Murph, and Timothée Chalamet as Tom.

In transmitting (via morse code) what the robot TARS has observed from inside the black hole, Cooper provides Murph with the data to solve the gravity problem required to uplift Earth’s population from its depleted home planet. Humanity is saved. Love wins again. Hard sci-fi goes soft. Christopher Nolan’s genius is confirmed, and any notions of emotionlessness are emphatically washed away.

This earnest centering of love in Interstellar is key to the film’s universal appeal, and undoubtedly plays a large role in why it features so prominently in three significant Letterboxd lists determined by pronoun: Interstellar is the only film that appears in all three top tens of “most fans on Letterboxd” when considering members who use the pronoun he/him, she/her and xe/ze. (“Most fans” refers to Letterboxd members who have selected the film as one of the four favorites on their profile.)

To get a bit reductionist myself, sci-fi adventure—in cinema, at least—has traditionally been a masculine-leaning genre, but Interstellar’s placement across these three lists points to it having superseded that traditional leaning, hopefully for the better.

Yet the film reliably still provokes reactions like this delightful tweet:

few movies make me as mad as Interstellar. who the fuck makes 3/4 of an excellent hard sci-fi movie backed up by actual science and then abruptly turns it into soft sci-fi about how the power of love and time traveling bookshelves can save us in the final 1/4? damn you, Nolan

— the thicc husband & father (@lukeisamazing)

February 13, 2021

Although this tweet is somewhat indicative of how many men (and women, for that matter) respond to the film, I think it’s pretty clear the writer actually loves Interstellar wholeheartedly, final quarter and all, but perhaps feels inhibited from expressing that love by the expectations of a gendered society that is becoming increasingly outdated. The “damn you, Nolan” is possibly a concession of sorts—he’s damning how Nolan really made him feel the love at the end. It’s okay, @lukeisamazing, you don’t have to say it out loud.

Conversely, it can be put like this:

“The emotion of Interstellar is three-fold: Nolan’s script, co-written with his brother as with all his best stuff, masters not only notions of black holes, wormholes, quantum data and telemetry, but it also makes a case for love as the one thing—feeling, fact, movement, message—that can mean more and do more than anyone in our current time, on our existing planet, can comprehend.”

The writer of this stirring summation, our own Ella Kemp, is paraphrasing a critical section of the film, when Nolan goes full literal on the concept of love and has Cooper and Dr Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) debate its very nature, quoted in part at the top of this story. It comes when the pair are trying to decide which potentially humanity-saving planet to use their dwindling fuel reserves to travel to. Brand is advocating for the planet where a man she loves might be waiting for her, instead of the planet that has ostensibly better circumstances for life.

Brand: “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that even if we can’t understand it.”

“Love has meaning, yes,” responds Cooper, heretofore the film’s most outwardly love-centric character, exhibiting a stoic longing for his dead wife, while also abandoning his ten-year-old daughter on Earth for a space adventure (albeit one designed to save humanity) than has now inadvertently taken decades. “Social utility. Social bonding. Child rearing.” Ouch.

McConaughey with Anne Hathaway as Dr. Amelia Brand.

Brand: “You love people who have died. Where’s the social utility in that? Maybe it means something more. Something we don’t yet understand. Some evidence, some artefact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that even if we can’t understand it yet.” Amen.

Cooper remains unconvinced by Brand’s rationale, but this dispassionate display presages him going on to realize the true (literal) power of love (and his poor, science-only decision-making—thanks Matt Damon) when it provides him the aforementioned channel of communication with Murph in the tesseract. Nolan has a female character make the most eloquent vocal argument for love, but it’s the male character who has to learn it through experience.

So while Interstellar does initially conform to some prevailing cultural ideas about love and how it supposedly relates to gender, it ultimately advocates for a greater appreciation of the concept that moves beyond such binary notions. That is reflected in how important the film is to Letterboxd members who self-identify as he/him, she/her and xe/ze. We all love this movie. Emphasis on love.

Brand’s speech—not to mention the film as a whole—also can’t help but inform the current global situation. Interstellar argues for a greater devotion to both science and love, in harmony; such devotion might have mitigated the devastating effects of the coronavirus pandemic where both concepts were drastically undervalued by many of those in charge of the response.

Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck as the grown-up Cooper siblings.

Despite the reactions cited above, responses to Interstellar aren’t always split down gender lines. We’re all allowed to feel whatever we like about it, and substantial variety comes across in the many, many reviews for the film.

Zaidius says Interstellar is so good that, “after watching [it], you will want to downgrade all of the ratings you have ever given on Letterboxd.”

On the other hand, Singlewhitefemalien takes issue with Dr. Brand’s aforementioned love-based decision-making in her two-star review: “She wants to fuckin’ go to Planet Whatever to chase after a dude she banged ten years ago because women are guided by their emotions and love is all you need.” A perhaps fair assessment of the role Nolan chose his sole female astronaut to play in the film?

Sam offers food for thought when he writes “First, you love Interstellar; then you understand Interstellar.”

Letterboxd stalwart Lucy boils it down effectively in one of her multiple five-star reviews of the film: “I needed a really good cry.” It’s hard to say whether Vince is agreeing or disagreeing with Lucy in his review: “Fuck you Matthew McConaughey for making me cry.” The catharsis this movie provides for dudes becomes clearer the deeper you venture into our Interstellar reviews (and I ventured deep): “How dare this fucking movie make me cry… twice,” writes John. Let it out, John.

Then there’s Rudi’s take: “I sobbed like an animal while watching this but I’m not exactly sure what animal it was like. Like a pig? Like a whale? I don’t know but I do know that I cried a whole fucking lot.”

Emotionless? With all this crying?

Christopher Nolan inspires more debate than any other filmmaker of the modern age (when we’re not getting unnecessarily riled up about something Marty has said, that is) and while Nolan has the passionate devotion of millions of viewers, I’d argue he still doesn’t quite get his due. Especially when it comes to Interstellar.

By so successfully using love as both a metaphorical vessel and a palpable plot point in a sci-fi adventure film, he built on notable antecedents like James Cameron’s The Abyss and Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, two (great) films with similar aspirations that didn’t stick the landing as well as Interstellar does. In Contact, McConaughey engages in a similar debate about love to the one quoted above, but notably takes the opposing side.

Steven Spielberg (who at one point was going to direct an earlier iteration of Interstellar) did a pretty good job of showing love as the most powerful force in the universe with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but there hasn’t been a huge amount of room for such notions in the genre since then.

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar’s most obvious forebear, is often accused of being the director’s most brazenly emotionless film. And while that’s perhaps a bit more understandable than some of the brickbats hurled Nolan’s way, there’s more emotion in the character of Hal 9000 than in many major directors’ entire oeuvre. It’s also, in part due to Hal’s place in the examination of queer consciousness in the sci-fi realm, the film currently in the number one spot on the xe/ze list.

Two films that notably exist in Interstellar’s wake are Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, which expands upon Interstellar’s creative use of time-bending (and like Contact, features a female protagonist) and James Gray’s Ad Astra, which tackles the perils of traditional masculinity with more directness.

Interstellar doesn’t solve the sci-fi genre’s cumbersome relationship with masculinity and gender, but it makes significant strides in breaking down the existing paradigms, if only from all the GIFs of McConaughey crying it has spawned. Its appeal across the gender spectrum is an interesting and encouraging sign of the universality of its themes. And the power of love.

Fans out of touch with their feelings may complain about the role love plays in the film, but that says more about them than it does the film. Love wins. Also: TARS. How could anyone not love TARS?

TARS and Christopher Nolan.

Related content

Men/Boys Crying: a master list

“I Ugly-Cried Like Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar”: Amanda’s list

“I Liked Interstellar”: Sar’s list of what to watch afterwards

Follow Dominic on Letterboxd

#interstellar #christopher nolan #2001 a space odyssey #stanley kubrick #letterboxd #science fiction #sci fi #sci fi film #sci fi movies #queer consciousness #the meaning of life #love

30 notes · View notes

bewitching-elizabeth-olsen · 3 years

Text

Press: Elizabeth Olsen’s 20/21 Vision

The Marvel star takes us inside her transformation to a new kind of hero

GALLERY LINKS

Studio Photoshoots > 2021 > Session 002

Magazine Scans > 2021 > Grazia

GRAZIA: Elizabeth Olsen is a trooper. We are in a field in Surrey on the outskirts of the Marvel studios; it’s a biting minus one and she is standing in a Chanel broderie anglaise sundress and increasingly soggy UGG boots. Her feline cheekbones face skywards, but Olsen is slowly sinking into the mud, trilling out high notes to keep herself warm (possibly distracted) and of course with spirits high. “It was the wind I think, that was worse than the sideways rain,” she jokes as we trundle back to the soundstage hangar that we are using as a studio. It’s the kind of moment that could go viral on Instagram, that is, if Olsen were on social media. Yet one of the biggest stars of our current cultural moment is completely offline – and that surprising fact might just be the least interesting thing about her. If anything, it is a sign of how Olsen has come into her own as a confident, decisive star with the power to create her own universe.

On the cusp of her 32nd birthday, Olsen is fastidious and professional, yes, but also bright, engaging, creative, and collaborative. Born and raised in the California sunshine, she is surprisingly at ease in the blustery conditions that deluge the English countryside in late January – or, it’s that she’s very good at acting. “It was one of the ugliest days of this winter – just hilarious – but I knew we wanted the shot,” the 31-year-old actress says.

Since October, Olsen’s been living in the leafy British countryside with her “man-guy-partner,” musician Robbie Arnett, just a short drive to the Surrey compound where Doctor Strange is being filmed. It’s a closed set, masked in secrecy as much as the socially distanced masked crew dotted all over the 200-acre studio. “It feels right being in a small city right now,” she says.

Indeed, Olsen is a modern-day Renaissance woman. Learned and dedicated to her craft, she studied at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, with a semester at the Moscow Art Theatre School studying Stanislavski. (Surely, no matter how much of a genius the Russian theatre master was, he never could have conceived of the Marvel universe.)

Approached with the concept of WandaVision, “I thought it was perfect for television, and a very original idea that made me excited,” Olsen says. Also, she was happy she would get to work with Bettany again: “He’s very precise, like me.”

In many ways, WandaVision is a love letter to the first American television heyday. Olsen, who stayed up late watching Nick at Nite reruns as a child, says it’s a bit of a homecoming in that way. “I was a very hammy, performative child,” she explains. “So, I do think I got to live out some sort of childhood dream doing the show.”

“The highlight was really getting to tell a story about these superhero individuals told in different decades of American sitcoms, trying to match the tone of those sitcoms in order to help orate the story,” she says. “But keep it playful and fun.” Little did she know just how much we’d need that.

Half-filmed pre-pandemic in Atlanta and half post-pandemic in LA – with a six-month hiatus in-between “until all the unions figured out to work safely” – WandaVision was released almost a year into the pandemic. In many ways, it is an artifact of its time: centered upon a yearning for the simplicity of earlier days, yet shot through with the creeping realization that such days may never return, and perhaps never existed to begin with.

Indeed, the weekly story of suburban superheroes Wanda and Vision has played out like a parable of our times: Wanda living in her chosen bubble, her trauma resonating in the world we find ourselves in today. Olsen appreciates a good metaphor, but feels people may be projecting a bit much. “I see Wanda as a victim of extreme trauma, who does not understand how to process it,” she explains. “She has been a human experiment.” (Not to belabor the point, but haven’t we all?)

Being summoned by Marvel is like being called to a parallel universe for an actor: thrilling, yes, but not without a tinge of terror and a dash of the unknown. Six years in, though, it’s become like family in some ways. As a member of two dynasties – Olsen and Marvel – family is key to Olsen. She checks in on her mom (who still lives in California) and, like many American daughters, is researching which vaccine mom should get.

The performative gene runs strong through her family, of course – and no, we don’t mean her sisters. Olsen’s mom was a ballerina. Still, when she first started auditioning, Olsen took special care to carve her own path – one far from Full House. “Nepotism is a thing and I’m very aware of it,” she says. “And of course, I’ve always wanted to do it alone.” She did just that, her acting credentials consistently rising as her sister’s cemented their fashion kudos. Olsen bears a noticeable resemblance to her fashion-designer older sisters and her sartorial DNA is similarly low-key. She loves The Row (of course) and NYC label Khaite’s denim and cashmere.

For Olsen, her day job is like playing dress-up. This time around, she walked away from WandaVision with the girdle worn underneath her 50s wedding dress, laughing, “I mean, to have a custom undergarment like that, I felt like it was necessary!” Her WandaVision co-star, Kathryn Hahn, also became her shopping cohort when filming.

“She’s dangerous!” Olsen says. “She has the most exquisite, minimal but expensive taste.” It was Hahn who led Olsen to the independent boutique where she found the belted Julia Jentzsch trench that she wore to our shoot.

At the rail of samples compiled by the stylist, Olsen gravitates towards a spacious linen boilersuit and longline cashmere cardigan. Has she always been a tomboy, I ask? “I think I felt uncomfortable being a child being told they were pretty,” she says of her early auditions at age 10, adding that her love of ballet and musical theater could leave her “feeling exposed” at a young age.

Speaking of over-exposure, Olsen is distinctly offline in a time when so many are defined by their social media presence. Among celebrities and regular digital citizens, the perfect balance of online and off is up for debate, but Olsen is clear: social media saturation is a choice for all of us, and everyone needs to draw their own boundaries.

“It has to be a personal decision, right?” she begins. “So, my opinion has nothing to do with what anyone else does or doesn’t do with it.” Her own journey began when she momentarily dabbled with Instagram (since deleted), while filming Ingrid Goes West, director Matt Spicer’s frightening and funny debut feature about a social stalker, co-starring Aubrey Plaza.

Up until that time, she says, “I had never touched it before. I thought, ‘This is an interesting social experiment for myself, to see if it is a good source to talk about charities or a good source to talk about small projects, or to share something goofier about myself.’ But I think at the end of the day, what I discovered was one, I’m really bad at creating a perceived identity!”

“I didn’t find it very organic to who I am as a person,” she continues. “I found some joy in putting up silly videos, but I think the main reason I stopped – not I think, I know the main reason why I stopped – was because of the organization in my brain.”

“Lots of horrible things happen all the time. Or, lots of great things happen all the time. Whether it’s something terrifying, like a natural disaster or a school shooting or a death, there are so many things that happen, and I love processing information. I love reading articles. I love listening to podcasts. I love communicating about things that are happening in the world to people around me. And what I don’t love is that my brain organization was saying, ‘Should I post about this?’ That seemed very unhealthy ….”

“And to then contribute to these platitudes that I don’t really love, you have to subscribe to two different ways of thinking,” she says. “So, I didn’t like that, and there was a lot of it that was just bothering me for my own sake of what value systems I have.”

That’s not to say that there’s any inherent value system – pro or con – in using Instagram. Olsen is clear that like any other method of expression, it’s up to the individual to use it as they see fit. “I do see a use of it and how you can use it well for work,” she says. “But I don’t think that I would like to use that tool to promote myself.”

She’s private for a millennial yes, but not prim. On the photoshoot, lockdown experiences were shared, and Olsen recounted her (hilarious) first at-home bikini wax: banishing her husband upstairs “for an extended chat with his therapist,” her trusted waxer on speed dial, and microwave set to ping! (Yes, Olsen is a trooper, as I mentioned.)

We catch up over Zoom a week later, her hair once again pulled up in a casual topknot, her cashmere turtleneck simmering in a dark claret, and her entire being suffused with covetable understatement. She chats buoyantly against an unexpected backdrop of pirate ship wallpaper in the playroom of a house she shares with Arnett, who proposed with an emerald and diamond ring in 2019.

“We first started to try to make it the gym, but it was so cramped,” she says of the jolly space. The home gym was instead awarded a larger room, where Olsen loves to maintain a varied fitness regime – running, yoga, dancing, more – though after all the intense Marvel filming, she jokes, “maybe it’s time to give up on my body?!” Being comic book fit does sound grueling or “time-consuming fun” as she anoints the “strenuous physical demands.”

Like most of us, she is longing for the spring, but she still takes a regular constitutional walk in a nearby Richmond park, whatever the weather. “The deer are incredible; every time I see them I feel alive,” she says. “We have been lucky to have nature around us in lockdown.” It’s a marked difference from her paparazzi-populated home in the Hills. “They know our walks, where we get coffee, work-out…,” she trails off.

Her haven in Los Angeles is her backyard, complete with a mid-century swimming pool and an edible garden. “It’s crazy the blackberries grow like weeds! I love watching a kid’s first reaction to an edible garden,” she gushes That has been the part of the pandemic travel restrictions she’s found hardest: missing her friend’s children growing up, and others who have been born this past year that she’s yet to meet. They will no doubt all be treated to her homemade blackberry sorbet on her return stateside.

Yet, her time on British soil will likely be prolonged, with a prospective indie commencing filming here when Doctor Strange wraps. Prompted for more detail, her firm charm kicks in. “I can’t jinx it!” she insists. Still, she will share that she’s heavily involved in the creative, and that funding smaller productions in the current climate has been a challenge.

Through it all, Olsen has remained determined and calm. “I feel patience is my superpower. But my weakness also,” she says. “I feel like it gets tested more than others who don’t have a lot of patience. If someone learns you’re easygoing or that you’re relaxed, sometimes it gets taken advantage of.” While she waits for the green light on that film, she is busy producing a new children’s cartoon with Arnett, “about loving and caring for our world,” and has also written a children’s book about to be published by Random House, all while the demands of Marvel life continue to surround her.

Indeed, Olsen is a superhero for the modern age: Multi-hyphenate, but fiercely devoted to the craft that she loves; instantly recognizable, yet thoughtfully protective of her private life; a woman with style, substance, success, and deep rewarding relationships with those around her; focused on a vision of a better world for us all.

Press: Elizabeth Olsen’s 20/21 Vision was originally published on Elizabeth Olsen Source • Your source for everything Elizabeth Olsen

#Elizabeth Olsen #WandaVision #Avengers #Scarlet Witch #Wanda Maximoff #Sorry For Your Loss #Avengers Infinity War #Avengers Age of Ultron #Captain America Civil War #Ingrid Goes West #Godzilla

24 notes · View notes

fictionturnedherbrain · 3 years

Text

Marguerite

Full name: Marguerite Blakeney, née St Just

Nick-names: Margot; ‘little mother’

Age: 25 (‘scarcely five-and-twenty’, in September 1792)

Born: August 1767

Place of birth: France

Education: Convent school, Paris; travelled to England to study the language

Currently lives: Blakeney Manor, Richmond, England

Height: ‘Tall above the average’, perhaps 5’ 6”; slender, regal figure

Eye colour: A very fluid blue!

Hair colour: Strawberry blonde (‘reddish-golden’, ‘ardent’)

Facial features: ‘Classic brow’, ‘sweet, almost childlike mouth’ with ‘full lips’, ‘straight chiselled nose’, ‘round chin’ and a ‘delicate throat’

Marital status: Wife of Sir Percy Blakeney, Bt. They met at Versailles, during a banquet held for the Flanders regiment on October 3, 1789. Two years later, they were married at the Church of St Roch, Paris, ‘just like that’, ‘without a soirée de contrat or diner de fiançailles’

Family: Brother, Armand St Just (eight years her senior). Parents died when Marguerite was ‘but a child’

Occupation: A gentlewoman. Formerly an actress with the Comédie Française. Also a member of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, 1792-1795 (‘You are a member of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel. The most adored. The most revered amongst all’)

Interests: Society hostess (balls, routs, suppers, etc.); music (operas, particularly Glück’s Orpheus); reading (contemporary novels, such as Fielding’s Tom Jones); setting the trend in fashion (‘She wore the short-waisted, classical-shaped gown, which so soon was to become the approved mode in every country in Europe’); the company of her friends, Suzanne Ffoulkes, Juliette Deroulede, Yvonne Dewhurst

Passions: Time alone with her husband (‘Moments like this, when she was alone with him, were the joy of her life’); the late night drives from London to their Richmond home (‘a source of perpetual delight to Marguerite’)

Character: Once an enthusiastic republican and feted actress, courted by men such as the Scarlet Pimpernel’s arch-enemy, Citizen Chauvelin (‘one of the many satellites that revolved around brilliant Marguerite St Just’ ), Marguerite gave all up for love. Yet despite exchanging the Paris stage for London and Bath society, she still holds true to the ideals of the Republic, even after personal experience has made her detest what people will do in the name of liberty. She does not judge by wealth or class, only by individual intelligence and creativity – and how these gifts are utilised. Marguerite is also very impulsive in her actions, and is often guided by instinct, whether wisely or foolishly. She has a passionate and loving nature, dedicating herself wholly to those she cares for – her brother Armand, and her husband, Percy. Her selfless concern for others has on occasion actually imperilled those she would give her life to save, so forceful is her desire to actively protect the people she loves. Her loyalty to her husband, the Scarlet Pimpernel, has never wavered, and has been tested many times. Initially insecure that his love for her, though great, was not as devoted as her own for him (‘He loved her and went away!’), Marguerite has learned to trust in her husband’s seemingly boundless good luck and ingenuity, supporting his dangerous mercy missions instead of trying to hold him back (‘the noble-hearted woman, whose very soul was wrapped up in the idolised husband, allowed herself to ride by his side on the buoyant waves of his enthusiasm’). She has even taken an active role in the League’s adventures, preferring to face her husband’s fate rather than be left without him (“If you go, I go with you”). If she sometimes gives into the emotional strain, and pleads for Percy to put her needs first, it is only because his love has come to shape Marguerite’s life (‘ the one man who had made her so infinitely proud and happy in his love’) ; from a young girl who thought herself incapable of love, and who claimed to have married for wealth and position, she has matured into a woman who is happiest in the company of her husband, and who will suffer any hardship to be with him. Marguerite has suffered greatly since learning of her husband’s dual identity, but she has also found a soul mate and earned the love of a noble-hearted, adventurous, and intense individual - somebody a lot like herself (“Are we not one, you and I?”) She understands that Percy’s honour is bound up in the reputation of the Scarlet Pimpernel, and that the strength of his love for her is proven by his dedication to others: ‘Nay, it intensified it, made it purer and better’.

Marguerite is not unaware of her physical charm, as it has helped to advance her career and attract admirers who flatter her vanity – but how much of her confidence is natural, and how much an act? Does she believe all that people tell her, about her beauty, wit and talent, or is she hiding behind a studied role?

Actress Vs. Child Marguerite definitely has a pampered ego, and will not let her guard down in public. Her republican philosophy that ‘money and titles may be hereditary, but brains are not’ seems to stem from her own self-image, rather than any political influence: she has only equals in society, never betters. When the aristocratic Comtesse de Tournay crosses Marguerite in public, the bourgeois actress regards her with ‘hard, set eyes’. Yet when the Comtesse refuses to let Marguerite speak to daughter Suzanne, a childhood friend of Marguerite’s, a ‘wistful, almost pathetic and childlike look’ replaces the defiant glare. This is Marguerite’s core: the young Mme. St Just within the haughty, practiced Lady Blakeney, and few are allowed to penetrate her perfect facade; only when she is alone can Marguerite relax, like one ‘long oppressed with the heavy weight of constant self-control’.

Love The key to earning Marguerite’s love is to win her trust. For all her brilliance and popularity, the twenty-five year old actress-turned-lady is emotionally insecure; before meeting Sir Percy, she had already consigned herself to a life alone: ‘I naturally believed it was not in my nature to love’. Why should such a beautiful, successful and young woman have closed her heart to happiness? After her rather unexpected and unconventional marriage, it was claimed that Mademoiselle St Just was a ‘brilliant matrimonial prize’ for which ‘there had been many competitors’, and this can be believed – but how many men might have proposed, how far they got, and what happened to them, seems not to have affected Marguerite. Even when speaking of Sir Percy, in the early days of their marriage, she can only say that she would have allowed herself to be ‘worshipped’ and ‘given infinite tenderness in return’; she does not speak of her love for him, because, at that point, she is not able to recognise it in herself (‘A woman’s heart is such a complex problem’).

Marguerite’s concept of love, as with her support of the revolution, is purely idealistic: she has notions of how it should be, but her upbringing has sheltered her from gaining any experience of the realities. Her formative years were spent in a Paris convent, where she was educated alongside the wealthy children of noble families, such as Suzanne de Tournay. After her education (she and Suzanne travelled to England, at one point, to study the language), Marguerite became an actress, making her debut at the Comédie Française when she was eighteen. Yet instead of succumbing to the attentions of male admirers at the theatre and perhaps becoming somebody’s mistress, she seems to have immersed herself in the romance and morality of the plays in which she acted, waiting for a ‘perfect love’ which might not exist. Percy’s slavish devotion to her flattered her vanity, but also appealed to her romantic imagination: when she talks of the Pimpernel, unaware of the connection with her husband, Marguerite reflects that ‘there was a man she might have loved’, the ‘shadowy king of her heart’ so like a character upon the stage in his bravery, chivalry and anonymity. She admits that she was ‘vain and frivolous’, attracted by Percy’s wealth and position, and takes advantage of all the trappings of her new lifestyle when he withdraws his love. Material possessions and a grand home in which to entertain a new court of admirers, however, are only superficial distractions; as Lady Blakeney, Marguerite is ‘lonely in the midst of her grandeur’.

Though praised for her beauty, wit and talent, Marguerite has always felt secretly undeserving and mistrustful of anything more than token flattery. Her vanity can accept compliments with ‘inimitable grace’, but she is wary of having to give anything in return. Though initially attracted to Sir Percy’s ‘curious intensity of concentrated passion’, it is the fact that she perceived him as ‘slow and stupid’ – or safe and submissive – which allowed Marguerite to overcome that main obstacle and agree to marriage. A clever or busy man would soon tire of Marguerite’s charms, her looks and her witty conversation, but she believed that an unquestioning slave such as Sir Percy would always worship her as a goddess, and bend to her will – which she accepted as no more than her due.

When Percy rejects her as soon as she becomes his wife, Marguerite is lost. She is ‘grateful’ to him, for his generosity, unceasing civility and polite attentions, but cannot comprehend the change in his attitude towards her. Loneliness, fear and a bruised ego cause her to defend herself in the only safe way she knows – by hiding her feelings behind a mask, and acting the role of her own life: ‘she, too, had worn a mask in assuming a contempt for him’. To maintain her dignity in public, and to try and rouse a strong reaction from her husband in private, Marguerite takes to mocking Sir Percy, who has similarly retreated behind the guise of society fop: she tries to ‘goad him to self-assertion’; ‘even amused herself by sharpening her ready wits at his expense’. When he merely accepts her taunts, she tries to stir his jealousy by flirting with other men, but Percy leaves her alone to do as she wishes, ‘to flirt, dance, to amuse or bore herself as much as she liked’, such is his pain over her apparent deception. Marguerite, like a vindictive child, wants to hurt her husband as much as the unexplained withdrawal of his love has hurt her, and says ‘cruel, insulting things, which she vaguely hoped would wound him’, but it is only her vanity that has been insulted. She assumed, before they married, that he would accept anything she did or said. Burdened with the guilt of her rash act of revenge, Marguerite told Percy of her part in the execution of the St Cyr family, trusting that her ‘boundless power’ over him would suppress his judgement of her, and took his silence as a lack of comprehension. Blinded by his devotion, Marguerite didn’t bother to learn about her husband’s true personality, just as he idolised his own image of her; only when she confronts her husband, after a year of estrangement, does she realise that her initial hesitation in confiding in him shattered his illusion of the ‘angel’ he married. When the permanence of marriage breaks the spell of their brief courtship, they begin to find out who it is they think themselves in love with. Percy learns about Marguerite’s human failings through her denunciation of the Marquis, and Marguerite must accept the exaggerated persona of her husband’s pride as his true self.

Armand ‘Her love for her brother, Armand St Just, was deep and touching in the extreme’: Marguerite is mother, sister, friend to Armand, and because he is the only person she can trust without reserve, ‘whom she dared to love’, the bond between them becomes like a lifeline to her. Losing their parents at a young age blurred the roles of their relationship: Armand, elder by eight years, became a father figure and chaperone to his young sister, and Marguerite, when she was old enough, provided a maternal influence in her brother’s life. Having Armand ‘near her to love and protect her, to guard her from the many subtle intrigues which were raging in Paris’ has obviously been a regulating factor in Marguerite’s unconventional upbringing. It is possible to imagine that he has saved her from her own guileless and impulsive nature, steering her away from unwelcome attentions on more than one occasion. Marguerite is naïve and sensitive beneath her cool attitude and arrogant beauty – she needs the advice of others to help her actively confront difficult situations, otherwise she is content to let events happen to her. And when she does act on impulse, to avenge her brother and her own injured pride, she is blind to the consequences until it is too late. Her denouncement of the treasonous Marquis de St Cyr, an unfortunate combination of her own petty desire for revenge and gullible nature, is the event which separates Marguerite and Percy immediately after their wedding.

Armand’s pivotal role in her life, however, makes Marguerite afraid to release her brother and trust in anybody else. Before he is to return to France, she holds him with ‘sudden strong, almost motherly passion’, and pleads with him that, “I have only you to care for me”, when what she probably means is that she has only Armand to love her. Her protective over-reaction is understandable, considering that Armand’s life is constantly under threat as a citizen of revolutionary France, but neither does Marguerite want to be left ‘alone’. Her brother’s first visit since beginning her new life in England as Lady Blakeney can only have intensified Marguerite’s feelings of loneliness and estrangement as a Frenchwoman in exile; her brother is her ‘home’, a link to the life she left behind. Already convinced that she will never love another being as wholly as she does her brother, ‘the only being in the whole world who has loved me truly and constantly’, her sisterly and maternal concerns for his safety are multiplied by her own fears of losing the last member of her immediate family, and being completely abandoned in a strange country with a husband who is cold towards her. Armand tries to reassure her, understanding ‘the reserve which lurked behind her frank, open ways’, but he is not as dependent upon her as she is with him.

Marguerite reveals to Armand the truth of her marriage, and hints at how unhappy she is in her new life, but her pride will not allow her to break down completely. After only a year apart, Armand finds himself locked out of his sister’s deepest confidence, and has to form his own conclusions based on his understanding of Marguerite’s nature. He realises that she has misjudged and underestimated her husband, not recognising that he could be as proud and headstrong as her until it was too late, and that her bargaining on a ‘fool’ might have been miscalculated. Armand regrets the distance between them, but as Lady Blakeney, she will not let down her guard, even to her brother.

Fate

Until she follows her husband to Paris to save his life, attempting to redeem herself by repairing the consequences of her actions, Marguerite tends to view the choices she makes as being beyond her control: ‘Fate had decided, had made her speak, had made her do a vile and abominable thing’. Without the support of a third party to ‘shift from her young, weak shoulders this terrible burden of responsibility’, Marguerite disassociates herself from her actions, in a defensive bid to spare her conscience: ‘What had she done to have deserved all this?’ Perhaps the greatest example of this is her view of the St Cyr executions, and the extent of her role in their downfall. The Marquis was a traitor to his country, a royalist and an aristocrat seeking military intervention from Austria, and this information was known by other people before Marguerite learned of it ‘amongst her own coterie’, but this doesn’t change the fact that she then, with ‘a few thoughtless words’, denounced the Marquis to the Assembly (probably via Chauvelin). Nor was her desire for retribution motivated by patriotism or political ideals – the Marquis’ crime was personal: ‘what her brother must have suffered in his manhood and his pride must have been appalling; what she suffered through him and with him she never attempted to even analyse’. Still naïve and immature, for all her renowned salon wit, Marguerite failed to foresee the fatal consequences of her actions, although her ‘friends’ were fully aware (‘they trapped and duped me’). ‘Horrified’ at the repercussions of her ‘thoughtlessness’, Marguerite ‘strain[ed] every nerve, us[ed] every influence’ to reverse what she had set in motion and save the St Cyrs, but it was ‘too late’. Satisfied that she had done all she could, Marguerite was able to convince herself that ‘fate had merely stepped in’, and that she was actually ‘morally innocent’. Spiteful, ignorant and easily influenced, she probably didn’t think beyond humiliating the Marquis, who had punished her brother, and therefore insulted her own bourgeois background, for being socially beneath his family – but that she did so in a petty bid for revenge makes Marguerite far from blameless.

Entirely free of false humility, Marguerite is equally aware of her attractions and her failings. She complains to Chauvelin about the incongruence of living in a land of ‘fogs and virtues’, and observes to the Prince of Wales that ‘virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant when it is crushed’. Marguerite’s bohemian lifestyle as an actress, earning a living in deception and courted as a republican mascot, contrasts sharply with her strict and pious childhood in the convent, and the dichotomy of the two goes a way towards explaining her liberal yet penitent attitude to life. Whereas there is no doubt that Marguerite enjoys life, as the ‘darling of a brilliant throng, adored, feted, petted, cherished’, with ‘the joy of living writ plainly’ upon her face, her generous and compassionate spirit is easily disturbed by the cruelty and suffering around her. Her cynical wisdom and sharp wit display a pensive and distrustful side to her youthful personality, as she warns her brother that ‘little sins are far less dangerous and uncomfortable’. An ardent supporter of the ‘lofty virtues’ that inspired the Revolution, Marguerite welcomed the new Republic, but when the words and visions of philosophers like Rousseau and Mirabeau were replaced by the harsher realities of violence and executions, she was horrified and quickly abandoned the bloody excesses of France for the security of England.

Class

Marguerite is trapped between social plateaus in ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’: proclaiming herself a republican with ‘an enthusiasm for liberty and equality’, she is originally from a middle-class background, elevated in her own sphere by her beauty and wit, and then removed from her queenly position in Paris to become a pretender to the aristocracy in England upon her marriage. Sir Percy is a baronet, on the next to the lowest rung of the peerage, but his wealth, good name and novelty value in the Prince of Wale’s court ensure that he is accepted amongst the higher ranks of society (at least two of the League are lords). However, this still makes rather a hypocrite of Marguerite, who, despite professing that ‘money and titles may be hereditary, but brains are not’, seems to enjoy her new status. She accepts ‘jewels and luxuries’ from Sir Percy, in place of affection and a happy marriage, and adapts to the privilege and insularity of English society within a year. At Brogard’s inn, when she and Sir Andrew travel to Calais to warn Percy that Chauvelin is on his trail, Marguerite is disgusted by her fellow ‘citizen’, thoroughly acting the part of the pampered aristocrat as she holds her handkerchief to her ‘dainty nose’ and stares ‘in horror’ at her surroundings.

She and Chauvelin are both idealists, preferring rhetoric to action; when the diplomat seeks to enlist her patriotic assistance in Dover, Marguerite asks, ‘What can I do, here in England?’ Overhearing her confrontation with the haughty Comtesse de Tournay, Chauvelin confronts Marguerite with this typical example of social injustice in the hope that her bruised pride will make her an ally, but Marguerite can defend herself. Instead of betraying the brave Pimpernel to punish the undeserving aristocrats he rescues, such as the de Tournays, Marguerite calls the Comtesse’s bluff with the aid of the Prince of Wales, ‘with a wealth of mischief in her twinkling blue eyes’. As a bourgeois actress, Marguerite has suffered the prejudice and arrogance of the aristocracy, inspiring her faith in the Republican creed of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’, but her popular reception amongst the London ton, and the Royal protection she enjoys as a friend of the Prince of Wales, tempers her vehemence. Marguerite’s primary motivation is safeguarding the security and happiness of herself and those closest to her: to avenge a brother, she spoke out of spite, and to provide for her future, she turned on her homeland. Money and titles may not matter to Marguerite, but neither will she renounce personal advantages on principle; without ‘her rank, her dignity, her secret enthusiasms’, she is always Marguerite St Just.

#the scarlet pimpernel #marguerite st just #lady blakeney #sir percy blakeney #character study #suzanne de tournay #armand st just #merle oberon #leslie howard

15 notes · View notes

loruleanheart · 3 years

Text

Desired Fate, Chapter 8

Read on ff.net

Read on AO3

The sky was an overcast grey, giving little light to Zelda’s chambers as the princess sat on a small settee, trying to focus on the book she held which contained her carefully written research notes. Urbosa, Link, and Impa had left that morning for Gerudo Desert where they would all board the Divine Beast, Vah Naboris, and set out for the Yiga Hideout.

There was a light knock at her door.

“Come in.”

Zelda turned her head to see one of her ladies-in-waiting holding a tray with a teapot and a cup for her.

“Thought this might lift your spirits, Your Highness.”

This gave Zelda pause. Was it that apparent she was feeling low?

“That’s very thoughtful of you, thank you.” The Princess acknowledged but barely smiled.

The attendant poured her a cup and gave a bow before turning to leave.

The tea gave off a pleasant earthy aroma, and as Zelda waited for it to cool she anxiously wondered what sort of news her champions would return with.

She redirected her attention back to her research which she’d gathered from books at the Royal Tech Lab as well as the castle’s library. She skimmed what she’d written down, finding it helpful to return to these notes every so often. Perhaps she’d add more soon where she’d record everything she’d learned thanks to the little Guardian with knowledge of the future.

This made her recall records that Robbie and Purah had shared with her before the arrival of that mysterious Guardian. These records indicated that there were many different types of Guardians stored in five giant columns that rested beneath the castle. These Guardians would be key in combating the Calamity, just as they had 10,000 years ago.

But how do I access them? Despite knowing every inch of the castle, I’ve never seen these columns. They must be buried deep underground, but I can’t give up looking… Even if I can’t find the columns themselves, maybe there’s something to activate them?

She thought she’d go insane from the feeling of impending doom if she didn’t do everything she could. Especially after being excluded from accompanying Urbosa to the Yiga Hideout, Zelda was feeling especially useless. She couldn’t afford to waste a single moment. She could at least agree with her father on that, even if they didn’t see eye to eye on what constituted a waste of time.

As unproductive as she was feeling, she forced herself towards the first area that came to mind for her to begin her search. She made her way to the secret passage in the library that led to the docks, praying she wouldn’t cross paths with her father on the way there.

After traversing the castle’s long hallways, she reached her destination and breathed a sigh of relief that she had gone unnoticed by castle staff. She began to descend the darkened staircase, illuminated only by torches that lined the natural rock walls.

As she rounded the corner and began to descend the last flight of steps she froze. She wasn’t alone down here. Her heart leapt and she audibly exhaled when she perceived who it was. The strange variation of the Gerudo emblem on the back of the Prophet of Doom’s robe had been etched into her mind both from her meeting with him in Korok Forest as well as the newest image on the Sheikah Slate.

“Halt! Take down your hood.” The princess ordered.

Astor turned to her slowly, appearing caught off guard by her presence. He rolled his eyes and smirked, doing as she asked.

His collarbone length dark hair nearly covered his Hylian ears. He gave her a look as if to say ‘Are you satisfied?’

Zelda stared at the man before her, speechless. A little in relief that he hadn’t put up a fight, but also feeling that he wasn’t as intimidating without his hood. She wondered if he ever got distracted by the braid that hung in front of his right eye. Still, he was undeniably beautiful to her, and she hated herself for thinking so, given who he was and what he’d done and probably would do if she couldn’t stop him

This man is going to be the death of me… If not literally, then figuratively… He seeks to revive Calamity Ganon. You should find him repulsive just from that fact alone. Ugh… What is WRONG with me… I truly am just a failure in more ways than one… I’m just broken… Horribly and irrevocably broken...

Astor was transfixed by the princess’s serene expression as she descended the stairs coming into the light of a nearby torch. She looked at him imploringly, and it unnerved him how she held him in her gaze. She only averted her intense gaze away for a brief moment to sweep a lock of her golden blonde hair away from her face before folding her hands in front of herself in a self-conscious manner. The luxurious fabric of her royal blue dress melded nicely to her figure. This girl, a woman and a queen-in-practice really, was the picture of Hylian beauty, not that Astor would allow himself to acknowledge that. She appeared so out of place in this dark, underground environment. The urge to look away was strong, but still, Astor held her gaze. He almost felt ashamed that this delicate girl was his mortal enemy. She didn’t look capable of sealing Calamity Ganon. She didn’t look like she was capable of sealing anything really, even though he’d so clearly seen it play out in prophetic dreams - more like nightmares, really - and he knew better. It would have been so easy to call upon his Hollows to end her existence right then and there, but something stopped him.

Zelda spoke softly. “Astor… How did you get in here?”

It had been such a long time since Astor had been addressed by name. Hearing it on the princess’s lips was somehow sweet.

“You think it would be difficult for me? Don’t insult me! This isn’t my first time.” He said in an intimidating manner, his voice smooth. He’d been called here before by Calamity Ganon. That was when he’d found his Harbinger. He now sensed something or someone different calling him to this place. Normally he’d disregard such a calling. It was just a distraction from his purpose as Calamity Ganon’s chosen. But the pull towards this place on this occasion was so strong, he couldn’t deny he was curious. And it had led him to the princess of Hyrule.

The Princess continued to hold him in her gaze, her voice taking on a more serious intonation. “Here to make another attempt on my life?”

Astor gave a wicked smile, questioning the vision he’d seen of her. Pathetic girl is being run ragged by fate… She’s practically begging to have her thread cut.

“Are you inviting me to do so? The princess with the blood of the goddess volunteering herself as a blood sacrifice to the Calamity… Exquisite… Your power could be mine for the taking forever.” His irises constricted in desire, and then his expressions darkened. “Then maybe I could, at last, get you off my mind….”

The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. It was a morbid sentiment, of course, but hearing him say it sent her reeling. There was a strange energy between them, a sort of magnetism.

“It’s not mine to give. I have my own destiny to fulfill.”

“Your answer doesn’t sound very confident, Your Highness.” He purred.

He’d seen right through her somehow. The Princess’s eyes widened and her face paled a bit in shame. Her lips parted to speak, but she said nothing.

“You… Certainly aren’t what I was expecting. I could never foresee that Hyrule’s princess would spare me, a disciple of Calamity Ganon.” Astor said, his voice held a sense of awe. “I wonder what your appointed knight had to say about that? Where is that despicable little pest? I thought he never left your side.”

Zelda bit the inside of her cheek. “Well, I… I couldn’t just stand by and watch you get killed.”

“Why not? I nearly succeeded in killing you. And you know I am bound by fate to try again…”

The princess sensed his words were just as hollow as hers. She narrowed her eyes at him, taking a few steps closer to the Prophet of Doom.

He takes a step back, his smile faltering. “You dare to test -” But it was too late, as he was hit with a multitude of images flashing through his mind's eye’. He recoiled, holding his head.

Zelda looked on with concern. “What was that?”

Astor tried to clear his mind, shaking. For a moment he had been back in that strange place that seemed to be an amalgamation of Korok Forest and the Lost Woods. A surreal place where the Silent Princess flowers grow abundant.

“Stay away from me….” He growled.

Zelda blinked, perplexed as to what had just overtaken the prophet. “Astor… Why would you want to destroy Hyrule? This is your home, too. What have you to gain from destroying it?”

Astor bristled at the question. This foolish royal girl wouldn't be able to comprehend his motivation given her station and role in this world, so he just answered simply, “This world is rightfully Calamity Ganon’s.”

Zelda reflected on this a moment. His answer was off-putting for her to hear, but still, she was determined to better understand what had led him down such a dark path. “But, why devote yourself to Calamity Ganon? How do you even know Calamity Ganon isn’t using you? Or do you plan to sacrifice yourself for this insane cause?”

Astor recalled Sooga’s words. He wanted so much to lie through his teeth and say yes, but he honestly wasn’t satisfied with that answer. But, to answer truthfully would be a weakness and disloyalty to Lord Ganon. Not that he was ready to accept that the Great Calamity would ever require such a thing of him, or worse betray him.

Instead, he simply said, “My fate is to be at the right hand of Calamity Ganon.”

“I see…” Zelda said unconvinced. “I’m no prophet, but if you continue on your current path you’re almost certainly going to fall, either by the sword that seals the darkness or by your master when your usefulness has ended. Please stop what you’re doing… I… I don’t want to see this dark fate consume you.” Her answer sounded so confident this time.

The prophet’s insides twisted up. He hadn’t been prepared for the princess of Hyrule herself to beseech him in such a forthright manner. No, he had just expected her to oppose him with only righteous anger and nothing else. Why did she care so much? Why did she have to make this so complicated… and even uncomfortable. It was one thing to hear such a warning from Sooga, as rudely as he had put it. But it was another to hear it again from his mortal enemy, and he was so unaccustomed to kindness. And here she was… She wasn’t begging for her life. She was begging for his. This wasn’t going how he expected. No, she just felt like an unwanted distraction, perhaps even.... a temptation?

“Spare me, Your Highness, “ He spat. “I don’t need pity from the weakest chain in the goddesses’ bloodline!”

Zelda shifted her posture, turning her head slightly away from him, wounded by his words. He might as well have stabbed her in the heart and left her to bleed. But she held back. If he thought she was going to cry over insults she’d heard before and internalized, he had another thing coming.

“It’s so much more than pity...” Zelda said softly as she looked at the ground, her voice wavering.

However, It was painfully obvious he was a force she wasn’t going to be able to persuade, she thought, losing hope. Not that she was surprised.

Astor turned to go and Zelda let out a little gasp, knowing where he might be going. “Wait… Please, don’t leave…”

He turned and gave her a strange look.

Zelda chose her words carefully, knowing her champions were still in the middle of a dangerous mission at the Yiga Hideout, and she couldn’t put them at risk.

“Astor… If you don’t heed my warning... you will almost certainly face defeat… And it may come sooner than you think…” Zelda wished her final warning wasn’t so cold, so sterile, even vaguely threatening, but it was the best she could do all things considered. Still, she knew the moment he left she’d be in a world of self-loathing and regret. Self-loathing that she cared a little too much for him, and regret that she had failed to stop him.

He scoffed at her warning. “Your pleas are meaningless to me. I am a great seer and prophet of the Calamity. And you… are but a mere nuisance in my path. You will not impede my fate any further. Farewell, Your Highness…” He paused a moment as if hesitant to leave. He almost looked a little sorry. “If you should survive the Calamity... What will I do with you?” And with that, he vanished.

#Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity #Age of Calamity #HWAOC #Astor #fanfiction #Some real interaction here between the two #I can just imagine all the Zelda's of the past judging AOC Zelda and being like #"Don't despair he's got plot armor and he'll be around at least until the final battle.#Zelast

15 notes · View notes

sie-werden-nie-vergessen · 3 years

Text

So I’m at work currently, but business is slow today and I was just doing some light desk work when I realized something.

The children that were poisoned by the mercury runoff from the Bellows family mill probably weren’t just random children from Mill Valley. They were probably mill workers. I wasn’t sure if this was historically plausible though, so I did a bit of research and found out that children were indeed employed as paper mill workers in 19th century England*, so it’s fully plausible that child laborers worked in paper mills in 19th century America. We generally only hear about textile workers or child cotton mill workers, however, because those were very widespread industries in 19th century America, whereas paper production wasn’t as widely spread across the nation. According to philadelphiaencylcopedia.org, “Philadelphia was the nation’s primary papermaking center through the early nineteenth century.” It also goes on to mention that paper mills spread throughout greater Philadelphia area, and many were family owned**. Often times, families grew empires around their paper mills and expanded and purchased many more mills (aka it is entirely plausible that the Bellows mill was actually an extension of an older family mill that started in or around Philadelphia in the early 1800s, or even earlier). The first paper mill in America was actually the Rittenhouse Mill, established in 1690 around the Philadelphia area.

{Side note: I am now willing to forgive the many historical inaccuracies in this film for the simple fact that their research on the Bellows Paper Mill was evidently very well done. So far, all historical accounts line up with movie canon and this history nerd is very pleased with that.)

So, knowing that child laborers in paper mills was common in England, we can assume that it was likely done in Pennsylvania as well.

Victorian attitudes on child mill workers were as follows:

(Keep in mind, this is referencing southern cotton mills, NOT paper mills, but the general attitude towards the rationale of child laborers and their perceived benefits would have most likely been the same).

“Just as the mill was important to the individual family, it was similarly important to many Southern towns in supporting the entire commercial ecosystem.74 The mill owner provided schooling, stores, and housing for the mill families.75 When workers fell into debt, they could put their children to work to pay the mill owner their living expenses. Despite this arrangement, according to the records from one early 19th century cotton mill, families frequently were in debt to the mill once store purchases and rent payments were deducted.76 Large households, however, increased income to the family and were seen as a benefit to the mill owner. Even children too young to work were viewed as an investment in the future productive capacity for the mill. Oftentimes, contractual arrangements with the head of the household bound the family to provide labor.77 In many cases, that agreement included a set quota for the amount of labor the family was to provide.78 The mill might provide schooling for children from the ages of 5 to 12, but at the age of 12, the children were required to start their working life in the mill. Not just mill owners insisted upon this arrangement. Many parents believed that they should begin receiving some money back on their investment once a child reached the age of 10 or 12.79 Thus, the actions of both the mill owner and the parents contributed to the widespread use of child labor in cotton mills. While owners were attempting to pull children into the factory, parents were eagerly pushing the children out of the nest and into productive employment.

This push of the children into mill work started even before they were old enough to competently work on their own. Children who were too young to work independently assisted others as helpers. This “helper system” enabled children younger than 10 to assist their mothers with any minor chores required at the mill.80 These children, though, did not earn their own wage. Because of their limited skills, they were frequently seen as being unprofitable to employ at any wage.81 Mill owners, however, saw that the presence of these children in the mill benefited the parent. This welcoming of children in the workplace was also in the long-term interest of the mill owner because the children could familiarize themselves with their future workplace.82 At recess during the school day, other children helped by bringing their parents and older siblings meals.83 In many cases, these same children soon made their way to the mill working full time. Usually the boys started as doffers and sweepers while the girls were spinners.84 Doffers replaced the full bobbins filled by spinners with empty ones and often had hours of free time in between their required tasks at the mill.85 These tasks were usually seen as children’s work, whereas other heavier work, such as oiling machinery, was seen as “men’s work.” In the mill, as in most other factory industrial settings at the time, work appropriate for children was clearly differentiated from work seen as appropriate for adults.86 Although mill supervisors oversaw the children who performed these child-appropriate tasks, they were often reluctant to discipline the children. In many ways, the mill was seen as an extension of the family unit. Therefore, for any trouble that the children caused at work, mill owners usually left their discipline up to the parents.87 This approach illustrates just how closely the mill was integrated into the family structure.”***

So, while the children would have been treated decently enough, the Bellows family still saw them as expendable in the sense that they did nothing even as the children died of the mercury run off from the same mill where they were employed. However, at least they would have been decently respected and not mistreated during their employment (because remember, Mill Valley did love the Bellows family, so they most likely did semi-charitable work for the children and the families of Mill Valley).

“The industry’s transition from rag to wood pulp production coincided with Philadelphia’s decline as the nation’s preeminent papermaking center. Much of the paper industry’s growth in the late nineteenth century occurred in New York and New England, particularly Holyoke, Massachusetts, which became known as “The Paper City.” While no longer the national leader, the Philadelphia area continued to support a significant papermaking sector. In 1880 there were seven paper mills in Philadelphia, employing 452 workers; in 1912, there were eight, four in the Roxborough-Manayunk area. Among the largest were the McDowell and Dill & Collins mills. The latter firm had a mill in Port Richmond and also took over the Flat Rock mill. There were also dozens of paper mills operating in the surrounding counties in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

A paper mill existing in a surrounding county and town like Mill Valley is completely possible in the late 1800s. By this time, the mills would have been steam powered, but they continued to be built by water even when they were no longer water powered operations. Handmade paper was no longer a viable option, and all mills were mechanized by this time.****

Long story short, the mercury runoff into the water is still fully plausible, even in the steam powered mills of the late 1800s.

(Again quoted from philadelphianencylopedia.org)

“Although the industry declined in the twentieth century and operated at a fraction of its nineteenth-century heyday, Philadelphia played a key role as the birthplace and longtime center of early American papermaking.” (philadelphiaencyclopedia.org)

Considering the fact that the Bellows family were living at the cusp of the turn of the twentieth century, and that the mill was their source of wealth and security, it makes perfect (albeit tragic) sense that they would do anything to preserve that sense of security and wealth, even if it meant allowing innocent children to die. The Bellows family were most likely on good terms with the children who worked at the Mill. Considering that both Deodat and (most likely) Harold would have worked at the Mill, they were probably fond of the children and possibly even close to them. At the very least, they were kind enough to them that the townspeople were more likely to believe a story of black magic (in a time when American spiritualism and the belief in the paranormal was fading. The height of spiritualism and a belief in the paranormal was in the mid 1800s*****) than to believe in the much more realistic story of mercury poisoning, considering the mercury was used in paper production in that day and age.

The children most likely went to the river after work to play, or maybe even between their tasks in the mill.They could have eaten by the riverside, and they most likely drank from the river as well, hastening their poisoning.

This is probably why Sarah tried to escape so much, and why she was so desperate to save the children. Not only were innocent children being poisoned,but they were exposed to the river daily, and it was literally a race against time to save them.The movie gave me the impression that Sarah suddenly ramped up her number of escape attempts (considering that Ephraim specified that if she tried it AGAIN, they would send her to the asylum, implying that this wasn’t the first attempt), and this would certainly explain why she would suddenly increase her escape attempts because she knew how little time she had before the children would be dead.

I think Sarah wanted to escape to save the children, not herself. I get the impression that she hadn’t ever attempted escape until the children started getting hurt. I think it was a case of someone not being able to summon the courage to do something solely for themselves, but being willing to risk it all to save others.

Sources:

* - paraphrased from this quote “The voices of children as young as five working in paper mills, iron foundries, bleachfields, potteries and factories are vividly revealed in transcripts of interviews for the second report of the Children's Employment Commission.” from this article by The Guardian.

https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/paper-and-papermaking/

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1124&context=charleston

** “Among the major paper producers in this area were the Flat Rock Paper Mill, owned by the Nixon family (descendants of William Rittenhouse); the Wissahickon Paper Mill, owned by the Megargee family; and the McDowell Paper Mills. All were family-run operations that were established in the 1820s through 1840s and continued in various capacities into the early twentieth century. Family members built new mills or established partnerships with other mills in the region over the years, resulting in a web of interrelated family-run paper businesses throughout the greater Philadelphia area.”

*** taken from a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics article on child mill and factory workers in the 19th century. Find it here.

**** “The demise of handmade paper finally came in the late 1830s with the invention of the tandem dryer. The tandem dryer combined drying and pressing of the paper emanating from the paper machine, and it produced a sheet of great smoothness that was superior to that made by hand. The market soon became flooded with machine-made writing paper, and all the remaining hand mills were now forced to switch to the machine or go out of business.” Full article found here

***** austintexas.gov slideshow on spiritualism. Found here

#sarah bellows #scary stories to tell in the dark #bellows family #the bellows family #ephraim bellows #harold bellows #deodat bellows #delanie bellows #gertrude bellows #ssttitd

4 notes · View notes

myfandomrambles · 4 years

Text

Azula Character Analysis

Born a princess with a high position

Was favored by her father and second in her mother's eyes

Deeply skilled bender from a young age

Attended the royal girl Fier Nation academy and had private tutors

Was around severe abuse emotional and occasionally physical

Abandoned by mother due to political intrigue which affected her

Aware of her parents' murder of her grandfather

Rose to crown princess after her father coronation and brother banishment which she watched

Was used as a weapon by her father against her uncle and bother by age 14

Had a few friends who became partners in hunting the avatar her brother

Was a skilled tactician able to infiltrate the heart of the earth kingdom

Overthrow the earth king

Nearly killed the avatar

Achieved high status for this but shared it with her brother is a skilled protective manner

Had a tumultuous relationship with her brother

Betrayed by her friends

Attempted to kill her brother

Became fire lord but felt rejected through this as she was unable to claim victory along with her father

Suffered a mental health breakdown

Was beaten by Zuko & katara in an Agni Kai losing her status

Overview:

Azula is a complex character who is gifted, clever, beautiful, and deeply psychologically injured. Her story is one of abuse, manipulation, and war. She was raised by abusive people in a cult of power and supremacy; by the age of 14, she was being used to put the same trauma out on the entire world.

The prime driver for Azula’s character is the necessity to retain control over her situation and due to her status as the princess of the world’s dominant power, this is control over everything. Control and power are the only things Azula truly understands as valuable. This control also equals safety, safety from physical harm during a battle, and emotional harm by others. We can see this control manifest in her emotional distress at having even one hair out of place during her training (2x01). She uses her place of power to hold fear over other people, those she considers lesser than her, by invoking the fear of losing their place and physical harm. Her social power and skill in bending back up the threats.

Azula’s need for control started as a child who grew up being taught through the iron hand of Ozai who demanded perfection. Her status as a prodigy with fire bending, physical aptitude, and intelligence gave her positive attention from her father but also led her to be inculcated even stronger into the idea that fear is the only way. Her father taught with the fear of retribution for failure as much as any positive attention. The more blatant abuse Zuko suffered from their father for showing what was perceived as weakness and emotionality was another teacher that she must always control every part of her. (2x07, 3x06)

This control via strength without understanding was worsened by her other connections. Her mother failed to connect and attune to her daughter so even in early childhood they were always moving past each other. Azula’s failure to show empathy was met with judgment and punishment and we don’t see them ever repair the relational rupture. Their mother then abandoned them accompanied by their parents murdering their grandfather and threats against her brother. Leaving her with only Ozai as a point of influence and even more surrounded by violence. (2x07)

Azula also gained little perspective outside of the pure ideology of the fire nation royal family and royal academy for girls. She carried the beliefs of fire supremacy and nationalism with no outside input which left her with the schemas of power in her nascent socio-political awareness and added to the stunting of her ability to gain empathy. She was taught to view the world as nations and people only worth understanding to beat not for its own sake. (2x07, 2x19-20, 3x05, 3x06)

This pain leaves her spending the whole second season [spanning months] as a weapon of her father. She is forced to travel around the world, originally with only staff, with the goal of hurting her own family in the name of not being shamed. To prove she can do it she gives herself the task of stopping the avatar. Azula is able to escape a fight with some of the strongest benders we see in the show easily and is persistent to a fault. (2x03) We see her skills of strategy and combat shine here as well as many of her trauma responses. The biggest one being she is acting in a mindset that can not shift from using the world and not experiencing it. (2x01, 2x03, 2x07-8, 2x13, 2x15)

Azula’s pure genius shows in her ability to take over Ba Sing Se on her ability to read other people, manipulate court games, and her sheer belief in her infallibility. We see her play the Dai Li and Long Feng with only the backup of her two friends. She has an iconic moment of power “Don’t flatter yourself you were never even a player” and invokes her belief in the divine right of kings or lords. (2x18-20)

Once she proves herself and can bring her brother and uncle home, if in a way not planned, putting her back in a secure place of princess she longs to keep. We see her try and maintain control by being the one who understands both her father and Zuko. We see her struggle greatly with normal life but thrive within the system of the place. (3x05-6, 3x11)

However, we see her set world start to collapse when Zuko leaves and her only two friends choose to take a chance for love versus staying in her control bubble. This challenges her sense of safety she works so hard to maintain. It also goes against her understanding of interpersonal relationships and her innate power. (3x11, 3x13, 3x15)

This causes a breakdown in the end. However, this leaves her without a throne and a sense of safety. After the show, we see her mental health stay in a deteriorated state, struggle with the past, and joins a group that wants to harm the new age of peace. (3x18-20, Comics: The Promise Part Three, The Search. Smoke and Shadow)

Relationships:

Zuko

Zuko and Azula are one of the key family dynamics within the story. Azula acts as a foil to Zuko during their childhood being the golden child to his scapegoat. She was Ozai’s favorite whereas Zuko was closer to Ursa. They both suffered severe trauma as young people but Azula spent the time trying to not be viewed as poorly as Zuko. (3x07, The Search) Something she directly tells their father, to not be treated like Zuko (3x18). Building your relationship with your sibling as wanting to prove you are better than them sets them up too but heads, something she acknowledges was also going to come down to them deciding who is the right one to succeed their father.

During the main plot, we see them start as the predator and the prey (2x01, 2x08). Both of them lived in the mindset Ozai Taught them, she was born lucky and he was lucky to be born (1x20, 2x07). She is the long arm of their father only claiming some autonomy when she chooses her team and attacks the avatar as well (2x03, 2x08).

Azula brings Zuko back into their fold because next to Iroh she understands Zuko the best. She knows easily the only thing he wants is to feel in control of his life and craves the respect of their father, these are things she also needs. We see her also offer the double-sided act of letting Zuko take credit. It is partially protective as should he live Azula is protected, Suko would be the one who failed. It can also be some degree of kindness for her brother because she does like the system the way it is and Zuko being in pain causes worse stress.

They continue to bump heads as we see Azula feel most at home within the bureaucracy whereas he struggles to feel as if it was right. Zuko still carries the pain of shame for his actions at the same time Azula pushes much of her emotion down. Part of this is Azula knows where she stands and as long as others play the part she has no worries. Zuko breaks this steady normal as a child when he wants to be empathetic to soldiers and again when he feels the need to save the earth kingdom she wanted to kill in total war. (3x01, 3x05, 3x16)

Their reactions during The Day of Black Sun (3x11) set them on their paths for the end and they mirror each other. Azula uses the time to play her role and waits for the fire bending to turn on to win. Zuko uses the time to pull away from their father for good. They continue to be antagonistic and Zuko is an axle in her relational rupture with Ty Lee and Mai. (3x14-16)

Their final Agni Kai for the title of Firelord shows how much Zuko has learned in his complex bending style and ability to hold control while we notice Azula loose form entirely relying almost completely on her raw power. Her very body language giving off how sick she is currently in her movements now disjointed and lacking precision which conflicts with the controlled fighting we see from Katara and Zuko. (3x18-21).

They have spent their whole life used as pawns by their parents and stuck in the milieu of war and suffering. Azula’s status as her father’s favorite offers her the status Zuko wants but she also lacks the time and ability to grow Zuko earned through his relationship with Uncle Iroh. Their understanding of each other is strong but Azula fails to offer sympathy to her brother when he chooses things she wouldn’t and treats him poorly. And Zuko needs to be able to challenge her so he can properly heal, along with team avatar, the fissures in the world.

Ursa

We see that Azula and Ursa do not understand each other and the abuse they both suffer disallowed them to properly attach. Ursa didn’t understand Azula’s natural predispositions or her trauma which left Azula often being told off by her mother or treated as separate from the bond Ursa had with Zuko. I wouldn’t go as far as to say Ursa was forming a scapegoat golden child dynamic more so she couldn’t bring herself to look past her trauma. (2x07, The Promise, & The Search)

During the fire nation teens' conversation at ember island, we see that Azula generalized her mother's view of her as a monster as much as the other conditioning she had as a kid. This whole where her mother’s attunement should be opened even more space for what Ozai taught her. Azula lack’s a full ability to process this but it is the one time we see Azula even come close to verbalizing painful emotions other than paranoia and anger. (3x05)

If we are to believe the memory we see from Iroh (1x12) she was already immune to violence as a pre-teen believing that Ozai’s assault of Zuko was justified and even taking gratification from it. This play into her relationship with her mother as the gentleness her mother might have displayed towards her child was missing making the hardest part of the indoctrination become the most prevalent. Worsen when Ursa abandons her children and seeks out her new life. The effects of this are her willingness to be cavalier with life, and failure to attach to others (3x17).

Azula’s relationship with her mother ends up being the breaking point in space after the betrayal of her friends. When we see her experience hallucinations and paranoid thought they center around her mother and their relationship, rather there was love or not being the central question. (3x19)

Paranoid delusions around her mother continue in the comics where we see Azula unable to interact from a clear headspace. (The Search)

Ozai

Ozai is Azula's main force of identity shaping her internal and external perceptions to the point of making her more of a human tool than a real daughter. The craving for her father's need is just as strong as Zuko’s but instead of trying to restore it her job is to keep it and not rock the boat. This is seen in her letting Zuko take credit for the killing the avatar which brings her brother back in (3x01) and when she asks Ozai to not treat her like Zuko when he becomes the phoenix king (3x20)

Throughout the show, everything she does is to please her father from going after her brother and then succeeding in killing Aang. (2x01-2x20). She also parrots her father's belief about weakness, fears power, and the might of the fire nation. Examples include naming the city New Ozai, demanding the divine right of kings, and her obsessive focus on acting and appearing perfect.

Ozai’s abuse permeated everything Azula was and is leading to her becoming the shadow of a person we see at the end of the series.

Ty Lee & Mai

Next to her blood family Mai & Ty Lee are her most influential relationships. She considers them generally friends starting when they went to the same school (2x07). We see that even as a child she had the highest status in the group and already needed to win. However, they do seem to have some genuine care for the princess even if it is never balanced. For example, when recruiting Ty Lee she uses manipulation and fear to force her back into serving the fire nation. (2x03). Mai and Ty Lee are skilled fighters making them useful to Azula, something she values more than anything other than loyalty. She has trouble conceptualizing their emotions as validly seen in her calling their emotions performances, however in the same episode we see her care about making Ty Lee cry and experience very human emotions of envy herself. They bond over their traumas and their shared love of destruction (3x05).

None of the three of them are particularly well adjusted but what Azula has on her side is an utter belief in her competence and her belief that their friends will fall in line with that ambition. For the most part, they do; Ty Lee often flatters her and Mail generally does as she’s told when Azula is around. However one of Azula’s most pivotal moments comes when this obedience falls through. Mai loves Zuko more than she fears Azla’s wrath and Ty Lee can’t bear to see them hurt each other. Earning one of Azula's most characterizing lines ``You should have feared me more”. This betrayal and shift in her stable world put Azula over the edge and fuels paranoid thoughts and a slip into worse mental illness. (3x14)

To consider Mai and Ty Lee to be the manipulative ones or otherwise treat them as the bad or abusive party to Azula is unfair. They are doing what they can as they believe Azula has the right to be in charge and suffer consequences when they step out of line. However, it’s equally unfair to assume everything Azula does is machiavellian; she too is acting on sincerely held beliefs and as a daughter of abusive or neglectful parents. I think Azula has a hard time conceptualizing others as full people objectifying them in her schema of the world but unlike some of her behavior to Zuko, I doubt it’s intentionally cruel.

Developmetnal Trauma

Adulti-fication (2x01,2x03, 2x07, 2x08, 2x13 2x19-20, 3x01-2, 3x05, 3x15, & 3x18-21)

Anger (3x13-20)

Control fixations (2x01, 2x03, 2x07, 2x7, 2x13, 2x19, 3x01, 3x05, 3x15, & 3x18-21)

Conditioned Value Systems (2x01, 2x07, 2x19-20, 3x01, & 3x05)

Empathic Deficits (2x03, 2x07, 2x15, 3x05, & 3x11)

Harm to Animals (2x07 & 2x15)

Hypervigilance (2x01, 2x03, 2x07, 2x08, & 2x19-20)

Obsessive Thoughts (2x01, 2x03, 3x05, & 3x18-21)

Locus of Control breakdown (2x01,2x07, 2x15, 3x05, 3x14, & 3x18-21)

Paradoxical Arousal, [Functions best during high-stress situations and worse under normal or positive] (2x03, 3x05, 3x13-5)

Paranoid Thoughts (3x18-21)

Perfectionism (2x01, 2x07, 3x05, 3x13, & 2x17-20)

Positive & Negative Psychosis Symptoms (3x18-21)

Recklessness (2x03, 2x07, 2x08, 3x05, & 3x15-16)

Risk Seeking Behaviors (2x03, 2x13, 2x15, & 3x11)

Social issues (3x05)

Trust Issues (2x13, 3x01, 3x11, 3x13, & 3x18-21)

Violent Play Behaviors (2x07 & 3x05)

47 notes · View notes

multiverseforger · 3 years

Text

Helmut Zemo (aka the 13th Baron Zemo) is Heinrich Zemo's son who was born in Leipzig, Germany. His father taught him the idea that the Master Race should rule the world. Helmut was originally an engineer until he became enraged when reading a report about the return of Captain America and his father's death. Helmut would ultimately follow in his father's footsteps as a supervillain using his family's money and his own scientific know-how to recreate his father's work.

He first surfaced under the alias of the Phoenix, and captured Captain America to get revenge upon him for the death of his father. He was presumed deceased when he fell into a vat of boiling, specially-treated Adhesive X. As he had not been wearing his mask when he fell into the vat, his face was hideously scarred by the boiling Adhesive X, giving his face the appearance of molten wax.[5]

He resurfaced years later as Baron Zemo, first allied with Arnim Zola's mutates. He allied with Primus I and the half-rat/half human mutate Vermin, and kidnapped Captain America's childhood friend Arnold Roth in order to lure Captain America into a trap. He forced the Captain to battle hordes of mutates before revealing that he knew Captain America's secret identity.[6]

Zemo later encountered Mother Superior and the Red Skull.[7] Zemo underwent tutelage by Mother Superior and Red Skull, and then kidnapped Captain America's friend David Cox and brainwashed him to battle Captain America.[8] Zemo then kidnapped Roth again, and directed a shared mental reenactment of Heinrich Zemo's last World War II encounter with Captain America.[9] Zemo then battled Mother Superior, but was psychically overpowered.[10]

Most notably, he formed a new incarnation of the Masters of Evil. This fourth Masters of Evil was formed to strike at Captain America through the Avengers; they invaded and occupied Avengers Mansion and crippled Hercules and the Avengers' butler Edwin Jarvis. Zemo captured Captain America and the Black Knight. Zemo battled Captain America, but fell off the mansion roof.[11]

Zemo later hired Batroc's Brigade and psychic detective Tristram Micawber to help him locate the five fragments of the Bloodstone in hopes of restoring his father to life. Fighting Captain America and Diamondback, Zemo's plan backfired, as he instead turned his father's corpse into a vessel for the demonic forces that lurk inside of the Bloodstone. The reanimated corpse was destroyed by Crossbones (who sought to steal the Bloodstone for Red Skull) and a distraught Zemo fell down an inactive volcano in Japan trying to retrieve it.[12]

Zemo survived the fall, though his right hand (which was not protected by a glove) was horrifically burnt and mangled. Driven insane by the destruction of his father's body, Helmut took control of an army of mutates and tried to re-enslave Vermin. He was defeated by Spider-Man and Vermin was freed.

Broken and beaten, Zemo was taken in by a female scientist calling herself "The Baroness" who modeled herself after Heinrich. The two married and began kidnapping abused, neglected children to serve as their children. Zemo's sanity returned and he even created a new realistic face mask to hide his disfigured face from his adopted children, whom he nurtured and swore to protect from those who might return them to their abusive foster homes. The couple's peaceful life was ultimately shattered when Captain America discovered their home, while searching for the evil super-scientist Superia. Superia and the Baroness (who revealed that she had pretended to be Heinrich Zemo reborn in a clone body during a fight with Silver Sable and Spider-Man) mocked Helmut and his newfound domestic househusband status as they plotted to kill him. Zemo turned on his wife and Superia, before turning his attention to dropping Captain America into a vat of Adhesive X. The plan failed and Zemo (now wearing his trademark hood) fell into the container instead, with the Baroness (hoping to curry favor with her husband), falling in after him. The two were rescued by Captain America and Helmut bemoaned that like his father, his face now was permanently hidden by his mask. Captain America responded by revealing that the Avengers had since found a way to dissolve Adhesive X and would use it to free Zemo from his costume and hood, a fact that drove him further into a rage due to Captain America never offering to share this adhesive remover with his father.

Helmut Zemo as Citizen V. Art by Mark Bagley.

Zemo ultimately escaped prison, though his wife the Baroness died shortly after being sentenced to prison for her role in the abduction of the children they were raising. During this time, Zemo discovered that Goliath was imprisoned in the Microverse and formed a new version of Masters of Evil to free Goliath. But after rescuing Goliath, the Avengers and The Fantastic Four disappeared during the Onslaught crisis and were presumed dead. After overhearing the Beetle (Abe Jenkins) and Goliath talk about who would replace the Avengers and The Fantastic Four, a distraught Zemo soon found a new purpose for his team: the Masters of Evil would take on new heroic identities as the Thunderbolts.[13] Zemo would lead the group under the alias Citizen V (a twist of irony as Heinrich Zemo had killed the original Citizen V during World War II) and planned to have the Thunderbolts gain the world's trust in order to conquer it.[14] The public took a liking to the team much more quickly than Zemo, or any of the other Thunderbolts, expected and soon most of them came to like the feeling of being heroes.

When the missing heroes returned, Zemo had the Thunderbolts' true identities leaked, forcing them to flee with him into deep space to assist his plan to conquer the world through mind control.[15] However, most of the Thunderbolts rebelled and with the assistance of Iron Man foiled Zemo's plan.[16] Zemo went into hiding and plotted revenge on his former teammates (who were trying to win back the public's trust by being true heroes).[volume & issue needed] After another of Zemo's plans was foiled by Captain America and a new Citizen V (Dallas Riordan),[volume & issue needed] Helmut was killed by the new Scourge of the Underworld,[17] though his mind was transferred via bio-modem technology into the comatose body of John Watkins III.[volume & issue needed] Now in possession of Watkins' body, Zemo again played the Citizen V role, this time as a member of the V-Battalion,[volume & issue needed] until the Thunderbolts' final battle with Graviton, during which his consciousness was removed from Watkins' body and transferred, in electronic form, into his ally Fixer's mechanical "tech-pack".[volume & issue needed]

On the artificial world Counter-Earth - the same world to which the Avengers and The Fantastic Four had previously vanished - the Thunderbolts encountered Zemo's counterpart, Iron Cross, in that world.[volume & issue needed] Fixer transferred Zemo's mind into his double's unmutilated body.[volume & issue needed] Zemo then took up leadership of the Thunderbolts who were on Counter-Earth;[volume & issue needed] when this group was reunited with their teammates who had remained on the normal Marvel Universe Earth,[volume & issue needed] Hawkeye briefly resumed leadership,[volume & issue needed] but then left the team to return to the Avengers.[volume & issue needed]

For a while Zemo remained the leader of the Thunderbolts.[volume & issue needed] In 2004's "Avengers/Thunderbolts" limited series, he attempted to take over the world again — this time with the belief that he could save the world by taking it over.[volume & issue needed] Zemo now seems to be motivated by a twisted altruism rather than his original selfish desires; he feels he has grown beyond his father in that regard.[volume & issue needed] However, the Avengers foiled his scheme, his teammate Moonstone went berserk, Zemo's new body was blasted while he attempted to protect Captain America, and he left the team and went into hiding after obtaining Moonstone's twin alien gems, two artifacts of great power.[volume & issue needed]

Zemo had been manipulating the United States government, the New Thunderbolts, the Purple Man, the Squadron Sinister, and a host of other relatively obscure Marvel characters.[volume & issue needed] His goals are unknown, but he is clearly still motivated by a desire to save the world by taking it over, or at least manipulating it towards what he perceives as a beneficial future. Zemo has also, apparently through trial and error, learned how to use the power of the moonstones in various ways, from simply generating raw energy, to transporting himself and others through time, space, and dimensions, to viewing possible future events through dimensional rifts—and, apparently, to repair his damaged face (or, at least to create the illusion that it was undamaged).[volume & issue needed] He has also recruited members of both his original and subsequent incarnations of the Thunderbolts to his cause, as well as eventually bringing the current team of Thunderbolts around to joining him.[volume & issue needed] The group resides in what Zemo calls his "Folding Castle", a structure that he has connected to various other places around the world by dimensional portals.[volume & issue needed]

As a result of The Civil War storyline, Iron Man asked Zemo to begin recruiting villains to his cause, which Zemo had already been doing, unknown to Iron Man.[18] However, he met up with Captain America and informed him that he really had reformed. He showed Captain America his face, once again scarred, to remind him of his earlier sacrifice, and gave him a key that would allow him to escape from the super-human prison being constructed if Captain America would allow his Thunderbolts to fight the Squadron Sinister.[volume & issue needed] He also gave Captain America all his old mementos, destroyed by Zemo in 'Avengers Under Siege', which he had gone back in time and rescued with the help of the Moonstones. Finally, Captain America agreed.[volume & issue needed]

Zemo, was always told as a child that he was superior, he now believes his father's Nazi ideals to be untrue, and that the only way to become superior is through righteousness. After helping Captain America, he remarked to his father's portrait that the man would be displeased with today's good deeds. Zemo—once again wearing his unscarred face—then revealed that Songbird was going to betray him and he was going to sacrifice himself in their upcoming battle with the Squadron Sinister. He told her that he would not die, but that he would become superior through his sacrifice "by living forever".[volume & issue needed]

Zemo revealed his true nature when he saved the Wellspring of Power from the Grandmaster planning to use it for his own ends. Believing that all of his visions were subject to the flow of time, and that nothing was set in stone, Zemo defeated the Grandmaster, and boasted to his teammates that the power was now all his—and theirs. He insisted that he would use it to help the world, despite the consequences of doing so. Songbird, having temporarily lost her own powers during the final battle, was told by Zemo "...now is when your betrayal would have come". However, the vision of Songbird's betrayal turned out to be true after all. Using a simple opera note to crack the moonstones, Songbird sent Zemo into a whirlwind of cosmic space/time. Just before he was completely sucked into the vacuum, he screamed out that he "would never have hurt a world he worked so hard to save".[volume & issue needed]

The limited series Thunderbolts Presents: Zemo - Born Better (2007), written by Fabian Nicieza and drawn by Tom Grummett, explores the history of the Zemo barony. Helmut, sucked into the vacuum, wakes up in medieval Germany (1503), witnessing Harbin Zemo's death and his succession, while in the present academic Wendell Volker and Reed Richards deduce that Helmut has traveled in time. Captured and taken prisoner as a leper, Helmut manages to inspire Harbin's twelve year old grandson Heller Zemo to kill his own father Hademar Zemo and fulfill his destiny as the third (and most enlightened and progressive) Baron Zemo. Heller goes to the hidden cell to free his "muse", discovering that Helmut has somehow disappeared. Helmut makes a jump to 1556 where he fights alongside Heller's son Herbert Zemo, then later jumps to 1640 where he slays Herbert's son Helmuth Zemo, and later arrives in 1710 where he narrowly escapes being killed by Helmuth's son Hackett Zemo.[volume & issue needed]

Meanwhile, in the present, Volker reveals that the Zemo bloodline is not just limited to Helmut's immediate family. In fact Harbin's descendants are spread out all over the world. Wendell visits Miss Klein, a descendant of a bastard child of Hilliard Zemo, the eighth Baron Zemo and Jewish lover Elsbeth Kleinenshvitz. Hilliard becomes baron after the death of his father Hartwig Zemo in the Seven Years' War. In the past Helmut sees Hilliard and Elsbeth in love, realizing that the residual energy of the Moonstone is drawing him into the present, but forcing him to stop and live every key moment of Zemo's lineage. Helmut manages to save Elsbeth, who is sentenced to die by the Diet because of her Jewish ancestry and her wealthy family, but in the present Volker kills her distant descendant, convinced that his actions can pull Helmut to his proper place in the time stream.[volume & issue needed]

Helmut next ends up in 1879 where he stays for several weeks working his way up to be part of the travelling guard of Hobart Zemo, the tenth Baron Zemo. Hobart is killed during a civilian uprising shortly after German Emperor William passes legislation to curb the Socialist party. Helmut jumps forward in time before he can save his own great-grandfather. Helmut arrives during World War I in a battle between British forces led by the original Union Jack and German forces led by his own grandfather Baron Herman Zemo, the eleventh Baron Zemo. Helmut witnesses Herman's men slaughter the majority of the British forces with mustard gas. Later, Helmut goes with Herman and his men to find Castle Zemo reduced to rubble by the war. Helmut travels forward in time again to his father's tenure as a Nazi during World War II.[volume & issue needed]

Back in the present, Volker discovers that Castle Zemo has been restored in the present. Wendell tours the castle with a local German police man and Interpol agent Herr Fleischtung, Wendell murders both men. Wendell has apparently murdered several Zemo relations in the belief that this spilling of Zemo blood would bring Helmut back to the present.[volume & issue needed]

After battling his own father in the past, giving him the inspiration to take up the Zemo mantle, Helmut returns to the present and manages to convince Wendell not to kill him as well, instead taking what is discovered to be his cousin under his wing, as he sets out to do something new for the world.[volume & issue needed]

Following the events of The Siege crossover as seen in the Heroic Age storyline, Luke Cage assumes control over the Thunderbolts and has Fixer impersonate Zemo as a test to see which of his new teammates would betray the team if offered a chance to escape.[19] Later on, it was revealed that Fixer was keeping in secret contact with Zemo while working on the Raft.[20] During the Fear Itself event, Zemo gave Fixer key info on the mutant army threatening Chicago.[volume & issue needed]

Having spent his time on the sidelines, watching Norman Osborn's rise to power with the intent of waiting to see what Norman would do with control over the Thunderbolts and later S.H.I.E.L.D., Zemo reappeared following the events of the Siege when Osborn was ultimately defeated by The Avengers. A chance encounter at the Thunderbolts' former base in Colorado with the Ghost led to him learning Bucky Barnes was the current iteration of Captain America. Zemo confronted his rival and discovered how the man had survived his father's death trap only to become the Winter Soldier, a trained Soviet assassin who killed scores of people for several Russian handlers. But most alarming was the fact that Zemo discovered the original Captain America had not only forgiven his successor for the crimes, but had actively covered them up even after Winter Soldier blew up a huge chunk of New York, killing several dozen S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in order to restore power to a Cosmic Cube fragment.[21]

Zemo recruited Jurgen "Iron-Handed" Hauptmann (of Red Skull's Exiles), as well as Fixer and a new female version of Beetle to expose the current Captain America's sins to the world. This included drugging Bucky with nanites that caused Captain America to behave irrationally and attack police officers and leaking to the media, not only detailed files revealing Winter Soldier's acts of terrorism committed as a mind-controlled pawn of the Russians, but video footage as well of him being trained by handlers. Zemo ultimately kidnapped Bucky and took his father's victim to Heinrich's island which is where Bucky's original "death" occurred. There Zemo confessed that he did what he did, not out of a desire to finish the job his father started, but out of jealousy over how Captain America and his allies quickly forgave Bucky for his crimes, yet continue to scorn the reformed Helmut who had saved the world on numerous occasions.[22] Zemo then forced Bucky into a similar deathtrap as the one his father put Bucky in, modified though in order to allow Bucky a chance to escape. Zemo then escaped from the island unharmed.[23]

Zemo has since turned his eye towards Hawkeye, who he blames for usurping control over the Thunderbolts from him. Zemo makes a deal with Hawkeye’s former mentor Trick Shot (whose cancer had returned) to train Zemo’s mystery acquaintance to become a master archer in exchange for medical care. When the training was complete, Zemo reneged on the deal. Trick Shot (on the brink of death) was delivered to Avengers Tower to serve as a message to Hawkeye. Before he died in his former pupil's arms, Trick Shot warns Hawkeye of the threat he will soon face.[24]

In the pages of Avengers Undercover, Zemo has become the new leader of The Shadow Council's Masters of Evil following the death of Max Fury.[25]

Zemo later becomes the new leader of Hydra and enters into conflict with Sam Wilson, the new Captain America.[26] Using the toxic blood of an Inhuman boy named Lucas, Zemo plans to sterilize the human race and distribute a cure to only a small portion of those infected, thus forcibly solving the planet's problems with overpopulation and lack of resources. He later kills Ian Rogers, the new Nomad and Captain America's partner, by slashing his throat and sends a photo to Steve Rogers.[27] He later fights Wilson to a standstill until Lucas escapes via jet plane to spread his blood in the world.[28]

During the Avengers: Standoff! storyline, Zemo appears as a prisoner of the S.H.I.E.L.D. established gated community called Pleasant Hill where the technology Kobik that was derived from the Cosmic Cube turned him into an amnesiac man named Jim who later discovered that Pleasant Hill is surrounded by a forcefield. He briefly witnessed an eerie girl bring a bird back to life until she is taken away by some adults. Then he encounters a mechanic named Phil who arranges a meet-up following his arson activity. On Day 40, Jim met Phil who had created a device that enabled people to return to their true selves. Phil also stole a training video where Mayor Maria Hill gave a video tour of Pleasant Hill describing to the S.H.I.E.L.D. cadets watching this to be the future of supervillain incarceration where they are turned into mild-mannered civilians using reality-warping technology derived from the Cosmic Cube called "Kobik". A demonstration was shown when Graviton was turned into a Pleasant Hill inhabitant named Howie Howardson. As Phil uses the device on himself and Jim to restore their true selves, Jim was restored back to Zemo while Phil was Fixer once again. Both of them vow to use the device on the other brainwashed supervillain prisoners and reduce Pleasant Hill to dust.[29] Zemo and Fixer started working on restoring the memories of the inmates one by one. Then Zemo led a coordinated assault on a S.H.I.E.L.D. outpost that serves as the Pleasant Hill City Hall.[30] After Kraven the Hunter captures Kobik, he loads her into Fixer's machine where Baron Zemo plans to control Kobik. During the Avengers' fight with Baron Zemo's villain allies, both Zemo and Erik Selvig tried to get Kobik to come with them. Kobik ended up teleporting Zemo and Selvig away from Pleasant Hill. They were last seen in the Himalayas trying to make their way back to civilization. Zemo brings Selvig with him as he's crucial to his next plan.[31]

After leaving the Himalayas, Zemo begins to form his "New Masters" group, he starts by recruiting Firebrand, Flying Tiger, and Plantman II. They later encounter Steve Rogers, the original Captain America, Free Spirit and Jack Flag. Zemo then tries to escape with Doctor Selvig until Captain America enters his plane. Before he could kill Steve Rogers, Zemo is defeated by Jack Flag.[32] After Rogers pushes Jack Flag out of the plane, he makes the plane crash into a building to kill Doctor Selvig and Zemo.[33] However, it is later revealed that Rogers kept Zemo in a cell.[34] Rogers then manages to convince Zemo that they were best friends since childhood, since Rogers's reality was rewritten by Kobik to believe he has been a Hydra double agent since childhood, and recruits him in his mission to kill the Red Skull. Zemo then starts to recruit all the supervillains who escaped from Pleasant Hill.[35]

After Rogers kills the Red Skull's clone in his mansion during the "Opening Salvo" part of the Secret Empire storyline, Zemo arrives with his team of supervillains called the Army of Evil.[36] After the Army of Evil disappears after attacking Manhattan, Helmut Zemo uses the Darkhold to enhanced a brainwashed Blackout into covering Manhattan in a Darkforce dome while trapping the heroes there.[37] During the Underground's battle with Hydra in Washington DC, Zemo goes to awaken the Army of Evil from their stasis as Winter Soldier arrives in time to free Black Panther. Both of them apprehend Zemo before he can awaken the Army of Evil.[38]

Helmut Zemo leads Hydra into occupying Bagalia. In his shared plot with Dario Agger and Roxxon Energy Corporation to have the United Nations recognize Bagalia as an independent nation, Helmut Zemo selects Mandarin as the public face for Bagalia where Mandarin uses the alias of Tem Borjigen. As part of his revenge on Hydra for manipulating him, Punisher finds Mandarin making a speech at the United Nations and fires a special bullet. After using his rings to slow down the bullet while trying to deflect it, Mandarin is struck in the head with the bullet which is witnessed by Baron Zemo and anyone watching his speech.[39]

3 notes · View notes

billehrman · 3 years

Text

Don’t Act Prematurely

The market pundits continue to communicate that we are nearing the end game of this economic cycle. They are warning that the Fed could take the punchbowl away earlier than assumed, attempting to slow the economy, curb inflationary pressures, and therefore cause a market top.

The truth is that we are just in the very early innings domestically and several quarters away from overseas economies kicking in too, making this a synchronous global expansion, something that we have not seen in years. The Fed and all monetary bodies are probably a year away from beginning to shift policy, which would begin by tapering the amount of bond purchases eventually to zero before even considering raising rates. This is a long way ahead out so don’t act prematurely. The markets will continue to be supported by trillions of excess liquidity already in the system, trillions in additional stimulus to come, and much higher levels of earnings, cash flow, and ROIC over the next few years than currently forecasted. Yesterday’s employment data put to rest, at least for now, that the Fed will act anytime soon even though the employment problem right now is the lack of labor supply rather than demand for hiring. That, too, will change as supplemental benefits expire later in the summer.

The key to the sustainability of the economic expansion is getting our arms around the coronavirus so that we can reopen and return to our lives as we knew them before the pandemic hit a year ago. More than 1.23 billion doses have been administered across 174 countries, and we are vaccinating at a rate close to 19.4 million per day. We have distributed over 252 million doses in the United States, now averaging 2.09 million per day. We continue to believe that we will have herd immunity in the U.S sometime this summer and globally by the end of the year. We also expect that we will have vaccines that can be administered orally before year-end, which could play a significant role next year if we all need booster shots, as many experts now think.

Nevertheless, Pfizer and Moderna expect to have close to 5 billion doses of traditional vaccines readily available next year to protect the world from further outbreaks. All good news which supports our view that the coronavirus will soon be in the rear-view mirror and viewed much like the flu by year-end. It will not interrupt our daily existence going forward, supporting a sustained economic expansion.

The Wall Street pundits are all placing bets as to when the Fed will shift policy as they would consider that a precursor to a market correction. Removing extra accommodation is good news as it means that the economy is on firm footing and growing. We have listened to comments from Powell and all Fed governors that the Fed is far from achieving its inflation and employment goals. The Fed expects the economy to expand rapidly and inflation to exceed its 2% target as we come out of the pandemic and are fulfilling pent-up demand. But as Fed Governor John Williams said last week ‘that doesn’t mean that the Fed needs to shift gears” as they want to see the data points and conditions, after the fact, before considering a change on policy. The Fed expects growth over 7% this year with inflation over 2%, so significant numbers will not be a surprise. We believe that the Fed will wait to see 2022 numbers before acting, recognizing that 2021 is a sharp recovery from a deep recession caused by the pandemic. By the way, Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury, corrected her comments last week as she sees no need for the Fed to raise rates because she does not see persistently higher inflation moving forward. We agree as we see significant productivity gains, like reported last week, offsetting higher wages, keeping a lid on unit labor costs, as well as global competition and disruptors pressuring prices. On the other hand, we continue to see higher industrial commodity and agricultural prices over the next few years as demand outstrips supply.

The debate on Biden’s two additional stimulus plans: American Jobs ($2.2 trillion) and American Families Plan ($1.8 trillion) center on what is considered infrastructure and how it will be paid for. We continue to believe that we will have a traditional infrastructure bill passed this year above $1.5 trillion paid by hiking the corporate tax rate to around 25% (even Biden is going there now), user fees, higher tax rates on the very wealthy, closing tax loopholes, project financing, and better collections. The bottom line is that whatever stimulus plans are passed, they will boost growth in future years. Whatever tax changes happen, they will not be as onerous as initially thought, nor will they alter the shape of the economic recovery.

Recent economic data continues to be off the charts despite Friday’s surprise employment report. We consider that report an outlier as jobs in April increased by only 266,000. Current unemployment benefits limit labor supply while the demand to hire has never been more robust. We see robust increases in employment ahead as those extra benefits expire in a few months. Recent strong data points include: April ISM Manufacturing Index at 60.7; new orders at 64.3; employment index hit 55.2; backlogs rose to 68.2; ISM Output Index was 63.5 up from 59.7 in March; the Services Index was 62.7; new orders was 63.7; prices paid increased to 76.8; new orders for manufactured goods increased 1.1% while shipments rose 2.1% such that the inventory to sales ratio fell further to 1.38, and the trade gap widened to $74.4 billion as the value of imports rose to a new high reflecting strong domestic demand. We found it particularly important that productivity increased 5.4% in the first quarter as we believe that productivity will meaningfully accelerate holding down unit labor costs over the next few years benefitting from massive increases in technology spending plus managements’ have learned during the pandemic how to be more efficient and productive with less.

Data points overseas are improving too: the Eurozone IHS Markit Composite Purchasing Index rose to 53.8 from 53.2 in March while the Services Index increased o 50.5 from 49.1; Eurozone business confidence advanced to a level not seen since 2012; Japan’s final services PMI reached 49.5 in April while it's Composite PMI jumped to 51.0 from 49.9 in March; China’s trade surplus increased to $42.85 billion as exports surged; China’s Caixin April PMI rose to 56.3, and Australia’s services PMI for April was 61.0, a record high. Not bad at all!

Don’t act prematurely as the global recovery is on track. The Fed will refrain from changing policy until employment has fully recovered and inflation, after a surge, stays elevated during the second half of 2022.

Investment Conclusions

The domestic economy is recovering faster than we anticipated a few months ago. The employment data was an outlier as it did not reflect the increased demand to hire as the economy reopens, and we put the pandemic in the past. We always felt that it would take longer than generally perceived for employment to surpass pre-pandemic levels. Corporations have learned to do more with less and are substituting technology for labor at a record pace.

The financial markets remain supported by trillions of excess liquidity in the system; an overly accommodative Fed; trillions of stimulus not spent yet with trillions more to come; and finally, much higher corporate earnings than even we projected a few months ago. The great margin story, which we began speaking about months ago, is for real as we continue to see record levels of operating margins, operating earnings, cash flow, and ROIC over the next few years. We could always have corrections, but the preconditions for a market top are not even close yet, so don’t be influenced by the pundits who remain one step behind and are, frankly, are usually wrong.

We continue to focus on companies leveraged to the global economic recovery. We see significant sequential gains in earnings over the next several years while defensive stocks and beneficiaries of the pandemic, including many technology companies, will have decelerating rates of increases in earnings, a precursor for underperformance. Areas of concentration include global industrials, machinery, and capital goods companies; financials; some technology tied to broadband and 5G; industrial and agricultural commodities; transportation; and several unique situations.

Our investment webinar will be held on Monday, May 10th, at 8:30, am EST. You can join by entering https://zoom.us/j/9179217852. in your browser or by calling +646 558 8656 and entering the password 9179217852. The meeting ID is 9179217852

Remember to review the facts; reflect, and consider mindset shifts; look at your asset mix with risk controls; turn off your cable news; do independent research and …

Invest Accordingly!

Bill Ehrman

Paix et Prosperite LLC

[email protected]

917-951-4139

1 note · View note

supanutphrom-anant · 3 years

Text

Rogers’ Five Factors

Relative advantage

From an innovator’s perspective, this aspect might be the first one that come to his mind since additional value gain plays an important role to attract customers. People will not migrate from their current product or service consumption if the newer one does not provide any additional benefits. This might be called differently in different subjects, such as value added in Economics, or product differentiation in Marketing. Therefore, for all four products in the case “Four Products: Predicting Diffusion”, they have relative advantage compared to incumbents at least for some level. However, this differentiation or relative advantage is very subjective since people perceive thing differently. For example, some people might see that having peanut butter slice can significantly reduce their breakfast making effort, but some might not feel the difference. It even can be viewed as relative “disadvantage” because the peanut butter slice gives up an ability of on-demand amount control. Nevertheless, there are innovations that show clear relative advantage in every point of views. A good example is the Polytrack which provides clear advantage of its drainage system and horses’ injuries reduction.

Compatibility

If we have to weigh importance of each five scores to calculate product adoption rate, I would give this factor the highest weight. Besides physical products or competitors, customer existing value is another obstacle that innovators need to tackle. Though a new product can provide a clear profit, customers will not buy it if they do not value it. Among four products, the collapsible bike wheel seems inconsistent to customer existing values the most. When we think about buying bicycle, we might give priority to its safeness and then its effectiveness during the ride. It is true that some customers want to have foldable bike to save up storing space. However, they might not willing to pay extra $2,000 to $6,000 for an additional space that they would get from collapsible wheel. This same factor is also a key that can explain why some innovations are adopted rapidly in some countries but not adopted at all in other countries where people perceive product values differently.

Complexity

This factor, in my opinion, play a crucial role in determining product adoption. Though a new innovation has clear relative advantage and is consistent with existing values, its high complication can hinder customers from adopting it. Polytrack might be the most difficult innovation to use among four products if we also think about how to renovate from ordinary race track. There are many external factors that race track owner might need to take into account, such as conversion cost, opportunity cost during the construction including ticket revenues and rent from some events that cannot be held anymore after converted.

Trialability

When I read through this section, I simply know the season why a start-up company like “Birchbox” can steal some market share from incumbent cosmetic companies such as Sephora. This start-up sees that fact that customers who want to buy new products always try the samples first. Therefore, Birchbox emphasizes the concept of trialability through its subscription model by sending a box full of customized product samples to their doorsteps. Then, after testing samples, the customers can buy products online through Birchbox’s website. My girlfriend also says that she never buys cosmetics online unless she has tried them before.

Observability

This factor, also trialability, serves as product advertising. The more people who can try or observe a product, the greater chance the product adoption rate. For example, Stave puzzles attract people sitting around attention to help finishing them. These people will get to know what is Stave and might be converted to be its customers themselves. Another good example from the four products is Polytrack that is observable by many audiences including other race course owners, who came to watch horse races. They will be able to acknowledge Polytrack’s relative advantages and then go back and convert their own tracks.

#2021SloanBrandingB

1 note · View note

mikhalsarah · 4 years

Text

The Emperor’s New Gender

How can you help a 3-year-old to stop misgendering family friends who are transwomen? She isn't trying to insult them deliberately, but just doesn't perceive them as women and won't remember being corrected the next time she sees them. -Quora

First of all, as per further information in the comments, this is not your child and it is NOT your place to be interfering in how this family handles the issue unless they have specifically ASKED for your advice. This is something for the offended friends and the parents to work out, and if you value your friendships you will back out of what isn’t your problem. The entire fact that you feel entitled to force your personal beliefs on other people’s children and intervene in their parenting and other social relationships is extremely disturbing. I suggest you get a good book on Co-dependence recovery.

Secondly, this is an “Emperor’s New Clothes” problem. There is NOTHING “wrong” with this toddler (who at 3 is actually a preschooler), so there is nothing the parents can do about it. You can’t fix what isn’t broken. This reminds me of medieval parents getting the idea in their heads that crawling was too animalistic and ungodly, and strapping their children to little roundabouts to force them to skip crawling and go right to “proper human” walking. Crawling is developmentally necessary for most children and they rarely skip over it, and their lower leg bones and muscles are not yet ready to bear their full weight, leading to possible bow-leggedness. You cannot force children to skip developmental stages because it offends people based on some ideology they have. It has consequences. It is grown-ups here who must accept the natural development of children however inconvenient it is. This is called ACTING LIKE AN ADULT.

This is a normal stage of neurological development. At a certain point in the developing brain it starts to categorize things as a means to understand them. The ability to understand who is biologically male and producing sperm and who is biologically female and producing ova is self-evidently crucial to the survival of every species on the planet that has sexual reproduction. Even for species that can literally morph from one sex to the other, it is still crucial to recognize which members of their species are in which sexual form, and to have that skill locked well down before puberty hits. Therefore that ability is hard-wired into us, just like our ability to acquire language is. This child has reached a stage where they can now identify key markers of biological sex in people’s body shapes (hip to waist ratio, shoulder to hip ratio) and faces (relative size and placement of eyes, nose and philtrum lengths, chin length and width etc) but they have no idea yet what “gender” is as a concept because their brain is not mature enough to entertain a concept that still confuses many adults, apparently.

Children are notorious for mis-gendering everyone, not just trans people. I was mis-gendered by two preschoolers yesterday when I appeared at work in a skirt instead of my typical jeans. There was even a story decades back in Reader’s Digest illustrating how they mix up and conflate sex and gender roles. It was submitted by a parent who allowed their 4 year old to go to JK wearing his sister’s barrettes, only to have the teacher overhear him arguing with another boy about whether he was a boy or a girl. The boy eventually became exasperated and pulled down his pants to show the other boy his penis to prove he was a boy, to which the other boy dismissively said, “Everyone has a penis, only girls wear barrettes.”

Here I will suggest that you also need some good books on child development and evolutionary biology.

This situation would not have been a problem even a few years ago, before “transsexual” was turned into a dirty word and transgender was foisted on us, instead. Once upon a time you could just tell a child that:

A) not everyone who is male or female fits neatly into the typical or average appearance for their sex (or behaviour, for that matter)

B) some people who are born into one sex are unhappy about it for reasons we don’t yet understand. They feel strongly that they are the other sex internally (in their mind/brain) and are much happier if everyone just lets them live as the sex they feel inside as much as possible, and they can have hormones and surgery to help them do so. Since most of those people don’t fully understand themselves until past puberty, they develop outwardly like their biological sex and it can take a lot of time and money to change that.

and

C) It’s impolite and unkind to make personal remarks, or to draw attention to physical features or other differences which people have no control over.

We don’t yet fully understand the biological working of things like gender development, gender identity, or sexual orientations, but there is more than enough evidence that they are “real” events with correlates in the material world. We know that people with conditions that are known to affect the structure and function of their temporal lobes are much more likely to be GLB (including sudden shifts in their sexual orientation after events like head injuries, strokes and seizures) and much more likely to identify as trans or otherwise not conforming to the gender binary (including again, sudden changes to their sense of self-identity in the wake of neurological events). Obviously the majority of people who are LGBT haven’t had a head injury, stroke or seizure, so being LGBT is not “caused by” those things, they’re just some of many things that can “flip the switch”; genetics, pre-natal hormone exposure, birth order, and developmental life experiences have all been tentatively cited as having a role to play.

*People on both the Right and Woke Left will be determined to misunderstand me here as saying that being GLB or T is evidence of a “sickness” of some sort…either agreeing and using this information as “proof” that it’s so or becoming angry at me for equating the two. So let’s just head off that nonsense at Go. ALL MANNER of changes can happen in the wake of neurological events in the temporal lobe or elsewhere. One man who had a head injury suddenly became a mathematical genius…do you think that’s evidence that being good at math is a “sickness”? One person finds they become more emotional, another less so (neither is a pathology unless taken to extremes that prevent the person functioning). Some people who develop Temporal Lobe Epilepsy suddenly take up writing or (less often) the visual arts. Is being a writer or artist a biological flaw? Obviously not. The linkage of any trait with an area of the brain is not evidence that the trait is pathological (it might be, it might not), it is merely evidence that one or more neurological substrates that control that trait resides in that particular part of the brain. As regards gender identity, it tells us that there is some part of our brains where sexual self-identity arises and therefore the person’s experience may be subjective (only they experience it, others cannot perceive it unless told of it) but is not imaginary.

In the past children gradually acquired the ability for more complex categorization and learned to differentiate between someone’s biological sex, their gender presentation (how closely they match others of their sex), and societal gender roles. Children are remarkably accepting of diversity and exceptions to rules when they are presented matter-of-factly. More so than adults who apparently can’t accept facts which don’t fit with their ideologies on the Left, any more than Evangelical Young-Earth Creationists on the Right can, and feel the need to tie themselves into mindless, slogan-droning intellectual pretzels as a result.

The fact that we now view even toddlers with suspicion of “transphobia” and seek to indoctrinate their natural neurological development out of them should be a GIANT F*ING RED FLAG that we are NOT becoming more aware of diversity and more accepting, we are becoming LESS able to see the full extent of how diverse humans really are and are being forced to pigeonhole them into categories that the average five year old is supposed to be outgrowing. What we are seeing is an extremely judgmental, rigid and abusive cult that denies an obvious reality that even a child can see, that biological sex is real and important, and cannot be replaced by or conflated with gender identity or roles, even if we also agree that gender presentation and gender identity are also important biological realities. It used to be only children who foolishly did so, but now we have adults telling children that everyone can have a penis and only girls wear barrettes.

In the original story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the child’s lack of indoctrination into social hierarchies left them nonconformist, and free to state what they saw with their own eyes with impunity. The child was not punished because children are not expected to be politically correct. In fact, it led the adults to realize that they had let fear and desire to conform and be thought clever blind them to obvious reality. It is the adults in the end who feel foolish and ashamed, and change their ways. We’re not yet at the end of the story of The Emperor’s New Gender, but based on the current trajectory the “adults” are going to double-down and I will soon be looking for a new career, as I will be expected to throw away everything I know about child development so that daycares can be run like Orwellian indoctrination camps. I will not participate in the ideological and developmental abuse of children so that a tiny minority of adults can live in a fantasy world in which they deny an aspect of reality when it has the temerity not to give a shit about their ideology.

6 notes · View notes