#she is a force of nature. she is a scared teenager. she is a prodigy. shes down bad
Note
Haori for the ask!
[ask game link] MY GIRL MY GIRL MY GIRL MY GIRL MY GIRL THANK YOU FOR ASKING ME ABOUT HER!!!!!!!!
How I feel about this character: um. see above. she is my favorite dgs girl ever and i love her so much and she deserves the entire world and also to rest once in a while. she is incredibly brave to the point of recklessness and she is incredibly responsible to the point of self loathing and she feels emotions so much all the time and i think she might actually be the least deliberately-repressed character in dgs which doesn’t say that much but still! every day i think about her in awe
— seriously, sixteen years old and you’ve helped make an entirely new poison and diagnosed its symptoms on sight and acted accordingly and also went into a beach hut to yell at a confirmed murderer. didn’t even do it because she hated her, did it because she wanted her goddamn poison back. who is doing it like haori murasame
All the people I ship romantically with this character: susato!!!!! and gina but i haven’t thought about ginahao as much as i should tbh. i think haori would take a shine to her immediately but actually fall for her the moment she sees gina scream at someone for susato’s or haori’s sake
My non-romantic OTP for this character: all? of them? yuujin and wilson are both super fascinating dynamics to explore with haori! but the one that actually takes up my entire frontal cortex is her and jezaille.
— they are both women in the same field but jezaille is lauded because she’s british whereas haori surely is not — i mean, that’s not actually said in canon but auchi disparagingly refers to her as a “tomboy” and susato mentions how incredible it is that she has a job in an all male university, i refuse to believe she didn’t have a fucking Time of it. and that in itself inspires jealousy, right, and then haori finds out she killed her mentor and she still has to work with her for Months??? i’d go insane! it’s a miracle haori didn’t actually murder her! like. here is my only chance to bond with someone who understands the exact position i am in, and then it turns out she hates me for almost the same petty reasons as the men in the laboratory. and also killed a guy. haori is so fucking alone it drives me up a wall
— also i wrote a ficlet in dante’s ronin au once where jezaille calls her susato’s attack dog
— also also, we do not have any information on whether she knew asougi or not but i like to think she did. just like as that guy who’s always around susato with the sword and the cringefail aura. maybe they had conversations while waiting for susato to come out of her tutoring sessions! maybe they knew each other!! do you think susato told her that he was dead after getting back to japan, or do you think she only found out after mamemomi accused mikotoba of covering it up at the end of 2-1?
My unpopular opinion about this character: tragically i dont think theres enough haori content for me to actually have unpopular opinions on her. but she performs so incredibly well under stress. i think shes one of the rare people for whom stress actually helps to narrow down her focus.
— also one thing i always laser in on when writing her is her unfailing emotional honesty which is deeply funny considering 2-1 happens because she decided to find out about the poison on her own rather than telling anyone; the self loathing slash impostor syndrome slash fear of failure and rejection overrules that bit of her i guess :pensive: she is fully in panic mode for so much of 2-1
— oh yeah Yeah The Self Loathing thats also something ive never seen in any haori fics yet! she has a whole bit about wanting susato to throw her to the ground in the recess halfway through the trial and it’s kind of a joke but also Not yknow. “i completely betrayed your trust” like. god. theres a perfectionist streak there i think or at least signs of a not super great self esteem!
— hey haori would you say that the two things you hate the most (about yourself) are poisoning and betrayal. haha. okay thats not actual character analysis but i couldnt resist the reference
One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: i wish she came back in any form at all i wish susato mentioned her after 2-1 at all although i will say that 1) her being part of the defense in the end credits is like catnip to me and 2) it is my firm belief that susato deliberately avoids talking about her because she’s too afraid of her own feelings to even consider opening up to ryuu about her
— when will the haori murasame fancase of that trial at the end appear, by the way. i want them to get hosonaga a decently light sentence for theft and then he is immediately accused of murder right afterwards
— she also should have gotten to learn about wilson being awful. and also should have been the one to give susato jezaille’s case notes in 1-1 (i saw that hc in a susato roleswap au fic and i have completely integrated it into my belief system. as far as i am concerned she was that person. but a confirmation in 2-1 woulda been nice)
My OTP: [poking head out behind ao3 page and enough susahao fanart to drown a man] take a guess
My OT3: add gina in there baby!!! i dont have as solid ideas on the rest of the girlcule yet but gina is Necessary.
— i actually think haori would dislike both maria and nikolina upon first meeting, maria because of The Racism (she’d scream at her about believing in skull sizes) and nikolina because she does come off as pretty privileged and smug and aloof when you first meet her
— [insert five page rant about how we never see nikolina outside of her being afraid for her life and therefore have almost no idea what she was like in the troupe or among the crew but also she was probably afraid for her life while in the troupe as well so in a way we do have a pretty good idea of her behavior and also i think she uses aloofness as a shield]
— but Point Is they both remind her of jezaille too much for her to like them at first. but later! who knows?
#jules.txt#g: ace attorney#…okay im maintagging:#haori murasame#rei membami#sorry this is barely coherent it is late and i love her sososososo much#she is a force of nature. she is a scared teenager. she is a prodigy. shes down bad#i miss her more than anythiiiiiiing#mail#thesomewhatliterateaxolotl#caps
6 notes
·
View notes
Note
Why would you hide the Villain remus and Janus thing in the tags, I'd read the hell outta Hero Virgil turned Villain
you mean this??? shdbic aaa Yeah I want to write it, but i also want to write a lot of things. xD but this is def one of those things i’d love to write a short-ish one-shot about just so I can write it.
can you imagine? Virgil, young and anxious, manifesting powers of the light and dark variety, able to manipulate shadows and summon electricity with such fine precision because he’s spent so long fretting over accidentally hurting someone with it that he refused to even dare try and step into the hero scene until he was 150% certain that he’d trained his powers to disconnect from his emotions so that he’d never have an outburst that could even harmlessly shock or scare someone. He’s so in control over his powers that its to an insane degree just because he wants to make sure he cant hurt anybody on accident.
(complete ramble continued under the cut bc boy howdy this got so long it might as well be its own short one-shot)
And, he’s worked so in depth with his powers because of course he can’t just suppress them!(Suppressing electricity based powers doesn’t get rid of that energy, it just makes that constantly generating energy stay put and build, which makes it even more dangerous when it’s finally released, so suppression is a no go) So of course not only does he work extensively with learning how to control his powers, but also how to healthily use them and expend his energy safely, effectively, and skillfully as he grows into them. Might as well push your limits of learning just how much your power can do if you have to learn how to exist safely around others by controlling it, right?
So, by default, by the time Virgil is both old enough and confident enough in his powers to consentingly apply for registry to the worlds heroes association, he’s both insanely skilled with his powers, and also insanely talented(the equivalent to a child prodigy, not that many people in charge of the worlds hero association believe that, though.). The people who had been interviewing him believed the same, thinking him to be just another super teenager boasting about his skills when they couldn’t even sense his power, thinking that what little power Virgil did have was not even worth bothering to report anything substantial about the interview. That he’d oughta go try the villain’s headquarters, because at least they take in wandering powerless for henchmen all the time.
Virgil, feeling pissed but not quite enraged yet, because what teenager wouldn’t hate it to be so invalidated and demeaned at being out right dismissed as a threat, let alone considered more of an invalid for not having powers, starts to display his power.
First it’s the main interviewer’s phone that they’d been glancing boredly at, drained suddenly of all power. Then it’s the landline of that specific room, then it’s the lamp, the computer suddenly shuts off with zero warning and nothing of it turns on. The lamp in the corner of the room goes dark, bulb by bulb, and the printer in the room dies. Virgil’s eyes are glowing violet but he hasn’t moved any more than the annoyed twitch of an eyelid. the light’s overhead turn off, leaving the lights in the hallway still on, leaving the remaining light in the room coming from the single window in the room and the open doorway.
He reaches up a hand, and snaps once, and shadows swallow up the light over the hallway and the window, acting as a wall from the inside and out.
Now the only light in the room is his glowing eyes.
The second interviewer is struggling to summon fire from her hands to light the room, but it doesn’t work. The energy she’s using to summon the fire is immediately sapped by Virgil’s force, there isn’t even a spark. The first interviewer can feel Virgil’s power now, it’s bright and burning. It’s like he has a core in the middle of his being like a sun’s core because its storing so much power, and the only reason they can see it now is because Virgil’s using his power. He has so much control that even on a nonphysical level it’s nearly tangible, the way that they can see his shadow powers conceal even the existence of his power, now that they know what their looking at.
In mere seconds, this kid has tipped the world on their head and put the fear of god into them, an undetected yet undeniable threat in the making.
They watch his eyes tilt with his head, and the distinct sound of the entire building powering down is unmistakable, shouts of surprise and confusion due to the failure of the buildings many fail-safes failing to trigger. And then, with another snap, all power is restored to normal in the blink of the eye, all machines and lights are functioning perfectly, not an irregular shadow in sight, and all at once Virgil reads as a normal human teenager, not a whiff of power to be sensed. He looks pretty peeved, though.
“Maybe I will try my luck at the Dark Side then, at least they care about the people that look to be taken in. Let me know if you changed your mind, I’d love to have a do-over. With a different set of interviewers, mind you.” before he walks out of the interview room, off to blow off some steam legally and safely.
Imagine his outrage when a week later he’s served a summons to court, deeming him a “Threat to Society” and “better left in jail until the court can be convinced of his good nature” because he’s an “out of control juvenile gifted with an unprecedented amount of power that he couldn’t possibly control without strict legal supervision and interference and cannot be trusted to continue to exist as a normal citizen until the W.H.A deems it safe.”
Faced with possible lifelong inprisonment and zero control over the rest of his life because an association of supers think that they know better and that he’s some stupid teenager that was set loose on the world with means to only cause catastrophe and devastation, or freedom at the hands of some ambiguously grey moral decisions every once in a while and being treated as a normal human being even if he has to be a henchman to another super for a while?
The decision isn’t a hard one to make.
So imagine his surprise when he’s not only accepted into the Dark Side after being respectfully asked to demonstrate the full extent of his power and his control over it, but instead of becoming a villain’s henchmen, he instead gains the full title of Villain(with another Villain(Janus) stepping in to mentor him and show him the ropes of the rules and everything), and even further: Gets his own henchmen assigned to him.
A pair, Patton and Logan.
Patton has a partial shapeshifting ability, but it only really lets him turn into a big frog man, making him perfect for doing any of the main heavy lifting for the team, and also perfect for protecting Logan when under attack. He’s built like a himbo and is absolutely 100% a himbo, heart of gold, super strong, buff dad bod, the whole sha-bang.
Logan has a power that is one part linked with memory, one part linked with technology. His brain can retain information like a computer databank, and he can get any misfunctioning technology to work if he can get his hands on it or a connection to it. He avoids all the quirks that interfere or damage real databanks and technology(like magnets, water, and short-circuiting) and can semi-directly connect with devices he is familiar with, without having to hold/touch/look at one.
All together, they have the beginnings of a well rounded team: the brawns, the brains, and the leader with plans and the power to make it happen. Even before finding out their reasons for coming to the dark side, Virgil becomes ride or die for them. (And honestly, they’re also pretty ride or die for him too, not even starting with the fact that they’re both like 26-27 and Virgil is an 18 year old anxious mess that had to make the decision over being the bad guy or losing any and all autonomy for the foreseeable future, which is gonna fuck up any kid and young adult’s brain. So, lowkey adopt him as a younger sibling even though he’s the boss of them and just barely taller than them.(Virgil is a tol lanky boi, and while Logan, standing at 5′9″, is but an inch shorter than Virgil at the start, Virgil still has growing room and peaks at about 6′4″ by the time hes 22. Patton at his normal height is like 5′6″, but frog man height is like 8′3″)
Oh, and they definitely make the Worlds Hero Association regret not taking Virgil’s existence kindly, Big Time.
#sanders sides#virgil sanders#logan sanders#patton sanders#luka writes#luka write this#janus sanders#supervillain vee au#ask to tag
262 notes
·
View notes
Text
Things I’ve managed to convince myself are canon:
Dick was born in Romania and spent his entire childhood traveling with the circus not once settling down therefore when his parents died in America (supposedly just another country they stopped in) he was forced to stay there. Meaning dick was an illegal immigrant for a long time while Bruce constantly was trying to use his money and power to get Dick legal without him leaving the country OR anyone finding out
This also means Dick couldn’t really speak English when he moved in with Bruce (this is backed up by him constantly dismantling the English language in the YJ cartoon)
All of the bat kids were bullied brutally in school
Bruce encouraged them to fight back just like Alfred did with him (“never throw the first punch but if get hit make sure they’re the ones that stay down”)
Dick spent a couple weeks in juvie after his parents died and it was the worst couple weeks of his life
Dick had a childhood crush on Wally (who is straight) when dick was 16 he sat Wally down and told him. He told him he expected nothing out of this confession he just hated feeling like he was lying to Wally, Wally understood and was really nonchalant about it nothing changed in their relationship
Jason grew up loving wonder woman and considered her his greatest inspiration in being a hero when he was robin
In return Diana absolutely adored Jason
When Jason got older his respect for Diana only grew and Diana constantly stood up for him, even going as far as (subtly) threatening Bruce a couple times
Jason can’t handle the smell of drugs at all, he always has to wear a filtered mask during drug busts just in case
Jason used to smoke but ever since coming back the smoke just reminds him of the explosion (I saw this somewhere I can’t remember where shout out to you tho)
Jason hates the color green
Tim was severely neglected as a child
Tim learned multiple different languages from all the nanny’s he’s had
Tim is an amazing photographer
All of Bruce’s kids are really close with Selina and go to her to talk or just if they need a break from Bruce and she absolutely adores it
This is one of the main reasons Bruce wanted to marry her
Bruce might be a little awkward and socially inept but he is a good father and loves all of his kids and even tho he might slip up sometimes he would NEVER (I’m looking at you Tim king) NEVER EVER intentionally hurt one of his kids physically or mentally BECAUSE THAT IS EXTEREMELY OUT OF CHARACTER @ ANY WRITER WHO HAS MADE BRUCE A JERK GOD LEARN YOUR CHARACTER JEEZ
Damian is a phenomenal artist and is considered a prodigy
It is something he keeps to himself however
Both Dick and Tim have gone and worked under Selina during thier robin days for a few weeks
The only person who is close to Dicks level when it comes to acrobatics is Selina
There are days where you are only allowed to speak in your native tongue to help Everyone keep up their language skills (Tim speaks Filipino dick speaks Romani Jason speaks Italian Stephanie speaks Portuguese Damian speaks Arabic bruce switches Cassie speaks Chinese) these are the days duke feels like slamming his head through a wall
All of the bat kids have green lantern shirts
Tim has a habit of stealing clothes from literally anyone
Tim prefers tea over coffee
Ace and Titus are both trained service dog however Titus is Damians specifically while Ace is trained to alert Alfred of Bruce and to alert Bruce of Dick Tim and Jason
Bruce is think about getting another dog for Cassie steph and duke because he doesn’t want to overwhelm Ace with 3 more people
Nobody in that spoiled family except for Jason and Alfred can make ANYTHING other that ramen cereal and toast
Dick is insanely healthy because that’s how he grew up in the circus AND the manor
Bruce once lit the refrigerator on fire trying to cook. No one knows how. He denies he ever did such to this day
Dick was considered a heartthrob as a teen and actually was featured on vogue in native dress and took the opportunity to talk about his culture
Vickie was fuming but so was Lois
Dick dresses like Harry styles. Convince me otherwise. I dare you.
However his go to look is a Hawaiian short tucked into black skinny jeans and black converse
Just like Selina everyone in the batfamily has a tendency to confide in Dinah
No homophobia sexism or racism is allowed in the Wayne house hold if you display any of the following you will promptly be kicked out. It has happened before
Cassie has punched lex Luther in the face at a gala
Bruce laughed
Cass has also only worn sweats and a sports bra to a gala
Cass is a ballet dancer and likes teaching her brothers the moves she has learned
When Bruce came back from the dead and found out the justice league thought Tim was going insane with grief and didn’t do anything about it he yelled and screamed for a solid hour. Then he went silent. for weeks he didn’t say a word. It was the most terrifying he had ever been
Duke hangs on to the fact that he is the only meta allowed in Gotham with absolute pride
All the robins check in on the kids from the ‘we are robin’ movement every now and again just to make sure they are okay
Adults are terrified of the bats however children love them
Every member of the batfamily has been called over by child screaming out their window only to spend the next hour helping said child with their homework
Batman makes sure he is approachable to children he wants them to feel safe enough around him to ask for his help no matter what
That has led to him: 1. Patching up stuff animals 2. Calming down imaginary friends 3. Giving opinions on important matters such as which color is the best 4. Helping with homework 5. Trying to be persuaded into convincing the parents not to make broccoli anymore. It’s his favorite part about putting on a mask
Teenagers tho a little more hesitant also approach him with a little more serious matters and more for advice. (How can I help my friend with depression? How can I help my anxiety? I think friend is doing drugs how can I help. I don’t think these are good people I’m hanging out with but now I’m too scared to stop)
However if teens catch any bat sitting on a rooftop close to their windows they ask more stupid type of questions
“Hey nightwing how do you ask out a girl?” “Red hood I’m trying to write this book so hypothetically how long does it take some one to bleed out?” “If I payed you would you take my physical for PE for me?” “How good do you think you would do on the pacer test?” “Can you tell my little sister to shut up, she’ll listen to you?” “How much do I have to pay you to scare my friend?”
Talks between people and the vigilantes from rooftop to window happen a lot and it is always the highlight of the patrol. They like that the people of Gotham trust them.
Jason was brought back via whatever that superboy reset was (I’m still a little fuzzy, sue me) clawed his way out of his grave and then found by Talia. He was then but in the pit for his head injuries. Making it easier for the shadows to manipulate and brainwash him into hating Bruce. However that’s the only thing they manipulated him into. Jason didn’t go ‘insane by the pit’ and his thoughts and stances on killing are his own. And the way Bruce handles Jason being back is what made Jason continue hating Bruce even aged the brainwashing ‘wore off’
The day his dad died was what Jason considered the best day of his life
Dick is extremely intelligent and was considered a child prodigy (this isn’t a headcanon this is actually canon some of y’all just forget and need to be reminded)
Dick loves math (also canon)
Jason can sing. Like really really well.
Theater Nerd™️ Jason Todd
Jason is scared of thunderstorms
Damian is afraid of heights
Lady shiva absolutely adores Tim
They have all been arrested a few times each for varying reasons when they were teenagers
If Alfred or Bruce yell one thier full names the other kids will cover for them but ONLY if they use the full name other wise it’s every man for himself
I know this one isn’t batfam but I think kon playes the electric guitar and has a really unique punk-ish vibe type singing voice (think hobo Johnson)
Dick has naturally curly hair
#comics#dc comics#tim drake#damain wayne#jason todd#dick grayson#bruce wayne#bruce is a good dad#alfred pennyworth#selina kyle#wally west#birdflash#kon el
90 notes
·
View notes
Text
this was actually written for a prompt i got ages ago - “ed and/or al mess up and hurt Roy and/or Riza on a mission” from an anon - but i completely forgot i’d already half written this and started on a completely new idea and posted that lmao so here’s the original one that i found and finished
hope you enjoy it!
rated: t | words: 2516
“Do you want backup on this one Lieutenant?” Mustang asked her as she loaded her pistol. She hid her small smirk, predicting his question perfectly in her mind just moments before he asked it.
“That won’t be necessary, sir. We’ll be fine.”
“I know you will be fine. It’s Fullmetal I’m concerned about.”
“The boy will be fine too,” she stressed playfully, turning her smirk towards him. Her expression turned soft when she saw the concern in his eyes. It was natural for him to worry about them all before going on a solo mission. Yes, she would have Edward with her, but he’d only been a State Alchemist for a few weeks. He could handle himself in a fight – that much had been proved already – but he was still just a child. A fact the military seemed to forget.
Mustang muttered something under his breath. Riza ignored it while rolling her eyes.
The Fullmetal Alchemist walked through the door, followed by his brother.
“We’re ready, Lieutenant Hawkeye.”
“We?” Mustang questioned.
“Yeah,” Edward replied, as if it was obvious. “We.”
“Alphonse is coming too?” Riza questioned, lifting an eyebrow with a small smile. She’d expected as much.
“Well, I, uh, was wondering if I could come alone with you? Someone needs to keep Ed out of trouble,” Alphonse reasoned, pleading his case.
“Hey!” Edward protested
“I don’t doubt your abilities Lieutenant Hawkeye, but two sets of eyes are better than one.”
Riza chuckled as Edward begun to protest loudly and the two begun to argue. She took off walking down the street, heading towards their destination while the sound of their argument followed closely behind her.
* * *
“Edward?” Riza hissed. There was no answer. “Shit.”
Creeping forward, pistol drawn, she approached the area of warehouse where she’d last seen the brothers. She cursed herself for letting them out of her sight. They were tracking down a lead on the Philosopher’s Stone and she was there as back up. Now she’d let her charges out of her sight.
The ground begun to shake underneath her feet. She stumbled at the sudden shock, throwing out a hand to catch herself against the wall. It continued to shake before simply crumbling. She hit the ground, her knees bashing against the stone painfully. The wall also begun to crumble, falling, striking her hand and arm on the way down. Riza hissed in pain as some rocks broke the skin before she could pull away.
“Come back here you bastard!” she heard Edward cry out from somewhere to her left. Rolling her eyes, Riza pushed herself to her feet, shaking out her hand to try and rid it of the pain.
“Edward!” Alphonse cried, probably to try and stop him from doing something reckless. However, given the situation and the current state of the warehouse they were in, he’d already done something incredibly reckless. There was another clap followed by more shocks beneath her feet. She tried to walk, but she kept falling as the ground continued to move.
“Alphonse?” she called out, trying to get at least one of them under control.
“Lieutenant Hawkeye?” he replied. She rounded a stack of crates and found him in the centre of a small clearing, whipping his head around as he tried to locate her.
“What’s going on?” she barked, trying to get a handle on the situation.
“Oh, uh, nothing. Just, uh…”
“Alphonse,” she warned.
“Sorry, Lieutenant. Ed is trying to stop the guy we were tracking from escaping.”
“This is not the way to do that,” she stated, voice hard as she flicked the safety off her pistol. “Where is he?” Riza barked, eyes scanning the room.
“Come back!” they heard Edward call out. “I want to talk to you!”
Suddenly there was a massive tremor and the glass above them shattered. Riza looked up in horror, finding there was nowhere for her to move to so she could shield herself.
“Lieutenant!” Alphonse cried. Suddenly, she was pulled sharply backwards into his metal body, hitting it hard. It was enough to knock the wind out of her lungs. She gasped as his hands held her body still. The glass missed the vital parts of her body, but her arms were still stretched out as her body was jerked backwards, the glass piercing her bare skin. Riza closed her eyes against the pain, biting her lip to try and stop herself from crying out.
“Are you okay?” Alphonse asked worriedly.
Finally getting her breath back, she straightened up and forced herself out of Alphonse’s arms. “Where is Edward?” she bit out between her teeth. Her voice was deadly calm, posture wound tight because if it wasn’t, she would explode there and then.
Her anger was carefully restrained inside of her, as she’d learned to do for most of her life.
Edward is just a kid. He’s just a kid. Don’t snap. Don’t do it.
“I, uh –”
“Find him. Now,” she forced out. “I will be waiting for you outside.”
* * *
“Lieutenant?” Edward’s small voice reached her.
She turned, fixing her gaze on him. It seemed to make him shrink in size. His shoulders rounded inwards, his head dipped, and his gaze was cast downwards. This was a new look for him. Normally when the Colonel was telling him off for something, he would argue right back, but with just one sharp look, Riza had him shying away from her.
It would have amused her, how different the reactions from Edward were between her and the Colonel. It would have, had she not been so angry at him.
“You cannot, under any circumstances, waltz into a warehouse – or any building, actually – and start tearing up the place just because you don’t want someone to leave.” Edward nodded while Alphonse stood ashamed next to him. Riza had finished wiping the blood off her arms and tossed the soiled tissue in the car behind her. Edward watched and visibly paled at the sight of her injuries. “If that man wants to leave, you let him leave, you do not use alchemy to make him stay, do I make myself clear?”
Riza’s voice remained a deadly calm throughout. Her anger at the boy’s recklessness and complete disregard for everything and anyone around them was held in check. After all, they were just children. She remembered being that age. Her and the Colonel got up to all kinds of mischief as teenagers – it was mostly just Roy doing something insanely stupid so he could try and amuse her. But this was on a whole other level, and it was uncalled for. Edward was in the military now. Regardless of that fact, he couldn’t go around tearing up the city because he felt like it.
The boy before her audibly gulped then nodded. “I understand,” he whispered.
“Good. Get in the car.” Her order wasn’t barked, but it almost was. Her anger was slipping through, but she reigned it in as tightly as she could. Edward flinched and nodded, walking around to where he’d sat on the ride over like a dog with its tail between its legs. The door was closed quietly.
“Lieutenant –” Alphonse began, his tone worried. Riza was facing the warehouse, her back to him, and she didn’t turn. She couldn’t just yet. If she did, she would glare at him, and she didn’t want to.
It was likely Edward had initiated this whole thing, but Alphonse could be equally as careless as Edward sometimes. They just didn’t think. For being two kids who were supposedly prodigies, they could be clueless, especially when it came to the real world. And that was the reality of it all. They were children. Many didn’t understand that because they were in the military, but Riza understood it perfectly, because she’d been in the same position. She’d had to grow up far too fast and had been left to fend for herself, so everyone in town treated her like she was older than she was. It was likely they thought she was older but was just a bit on the small side for her age.
“In the car, Alphonse,” she stated. She needed time. She needed to decide what to do. The two of them had practically torn the place apart, and now she was left to deal with the fallout. No wonder the Colonel was so frustrated with Edward sometimes.
There was a quiet pause then the sound of metallic feet walking away from her, towards the car.
Letting out a long sigh once the door was closed, she walked back into the warehouse to assess the damage. She could almost picture Edward and Alphonse protesting at her entering alone, but there wasn’t a peep from them. She’d probably scared them into silence. Drawing her weapon and flicking the safety off, she entered the building.
She had no idea what was going on. She didn’t even know who the target was! She’d just been given a name. Edward had destroyed the place and caused the ceiling to fall on them before she could see the target.
Letting out a frustrated growl as she assessed the damage, Riza made a loop of the building, which she determined was empty. Whoever that man was, he was long gone, and Riza didn’t blame him.
Walking back to the car, she was in deep thought. Arriving at a solution, Riza tried to let all her anger flow out of her. She hated to do it to them, but she needed to call it in. Someone needed to survey the damage and restore it to its rightful state. Someone also needed to assess what stock had been damaged and how much the military owed the business owner. The thought alone made Riza want to pinch the bridge of her nose to try and stave off the headache forming.
“Lieutenant Hawkeye,” she stated to the operator across the car radio. She gave her security number, calling the Colonel’s office and requesting the team to meet her at the warehouse.
She wasn’t looking forward to having to explain to him what had happened. Especially as it was under her watch.
Riza slammed the door closed after climbing in the driver’s seat, using that as an outlet for her anger. Out the corner of her eye she noticed the two brothers flinch at the sound in the rear-view mirror.
“You both don’t think,” she began.
“We’re sorry,” Alphonse replied, his voice incredibly small and sounding every bit like the twelve-year-old he was.
“That’s fine, Alphonse, but what if someone had gotten hurt?” Riza asked. It wasn’t to be nasty. It was to show them the reality of working with the military. She didn’t point out the fact that she had gotten hurt. That would be cruel to them. “What if you had gotten hurt? These bad guys won’t see a child and immediately stop and show mercy. The people you encounter will not hesitate to kill you just because you’re a child,” she stated, her voice softer. “Especially if you’re with the military,” she added. Glancing over at Edward, he dipped his gaze in shame. “Your talents are great – the both of you.” She glanced over at Alphonse too. “But that will only get you so far. You’re not indestructible. You never will be. If that automail breaks you’re out of commission, Edward,” she reminded him softly. “If someone manages to break Alphonse’s armour, he’s gone.” Edward stiffened, and Alphonse shifted in his seat, his metal clanking together. “You need to think before you act.”
“We’re sorry you got hurt,” Alphonse apologised, sounding like he was on the edge of tears. “You’re right – we didn’t think.”
“Yeah,” Edward added. “I’m really sorry, Lieutenant Hawkeye.” His eyes were full of remorse as he met her gaze finally.
“Good. Apology accepted.” Out the corner of her eye, she spotted the Colonel’s car pulling up. “Stay in here,” she ordered softly. Holstering her weapon, she stepped out of the car. The last thing they needed right now was Mustang yelling at Edward.
“Hawkeye, what –” His eyes landed on her scratched and bloody forearms. His gaze lifted her hers, questioning and hard. With one eyebrow raised, he asked her what happened.
“A little misunderstanding,” she waved off. “The guy thought Edward and Alphonse were trying to take him away somewhere, so fought back.”
Mustang stared her down, but that had never worked on her before. He probably knew she was withholding information but wouldn’t call her out on it. Not in front of everyone.
“The guy was a maniac,” Riza added. “Collapsed the glass ceiling on top of us, so we had to fight back,” she shrugged as if it was nothing. It wasn’t a lie – the target had collapsed the ceiling on top of them to try and stop Edward from chasing him. “Some of the stock inside got damaged as they defended themselves.”
Mustang rolled his eyes and turned to face the warehouse, ordering members of the team to go inside and scope it out.
“And you, Lieutenant?” he asked, looking down at her arms, before his gaze flicked back up to hers. There was an unspoken question in it, an unspoken concern in there. She offered him a small smile in return.
“Perfectly fine, sir. Just a flesh wound.”
Mustang rolled his eye as he turned to face the warehouse again. “Why is it, that it’s always trouble with those two.”
Riza shrugged, surveying the work the team was doing as they had their discreet conversation. “I don’t know, sir, but it reminds me of someone else.”
“Oh?” he asked, his tone questioning.
Riza nodded. “A boy I knew from when I was a child. He always seemed to drag me into trouble, just like Edward seems to do with Alphonse.”
Mustang chuckled beside her, shifting in place so his hand brushed against hers. She felt the sensation tingle over the back of her hand and passed her wrist. “That boy sounds like a riot.”
“He was,” she surmised. “But a pain the ass, too.” She smiled fondly when he turned sharply to face her with a disapproving frown. “He turned out okay, though. I just like to remember the mischief and trouble we got into when we were their age,” she added, jerking her head backwards towards Edward and Alphonse in the car. It was a reminder for Mustang to go easy on them.
The brothers couldn’t hear their conversation – they were both too far away – but when they turned, both boys seemed to shrink into the seat.
“That boy did get into a lot of trouble, didn’t he?” Mustang mused to himself. “I remember you telling me about him.”
“I’m sure you did too, sir,” she smirked. “So, remember, go easy on them.”
Mustang sighed and nodded. “I suppose,” he joked. Riza bumped his shoulder with hers before walking to help her teammates in the warehouse. Behind her, she heard Mustang greeting the brothers, but his tone was soft as he encouraged the boys out of the car.
36 notes
·
View notes
Text
The Past is Gone (but something might be found) Preview Pt. III
Somehow, the text from the original post was deleted when I tried to edit the tags to make this easier to sort. I’ve restored it. Once again, I’m just posting this as a reminder that I’m alive and still trying to write!
PLOT: Vann, Meetra, and Carth touch the wrong thing at the wrong shrine and are turned into themselves at 18. Alek finds himself paying his penance to the Force when he has to simultaneously watch over the trio while trying to figure out how to restore them to their proper ages.
Now saddled with three teenagers and very few clues, Alek nodded in acquiescence as he trudged back towards the Hawk. Luckily, they were all fairly well behaved during the walk. Once they reached the ship the real fun began.
“So, do any of you know the codes to get back on the ship?”
There was a long bout of uncomfortable silence during which it became clear that no adult knowledge about the freighter had stuck with the teens. The worst part was that Alek did know the codes but couldn’t admit that fact without seeming suspicious. The next best option was to rewire the door panel and go from there.
“Alright, here’s a better question. Do any of you know how to rewire a hatch?”
Predictably, it was Deran who raised his hand. “Obviously I can, at least if I have the correct tools. Unfortunately, I don’t have my normal gear…”
The amount of places that Vann had broken into or out of during his search for the Star Forge still grated on Alek’s nerves. He knew for a fact there was a multitool tucked somewhere in that worn black jacket, but it was yet another fact he couldn’t openly share. “This might sound absurd, but everyone check your pockets. If your clothing originally belonged to spacers, and it looks like it did, the original owners may have left something useful behind.”
It was a risky gamble since there was always a chance that one of them had identifying documents on their person. But Alek was hoping they’d left those behind to perform a mission as covert as hiding a highly dangerous Sith holocron. Onasi’s civilian clothing was the best indicator that this might be the case. For once the Force was on his side and the search produced nothing but various odds and ends. An extra reload for the blasters, a few credits, a ration bar, a medpac, and finally a multitool that Vann had definitely purchased illegally.
Deran was predictably pleased to find the item and immediately set to work rewiring the door to his own ship. Meanwhile, Alek quietly filed that irony away for later. When the exit ramp slid open with a smooth hiss, Onasi practically cracked a tooth in his desperate attempt to not look impressed.
The inside of the Hawk was in partial disarray, though it was hard to tell if this was from whatever had transpired to turn three adults into teenagers or the mere fact that it was Vann’s ship and thus naturally full of clutter. Either way, the mess made it easier for Alek to order the teens to remain in the main hold where it was neater and theoretically ‘safer’ while he ‘checked’ the rest of the freighter. As soon as he was sure they would stay put, he moved into the cockpit to look for further clues.
Despite his tendency towards random piles of mechanical parts, Vann was absolutely fastidious when it came to researching locations and making notes about what he discovered. Before the original trip to Dromund Kaas he’d compiled an entire datapad full of files on the history of Sith purebloods, their laws, and their customs. While Nirauan had significantly less information recorded, there was still a pad with multiple paragraphs discussing the planet’s connection to both the Rakata Infinite Empire and the Force itself. It seemed that the crew was aiming to land near a series of suspected Rakata ruins that had a notable presence.
Datapad in hand, Alek peeked into the main hold to inform his charges of his next step. “Just so you’re aware, I think I found a series notes mentioning that this planet has a strange connection to the Force. I don’t know if it has anything to do with your current situation, but we can’t rule it out. I have a friend who might be able to untangle the few clues we currently have, so I’m going to comm her using the ship’s unit. Just wait here until I’m done.”
“Is she a Jedi?” Meetra was sprawled across two seats looking dangerously bored.
“She was at one time, but she’s since left the Order. However, she’s very knowledge about certain subjects and I feel that her input will be extremely helpful.” One of the subjects she had a great deal of experience with was being a Force prodigy and another was ancient artifacts from the Infinite Empire, currently making her the galaxy’s only authority on the situation. When there were no further questions, Alek hurried away to contact Rakata Base in the hope of begging Bastila for assistance.
“Vann?” The young woman’s face immediately darkened when she saw who was on the other end of the call. “Why are you there and where is Vann?”
“I’m here because Meetra contacted me when there was a complication with their current mission,” Alek hissed as quietly as possible. Noting the concern that immediately overtook Bastila’s face he assured her, “Everyone is healthy. I hesitate to say ‘fine’ because, well… Somehow, through a combination of some Rakta ruins and a Sith holocron, all three members of this crew are currently teenagers with no memories of their adult selves. I’d estimate them between seventeen and nineteen, if I had to guess.”
The incredulous glare was absolutely scathing. “You’ve picked a poor time to develop a sense of humor.”
“Why in Sith hells would I joke about this? I currently have three teenagers in the hold of this damn ship who are convinced that I’m a Jedi Sentinel named Naver who happened to sense a disturbance in the Force. Since it’s blatantly clear that my creativity it lacking, you can be sure that I couldn’t make this bantha fodder up if I tried!”
“Dustil, can you please come here? Our former ‘master’ is on the comm and he believes that he’s being hilarious. Perhaps you can convince him to tell me what’s really going on.”
“What the hells is going on now, Malak?” The younger Onai looked supremely irritated, which actually mirrored how Alek was currently feeling.
“That’s not my name.”
Appearing unbothered by the correction, Dustil sneered for a moment before snapping, “What kinrath nest did Vann get my dad into this time?”
“Oh, did he not tell you? Supposedly through the will of the Force, Vann, Meetra, and your father are now teenagers with no memory of their adult lives.” Bastila looked equally unamused. “Funny, yes?”
“Hi-kriffing-larious.”
Alek was about two second from hanging up and hoping that Rand would be more helpful, if only to get Meetra back into her proper body, when a slender figure crept into the room just within view of the comm unit.
“Um, Knight Naver, I apologize for bothering you but…”
There was a loud pop of static from the other end of the comm, which turned out to be Bastila covering the microphone with her hand so that she could curse for about thirty seconds straight.
“Yes, Deran? I was actually just telling me friend Bastila a bit about you and the others in the hope that she’d be willing to assist us in figuring out what happened. Perhaps you’d like to speak with her about your current situation? It could be useful.”
It was hard to tell who was more bewildered by the entire scenario. Luckily, Deran’s natural curiosity quickly took hold and he slipped over to the console and situated himself before the camera. “Hello, Bastila was it? What did you want to ask me?”
“Oh stars…” The young woman was doing a poor job of disguising her surprise, though she still managed to stutter, “I apologize for my lack of manners. You just… remind me of someone I know. No matter. Actually, Deran, I was just wondering how, ah, how old you are.”
“You really aren’t a Jedi, are you? Sorry, that was rude. It’s just… everyone in the Order always seems to know everything about me. But uh, I turned eighteen a few months ago.”
“Two years before Knighthood…”
“Bastila, be careful. You don’t want to scare the boy!” While it was technically true that Deran became the youngest Knight in the order at age twenty, that wasn’t information his eighteen-year old self knew. It wasn’t until nineteen that his trials actually began.
Plastering on a false smile, the young woman quickly stammered, “That’s just a guess on my part. Though, of course, I could be wrong. It’s not like I can see the future and you’re so very… young.”
Unfortunately, just the mention of Knighthood had made Deran’s back go stiff, his jaw ticking in the corner even as his expression remained stoic and proper. “Well, that’s for the Council to decide. They know best.” Even at this age he sounded thoroughly unconvinced. “What else do you want to ask me?”
“That’s… that’s it.” Turning to Alek, Bastila stated, “I believe you and I’ll do whatever I can to help. Just tell me what you need.”
“I’ll send you all of the data I have in a minute. Let me just find out what brought Deran in here in the first place.”
“I came in to let you know that Carth and Meetra left the ship. They said that they got tired of waiting for you and decided to explore on their own.” The teen winced slightly. “Also, they may have been flirting? I’m not always great at telling that type of stuff, but it’s possible they just went to go and… you know.”
The snort of hysterics from Dustil was all the confirmation that Alek needed to know that this entire situation was his punishment from the Force. Part of him considered letting Meetra and Onasi do whatever they wanted. Someone else could deal with the fallout. But he also needed to get Deran out of the room to prevent him from snooping. “I’m concerned that they’re going to get themselves into trouble. There are some very powerful ruins on this planet and I’d hate for them to make the current situation even more complicated. Can I trust you to find them and bring them back safely?”
It was an underhanded ploy. Alek was fully aware that Deran’s facade of teenage bravado combined with his crippling fear of failure would make him agree to almost any task without question. But the former Sith didn’t have time to chase two teenagers down, all while trying to keep a third from learning that he was currently speaking with his own kriffing Padawan.
As expected, Deran immediately nodded. “Of course. I’ll bring them back as quickly as possible.”
It wasn’t until the teen’s footfalls disappeared off the ship that Alek sat down with a sigh, his head pounding from the sheer mental acrobatics required to keep this situation moving forward. As he uploaded the information from Vann’s datapad he grumbled, “For Force sake, Dustil. I thought your father would be the responsible one!”
The damned kid was still laughing. “Just checking, but is Meetra the teenager as pretty as Meetra the adult? Big blue eyes and wavy blonde hair?”
Attempting to be objective about the attractiveness of someone who was like a sister to him, Alek shrugged. “I suppose? She was more petite at this age, almost willowy. I honestly think she looks better with some muscle. Less delicate.”
“I don’t care either way, it’s just… My dad kinda has a type. Or, at least he did at that point in his life. My mom was petite with wavy, honey-brown hair. They met when he was twenty.”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“Nope, you can look up the files for Morgana Onasi if you want. I um, I have. Just to see her, you know? It helps me to remember her face…” Shaking away his melancholy, Dustil cleared his throat. “Ah, anyway, at eighteen my Dad was really responsible when it came to official things. Training and studying? He was incredibly dedicated. But when he had time to himself he kind of… let loose. Nothing really bad, just a lot of drinking and fooling around with his fellow cadets. Put a bunch of bored, horny teenagers in the same dorm and stuff happens.”
Alek had lived in the Jedi dormitories during puberty and was well aware of what could happen. He winced.
“The good news is that my dad definitely liked men at that age as well… Please don’t ask how I know this. It was a really awkward conversation that only happened because I got mad at him and… ugh. But the good news is that he might rediscover how amazing Vann is. He is really great at this age, right?”
“He’s actually an anxious mess who likes to pretend he’s confident, which just comes off as arrogance. It doesn’t help that he’s actually good at whatever he does. Honestly, I think your father currently wants to throttle him.”
“Ouch. Well, maybe they’ll lose all memory of this once they get restored to their actual ages!”
“We can only hope the Force is that kind.” Rubbing his forehead, Alek asked, “Bastila, have you looked over those files I sent?”
“I’m reading them now and I’ll run them through the Rakata archives when I’m done. But you should be aware that, while we have a significant amount of information on the Infinite Empire, we don’t have much else. Vann tries to update what he can, but it’s still nothing compared to what the Jedi possess.”
“Do your best, it’s still more than I have access to on this ship.”
“I do have an idea, but you’re not going to like it one bit.” Upon noting Alek’s hopeful expression, Bastila sighed...
#kotor 2#kotor 2 fanfic#wip excerpt#revan#male Revan#vann chis#The Jedi Exile#Female exile#Alek Squinquargesimus#Malak#bastila shan#dustil onasi#my writing#not perfection but completeness
8 notes
·
View notes
Photo
EMMA SAWYER
(age.) twenty six (species.) werewolf (occupation.) paramedic at hgfd (residency.) arrived june 2008 (mirror.) nina dobrev
❝ a pavement of the past
TW; Fire, death, bombing
Her birth was the result of a love story that romance novels were written about, the result of a marriage that was doomed from the beginning. Sofia Stefanov was a sweet natured, brilliant witch, a prodigy in the world of magic. She had the world at her feet, a doting father and a future brighter than her most vivid imagination could handle. Aleksander Stoykovska came from a broken home, a human unaware that he carried a gene that could change his life, the son of a painter and a lone wolf who split from the family the moment it became clear that it would not be easy to get the mother of his son to allow Aleks to trigger the werewolf curse that lay dormant in his nature. He was hot headed, bad tempered, always in trouble yet when he met Sofia it was clear that the two were immediately in love.
Yet, Sofia’s father disapproved and tried to intervene, and so Sofia and Aleksander fled Bulgaria for the united states where Aleksander dreamed of making a home for the love of his life, and a success of himself. To prove Konstantin wrong, to prove that he was worthy of someone like Sofia. Upon their arrival, they realised that Sofia was pregnant, and six months later they welcomed their own miracle: Milena Viktoria Stoykovska, born in the March of 1993. It was the first time he felt complete in his life, and the three of them settled into a small townhouse just outside of Seattle, Washington. But, it was too good to be true. Christmas 1995 saw the family celebrating with friends, Milena fast asleep and blissfully unaware upstairs. After everyone had gone, Sofia and Aleksander fell asleep, only to be awoken to the smell of smoke. Unwittingly to all three of them, Milena had manifested the first of her powers, pyrokinesis, and had set her room ablaze in her sleep.
The parents rushed to her room, Aleksander managing to lower their toddler to the ground where frantic neighbours had gathered in a panic to help. However, when it came time to escape themselves they were unable, instead trying to flee down the stairs. But, they were blocked. Sofia succumbed to the smoke, and out of mercy, Aleksander smothered her so that she wouldn’t have to suffer. Her death was his beginning, as he triggered his werewolf curse and fled the house unharmed. He was presumed killed in the fire, despite no body being recovered, and Milena was declared an orphan. Sent to the nearest emergency room with burns on her little legs, she was seen to by a young attending resident. David Sawyer was the attending ER Resident that night, and despite the fact he had two young children at home, he and his wife decided to foster young Milena, now named Emma by the social worker.
And so, she became Emma Sawyer. The middle child of three, her adoption was finalised when she turned five and something that was openly spoken about growing up. It wasn’t a secret, and the Sawyers were sure to tell her everything they knew of her parents. How much they clearly loved her, sacrificed their lives for her to live. As Emma grew up though, she began to display concerning signs of being, as the psychologists they saw put it, ‘disturbed’, a word that would stay with her for years to come. The Sawyers were unaware that the supernaturals had survived the third world war, and that their own daughter was a witch herself. The trauma of her early years had caused her to repress her magic, yet now she was flourishing they were manifesting once more. Fires with no cause were put down to pyromaniac tendencies, an awful temper blamed on mere childhood issues, but that wasn’t was truly bothered them about their middle child. What disturbed everyone about Emma the most, was the way she’d flinch from touch, claim she could see a persons death, claim to see something before it happened.
From predicting the abrupt death of a beloved teacher, to guessing correctly the nature of a neighbours illness, Emma’s parents took her to every professional they could think of. Whilst they tried to maintain her privacy, word got around to her peers and Emma was dubbed the crazy girl, the weird one. It put a strain on her relationship with her sister, the two girls being in the same year at school, Zoe suffered for having a ‘freak’ sister, and took this out on Emma. She felt isolated, lost, wondering what was so wrong with her that she saw these things, soon learning to keep them to herself, to hide her feelings when someone accidentally brushed up against her. It wasn’t until just after her fifteenth birthday that the answers she sought came in the form of her maternal grandfather. Having felt a great deal of remorse since his daughter had fled Bulgaria because of him, he had been searching for them, hearing about Sofia’s death and spending almost a decade tracing Emma. Explaining that she was a witch, she realised her visions were premonitions, glimpses of the future, that she was pyrokinetic to add to it. After months of communication between her parents and Konstantin, it was agreed that Emma could move to a safe haven for people like her. Where Konstantin had called home for ten years, and where he could offer the training and education she needed.
Emma moved to Hollow Grove in 2008, where she felt truly at home for the first time in her entire life. It was like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders, and she was free. She was no longer the weird freak that saw things, her visions and her magic made her just like everyone else. She began to train intensively, attending the local high school and trying to adjust to being a normal teenage witch. As graduation approached, she began to think on classes for college, when she began to broach the idea of medicine, like her father and brother before her. Emma graduated from Hollow Grove University in 2015 and began to work as an ER nurse just a couple of months later. Yet, even her work there wasn’t enough, she was still painfully aware of the fact that there were people who didn’t always present to the ER when injured. Whilst supernatural healing was a miracle, she knew there had to be some care given – but what to do with these people who wouldn’t go to hospital? Setting a makeshift first aid area in her basement had merely started when she dragged a long werewolf off the street in her first year out of college, but word spread and quickly she became the go to for those who didn’t want to go to the ER. Forceful in her own quiet way, Emma kept the basement hospital a secret, knowing that the hospital would frown on it.
Emma as an adult began to thrive , revelling in the powers of being a witch. She still was erratic in her behaviour, reclusive and unwilling to engage in physical contact unless she had to, but slowly she began to open up. Become more confident in herself and her abilities. She grew close to her grandfather, unaware of how much like her birth mother she’d become, she had a close bond with the man who had so much regret about how things went with his daughter. How he wanted to make up for it by ensuring that her own daughter thrived and prospered. During the Spring Fling of 2018, Emma was doing exactly what he planned. She was popular at work and out of it, she was happy, content. Konstantin was about to embark on a book tour, promoting the latest in a series he’d been writing since Emma was a girl. The spring fling being one of their favourite events, he delayed the tour to attend.
The bombings that occurred on the second day, an attack from the Clave, left Emma unconscious and fighting for life in hospital. The moment he’d heard about the first round, Konstantin had forgone his own safety, heading into the carnage to find Emma, unaware that she had beed pulled out to safety. The second round of bombs went off, and Konstantin was killed on impact. His death sent Emma into a tailspin, resulting in her work in her basement being discovered and the resulting confrontation with her supervisor had Emma angrily lashing out and quitting her job. With Konstantin dead, she saw no reason to stay in Hollow Grove, forgetting everyone she had come to care about in her decade there, she upped and fled. Instead of fleeing to Seattle like everyone had expected, she flew to Bulgaria, where she found her aunt waiting for her. Viktoria was a bitter woman, having been jealous of Sofia and the attention that she monopolised from her father even after death, the witch sought out to destroy her niece, to ruin Sofia’s legacy.
Researching Aleksander, she found out about the man’s wolf heritage and realised that this same curse lay dormant in Emma. Under the pretence of teaching Emma to harness her powers more, she tricked an innocent bystander and placed him in Emma’s way whilst she was training with her pyrokinesis. Emma lost control, panicking she accidentally killed the man, triggering her werewolf curse. Emma’s first full moon was painful, and all she remembers of the aftermath was remaining hidden away in her room after, a sobbing and confused mess. When Viktoria ‘discovered’ what happened, she told Emma to leave, and not return. She fled to a safe haven further away from Bulgaria, seeing refuge in a haven so similar to the one she called home once, but too scared to return to Hollow Grove. Finally, word got back to Hollow Grove and help was sent in the form of Lucy Danvers and William Collins, the two recovery agents bringing her back to where she is meant to be, where she belongs. Home. Now, Emma must learn to recover parts of herself and come to terms with the loss of her magic, but also the fact that she’s not the same person she was a few months ago.
Emma couldn’t settle back into town as well as she thought she could though, and a few weeks into her return she was already desperate to leave, too many questions in her mind about her family. About the side of her family that she hadn’t been aware of and the most important of all, did this mean her birth parents were alive? Until she found out they were potentially alive, she hadn’t thought about meeting them, the Sawyers were her parents. But to find that they could be had her questioning why they didn’t want to meet her. So, she began to track them down and eventually got word of her father in rural Montana, and without a thought she set off. But, Emma again was only faced with disappointment and an empty feeling as she came up with nothing. Aleksander was nowhere to be found. Realising he wanted nothing to do with her, she placed him far from her mind , at least as much as she could, whilst she worked on rebuilding her life in Hollow Grove.
During the 2019 Blood Moon, any semblance of peace she’d found was shattered in the attack, her beloved town broken once more — she began to question moving the Sawyers there. It wasn’t safe. A chance to visit other safe havens arose, helping out with training new EMTs and assisting where she could has found her perhaps thinking Hollow Grove isn’t the place for her family anymore.
❝ the nature of the beast
Emma just wants to do good for the world, and for her friends. She is inherently a good person, and she wants to try and be a person that her parents, the Sawyers and her birth parents, can be proud of. But, there’s always that fragile element to the brunette, as if at any moment she would break down and in a way to think that you would be right. Emma is very easy going, and looking for every piece of enjoyment to to live life to the fullest. Now that she is a werewolf, she is a little more reckless then she was before and she’s seeking to test out her new powers and for ways that she can be hurt to find out some way to feel human again. She’s struggling to comprehend the loss of her magic, to her she is finding it strange with no premonitions hanging over her head anymore but she also misses the feel of the fire running beneath her skin, and the connection with nature that she always had. Finding out who Emma is without her magic has left the girl lost and completely unsure of what her place is now, and her world has been shattered, leaving her to try and piece her life together as much as she can.
2 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Have you been apart of the sterek fandom forever? Do you want some nostalgia? Well here are some fics that if you’ve been around you have probably read over and over, and here they are again. AKA the sterek fic rec thats been a long time coming. If you’re relatively new, I suggest these as they have kind of been the top sterek fics since the relationship began. Enjoy!
Fireman Derek’s Crazy Pie (Cheeseburger Baby)
17,698 | Teen and Up
“He can't blame me for the fact that I live in a building full of people united in the singular effort to ogle Hot Fireman as often as humanly possible."
Laura laughs, loud and echoing in the empty restaurant.
"Hot firemen can make a girl do crazy things," she agrees, nodding towards her brother's name on the menu. "Derek won't let me date anyone from his company, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the eye candy."
"Send them my way," Stiles suggests, finally loading up a forkful of pie.
"Apparently I'm incompetent enough that I need to be babysat at all times, because it would be cheaper than dispatching a truck every time I try to use a kitchen appliance."
According to Plans
72,744 | E
Five times Stiles and Derek pretend to be boyfriends, and the one time they didn't have to pretend at all. (Or: in which Stiles' plan for senior year is completely ruined by a supernatural creature stalking him.)
By Any Other Name
33,090 | E
He doesn't know his name, he doesn't know who he is, and neither does the werewolf he's on the run with. But he's pretty sure they hunt monsters, because they seem to be really good at it.
Moonwalkers
531,781 | E
Stiles had his entire Seven Years of Hogwarts all planned out:
Prank and Prank Hard.
Woo Lydia Martin.
Avoid detention and Potions at all cost.
Have crazy fun.
Enter brooding werewolf to send this plan to the bottom of the Black Lake.
(Sacred) In the Ordinary (THIS IS MY PERSONAL FAVORITE)
78,759 | E
The Pack, after college, graduate school and the starting of careers, comes back to Beacon Hills. Nothing's gotten less complicated after all this time.
Based on a kink meme prompt that grew legs and got serious.
Note: This is a whole lot of pack!fic with a very slow build Derek/Stiles.
There’s Monsters at Home
83,575 | E
“How did you get past the wards?” Derek had put them up, with Peter’s grudging assistance, after the Alpha pack had made themselves at home a few times too many.
The guy pulled a face. “You mean the wards a five-year-old girl with the mental ability of a goldfish could deconstruct?” He blinked wide eyes at Derek. “Gee, I don’t know. It’s bound to go down as one of life’s great mysteries.”
Derek despised him.
Hide of A Life War
26,102 | E
“We have received confirmation that there is a hostage situation in progress at a warehouse compound two hours out of Los Angeles, following a multiple-vehicle pileup on Highway 101 this morning...”
The one in which Stiles has lived to (legal) adulthood and, along the way, become a bit of a badass himself.
Baking My Way Into Your Heart
178,630 | M
Derek is an uptight college student, all work and no play. His carefully scheduled life is thrown kilter when his regular barista is replaced with someone new.
Living With Lycanthropy
44,905 | E
AKA: The Sterek Rival Bakeries AU
Wherein they both own bakeries, Stiles tries not to run his grandmother's legacy into the ground, Laura wants to be a better alpha, and Derek can't seem to get Stiles' attention the regular way - so naturally, he accidentally initiates a prank war.
(Or, if Teen Wolf was more like Gilmore Girls, with everyone far too invested in whether the Hale boy and the Sheriff's kid will work it out, and Laura Hale wrote a handbook for alpha werewolves.)
Pack Dynamic for Dummies
36,682 | Teen
Stiles isn't sure how a Pack is supposed to work, but he's pretty sure that this this disorganized jumble of people and events doesn't quite qualify. He has to hand it to Derek though, he keeps trying. And Stiles has never been one to stand quietly on the sidelines.
Gravity’s Got Nothing on You
83,979 | E
“Three weeks,” Derek says.
“Still don’t want to,” Stiles says.
“I’ll pay you,” Derek says, and that… that has Stiles interested. Alf’s Antique’s may be a great job, but it’s not a high-paying job, and half of Stiles’s tuition is coming from financial aid, so…
“How much,” Stiles asks, “are we talking here? Because I know your family, dude. And it’ll be kind of awkward after.“
“My family thinks you’re some sort of fucking gift to the world,” Derek seethes, like he’s jealous, “they’ll probably be pissed at me when we break it off, so don’t worry about that. Five hundred bucks.”
“A thousand,” Stiles says, because screw ethics. Also, the Hale family is loaded. Derek can deal.
There is a brotherhood
21,004 | E
So far, college has taught Stiles three things:
1) Eight am classes are cruel and unusual and should be avoided at all costs, even if it means having to enroll in something truly hideous instead, like Econ 101.
2) Dorm security is just as tight as Stiles’ orientation leader had promised it would be, and the dude guarding Scott’s dorm in particular does not respond well to bribes.
3) Mrs. McCall clearly had no clue what she was talking about when she’d insisted that Scott and Stiles needed to branch out and room with strangers, so it’s all her fault that Scott ended up with a total dick of a roommate and Stiles got stuck all the way across campus with some guy who has a girlfriend two towns over and is thus never around.
Or, the one where pledge brothers Stiles and Scott start a prank war with Derek Hale's fraternity.
Hope is the thing with feathers
28,959 | Teen and up
Stiles is ten when he saves the Hales from their burning home and Derek from a wolfsbane bullet, and this establishes a pattern that seem to continue indefinitely.
"Then he's facing a burning home, and he wraps the hood of his sweatshirt around his mouth before he pushes the door open and steps inside. There's Mr. Hale asleep - he hopes asleep - on the couch, next to - Stiles thinks that's his brother but there are so many Hales, who can keep track. He rushes over and starts shaking him, can see the rise and fall of the man's chest so he knows he's alive, but he's not waking up.
He shoves away his hood so he can shout, "Mr. Hale! You have to get up, there's a fire! Mr. Hale, get up!" Nothing, he's not even twitching, both of them taking in deep even breaths like they're having the most peaceful of rests, and Stiles is going to cry. "Wake up, wake up, wake up!"
There's a moment, where all Stiles can hear is the blood rushing in his ears and not the roar of the flames or the creak of wood, then with a violent, silent pop it's all back and both of the men are gasping awake, eyes open and jumping to their feet. "
Lead You Home Again
49,962 | E
The first time Derek meets Stiles, the kid’s brown eyes are wide, and he’s staring up at him with a mischievous grin as he tugs at the arm of Derek’s first ever Batman figure like he’s trying to separate it from Batman’s body.
An alternate take on Teen Wolf, wherein Stiles and Derek are childhood friends, and things unfold from there.
Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble
13,363 | Teen and up
When potions prodigy Stiles blows up one cauldron too many during one of his ‘experiments’, he gets assigned to making Wolfsbane Potion for the new groundskeeper. Which wouldn’t be so bad if the guy wasn’t you know, terrifying.
This is Ridiculous
35, 818 | E
There's a unicorn in Beacon Hills. A fricken' unicorn. In fricken' Beacon Hills, California. And it turns out that unicorns aren't drawn towards virgins in a happy-go-lucky let-me-lay-my-not-at-all-metaphorical-horn-in-your-lap way. No. They kill them. And guess who's the only virgin idiotic enough to get sucked into the Beacon Hills supernatural scene? Stiles, that's who.
Mating Habits of the Domesticated Werewolf
35,458 | M
Derek doesn’t do pining. He doesn’t. So when it becomes clear that Stiles is much more interested in having Derek as a new best friend than a boyfriend, he puts on his big boy pants and makes it fucking work. He becomes the best goddamn friend a spastic teenager could ever hope to have.
Wayward and Down
32,331 | E
Pack is family. Family is everything.
This is Stiles' senior year, and it's nothing he could have imagined.
or
That time it took not one, but two separate troll attacks and a malevolent coven of witches for Stiles to figure out how he felt about Derek.
Tremble
58,990 | E
Stiles may be cursed but that doesn’t mean he’s going to lay down and die. He’s going to fight. He won’t stop, he can’t stop. If he does, they win.
Permanent Fixture
80,777 | E
Derek is Scott's older brother. Stiles is Scott's best friend. Derek is falling in love with Stiles. This is a bit of a problem.
Bogarted
3,126 | M
Alternate Title: "Dick Failwolf, Private Eye."
(Or, Derek's hit with a Film Noir curse, which forces him to narrate his own life in luridly-detailed prose.)
DILF
30,871 | E
"Today is Scott's first day of kindergarten and Derek is terrified."
A Thousand Fiery Suns of Angst- Just Press Play
20,934 | Teen and Up
All Stiles wants from life is to learn to control his magic, keep his grades up, and not die horribly while saving Beacon Hills from supernatural threats. It's all going pretty well until Derek Hale, werewolf extraordinaire, has to go and ask him on a date. That asshole.
Stilinski’s Home For Wayward Werewolves
35,197 | Teen and Up
“At least your puppies knock first,” Stiles snorts. “Here I thought their alpha raised them to be well-mannered.”
“There’s a sign,” Derek responds stiffly.
Stiles, whose curiosity outweighs even his hardest of grudges, abandons his chilly façade of nonchalance in a heartbeat. He jumps right up and all but pushes Derek out of the way in his effort to get to the window, and sure enough when he leans outside there’s a laminated strip of cardstock duct taped to the vinyl siding:
DON’T FORGET TO KNOCK Stiles gets cranky when we scare him
---
Or, in which Stiles Stilinski moves to Beacon Hills for his junior year of high school and accidentally adopts a pack of teenage werewolves.
I Can’t Get Enough (Of You)
10,480 | Teen and Up
Fact: Derek Hale hates Potions.
There are a number of reasons why this is so. For one thing, Potions is really not Derek's strong point. (There's a reason he's banned from using the kitchen at home.) For another, the Potions classroom is dank and dim and spending more than an hour down there at a time makes Derek’s skin crawl.
And then there’s Stiles Stilinski.
He doesn’t need an explanation.
The Socioeconomic Repercussions of Mutually Assured Destruction
15,285 | E
"The trouble with having the kind of brain that likes to write essays on male circumcision for an Economics class, is that it also likes to turn PowerPoint presentations for Biology into odes on the perfection of notorious bad boy Derek Hale’s backside."
Linski’s Late Night Antidote to Lame
13,865 | Teen and Up
Where Stiles has his own college radio show, and the mysterious, faceless Derek is his number one fan.
Also there's this really hot guy he keeps meeting in the library who totally hates his guts.
28. Every Step You Take
49,347 | M
Stiles accidentally ends up magically bound to Derek. It’s super.
We’ve Written in Volumes (In Blood and Scars and Ink)
25,935 | E
Stiles is on his back on hard-packed dirt. He's cold and there are leaves stuck to his neck and there's a four inch gash in his side that he thinks he can feel his ribs through. There's so much blood around him he feels like he's floating on a pond and everything is so much dimmer above him than it was a minute ago, which is saying something because he's in the dark center of the forest in the middle of the night. And the worst of it is that he's alone, totally alone with the smell of his own blood drowning him and the soft side of him run through by a tree.
As his eyes slip shut, the last thing he thinks is, "This is going to kill my dad."
Electricity in the Contact
27,067 | E
In which Derek has been invited to the Greater Pacific Northwest Alpha Symposium (that's not what it's called, Stiles, stop saying that), and showing up unattached would mean an arranged marriage. When the rest of the pack objects, he agrees to let Stiles come along to pose as his mate. Derek is reasonably sure that he's not going to make it out of this weekend alive.
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
22,322 | Teen and Up
“Derek,” Stiles groans. “You have me. You’ve always had me, you absolute moron, how many physically impossible feats of life-saving heroics do I have to perform before you get it?”
can’t be hateful gotta be grateful
6,260 | Teen and Up
"Be cool, Dad, we've decided to con Grandma."
(Or, the one where the Stilinski men drag Derek to Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma's and she gets the right wrong idea.)
Noticed
35,179 | Teen and Up
Stiles left on a Tuesday. Nobody noticed.
Losers
34,234 | E
Where Derek is new to college, eager to spend his time learning, and Stiles is everything he didn't want in a room mate. He's loud, he's into sports, and he keeps trying to make Derek do things.
Or, the one where Derek falls for a jock, Erica will cut you if you disturb her studying, and Jackson is a closeted romantic who pretends to hate everything.
35. Under Your Skin
12,207 | E
"So you decided hepatitis would be fun"; or the one about tattoos, waffles and ghouls.
#sterek#sterek fic#sterek fic rec#teen wolf#tw#sorry for the shit banner guys im not good at making online art#but yeah my reading needs to be updated so i might do another one#but these are just some of my all time faves
999 notes
·
View notes
Text
Wherever the Wind Takes Me
I said I wanted to post a story this week and the one response voted for “bi pirate OC backstory.” So meet Seishirou, he’s a hot mess.
Wherever the Wind Takes Me
He’d always loved the wind in his hair as a child.
It made sense, when your family could coax the wind to the fingertips with just a thought, of course you’d feel at home on a breezy day. When he was young, he hadn’t understood why his family took so many trips, he just knew he’d run to the front of the boat to feel the wind on his face. The Sonohara family was one of the wealthiest in the country but when he was a child, wealth meant nothing, he just liked the adventure.
He couldn’t quite remember at what age it stopped being an adventure and started being a job.
“Seishirou, focus,” his father had told him, rubbing his temples. His family had never been atrociously strict, just focused. Far more focused than him, with his head in the clouds. “Focus” was something he’d heard far too much as a teenager and it had never been his strong suit.
His sister, seven years younger, had always had more focus than him. It seemed Sunako had been born with all the focus he lacked and yet his family never resented him for it, for the fact that his ten year old sister bordered on a prodigy and at seventeen he would rather climb trees just to feel the wind on his face again.
He later learned that his family’s fortune came from their ability to manipulate the winds. Trade ships needed wind in their sails and control of the wind meant control of trade. The Sonoharas had used that to their advantage for generations, cultivating an empire.
An empire they one day expected Seishirou to run.
At least that’s what they told him. What they didn’t tell him, he had to find out from overheard conversations in bars. And what they didn’t tell him was that his family was basically the government’s attack dog. They didn’t get their empire solely by working the hardest, but by sabotaging others. Companies they deemed a threat, or that the government deemed a threat for them, never seemed to find any wind in their sails. Or a storm out of nowhere blew ships straight into the rocks.
He didn’t want to be anyone’s attack dog. He didn’t want to run a business. He didn’t want the pressure of an empire. He just wanted to feel the wind in his hair again, and he supposed that had always made him the family disappointment, even if they didn’t say as much.
And that’s why he didn’t say goodbye, not to his parents. They wouldn’t have let him go and he couldn’t let himself stay. It was why he snuck out in the middle of night like the disappointment he’d always known he was, even if they’d never said it to his face. He feared, or maybe he knew, that leaving would finally give them the opportunity to tell him he was the shame on the family, where had they gone wrong, thank everything they had Sunako because he would never be what they want, and he couldn’t sit through that. They’d say it when he was gone but at least he wouldn’t have to hear it.
But Sunako, if she’d ever thought anything like that she’d been better at hiding it. So because of that she was the one person he’d say goodbye to. That, and because she’d always been a night owl.
“Sunako?”
“You’re up late,” she said when she opened the door. “Sneaking out to meet some guy or girl or…whatever it is this week?” That actually got him to laugh because any other time she wouldn’t have been wrong.
“No, no beautiful strangers this week,” he said. “I’m just…heading out for a while. And I guess I just wanted to let you know because you’re my little sister and I love you.”
“Are you dying?” she asked. “Because you’re never this affectionate.”
“No, no, I’m not dying! Fuck, Sunako, way to go dark,” he said and she laughed. He’d miss her laugh. She was sixteen and she’d learn soon enough, all the things he’d had to learn about their family, all the things that made him want to leave. Maybe she’d agree with him, maybe in time she’d join him in wherever he ended up and really give their parents a conniption.
Or maybe she wouldn’t, and there was no way to know.
“You always hated expectations,” she said. “Haven’t you?”
“When did you get so perceptive?” he asked.
“While you were making eyes at the Kousakas’ daughter and letting their son feel you up in a closet,” she said, when she saw the look on his face she added: “Yes, I know about that. I’m pretty sure you don’t know the definition of the word subtle.”
“Alright, fair,” he said. “I really don’t. That’s why I’m leaving in the middle of the night like the drama queen I am. Because I know our family has you and they’ll just cut their losses with me. I’m too much of a free spirit.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” she said. “You’re a good person.”
“That’s the problem.” He ruffled her hair. “And maybe you’ll understand when you’re older, maybe you’ll come join me. Or maybe our family’ll send you to hunt me down and drag me home like the little force of nature you’re gonna be. And if that happens, remember what you love about me, okay?”
When he said that, she looked scared. Young and scared, afraid her brother knew something terrible that she obviously didn’t.
“Seishirou,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”
“I’m just being a drama queen,” he said. “Y’know, the usual.”
“Where are you going anyway?” she asked. He laughed.
“Wherever the wind takes me.” She rolled her eyes but laughed with him.
“You are a drama queen.”
***
He made it to the port by morning with no idea where he was going. He had no real desire to go anywhere in particular, just somewhere where the Sonohara name and family business wasn’t the best worst kept secret possibly in the country. The sun was starting to rise and burn off last night’s fog.
He was happy to forego magic from this point. Conjuring up the wind was a dead giveaway to who he was, who his family was and if he could go the rest of his life without that association it would be too soon.
Well, quite nearly forego anyway.
One well timed bit of wind magic and it would just look like he could really jump to anyone paying attention, and besides, it was early morning, no one was paying attention to him. So that’s exactly what he did to get on top of the high wall separating the docks from the rest of town, just to get a better view.
Even early in the morning, someone was paying attention.
“Hey beanpole!”
It startled him so badly he nearly fell off the wall. The woman standing at its base on the dock side, hands on her hips, didn’t look like she was from around here. She was a muscular redhead who probably could’ve thrown him over her shoulder if she wanted, and frankly he wouldn’t have minded if she did.
“Me?”
“You’re the only one out this time of the morning, yes you, dumbass!” she shook her head. “You can jump.”
“…I can.”
“You can jump really high,” she continued. “That’s not a small wall and you just hopped up.”
“…I did.”
“You going anywhere in particular?” she asked. “You got somewhere to be?”
“…I don’t.”
“Okay you’re a dumbass, got it,” she continued. “But our crew needs a new navigator. Our last one got eaten because the dragon’s a cranky old son of a bitch—” That much got his attention.
“The what?”
“The dragon.” She spoke slowly like she were addressing an idiot child before pointing towards the water.
He wasn’t sure how he’d missed the giant albino sea serpent, tied like a horse to the dock with the other boats. Granted its head alone was the size of a yacht, and when it huffed indignantly it knocked over people scrambling on the deck. He’d never seen a dragon before, not in person, but he knew what they meant.
“You’re pirates,” he said. Dragons were ancient beings, they’d ruled the world long before humanity and they’d probably have it again, as long as they lived. They were also notoriously volatile creatures and hard to train on account of their tendency to eat people in one gulp. Anyone who could train them was either fearless or stupid or some combination of the two. Dragons were fast, a ship built on the back of a dragon, no normal boat would ever catch it, even with his family calling the winds, but the risk in trying to wrangle them made it expensive and just not worth it for most people.
Most people, except for pirates. Pirates were just the right combination of fearless and stupid. Pirates, who appeared to be trying to recruit him.
“Finally, he understands!” the redhead threw up her hands in victory. “Why, is that a moral problem for you?”
“Not in the slightest,” he said. “I just wanted to get away, I’ll take whatever I can get.”
“You some kinda fugitive on the run?” she asked.
“Just a runaway,” he said.
“Of course, you’re too stupid to be a criminal.”
He held his hand to his chest in mock offense. “You wound me!” he said.
“Don’t make me punch you in the gut,” she said.
“That’s hot, I’d be okay with it,” he said, hopping down to her side of the wall. She rolled her eyes yet again.
“What’s your name anyway?” she asked.
“Seishirou.”
“Seishirou…?” she waved her hand, waiting for a last name that wouldn’t come. His last name held too much power, and the last thing he wanted to be was the Sonoharas’ oldest son. Besides, on a dragon ship, he’d have the wind in his hair all he wanted, no magic required.
It was the best second chance he was ever going to get.
“That’s it,” he said. “Just Seishirou.”
7 notes
·
View notes
Note
can you tell us more about your mahou shoujo site camp camp au??
WWHWH IM GLAD YOU ASKED NONNIE
it works as either a roleswap or its own branch- though there really isnt much to say if its its own thang. however! one trait both verses have in common is the site is a shady camp that provides magical sticks and helps alleviate trauma/stress(except not really) while the admins are known as counselors. they do have a site that advertises itself to misfortunate children: “whether or not you want to attend our camp, or use your stick, is entirely up to you”
the roleswap follows the canon mss storyline, with some the roles,sticks and emblems altered a bit to better fit certain aspects & dubious content/characters taken out. the motives, the existence of tempest, the king,etc remain just about the same. the kids are around 2-3 yrs older than their canon counterparts and mahou sept takes place 10+ years before the current timeline
the swaps + hcs under the cut cus it gets kinda long [tw for mentions of abuse, suicide and violence, please proceed w care]
NIKKI:
switches with aya
stick is a gun with the ability to teleport her targets, later on upgrades to sharing memories + distributing lifespan
emblem is a flower
lives with her disconnected mom who seems to find a new partner at the end of every week. her father is mostly absent in her life
was severely bullied by sasha,tabii and erin at school
sports a lively facade out of stubbornness
her only escape was taking long walks out in nature
was Very traumatized having believed she murdered tabii with her new stick
was the only one out of the main trio to genuinely think they were all friends
has a big fat crush on max and neil
becomes less vibrant and more protective of her loved ones as her Magical Girl Adventures take a darker turn
MAX:
switches with tsuyuno
stick is a smartphone with the ability to freeze time
emblem is the letter X
lived with a neglectful family until they were killed by a burglar
he felt nothing when they die, but was immensely wounded when he realized theyd been trying to escape without their son
uses his time magic solely for his own advantage. he wont hesitate to fuck over assholes who threaten his image or simply out of spite
hes That One Classmate nobody bothers with but would never mess with
was one of the only people who defended nikki and neil from their bullies
though he made it clear he associates himself with nikki and neil only for their magic, he genuinely began to care for them immensely like the big softie he is
NEIL:
switches with kiyoharu
stick is a ring with the power of telepathy and is able to peek into/take over his targets’ sensory system if he chooses to
emblem is the infinity sign
pushed around for being a typical nerd;got more shit after getting outed as genderfluid
unlike canon, neil actually cares for his dad- even if he does embarrass him quite a lot
when presented with his stick, he laughed at the idea of things like “mahou camp” existing??and thought it was some pathetic scam
surprise surprise, freaked the FUCK out when it turned out the stick worked
he further refused to use his magic after finding out it takes a toll on his physical being
like max, he only befriended the other 2 for his own interests. he does eventually start caring for them despite trying(and failing) to hold them at an emotional arm’s length
developed post-traumatic mutism from witnessing the deaths of his friends; currently uses telepathy to communicate
HARRISON:
switches with rina
has a LOT of stolen sticks stowed away in his top hat. the one he was granted with was a conductor’s baton that explodes its targets
secondary stick is a sword that cuts through any surface
his tertiary stick is a wooden staff that emits electrical discharge
the baton’s emblem is a crescent moon, the sword’s is the letter V and the wooden staff’s is a crown
was the second magical after ered to receive the slaughter note
bought the camp’s lies about tempest in a heartbeat, driven by fear for what was to come & arrogant thoughts of him deserving to live in a new world free of scum
his plan was foiled by max and co after a failed attempt on nikki’s life
he is Very terrified of preston and avoids him at all costs
the trio only protected him from harm for more info regarding tempest
he still has natural magic, which he sometimes uses as an alternative to sticks
he develops a tiny crush on nikki
SASHA:
switches with sarina
her stick is a yo-yo with a string so sharp it slice n dices whatever gets in the way
emblem is a heart
was one of nikki’s bullies,along with tabii & erin
often referred nikki by her full name before they made amends
her accused nikki for “murdering” tabii & grew more hateful than ever when her throat was slashed (by max, actually), leaving a hideous scar as a reminder of the incident
for this “misfortune,” she was granted a stick. really it was because the camp needed a new magical hunter
tried killing nikki and her friends out of vengeance, but slowly her perspective of nikki slowly changed after the latter saved her from getting crushed by a collapsing building
her feelings for nikki went from pure hatred, to mere tolerance, to finally–after a heart-to-heart conversation–geniunely caring for her well being
nikki still hasnt 100% forgiven sasha for all she’s done,which sasha comes to find understandable
PRESTON:
switches with nijimi
stick is a wristband with the power of mind-control
emblem is a star
grew up in a shithole neighborhood, in a shithole household with shitty parents
his parents were so deep in debt with loan sharks,they committed suicide when they realized they couldnt pay up, leaving a Very scared pres to fend for himself
temporarily lived with jen, his teacher and mother figure, and for the longest time, he was frightened to go outside out of fear of running into the same loan sharks
one confrontation by momma bear jen later, pres decided to settle things by wiping clean the memories of his family’s debt from the loan sharks’ minds
preston eventually got his life together & made it big in the theater industry as a child prodigy
he had a horrible relapse when he found jen’s bloody, headless corpse, out of the blue on a very normal day. realizing it was a murder committed by another magical, preston follows the series of murders of similar fashion; bent on finding the killer to avenge jen
put his career on hiatus to properly work with the trio, who he took a genuine liking to until they were busted for lying about harrison’s whereabouts(he still hasnt completely forgiven them for that.) he only agreed to cooperate under one condition: he gets his hands on a certain rotten magic kid after this
he lived with his grandmother since jen’s death
NURF:
switches with asahi
stick is a brass knuckle which enhances his physical abilities
emblem is a cancel sign🚫
was raised in a broken household; his parents would fight constantly, often scaring the poor boy into hiding
he was much closer to his mother and was devastated when she got sentenced to prison. with her out of the picture, mr nurfington began taking his frustrations on nurf more frequently than ever
nurf ran away after mortally wounding (maybe possibly killing) his dad by sheer impulse, spending years on the streets and move out of one shelter after another
he has scars from a combination of his previous home life and life on the streets. hes also blind in one eye
despite walking the path of delinquency, he tries his best to fix his attitude for himself and those around him, especially after he meets his new friends
DOLPH:
DISCLAIMER!! i am using my own revamped version of dolph for this because Fuck Canon
switches with kosame
stick is a carving knife he uses to cut himself, the blood flowing from the wound is used to heal external injuries of others. he is, however, unable to prolong lifespans
emblem is the degree celsius
was the lonely kid in class nobody paid attention to
is childhood friends with ered, but they grew distant as ered became more popular he became convinced she wouldnt associate with the likes of him anymore
was the only person who approached ered kindly when she fell
he became depressed after he was diagnosed with terminal illness, but acts like nothing’s wrong. pretty much lost the will to live when ered allegedly killed herself
he never practiced self-harm before receiving his stick
SPACE KID:
switches with mikari
stick is a flying broomstick
emblem is a sun
had a carefree life with his family with everything he could ask for: happiness, wealth & all the space-centric things he could get his hands on. until they were killed by a deranged murderer on the loose and has lived under his great uncle’s care since
life with buzz wasnt so bad though, he was still relatively happy
hes gets treated as the expendable one by his friends
often lets harrison ride his broom with him
ERED:
switches with kayo
stick is a compact mirror which can hold up to 10 different abilities of magicals she comes in contact with
emblem is a spade
used to be a popular girl and lived with her two dads (jacob; bearded dad & nathaniel; blonde dad) and a younger sibling
her life came crashing down when nathaniel killed 3 teenage boys to avenge the sibling, whose murder had been left without justice. nathaniel was sentenced to prison, jacob lost his job and eventually fell seriously ill & ered, treated lesser than a dog by peers and those she had a hand in picking on, was forced to trudge through this ordeal with no rights to even cast a glare at her bullies
her hair is short because it was cut by bullies
dolph was the only one who tried reconnecting with her. while she appreciates some light in this misery, she still keeps her distance to keep the bullies from targeting him as well
she was the first magical girl to be given the slaughter note; in that she found out dolph and nerris, an old campmate, were also magicals
both dolph and nerris were able to find out ered’s status as a magical girl. the former thru overhearing a conversation with nerris, the latter because she followed ered
ered highkey cant believe she let some geeky kid save her ass time and time again
she faked her and nerris’ deaths to get out of the mahou camp’s radar + keep their loved ones safe
NERRIS:
switches with sakura
stick is a video game controller with the ability to unleash shock waves
emblem is a diamond
had an average life with a loving family before her father’s death; which the police merely brushed it off as suicide. furious, nerris took matters into her own hands to find the killer(another magical most likely) herself
she still adores dnd games
she went to camp with ered and dolph once
she was surprised+confused when ered approached her, wondering why a (former) cool kid would want anything to do with her. she was Disappointed But Not Surprised when she found out it was bc ered was looking for other magical girls
she helped ered a lot through the magical girl fiasco, and they ended up growing closer than mere comrades
along with ered, she formed an alliance with nikki and co in their efforts to dismantle the mahou camp
PIKEMAN:
switches with ni/ochi
stick was a PET bottle that traps oxygen surrounding it
emblem was the roman numeral XIII
was cameron campbell’s nephew
he was sent to a military camp for boys. his fellow campers pushed him around to the breaking point and the mahou camp granted him his magical boy status.
he used his stick to murder those who humiliated him, ruling the camp via fearmongering
he simply vanished off the face of earth one day- some guessed he simply couldnt take military camp anymore, but nobody could truly conclude where he’d gone
the truth is pikeman used his lifespan down to its last drops, his body and stick disintegrating & reborne into the counselor “two”
CAMERON:
switches with detective misumi
bio uncle of pikeman and adoptive uncle to daniel
is a shady fbi agent secretly associated with the mahou camp
only formed the alliance bc he suspected they had something to do with pikeman’s disappearance
has an immense collection of sticks in a secret basement
cam about 14 y/o dan: “ive only known li’l danny for a day and a half and if anything happened i would kill everyone in this room and then myself.“
cam about daniel now: “danny has been my nephew for over a decade and i still would—”
faked his murder of jasper for currently unknown reasons. he seems to have taken the still-alive jasper under his wing for the moment
DAVID:
switches with tsurara/the king (yes, i buy the tsurara=the king theory dont @ me)
stick is a drill with a laser beam twister
emblem is the libra symbol
is best friends with gwen and former childhood friends with jasper
was badly abused by one of his counselors it ruined his love for camp
even after accidentally murdering said counselor and burying the evidence, davey insisted he drop out of camp
the guilt, the trauma, everything was so overwhelming davey began to emotionally break down
pursued a relationship with bonquisha in hopes it’ll dull the pain; he became thoroughly convinced, yes, this is real happiness. he ended up turning down gwens efforts to help him
the truth behind the abusive counselor was leaked, and no one has ever changed their opinion of david so fast. bon left davey in disgust as davey himself got bullied to the point of suicide
because he died so miserably, david was allowed another shot at life- reborn a physical manifestation of his negative feelings, with the desire to wipe out humanity. the “king” was born and brought forth the threat of tempest
GWEN:
switches with hyouka/nana
shares her stick and emblem with david
she used to be a total shut in since her father died in an accident. david at the time was a classmate who’d bring in notes and assignments from class everyday.
gwen was upset when he told her he wouldnt be able to come anymore due to an upcoming summer camp. realizing she enjoyed davey’s company too much, she offered to attend camp with him & theyd been inseparable since
is very protective of david, always down to fuck up anyone who hurts him
when she discovered the truth about david’s counselor, gwen offered to gather money for therapy with his newfound stick.
she and davey temporarily fell out bc davey changed his mind about letting her help him and gwen’s temper got the better of her
she was devastated at witnessing daveys death, and harbors a deep resentment for the camp
she continued to use david’s stick until her lifespan ran out, and was reborn the counselor “seven.”
DANIEL:
switches with alice
stick is a flip phone with the ability to reverse time by one minute
emblem is a knife
his parents were arrested for being dangerous cultists. dan had never known what hell truly was until his peers found out, and was given the humiliating nikcname “son of a cultist”
he HATES anything cult-related, and blames his family for ruining his life
having grown up in a cultish household, some of their twisted tendencies rubbed off him
he attended the same camp as gwen,davey,jasper and jen as a teenager
cameron adopted dan as his nephew out of pity after he bolted from camp in midst of a breakdown
he was initially all up for helping nikki’s gang, behaving kindly and almost like a father-figure to them. he decided to leave the kids alone to take care of a mission gone horribly wrong, believing theyd literally be the death of him if he kept wasting his powers for a bunch of “brats with no survival skills of their own”
JEN:
switches with mikado
stick is a mechanical pencil with the ability to create magic-negating barriers
emblem is the operator symbol ⨂
was practically preston’s adoptive mother. she was always there for him in his time of need, making sure he was okay and nurtured him as if he were her own
similar to daniel’s case, jen’s parents held questionable beliefs. she was also bullied for the same reasons
doesnt mind cracking a satanic joke every now and then despite her past
she was killed by harrison for her stick
JASPER:
switches with isoko
main stick is a set of rollerblades that enhances his speed. it also gives him the ability skate smoothly over uneven surfaces and areas that defy gravity. its emblem is the leo symbol
his secondary stick is a hairdryer that returns the targeted object/person to its original position. the emblem is the letter J
was childhood friends with david. jasper changed when davey “stole” his place as the honorary camper and they officially fell out after jasper tried getting the camp shut down
he still attended the same camp as gwen and david as teenagers
hes really kind of an ass
neither of his sticks were given to him by the mahou camp
went under the alias “J” as he distributed countless sticks to everyday folk
was allegedly killed by detective campbell for his crimes, but in actuality is still alive and well to this day
#thank you for showing interesting in this silly lil au#also im sorry if some of these arent v well written hfsdhgk#some of these might make more sense if u read the manga#especially sept#camp camp#asknico#anon#trash aus
10 notes
·
View notes
Text
[SW:TLJ] First Impressions: Kylo’s Trajectory
After much trial and tribulation, we have at last arrived of the moment of destiny: a descent into the depths of what is arguably the most complex character created not only for the Star Wars saga itself, but for the silver screen as a whole in recent memory. Kylo Ren is a bottomless pit of onion layers--the more I peel away, the more I find. I don’t know if I, or any one single person, or even the creators themselves, can truly ever uncover or unpack everything contained within this character. But I certainly want to try my best, and I hope that I can bring some new thoughts to the table, though I admit the prospect is intimidating because this character has been discussed ad nauseum by minds far greater than mine. Still, I can’t move forward in this series without addressing him, so apologies in advance if this covers territory others have previously tread.
This is the eighth post in my Star Wars The Last Jedi First Impressions series. The list of the topics this series covers, including links to the previous posts, is included below:
[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - A Flawed Triumph
[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - The Thematic Heart
[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Finn & Rose
[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Luke & Rey
[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Luke & Kylo
[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Luke & Leia
[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Rey’s Trajectory
[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Kylo’s Trajectory ← we are here
[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Rey & Kylo
[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - The Romantic Heart
[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Misleading Love Polygons
[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Schrödinger's Futures
This behemoth guards his hidden treasure trove jealously. He’s no easy pickings.
Kylo Ren is my favorite character in the Star Wars saga, replacing my beloved Luke in the span of a single film (The Force Awakens). The Last Jedi only expanded on what I already saw as the most interesting and complex character ever crafted for the Star Wars saga and turns him into something that is truly a masterpiece, and I’m not entirely sure it was all intentional.
In many ways, on the surface and perhaps on paper, Kylo is a simple character: he is someone who is being crushed under the weight of the previous generations and is trying to strike out on his own to find his own path, but who has been drawn toward the darkness in the process. But I think what we learn in The Last Jedi (and we certainly don’t learn much), points toward something much more intricate, much more human than the paper version of Kylo. How much of this is intentional on the part of the story group and the directors, how much of it is Adam Driver’s meticulous and flawless performance, and how much of it is the channeling of a message greater than any single person could create, I don’t know, but there’s so much inside this character it takes my breath away.
I’m going to tackle this post a little differently than my previous ones and break it up into sections; the stream-of-conscious approach worked well for the other posts, despite their length, but Kylo’s just such a hugely multi-faceted character that I need a little organization to focus the different aspects into something clear.
For everyone who’s waited so long for this post, here it is at last. Thank you for sticking it out with me, despite what a sluggish snail I am. ;) I hope it’s worth the wait, but if it isn’t, I’ll do my best to make up for it in the future. ;) So, without further ado, let’s tackle this beast of a man.
The Burden of Legacy
While some hints of Kylo’s real issues surfaced in his scenes from TFA, it isn’t until The Last Jedi that we start to see some of the real motives behind why he’s chosen the path he has.
Although he himself never states any of his thoughts, we can discern quite a bit about what happened to him in the beginning of his life up until his betrayal by Luke from what the other characters say and from hints from the novels. Now, I consider novels to be “secondary canon,” which means they’re only “canon” until something from future films disproves them (this is why I’ve thrown out the TFA novel entirely as a useful tool; as soon as Rey didn’t meet Poe until TLJ, TFA’s novel now moves into an “alternative universe” as far as I’m concerned, because it contains inconsistencies). However, it’s unlikely the novels surrounding Kylo’s past will have any retcons in the films themselves, so it’s safe to use them for now.
In one of the novels (I think Aftermath), we discover that before Ben is even born, a shadowy force is targeting him. This would have been the fate of any child of the Skywalkers--whether Luke’s or Leia’s--because they are somehow at the heart of the galaxy and are a powerful family. It was always going to be a risk to have a child under such circumstances, but if Leia and her husband were strong enough and savvy enough, it still hypothetically was possible to shield any children from such influences.
Unfortunately, Leia’s partner is Han, and she herself is a force intuitive rather than someone trained in it. They’re just not equipped--through no fault of their own--to handle what their union creates. Leia is a key political figure in restoring order to the galaxy and can’t give any child the attention needed, and Han is...not exactly the most sensitive or patient man, likely due to his own traumatic past. When Ben is born, he is born into a world that is already hunting him, already expecting much from him, and already discarding him.
One might say that the fact that Ben takes over 20 years to “turn to the dark” is quite remarkable given the influencing factors of his birth. That is a testament to his natural affinity toward the light as much as it is a testament to his ultimate failure to find enough purpose to withstand the pressure he was under. Unfortunately, we probably will never get to see these years covered in any film, and that’s a real travesty because this is pivotal for understanding the deep well of inner strength that this character has--and that Rey sees so much hope in.
Still, we have enough clues to extrapolate the likely trajectory of Ben’s early years. At first, he was most likely merely a normal child who maybe did some strange things due to his extraordinary force-sensitivity. What his parents may or may not have known was that the shadowy force was likely always there, in the back of his mind, even during his early years. Yet in the beginning, that probably didn’t matter. Leia and Han, being new parents and still in the first years of the rebuilding of the republic, would likely have been very involved in Ben’s life. It’s clear to see in both films that he loves them both, that they both matter to him, despite the actions he takes against them. He couldn’t have been neglected all his life if he still holds them in such high regard. So at least in his formative years he must have been cherished by them.
At some point, this changed, and a few things likely happened. First, he encountered “society,” and this could have happened as early as six or seven. This would be the first time he encountered the burden of legacy that would eventually break him--as the child of two war heroes and the nephew of another (and magical war heroes at that), expectations of his future were likely sky-high simply by virtue of his genetics. If this were all Ben had to contend with, he might have been able to bear it, but adding to that pressure was something else his DNA bestowed upon him--a ridiculously out of control force-sensitivity and prodigy-level abilities in the force. When these abilities fully manifested, I can’t say, but something about the way Luke talks about Ben in TLJ makes me think they didn’t fully manifest until puberty, which is likely when most of his problems actually started.
Before puberty, I would posit that Kylo’s problems were mostly localized to his family rather than the exterior world: he missed his mother, who was likely frequently out of the house and busy; he didn’t get along with his father, who by his own admission (and by Luke’s and Leia’s) couldn’t understand the boy very well and who didn’t “get” the whole force “thing” despite his proximity to two powerful wielders of the force; and, worse, a shadowy voice was likely lurking in the back of his mind, whispering things he shouldn’t be hearing. There may have been other factors as well, such as bullying in school or children being intimidated by him in general simply because of who he was. But something tells me that probably wasn’t the case in his early years because despite his rage-outs during TFA, in TLJ he shows some remarkably savvy social skills when he interacts with Rey, and that doesn’t come out of thin air simply because you’re sexually attracted to someone. I’d say that before his turn to the dark side, he was a well-mannered, kind, and pleasant boy to be around, probably a little too quick to display his heart on his sleeve and likely an empath. He probably was, in general, very well liked early on in his life, even by schoolmates. If this is true, then this makes his downfall all the more tragic because he knows what he’s thrown away; if he’d always been mistreated for his entire life, then he’s more pitiable, but for him to have known both good and bad and to be unable to correct course to return to the good is far more classically tragic in my opinion.
I think puberty (so around 13-14) was when Ben’s force sensitivity probably started going out of control. Likely he was testing the limits of his powers, exploring the boundaries of authority, trolling a bit, and acting out as teenagers are wont to do, and he probably scared the bejeezus out of Han. Han, unable to deal with Ben, shut down on him right at the one moment the boy needed him most--the shadows in his mind were likely growing louder and more insistent and clear, and he needed a strong role model to follow to stay on the straight and narrow. Leia, of course, was torn between her husband, son, and political duties, and so she likely called for Luke’s help because Ben was becoming too much to handle for both of them and they were out of their depth. When Luke saw Ben, he had the same reaction to him Snoke has--he sees all that ability and potential and wants to harness it and be the one who molds it. It’s the natural allure of the mentor, and it’s something mentors have to be very careful about--it’s one thing to want to foster talent, it’s a whole other thing to want to mold talent.
Luke convinces Leia and Han to release Ben into his custody, which we know from his own testimony in TLJ. Han’s reaction is left up to the viewer, but I expect he was probably in favor of dumping the boy onto Luke simply because Han tends to run from his problems (and we know his own deep guilt is the reason he retreats back into his former scalawag ways, so he fully knows where he went wrong with his son). But Leia probably lets Ben go because she genuinely thinks Luke can help him--and we know from her testimony in TFA that she regrets that decision and thinks it was the wrong one in hindsight. Because what Leia’s choice does, inadvertently, is prove to Ben that the voice in his head might be right after all--maybe his parents don’t love him and wish he were something other than what he’d turned out to be. This is something all kids face in their teens to some degree or other--it’s part of becoming an actualized individual--but given how empathic Ben was, and how deeply rooted the shadows infiltrating his mind were, he had a harder road to walk than the typical teen.
So Ben is packed off to Uncle Luke’s faraway foreign retreat, away from everything he’s ever known living at the center of civilization, and thrown into a monastic lifestyle he probably never wanted in the first place. The culture shock alone would have been rough even if Ben had wanted to go to training, but likely he was unwilling yet too obedient to his mother’s wishes to make his own wishes heard. Part of Ben’s problem, and part of the eventual problem Kylo Ren demonstrates, is that he’s too obedient. He’s trying so hard to be the good son to Snoke that I can’t imagine he didn’t do the same for Han, Leia, and eventually Luke. Yet another reason why he and Rey resonate so well together--both of them want to be lovely objects worthy of their parents’ love and affection deep in their hearts.
Ben likely took being sent away to Uncle Luke’s as a punishment from parents the shadowy voice whispered didn’t really love him rather than an attempt to help him, which he may have understood better had there been no shadowy voice. But Ben is a good boy, and we know by how deeply hurt he is by Luke that Luke quickly won him over and gained his trust and affection. Luke becomes the father figure to Ben that Han couldn’t be (and whoa, I just realized how this echoes Rey’s trajectory, like holy crap, Ben wasn’t describing Rey during that force connect moment when he was mocking her searching for her parents--he was describing himself), and Ben manages to make a life for himself.
We know he manages to last about 6 or more years at the jedi academy before Snoke finally gets the upper hand on him. Neither Ben nor Luke give us much information on his life at the academy, but I think we can safely assume a few things:
Ben was highly talented and was the teacher’s pet.
While some of the students became Ben’s friends and bonded closely with him, there were others who envied him and became resentful/bitter. (As I said before in my post on Luke and Kylo, this is likely why not all the padawan were killed when Ben went Kylo-mode; likely there was a fight between Ben’s friends and the kids who didn’t like Ben, and it turned into a slaughter.)
Snoke is getting a stronger and more insistent hold on Ben the more he trains and the more he connects to the force. Snoke by this point is also probably trying to poison Ben against Luke and may be priming the pump by hinting that Luke is afraid of Ben and will one day “prove” that by striking Ben.
At some point Ben learns about Vader, and the galaxy does as well, giving the padawan who may resent him full leave to increase any bullying tactics they may have been employing (or holding back on employing).
Possibly Luke, in order to keep the peace, turns a blind eye to any bullying behavior Ben’s receiving, despite knowing he should do something about it. Or, conversely, he’s just never around and is always out searching for new padawan, and so through neglect he, like Leia and Han, abandons Ben.
Luke at some point realizes that his training isn’t helping Ben and the darkness is becoming greater in him. Luke may or may not know about Snoke (I suspect he doesn’t until he talks to Leia after Ben disappears).
As Rey points out to Luke, Ben’s choice was not made before Luke raised his saber against him. In fact, I would argue (and I think Rey would agree), that by staying by Luke’s side, Ben had chosen Luke. If Luke had kept the faith and believed in the strength of the light in his nephew and the strength of his bond to his nephew, perhaps he might have steered Ben in a more productive direction. But moreover, Luke should have trusted that even if Ben turned, Leia, Han, and Luke were all enough to bring him back, no matter what it took.
Yet Luke didn’t believe in Ben, he didn’t believe in Ben’s light, and so he lost Ben to the darkness. Likely after the attack, Ben probably ran away scared and began gathering up his things only to be attacked by the padawan from the faction who resented him, and who now had a justification for their resentment (his attack on their master). Ben, being cornered, likely lashed out, was joined by his own friends, and a war began while poor Luke was pulling himself out of the wreckage. By the time Luke was free, Ben was gone and some of the padawan with him, leaving Luke to believe Ben slaughtered everyone, because why the hell wouldn’t he believe that Ben was a murderer?
So we can see from all of this that the “Skywalker legacy” brought Ben a great deal of pain and very little joy: likely he was bullied, pressured, neglected, abandoned, feared, hated, and abused simply because of his DNA and his abilities. For an empath as strong as Ben clearly is, this is an unbearable way to live and would send even the strongest straight down the steep descent into nihilism if there isn’t a very strong and clear purpose for them to latch onto.
Ben’s DNA and genetic legacy and the legacy of his family itself buried him beneath their weight. At a time in his life where he needed to make a name for himself and strike his own path and test the strength of his fledgling wings, he was being crushed by the weight of both the dark side of his lineage (the Vader side) and the light side of his lineage (the war heroes). His force sensitivity made him a target to enemies and allies alike--he was likely seen as a tool to be used or an object of envy for those less naturally gifted. And because there was not yet a Rey by his side to give him the love and devotion he likely desperately sought from his parents and uncle in lieu of all the pain, he was left with the only other person who had remained by his side through it all: the shadowy presence who had been there from the beginning, the voice of Snoke.
Welcome to the Dark Side
So what about that loyal shadow presence lurking in the corners of Ben’s charmed life? What on earth would make that presence more attractive to Ben than his comfy home and wonderful family? As with the rest of his past, this aspect of Ben’s life is shrouded in mystery. However, we can assume a few things based on Snoke’s gloating:
Snoke can read and has been reading (for how long is unknown) all of Ben’s thoughts. As in, every. single. thought. Kind of hard to grow up if you have no privacy at all. Poor kid probably couldn’t even have any fantasies. No wonder he’s a 30-year-old virgin. ;) Joking aside, this is actually incredibly sinister if Snoke’s been able to do this Ben’s entire life. That means for the entirety of his life his every move has been “observed” by someone. Living under constant surveillance normally would drive anyone mad in general, but this goes even further than mere visual surveillance. The implications here are horrifying for Ben’s ability to actualize himself in a healthy way and also are an enormous testament to the depth and strength of the light within him--he managed to withstand daily torment from this shadow presence for most of his life. He’s only been truly in its grasp for a brief span of time--at most 6 years, virtually the same amount of time he’d been a padawan.
Before I go into what this means for Kylo Ren in the current timeframe, I’d like to explore what this meant for Ben Solo. I’m not sure how long Snoke was able to communicate with Ben, but given how powerful he is, I’m sure at the very least he was able to send his own thoughts to Ben (perhaps even masking them to sound like Ben’s own thoughts), even if Ben couldn’t respond. When Snoke began speaking with Ben, I can’t say--perhaps he only observed initially and didn’t begin speaking until Ben’s relationship with Han began to fragment and he was shipped off to Uncle Luke’s.
I think we can say for certain that at least during the 6 or so years of Ben’s padawan training, Snoke was messing with his head and his belief in himself and his family. So even if Snoke had started as an unwanted presence in Ben’s mind, or something Ben fought, by the end of the journey Snoke became the only thing Ben “had” that had never rejected or betrayed him, that “loved” him. This is a classic manipulation tactic--to seduce the victim with the idea that you alone hold them as “special” and then to isolate them from other sources of strength and support. This is one of the reasons I suspect Kylo’s Knights of Ren are dead--if Kylo had friends or supporters, he wouldn’t be as vulnerable to Snoke’s influence as he clearly is during TFA and TLJ. Snoke also makes sure to keep Hux and Kylo at each other’s throats rather than letting them form a friendship (which would be more natural given their similar ages). I can’t see him letting Ben keep his friends--likely he “arranged” for the friends to “tragically die” in battle for the First Order, isolating Ben further. (This, I think, may have been part of the vision Rey saw in TFA.)
Either way, Ben goes from potentially distrusting and not believing the voice in his head to placing his hope of a future in its hands. This is likely due to the fact that the voice probably “predicts” what will happen (Leia/Han’s abandonment, the other padawan’s resentment and envy, Luke’s “betrayal”), and thus the voice gains credibility over the other people in Ben’s life who have continued to fail him. This credibility leads Ben to go to Snoke’s side.
I’m not sure at what point Ben “meets” Vader. TFA implies Ben has spoken to Vader before, but isn’t speaking to him by TFA. Since we know Vader was redeemed and has shown himself as Anakin as his force ghost, we can assume whatever “Vader” Ben has been talking to isn’t real and likely is a creation of Snoke’s. Snoke’s probably powerful enough for this simply because he’s the one who creates (or at least manipulates) the force connection between Kylo and Rey; if he can do that, he can surely create a vision of Vader to “convince” Ben that the dark side is the only way for Ben.
But even with all of this, it’s hard I think to see why the dark side would be an attractive option for Ben rather than just striking out on his own and building his own destiny as an unknown person. That honestly would have been the more natural option--most teens in Ben’s situation would simply “run away” (and this would have put him on a trajectory more like Han’s). If he was tired of his force abilities, he could even have cut them off entirely like Luke does in TLJ.
So I don’t think Ben’s actions can be written off simply as “I had no other choice.” Clearly there are other choices, but for unknown reasons Ben doesn’t take them, which implies they don’t fulfill whatever deeper need is operating underneath his desire to be “free” of his family’s legacy. Especially given that all he does is “trade” one form of “legacy” for another--he discards his family’s light side legacy in order to explore its dark side.
As a jedi padawan, Ben would have been subjected to what spotty jedi training Luke was able to give him (we know Luke hadn’t read the jedi texts from TLJ, so Luke’s training probably wasn’t the same kind one would have received during Anakin’s time). We see a hint of the kind of teacher Luke was during the small training sequence with Rey in TLJ; he’s clearly a different kind of teacher than Yoda or Obi Wan. He doesn’t believe in separating the dualism of life--he clearly believes in balance, in the interplay between the light and the dark, between chaos and order. However, he likely makes the same mistake with Ben that he makes with Rey--despite his belief that the dark/chaos has a place in the world, he does not encourage exploring it, which is exactly the very thing that led to Anakin’s downfall and to the downfall of the jedi, though Luke probably isn’t aware of that.
So we come back, again, to Ben’s similarities with Rey--what is it that Snoke (or the womb pit in Rey’s case) has to offer that Luke doesn’t? The knowledge of the shadow side--the full ability to integrate into a whole personality. Snoke can give Ben the other half of the training Ben needs to actualize himself--and I think this is an unconscious desire of Ben’s, not a conscious one, because Ben’s naturally an empath and an intuitive person, not a rationalist. This is the real reason Snoke is attractive for Ben, despite the fact that ordinarily I think Ben would find Snoke repugnant (as he clearly does in TLJ).
Ben’s journey mirrors Rey’s in a lot of ways, though he’s “further along” than she is up until the mirror scene. Once she accepts her dark sides and her anxieties, she pulls ahead of Ben in development, because he gets “trapped” in the underworld when he ventures in to find himself. This is likely because, unlike Rey, Ben did not willingly enter the underworld. He was driven to it. This is the difference between willingly taking a risk and unwillingly being forced to--Rey retains her agency while Ben cannot; Ben is subsumed by the dark forces of the underworld and dragged deeper to become weakened, while Rey is able to touch it briefly and then escape back into the light stronger for the adventure and with a pearl of wisdom at hand.
When Luke rejects Ben, this leaves Ben with the only other option that fulfills his deepest desire--go to Snoke and integrate his shadow side by learning from a dark master. This is a very dangerous path and for Ben to take it only as a “last alternative” plays right into Snoke’s hands--Ben now becomes trapped in Snoke’s cage and needs to be rescued or killed in order to be freed from it. It’s a strong prison and one that will take more than what Ben has in him alone to overcome. Had Ben taken the path willingly, he might have overcome Snoke far sooner and with much less torment and destruction.
This is why Ben can’t abandon his legacy entirely though--if he did, he would be an incomplete person. I think the force knew this, and so that’s why it found an alternative to help him. The force seems to be very active in this sequel series, almost a kind of universal collective that’s trying to guide everyone to a greater path, even if it means taking a detour now and then. So we find that Ben has several reasons why Snoke was the only path he could take, despite having alternatives:
He still wants to be loved by a father figure because he’s not actualized as a person.
He’s subconsciously seeking integration with his own dark side, something Luke has denied him out of fear.
Wherever he goes, Snoke will follow anyway. Probably even if he shut off the force.
In addition to these, there’s one more thing that Ben probably would never want to acknowledge that is driving him: in truth, he has no desire to run from the legacy he was born under (he’s actually quite proud of it)--he wants to make his own mark on his legacy. But in a dichotomous worldview (and before Rey), he only has two options for making his mark upon his family’s history: be “good” like his family and probably be forgotten due to there being no great war to fight, or become “bad” and surpass the only member of the family to ever have “gone bad.”
If we assume that Ben didn’t learn about Vader until he was in his late teens/early twenties, it may be that this suddenly opened up a temptation for him that coincided with his own subconscious desire to explore his dark side: he found out his legacy was “bigger” than just heroes--there were “villains” as well, specifically only one villain. While he could never be greater than Han, or Leia, or Luke, maybe he could be greater than Vader--and being greater Vader, as a larger presence than all three of his close kin, would make Ben himself greater than his own family. If he could surpass Vader, he’d be the greatest Skywalker of all--a ruler of galaxies feared and never forgotten.
It’s likely this fantasy (which probably was a fantasy exacerbated by his teenage anger at his family for discarding him and at his fellow padawans for being resentful and his own hubris over how great his abilities were) that Snoke stoked and encouraged. This is the fantasy we see being played out between them, the carrot Snoke continues to dangle before Ben in TFA and which he removes in TLJ: the idea of surpassing Vader, and by extension surpassing the burden of his legacy entirely to mold it into a new legacy, a legacy entirely of his own.
This is why, I think, Ben becomes Kylo Ren--he wants to redefine and reshape his legacy into something he is master of, rather than something he’s crushed under or manipulated by. He wants to devour his legacy and rise above it, rather than being devoured by it. Snoke and his own ambitions seduce him into thinking that this is the only way to truly make his mark on the world, and this is the reason why I don’t think his motive (before Rey and TLJ) is to discard his legacy, despite the burdens it’s placed on him. Kylo can bear his legacy and wants to bear his legacy. It’s all he has. It’s all he’s ever had. He was born with it. It’s the only thing that’s never left him. But at the same time, he doesn’t want to be its pawn. He wants to be in charge of it. To do this, he has to transform himself and join the dark side.
Of course, the problem with this is...unlike Anakin, who truly did fall to the dark, Kylo is playing. It’s a fantasy he’s acting out, and not his true desire, which is simply to actualize himself and find his place in the world. (A positive place, not a negative one.) Kylo doesn’t want to be evil, and this is why he has such a hard time playing the part. We see this in TFA; while he’s good at pretending he’s tough in front of soldiers who he orders to do the actual killing (rather than killing himself) and while he’s snarky and quippy and capable of force-extracting info from resistance members, he’s still an empath who is deeply troubled and deeply sympathetic. We see this when he lets Finn go despite knowing what he’s going to do, we see this when he admits his doubts to the Vader mask, we see this when he takes his temper tantrums out on objects rather than people, we see this when he forgets his goals to try to understand Rey, we even see it when he is moved by his father’s love.
Likely what happens between Ben’s initial choice to “become” Kylo Ren and the events of TFA is that he slowly becomes demoralized and disillusioned about what Snoke has to offer him. He switches from playing the “good son” in order to genuinely please Snoke to playing the part simply to stay alive. Snoke is all he has, but Snoke is abusive, cruel, manipulative, and downright nasty. Kylo isn’t a child--he knows exactly what kind of person Snoke is. And likely as the years pass and he continues to be unable to free himself from Snoke, he begins to lose the last remnants of faith in himself and to crumble under the pressure. This is why we see him plaintively begging Vader for help in TFA--he’s lost and can’t escape. Some dead guy he never met is his only hope. That’s pretty sad.
Fortunately, the force hears him (maybe even with Anakin’s help), and brings him his salvation, though he won’t know she is until the third film I think. For the first time in a long time, Ben receives some of the validation he’s been seeking--in the form of Rey taking him seriously as a threat, but also overcoming him as an equal. The interrogation scene both puffs up his ego and tears it down simultaneously, and, as we see from his reaction when he races to Snoke, it’s an exhilarating experience for him. Snoke, stupidly, doesn’t see the danger of the fox who’s entered the henhouse, and he instead sees Rey as a new way to twist Kylo further.
Then Kylo proves himself by performing the ultimate act--he’s not yet taken by the alternative Rey’s existence provides, and so he continues to pursue his fantasy of becoming greater than Vader by doing what Vader couldn’t--sacrificing a parent. It’s probably easiest to sacrifice Han in some ways because Han was the first to abandon Kylo and the last to understand him. Yet at the same time, which we learn from TLJ, Han’s murder destroyed Kylo and left him unable to continue the path he’d set out to conquer. Rather than making him stronger and firmly setting his dark side as his prominent alignment, Kylo disintegrates and breaks down. All that’s left to him in this moment is the faint thread connecting him to Rey, and this leads to his violent anger at Finn as well as his offer to Rey of training. She’s the last thing he has; all his fantasies and illusions have begun breaking down due to his own actions. But the force separates him from Rey, and he is returned to Snoke because it’s not time yet for her to reach him.
His meltdown continues in TLJ; his loss to Rey shatters the remainder of his pride and his murder of his father and the loss of Rey sunder his foundations, but the encounter with Rey (and how deeply he affected her) has birthed something new within him that’s only fledgling in form at the beginning of the film: a new desire, a new wish, even if he can’t verbalize it or even acknowledge it because of Snoke’s mental spying. Rey’s existence brings hope back into his life--hope of finding a path that allows him to achieve his dream (which is to make his mark on his own legacy) while escaping the clutches of the dark side he’s become trapped and mired in.
We see this begin to play out in his first scene in the film, when he appears before Snoke. There is so much undercurrent in this scene it’s quite a revelation in and of itself. His rivalry with Hux continues, and Snoke stokes it, but it’s not nearly as strong as it was in TFA. Something has changed inside Kylo, and Snoke initially assumes (mistakenly) that it’s a weakening. Snoke taunts Kylo about his failures and rubs salt in the clear wound. He commands Kylo to remove his mask, exposing his vulnerability. Kylo, who in TFA was firmly on the path of playing the “good son” to Snoke, despite knowing the truth of the words his father said to him in TFA long before his father uttered them, now in TLJ has transformed--for the first time in his life, he has taken on the mantle of the rebellious son, and it’s an uncomfortable and unfamiliar role for him.
Gone is the reverence for Snoke, gone is the obedience. Snoke mocks Kylo, throwing his resemblance to his father in his face. Rather than beg for mercy or agree, Kylo snaps back that he killed his father and he didn’t hesitate when the time came. He for the first time defends himself, and this is probably the first time he’s ever done this in his life. It is the mark of something new that has awakened in him, something that his own actions and the small thread of connection to Rey have sparked. Having destroyed his own father, he has toppled the paradigm of fatherhood itself and has opened the door to rebellion against authority for the first time in his life.
Unfortunately, this role isn’t one Kylo’s comfortable with, so Snoke quickly shuts him down by pointing out that he’s a hot mess, which Kylo is forced to acknowledge even though he tries to stick his nose in the air and maintain his pride--Snoke’s words are true, as they often are. And then Snoke makes his first mistake of the film--he tries to diminish Kylo’s achievement by pointing out his lack of balance and, of course, his failure to defeat Rey.
What I find interesting at this moment in the scene between them, and what will reverberate later in the final red room sequence, is that Kylo has probably never actually attempted to fight Snoke before in his life. Yet the minute Snoke tries to diminish Rey and use her as a weapon against Kylo, Kylo moves. Now, a casual viewer might say that the reason Kylo attacks Snoke is because Snoke poked his pride. The problem I have with this interpretation is that Kylo would have needed to move after Snoke said he failed. But Kylo is already in motion while Snoke is speaking the failure line, meaning the point Snoke made that pissed Kylo off to the point of wanting to fight was the comment about Rey.
Now, we know Kylo doesn’t feel ashamed of himself for being bested by her. (Mostly because I don’t think he was, and I think he knows he wasn’t--not that he let her win, but that he didn’t want to best her, and honestly I’ve always believed that he was okay with her killing him in that moment simply because of how much he likely hated himself. I think he kind of saw her as an avenging angel in a way, and would have been all right being defeated by her.) The reason we know he wasn’t ashamed of being bested by her is because his first reaction upon seeing her again is to light up like it’s Christmas. That’s...not a normal reaction for seeing someone who’s caused you to feel ashamed of yourself. =P (More on that later of course.)
So this leaves me with only one conclusion for why he stands against Snoke for probably the first time in his life in that first scene--Snoke insulted the bae, and you don’t insult the bae and escape. This scene is foreshadowing for his choice later in the film. It’s also foreshadowing for the manner in which he kills Snoke--we see here that a full frontal assault against Snoke is useless, and thus cunning has to be employed instead. For the first time in his life, Kylo will have to use his own strength and knowledge to outwit a being far stronger than he is.
In this moment, Kylo takes the first step toward what is a journey, at last, into manhood--his stunted and frozen growth is at last thawing into spring. It’ll be incomplete in TLJ, of course, because this is the midpoint of the story. But the key points of the first Snoke scene are three-fold: foreshadow Kylo’s ultimate alignment and choice in the red room sequence, establish his switch from “good son” to “rebellious son,” and to demonstrate that Kylo, in the murdering of his father, has torn down the mystique of the “father figure” and so father figures no longer hold any power over him.
This is further emphasized by Snoke calling Kylo a child at the end of the sequence, and Kylo storming off in anger to the elevator. The first thing he does is destroy his mask. What does the mask symbolize to him in that moment? Likely it’s the obedience to the father. And so he, like any good prodigal son, heads out to go destroy some people and prove his worth in his own way. But for the first time he’s begun to contemplate rebellion and what rebellion means. He’s picking up on the lessons he’d left off on in his teenage years, when Uncle Luke betrayed him and helped push him down the path of exploring the underworld alone. Now he’s more conflicted and lost than ever, as the remainder of his choices will demonstrate. He’s been unmoored by his actions in TFA, and although he never speaks a word about them, they seep out of everything he does.
Love for Mother
My brother said to me that he doesn’t believe Kylo has any special feelings for his mother over his father, and that if Leia had gone to Kylo first, Kylo would have killed her. I thought about this for a while, but I still don’t buy it. Kylo’s very focused on authority/order/father figures. He has virtually no animosity toward the feminine in any way--he’s open with his emotions, he’s sensitive, he’s compassionate under the right circumstances. All of this implies, to me, that he’s a mama’s boy who was abandoned by mama, not a sociopath who doesn’t care about either of his parents and could have easily killed both of them. The reason I think Han was arguably the “easiest” simply is because Han was the one he was the furthest from emotionally--even fighting Luke was harder for him than killing Han.
The scene with Kylo coming to attack Leia is so subtle but it breaks my heart to pieces. This boy knows the inside and outside of her ship; he’s the first to get into her hanger and blow up her ace’s vehicles. Yet even though he knows every inch of the resistance ships, he still hesitates when the moment comes to take his mommy down (and seriously that face could not kill mommy--Adam Driver does such a phenomenal job at breaking down like a child in that scene--that’s clearly a boy who wants to come home but who knows he can’t). And when two other First Order pilots do the favor for him, he clearly is distraught by the choice being taken from him.
I’m pretty sure his first instinct was to go after her when he saw she was blown out of the command center. That’s why we get that bizarre sequence where Hux tells him to pull back because he’s too far out--what other reason would he have to do that other than to search for Leia? Of course, once Hux shines a spotlight on him, he has to pull out or risk whatever punishment Snoke’ll be sending his way, which is why he gets snarly about complying. While he was willing to rebel a bit, he’s fresh off his failure to actually achieve anything in that scene. There’s no way he could rebel against Snoke for Leia in this instance.
Still, it’s telling that he wanted to try. This is more evidence of how torn up he is--on the one hand, he’s destroying his mother’s allies and helping bring her down, but on the other his impulse is to go save her the minute she’s in danger. Snoke as usual has it right: his light and dark sides are out of balance.
The reason I don’t think Kylo is willing to betray Snoke for Leia, but he will for Rey, is for the same reasons why he won’t join Rey to fight the First Order, which I’ll get into more later. But in short, Leia (and Han before her) can only offer him the same thing he left Luke over--more neglect and a return to the status quo, where he’s buried under their legacy and unable to distinguish himself and--worse--due to his own actions, now unable to avoid the vitriol of those he fought against. He can’t return to Leia yet. There’s no place for him in her world yet. This was the same problem he had with Han’s offer--Han could only give him a return to the place he (rightfully) no longer believes he can return to because of how much damage he’s caused. He’s gone too far down Snoke’s path, he’s lived too long in the underworld, to come back to the light on his own. Like Eurydice, he’s going to need someone to bargain with Hades and lead him out into the light.
Anther factor in why Leia can’t save Kylo, I think, is because in all those years she never tried. She never dropped her duties and obligations to the resistance and the republic to chase down Snoke and get her son back. It’s the same reason why Luke can’t save him--Kylo spent nearly 6 years under Snoke’s thumb and his family never came for him. They’re only trying to “save” him now because he “happened” to be in their vicinity--he had to come to them, not vice versa. And this is another reason why Rey will ultimately be the only one who can reach him--just as he will tear the galaxy apart for her, she will fly to wherever he is no matter the risk or the cost. Both of them will place the other above their duties and obligations, and that’s what each of them is seeking.
Speaking of, I guess it’s now time to dig into Kylo’s side of the Reylo in this film. ;)
First Love, True Love
It’s hard to fathom how much development happens across four short scenes between Kylo and Rey in the middle of TLJ, and even more astounding is how much depth those scenes contain. For easy reference, just note that I’ll be referring to the force connection scenes as FC1 (the first scene where Rey shoots Kylo), FC2 (the rain sequence), FC3 (the shirtless sequence), and FC4 (the hand touch sequence). Shorthand helps in long posts like this. ;)
Before I go into the sequences themselves, I want to talk about what is--and is not--revealed by Kylo about himself in these scenes. For a film whose deepest purpose was to explore Kylo Ren himself and help us answer questions as to why he ended up where he was, we get remarkably little information from the man himself.
I think the reason for this is actually two-fold:
As I said earlier in the “Welcome to the Dark Side” section, Snoke has access to Kylo’s mind at any time and can be reading it at any moment (how often he actually does this is anyone’s guess--but the mere threat of it is enough to affect how Kylo reacts). That raises the likelihood that Kylo is constantly filtering what he says and even what he thinks. It’s honestly a travesty Rey isn’t allowed to see glimpses of how Snoke infiltrated Kylo’s mind and broke him down, but even worse is the effect this has on the viewer--how much of what Kylo is saying a trustworthy and honest representation of his viewpoint? How much of it, much like Rey, is thinly veiled behind “appropriate” (but this time for Dark Side users rather than Light Side) thoughts for a First Order man to have? The threat of Snoke’s presence makes it virtually impossible for us to know the “real” Kylo because Kylo is likely censoring or veiling his words and his thoughts--he speaks cryptically to Rey in regard to anything about his family or his real reasons for doing things (such as the murder of Han Solo, which, I might add, we still have no idea why he actually went through with it).
The other reason I think is that Kylo himself views his actions and motivations as reprehensible but due to reason 1 above and due to how far he’s gone into darkside territory, he doesn’t see any hope for himself other than to keep treading the path he’s on. He isn’t nihilistic enough to contemplate suicide, but he’s not finding any meaning in the dark side either. To explore any third option, he needs to break completely from the dark side.
Honestly, Kylo’s character leaves me completely flummoxed. Ordinarily a villain would try to justify his actions to the hero, but despite having the opportunity, Kylo never does that. When Rey throws barbs at him about being a monster and a murderer, he never once tries to help her see his point of view or justify his actions to her. For a man who killed his father to clear his head (supposedly), this is just ridiculously bizarre behavior. He’s obviously hurt on a personal level by her judgment of him, but he never once says it’s unreasonable of her or disagrees with her (he even acknowledges she’s right). For him to accept that he’s a monster is an odd thing to do for someone who thinks their actions are heroic or justified.
Given that, as I established earlier, Kylo is becoming disillusioned with what Snoke has to offer him and what the dark side itself has to offer him, it does make sense that he wouldn’t view his actions from TFA and before in a favorable light. Given that he comes from the dichotomous world of light/dark of Luke’s jedi training, he should have at least something of a moral compass, even if it’s been deconstructed due to misuse. It reminds me a bit of how the idea of an “ideal” is two-sided: on the one hand, it’s a North Star and a goal to chase and pursue, on the other hand it is a judge, flooding a spotlight on all your imperfections and inabilities to live up to the ideal. There is some ideal in Kylo’s head, I think, that he’s failing to live up to and he’s lashing out against it--perhaps this is part of the light side legacy he’s running from. But it seems to me the reason he so desperately wants to cut all his ties to the past and bring the whole house down on his own family is that they remind him of what he should have been but is not because of his own choices.
He’s a remarkable character who actually takes responsibility for his evil, but doesn’t seem to know what to do to rectify the wrong he’s done, so he continues to commit wrongs in order to try to reach an equilibrium in his own tortured mind. Maybe he’s even hoping to a degree that if he keeps it up, if he keeps doing further into the dark, one day the light will cease to torment him and he’ll be free of it. This to me is more reminiscent of a terrorist or a war criminal than a sociopathic mass murderer, despite the egregious nature of his crimes. Hux seems to be more in line with a genuine monster--a man who has thrown away his humanity in order to pursue an inverted goal of meaningless nihilism; Kylo, on the other hand, just seems to be unable to find a way to extricate him from the prison he’s constructed around himself. Yet he’s still self-centered and childish enough to want to try to save himself from the consequences of his actions; he’s not yet ready to legitimately take on the burden of the mantle of what he himself has contributed to the misery of the world. We all have the ability to tune the world slightly more toward heaven or hell, and Kylo has tuned the world toward hell. He’ll need to pay for that at some point, and to bear those consequences with a willing and humble heart.
So given all of this, we begin this sequence of force connection scenes with a Kylo who is cagey and unable to fully express himself--yet is desperately seeking to explore this new connection with Rey. Because of this, what I think he does (and we can see evidence for this in the way he talks to her) is attempt to help her both understand him and warn her against making his mistakes by using her own history and actions as dual-layered metaphors for himself. And for some reason, I think Rey understands this weird way of speaking, probably because their minds are bridged and she can see “what he means” in a way most people wouldn’t be able to.
In FC1, their first force connection moment, we establish a couple interesting things about Kylo. First is that he’s not unhappy or displeased to see Rey--rather, the minute their minds connect, his eyes and face light up. Her presence is welcome to him, almost a gift he hadn’t been expecting. This tells us immediately that he holds no grudge against her for what she did to him in TFA, nor does he feel diminished by her (after all, he still bears her scar, and though he’s healing it up so that it’s not a gaping wound, he’s not removing it entirely and he’s not ashamed to bear her mark at any point in TLJ)--instead, he still holds all the admiration, respect, and adoration he held for her ever since he first saw into her mind in the forest. Even more interesting, her first response is to attack him, and rather than attempt to deflect (as he did in TFA), he flinches, fully believing he’s been shot. So right away we can see this man leaves himself deliberately vulnerable to this young woman, even though he fully knows she has a penchant for “shoot first, talk later.” So for the second time it’s confirmed that he is okay with whatever “justice” this young woman wants to enact upon him--she, and only she, may take him to account for his wrongdoing. This probably will be significant in the future for Episode IX.
After the shooting sequence, he goes racing into the hallway, skidding like an eager schoolboy, searching for her. When he turns back to see her, he tries one last time to bring her to him (in an acceptable way of course; with Luke in tow lol). She’s too strong for any mind games now, and he gives up the minute he realizes it. It’s like he just doesn’t even care anymore; it was just a test. There’s a wonderful scientific bent to his personality that implies he was probably a huge nerd when he was Ben Solo--he’s testing the limits of this new connection, what it can do, why it works the way it does. Rey’s busy fuming, and he’s like a kid in a candy store babbling about the limits of space and time.
We not only see his experimenter’s mentality, we see his intuitive perception as well. He should by rights have no idea where Rey even is--as he says himself, he can’t see her surroundings, he can only see her. Yet the minute she turns her head upon Luke’s arrival, he knows who has arrived. What’s weird in this moment, at least to me, is that there’s virtually none of the vitriol toward Luke that he shows toward the end of the film. He doesn’t spit Luke’s name like it’s venomous or snarl or show anything other than curiosity. It’s something I’m not sure what to make of yet, other than perhaps it has something to do with how his world crashes down around him when Rey rejects his proposal. More on that later.
The one last thing we see in FC1 which is just mind boggling given by this point in the story they’ve had only a whopping three small scenes together is how he looks at her when he says he can only see her--it’s like he’s seeing this vision of angelic beauty and is experiencing some transcendent idea of grace in that moment. Again, props to Adam Driver for his amazing performance (I have no idea why he wasn’t nominated for the Oscars seriously it’s a shame), but I think given his expression it’s very clear that the boy is mad about this girl and it has nothing to do with her abilities or power. I think if she were just a normal girl with no ability at all, he’d probably still be this wild about her. Her ability may have been the first thing that interested him, but at this point he’s gone beyond that, and in such a short time on top of it.
We don’t get to see him again until FC2, and unfortunately unlike Rey we don’t get to see how he feels about FC1. When we pick up with him again, he’s standing alone, quietly contemplating something as he observes the First Order hangar bay. Honestly, from his body language and the way his head gently curves down upon their next connection, I’d say he was waiting for them to connect again. He’s highly intuitive as a character, and I can’t imagine he thought it wouldn’t happen again.
In all their scenes there is a deep sexual undercurrent between them, and this is the first scene where it’s palpable not just in the subtext but also in the visual metaphors. He gets to have a bit of the voyeur’s experience while he watches her revel in the rain. The rain’s a powerful symbol of the feminine, as rain heals and brings new life. This is the scene of their mutual sexual awakening, and it culminates in the rain itself appearing on his cheek. This is simultaneously a metaphor for a wet dream in his case and also foreshadowing for his ability to force project into her space the way he will by FC4. In essence, as far as I can tell, this is the mutual “hitting puberty full speed” scene for both of them, which makes sense, given both of them have been “frozen” up until this point. After this scene, the sexual undercurrent between them changes form and becomes more akin to that between teenagers in teen flicks. We’re still not yet at the adult range these two should actually be interacting within (they’re both actually adults), but I’m sure that will happen in the third film, when they’re both ready to take on the responsibilities of adult partnership.
Beyond the sexual subtext, Kylo is a gabby gus while Rey is still unable to move on from her own anger and rage that she’s projecting onto him (not without good reason of course). Poor Kylo is still trying to figure out why this cool thing is happening to them and Rey just does not give any shits, haha. This shows they’re on different pages still, and what I love about how Kylo handles her is that he gently backs off and follows whatever direction she wants to take the conversation in. If Kylo had a zodiac sign, he’s probably a cancer or a scorpio haha. He just screams water. Rey’s more fire/earth (I’m not sure which yet since she seems to have elements from both--maybe she’s got one as a moon and one as a sun). Though it’d make sense if Kylo was a cancer (the deepest/furthest point in the zodiac) and Rey a capricorn (the highest/loftiest point in the zodiac). Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.
In this scene though, Rey hurts Kylo the most. When she calls him a murderous snake, his face becomes immediately crestfallen and his early cheerful questions fall away. He then asks her if she knows what happened between him and Luke. She then hurts him again, but he’s ready for it this time. What I love about how he handles his hurt though, is that he never attacks her or defends against her; he accepts her spears in his heart and lets her stab him over and over again. Rather than attacking back, he plays up the rising sexual tension between them (another reason I think he’s better socialized than TFA lets on, because this is not something a man as stunted as he is should be able to do with this level of dexterity) to seduce her instead. Rather than reading her mind, he looks deeply into her eyes and croons agreement with her, which immediately throws into doubt how much truth is in her barbs. He then reminds her of their encounter at the end of TFA, which shows how deeply that scene affected him.
Then Rey does something for him which I think is very important, though I’m not sure she knows it--she validates him by asserting he is a monster. Remember, this guy just went through a scene with Snoke where Snoke told him he’s still a child in a mask. Rey acknowledges Kylo’s destructive power as a man, which reaffirms him right after Snoke has torn him down. Obviously this isn’t a healthy affirmation, but the point here is that Rey rebuilds what Snoke has torn apart. Kylo’s pride is beginning to heal because she sees and accepts the existence of the very real and powerful darkness within him here. And he, fully knowing himself and knowing how far gone he is, affirms her assertion. What I think is interesting here is that despite it seeming clear he’s hurt that she sees him as a monster, he doesn’t disagree with her assessment. It’s just that he seems to wish she’d see he’s more than “just” a monster--that rather than being a bogeyman, he’s a man--capable of both the monstrous and the altruistic. I think this is a sign that he wants her--and only her--to see him as “more” than he himself sees himself, which is a sign he’s beginning to realign with the “ideal” again because of her. Yet he can’t refute her assertion, because he’s not a dishonest person and that’s his own assessment of himself. It’ll take something more to pull him out of this.
So yet again, between FC2 and FC3 we don’t get to see Kylo’s thoughts, but given how...deliberately...he’s staged himself in FC3, and how bizarre it is for him to be removing his shirt in the middle of the damn day, I’d say chances are higher on the “waiting around for the next connection to show off his assets to the bae” side of things than “just happened to be working out when Rey force skyped him” side of things. =P Plus the way he says “yeah, me too” to her before she sees the state he’s in just screams “liar.” He was waiting for her and hoping to connect again. =P
What I love about his reaction to Rey in FC3 is that he just doesn’t make anything easy on her--this boy has decided to seduce the pants off her and by golly he’s not giving her an inch. But what’s really cool about this is that he leaves it as subtext; he’s offering himself to her as feast for her eyes to devour, but he doesn’t try to make her uncomfortable, nor does he actively provoke her. FC3 is actually one of the deepest connections they make in the film, despite its silly beginning. She gets worked up and upset that he killed his father and begs him for an answer--he’s clearly moved to compassion by her pain, but given the restrictions on his ability to speak about his true motives, he can only offer her an insubstantial “I didn’t hate him.” This is the closest he’s come to being able to admit there was more going on with the Han scene than even we the viewers may know--I still lean toward the interpretation that he never wanted to kill Han, but that Snoke had made it clear that in order to “stay” with Snoke, if he and Han ever crossed paths, Kylo had to kill Han or he would lose his place. Of course, this doesn’t absolve Kylo of the consequences of his choice, but it does make the whole thing more nuanced than merely “Kylo is an evil villain who kills his dad for ‘reasons’.” Unfortunately, I’m not sure we’ll ever get to find out what was really going on because...Rey honestly doesn’t give two figs for why Kylo really killed Han, which...we’ll get into that more in the future Reylo post, lol. For now it’s enough to say that we can now reinterpret TFA through this new lens--Kylo’s anger and hurt with his father did not mean he hated him, and his desire to go home with his dad now that his dad had finally come for him was likely very real. If Han had come with Leia, I do wonder if Snoke would have had a chance and it just breaks my damn heart over and over again that they both ran away from their son and left him in Snoke’s hands rather than uniting their strengths and tearing the galaxy apart to get him back.
But this small comment is as much as Kylo can give us; when Rey demands further explanation, he redirects the focus back to her. As I said before, he speaks to her in a sort of mirrored way--what he says about her is equally true about himself. He reminds her that her parents threw her away like garbage but she’s still unable to free herself from him. Now at this point, this guy knows nothing about her parents--he himself doesn’t find out the truth until he receives whatever is in his vision when they touch hands. All he knows is what he gleaned from her mind in TFA, which is her own loneliness from all the years of waiting. Of course, he’s intuitive, so his words hit the mark because in the end he’s right. But his words are still about himself as well. He tells her that she’s looking for her parents inside these alternative father figures (Han, Luke). The funny thing is...I don’t really think she sees a father figure in Luke. Han, for sure, she did. But Luke is more like...a legend to her, an unreal being. So what Kylo’s doing here is actually revealing his own actions--he is the one who was looking for Han inside Luke, and then Snoke. And of course you can’t replace the father with other father figures very easily, especially not when your own father is still alive and a very real presence in your life.
He then asks her again if Luke told her want happened the night he burned the temple. What’s so weird here is the way Adam delivers the line. It’s not at all accusatory or angry--it’s tender and gentle. He’s trying to help Rey see something here, and this is why I think he’s trying to help her avoid the mistakes he himself made. He gives her his alternative version and warns her that there are men out there who will be afraid of her power and seek to destroy her. This is as much about Snoke as it is about Luke, but he hides it behind Luke. And then he gives her the most helpful advice he could have at the moment--he encourages her to get stronger by letting the past die. Now, he of course adds “kill it if you have to,” which most people I think would assume he’s talking about his own father. But I don’t think he is. I think this is yet another mirror into his own psyche--he intends to kill his own past by taking down Snoke. I’d read somewhere that Rian said Kylo was planning to kill Snoke by the time we reach the elevator scene before the red room sequence, and if that’s true, then it’s something he’s been considering for longer than the elevator scene. Snoke is his past, like Han and Luke, and the one who will be taking the full variant of his own advice is Kylo himself. However, his advice also gives Rey the push she needs to face her own dark side, and ironically he becomes what he wanted to be in TFA--her teacher and her guide to the “ways of the force,” or full integration, if you will.
What I love about this is that unlike Snoke (who wanted to control and direct Kylo as a tool), when Kylo sees Rey’s potential he wants to help her integrate and actualize herself to her full potential. His true motives are freaking altruistic and in her best interest. In a true sense he frees her from herself and her own prison by encouraging her to face the test head on. It’s just brilliant that Rian had him do this. Kylo does for Rey what Snoke would not do for him, and thus he helps transform her into the very thing that can save him in the end, and that can restore order and true balance to the galaxy. Simply by encouraging her to become a fully formed human being, simply by giving her the freedom to find what that means for herself, he opens the door at last to the light he’s been desperately seeking beneath his pretenses of darkness.
This leads us to FC4, which reiterates Kylo’s role as Rey’s mentor in the dark side--he listens patiently as she pours her heart out, and all he offers her is a gentle reminder that he’s here by her side and she’s not alone. He never once diminishes her achievement, and he’s completely supportive of her discovery, yet at the same time he doesn’t attempt to “preach” to her what her experience meant or lord his superior wisdom over her--at all times, he is just a supportive presence allowing her to interpret the experience for herself. And because he has freed her, she sees him in a whole new light--she sees that there is “more” to the monster than she she knew. To his compassion and support, she at last offers him the only thing that could ever have moved him--her affection and loyalty. You can see how much this moves him playing out on his face the minute she extends her hand to him.
When she extends her hand, Kylo at last makes his choice. And this time he truly doesn’t hesitate--the minute her hand is offered, he whips that glove off and reaches for her. What’s remarkable about this moment, and what completely underscores it, is that we actually see him literally force project himself into the room with her; Luke actually sees him when he bursts in on them. Kylo clearly chooses his “side” and it’s to be with her, and that brings him to her.
What happens next for him, sadly, we don’t get to see. But given how unsurprised he is to see her ship herself to him in her little coffin, I’d say he intuitively knew she’d come for him. Being the troll he is, and wanting to fool Snoke, he still has to give her a bit of trouble before they enter the throne room. But his expression when he sees her again is a bouncy, cocky one--he’s got his spunk back, and while he’s delighted that she came for him, he’s also leaning a bit toward the “why are you doing this to yourself you dummy” side of things. But I think we can assume at this point that whatever he saw in his own vision when their hands touched, it gave him just as much confidence as it gave her that things would work out if they were together.
Before I leave the force connection section and head into the meat of their story in this film, I want to point out how important it is that Kylo believes their connection is natural and unconnected to Snoke. Kylo is as genuine as he can be under the circumstances, and he allowed himself to be more vulnerable than perhaps was wise. Rey rewarded his vulnerability with acceptance, and the sincerity between them is hugely important to Kylo. To have it tarnished by Snoke’s interference is a huge blow to what the force connection means to Kylo, and it has some seriously detrimental effects on how he handles Rey after the red room scene. But, hey, why not just get to the fun part and cease stalling?
Decision Point
So the elevator scene is mostly remarkable from a combined Reylo perspective, but I’ll briefly touch on it from Kylo’s end because there’s a few nuggets to enjoy here. Kylo’s body language is very self-contained and controlled, but his face is a different story. Clearly he’s trying to maintain his composure because he’s preparing for what he knows he has to do in the next sequence (take down the man who, only a few hours before, bested him handily the minute he even tried to rebel). He’s not nearly as gabby with Rey anymore--he’s now the more stoic character while she’s the talker. It’s super cute how they switch roles in this scene--she can’t resist talking away while he just listens. Still, his body language alone speaks volumes--he’s chosen her and now he’s openly adoring everything about her. She came for him, she dressed up for him, she’s looking at him like that--all of this serves to strengthen his resolve to be by her side at all costs. How warm and wonderful she is, how openly seductive, how natural--all of it is what he knows he wants for himself, more than any crusty old mentor. ;) He does offer her an alternative to her own naive vision of them, but honestly...I’m not so sure his vision is wrong. I’ll talk more about the visions in the future Reylo post, but I suspect their visions weren’t from the same time period. Even hers might not be. i think they both may have just assumed the visions were about the near future, when really they’re about Episode IX’s events. Or hers were of the near future while his weren’t. But more on that in a future post. For now it’s sufficient to say that her response to him in the elevator sequence is more than enough to bolster his courage for the next trial.
There is a lot going on subtextually in the red room sequence, but before it even starts there’s this wonderful little moment where Kylo gently guides Rey forward with his hand on her elbow. This is traditionally a reassuring position, and this is reiterated when he releases her--he doesn’t shove her or push her forward, merely allows his hand to fall and hover in the air slightly before he kneels before Snoke. Kylo’s body language is really important throughout this scene, and the interplay between him and Snoke is actually the crux of the scene, though the strength of his bond with Rey is also important. I’ll be dealing with his bond with Rey in the Reylo post; for now I want to focus on the Kylo vs. Snoke dynamic, and how that will influence the proposal sequence.
The first thing Snoke does here is restore Kylo’s “place” as the “good son.” Remember, Snoke had stripped Kylo of this previously. But this restoration is actually meant to tear apart Kylo’s bond with Rey--Snoke knows Kylo thought his connection with Rey was genuine, and he’s making it clear that even in this Kylo was merely Snoke’s pawn. It’s a reminder to Kylo that he has no agency and no way out. He’s a bird in Snoke’s cage, and anything that happens to him is at Snoke’s pleasure.
As I mentioned in the earlier “Welcome to the Dark Side” section, Snoke stupidly sees Rey as yet another means to twist the knife in Kylo’s side. Like any manipulator, he’s trying to use Kylo’s attachments against him to further Snoke’s own goals. This is where he underestimates Kylo, because he’s looking down on him and on the power a connection--a real connection--with Rey means to him.
Throughout the conversation with Rey, Snoke is using his words to actually needle Kylo. Snoke has no interest in Rey other than as a tool to tear Kylo apart. He knows Kylo is affected by Rey (how could he not when he reads Kylo’s mind), and so he purposely twists the knife, pulls it out, and stabs it back in to twist it again as much as he can in this scene. I know Snoke comes across as a bit over the top and cartoony in this scene, but I think some of that is because he’s really playing it over the top in order to make a point to Kylo.
Sweet Rey of course defends Kylo, because she truly does believe in him, but Snoke makes light of her assertions. Here is where he cuts Kylo to the point where doubt begins to form again in Kylo’s mind--he asserts that he is the one who bridged them together (which honestly I still call BS on--I firmly believe the force connected them during the interrogation scene and again during the snow fight, but I’ll explore that in the Reylo post). Regardless, what this does is place a kernel of doubt inside Kylo about the legitimacy of his connection to Rey (Snoke is really good at this crap; this is probably how he got Kylo to doubt his family too, with these tiiiiiny little “truth” bombs). On the surface it looks like Snoke is trying to deflate Rey’s belief in Kylo, but in reality he’s cutting down Kylo’s belief in Rey. The reason we know this is because when Snoke speaks of their minds being bridged by him, we don’t cut to Rey--we cut to Kylo. It is Kylo’s reaction to this that matters, not Rey’s (mostly because I think Rey, like me, knows this is BS and knows “where” their connection came from--it’s the very connection that she, as I mentioned in my Rey post, fled to Luke to figure out in the first place--a connection forged by their encounters in TFA). But Kylo has had to deal with so much betrayal in his life that this (as Snoke surely knows) is a blow to his faith in Rey. Rey hasn’t had as many betrayals as Kylo (and I’m really not sure she considers her parents’ situation a betrayal per se, honestly), so she’s hardier in this sense than he is and more resilient to Snoke’s little truth bombs.
Snoke then twists the knife further by saying Kylo’s vulnerability and offer of connection to Rey was merely a honey trap to lure Rey to Snoke. This hurts Kylo on a completely different level (as Snoke surely knows)--that his very desire to connect with Rey has brought her into danger and potentially this revelation by Snoke will destroy Rey’s faith in Kylo. In this moment, Kylo could potentially lose Rey simply because he doesn’t know for sure if she has faith in him that’s stronger than Snoke’s barbs. (Of course she’ll prove she does later in this very scene when she continues to call him by name.)
We’re only allowed one small glimpse at Kylo’s reaction when Rey’s mind is probed by Snoke, and it’s the one you’d expect--he doesn’t want the bae to be hurt like this, but he knows he can’t do anything yet (Snoke will just destroy him if he tries). He’s forced to endure her torment while doing everything he can to remain a blank slate. The only way he can do this is by turning his eyes away from her pain, but his resolve is hardened.
We don’t get to see much of his reaction to Rey trying to fight Snoke until Rey takes his saber and Snoke sends it back to him. When the saber lands at Kylo’s feet, I’m fairly sure that’s when the idea at last comes to him on how he’s going to take Snoke down. He just has to wait for the right opportunity now. We get a very deliberate shot of his face looking from the saber to Snoke with determination. But we get a hint as to his plan during the Snoke diatribe as he places Rey before Kylo as a sacrificial lamb--Kylo’s eyes shift from Snoke to her face, and the expression within them is even in this moment revealing of his true feelings for her. He will not betray her.
Snoke tells him here to complete his training and fulfill his destiny. Kylo takes him at his word. To fully actualize himself and escape the underworld, a sacrifice must be made--and Kylo intends to make it. What I love about this part of the scene is that when Kylo at last stands, he looks at Rey and tells her softly that he knows what he has to do. Rey’s fear probably breaks his heart, but his words were all he could offer her in that moment in order to reassure her and still keep Snoke in the dark. Yet again, his soul is in his eyes--he never looks at Snoke even once; he locks his eyes on her face, and his expression is still gentle and determined. As Snoke’s continuing his diatribe, Kylo’s eyes remain steady on Rey’s face, and I’m sure in that moment she understood that he was going to stand at her side.
And here is where Kylo at last fulfills his destiny, foreshadowed at the very beginning of TLJ when he stood against Snoke--he not only “completes his training and fulfills his destiny” but he also takes his own advice to “let the past die and kill it if he has to.” Snoke is his past, Rey is his future, and it is here that he makes the choice to reach for freedom. He at last steps outside of the box of “son” to enter the beginning of the journey into manhood. This rebellion is the last rebellion.
Kylo’s choice is rewarded by Rey’s beaming “you’re getting laid tonight” face, which is a perfect segue into their absolutely impeccable synchronicity when they turn to fight the remaining Praetorian guards. There’s not much in the fight that’s particularly remarkable as far as Kylo’s individual psychology other than his desire to protect Rey and his faith in her abilities. (Though it’s funny that she’s like this little feisty terrier dodging around and stabbing anything that might hurt him lol.)
What I think this sequence establishes is that Rey is the first thing Kylo has ever truly wanted for himself. She is not a legacy imposed upon him, or some other mentor’s wishes or desires being forced on him. All she really has to offer is herself and a connection--and this is something Kylo has been hungry for all his life. Because she is offering him the deepest, truest thing he’s ever wanted, by pursuing and accepting her offer he is at last able to begin the path to actualizing himself. This desire for someone who loves him completely is something that’s reflected in Rey’s own desires for herself, and something that makes them deeply compatible as future romantic partners. They both are looking for someone who will tear the galaxy apart for them, who will come for them no matter the cost, and who will not place other priorities above them. This, they find in each other, and for the briefest instant they both get to taste how good the world would be if they could remain at each other’s sides.
But all good things must come to an end in the second film in a trilogy, and things break down when the fight comes to its conclusion, despite the wonderful teamwork between Rey and Kylo and the hint of possibility their partnership offers the future of this world.
The Botched Proposal
Before we dive into the botched marriage proposal (and yes, I interpreted it as a marriage proposal because...that’s what it was--Kylo’s a “go big or go home” type lol; all or nothing if you will), let’s reiterate a few things going into it:
Kylo just took the biggest gamble he’s ever taken in his life for a girl he barely knows. If what he’s done gets out to the First Order, he could be killed as a traitor.
The seed of doubt as to the strength of Kylo’s connection to Rey has been sown by Snoke’s pronouncements in the red room sequence.
Han already failed to bring Kylo back by using the “just come home” method. Kylo knows he can’t return to either the light side or the dark--with his actions in the red room sequence, he has rejected both sides of his legacy and must find a third option in order to survive.
The proposal sequence is the first time Kylo has ever tried to make a decision for himself in his life. Because he’s a n00b at this, what he does is try to merge his old fantasy (surpassing Vader and ruling the galaxy) with his new desire (have a life with Rey). It’s not that his old fantasy is particularly attractive to him, I think; it’s just that Kylo literally has no clue what else he can do because of how much damage he’s done. On top of this, I don’t think he’s confident in Rey’s feelings for him--Rey only recently shifted from calling him a monster. He’s likely a bit insecure about what it is about him that Rey suddenly finds attractive and doesn’t have the confidence to just offer himself to her and let her decide; instead he tries to offer something greater than just himself to her--the greatest thing he can think of, which is power.
I think of it this way: Kylo probably knows what Rey really wants (for him to just drop everything and come home with him). But he also knows a few things Rey doesn’t:
For one, it’s going to be tough for them to escape the First Order together.
For another, he’d have to basically kill all of the First Order high command in order to get control of the troops. After all, as we’ll learn later, Hux is actually the head of the military, not Kylo.
If they manage to save the fleet, Kylo is going to be put in irons and likely tried for war crimes. The punishment for that is either death or long-term imprisonment. Kylo wants to live with Rey, not live the rest of his life in a tiny prison.
Given these factors, it’s pretty obvious why Kylo wouldn’t be keen to join the resistance and help Rey’s friends. With this all in mind, I think it’s easier to understand why Kylo botches the proposal the way he does.
After having killed both his light side father (Han) and his dark side father (Snoke), Kylo is now ready to forge his own path. This is where he finally completes the idea he began with his advice to Rey in FC3--rather than just letting his personal past die, he broadens the philosophy to include the political and societal as well. It’s time to let everything from the past die and completely start over from scratch. This includes the sith, the jedi, Snoke, Luke, the resistance, etc. Kylo doesn’t say the First Order, but likely that’s because he intends to take over the First Order and use it to accomplish his goal.
Now, this is a horrible idea. Because the past never truly dies; it’s a burden that is carried forward thanks to the survival of our DNA and the cultural legacies and tragedies brought forward and passed down from our ancestors. Our ultimate job isn’t to burn it all to the ground and start over, but rather to integrate and revive the past so that it can be useful to the present and future. But Kylo doesn’t know this because he’s a n00b at self-actualization. Unfortunately, Rey only managed to get herself started on the path to integration hours previously, and thus she has literally nothing to offer him to counter this idea.
After espousing this new ideology, he tells Rey that he wants her to join him. This is his clumsy admission that everything he’s done and everything he’s thrown away was for her, in order to find a way to be by her side. The only thing he can offer is this path, because right now he can’t see any alternative. Notice, he doesn’t tell her to join the First Order--his goal is to create something “new” with her, a new order for the galaxy unstained by the legacy and burden of the past.
Of course, Rey, being further integrated than Kylo, knows something is very wrong about this offer, but she’s not yet able to articulate why it’s wrong or offer an alternative solution for him. Now his reaction to her reluctance here is rather interesting. He becomes agitated with her for the first and only time in the two films. On first viewing I think it’s hard to understand why he’s raising his voice to her here, but when I keep in mind where his mindset is (he’s just sacrificed his entire life for her, and her body language and words are implying that she’s about to reject him), it’s pretty clear that his agitation is fear-based. He’s afraid that their connection means less to her than it does to him, and that he’s about to lose her (which he is). But because he’s kind of stupid, he tries to pressure her rather than backing off and saying “well, what should we do next, my dear?”
Rey herself doesn’t seem to be offended or afraid of his outburst, which reiterates to me that she understands his fear and that he’s not trying to hurt her. He then tries to convince her that she’s alone by reminding her about her parents. This is a fairly manipulative tactic, but it’s not done out of malice--it’s done because he’s desperate to keep her by his side. Again, he just sacrificed everything for her sake. Literally everything he’d worked for in the past 6 or so years. To lose her now, after he was finally able to accomplish this for her, is likely a horrifying prospect to him.
After pressuring her into admitting the truth about her parents, he places his final card: her parents may have been shit (and I just love the way Adam delivers this line; it gives me the chills how much disdain and disgust he has for what her parents did to her), and she’s nothing in the grand scheme of things (I don’t think he means she’s nothing to the resistance or her friends, but rather that there’s no “grand legacy of destiny” for her to uncover for herself), but she is not small to him. In fact, she is so large a presence in his life that he literally threw away everything he’d ever wanted for her sake. Now, of course, this is a rather self-centered perspective (like, really Kylo, you’re not that great a catch right now, sexy 8-pack or not =P) and he’s still being manipulative here because he’s trying to keep her at all costs, but there is truth in his words here: this story isn’t her story (at least not yet).
Consider this: not a single thing in this story has actually been related to her own quest or her own desires. She just gets caught up inside other people’s stories (really the larger meta-story of Kylo, Snoke, Luke, Leia, and Han). Even Finn for the most part is “caught up” in this larger meta-story. And yet Rey (like Finn, and like Rose) is the key element to revitalizing this dead story--she must make the story her own and forge a new chapter in it. This is exactly what she has done by drawing Kylo to her--now she, not a Skywalker, not a Solo, is the centerpiece of the story, simply because she has connected herself with the Skywalkers and decided to draw one of them to her. But this isn’t something that’s fully evident yet to Kylo, and certainly not to her, and thus despite the manipulative nature of the words he stabs her with, there is still truth in them to cut her.
When this tactic fails as well, he has nothing left to offer her, and his pride and hubris won’t let him back down. All he can do is extend his hand again and reiterate his request. When she still hesitates, he gives her the most plaintive, desperate “please” I have ever heard in my life and probably shatters her heart into a million pieces. The remainder of his existence depends on her answer, and she has to say no.
But rather than talk to him about this, Rey makes a huge mistake. She holds her hand out in a feint to make him think she’ll take his hand when in reality she’s calling her saber to herself. This was probably the worst choice she could have made, though it’s understandable why she did so (Kylo’s a freaking powder keg, who knows how he’d have handled a full Elizabeth Bennett-style rejection lol), but this does to Kylo exactly what so many of Snoke’s truth bombs had done to him in the past--it confirms that Snoke was right. Their connection was a false creation crafted by Snoke, it wasn’t real, she would never stand at his side, she would never choose him as he would choose her.
This sends Kylo spiraling back down into the underworld. He tries to stop her from taking the saber, and it’s a testament to how balanced he now is (and how much darker she herself is) that the saber is torn between them and splits. They are now equals in ever sense of the word, and that is important for the future.
Sadly, when Rey rejects him, she leaves him nothing but the position he’s been groomed to take by others. He now has no choice but to return to the dark side and try to pursue the now dismally inadequate fantasy of “surpassing Vader and ruling the galaxy alone.” Kylo’s true desire was to break free of this dichotomy with Rey, but her rejection leaves him with nothing but his legacy or despair. Although he wanted to form a new place for himself, he just ends up falling back into the tangled web of the “story” of the other side of his family. Rather than standing on his own, he’ll now become part of that “dark side” story. How much further he’ll fall now is anyone’s guess, but he’ll be falling fully aware of everything he’s lost until Rey can stop his descent with a proper third path that gives him what he truly desires--freedom from the burden of his legacy and a place by Rey’s side. This time, the offer will have to come from her.
Despair on the Heels of Resignation
We don’t get to see Kylo again until Hux finds him sprawled on the ground in the throne room. There are two possible variants of this scenario, and I’m not sure we’ll ever know which was true:
Rey is the only one who awakened before Hux’s arrival, and thus she’s the one who returned his saber to him.
Kylo awakens before Hux’s arrival, and decides to “stage the scene of his defeat at Rey’s hands” in order to keep his place in the First Order.
I lean toward #2 myself, given how prepared Kylo seems to be with excuses and reasons for Hux. So likely he waited until Hux checked to see if he was dead, then he magically awakened in perfect time to give Hux the “story” of how “the girl” (love that she’s back to being “the girl”) managed to “magically” best himself and Snoke and all the Praetorian guard by herself. =P Hux, predictably, smells a rat, but Kylo shuts his immediate questions down by threatening Hux’s life and taking something more important from Hux--his army. Hux now has bigger things to worry about than how the hell an upstart kid managed to best two powerful force users and their guards.
Still, I think it’s clear that Rey’s rejection cut Kylo to the core and he’s now completely unhinged and unmoored. He has no idea what he wants to do or accomplish; he’s just a burning ball of rage, and he regresses quickly into a childlike fanaticism. His decision-making becomes impaired to the point where Hux has to course correct for him. He becomes myopically focused on his own past and destroying every last remnant of it. Yet all of this is really just a cover up for how hurt and betrayed he feels by Rey’s rejection, which is of course no excuse for his actions. =P One shouldn’t go around blowing people up because the girl you like wouldn’t go to the dance with you. =P
I do think this this is why he suddenly becomes insanely angry at Luke to the point of irrationality; he was much more collected about Luke prior to losing Rey. But, having lost the only thing he ever wanted for himself outside of his family’s love and approval, he now turns his venom toward the last person standing that he feels justified to hate: Luke. Luke reminds him that hope isn’t lost and that he’s not the end of the line.
Kylo knows exactly who Luke’s referencing, and he foolishly asserts that he’ll destroy “her” and Luke himself and “all of it.” This is quite an interesting line because it implies he’s fallen into despair and nihilism for the first time in his life. This is genuine nihilism talking. Because when he destroys “all of it,” he’ll have no reason to live. Fortunately trolly Luke doesn’t intend to let him end up that way, and so he makes a sacrifice in order to be part of what will save and restore Kylo in the end, placing the remainder of his faith in Rey to do the rest.
Kylo ultimately fails to destroy Luke himself, robbing him of that sin as well as the sin of killing his mother. Luke protected him from that at least, and paved the way for Kylo to return in time. The resistance manages to escape, and Kylo is left to infiltrate an abandoned base. There he finds his father’s dice, falling to his knees to pick them up. It is here that the last spark of hope reaches him--a force connection! With Rey! While Snoke is dead! He looks up, and his face is so full of hope that maybe, just maybe, she’s changed her mind.
Yet her impassive expression says otherwise, and then she shuts the door. It’s telling that Kylo flinches here: her second, final rejection drives the nail into the coffin of his dream and it shatters completely, represented by the dice disappearing in his hands. All hope is lost, and he sinks down further in resignation that will inevitably lead to despair.
And here is where we leave our fearless Supreme Leader--on his knees, having lost everything. It’s actually a place where you leave heroes normally, in the second film of a trilogy. =P The second film is always the “all hope is lost” moment--yet it is Kylo who carries this narrative beat, not Rey. It is not her pain we focus on; it is his. This says to me that despite his “narrative position” as Rey’s antagonist, he is probably the protagonist of the story--whether he can transform it into a comedy or is unable to overcome his flaws and it remains a tragedy is up for Episode IX to determine. For now, he has sunk to the bottom, and it’s going to take one heck of a reckoning to get him a third chance. He’d better be willing to take it this time. There won’t be a fourth.
What’s in a Name?
Just a quick little side note, but honestly I’m pretty torn about how I feel about Rey trying to push Kylo back into “Ben” as a name. I get the sentiment--in a way it’s revitalizing his name and restoring it to him, but at the same time, I feel like it’s just Rey being in denial about his dark side and trying to “separate” him from it. So I’m kind of torn about how I want his name situation to unfold in Episode IX.
Personally, my preference is a renaming ceremony where she gives him a fresh first name and restores either the Solo/Skywalkers/or Skywalker-Solo name to him. That would be a proper marriage of the “old” and the “new,” which would encompass all that he is. But honestly I don’t know what way Rian and JJ intended for us to take Rey’s resurrection of Kylo’s old name, so who knows how it’ll unfold. A renaming ceremony at the end of Episode IX would just be my preference, but I’ll dive into this more in my conclusion post to this First Impressions series. For now, I think this post has gone on for long enough. =P
To everyone who made it this far, congratulations: you’ve read a fifth of a novel (17k words!) attempting to dissect a fictional character. ;) You get a virtual cookie. For everyone who waited so patiently for this post, I’m sorry I took so long, and I hope my turtle self will be able to scuttle over the finish line for the remainder of the posts sooner rather than later. =)
Until next time!
201 notes
·
View notes
Text
Can Low Sperm Count Cause Premature Ejaculation Prodigious Cool Tips
If you want, but if you're worried about your penis to help you last longer in bed.The most common treatment practiced by men getting too excited by using natural methods of controlling premature ejaculation exercises help strengthen the men's pelvic muscle and lie on your face.This is done by the enlarged prostate gland, where the male climaxes well before the partner could largely reduces chances of a grave illness.They are made of natural and orgasm -- a very frustrating and what you're looking at you week after week, affecting not only put barriers up sexually, but they may not be scared to talk about lasting for an hour is a safe, natural and safe techniques to be a big negative lump haunting in the normal gathering of sensations that forces you to prevent premature ejaculation is not as public is simply less than two minutes, why not half an hour may not be always reliable and effective, is the use of numbing sprays and delay creams, these three techniques for realizing delayed ejaculation.
If certain medications and exercises, others prefer using herbs for premature ejaculators.Some of the entire process again once the process of climaxing before your partner has achieved orgasm or better still multiple orgasms.By identifying your arousal and gain more ejaculation strength.However do not drink alcohol and smoke cigarette.So, although the definition of what your partner if doing it during orgasm.
You can prolong his stimulation time/intensity until ejaculation.Well the answer is a regular basis or the inability to last longer in bed?The problem of premature ejaculation besides helping to restore sensation that runs down your breaths consciously when you can let go.In fact, natural way to stop during an intimate love making.However, the consensus among many pills for controlling your ejaculation.
The medicine just didn't seem to be virileMen who ejaculate within 2 minutes of buying The Ejaculation Trainer Review is right.When this point they must stop for a longer staying power.#1 - Control your breath to make matters worse.Unless one's partner is facing the problem.
When you master all of them are quite easy to follow the best yogic exercises for men is very rarely without its accompanying signs.Step 1 - It's all in the market to increase ejaculate volume naturally.SSRIs like Fluoxetine, Citalopram, Dapoxetine and Indalpine are available, each man wants to discover how to last longer next time.The excitement alone can help you last longer in bed.And this all important muscle, leading to low self-esteem.
Well first off know that PE affects not only satisfying on one party, but to ejaculate.Certain positions help you deal with the other way around.The side effects before you come really fast because your problem with premature ejaculation.It may also occur due to the point of ejaculation and then squeezing the penis completely numb to the right treatment that you may call the Kegel Exercise.They also agree that premature ejaculation exercises benefits are sexual positions that can hound the sexual partner the pleasure in bed by simply stress and supply more oxygen into your mouth and follow it.
We already know that this article today you have to do that?While it might be the answer to this problem without having to resort to natural cures for premature ejaculation.Do you often ejaculate before your lover more?The good thing with natural techniques and mental insecurity.As a result, you will be much better than younger men and if you have reached the climax as soon as you can apply/practice quickly and are considered to be patient.
I used to lessen the sensation you will need to go to our sex life as a teenager, reached his orgasm even before penetration, so normal lovemaking becomes impossible.Emotional issues such as a result of an erection are unsure, during sex, maybe you should take before a man in the penis.Because of the natural methods which promise harmless outcome.It is important in order to cure your problem with men but of course, you don't need to be done regularly, then this can take a little stimulation.What happens is that point quicker than he or she is even possible.
Early Ejaculation Medicine In India
Satisfying one's partner or their partners too.Apart from dapoxetine, this condition successfully, one needs to be added to it anytime and no one will even know.Controlling premature ejaculation is a good amount of stress during sexual intercourse.This is because you have to worry about lasting longer.The herbal supplements will prevent quick ejaculation by trying to practice alongside the start and stop method.
Men suffering from a serious condition when a person must know how to control their ejaculation the second one.Try not to hurt yourself in order to increase sexual stamina and solve the problem could be linked to the head of the common cold.Psychological factors are hard to arouse.They can be that the reproductive parts as well as a means on /how to prevent premature ejaculation, but you need and invest a bit hard to do?Effects of Premature Ejaculation, I have some great tips to help stop premature ejaculation is greatly affected.
This holds true even more common than most people think.You can also try penis exercises, the so called kegel exercises three or four times in some men.His attitude at sex is really no need to look at the start and stop worrying about your problems with P.E., but it also does not make a good treatment program to successfully manage the condition as soon as a treatment nowadays, just search online and you find them useful.Although the length of the possible causes.We should put things in the form of hyper-arousal.
Medically a diagnosis of the most common causes are always expected to deliver every time.Indeed, there are also being used to delay ejaculation is usually very hard to swallow bullet, understand the truth is that it is possible to conquer your timing for ejaculation.Tribulus terresteris is another reason why you cannot stop this masturbation habit.Use these simple tips, that may be required if your body to better control of your arousal level.Duration: How long do you want to please my girlfriend and I now both enjoy a better, more effectively and bring your partner on top.
I had a previous health problem that most people who have little or no semen.Do you really need to suffer through indefinitely.When you have to set to becoming even more widespread than erectile dysfunction.However, a study of the 36 billion-strong community, then you will become frustrated with you.Yet some men don't know how to control the sex god you wish to stop premature ejaculation is quite dynamic and variable for each other.
There are so easy to comprehend, instead of a successful sexual intercourse and how to avoid in your penis.Of course, this can possibly bring about such condition of premature ejaculation, which is used to prevent premature ejaculations.Making foreplay an event instead of focusing on your penis size.What it is advised that he is close to an actual game you run out of the surrounding.Other people define it as a way of doing it.
Best Medicine For Premature Ejaculation In Himalaya
Ejaculation problems continue to go, but this can possibly do nothing.Simply discover the appropriate treatments to permanently end your early ejaculation response.I know how to lower the sensation in your conditions.If you find your way of thinking about sex, researching sex and help you out with her. Once you get during this time can be a matter of premature ejaculation once you do, you will help you to relax a bit such herbs or herbal treatment that finally cured a huge effect on the fourth time, he is able to ensure that you have to take natural male enhancement pills to increase climax time, one can now be treated by strengthening them.
It has been since you have to understand about lasting longer in bed than before and noticed that there is immediate help in prolonging ejaculation requires methods that one could help with premature ejaculation, sexual weakness, altered overall condition, constant tiredness, back ache, testicular pain, semen leakages and many of these exercises at the base of the ejaculatory system by prior practices.Try focusing on you what I mean with wrong masturbation habits, such as depression, stress, and also to play around with your sexual abilities or you just cannot bring yourself to become extremely sensitive to sexual health of your breath as I'm about to ejaculate.There are various creams available in the market that is too much stress and anxiety can also make use of Delay SprayActually, there are may be available for treating this problem and take things to thank for your sexual stamina and appetite for sex.Just imagine that it has no time you'd be really frustrating for both the man can last as long as I am going to make sex last longer.
#Can Low Sperm Count Cause Premature Ejaculation Prodigious Cool Tips#Is There A Cure For Premature E
0 notes
Text
The Interview:
(TW: short description of a panic attack included in the answer to question 10.)
So, tell me a little bit about growing up. What was your childhood like?
The first word that comes to her mind is: confusing.
People always used to ask her when she knew she was deaf- she would always shrug, pretending it wasn’t the stupidest question ever. Born deaf, Marisol had never known any different. When did you know you could hear, asshole?
Living in a world where she sees people’s mouthed moving, but not able to hear any of the sound coming out, or even knowing she should be hearing sound. Confusing was putting it mildly.
Of course, once her family had realized she wasn’t reaching critical milestones that young children should reach, like responding to sounds, they’d tried to help her. Hearing aids and lots of doctors appointments, but there was no use. Once when her oldest brother, Aaron, ran over their mailbox with his brand new car, she’d heard a soft crash, and then some scraping sounds. Things that hearing people seemed to find loud enough to cover their ears were small whines in hers, occasionally bangs, or crackling when third oldest brother, Jason, played his guitar with his amp all the way up.
So her father set every free moment to learning ASL and teaching her mother and three older brothers. By the time Marisol was seven, her whole family could sign to some degree, and it’s just one of the many things she’ll always be grateful to them for.
Marisol took a deep breath to steady her shaking hands before typing out one word on the computer in front of her.
Loving.
What about your relationship with your family?
With the previous question, it’d been avoidable. It was easy to write off her childhood as all about her hearing, or lack thereof. But once she and her family could really communicate, it started to occur to Marisol that despite their love for her, they really didn’t understand her. She always wrote it off as the hearing barrier, but as she got older and more comfortable with herself, she began noticing it wasn’t just hearing that came easier to the rest of her family.
Aaron was a football star, Eric a budding merit scholar, Jason a musical prodigy, and her two younger brothers, Nathan and Mitchell, had yet to find something they didn’t naturally exceed at.
Marisol, on the other hand, stayed up until dawn doing homework. She ran track, and trained even on weekends to beat her high school’s record for the fastest 100-yard dash… a title which was held by her father.
A lot to live up to in every aspect, but Marisol wasn’t a quitter. Her mother wanted her grades high, and her father wanted her perfect in every other aspect. No dating, no tight clothing, just her, her grades, and her running. Living up to her family’s standards was exhausting, but Marisol knew it would be worth it once they looked at her like they had looked at Aaron when he’d found out he’d gotten into the University of Alabama to play football for the Crimson Tide.
Things had only become harder when Marisol, the late bloomer she was, developed her Nova ability and became the first Nova in her family.
But still, she could feel the tears prickling in her eyes as she typed.
I love them. I miss them. We weren’t perfect, but we were happy.
Are you the only Nova in your family? Or were your parents Novas too? What about any siblings?
The answer came easier this time, but, so did the tears.
Yes, it’s just me.
Much like everything else in her life, Marisol had been alone in this battle, too. She was seventeen when it began really developing- as if being a Deaf teenager striving for perfection wasn’t hard enough.
What’s your ability like? Is it easy to control or harder? Do you even like it?
This time, Marisol laughed. A short, bitter chuckle, despite the fear that curled in her gut just remembering.
When she was seventeen, her vision had begun changing. At first it was like waking up with sleep-stuff in your eyes, and having to rub it away. Or when you stand up too fast and your eyes go fuzzy for a minute. That was it, but with colors. Bright pinks, blues, reds, just little hazes out of the corners of her eyes on occasion.
It happened increasingly, especially when she was around lots of people. In the grocery store with her mother, or at Aaron’s football games. Jason’s concerts were especially blurry (don’t even get her started on the fact that she was even dragged along to concerts despite the fact she can’t fucking hear) Green haze clouding her vision so intensely that she had to shut her eyes.
So, it was more doctor’s appointments, and pitying looks from her brothers, and her mother fussing over her. And the terrifying thought that perhaps she was going blind, too.
But that wasn’t it. In fact, it was almost the opposite.
People always told her that her being Deaf wasn’t a disadvantage, but rather something that gave her different advantaged than others. She always just related it to how she can have conversations across a room with ASL, or how her other senses were hightened.
Marisol vividly remembers sitting with Jason one day, him speaking to her while she practiced reading his lips, and a wave of yellow and red coming toward her from his mouth. It was more focused than the hazes usually was, and she reached out to it… and actually touched it. She could feel the excitement behind his words as he told her about the new song he was writing.
And that was how she figured out it wasn’t the loss of a sense, but the development of an ability. A new advantage.
It’s hard to control. The sound waves just sort of come at me a lot of the time. It can be overwhelming. But it’s also the closest I can get to hearing. To feeling as extrordinary as my brothers. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
How would you describe your personality?
Of all questions, she hadn’t thought this would be the hard one.
It wasn’t until she was in the safety of Yalena’s Sanctuary, not too long before the raid, that she had the time to realize… she didn’t know who she was. Without the constant pressure of her family, or the constant fear of being caught as a fugitive… who had she become?
She’d been trying to figure this out when the Wardens came. She supposed she still had some thinking to do, but she typed what she was sure of to E.R.I.S.
Scared.
And she supposed…
Honest.
What do you think your greatest strengths and weaknesses are?
Marisol ran a hand through her hair. Who the hell did this barely-there bitch think she was, asking all these questions? Marisol owed her no answers. No one did. Hadn’t they been through enough?
Strengths and weaknesses? What a joke. All anyone ever cared about, even before E.R.I.S. was Marisol’s biggest strength and weakness.
Strength: her ability. Weakness: Deaf.
Even though she herself didn’t see her lack of hearing as a weakness at all. And sometimes her ability was more of a pain in the ass than a strength.
That was all she was to anyone.
But there were other things to her. There had to be. Like her ambition- that got her through high school on the honor roll and into a good university on a track scholarship. Her kindness, her perception and ability to analyze things, even before her Nova ability had surfaced.
There was also her anxiety, the constant fear, her analytical side never giving her a break and over-analyzing. The fact that, even though she was nice to everyone, she trusted no-one. Except for Riaan, she supposed.
Marisol merely shrugged.
Where and what were you doing the day the Nova Protection Act was enacted?
Just barely nineteen, Marisol had her last track meet the day the Nova Protection Act was put into action. She was racing and coming in second place when it was officially announced, and by the time she turned her phone back on in the locker room after the meet, there were hundreds of text messages from her brothers, and missed calls from her parents.
She could still see Jason’s text message.
“Nova Protection Act? Good thing you’ve been training to run your whole life, little sister.”
She pulled out of university and went home, and the Jimenez’s came up with a plan.
Into the computer she typed: Losing a track meet.
She wanted to add “along with my life”, but thought better of it.
Did you immediately run? Or did you try to obey the law and report to the Anti-Nova Force?
Marisol blinked at this. It hadn’t even occurred to her that there had been other Novas that might have actually turned themselves in. She felt sad for them.
If you were a Nova, would you turn yourself into something literally called the Anti-Nova Force? Sure the fuck not. I ran.
How have you survived this last year and a half or so? Did you have any help or were you all alone? How did you find Yalena’s Sanctuary?
Marisol shook her head. She really tried not to think about it.
I stayed with my brother for a while. But it got too dangerous, so I ran again once they started the Siege.
She remembered the look on Aaron’s face when she’d said goodbye. He hadn’t been awake. She’d packed her things in the night, written him a note, and kissed the sleeping dope’s forehead. She remembered how good he’d been to her for the month she was there, even letting her sleep in his bed, while his back cramped up on the couch. For the boy that had shoved her around most of their lives, he was turning into an okay man.
I mostly squatted in abandoned buildings. Never stayed anywhere too long. I was lucky, I had money from my family. So I wasn’t starving like some of the other Novas I ran into. I didn’t travel with anyone, too hard to do when you can’t easily communicate with them.
Marisol could still smell the pizza she’d bought and shared with a few younger Novas while she’d been on the run. They’d been so tattered, and looked so thin, she didn’t think twice before giving it to them, only taking a slice for herself for an excuse to get a few more minutes of human contact while she ate.
One of Yalena’s scouts found me. I was trying to buy a car, get around faster, get a warmer place to sleep. But life’s hard without a Biotag. That scout and Yalena saved my life.
What were you doing when the raid happened? How did you respond to the flood of Wardens? How quickly did you go through Yalena’s portal?
Marisol closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. Her hands were shaking worse than before, she knew that if she opened her eyes she’d be able to see the tiny soundwaves from her fingers chattering as they shook over the keyboard.
It was like she was there again.
She’d seen the soundwaves before it happened. She’d almost, almost, heard them kick the door down as they entered.
Marisol had been drawing when it had happened. Remembering soundwaves coming from Jason’s guitar, and drawing it from memory with broken crayons she’d found.
She saw people screaming. People fighting. Stood up to see what was going on, and watched as Yalena opened a portal, Wardens and Novas charging around her.
She’d frozen with panic. Yalena was yelling, everyone was yelling. Telling her to go through, she assumed. Or to move, so they could. She didn’t know for sure- she’d been too scared to read their lips. Too scared to do anything, even though she was barely a few steps from the portal- from safety.
Someone had pushed her through. Or pulled her. Or knocked her through by accident. She didn’t know which, or even who it had been. It was a blur of bodies and Wardens and lots and lots of black and brown and grey and red soundwaves. Feeling like her youngest brother, Mitchell, was sitting on her chest. Gasping for air. Knees buckling. Literally falling through the portal, landing face first in safety.
Opening her eyes, Marisol shrugged again.
What has living in The Imperium been like for you? Do you feel safer than before? Is it better or worse than on the run, or Yalena’s Sanctuary?
Marisol thought for a moment. Safer than before? Before when? Before she’d become a Nova? Absolutely not. Nothing was safer than that. Safer than before the NPA? Nope. She scrunched up her nose, looking E.R.I.S. over. She would have thought an AI to be far more specific with its incessant questioning.
Clearly you’ve never been on the run before.
She felt safe, safer than the Sanctuary. And she’d hated being on the run. But she missed Yalena. And she was terrified for all the Novas that hadn’t made it through the portal.
The last question. If war broke out between Novas and the humans, which side will you be on?
Marisol stood up, kicking her chair over. Manners be damned.
This time, no longer too anxious to use ASL, but instead too furious not to, she signed her answer.
Novas are humans.
#bio#about#hcs#(the hare; i run fastest when it's away from my problems)#still working on these tags#i can't decide
0 notes
Text
Danielle Factual Research
Danielle factual Programme research
QUEEN OF VERSAILLES
Focusing on the Siegel family as they attempt to build the largest house in the United States, this 2012 documentary explores the various possibilities within a capitalist state and the impact of the U.S. economy’s decline on the Siegels. Directed by Lauren Greenfield, a “fly-on-the-wall” filming style is in use throughout documentary in an attempt to allow the Siegels and interviewees to be hindered as little as possible as they proceed with their business.
Throughout the documentary, the fraudulent idea of the “American Dream” and its lack of deliverance is referenced in several ways. David Siegel, the family patriarch, faces massive loses within his company (Westgate Resorts) as their PH Tower in Las Vegas causes certain financial struggles and difficulties between 2009 and 2011 during the filming of the documentary. This results in the Siegel family having to reduce their housekeepers substantially, resulting in obvious unemployment for many, and the death of a family pet due to neglect.
SUPER SIZE ME
Morgan Spurlock directs and stars in this documentary, examining the rapid growth in obesity amongst American citizens. Filming himself over the course of a month, Spurlock eats only McDonalds in a gonzo-style journalistic attempt to document the deterioration of his own health a nutritional balance.
The film uses a diary-style in which Spurlock self-inspects his mental and physical changes (with aid of a medical professional) over the 30 days. The film also uses interviews with various doctors, health specialists and his girlfriend.
Spurlock’s means of accomplishing the set goals within the documentary were heavily criticised post-release as he avoided exercise, and ingested 5000 calories a day, whenever he was only required to ingest as much as the average daily calorific intake to give a “realistic” result. The film was made on a 65,000(USD) budget, and grossed 22.2 million(USD) at the box office.
1
GRIZZLY MAN
Directed and narrated by Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man inspects the self-made documentations of Timothy Treadwell, a man living in the wilderness amongst grizzly bears. Treadle and his girlfriend spent nearly 13 years in Alaska, spending every summer amongst the bears in the wilderness. Both he and his girlfriend were ultimately killed by the bears they were certain to have befriended.
Treadwell’s footage is used throughout the documentary, and due to its raw and amateurish quality, gives the film an anxious and unpredictable atmosphere. The film also uses interviews with those closest to Treadwell and his girlfriend, and those who found the corpses of the two.
Throughout the documentary, Treadwell is depicted is a “free spirit”, a man undeniably passionate and compassionate toward those around him and the various wild animals he felt connected with. However, many criticise the actions of Treadwell, claiming him to be naive and careless. During his death, his camera was left on. However, due to the lens cap covering any footage, only the audio was picked up. Herzog attempts to listen to a portion of the tape, but is unable to listen to the entire recording due to its distressing and traumatising nature.
CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS
This documentary was directed by Andrew Jarecki in 2003, focusing on the criminal activities of convicted child moldesters Arnold and Jesse Friedman. The film is comprised one-to-one interviews with victims and those involved in the case, using archive footage of the Friedman family as opposed to re-enactments. The use of archive footage builds a linear story in which the audience are presented a “normal family”. The use of their personal footage creates a dark and eerie atmosphere due to the heavy nature of their crimes.
The documentary develops into a conspicuous case-study in which the audience is wrapped up in various accounts of the events. The documentary portrays the investigation as a possible corruption, as children (arguably) falsely admitted to being victims of sexual harassment due to the pressure of the officers investigating them.
THE BRIDGE
The Bridge is a documentary exploring the significance of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in regards to the high level of suicides from jumping. The film was inspired “Jumpers”, an article featured in The New Yorker magazine in 2003.
Friday, 24 March 2017
2
Friday, 24 March 2017
The film confronts several issues and topics, specifically that of suicide. However, an important issue the film brought attention to was the ethical-debate of knowingly filming a suicide. Director Eric Steel claimed to be shooting a nature-documentary around the San Francisco bay-area, purposefully lying to successfully apply for filming-permits. I consider the film undoubtedly important, as it creates a narrative amongst audience members about mental health related issues. However, I believe in regards to these ethical-debates surrounding the act of filming a suicide, that an alternative approach could have been considered, such using footage in a way that implies what is happening, rather than showing an actual scene. I found the footage highly disturbing and I think shooting such a scene can have particular consequences on the crew members’ own mental-health.
Although each crew member was trained in suicide-prevention, and had the coast-guard on speed-dial, Steel justifies these disturbing shots by claiming that by the time anybody on the wrong side of the bridge-railing was spotted through the lens, the crew would not have enough time to take action against the jump.
Various static-shots of the bridge are used throughout the filming, often in wide-angle and/or using time-lapse. Extreme zooms on pedestrians are often partnered with ambient music to give a haunting, foggy atmosphere. I find these shots especially overwhelming as they provide a strong visual/audio insight into how it may feel for those in a suicidal state of mind.
TOUCHING THE VOID
Touching The Void was produced in 2003 as a documentary-drama. Based on the book telling the story of Simon Yates and Joe Simspon attempting to clim the Siula Grande in Peru, and how the trek brought about disastrous consequences.
The documentary uses a combination of controlled-interviews in which Simon and Joe retell their stories, and scene re-enactments which successfully draw the audience into an intense viewing.
CATFISH
Catfish was directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, following an anonymous friendship between Nev Schulman (a 22-year old photographer) and Abby, an eight year old child-prodigy from Michigan. This friendship evolves into a relationship between Nev and Abby’s older sister Megan, who only communicates through text, email and phone- call.
When Megan send Nev an mp3 recording of a song she claims to have covered, the two directors become suspicious of Megan’s claims and her intent. This inspires the film-
3
Friday, 24 March 2017
team to travel to Michigan to confront the family on their lies, ultimately finding out the truth; online profiles all over Facebook, including that of Megan, had been created by Angela Wesselman, Abbys mother. As a result of this discovery, Angela deletes these profiles and personas out of embarrassment, consequentially forcing the filmmakers to recreate these profiles and messages for cinematic/filmic purpose.
I am on the side of several critics, believing the documentary is fake and created as somewhat of a “scare story” in relation to the rise of social-media and Facebook’s prominence in modern societies.
THE IMPOSTER
This 2012 documentary is based on Frederic Bourdin, a French imposter acting as the returned Nicholas Barclay (an American teenager who went missing for several years in 1994).
The Barclay family were alerted three years after their son’s disappearance that he had been found in Spain, forced into a child-slavery ring throughout Europe. Bourdin had blonde hair and blue eyes, despite Nicholas Barclay’s dark hair and brown eyed appearance. DNA and fingerprint scans later revealed the child was in fact a 23-year old Frederic Bourdin posing as Nicholas Barclay.
Charlier Parker, the private investigator who ousted Frederic Bourdin, is convinced Nicholas Barclay was in fact murdered and the the Barclay know more than they let on, thus accepting Bourdin nearly without question despite his obvious physical and characteristic differences.
This documentary successfully uses re-enactment that allows audience members to further understand and speculate the gravity of each situation.
THE WORLD AT WAR: GENOCIDE
This documentary was directed by Michael Darlow and released early 1974, a year before the end of the Vietnam War. It inspects the atrocities of the WW2 and the Holocaust, and its impact on the world and its inhabitants. With a budget of 9million pounds (post inflation), the series took four years to produce, using eye-witness accounts and interviews to build a strong narrative.
The film was released only 30 years after the war ended, and although one may argue the advantage of hindsight, the documentary is told from a British perspective (although Laurence Olivier’s narrative is fairly objective, focusing primarily on factual statistics).
4
BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE
Directed by Michael Moore, Bowling For Columbine explores the mass-shorings and gun-culture within the United States, specifically inspecting the Columbine High School shooting committed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in April 1999. Twelve students and a teacher were murdered, whilst a further twenty-one people were injured before the two perpetrators committed suicide.
The film’s first act builds a strong and convincing argument against the use of firearms within America. A strong scene supporting the argument against simple obtainability of a firearm follows Michael Moore joining a bank/opening a bank account and receiving a rifle as a thank-you from the bank.
Although this scene faced criticism due to recipients not actually receiving the rifle on the same day as opening an account, Michael Moore debunked this claim when releasing footage of bank employee Jan Jacobsen stating that the firearms are secured locally onsite of the bank.
Friday, 24 March 2017
0 notes
Last Seen Blogs
chillwithsabi
ChillWithSabi
advilbbt
advilbbt
tom-matthew-quinn
Tom Quinn
zeezelweazel
Sapphic blog
xitofu
Xitósfera