Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

5 Headcanons AU Meme

Prompt from @littlestartopaz​: Max and Lessa role reversal?  (Reminder that Max and Lessa are the main characters of my novel Polaris, explained in more detail here.)

• Okay so, in this world, Max grows up Margaret Stone, with long hair and makeup and heels and money.  She wants to strip off her skin.   Lessa, full name unknown, on the other hand, is on the street at eleven and picked up by Sebastian McCoy, MD, on his way to Polaris’ newest base.  She’s a little too timid to be a revolutionary, at first, but she takes to it like a duck to water after a little bit of an adjustment period.
  
• Lessa never joins Mercury squad, she’s not cut out for life as a spy and she has no talent for hacking.  Instead, when she’s fifteen she joins Mars squad, the strike team, and starts taking point on their operations, throwing bolts of electricity rather than bullets.  She’s promoted to Mars Prime at nineteen, and she has a reputation for being the gentlest professional soldier anyone’s ever met.  
• There’s also a couple of stories about her blowing the power for whole city grids, or turning on the sprinklers in a building and using the water as a conductor to kill everyone on the floor.
• Under Lessa, Ursa Major’s Mars squad gets a new nickname.  Blitzkrieg.  It means lightning war.
• On the one hand, Polaris does a lot worse in this universe.  Having a technopath to network a continent-spanning rebellion is invaluable, and without such an advantage, they lose lives, they lose bases, more than once they almost lose everything.  There is no secure intranet linking their family of thousands, there is no safe way to smuggle those who don’t want to fight out of the country.  Fight or die is the unspoken option given to every new recruit, and those few who are desperate enough to attempt to leave the country on their own learn how true it is.  Polaris is harder, every base dependent on only itself, with no safe way to reach out for help, and its people are angrier, with an ever-growing ‘missing’ list of those who can neither be contacted nor confirmed dead.
• On the other, Polaris does a lot better in this universe, because when Margaret is nine, she discovers that she can make any computer do anything she tells it to, just by touching it.  When she’s twelve, and Lessa is still years from getting kicked out, Margaret starts funneling information from her father’s system onto a private hard drive so encrypted the NSA couldn’t crack it with their best men.  She does research, lots of research, and hunts down a boy at her school whose family is on one of the lists.  She tells him, warns him, and says, “Polaris.  Go to Polaris.  Take them this.”  The moment the hard drive is connected to a Polaris system, their database is flooded with more national secrets than they’ve been able to get in a decade, every block of code signed with a simple MAX.  Marshal North has to sit down, and she laughs and laughs until she’s breathless.
• Margaret is twenty-two and ferocious with being trapped like an animal in a cage when she’s caught up in a Polaris operation.  She gets taken hostage by a girl with long blonde hair and a grim look in her eye, one hand wrapped around her throat as the girl says, “Sorry, Miss Stone, but it is what it is.  Tell your bodyguards to drop their guns, or I’ll put so much electricity through you you’ll wish you’d just been struck by lightning.”
• Margaret bares her teeth and looks as wild as any of the rebels when she says, “If you take me with you, I can get you another load of my father’s data before we leave, and more that I’ve hidden around the city.  it’ll make the hard drive look like nothing.”
• The blonde girl is so startled she almost drops her hostage in a pile on the ground.  “How did you–”
• “I sent the first one.”
  
• “Max,” Lessa breathes, and gives a feral grin of her own.  “You’ve got a deal.”
  

Anonymous asked: I can't help but feel that we are falling inline with themes played in V for Vendetta. Your thoughts? World events seem too coincidental, but there is no such thing as coincidence.

This is…a weirdly heavy question to just….get in Ye Olde Inbox, but okay, sure, we can talk V for Vendetta, I ain’t got shit to do.

Okay, to appreciate that I’m not just being a bitch here, you need to know that I’m not being funny when I call myself a cynic.  I’m pretty serious about that, I consistently expect people to act selfishly and be generally unhelpful until/unless I know them pretty fucking well.  @twistedangelsays (yoooo babe, back me up here) can confirm that my usual response to being told to depend on someone for help is to blink blankly and ask “but what would be in it for them to help me with this.”  (Her usual response is “they’re your teacher, they’re literally getting paid for this,” but I’d like to kindly remind her that teachers at colleges get paid regardless.)  The way I’ve described it several times in my tags is that I’m in love with humanity, and they don’t love me back, so I have a very peculiar view that’s half “God let’s just talk about the Voyager probe and random acts of kindness and the fact that we domesticated our primary predator” and half “I am genuinely not even surprised when people suck, and haven’t been in…forever, maybe.”  It’s a very capital-R Romantic viewpoint, think Grantaire from Les Mis, I am Grantaire and Grantaire is me.

That being said, here are my current thoughts on the V for Vendetta thing.

1. V for Vendetta, or any other dystopian story on the lines of 1984 or Brave New World, presumes a level of competence on the collective scale that I just haven’t seen in the American government (I’m American, we currently have Clinton and a racist Cheeto duking it out for president, I’m usually better about being aware of the wider world but I am Very Concerned about the election, so the only thing that I really took note of was Brexit, I’m sorry, this is gonna be pretty US-centric.)  Individually, I’m confident that many–um, some of our politicians and administrators are perfectly functional human beings with a high degree of competency, but I have yet to see that brought to the table in any sort of concerted effort.  I remember a lot of government criticism way back when the Occupy movement was a thing revolving around “Well, they don’t have a goal” and that’s valid, I made that remark myself, but also…like, fucking hark who’s talking, Washington DC, what have you done with your life lately.  So that’s the main thing, is that our government flat-out isn’t cohesive enough to execute a functional dystopia, we’re too much of a chaotic mess.
   
2. That being said, I don’t know how much that’s a positive thing.  I mean, the lack of a genuine totalitarian regime (and conversations about whether or not America trends toward dystopianism can please delayed to a later date) is obviously a good thing, but the entropic decline toward chaos we’re witnessing in the clash between the rising generation of (largely) liberal mindset and the people in power, who are by and large interested in maintaining the status quo…that’s going to be REAL messy when it starts to break down.  I mean, shit, it’s already breaking down, look around, read the news, and then maybe drink, ‘cause shit’s depressing.  Who needs totalitarianism when you have what-the-fuck-ever this is.
3. This is more general, but I’m of the opinion that people are neither fundamentally good nor bad, but rather fundamentally people (that’s a bastardized Good Omens quote, it makes some EXTREMELY good philosophical points between the demonic/angelic antics and Four Bikers of the Apocalypse).  As mentioned above, this means I assume a level of selfish behavior, particularly from those already in a position of power–power and wealth beget nothing so much as the desire to maintain one’s power and wealth.  In addition, that translates to a fairly telescopic view on the world, in which one’s immediate loved ones (possibly including self) generally take absolute precedence over the abstracted ‘they.’  Soooo that translates into “the human capacity for precipitating disaster is boundless,” in Moran-speak.

Anyway.  TL;DR: I don’t think much of people’s inherent capacity to be functional enough to run a V for Vendetta style dystopian system (this is also where a lot of conspiracy theories break down for me), but hey.  I’m sure they’ll impress me with their skill at fucking everything up anyway.  Let me take this opportunity to remind my American followers to vote against Trump, I don’t give a damn what you think of Clinton.

And if a revolution starts, I can shoot a gun and have medical qualifications in addition to a good tactical brain, fucking point me at the recruitment office.

urbancityking:

jopara:

the fact that you can work full time in this country and still not afford to live disgusts me more and more every day

Everyone reblog this because it speaks volumes.

Also please note that it’s not “can’t afford insert thing about middle class here” it’s literally “can’t afford to LIVE.”  Food, clean water, a roof, medicine, the basics.  That is what that covers.

(via academicfeminist)

silkshirtlesbian:

im here for women who’ve survived trauma and come out of the other end furious and spitting blood and im here for women who’ve survived trauma and ended up softer and smaller and less brave and im here for women who refuse to deal with their trauma, who fuck and fight and run, and im here for women in the middle of dealing with their trauma who cry on the floor one day and feel invincible the next im here for any woman who’s experienced trauma. you’re not handling it wrongly. you’re doing your best

(via academicfeminist)

speckeltail asked: okay, so, an au where your ocs all work shitty retail jobs

Oh dear Christ.  Okay, let’s see, I don’t make OC’s for fic as a rule, and my OC’s for my original writing all tend to be really aggressive people, this should be fun.  I’ll just pick five at random.

• Sam Lightworth, Horseman of Death and unwilling Antichrist and my fave: she’s the best salesperson in the house, no one is disputing this, she could sell light switches to the Amish and matchboxes in Hell so they’re not going to fire her, but she’s also on so much probation always.  A short list of highlights from the notes in Sam’s file:
  
• punched a customer in the nose for flicking water at her
• found a customer rifling through the shirts she’d just spent an hour folding and almost broke their fingers
• responded to a crying child by setting him on a shelf and telling him that if he wasn’t good she’d sell him (in her defense, it worked)
• threw a grown man into a wall so hard she knocked him out when he tried to grab her ass (the manager doesn’t know how she managed it and doesn’t WANT to know, okay, he deals with too much shit to ask how she sent someone flying without a finger laid on them)
• was found in store at opening with what looked suspiciously like a hellhound (there is a sign, okay, it’s very unambiguous, no pets allowed)

• Max, no last name, my spy-slash-technopath from this novel: she used to work on the floor but she’s shit at selling things and only slightly better at giving directions, so they shoved her in a glorified janitor’s closet with the security system and told her to keep it running.  She helps make sure there’s never any video evidence of Sam’s antics.

• Gwynion, erstwhile Prince of the Unseelie Court and ex-assassination victim, because we need a guy in here somewhere: he’s very polite, which has him one up on Sam, and very efficient, which has him one up on Max, but he’s also…look, the manager isn’t accusing anyone of anything, but no one ever found that one woman who tried to grope Gwynion, okay, the manager’s not saying she disappeared.  He’s just saying they never found her.  There’s a difference.

• Sephie, from this: honestly Sephie doesn’t deserve this, Sephie deserves better than this bullshit and these coworkers, she is a Normal Human trying to pay rent and she needs a drink.  Nonetheless, she gets along famously with everyone and doesn’t mind working the register since Sam isn’t trusted to do it and Gwynion seems prone to causing equipment fry-age.  Sephie is also gunning for the managerial position when their current boss inevitably caves, and stands to make a tidy sum in the pool given the newest hire.

• Angharad “Harry” Ainsel, from this (parts are noted ‘first,’ ‘second,’ ‘third’): the new hire.  The manager almost cried when she walked in, because no one who wanders around with that strange bone crown is going to be a good thing.  She’s almost as good as Sam at the sales end of things, but she’s also making people sign things that don’t look like receipts and has offered to exchange two return items for changeling children.  Also, the bike rack is for bikes, and the no pets allowed thing should cover the bike rack, as far as the manager knows, which means the warhorse is definitely contraindicated.

• Bonus sixth headcanon: the manager quits within three weeks of Harry’s hire (with the apparent intent to move to Bangkok or somewhere similarly distant), Harry and Sephie shake hands as soon as Sephie’s signed her new managerial contract, and the Huntsmaster leaves in the middle of her shift and doesn’t come back to work.  Sephie, when asked how she knows Harry and could she get Sam one of those nice daggers she carried, shrugs and says that her girlfriend has contacts.

send me an au and i’ll give you 5+ headcanons about it

buckygreyjoy:

published aus are right here, feel free to send me new ones!

Okay since I have actual existing AUs in my writing tag, what if I actually tried to do the 5 headcanons thing properly.

(Source: bodhilukes, via skymurdock)

geekandmisandry:

aunt-mimi:

When somebody says that “a man likes to feel like a man,” all I hear is “A man likes to feel superior to you and it’s your job to make him believe it.” 

Someone said this to me once, that a man needs to feel like a man, I replied “well I’m not stopping him” and had to watch this fragile creature try to explain to me that my strong personality could demean men.

Like, if I have to pretend you are a strong man and cater to that then clearly you’re not that strong dude.

(via lupinatic)