Since Charles Lee is played as a pretty young guy in Hamilton, I’m not sure how many people are aware of the full context and hilarity of Laurens’s roast of Lee at Lee’s court-martial
Laurens was a 23-year-old aide-de-camp when he testified at the court-martial. Charles Lee was 46 and a general. Lee was twice Laurens’s age and outranked him, but Laurens had no reservations about completely dragging him.
Back in early high school, I knew a girl - we were kinda friends by virtue of having multiple friends in common, but in hindsight, she never much liked me - who had this purebred dog. I’d met him at her place, and he wasn’t desexed, which was pretty unusual in my experience, so it stuck in the memory. And one day, as we were walking across the playground, this girl - I’ll call her Felice - said to me, “Hey, so we’re going to start using my dog as a stud.” And I’m like, Oh? And she’s like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking to breeders, we’re going to get to see his puppies and everything,” and I made interested noises because that actually sounded pretty interesting, and she went on a little bit more about how it would all work -
And then, out of nowhere, she swapped this sly look with another girl, burst out laughing and exclaimed, “God, you’re so gullible. I literally just made that up. You’ll believe anything!”
And I was just. Dumbfounded. Because I was standing there, staring at them, and they were laughing like I was an idiot, like they’d pulled this massive trick on me, and all I could think, apart from why the fuck they felt moved to do this in the first place, was that neither of them knew what gullible means. Like, literally nothing in that story was implausible! I knew she had an undesexed, male, purebred dog! It made total sense that he be used for a stud! And it wasn’t like I was getting this information from a second party - the person who actually owned the dog was telling me herself! And I felt so immensely frustrated, because they both walked off before I could figure out how to articulate that gullible means taking something unlikely or impossible at face value, whereas Felice had told me a very plausible lie, and while the end result in both cases is that the believer is tricked, the difference was that I wasn’t actually being stupid. Rather, Felice had manipulated the fact that she occupied a position of relative social trust - meaning, I didn’t have any reason to expect her to lie to me - to try and make me feel stupid.
Which, thinking back, was kind of par for the course with Felice. On another occasion, as our group was walking from Point A to Point B, I felt a tugging jostle on my school bag. I didn’t turn around, because I knew my friends were behind me, and my bag was often half-zipped - I figured someone was just shoving something back in that had fallen out, or had grabbed it in passing as they horsed around. Instead, Felice steps up beside me, grinning, and hands me my wallet, which she’d just pulled out, and tells me how oblivious I was for not noticing that she’d been rifling my bag, and how I ought to pay more attention. This was not done playfully: the clear intent, again, was to make me feel stupid for trusting that my friends - which, in that context, included her - weren’t going to fuck with me. As before, I couldn’t explain this to her, and she walked on, pleased with herself, before I could try.
The worst time, though, was when I came back from the canteen at lunch one day, and Felice, again backed up by another girl, told me that my dad had showed up on campus looking for me. By this time, you’d think I’d have cottoned on to her particular way of fucking with me, but I hadn’t, and my dad worked close enough to the school that he really could’ve stopped in. So I believed her, a strange little lurch in my stomach that I couldn’t quite place, and asked where he was. She said he’d gone looking for me elsewhere, at another building where we sometimes sat, and so I hurried off to look for him, feeling more and more anxious as I wondered why he might be there.
I was halfway across campus before I let myself remember that my mother was in hospital.
I felt physically sick. My pulse went through the roof; I couldn’t think of a reason why my dad would be at school looking for me that didn’t mean something terrible had happened to my mother, that her surgery had gone wrong, that she was sick or hurt or dying. And when my dad wasn’t where she’d said he would be, I hurried back to Felice - who was now sitting with half our mutual group of friends - only to be met with laughter. She called me gullible again, and that time, I snapped. I chased her down and punched her, and the friends who’d only just arrived, who didn’t know what had happened or why I was reacting like that, instantly took her side. Noises were made about telling the rest of our friends what I’d done, and I didn’t want them to hear Felice’s version first, so I ran off to the library, where I knew they were, to tell them first.
I walked into the library. I found our other friends. I was shaky and red-faced, and they asked me what had happened. I told them what Felice had done, that I’d hit her for it, that my mother was in hospital for an operation - something I’d mentioned in passing over the previous week; multiple people nodded in recognition - and how I’d thought Felice’s lie meant that something bad had happened. And then I burst into tears, something I almost never did, because it wasn’t until I said it out loud that I realised how genuinely frightened I’d been. I sat down at the table and cried, and a girl - I’ll call her Laurel - who I’d never really been close to - who was, in fact, much better friends with Felice than with me - put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me, volubly furious on my behalf.
And then the other girls showed up, and Laurel said, with that particular vicious sincerity that only twelve-year-olds can really muster, “Prepare to die, Felice,” and I almost wanted to laugh, but didn’t. A girl who was a close friend, who’d come in with Felice, took her side, outraged that I’d punched someone, until Laurel spoke up about my mother being in hospital, and everyone went really quiet. Which was when I remembered, also belatedly, that Laurel’s own mother was dead; had died of cancer several years previously, which explained why she of all people was so angry. I have a vivid memory of the look on Felice’s face, how she tried to play it off - she said she hadn’t known about my mother, I pointed out that I’d mentioned it multiple times at lunch that week, and she lost all high ground with everyone.
Felice never played a trick on me again.
Eighteen years later, I still think about these incidents, not because I’m bearing some outdated grudge, but because they’re a good example of three important principles: one, that even with seemingly benign pranks, there’s a difference between acting with friendly or malicious intent; two, that ignorance of context can have a profound effect on the outcome regardless of what you meant; and three, that getting hurt by people who abuse your trust doesn’t make you gullible - it means you’re being betrayed.
And I feel like this is information worth sharing.
Oh, hello there, primary reason for deep-seated trust issues two decades later.
daaamn that made my blood boil
Wow, yeah. That’s not how a “prank” works, people.
And with the Felices of the world, they’re always eager to mock you for trusting them, but if you make it clear you don’t trust them anymore they get upset and paint themselves as the victims because you can’t take a joke.
“You can’t have a character with big boobs and not sexualise them”
“There aren’t any feminist female characters that want to do things that are typically feminine”
“There aren’t any badass gay characters”
“There aren’t any cool/badass disabled characters”
“Okay well what about disabled POC characters?”
“There are no interesting or complex villains! None that ever question their morals, or have an interesting motive”
“There aren’t any women characters that don’t just do things for men”
“I want a poc character that fights against racism”
“There aren’t any cool characters that aren’t young and healthy”
“There are no male characters that like feminine things”
Need I go on? Go watch Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood.
Fullmetal alchemist also tackled the issues of imperialism, genocide, PTSD, friendly fire, racism, war brutality, and military corruption unflinchingly. “Most military commanders are killed by their own disgusted soldiers.” indeed.
Anonymous asked: Important questions in no particular order: what is the Foxhole Court, do I need to give a shit about sports in order to enjoy it, are there LGBT characters/relationships, and in the event that I cave, should I just buy all the books in one fell swoop?
OKAY because I keep seeing it pop up on my dash and it looks like EXACTLY my cup of tea (I’m that person who considers things like Die Hard and, like, fuck, I don’t know, the Mummy and superhero movies and Deadpool to be wholesome cleansing entertainment, intrigue and murder and violence are my shit) and I was just, like, SO CONCERNED that I needed to give a shit about sports. I just. Do not. BUT Check Please! is a gift unto this earth and I kinda give half a fuck about hockey after reading it, so SOLD, I’m gonna go get the first book.
words-writ-in-starlight asked: *appears to harass you again* Okay but for real, talk to me about the disaster that unfolds as Anakin has to deal with Padme's insistence that no one OWNS him, because he's a PERSON, not a thing, and also how that turns into handmaiden!Anakin, and also whether this eventually turns into Padme/Anakin, and also whether this still ends with Vader or if Anakin loses it completely and they have an untrained Dark Side nine-year-old. I swear I'll get out of your inbox someday, but clearly not today.
(I’ll be honest there’s a lot here so I just wrote The Next Thing That Happens, lolll. hopefully it satisfies?)
Anakin cries for a very long time, surprising Padmé exactly not at all. She guides him a little further away from the funeral stragglers and does her best to disappear him behind her robes in the shadows, suspecting that later he might be ashamed to know the Jedi had seen him do it, even if he’ll never see them again. Perhaps some part of her just wants the excuse to disappear him, but that doesn’t make her wrong either.
It doesn’t hurt to get him to sit down somewhere, either. He looks so exhausted.
So Padmé takes a seat, and she lets Anakin lean in against her side and weep silent tears into her chest. She does not reflect on why a nine year-old might cry hard enough to shake without making a sound. Her fists curl inside her sleeves, though, and she makes no effort to disturb his grief.
Anakin cries and cries and cries, and Padmé lays a hand on his back and watches the embers of Qui-Gon Jinn gutter out into nothing. Even with as long as the pyre has burned already, it takes a very long time.
She is so very tired, and there is so very much to do.
“Your majesty,” Sabé murmurs sometime later; Padmé blinks, slowly, and looks up at her. The gesture feels thicker than it should, padded by exhaustion and borrowed pain and a tinge of grief.
“Sabé,” she says, the name coming out slow too. Sabé and Rabé stand side-by-side in front of her, as close to mirrors as any two humans could be. Padmé wants to say more, but the right words won’t come. Words don’t seem to want to come at all, in all honesty.
“Anakin Skywalker is asleep, your majesty,” Sabé says; Padmé glances down automatically and finds that she speaks the truth, although she had not doubted it anyway. “Shall we take him to the Jedi’s rooms?”
“No. He is not a Jedi,” Padmé says, her fingers flattening against Anakin’s back. “He is one of the Naboo. He will stay with us, until such a time as he chooses not to.”
Sabé looks at Rabé, who looks back at Sabé. Padmé looks at neither of them, because Anakin is small and soft and sleeping against her side, body half-hidden by the heavy length of her sleeve but tear-stains still visible on his face.
“We will prepare a room for him, your majesty,” Sabé says, she and Rabé both inclining their heads in perfect unison.
“If you would, please,” Padmé murmurs, and lifts her arm a little higher to better hide Anakin. He shifts in his sleep and lays heavier against her side. She wishes, again, to disappear him–make him unremarkable, unnoticeable, uninteresting. As if she could take his Force strength and his grief and uncertainty off him as easily as she herself takes off Amidala and vanishes into a handmaiden’s cloak.
Of course, even when she takes Amidala off, she is always still Amidala, and Anakin would be no less Anakin if she could do the same for him.
Still. It’s nice, sometimes, to not always be looked at as though she is.
And even without everything he’s done for her people and planet, Anakin is someone who looks at her the same way no matter what she’s wearing. Padmé meant it when she told him he was valuable, and not just in the inherent way that any sentient is, not just for what he’s done–Anakin is valuable to her, for how he treats her. It’s one of the few truly selfish things Padmé has allowed herself to feel since being elected, and she has no intention of changing it.
Honestly, Anakin might need more people to be selfish about himself. Especially now, with Qui-Gon Jinn dead. Who else does he have, now that he’s left his home?
Her.
He will have her.
The rest of it … the rest of it they’ll just have to see, she supposes.
slyrider asked: So here's a story of when i was a wee lass. Me, my mom, and older brother were out shopping and i was probably like 5 at the time and my brother was 7. So we were shopping and my bro was glued to my moms side while I was interested in my career as a
Mannequin. Weird ik, so I’m at the front of the store standing in the window, posing with all the other mannequins, standing completely still. And being the dedicated person i am, i did not break my role fot anything, not even to use the potty. Thats
Right, I completely wet myself to keep my mannequin charade up. So my mom came to check on my and sees the little piddle by my feet and drops everything. She grabs me andy brother and just bolts out the store. And thats the end of story time today:)
Holy shit this is beautiful, I need this in my epic tales tag, this is getting posted just because I NEED IT IN MY TAG.
Everyone should feel totally free to tell me crazy stories from their past.
