Scarlett | she/her | co-writing with @reylotrashcompactor @mayimorr and @elizaviento | queer disabled pillar of salt | multi-fandom disaster: Reylo, SasuSaku, Zutara, Stucky, and too many others | am I writing rn? 🎱 signs point to yes
Jakku hadn’t changed a bit. It was all as Rey remembered: the sun just as searing, the air as dry, the people as selfish and desperate. The galaxy’s garbage bin, where junk was left to rot.
She found her parents’ grave on the outskirts of town, so close to the place where she’d spent years bargaining for her daily bread, waiting for a family already laid to rest. Rey remembered coming here once when she was five or six, just a few days after her parents had sold her to Unkar Plutt. She’d buried it down, deeper than the single grave that held their bodies.
The spot was marked by a stripped-clean cruiser’s battery. It had been so heavy to her childish arms that she’d been forced to beg an older scavenger to carry it for her. It was a miracle that the shifting sands hadn’t dislodged it.
Rey sat, legs crossed, and pressed her bare hands to the ground. Breathe, Luke would have told her. Just breathe.
She could feel the decay below the earth, bones stripped of flesh toward no purpose. This wasn’t Ahch-To; her parents’ bodies had never fed new life.
They’d been weak people with rough lives who had loved neither her nor each other. Your parents threw you away like garbage, Ben had said. A nasty thing to toss in her face, and all the more bitter to swallow because it was true.
Rey spent that night in her AT-AT. (A foul-mouthed Twi’lek had taken it for himself, but one swing of her lightsaber near his lekku had the bastard running off.) She could have slept aboard the Falcon, or better yet taken it back to base, but she didn’t want to. She wasn’t ready to leave. Maybe she’d never been ready to leave.
Her hammock was gone, but the Twi’lek had put together a pallet of musty blankets and flight seat cushions. Rey clutched her doll to her chest, looking up at the wall defaced with thousands of tally marks. Each one commemorating a day passed on this desert hell, wasted waiting on people who were here all along, dead and buried.
Rey didn’t cry. She’d shed enough tears for a family who had undoubtedly shed none on her.
She was half asleep when she felt the world slow down, her crippled walker hushed to an unnatural silence. And then Ben was there, lying right beside her.
He stared at her with hungry eyes, mouth trembling with want and anger.
“No wonder you wore a mask,” Rey said. “Everything you think shows on your face.”
Ben sat up and snarled, baring his uneven teeth. Rey looked up at him, frozen under the weight of his fury.
“I should be the angry one. It didn’t have to be this way, Ben.”
He laughed, a sound so sharp that it could cut her from across the stars. “No, it didn’t. You could have come with me, ruled with me. And instead you’re doing--what, trying to build a rebellion out of one ship full of fighters?”
Rey didn’t answer, although his assessment was spot on and he had to know it.
Then he softened, settling back to the calm she’d learned to expect from him in the quiet moments when the Force connected them. It was strange, how even keeled he could be with her when the rest of the world only ever saw his rage, as unbridled as an animal’s.
“What do you want?” Rey asked. “You know I won’t join you.”
Ben’s gaze swept over her, taking her in, and Rey felt suddenly exposed. She could be his prey, lying on her back like this; she could be his lover.
He reached for her, brushing her cheek with the back of his hand. Rey closed her eyes, a shudder rippling over her body. They’d touched so little since they met that it always felt precious, even when it was only the ghost of him that laid hands on her.
“Come back to me,” he whispered. “Please.”
Ben cupped her cheek now, and Rey clenched her jaw to keep from making some small, pitiful noise. It felt so good to make him beg, to break this powerful man over his need for her--but it was growing so hard to deny him, more difficult every time he asked. Rey leaned into his touch, stealing what comfort she could while he was here. The Force wouldn’t allow them much more time. She could already feel their connection slipping away, the noise of the real world invading this sacred space.
Rey couldn’t give in, but she could give him something.
“I miss you,” she said.
Ben looked down at her, his vulnerable lips parting, but she’d never know what he was going to say, because then he was gone.
Rey held her doll tighter. She’d almost forgotten the principal law of this world, the one that ruled every day of her childhood: the desert only took, never gave.
NOTES: This story is for the @reylofanfictionanthology‘s TLJ Flash Fic Challenge prompt “Jakku”
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A works cited list, because nine books need lots of calcium.
It's not required reading. It's just what's in the walls.
On Revolution & Its Aftermath
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Viking Press, 1963.
Brinton, Crane. The Anatomy of Revolution. Rev. ed., Vintage Books, 1965.
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Dix, Robert H. "Why Revolutions Succeed and Fail." Polity, vol. 16, no. 3, 1984, pp. 423–446. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3234558.
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Kramnick, Isaac. "Reflections on Revolution: Definition and Explanation in Recent Scholarship." History and Theory, vol. 11, no. 1, 1972, pp. 26–63. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2504623.
Skocpol, Theda. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge UP, 1979.
Stone, Lawrence. "Theories of Revolution." World Politics, vol. 18, no. 2, 1966, pp. 159–176. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2009694.
Yoder, D. "Current Definitions of Revolution." American Journal of Sociology, vol. 32, no. 3, 1926, pp. 433–441. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2765544.
On Colonialism & Its Psychology
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1983.
Bentahar, Ziad. "Frantz Fanon: Travelling Psychoanalysis and Colonial Algeria." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol. 42, no. 3, Sept. 2009, pp. 1–12.
Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. Maspero, 1959. Translated by Haakon Chevalier, Grove Press, 1965.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Translated by Charles L. Markmann, Grove Press, 1967.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Maspero, 1961. Translated by Constance Farrington, Grove Press, 1963.
Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. Edited by François Maspero, translated by Haakon Chevalier, Grove Press, 1967.
Fanon-Mendès-France, Mireille, and Donato Fhunsu. "The Contribution of Frantz Fanon to the Process of the Liberation of the People." The Black Scholar, vol. 42, no. 3–4, 2012, pp. 8–12.
Forsythe, Dennis. "Frantz Fanon—The Marx of the Third World." Phylon, vol. 34, no. 2, 1973, pp. 160–170.
Gordimer, Nadine. Burger's Daughter. Jonathan Cape, 1979.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, International Publishers, 1971.
Mbembe, Achille. "Necropolitics." Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. 1957. Translated by Howard Greenfeld, Beacon Press, 1965.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey, 1986.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children. Jonathan Cape, 1981.
On Class, the Gutter, & the Underworld
Brooks, Clem. "Class Politics and Political Change in the United States." Sociological Forum, vol. 12, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1–35. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2580718.
Clark, Terry Nichols. "The Breakdown of Class Politics." Social Science Quarterly, vol. 84, no. 2, 2003, pp. 299–315. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27700340.
Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist. Belknap Press, 2011.
Evans, Geoffrey, and James Tilley. "How Parties Shape Class Politics: Explaining the Decline of the Class Basis of Party Support." British Journal of Political Science, vol. 42, no. 1, 2012, pp. 137–161. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123411000202.
Evans, Geoffrey, and James Tilley. "The Depoliticization of Inequality and Redistribution: Explaining the Decline of Class Voting." The Journal of Politics, vol. 74, no. 4, 2012, pp. 963–976. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381612000618.
Fitts, Robert K. "The Rhetoric of Reform: The Five Points Missions and the Cult of Domesticity." Historical Archaeology, vol. 35, 2001, pp. 115–132. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374397.
Jarness, Vegard, Magne Paalgard Flemmen, and Lennart Rosenlund. "From Class Politics to Classed Politics." Sociology, vol. 53, no. 5, 2019, pp. 879–899. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038519838740.
Lichtenstein, Nelson. "Class Politics and the State during World War Two." International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 58, 2000, pp. 261–274. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27672683.
Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. 1851.
Milne, Claudia. "On the Grounds of the Fresh Water Pond: The Free-Black Community at Five Points, 1810–1834." International Journal of Historical Archaeology, vol. 6, no. 1, 2002, pp. 127–142. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016084621564.
Oestreicher, Richard. "How Should Historians Think about 'The Gangs of New York'?" History Workshop Journal, no. 56, 2003, pp. 210–215. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4289867.
Petras, James. "Class Politics, State Power and Legitimacy." Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 24, no. 34, 1989, pp. 1955–1958. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4395265.
Reckner, Paul. "Remembering Gotham: Urban Legends, Public History, and Representations of Poverty, Crime, and Race in New York City." International Journal of Historical Archaeology, vol. 6, no. 2, 2002, pp. 95–112. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016032604726.
Reynolds, George W. M. The Mysteries of London. 1844–1848.
Samuel, Raphael, editor. East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
Walkowitz, Daniel J. "'The Gangs of New York': The Mean Streets in History." History Workshop Journal, no. 56, 2003, pp. 204–209. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/56.1.204.
Wiley, Norbert. "America's Unique Class Politics." American Sociological Review, vol. 32, no. 4, 1967, pp. 529–541. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2091022.
Wilentz, Sean. "On Class and Politics in Jacksonian America." Reviews in American History, vol. 10, no. 4, 1982, pp. 45–63. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2701818.
Yamin, Rebecca. "Lurid Tales and Homely Stories of New York's Notorious Five Points." Historical Archaeology, vol. 32, no. 1, 1998, pp. 74–85. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25616594.
On the Built Environment & the Vertical City
Girard, Greg, and Ian Lambot. City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City. Watermark, 1993.
Girard, Greg, and Ian Lambot. City of Darkness Revisited. Watermark, 2014.
Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Verso, 2012.
Ho, Suenn. An Architectural Study on the Kowloon Walled City: Preliminary Findings. Columbia University, 1992.
Johnson, Steven Berlin. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic. Riverhead Books, 2006.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale UP, 1998.
Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Blackwell, 1996.
Soja, Edward W. "The Socio-Spatial Dialectic." Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 70, no. 2, 1980, pp. 207–225. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2562950.
Wong, Kwan-yiu, et al. A Geographic Study of the Kowloon Walled City. Chinese University of Hong Kong, Department of Geography, 1992.
On Extraction, Addiction, & the Drug Economy
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Pantheon Books, 1977.
Trocki, Carl A. Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750–1950. Routledge, 1999.
On the Sacred, the Chaotic, & the Occult
Carroll, Peter J. Liber Null & Psychonaut: The Practice of Chaos Magic. 1987. Weiser Books, revised and expanded ed., 2022.
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by Willard R. Trask, Harcourt, Brace, 1959.
Evans, Dave. The History of British Magic After Crowley: Kenneth Grant, Amado Crowley, Chaos Magic, Satanism, Lovecraft, the Left-Hand Path, Blasphemy and Magical Morality. Hidden Publishing, 2007.
Hine, Phil. Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic. New Falcon Publications, 1995.
On the Body, Pain, & Violence
hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow, 2000.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford UP, 1985.
On Dystopia, Hope, & Genre Theory
Aurora, S. "From Structure to Machine: Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of Linguistics." Deleuze Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 2017, pp. 405–428. https://doi.org/10.3366/dls.2017.0274.
Baccolini, Raffaella. "The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction." PMLA, vol. 119, no. 3, 2004, pp. 518–521. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25486067.
Gonnermann, Annika. "The Concept of Post-Pessimism in 21st-Century Dystopian Fiction." The Comparatist, vol. 43, 2019, pp. 26–40. https://doi.org/10.1353/com.2019.0002.
Herman, Peter C. "More, Huxley, Eggers, and the Utopian/Dystopian Tradition." Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 41, no. 3, 2018, pp. 165–193.
Michael-Matsas, Savvas. "A Utopia of Immanence: Revolution in Deleuze and Guattari." Deleuze Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, 2016, pp. 289–300. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/45331737.
Mihăilescu, C. A. "Mind the Gap: Dystopia as Fiction." Style, vol. 25, no. 2, 1991, pp. 211–222.
Moylan, Tom. "The Necessity of Hope in Dystopian Times: A Critical Reflection." Utopian Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 2020, pp. 164–193. https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.31.1.0164.
Schönher, Mathias. "The Triple Transformation: The Emergence of Philosophy in Deleuze and Guattari." Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 4, 2019, pp. 610–627. https://doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.33.4.0610.
Stivale, Charles J. "Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Schizoanalysis & Literary Discourse." SubStance, vol. 9, no. 4, 1980, pp. 46–57. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3684040.
Period Detail & Material Culture
Altick, Richard D. Victorian Studies in Scarlet. Norton, 1970.
Beeton, Isabella. Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management. 1861.
Gloag, John. Victorian Comfort: A Social History of Design from 1830–1900. Allen & Unwin, 1961.
Literary & Dramatic Sources
Dumas, Alexandre. The Count of Monte Cristo. 1844–1846.
Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. Spartacus. Victor Gollancz, 1933.
Shakespeare, William. Henry V.
Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus.
Waters, Sarah. Tipping the Velvet. Virago Press, 1998.
Visual Media
Black Lagoon. Directed by Sunao Katabuchi, Madhouse, 2006.
Black Sails. Created by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine, Starz, 2014–17.
Children of Men. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, Universal Pictures, 2006.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi, Trigger, 2022.
Deadwood. Created by David Milch, HBO, 2004–06.
Domino. Directed by Tony Scott, New Line Cinema, 2005.
Empire. Created by Lee Daniels and Danny Strong, Fox, 2015–20.
Gangs of New York. Directed by Martin Scorsese, Miramax, 2002.
House of Cards. Created by Beau Willimon, Netflix, 2013–18.
In the Mood for Love. Directed by Wong Kar-wai, Block 2 Pictures, 2000.
Jormungand. Directed by Keitaro Motonaga, White Fox, 2012.
Mad Max: Fury Road. Directed by George Miller, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2015.
Metropolis. Directed by Fritz Lang, Universum Film (UFA), 1927.
Neon Genesis Evangelion. Directed by Hideaki Anno, Gainax, 1995–96.
Peaky Blinders. Created by Steven Knight, BBC, 2013–22.
Penny Dreadful. Created by John Logan, Showtime, 2014–16.
Pirates of the Caribbean. Directed by Gore Verbinski, Walt Disney Pictures, 2003–07.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Directed by Akiyuki Shinbo, Shaft, 2011.
Rome. Created by Bruno Heller, John Milius, and William J. MacDonald, HBO, 2005–07.
Shadow and Bone. Created by Eric Heisserer, Netflix, 2021–23.
Silo. Created by Graham Yost, Apple TV+, 2023–26.
Snowpiercer. Directed by Bong Joon-ho, CJ Entertainment, 2013.
Sons of Liberty. Directed by Kari Skogland, History Channel, 2015.
The Crow. Directed by Alex Proyas, Miramax Films, 1994.
The Great. Created by Tony McNamara, Hulu, 2020–23.
The Sopranos. Created by David Chase, HBO, 1999–2007.
The Wire. Created by David Simon, HBO, 2002–08.
V for Vendetta. Directed by James McTeigue, Warner Bros., 2005.
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Omg my wishes were granted 😭 3x03 was a beautiful day for both the Daemyras and the Rhaenicents. And I’m a filthy multi shipper so I got fed two feasts
not team green not team black but a secret third thing (it is all a cycle of violence that will never be broken even two hundred years from now and there is not an single happy ending or “winner” for anyone in this story)
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I’m amused (but not delighted) seeing the fan angst over iwtv and its characters who do evil things.
Friends. They are monsters. Actual monsters. And they are pretend! Vampires aren’t real! I promise! They’re going to do terrible things. That’s literally why they exist.
Go with it. It’s fun to watch monsters and villains do what they’re meant to do. You don’t have to justify a damn thing.
I’m so glad the Internet wasn’t a big thing yet in college when I read the series. I just read and enjoyed the monsters.
