Man without a cause

Roleplaying blog for Josephus Miller from The Expanse. Both book and series based. UNDER CONSTRUCTION

[josephusamiller]

@andersondawes

He was drunk. Very, very drunk. Probably too drunk to still be outside his hole. It wasn’t like he had anywhere to be in the morning. Not anymore at least. 

It took him an embarrassingly long moment to focus on the man sliding into the seat beside him. When he realised it, he rolled his eyes and slurred: “Come to beat me up again? Sorry, get in line. LIfe’s already on it.”

[andersondawes]

            “That would be entirely up to you, Beratna.” Dawes replied as his eyes did a quick once over. The man was clearly drunk, but he had no intentions of kicking him around, not this time at least. “Why didn’t you trust me about Julie? We were on the same side, but you wouldn’t listen.”

            He frowned, perhaps it was a bit too much to discuss at the moment as it was clear to him that the other man wasn’t thinking straight in his drunken state, but part of his was curious. Anderson wanted to understand the way that the man thought, but he couldn’t do that if he kept forcing his hand. “What happened? You get fired or something?”

[josephusamiller]

Miller waved his hand dismissively without realising that he was still holding onto his glass. The golden brown fungal pseudo whiskey spilled over his fingers and down onto the dirty bar top. Miller frowned at the splashes as if having trouble understanding where they had come from.

He shrugged and emptied his glass.

“You sound like you didn’t have anything to do with it.”, he sneered, half because of the sting of the alcohol and half because of his disdain for the man sitting beside him.

[sapphicsummerchild-deactivated2]

tell me people who watch the Expanse, does the boring white detective dude stop being the focus of the show? i need a reason to get through the first few episodes. ?

[the-roci]

His story gets to be very interesting. Keep going.

[whenimaunicorn]

Almost everyone falls in love with the show by the fourth episode. Keep going!!!

[josephusamiller]

The focus on Miller in the beginning is for the simple reason of world-building: Showing the Belters and their struggles. He does play a bigger role later, but even if you don’t like him or the Noir feel of his story, there is much more to come apart from him. 

Expanse builds a lot slower than most ‘traditional’ tv series’, as a friend of mine pointed out, but it’s SO worth it! Keep going.

[starsinamonolith]

A cool Miller / Julie collage art piece by  dan-zhbanov

[somekh]

MY MUSE IS NOT ALWAYS RIGHT

   Please keep in mind that, however hard my muse may argue something or however confidently they make a statement, they can be wrong. It’s my muse’s opinion, and my muse talking, and their perception is skewed.               Do not feel like everything out of my character’s mouth is the truth, or that I’m godmodding. 

[sigurism]

@nourgelitnius, happy birthday love

[eatingcroutons]

Problematic ships: are we having a semantics issue here?

More and more I’m beginning to think that a lot of wank about problematic “ships” comes from the fact that we’re collapsing an entire spectrum of how people approach fandom pairings into a single word. (To keep the language simpler here I’ve only talked about “pairings”, but this also applies to poly ships.)

At one extreme, I’m personally reluctant to use the word “shipping” at all about pairings I read and write, because I don’t think “shipping” really describes how I approach fandom. I don’t have strong feelings about who characters should be paired with. When I read or write a pairing it’s because that pairing has a dynamic I’m interested in, not because I think it would be good for the characters.

At the other end of the spectrum, I know people for whom “shipping” really is believing that two characters should be together, because they have such a great relationship dynamic in canon. Who believe that being together would be better for both characters.

When people say that nobody should ever “ship” or create fanworks about a pairing because they have an unhealthy relationship in canon, those people seem to be assuming that literally everyone who creates fanworks about a pairing “ships” them in that second sense. That the only reason to create fanworks about a pairing is because you believe the characters have a great relationship dynamic in canon, and would be better off together.

Fandom is about so, so much more than that.

Sometimes we want to read or write about unhealthy relationships. Sometimes we want to explore what circumstances might make a relationship healthier, or unhealthier, than what’s depicted in canon.

We “ship” characters with unhealthy canon dynamics because we believe these are interesting and important stories to tell.

Not all relationships are healthy. It’s absurd to insist that we should only ever tell stories about completely healthy relationships.

[bastlynn]

….

Crap, that makes a *lot* of sense.

[eatingcroutons]

I mean, this is an actual quote from an anti post I saw today: “If you ship an abusive ship, you condone that ship automatically. There’s no way around it.”

This person clearly understands the word “ship” to entail some sort of moral endorsement – they’ve said so outright!

But that isn’t the only kind of “shipping”, and that kind of “shipping” certainly isn’t the only reason people create or enjoy fanworks about a pairing.

[once-a-polecat]

Actually, I 100% totally hate the idea of “shipping” as moral endorsement. It’s about exploring the dynamics of two (or more) characters in relationship with each other. In and of itself that carries no moral weight.

[josephusamiller]

Saying that only if you ship an unhealthy pairing you automatically condone it you essentially say "If you write about murder, you condone it." Okay, that is a very polemic way of putting it, but both statements have the same underlying issue: when a writer writes something, they do so to tell a story and a story needs conflict. I had a different discussion on another one of my blogs about an issue that comes from a very similar place. People write certain things as a thought experiment. Not always, but a lot of times. A literary version of what-if. Crimes, hate, war, bad relationships, people don't write about these things because they condone them, but because it's a way for us writers to think about them. Only writing good and problem free ships is simply boring. It's not good writing, just like only writing stories where nothing bad happens are boring. What I'm trying to say in a very convoluted way is that writers write things they don't necessarily condone. The problem only comes when a writer does not acknowledge the problems their ship has, but even that can come in a multitude of different ways and from a multitude of different points that a single catch-all answer of 'good or bad' simply does not apply.

[josephusamiller]

Off for the night

More writing in the morning after I took care of some other muses.

[josephusamiller]

@welcometothechurn

“I know you don’t trust me, but can we at least agree that we both want the same thing? For this shit on Eros not to destroy all of humanity?”

[josephusamiller]

@andersondawes

He was drunk. Very, very drunk. Probably too drunk to still be outside his hole. It wasn’t like he had anywhere to be in the morning. Not anymore at least. 

It took him an embarrassingly long moment to focus on the man sliding into the seat beside him. When he realised it, he rolled his eyes and slurred: “Come to beat me up again? Sorry, get in line. LIfe’s already on it.”

[josephusamiller]

Starter Call

Let’s see what we can get done here. Like or reblog to get a starter from Miller.

[avoidantgh0st]

[josephusamiller]

rociinante:

“If you ask me, she didn’t steer you at all, but whatever helps you sleep at night,” he nudged at the bruise in his neck, wincing at the memory of anestethic going through his veins.

“I am pretty sure I won’t be doing the whole radiation thing again. It ain’t my thing.”

Miller chuckled and coughed again at the roughness in his lungs. He patted his own chest in a vain attempt to settle the feeling. “No, me neither. It was shit.”

He leaned back and took a deep breath.He could feel his reduced lung capacity, the soreness of his muscles and the fragility of his mucus membranes. Just a small tug of his teeth on the inside of his cheek would still cause bleeding. According to the ship’s medical computer, it would take another few days for him to feel ‘normal’ again. 

Whatever passed for normal these days.

“So, what are we up to now? We know that Phoebe is where the bug came from.”, he shrugged with a question on his face. That where we’re going?

[josephusamiller]

rociinante:

“Handsome,” he echoed back, “and yeah, but you won’t. I happen to know that. Seems I made the right judgement call.”

In fact, he found those ridges interesting, for the lack of a better word. Something otherworldly, something that made him different.

“You and your Julie.”

“She’s not my Julie.”, he sounded almost regretful and in his mind, she laughed at him. “Was.”, he corrected himself then and shook his head, ignoring the way she pursed her lips and shook her head in his mind. He might as well get used to the way things were.

“So far, she hasn’t steered me wrong.”

[occasionalrpmemes]

RPers, please reblog this if you’re okay with ICONLESS threads!

[josephusamiller]

rociinante:

“I thought you were an earther, at first,” he pondered, looking up at the ceiling, pushing around in his chair. “I don’t know why, I really don’t. It wasn’t until I saw your back that I realized you must be of Belter origin.”

He tapped at something in the screen.

“I just want to find who is responsible for the Cant.”

Miller couldn’t quite help it and his hand went up to the ridges along his spine. “You know that another Belter might punch that pretty-boy face of yours for that, right?”

He shrugged. “Whoever killed the Cant also killed Julie.”

[rociinante-blog]

Continued with @josephusamiller

“There were plenty of people on the Scopuli,” he said, “she just had a rich daddy - doesn’t mean she’s the key to all this, does it?”

He fell down in the chair next to miller, gazing out at space in front of them. “You’re a belter, right?”

[josephusamiller]

“The difference is, her rich daddy told her to come home because it would get ugly two weeks before the Cant went down.”, he watched Holden sit, before letting his eyes slide back out of the observation window. It still caused an odd sense of vertigo for him.

“Yeah. born and bread. Why?”

[josephusamiller]

"What's that obsession with Julie Mao about?"

“She’s connected to all of this. The Canterbury, the Donnager. Mars declaring war on the Belt.”

[rociinante-blog]

“You sound so sure,” he raised his eyebrows as he leant against the door. “Miller, seriously, spill the beans. This godforsaken mess needs to have some sort of explanation.”

[josephusamiller]

Miller took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair, looking up at Holden. He had related this chain of events so often by now that it was embedded in his mind. “Julie Mao was on the Scopuli, the ship serving as bait for the Canterbury, which served as a reason for people to start pointing fingers and as bait for the Donnager which, in turn, was the nail in the coffin for the fragile peace between Mars and the Belt.”