she made him take this before she called for backup (even tho she already called for backup)
MIGUEL O’HARA aka SPIDER-MAN 2099 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
I can’t begin to describe how happy and flattered and a little teary I am that this just broke 100k.
I may be the actual only human being on Tumblr with a post this popular that I not only don’t regret making, but am actually HAPPY whenever I notice a surge in its circulation.
I never intended this to gain any traction at all (you’ll notice there’s no sources or anything–this was a personal ramble, prompted in good humor by a friend after I jokingly said that I wished someone would give me an excuse to cry about Carpathia on Tumblr so I could get it out of my system.) I literally expected to get, like, maybe 20 likes and a reblog, from friends, indulging me in my nonsense.
It just….means a lot to me that it’s touched so many people. I see a lot of tags to the effect of “HOW DARE YOU HURT ME LIKE THIS AND MAKE ME CRY ABOUT A BOAT” that are often really funny, but overwhelmingly the tags on this post are from people saving it for a rainy day, or remarking in a sort of quiet awe that they never even really thought about her role in the story–and God knows I never did, I learned it by complete accident much as most of the people who’ve found this post.
And so many of you guys are taking strength and reassurance from the reminder not only that people are capable of amazing things together, but simply that kindness matters and that a simple, tiny act of compassion is never wasted. I’m just really glad to have been able to do that for some folks.
If I can just add one personal note. I need to emphasize something I only touched on in the original post.
I need to emphasize that Carpathia failed.
A lot of the tags and comments have a tinge of…despair, or guilt, or wistfulness about things like this happening so rarely. Or inadequacy, or just being overwhelmed or unhappy about not being in a position to step up in a comparable way. And I want to gently bring up the fact that this is still the sinking of the Titanic.
They did not get there in time. They did not save the ship. It can be argued that they may not even have saved a single life; we have no way of knowing. This was still a horrific maritime disaster mired in arrogance and incompetence and a lack of care.
If the response to this story shows anything, it shows this: It matters that they tried.
Even though they got there too late, even though the ship still sank. It matters that they tried. The difference between making the best reasonable speed after confirming the seriousness of the situation, and the miracle they pulled off–it matters. It makes all the difference. Even if it made no difference at all. Not one of you read this and concluded that I was stupid for caring so much when the Titanic still sank and all those people still died.
You don’t have to fix the world. You’ll likely be cold and sick and miserable and testy and scared, and unprepared, and in over your head, and entirely too small to be of any real use. It feels stupid, passing out blankets and coffee in the middle of an ice field knowing what just happened. It’s hard to feel anything but useless when all you can do is tap a wireless transmitter and promise help that you know will come too late.
It matters that they fought for those people. It matters that they cared, and it matters that they tried. It matters that they didn’t stop. If it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t have read this far.
Morpheus: I am the King of Dreams. Ruler of the Nightmare Realms.
Lucienne: Does the ruler of the nightmare realms want the crust on or off his sandwich?
Morpheus: ….off
i’d like to personally thank boyd holbrook for how slutty his performance as the corinthian is. the director said “one more!” but he heard “more whore” and went with it.
Hello!! If you’re seeing this then it means you’ve read the final chapter of It Happened Quiet!! Thank you very much for making it all the way through :’’))
I figured, since this sort of my first time writing this much of a thriller/mystery kind of thing that there would be loose ends I didn’t manage to quite tie up, or details that probably deserve more explanation than I gave them, so I’m just going to write a big long masterpost about the fic, basically. I considered writing this like a big fancy essay but I haven’t written anything formal since high school, so you’ll have to excuse the informality :’’))
CHARACTERS
1. Yoongi
In the fic, Yoongi is 25 years old. In the past 14 years, he’s lived a very quiet life, going to school and befriending Namjoon, Seokjin, Jungkook and Jimin. He’s relatively unaware of his witch heritage and very dismissive of it in general, chalking it up to superstition.
The events of what happen in the forest when he and Hoseok go into it as children is very murky a) because I wanted to be sort of dark and never really clear but also b) because I couldn’t make up my damn mind about what I wanted. (pls forgivi). The breakdown is basically yoonseok go into the woods one day and they’re in for a big surprise and through some unclear turn of events, they have a falling out, and they’re just kids and they’re tired and hungry and scared, and things get thrown way out of proportion and they separate, and then things fall apart. Yes, Yoongi did intentionally leave Hoseok behind. Not through ill-will, he was just a kid and he was frustrated and scared and just wanted to get home, but as you can see the guilt literally eats him up as soon as he’s out and he can’t go back for Hoseok.
The majority of the flashbacks are experienced by Yoongi, as weird dreams or distorted memories or whatever, but they’re not necessarily his. That’s an important point I did try to reinforce by having Taehyung have memories that mirror Yoongi’s exactly. It was my attempt at playing the unreliable narrator card. I hope I did it justice :’’)
Anyways, story goes on, Yoongi chooses Taehyung over his friends when they have some weird inquest at his home, and then Jungkook does his big I release you and then taegi fall in love whatever it’s just like that in the countryside.
Something I did try with Yoongi was to have the witchy feel come back in the later chapters following his talk with Namjoon when his eyes go blue. I made him make sage oil instead of his sage-steeped-water-thing and threw in a few references to his mother doing it but never fully explaining it because she knows Yoongi isn’t his full self anymore. Essentially Yoongi’s “ghost” in the woods was his ‘witchy’ half. At least that’s what I tried, obviously he stayed kinda witch-boy aesthetic but you know.
2. Taehyung
Taehyung is my son and I love him. In Yoongi’s part of the story, he does show up with no memory at all and that’s because Yoongi’s half-life in the woods says give those to me, referring to his memories. By the time he reaches Yoongi’s door he’s basically a total amnesiac.
Obviously, I tried to give Taehyung and Yoongi as much parallels as I could. See: the cows, being called a ‘witch’ (even though Taehyung is 100% NOT a witch), the piano, etc. I also had him get involved with Hoseok mostly because I wasn’t prepared to try and fit in Taehyung’s gay awakening in the 8 chapters we had (but also so I could imply some sexy taegiseok poly), but also because I wanted to flesh out Hoseok’s character. Vhope were always going to be involved but originally I wasn’t going to reveal quite as much as I did in chapter 7. But I still had fun writing it so it’s whatever.
Some key points about Taehyung worth noting are how he chooses his friends and family (his siblings, his town) over Hoseok, especially with his line “You only have me, but I have a lot more than just you.” This is basically the mirror image of what Yoongi does when Jungkook confronts them, which gives you a little more insight into Taehyung’s character at the time. When he was shaking his head in chapter 6 it was more of a ‘don’t do it Yoongi please don’t do it’ instead of a ‘they’re speaking bs you should choose me’. Taehyung remembering Jungkook is something I justify since Jungkook is obviously more powerful than a witch half-life in the woods, so obviously the memories belong more to Jungkook than they do Yoongi. But also it was just fun.
Taehee and Taewoo live long and happy lives despite losing their big brother in the war. Taewoo becomes a farmer that moves down the valley, and Taehee ends up marrying Jungkook in the sixties. (It was Jungkook’s attempt at keeping her safe. It was very wholesome don’t go yikes on me!!! It also implies Taehyung has descendants in town but we don’t ever see them.)
Taehyung is the ‘fairy’ of the story. In return for the mortal body he gave Hoseok (blood and bone) Hoseok essentially made him into a fairy that could grant wishes. I thought it was cute, since Hoseok had called Taehyung a fairy earlier and stuff. (The alternate title for this fic was also “The Witch, the Fairy and the Woods” so.)
3. Namjoon
Namjoon is essentially god!!!! Even though he clowns the concept of god!!! There’s not much to say about him, I’ll get into it when we get to the LORE section of this mess of a masterpost. You can call Namjoon god or death or whatever makes you happy. When he said he was the ‘bad’ guy compared to Jungkook, it’s because Namjoon is essentially Jungkook’s boss and will have to punish him for breaking the rules as a shrine god. We’ll get to that later!
It is implied in the epilogue that Namjoon had more influence than he let on. If you’ll remember in the earlier chapters Yoongi says something like he has “less than 65,000 won to his name” and yet Namjoon transfers Seokjin “500,000 won”. Basically I was trying to hint that Namjoon was trying to nudge Yoongi along the path that would take him back into the woods by removing the vast majority of his savings. Food for thought!
Essentially Namjoon was just a fun venture fo me, I’d always wanted to write a character who knew everything but was just distant and mysterious enough to drive someone insane. Also when I was younger and read The Fault in Our Stars the author-guy mentions that the Flower Man in his story was God, and I’ve always kind of wanted to do that too. That’s about it for him. :’’)
4. Jungkook
I do feel like Jungkook’s character has been quite explained already in the fic, but he’s wonderful so we’re going to talk about him a bit more. As previously said, he’s the shrine god, and that means he lives his life in a constant cycle of reincarnation, essentially. Mortal body turnover may be a better way of putting it. He’s essentially the founding spirit of the town and the land it’s on, and has been for however long the land has been there outside of the woods. The runes on his arms don’t really mean anything when they appear in chapter 6, they’re just sort of symbolic of Taehyung—something of the woods—touching something he has no right to. If Yoongi had grabbed him, there would have been none of those markings.
Though he was obviously cold to Taehyung, Jungkook is a character I tried really hard to make very kind. He’s not bitter towards Taehyung, but he knows he has a job to put things back in their rightful order, and that involves sending Taehyung back to the woods. I’m sure he would have loved to tell Taehyung about what happened to his siblings, but alas, things didn’t work out that way. Rip.
5. Jimin
Jimin is the current Park, Jungkook’s direct servant and bOYFRIEND. Jikook love each other a whole lot and that’s why Jungkook risked it all to just be with him. It’s not mentioned in the fic, nor is it especially relevant, but Jungkook did have Jimin’s parents sent away when they started to get romantically involved because the elder Parks were obviously against it. As Namjoon says at the end of chapter 9, they’re going to live a very long and happy time together.
It did break my heart not to have vmin be best friends, and in the original drafts of the fic they were going to become somewhat friendly, but things didn’t work out that way. I think it was at least interesting for Jimin to be the way he was in the fic.
6. Seokjin
Owner of The Best dialogue. As said he’s part of some low-key exorcist order that the author didn’t spend enough worldbuilding time to fully develop, but it’s just a very low-key, very very top secret Order of families that have been going for ages and ages that are aware of the position of gods and stuff. Very different to witches. He is 100% normal human, and his father did die before he came to the village where Yoongi lives, and so his mother Mrs Kim decided she didn’t want her son to die the same way and had them stationed in this remote ass place. I’m not sure what else there is to say about him other than he’s Extremely Valid and I love him.
7. Hoseok
Namjoon calls him the ‘mouthpiece’ of the forest, but’s a bit more complicated than that. There’s a large part of Hoseok’s character that is still fundamentally him, but it’s a little bit funked up, as you can probably imagine. As you can imagine, deep down he still is that ten year old boy that got abandoned by his best friend in the woods, so he’s grown pretty possessive of the idea of Yoongi, since he couldn’t ever have him. His whole schtick with Taehyung is completely genuine, though.
I did spend a lot of time justifying how to make him older, since I did want to imply that Taegiseok poly at the end of the fic, and I figured Taehyung’s implied wish for a friend would have enabled Hoseok to grow with him. Also I just wanted a grown-up Hoseok. In the original drafts of the reunion scene, Hoseok was going to be naked, but I ditched that when I was writing chapter 7 because I doubt Taehyung would have even considered going near a naked boy in the woods.
8. Min Insook
Yoongi’s mother!! A bona fide witch, she relocated to the countryside with her husband some time before Yoongi’s birth and then her husband died. I don’t know why, but he did. She was obviously planning on using the ‘ley lines’ for her witch magic and stuff, hence why Yoongi’s early childhood is filled with odd mentions of forest gods and his mother making things at the counter, but after her son gets caught by the forest and leaves his ‘witchy’ half behind, Insook basically abandons all of that in favour of raising him normally.
I did wait until chapter 8 to reveal her name for no real reason other than I hadn’t thought of one. Sorry guys :’’))
Her death is completely natural and unrelated to the schenanigans of the story. She really just does get sick and ends up dying from it because she’s too proud to ask for help. HOWEVER, as Taehyung kept bringing up, some of her is left in the house. Her ‘ghost’ or half-life, whatever, stays in the house in an attempt to keep Yoongi from going back to the woods, since she says the instant Yoongi’s free of them that she ‘won’t let’ him go back. She made the choice for him. This continues for the rest of Yoongi’s twenty-five years, basically, until Yoongi has that weird dream where he meets his other half and basically sticks himself back together, turning his eyes a proper light blue like Hoseok’s and Taehyung’s, and giving him whatever witchy dominance he needs to break whatever binding spell is on him.
The white moth that appears in the epilogue is basically her metaphorical presence. It’s on the urn (her ashes) and Yoongi lets it outside, symbolising that he’s going to be free of his grief about her and that he’s broken free of her spell and whatnot. The household fae works mostly the same way, except that Yoongi releasing it is way more metaphorical in that he’s removing everything of a home (household) he used to see there. It’s basically the equivalent to him packing up and leaving.
As you can see this isn’t organised at all, and I apologise. Hopefully it still improves your understanding somewhat :’’)
LORE
Gods, Woods, Fairies
I did say throughout the fic that the word ‘fairy’ was very important and had several meanings. The epilogue covers the last one. They were:
1. Fairy = gay man (shown through Taehyung)
2. Fairies grant wishes (Yoongi wishes he went back)
3. “Before gods and monsters, they called them fairies.” (Mostly pertaining to Jungkook’s connection to the word.)
Obviously, you guys came up with WAY more complex and meaningful versions than I did, but they were the ones I had. Every interesting comment I got about the meaning of the word ‘fairy’ I basically accepted as canon, so thank you all for them :’’))
Gods
As previously stated, this is where we discuss Jungkook and Namjoon. This concept of gods is something I’ve had sitting around for a while. Basically it goes like this:
There are gods of people (Jungkook) and
There are gods of nature (the woods).
And then there’s Namjoon who’s essentially Mr Big Boss but whatever.
Gods of people like Jungkook are obviously fully equipped to understand and judge their subjects as best they can. He has a domain, the village and the surrounding land and all of its people, and he has a job: whenever they die, he has to make a judgement on their souls, basically. The idea that the god always has to have a reincarnation that has lived through every generation of people is so important here, because only then does he have the context to judge people’s choices fully. He was a young man during the war, so he can judge the soldiers that died on his land. Hence why he only really gets to the age of ~30.
Therefore, by choosing to love Jimin instead of finding a woman to love for a few decades and having an heir, he’s broken this rule that’s been set that gods have to live through every generation and fully understand all their subjects. Jungkook will grow older, more distant to the younger people of the village, less able to judge them properly, and then once he reaches a certain age he can’t face the people without giving away his immortality.
Namjoon calls himself the ‘bad guy’ in this scenario because he will be the one taking Jungkook aside and fixing the mess he’s made. Namjoon is very kind, though, so the worst he’ll probably do is make Jungkook just restart the Jeon line, because losing Jimin is probably enough suffering.
The gods of nature like the woods are far less sophisticated. They don’t have this human range of emotions because they don’t have subjects to judge when they die. They’re gods of places and stuff. They are sentient, but not as people. Hence, when Hoseok more or less gets turned into the embodiment of the woods, he still retains the majority of his personality since the woods has nothing to replace it with. He’s just a little bit wilder.
I really hope this makes sense!! Please feel free to ask me more about it, since this particular lore is something I’ll definitely be re-using in future fics.
MOTIFS
The white deer
Honestly, I was very wary of overusing the white deer. I did try to sow some seeds in the early chapters that Yoongi is a little bit obsessed with it, seeing as he carved wood to look like it and even gets up when the white deer gets near his house—so don’t take it to be completely legitimate. The fact is, we’re never going to know what really went down in the woods between Yoongi and Hoseok, but the white deer is a scapegoat for Yoongi to unload his reasoning on, basically. It’s definitely a real thing, though, if you see a white deer in the wild make sure you nod to it and all that. It’s just that in this fic, it’s obvious Yoongi is kind of obsessed with it.
Also deers do eat birds. I watched a video where a faun ate a baby bird and I’ve been traumatised every since, but I thought it was a a valid image to use in that scene.
Sage
Honestly, I’m not sure about the validity of sage. If you’re native American and you know the proper rituals, that’s a completely different ball game and you’re by Far the expert here. I’m just a babie who knows Nothing, but sage is something that keeps coming up pretty often in fics like these. In my family it’s more common to use things like rosemary or that tree I think is called a ‘money tree’ (I have no idea what it’s called, sorry.)
Eragon
The Eragon series is very important to me! That poem Yoongi recites is something I also use whenever it’s late at night and I start to freak out for whatever reason. When I first read it, it really stuck, and because I’m unimaginative I just gave Yoongi the same poem. Eragon was also a big part of my tween years, so I did just insert it straight into the fic. I haven’t read it in a VERY long time, though.
Final Notes
Taehyung’s initial wounds when he comes to Yoongi’s door are based off that one redidt post where op meets some strange man in a forest whose face is red with blood and he freaks out when he sees her old Walkman. I’ll definitely update this with the link when I find it again.
A major inspiration for this fic was the song “It Happened Quiet” by Aurora, and also some at by @feelfei on twitter that she has sadly taken down. I have the image saved, but I don’t know if I should attach it to this post without her permission, so I don’t think I will. It’s a very game-cam-esque drawing of a naked Taehyung in the middle of the dark woods with glowing eyes. It had the caption “something that came from the forest” and it was really inspirational to me (it’s also the image of the playlist)!! The final inspiration was the song “Human” by Sevdaliza.
I think that should be everything I have to say about this fic!! If you have any more questions let me know and I’ll be sure to update this as well. Thank you all so much for reading all the way through It Happened Quiet, it really means a lot to me. You’ve all been super kind and I wish you all the best!!
EDIT: finally found an excerpt of the original reddit post!! i think it’s been taken down tho rip. but you can see it here:
I could see that his nose and lips and part of his forehead were all gone. It was like they’d been sliced clean off. He was bleeding bad, and I saw that the knees of his pants were red too. He looked me over and he saw my Walkman and he screamed. He just kept babbling and touching his face, and I realized he wasn’t wearing the right clothing. He had some kind of weird grey cloth jacket and almost formal pants on, and the jacket had these weird buttons and red borders on it. – the only thing I could really understand: ‘Don’t touch me! You’ll make me go back there!’
took me a while and it’s not the complete post but the fact that I found anything is nice! Thank you again!!
nheyguys-deactivated20181204
my dying body: please…. feed me a vegetable……..
me: lmao i dont think so you vegan sjw piece of shit
I always hate it when people are all “so do you go to school, or are you working, or” and I either have to
- make up some lie, or
- eventually get around to “I am not working because of depression/anxiety,” and subsequently have to deal with whatever bullshit-riddled and completely unsolicited opinions on mental illness this stranger feels obligated to share with me.
So my therapist was like, “You don’t have to do either. You can just say you haven’t worked in a while because you’re recovering from an illness.”
I tried it when the home inspector was here today, and it fucking worked. He was like, “oh, I’m sorry, are you doing better now,” and I’m like yeah, and don’t worry, it’s not contagious, awkward laugh, and we moved on.
MY THERAPIST. IS A GENIUS. Because it is an illness, so it’s not a lie to say that, and it’s also none of his business to know specifically what it is, and I clearly don’t want to give more details, so we should move on from this topic. MY THERAPIST IS A GODDAMN GENIUS.
Dude I needed this. I never know what to say when people ask if I work because I’m severely disabled and don’t work.
jerseyfiredragon20
REBLOG TO SAVE A LIFE HOLY SHIT
spacedogprincess
To add, this works on job interviews too. I once had to answer the ‘so whats up with this gap of 8 months in your resume where you were unemployed?” and I just said I had suffered an illness and I needed time to recover.
It’s easy enough, not a lie, and puts them on edge enough that they usually don’t go digging.
Horton hears somebody he used to know
do you ever regret drawing something
If I had spent my teenage years reading actual books instead of fanfiction then I would have over 1000 books listed on goodreads by now.
reminder that this blog, while not politically focused, supports BLM. bootlickers and racists aren’t welcome here, and never will be.
thelonelymochi
JUST TAKE THE DAMN BATTON RYO! PLZ!
This actually killed me that he didnt.
““ryo is a horrible person/the worst/irredeemable””
hey quick question: what the fuck is this facial expression
That awkward moment when your friend is getting yelled at by their parent and you just stand there feeling awkward.
episode 8 of devilman crybaby
