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#Essay
dootznbootz · 2 days
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The Telegony goes against what the Odyssey tells us not only because of Tiresias' Prophecy but also because Odysseus' family line only has one son each.
Zeus made our line a line of only sons. Arcesius had only one son, Laertes, and Laertes had only one son, Odysseus, and I am Odysseus’ only son. He fathered me, he left me behind at home, and from me he got no joy.
(Book 16, Fagles)
Telegonus can't even realistically BE Odysseus' son as he already has Telemachus. The Only son
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flowerytale · 6 months
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Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One’s Own
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lifeinpoetry · 4 months
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History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, ran away to the desert, stood on the streets in rags, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, walked barefoot through town, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light.
— Anne Boyer, from "No," published on the Poetry Foundation blog
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longreads · 1 month
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In a new Longreads essay, Arkansas writer Jordan P. Hickey writes about a Palestinian American chef who honors her family's roots and culinary traditions through her pop-up bakery and cooking classes
And while these aren’t the most complex dishes to grace the text thread, they are the most remarkable, the most joyful, because they are the most improbable. They’re celebrated not because they’re beautiful, but because it means the family ate well that day—because they made something out of nothing.
Read Jordan’s essay, “The Expanding Table: Honoring Palestinian Culinary Tradition in Arkansas,” on Longreads.
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nevver · 3 months
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Now is the winter, Caspar David Friedrich
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mcmansionhell · 1 year
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this house may or may not be real
on grayness in real estate
Allegedly, somewhere in Wake Forest, North Carolina, a 4 bed, 5.5 bathroom house totaling more than 6,600 square feet is for sale at a price of 2.37 million dollars. The house, allegedly, was built in 2021. Allegedly, it looks like this:
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A McMansion is, in effect, the same house over and over again - it's merely dressed up in different costumes. In the 90s, the costume was Colonial; in the 2000s, it was vague forms of European (Tuscan, Mediterranean), and in the 2010s it was Tudor, dovetailed by "the farmhouse" -- a kind of Yeti Cooler simulacra of rural America peddled to the populace by Toll Brothers and HGTV.
Now, we're fully in the era of whatever this is. Whitewashed, quasi-modern, vaguely farmhouse-esque, definitely McMansion. We have reached, in a way, peak color and formal neutrality to the point where even the concept of style has no teeth. At a certain moment in its life cycle, styles in vernacular architecture reach their apex, after which they seem excessively oversaturated and ubiquitous. Soon, it's time to move on. After all, no one builds houses that look like this anymore:
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(This is almost a shame because at least this house is mildly interesting.)
If we return to the basic form of both houses, they are essentially the same: a central foyer, a disguised oversized garage, and an overly complex assemblage of masses, windows, and rooflines. No one can rightfully claim that we no longer live in the age of the McMansion. The McMansion has instead simply become more charmless and dull.
When HGTV and the Gaineses premiered Fixer Upper in 2013, it seemed almost harmless. Attractive couple flips houses. Classic show form. However, Fixer Upper has since (in)famously ballooned into its own media network, a product line I'm confronted with every time I go to Target, and a general 2010s cultural hallmark not unlike the 1976 American Bicentennial - both events after which every house and its furnishings were somehow created in its image. (The patriotism, aesthetic and cultural conservatism of both are not lost on me.)
But there's one catch: Fixer Upper is over, and after the Gaineses, HGTV hasn't quite figured out where to go stylistically. With all those advertisers, partners, and eyeballs, the pressure to keep one foot stuck in the rural tweeness that sold extremely well was great. At the same time, the network (and the rest of the vernacular design media) couldn't risk wearing out its welcome. The answer came in a mix of rehashed, overly neutral modernism -- with a few pops of color, yet this part often seems omitted from its imitators -- with the prevailing "farmhouse modern" of Magnolia™ stock. The unfortunate result: mega-ultra-greige.
Aside from war-mongering, rarely does the media manufacture consent like it does in terms of interior design. People often ask me: Why is everything so gray? How did we get here? The answer is because it is profitable. Why is it profitable? I'd like to hypothesize several reasons. The first is as I mentioned: today's total neutrality is an organic outgrowth of a previous but slightly different style, "farmhouse modern," that mixed the starkness of the vernacular farmhouse with the soft-pastel Pinterest-era rural signifiers that have for the last ten years become ubiquitous.
Second, neutrals have always been common and popular. It's the default choice if you don't have a vision for what you want to do in a space. In the 2000s, the neutrals du jour were "earth tones" - beige, sage green, brown. Before that, it was white walls with oak trim in the 80s and 90s. In the 70s, neutrals were textural: brick and wood paneling. We have remarkably short memories when it comes to stylistic evolution because in real time it feels incremental. Such is the case with neutrals.
Finally, the all-gray palette is the end logic of HGTV et al's gamified methodology of designing houses with commodification in mind: if you blow out this wall, use this color, this flooring, this cabinetry, the asking price of your house goes up. You never want to personalize too much because it's off-putting to potential buyers. After twenty years of such rhetoric, doesn't it make all the sense in the world that we've ended up with houses that are empty, soulless, and gray?
A common realtor adage is to stage the house so that potential buyers can picture their own lives in it. In other words, create a tabula rasa one can project a fantasy of consumption onto. Implied in that logic is that the buyer will then impose their will on the house. But when the staged-realtor-vision and general-mass-market aesthetic of the time merge into a single dull slurry, we get a form of ultra-neutral that seems unwelcoming if not inescapable.
To impose one's style on the perfect starkness is almost intimidating, as though one is fouling up something untouchable and superior. If neutrality makes a house sell, then personality - at all - can only be seen as a detriment. Where does such an anti-social practice lead us? Back to the house that may or may not exist.
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In my travels as McMansion Hell, I've increasingly been confronted with houses full of furniture that isn't real. This is known as virtual staging and it is to house staging as ChatGPT is to press release writing or DALL-E is to illustration. As this technology improves, fake sofa tables are becoming more and more difficult to discern from the real thing. I'm still not entirely sure which of the things in these photos are genuine or rendered. To walk through this house is to question reality.
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Staging ultimately pretends (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) that someone is living in this house, that you, too could live in it. Once discovered, virtual staging erases all pretensions: the house is inhabited by no one. It is generally acknowledged (though I'm not sure on the actual statistics) that a house with furniture - that is, with the pretense of living -- sells easier than a house with nothing in it, especially if that house (like this one) has almost no internal walls. Hence the goal is to make the virtual staging undiscoverable.
If you want to talk about the realtor's tabula rasa, this is its final form. Houses without people, without human involvement whatsoever.
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But what makes this particular house so uncanny is that all of these things I've mentioned before: real estate listing photography, completely dull interiors and bland colors all make it easy for the virtual furniture to work so well. This is because the softness of overlit white and gray walls enables the fuzzy edges of the renderings to look natural when mixed with an overstylized reality. Even if you notice something's off in the reflections, that's enough to cause one to wonder if anything in the house is real: the floors, the fixtures, the moulding, the windows and doors.
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This is where things are heading: artifice on top of artifice on top of artifice. It's cheap, it's easy. But something about it feels like a violation. When one endeavors to buy a house, one assumes what one is viewing is real. It's one thing if a realtor photoshops a goofy sunset, it's another to wonder if anything in a room can be touched with human hands. I won't know what, if any, part of this estate costing over 2 million dollars actually exists until I visit it myself. Perhaps that's the whole point - to entice potential buyers out to see for themselves. When they enter, they'll find the truth: a vast, empty space with nothing in it.
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The better this rendering technology gets, the more it will rely on these totally neutral spaces because everything matches and nothing is difficult. You are picking from a catalog of greige furniture to decorate greige rooms. If you look at virtual staging in a non-neutral house it looks immediately plastic and out of place, which is why many realtors opt to either still stage using furniture or leave the place empty.
Due to the aforementioned photography reasons, I would even argue that the greigepocalypse or whatever you want to call it and virtual staging have evolved simultaneously and mutualistically. The more virtual staging becomes an industry standard, the more conditions for making it seamless and successful will become standardized as well.
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After all, real staging is expensive and depends on paid labor - selecting furniture, getting workers to deliver and stage it, only to pack it back up again once the property is sold. This is a classic example of technology being used to erase entire industries. Is this a bad thing? For freelance and contract workers, yeah. For realtors? no. For real estate listings, it remains to be seen. For this blog? Absolutely. (Thankfully there is an endless supply of previously existing McMansions.)
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The thing is, real estate listings no longer reflect reality. (Did they ever to begin with?) The reason we're all exasperated with greige is because none of us actually live that way and don't want to. I've never been to anyone's house that looks like the house that may or may not exist. Even my parents who have followed the trends after becoming empty nesters have plenty of color in their house. Humans like color. Most of us have lots of warmth and creativity in our houses. Compare media intended for renters and younger consumers such as Apartment Therapy with HGTV and you will find a stark difference in palate and tone.
But when it comes to actually existing houses - look at Zillow and it's greige greige greige. So who's doing this? The answer is real estate itself aided by their allies in mass media who in turn are aided by the home renovation industry. In other words, it's the people who sell home as a commodity. That desire to sell has for some time overpowered all other elements that make up a home or an apartment's interiority to the point where we've ended up in a colorless slurry of real and unreal.
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Fortunately, after ten years or so, things begin to become dated. We're hitting the ten year mark of farmhouse modernism and its derivatives now. If you're getting sick of it, it's normal. The whole style is hopefully on its last leg. But unlike styles of the past, there's a real, trenchant material reason why this one is sticking around longer than usual.
Hence, maybe if we want the end of greige, we're going to have to take color back by force.
If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including extra posts and livestreams.
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krummholz-go · 3 months
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The Final 15 - Aziraphale’s Perspective
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I see a lot of empathy for Crowley’s experience during the final 15 minutes of season 2 and it makes sense that we feel deeply for him. What he is experiencing is very human - acknowledging the depth of his own feelings, plucking up the courage to say something, having it come out all wrong, feeling utterly rejected, and then walking away in a mix of pain and anger. Who among us hasn’t been there?
But Aziraphale is experiencing something more complicated, something fewer of us have analogs for. Aziraphale has internally acknowledged his feelings for Crowley for some period of time, probably at least since 1941. Michael Sheen confirms this mental state in a NYCC 2018 interview:
“I decided early on that Aziraphale just loves Crowley. And that’s difficult for him because they are on opposite sides and he doesn’t agree with him on stuff. But it does really help as an actor to go, ‘My objective in this scene is to not show you how much I love you and just gaze longingly at you.’”
Unlike Crowley, Aziraphale’s struggle isn’t acknowledging his feelings. His struggle appears to be two-fold: 1) believing that Crowley could ever love him back and 2) even if Crowley did love him, believing a future for the two of them together could exist within the restrictions of his larger world view.
Can Crowley love?
Angels are, traditionally, beings of love. We see Aziraphale embody this time and again, showing kindness and support to almost everyone he meets, including the amnesiac Gabriel who has treated him abominably in the past. He is attuned to love, remarking on how the area around Tadfield “feels loved” twice in Season 1. As for how Aziraphale personally understands and expresses love, he shows his love to others through verbal affirmation and, to a lesser extent, physical touch. There are many examples of Aziraphale expressing his love for Crowley through positive verbal affirmation, typically by praising him for instances where he has been kind, nice, or good. And on the rare occasions when Aziraphale receives verbal praise, he absolutely interprets it as an expression of love, blossoming with happiness.
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But from Aziraphale’s perspective, it may be unclear if Crowley can feel love in the same way. Can demons love? Did he lose that capability when he fell? Crowley can’t feel the aura of love in Tadfield that Aziraphale remarks on, and his reactions to Aziraphale’s praise are always to shrug it off, tell Aziraphale to “shut up,” or in the most extreme case to physically slam him against a wall and get in his face about it. In this last instance he tells Aziraphale, “I’m a demon, I’m not nice. I'm never nice. Nice is a four-letter word.” A four-letter word, like love, that is not in Crowley’s self-defined vocabulary.
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If Crowley can feel love, does he love Aziraphale?
Even if Aziraphale believes Crowley is capable of feeling love, he does not always recognize how Crowley expresses it in the moment. Crowley shows his love for Aziraphale through actions, but Aziraphale often misconstrues Crowley’s motivations. In 1793 when Crowley rescues him from the Bastille, Aziraphale initially assumes Crowley is only there because he is responsible for the Reign of Terror. Similarly, in 1941, Aziraphale’s reaction to Crowley’s appearance is to assume he’s just part of the Nazi gang, saying,“I should have known. Of course. These people are working for you!”
Crowley doesn’t help matters in this regard because he is constantly muting and undercutting his signals to Aziraphale. Every time Crowley expresses his love for Aziraphale through actions - rescuing him, saving his books, even taking him to lunch - he does so in a nonchalant, dismissive manner, indicating he ascribes little value or importance to the actions he has performed. “I just didn’t want to see you embarrassed,” he says when he appears in 1941. And when Aziraphale positively glows with happiness about his books being saved, Crowley tells him to “shut up."On top of these confusing signals, Crowley is almost pathologically incapable of expressing his feelings in the verbal love language that Aziraphale can understand. This is heartbreakingly demonstrated in this scene after the bookshop fire:
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Crowley can’t even say “I lost you.” Instead he speaks of Aziraphale in the third person while sitting in front of him, saying, “I lost my best friend.” The little hitch on Aziraphale’s face when he hears this is just devastating. Who is Crowley talking about? The last conversation they had before this scene was when Aziraphale called while Hastur was in Crowley’s apartment and Crowley said, “Not a good time - got an old friend here.” Aziraphale is left to wonder - is that who Crowley means when he says "best friend?" Crowley is everything to Aziraphale, but what is he to Crowley?
How Would It Even Work?
Even when Aziraphale does get flashes of the possibility that Crowley may care for him he immediately runs up against his second mental block - there is no world he can imagine where they could be together. When Crowley first suggests running off together in the bandstand scene in S1E3, Aziraphale collapses under the thought: “Friends? We aren’t friends. We are an angel and a demon. We have nothing whatsoever in common. I don’t even like you.”
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While he is obviously in denial, Aziraphale is also under tremendous stress in this moment and is desperately trying to hold onto some stability by falling back onto his world view and ideology. In this state he backpedals all the way to “I don’t even like you.” In his understanding of the way the universe is supposed to work, he and Crowley are hereditary enemies and should not even be friends, much less in love. Aziraphale expresses this core belief throughout the series. What kind of existence could they ever have together in reality?
The Final 15
With this as a background, we can better understand what Aziraphale experiences in the final 15 minutes. Even before the Metatron enters the scene, Aziraphale begins to have his fundamental beliefs challenged which puts him off his footing. The revelation that Gabriel and Beelzebub are in love is deeply impactful. When Beelzebub says “I just found something that mattered more to me than choosing sides” and takes Gabriel’s hand, Aziraphale immediately reaches out to make contact with Crowley, a look of incredulity on his face. Here is proof that demons can feel love and that an angel and a demon can carve out a space together. The road may be difficult, but it is not impossible.
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Before Aziraphale can digest this revelation the stakes are ratcheted up: Michael threatens to erase Aziraphale from the Book of Life due to his part in hiding Gabriel. The future that Aziraphale has just barely glimpsed is already under siege. It is at this point that The Metatron enters, offering Aziraphale not just survival and protection, but a version of everything he has ever wanted.
If Crowley is reinstated as an angel, Aziraphale will no longer have to wonder whether Crowley is capable of feeling love. And if they are both angels, there will be no conflict inherent in having a life together. In one fell swoop, the Metatron entices Aziraphale with a future where there are no remaining blockers to an eternal, loving existence with Crowley. It will be “like the old times, only even nicer” because they now have millennia of their shared history to build on together. Of course this logic is horribly flawed and does not take into account at all what Crowley wants, but in the moment it must feel like an enormous gift to Aziraphale.
Unfortunately, not only is Crowley’s reaction to this “incredibly good news” not what Aziraphale expects, the conversation quickly takes a baffling turn for him. Crowley shuts down the talk about returning to heaven and attempts to say what he wants to say. Sadly he once again utterly fails to speak in a way that Aziraphale can understand.
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The audience knows what Crowley is trying to say because we have the context of his earlier conversation with Maggie and Nina. But Aziraphale lacks that and thus can’t understand where this is coming from or what it means. Rather than expressing his feelings as Beelzebub and Gabriel did, Crowley recites facts: we’ve known each other a long time, we’ve been on this planet a long time, I could always rely on you, you could always rely on me. He can’t even say the word “couple” when he describes them, referring to them more as colleagues with words like “team” and “group.” And the one time he does try to express his feelings and desires he is physically unable to get out the words: “And I would like to spend—.” He then retreats into his old plea to turn away from heaven and hell and run off together. Nowhere in Crowley’s confession does Aziraphale hear “I love you” or even “I want to be with you.” What he hears instead is what he’s heard multiple times before - Crowley wants to abandon both heaven and hell and default to just the two of them. From Aziraphale’s perspective this will not solve anything for them. They will still be an angel and a demon, at some level fundamentally separated by their very natures.
Having failed in his speech, Crowley then does two things in rapid succession that must be excruciatingly painful for Aziraphale. First, he does the opposite of verbal affirmation by calling Aziraphale an idiot. We have seen Aziraphale become physically radiant in the rare instances where Crowley has praised him, so a direct insult like this must feel poisonous. Then Crowley makes a last desperate attempt to communicate through Aziraphale’s other love language - physical touch - by initiating the kiss. But without context or understanding of what is behind it, Aziraphale can initially only experience it as forceful, angry, and shocking. With more time to parse it I think Aziraphale will come to understand Crowley’s meaning, but in the moment it must feel manipulative and borderline cruel.
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The Results
In a very compressed time frame, Aziraphale has to move quickly and radically through multiple mental and emotional states. For 6000 years he has believed he and Crowley cannot be together. Suddenly, with the revelation of Gabriel and Beezlebub, that foundational belief is challenged. Before he can work through what that could mean for him and Crowley, the Metatron offers an even cleaner solution - they can be protected from retribution and be on the same side again. When Crowley rejects reinstatement wholesale, it makes Aziraphale feel that he and his loving offer of a life together have been personally rejected. Then that rejection is further confused through the shocking experience of the kiss which Aziraphale does not have adequate context for or time to understand and integrate. In his emotional turmoil, Aziraphale falls back on his default crutch for dealing with sadness and anger - forgiveness - which further cuts him off from Crowley. Taken all together, this is a tumultuous rollercoaster of whiplash emotions that pull at every part of Aziraphale's self- and world-views.
Compared to what Crowley is going through, I think Aziraphale is going to have the tougher road in Season 3. Crowley may still need to better reconcile and integrate his feelings for Aziraphale, but Aziraphale has 6000 years of foundational ideology to challenge and evolve to reach a place where he and Crowley can be together as their authentic selves.
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emma-needs-attention · 3 months
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I don’t shave every day. It’s not that I don’t “need” to; I have very dark, dense facial hair that grows quickly and remains pretty visible after shaving. When I do shave, I don’t try to cover it with makeup (beyond some powder to reduce redness). In most other ways I present very feminine, but I always have fairly obvious facial hair.
And it makes me feel terrible.
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I started electrolysis a couple months ago. It’s excruciatingly painful, expensive, and it takes forever. In an hour-long session, my electrologist is able to remove hair in only a small region (about 1 square inch). A few weeks later, much of that hair comes back. I am told that it will take two to three years of regular treatments to remove it entirely. On top of that, I apparently have a condition called Post Inflammatory Hyperpigmentation, which causes the skin in affected areas to darken after treatment. For nearly two months after completing a single pass over my upper lip, my mustache was more visible than it had ever been, despite having significantly less hair.
And it made me feel terrible.
I know this is the best way for me to permanently remove my facial hair, but I just canceled all of my upcoming sessions and at the moment I have no plans to begin again.
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If I could pay to have my facial hair instantly and completely removed I would empty my savings account. I am intensely aware of it any time I go out in public. If it makes me so uncomfortable, why do I not do more to hide it?
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I feel incredibly privileged for a trans woman. I have a loving, supportive family. I have a well-paying job. I live in a very accepting area. I have never had a single person say anything negative to me about my gender identity, which was certainly not what I was expecting when I came out. It is important to me that I be visibly queer, and in my privileged position I am able to do that without fear. A year ago I didn’t think I would ever transition; now I want people to know that I’m trans.
I am disappointed with myself for wanting to remove my facial hair, for changing my voice. I am determined not to have to do more work than a cis person does. Cis women don’t have to shave their face every day. Cis men don’t have to shave their face every day. Why should I? This is who I am, what my body does. Shouldn’t I be proud of that? Am I not supposed to love myself the way I am?
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But by that logic, why am I even transitioning in the first place?
I am doing more work than a cis person does. Cis people don’t transition, and transitioning takes effort. I know that there are cis people, both men and women, who do shave every day. Am I lying to myself? I’m a trans woman; aren’t I supposed to want to get rid of my facial hair? Shouldn’t I be trying harder? Doesn’t this give me dysphoria? Am I pretending not to have dysphoria so I don’t have to put in the effort? Does the fact that I’m not trying harder make me… I don’t know, less trans? Non-binary? Is it ok for me to call myself a trans woman? Am I lying to myself?
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As a woman who was a man until thirty, there are things about my body that I must accept, that I won’t be able to change no matter how much money I dump into my transition. I’m tall, I have broad shoulders, I have large hands. No amount of surgery or hormones will change these things.
But there are many things that I can change, and while none of them are requirements for being a woman, they may still be changes that I want to make. Where do I stop? Am I finished transitioning when I’ve done everything that is physically possible? My goal isn’t to “pass,” at least not in the way that word is generally used. In a time when cis women are being assaulted because people think they’re trans—because they don’t “pass” as women—the idea of what it means to pass becomes blurry. Often when we say that we want to pass, what we really mean is that we want to be conventionally beautiful.
I am a woman. Therefore, I look like a woman. My transition goal is to pass as myself. I’ve spent the last year trying to figure out who I am so I can look like her. I don’t care whether people see me and think “that’s a woman.” I want to be able to look in the mirror and think “that’s me.” But it can be extremely difficult to separate your own image of yourself from society’s idea of what you should look like. Am I self-conscious about the size of my body because it doesn’t feel like me, or because I’ve been told that women should be smaller? There are tall cis women, there are broad-shouldered cis women, there are cis women with large hands. Those traits don’t make them less womanly.
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For the aspects of my body that I do have control over, I am stuck wondering whether I am changing things to become myself, or changing them because I have internalized that the way I am is wrong. At the moment, facial feminization surgery is something that I think I might like to do. But how do I know that I want to do it for the right reasons? I don’t hate my face, but when I catch a glimpse of myself from certain angles I can’t help but think that it isn’t feminine enough. What I should be asking is if it’s Emma enough, but how can I know that? How do I know who I’m supposed to be?
I feel like I was supposed to be a cis woman, but… why? Who am I to say that I wasn’t supposed to be trans? That I wasn’t supposed to transition at thirty, to have both a male puberty and a female one? Being trans has made me more self-aware, more open-minded, more empathetic. The totality of my experience is what makes me who I am. Maybe there’s a world in which I was assigned female, maybe there’s a world in which I was put on puberty blockers as a kid. But the girl in those worlds isn’t me.
Loving yourself and wanting to change are two feelings that can coexist. I tend to think of body positivity as simply accepting yourself as you are, but it is more nuanced than that. As a trans person, who I am inside is not the same as who I am outside. Which one am I supposed to love? I do love myself, but I also love who I could be. I’m transitioning so that someday they’ll be the same person.
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Over the past year I have become both my biggest supporter and my biggest critic. I constantly tell myself how pretty I am, how brave I am, how fucking cool I am (hey, nobody else is saying it and it’s true). This forced positivity has been fantastic for me. I can confidently say that I truly love myself for the first time in my life. But I sometimes feel guilty that I don’t love myself more.
I can’t help but stare at myself in the mirror all the time now. I actually bought a new mirror so I didn’t have to walk as far to do so. I’ve taken more selfies than I did in my entire pre-transition life. After many months on HRT, I finally see myself in my reflection. But my eyes refuse to focus on my stubble. Sometimes I catch myself thinking “I’m going be so beautiful once I get rid of this facial hair,” and it feels like a betrayal. Fuck you Emma, I’m already gorgeous.
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notetaeker · 2 months
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PSA to anyone writing an essay at ANY level:
please, for the love of god, integrate your quotes properly. don't just drop them in the middle of nowhere D:
it's very easy:
Step 1: Introduce the Author of the Quotation (Who/where is it from) Step 2: State the Quotation (the quote) Step 3: Summarize the Quotation (paraphrase it) Step 4: Analyze the Quotation (Break down the meaning) Step 5: State the Quotation’s Relevance to Your Argument (Why did you just share this quote how is it related to your essay?)
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Here's another example:
After talking with Cherry, a girl from the opposing group, Ponyboy, the main character in The Outsiders, by S.E Hinton, observes, "Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren't so different. We saw the same sunset" (Hinton, 78). In other words, after talking, they realized they had more things in common than they thought. This shows that one of the reasons the two groups keep fighting is that they don't really ever communicate with each other. This is a reflection of our society today, where people discriminate against each other based on stereotypes, without actually ever communicating with each other.
Its an easy formula to follow and literally makes your writing sound so much clearer PLEASE just DO it and SAVE THE EYES of your teachers today
- sincerely a teacher who is TIRED OF SEEING quotes that have been parachuted into a sentence and no one knows who said it or why you added it in your paper PLEASE we want to give you good grades help us out 😭😭😭
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betterbooktitles · 1 month
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"I’m certain I’m not the only millennial who feels we as a nation have taken a dizzying turn when it comes to drugs. I remember a uniformed police officer showing up once a week in 5th Grade (a year before Sex Ed) to explain how to avoid buying and taking drugs. Luckily, I already knew the dangers of the drug trade because I had seen The Usual Suspects. I knew cocaine was a bad thing to buy, sell, or steal, especially from a drug kingpin. The D.A.R.E. program, however, let me know how important it was to say no to anything fun, including alcohol. At least until I understood a little algebra first. We did role-playing exercises where we walked one by one toward the portly police officer and he casually asked if we wanted to hit a mimed joint with him. All we had to do was say “no” and walk to the other side of the room, defying the only rule I knew about improv. We wrote essays about how important it was to preserve our pristine bodies and minds, obviously unsullied since we had yet to take the class teaching us how puberty was going to defile them both. I’m still mad that my friend Nicole’s essay beat mine in a contest, and she got to read hers in front of the whole school all because she had the benefit of an older brother who took too much acid and sat in her room all night talking about why the existence of light proved God was real. My essay about a time I saw my friend’s dad drink a beer and then drive his truck somewhere was also good! We signed pledges to enter the new millennium drug-free. We took the red pencils that said “Friends Don’t Let Friends Do Drugs” and sharpened all of them down to say “Let Friends Do Drugs,” “Friends Do Drugs,” “Do Drugs,” and simply “Drugs.” Despite that little rebellious act, my friends and I spent a solid six months swearing we’d never put any harmful substance into our bodies besides every form of candy available.
Imagine how I feel now as a D.A.R.E. graduate becoming my dad’s drug dealer. It’s less thrilling than I thought it would be. Between my father’s warning not to hang around one specific neighborhood in Cleveland as a kid and nearly every TV show about drugs, I thought I’d always be buying marijuana from an intimidating dude who definitely had a gun and would use it immediately if he thought I was wearing a wire. Instead, I now buy marijuana from a well-lit storefront that looks like the Apple Store. I’ve even gone to a place where a guy with an iPad explained what each available strain would do to me. I buy what sounds good with all the confidence of a man pointing at items on a menu written in a language he can’t read. I put it all in a cardboard box. I place a book on top. I mail the box to my dad from my local post office. I tell myself the book is to hide the contraband crossing state lines, but in truth, the book is what clears my conscience. I want to send my dad something edifying while also sending him the drug that all of America worried would make me unable to read if I tried it once. The unrequested book is a red herring to distract from the vice, like when you were young and didn’t want to buy condoms outright at the store so you cushioned them between a pack of peanut M&Ms and a magazine. Hmm, what else did I need, — right, while I’m here — might as well pick up a few condoms.
Right as marijuana becomes legal in most states, I’m about done with the drug. I’ve had three good times on edibles, and one of them was when I felt nothing and fell asleep at 9:30 PM. I’m flabbergasted that my dad likes edibles. He seems to be a man free of anxiety. Case in point, I once brought him some THC lozenges to our summer holiday in Chautauqua, and around dinner time I told him “You might want to only take half of what I gave you” to which he replied, “I took it hours ago.” He was stoned and no one noticed.
While I’m stuck in my head, stoned or sober, wondering why I didn’t take some acting gig 15 years ago, wondering if I’ll ever make enough money, worrying I’m doing everything wrong including in this moment as I write this sentence, my dad is enjoying himself.
Judith Grisel, the author of Never Enough: The Neuroscience And Experience of Addiction, describes using marijuana as throwing “a bucket of red paint” on your brain. She was approaching the stimulant clinically in terms of how it differed from the laser focus of other drugs (THC reacts with many receptors in the brain, cocaine focuses on one), but now every time I smoke, I think of the red paint metaphor. While other people seem able to crank an entire joint and do insanely complicated stuff like function at their jobs, I am reduced to a gelatinous blob, on top of which my eyes and brain are navigating a dream state that, like many dreams, isn’t all that interesting the next day. Mostly, I get high and can’t decide what I want to watch on TV or what video game I want to play, I realize how hungry I am, and then I fall asleep with cereal still stuck to my teeth. Pot, for me, is like the squid ink hitting the screen in Mario Kart: I can still see where I’m going, but everything gets a little harder to do, and the panicked half-blindness makes everything slightly more chaotically fun."
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Other articles include:
An essay on Claire Dederer's book Monsters and movies made by monsters.
Writing inside a Toyota Service Center.
Writing mistresses.
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musicalslugs · 4 months
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Grace and the Lords in Black: an analysis.
Okay, so, this may be obvious; although I haven’t seen anyone mention this as of yet. The link between Grace Chastity and the Lords in Black is clear, I mean we’ve all agreed that she seems to be like that, and Dirty Dudes must Die highlights her “corruption” plainly.
That being said! I think there may be more.
Firstly, the Lords in Black mention/talk to Grace first, before Peter and Stephanie (the arguable proper protagonists of this story).
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Sure, Blinky’s motif is obvious, it’s of eyes, of watching and of observation. But to speak to Grace first, even if it seems (on the surface level) that it’s just to flex their omniscience and make her uncomfortable, is a little strange. Especially since they then speak mostly (only) to Steph for the rest of the song [The Summoning].
Secondly, because if that were all this wouldn’t be a very good analysis, we have her (Grace) and Nibbly being echoes of eachother.
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“Swallow” and “devour” are synonymous. Both fit into Nibbly’s motif of consumption. Now, Grace could’ve said anything. Absorb, harness, control etc. I think the wording here is particular. Not exactly the same, but clearly within the same ball park.
What is exactly the same though, is Grace Chastity and Wiggly.
This may seem a bit out of left field at first, but hear me out.
In The Summoning, it is said that “Wiggly wants his Wrath”, Wrath is a vice, a sin. It may not be the exact opposite of Chastity, however Chastity is to do with restraint, whereas Wrath is very much, not so. Moreover, Wrath can be defined as ‘a great anger that expresses itself in a desire to punish someone’. Now… who else could be described as wrathful? Obviously Max. And Grace. I mean, her song is called Dirty Dudes must Die. As well as being a direct reflection of Max, it implies that she wants to harm someone. Punish someone though? Well, yes. Grace says “This is the consequence of what you’ve done!” - she must believe that death is a worthy punishment for their actions (being ‘pervs’). Thus, Wrath.
Lastly, and this is where the exactly comes in, Grace and Wiggly both say the same things. (Again, of course, I could write another analysis on how Grace and Max reflect each other beautifully by also saying the same/extremely similar things) The difference between Grace saying similar things to Max, is that she and Wiggly aren’t similar. It’s the same.
Example A) Stephy / Stephie.
Upon rewatching Nerdy Prudes Must Die and listening to the album on repeat, I noticed that no one bar these two call Stephanie: Stephie. I know Grace calls Ruth, Ruthy and Peter, Petey- so her calling Stephanie, Stephie, makes sense linguistically. That doesn’t take from the fact that Wiggly is the only other ‘person’ to use that particular moniker.
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Example B) “bloody bits”
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A particularly strange phrase that these two say. However, not really. The point of this analysis is to point out the links between the Lords in Black and Grace Chastity, specifically Wiggly and Grace. By pointing out the parallels in their idiolects, I have come to the conclusion that they are not only linked but INCREDIBLY similar.
Both are characters that use cutesy, almost childish language (“mommy spot” / “belly-well”) to disguise the violence, the wrath that lays beneath the surface. Wiggly (as shown in Black Friday) uses it as a facade. Throughout Black Friday and throughout The Summoning, he expresses himself as non-threatening (“We’re all pally-wals.” etc) before eventually showing what’s beneath the surface (“..deck the fucking halls!” / “We don’t give a shit about your phone!”). Both times are as abrupt as each other, showing that Wiggly has a fairly short temper. Grace doesn’t necessarily have a short temper, instead she has periods of ‘sin’, when stressed: Dirty Girl, calling “God a son of a B-Word”, smoking (after), having sex with Max, the scene of her ordering hot water etc etc. The visage, her carefully constructed facade, slips. Wether it’s because deep down she doesn’t believe in God (possibly shown in her “are you religious?” conversation with Shapiro), or that due to her upbringing she’s being confined, restrained, controlled, and this is when her ‘true self’ begins to peer through the cracks.
Either way, these are two characters who use similar themes (one of childishness, the other of purity/innocence (which can also be linked to childishness)) to cover their violence, their real selves.
Uhhh- anyway, watch Nerdy Prudes must Die on Youtube- it gave me brain worms.
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auramgold · 4 months
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The Abuser's Guide to Transmisogyny
aka "How to Cancel a Trans Girl", an essay about the tactics transmisogynists use to ruin their victims' lives framed as a satirical how-to guide.
i wrote this last year, but i've been reminded of it recently, and it remains relevant. you can read it on my website:
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centrally-unplanned · 4 months
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The thing about morality is that it only matters when it's real. Discussions of rules or norms for what is right or wrong are almost always, at some level, illusions, approximating reality and guiding decisions in an uncertain world - which does not make them useless, just contextual. Profaning god in your bedroom can never be “wrong” - there is no one to hear you, no one to be hurt by it. You can only show something is really wrong from the intentions of the actions and their results.
So with that out of the way, lets talk about Knives Chau - and specifically, how the comic vs the anime handled that part of the story.
Scott Pilgrim vs The Reification of Dating a High Schooler
There is an extremely pervasive meme in Scott Pilgrim discourse that our titular Scott is a scumbag. Our returning whipping boy the Kotaku article loves this idea, describing Scott’s “detestable behavior” and wondering “was it too subtle the first time about Scott being an absolute shitbag?”. There is this viral headline screenshot from an interview floating around right now riding that same line:
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Which is, of course, pretty much false. Its up to you in the end, “shitbag” is a subjective description, but the story just isn’t about events that would be described that way. Its the story of a guy getting over an awful ex, hurting some people, then meeting a new person, and realizing step-by-step what it takes to be their partner and levelling up as a person each time he does. He starts off broken, and Ramona of course is just as broken - getting better is their mutual arc. And its fundamentally about relationship drama - those stakes don’t make you a scumbag lol, just clueless, unless you are terminally online and don’t know what real stakes are.
I will let O’Malley get the last word in with his quote the writer of that interview is hilariously trying to torture into his headline:
There's a bit of, like, young people see Scott Pilgrim a certain way, and, you know, there's a lot of, like, 18-19-year-old fans that are really judgmental of the character. They're like, "Oh, he's a bad person. I would never do that." But I always tell them, like, get back to me when you're 25 or 30, tell me how your 20s went. Were you a bad person? Everyone has to make choices and do things in life that maybe they're not going to be proud of later.
Scott is a scumbag the way everyone is - you yourself will likely commit similar sins; that at least seems to be the authorial intent, and I agree with it.
So how does dating Knives Chau slot into this?
Despite the memes, age, in fact, is just a number - two consenting people dating does not a sin make. The reason dating underage people is bad is because of its consequences, not the categorical imperative. So what are the consequences of dating Knives Chau in the comic?
Knives is, as a consequence of dating a guy who is simply via his age able to appear so much cooler than her peers to her, absolutely obsessed with Scott. She worships his band:
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She starts aping his taste in music and interests; she slots herself into his circle of friends, who don’t relate to her, even after their breakup (often drinking her way through it):
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She totally spirals after he cheats on her and leaves her, blaming everyone but him; she is wounded and hurt for months, a year, over a relationship that lasted weeks:
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Knives Chau is a literal poster child for why you should not date a high schooler. She is, at every turn, emotionally not ready to date someone who is not at her own level of social development, and is deeply affected by it. It is, sometimes, played for laughs - that is the nature of the comic, everything is played for laughs, but I would have given it a bit more dramatic space myself - but over the course of the story Scott himself realizes how much of an ass he was to her, and how he didn’t take what happened seriously.
The reason I view this with charity is what Scott did to lead to this - he met a cute girl on the bus! He was deeply hurt and kind of numb in life, and found someone who was safe and easy to talk to. He never attempts to kiss her (she starts trying to kiss him which he repeatedly rejects) they don’t even hold hands, and it lasted a few weeks. He knew deep down, pretty much immediately, it was fake:
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Then he met an actual person he liked, and with some browbeating from Wallace agreed to break up with her, but chickened out for a day. Then the next day he decides to break up with her, and she drops the L bomb before he can, so he instantly ends it. It is really awkward for everyone involved.
Pushing off an awkward and uncomfortable conversation resulting from a dumb decision you made on a whim for a week - god I relate to that, that’s everyone! If you think it isn’t you I think you're lying. Its why this relationship is so interesting in the comic - Scott is always one step removed from it, putting it at abeyance, and the fact that something so minor to him is so destructive to her is a really good portrait of how these kinds of things happen. Its so easy to hurt someone when you don’t even know what the stakes are, and when its coming not from malice, but from weakness. Its a very good portrayal of a bad relationship because its bad in a relatable way, even if as a story is a bit more dramatic than is typical. And its a great portrayal of how fraught age gaps can be - this bad relationship is part of what makes the comic a good story.
But its 2023, we don’t give a shit about any of that anymore!
O’Malley in the same interview discusses the cultural shift around these kind of relationships:
I felt like in this day and age, I had to provide clarity on that [relationship]. Because when I wrote the first books, I took it for granted that people would understand that dating a high schooler was a bad thing. But on the internet, in this day and age, people are like, "He's dating a high schooler. That's terrible!" Like, that's pretty much what I say on page 1 of the book. But I try to spell it out a little bit more this time.
He isn’t telling the full story though - it was bad in 2004, but not bad the way it is today. Its dubiousness was mitigated by its frequency; people were doing this kind of shit all the time. Scott Pilgrim is a bass guitarist in an indie band; fucking groupies is like built into the cover charge. Half the problem Scott has in dating Knives is that she is the wrong kind of 17-year-old - had Scott met her at 1 am in the aftermath of a Born Ruffian’s concert at the Whippet Lounge knocking down shots off the back of her fake ID, no one would have even noticed. Hell, no one does notice; there is someone who actually makes out with a drunk 17-year-old Knives Chau in the comic Scott Pilgrim, and isn’t Scott Pilgrim:
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No one cares about Kim’s inebriated petting session here; that is 10% because she is a Girl and Girls Can’t Be Predators, 40% because she isn’t the main character, and 50% because Kim Pine’s dating history is not a useful proxy battleground for GamerGate-adjacent nerd culture wars in ~2014; but that is road that goes directly to hell, so let's veer back.
The point, of course, is that in 2004 this is a crime flecked with normality, something your friend would do and you would maybe just cock an eyebrow at:
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Its not that in discourse today - it is radically more condemned. It is not a contextual sin, but an original sin. It underwent a process I am calling reification - where it goes from being just a shifting descriptor of reality, to a thing in itself, with a defined (reified) meaning. And to be clear, that is in a lot ways on net a good thing? The reality is that, despite everyone’s protestations, there are today thousands of 17-year-olds taking the L line out to a gig at the Brooklyn Steel and going down on a 25-year-old guy they just met in a back alley off Frost St who swears he’s a “drummer in a sick new band” that played here “just last week”, he promises, and she is having a great time, bragging to her friends about how hot his tattoo was, and then shipping herself off to Cornell next year to start on her pre-med track with barely a memory. But for every dozen of those, there is at least one person who is deeply, deeply hurt, a Knives Chau who never deserved this. The rest can have a slightly worse time, its probably worth it.
That does not make it a categorical imperative, though - the reification has masked that truth. The crime comes from the context - those other girls aren’t victims, they would laugh at you for suggesting they were. But in 2023, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is no longer concerned with context. It is telling you, right to your face, that Scott is a bad dude. Over and over and over - jokes from the Evil League about “wow, I thought we were evil”, its not subtle.
Yet meanwhile, Knives Chau is, like, fine? She dates Scott, is totally into him, and then literally in the middle of his funeral forgets about him for Envy crashing it:
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Picks up the bass and has yuri-inflected playtime with Kim the literal next day:
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And less than a week later is pitching an off-broadway musical adaption of Scott’s life to a billionaire Matthew Patel - I can’t explain that okay, I’m as confused as you are.
She is mad at Scott, sure, but she is over it in a matter of days. Hell, notice how she was already a fan of the Clash at Demonhead now? There is no scene of Scott introducing her to his kind of music. He didn’t change her. By the end she is a member of his band and they are totally chill:
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This is, again, about a week or two later.
Knives is not an important character in this show, way less than in the original, this is no grand sin. But I still find it very interesting: O’Malley is wrong. He “spells it out” way less in this version when it comes to the actual consequences of Scott’s actions. Everyone’s verbal condemnations are substitutes to replace the real damage his actions dealt in the comic. Scott is a better person this time, in a world that has universally agreed he is worse (still not a good move ofc). Even Scott’s moment of apology to Knives about their dating is so tepid its almost Straussian:
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Its ‘frowned upon’…which is not the same thing as saying it was wrong! I don’t think this is intentional, its just funny, but its a nice capstone nevertheless.
And it had to be this way, not just for media in general, but for Scott Pilgrim in particular. Not only are sexual crimes far more reified today, but Scott Pilgrim’s sin of dating a high schooler is reified as well - its the first piece of discourse everyone encounters about it. Its the ur-debate of the franchise. The idea of actively engaging on this point, and digging deeper into it…its too hot, too controversial. Way better to shy away from it, disown it. The discourse wrote this part of the script over the course of a decade; its not something the creatives had any say in.
Honestly they should have just gone all the way - just make Knives 19. Then how tepid it is wouldn’t be a distraction anymore. Scott can just be an asshole for cheating on her, that would work fine. If you aren’t going to commit to the reality of these things, you shouldn’t bother with it at all.
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The Sorrow Glaive, and Halsin's Backstory
So, one of my favorite things about second playthroughs is going back through with the context to put meaning to information you overlooked in your first playthrough.
One such piece of information is the "Druid Notebook" you can find in Nettie's chambers in the Emerald Grove.
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Inside, the writing is incredibly fragmented, and doesn't come together into any sort of coherency based on the Act 1 knowledge you could have at the time of reading it.
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However, if you go back after completing the quest to free Halsin and save the grove, you could put together the link to the glaive you can receive as your reward, named Sorrow.
Note: there is an additional piece of information that I clearly recall, but was not able to trigger when I went back through and attempted it on one of my save files. After you pick up the glaive, the character who does so has a line that describes an overwhelming tide of sadness filling them.
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If you get even further in the game, to conversations with Halsin in Act 2, he reveals the way he became Archdruid one hundred years ago:
In the battle against Ketheric, his master, the previous Archdruid, was felled, and the responsibility fell on Halsin's shoulders to take charge of the druid forces and get them to safety as the shadow-curse fell upon them. He describes it as an incredible weight of regret on him that he was never able to do more to help them - his master, the land, and Thaniel.
There is a possibility that I am wrong of course, but I'm pretty confident in this conclusion:
That journal is Halsin's, and the shade he describes is his master's.
He had to destroy the shadow-cursed version of his beloved teacher.
Not only did he have to go through the sorrow of losing him in the first place, but he had to "kill" him himself, all over again.
We also know that many of the shadow-cursed creatures leave vestiges behind, with echoes of who they were when they were alive.
That vestige would have been Halsin's last fleeting memory of his master, as he was in life.
Thank you for coming to my TEDxtalk, I am going to go throw myself in the nearest river (nonlethally).
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longreads · 1 month
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Fresh Meat
"The resistance to women in butchery goes further: we associate butchery with blood and gore, and dealing with blood and gore is not a place for a woman.”
Regular #longreads food writer Olivia Potts is back! Explore how women are breaking into the male-dominated world of butchery in our new feature.
Blood, craft, and sexism. Read it here. 
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incognitopolls · 2 months
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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.
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