#and really that in itself is a severe conflict in human existence ; that we perceived these people we will never know past our perception

[flickeringart]

Neptune in aspect with Mars

(Read my post about Sun and Moon aspecting Neptune and Mercury and Venus aspecting Neptune)

These planets aspecting each other makes for a curious connection, because in a sense, they represent opposing principles; Mars represents the personal drive and the ability to spring to action, the force that works to impose one’s independent will on the world – Neptune represents the inner urge for emotional unity and the religious/spiritual experience of being merged with the source of life. When these planets are in aspect in the natal chart, the personal ability to carry out one’s will is inextricably linked to redemptive longings. Simply put, Mars-Neptune individuals will put their energy into fulfilling the ego ideal, the perfection of potential that existed before the personality began to form. The personality cannot assert itself in a way that would crush the dream of perfection. Neptune is the dream of purity, the undifferentiated beauty of never having left the garden of Eden. Mars on the other hand is the agent of independence and self-motivated action – he has the purpose of fighting for the individual self which is antithetical to the Neptunian principle of surrender. While the Moon and Venus are quite social; the Moon represents nurturing and care-taking of needs, Venus represents the ability to be loving, affectionate and gracious; Mars is selfish and to a certain extent anti-social – most definitely anti-Eden and its eternal bliss. Subsequently, Neptune paired with Venus or the Moon is a little less of an obvious conflict than Neptune paired with Mars.

The conjunction of Neptune-Mars might cause considerable frustration and unconscious manipulation, because one cannot assert oneself, which is to declare separation, without feeling a deep sense of guilt and shame. It’s a little bit like the Bible story of Adam and Eve eating of the forbidden fruit and immediately becomes aware of sin. This is certainly not an easy phenomenon to deal with. The impulse to avoid accountability for one’s actions can be overwhelming, even if the consequences are perceived to be good. There can be a tremendously inflated sense of righteousness accompanying every move the individual takes because deep down there’s the feeling that one has committed a terrible trespass, that one will be unable to atone for. While the softer aspects, the trine and the sextile, more easily lend themselves to genuine selfless acts and natural inclination to fight on behalf of every bleeding heart and soul in the world through acts of sympathy and kindness, the conjunction usually brings more troubles. There can be an overwhelming feeling of having to do certain things because one cannot stand the idea of being separate from other people. One finds it easy to identify as the martyr or victim, unwilling to take radical responsibility for one’s actions – or if one does it’s in order to self-sacrifice. Often the individual will adopt any ideology that promotes the mass before the individual – often socialism or marxism fits the bill. Neptune is symbolic of undifferentiated reality, blurred edges and passive surrender. It’s not a planet that promotes autonomy and individuation. Not uncommonly, decisions and actions are referred to as byproducts of societal or larger-scale units that have little to do with the poor self. These individuals are usually profoundly dissatisfied with the ways of society because on some level they believe that individual autonomy and agency is a sin – and that the only way to redeem oneself and humanity is through some kind of chaotic dissolution of difference. This urge is seldom conscious, but it is there none the less. Vladimir Lenin had this conjunction and he wanted to revolutionize society to fit the marxist ideology, but really what this means is to overthrow the upper class – to punish those that seem to revel in the delights of Eden, to get rid of the internal shame of being excluded from paradise.

It seems like Neptune-Mars shows up in individuals with the capacity to move a crowd, perhaps most importantly, with the capacity to be the front figure and leader of the masses. Vladimir Lenin certainly affected the masses and so did Napoleon I with the same conjunction. Hassan II of Morocco, known to be one of the most severe rulers widely accused of authoritarian practices and abuses of civil rights had this conjunction as well. These examples are far removed from Neptune’s reputation for denoting empathy, soft-heartedness and sensitivity. However, it might be precisely because of the refusal to abandon the hope of the sweet sweet nectar of paradise that can only truly be accessed in a state of pre-birth if even then, that the outrage is so total. Most children scream when they are born, and this is probably the kind of terrible rage caused by separation that lingers in these people. The sign the conjunction falls in will certainly affect the expression the energies filter through – Lenin had the conjunction in Aries, Hassan had it in Leo and Napoleon had it in Virgo. Virgo is a much more analytical and practical sign than the prideful fire signs of Aries and Leo – consequently Napoleon is famous for his fine skill for method and strategy in war. On his Wikipedia page, it states that Napoleon had a hypnotic effect on people and could bend the strongest leaders to his will in one-on-one conversations. Hypnosis is a marked Neptunian phenomenon. What happens is that the person is able to gently infiltrate the other person’s will – which is quite extraordinary. If someone is receptive and open enough to suggestion, the opportunity and the invitation is there to mold the other through unconscious communion. Since there’s no obvious forcing taking place under hypnosis, the hypnotized person must cooperate on some level – yet it’s not a conscious cooperation which is why the whole phenomena of hypnosis is so unnerving. In general, people would like to think that they are in complete control of themselves, but it’s more of a fancy fantasy rather than an actual reality. We don’t know what we are receptive to and Neptune reminds us of this. He seeps through the most tightly shut doors.

(Buy products with my art)

My own family is quite Neptune dominated and what often happens is that I feel subtly manipulated, yet the manipulation is never fully conscious on the part of the individuals so it becomes difficult to confront them. The times I have, they either take offense or seem genuinely perplexed. It is impossible to confront Neptune, because he works underneath the surface, below the threshold of consciousness. When confronted these types are deeply disturbed that they could’ve imposed something on someone – they either go into a introspective mood, become appalled or proclaim their love and sympathy in an attempt to restore union. My mother has Mars in the 12th house and although it’s not aspecting Neptune, Mars is placed in the house pertaining to this planet and she has Neptune in her 1st house. She never gets angry but people around her certainly do. She is eternally understanding of everyone else’s anger and has acceptance for it, yet she doesn’t respond to any of it on a personal level. She apologizes every time something upsets her. She is never aggressive, yet she does instill subtle guilt through little cues and hints every now and then because it is a sin to have a will that does not align with the crowd that one finds oneself in. Sometimes, when things aren’t the way she wants to see them she doesn’t see them. She presumes that on the most basic level, all people want the same thing, which is probably true on a “soul level”, but sometimes it doesn’t translate to everyday matters. People’s personalities contradict each other and this is no trivial matter – people can and do clash because of individual differences and it can be detrimental to one or all of the individuals involved. However, Neptune doesn’t like to see a clash as a clash – that would be to treat it as a definite fact, which would contradict the fluidity of oceanic union. The frustratingly passive statement “It’s everyone’s fault” or “It’s everyone’s responsibility” is the attempt to not deal with cause and effect while establishing the fact that some abstract common force is always at work. This is neither true nor false but this attitude conveniently keeps everyone “unified” and dependent upon each other.

Admittedly I went with the most gruesome examples when writing about the conjunction, but it goes without saying that not all people with this aspect is going to be a Lenin type – Ryan Gosling, Avril Lavinge and Timothé Chalamet all have this conjunction and they’re all quite popular entertainers in their own ways – they move the masses on some level. Ryan Gosling has a Pisces Rising so his chart ruler is Neptune which makes it particularly strong. He gives off that pure hearted watery eyed look that is extremely mesmerizing to the public – he portrays himself as sweet and compassionate, he seems to have a marked innocence and purity to his outward projected identity. Avril Lavinge has her Sun-Mercury in the 12th house squaring her Neptune-Mars conjunction in the 3rd. She has more of an edge to her personality with a lot of planets in Scorpio but she certainly comes off as a chaotic, intense and absent-minded creative which I would attribute more to Neptune. Her strong rebellious “I don’t care” statements through her music resonates with a lot of people, but so does her more sentimental songs. Timothe´ Chalamet has his Moon in Pisces sextile Mars-Mercury-Neptune and he is quite the stereotypical Neptunian boy – he looks delicate, introspective, dreamy and androgynous, more like an ethereal creature than an earth-bound human. With the conjunction in the 5th house there’s no wonder that he can act and express himself in a very fluid way. Acting and performing musically are the specialities of the Neptune, and if enough components in the chart support the endeavor one might just become famous. The trine and sextile aspect also lend themselves well to these kind of occupations. These people can effectively gain the sympathy of the public because people recognize something of themselves – something pure and unborn, a mutual feeling.

A good example of someone with the trine aspect between Neptune and Mars is Russel Brand. He is quite the Neptunian with an angular 10th house Neptune opposing his Sun and trining his Jupiter-Mars-Moon planets in Aries. Even though he certainly has the fire and energy of an Aries Mars that can sometimes be a bit too much for people he is not only fighting for himself he is fighting for all people. In many ways he’s embodying  universal hope and rage. He is fiery but also very receptive and deeply concerned with not causing any damage or hurt despite his characteristic blunt and direct approach. He has a marked religious/spiritual inclination, which is usually the case with a strong Neptune in the chart. In his early years the longing for Eden was sought through drugs, alcohol and fame, while it has now shifted to a more healthy inner exploration and focus on being of service to people. The soft aspects between Neptune and Mars-Moon-Jupiter planets in his chart helps him to cope with the disturbing Sun-Neptune opposition. In recent interviews, he admits that he still feels the pull of fame and success, yet he knows that if he goes down that path he will lose himself (his Sun) and will ultimately end up disillusioned and dissatisfied. I have the trine in my own chart, and I float aimlessly through life with the notion that things will work out and my actions will come to me, because I can’t plan or control anything. I have learnt that I have to trust the way things unfold, because I have a clear sense that my forced actions won’t lead me anywhere except to frustration and a sense of isolation. The sextile aspect seems to function a little bit more as an asset and a skill for the person to use. Politicians like Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande all have this aspect and they can effectively use their receptivity to the masses and people in general to inform their actions.

Now to the harder aspects. Britney Spears is a good example of the dilemmas created by the Neptune-Mars square. Her Neptune squares Mars in the 12th house, the house belonging to Neptune and Pisces. Because of mental instability in her twenties she was put under a conservatorship which is essentially the equivalent of giving up personal control of one’s personal matters in order for an outside source to manage them until one gains some foothold. Mars is one of the prime factors of personal ambition and autonomy, but when it’s in the 12th it is given up – it is essentially a slave to the undifferentiated realm and subjected all the forces of the unconscious. A 12th house Mars in itself doesn’t have to produce the mess that Britney found herself in, but with it squaring Neptune, Mars is going to get swamped, mislead, confused, manipulated and subtly coerced because of the need for fusion, into doing things that will pull her further away from independent action. Another good example is Kylie Jenner. She has Neptune in her 1st house squaring Mars on the MC. She is publicly known for being part of the Kardashian-Jenner family, but she’s also gained attention because she skillfully created her own brand Kylie Cosmetics and became very “successful” (as in earning a lot of money) due to her own independent action and initiative. However, Neptune is anti-independence – and curiously enough there’s always some dishonesty involved when Neptune makes any hard aspects in the chart. She was declared the youngest self-made billionaire by Forbes in 2019, but, she has later been accused of forging tax documents to appear to be a billionaire. Neptune simply can’t let her be all that her Mars wants to be – a successful business woman with a clean record. Self-sabotage is almost always the case, however minor with this aspect, because Neptune refuses Mars’ need to be potent in the world.

The opposition creates a different dynamic although the dilemma is similar to the square. The person can be called to completely abandon an independent will to take action in favor of the glamour and blissful archetypal experience, not unlike the example of Russel Brand and his indulgence in fame and crowd-pleasing at the expense of his sense of self. The difference between having Sun opposing Neptune and Mars opposing Neptune is that in the first instance one is prone to give up a sense of self in favor of Neptune’s waters, while in the second, one feels the urge to give up the ability to direct one’s own life in order to merge with life around oneself. The opposition usually lends itself to extremism because the two polarities, in this case Mars and Neptune, can’t coexist. Queen Elizabeth II has this aspect, Mars-Jupiter in the 1st opposing Neptune in the 7th. She is on the one hand seen as an archetypal figure, immortal and divine and blissfully kept out of the real world in order to serve as a symbol and a fairytale for people to feel spiritually connected to. She’s non-aggressive, forgiving and compassionate, transcendent of the fuss of the world yet overseeing it all with care. She is essentially functioning to satisfy the religious/spiritual instinct of the masses, although it’s certainly done at the expense of her own selfish wants and needs. Luckily for her, her Mars drive is quite global and collective in nature considering that it falls in Aquarius and is conjunct Jupiter – it keeps her objective and less personal in her martial assertion. However, I’m sure she struggles with the contradiction between her own will and her role as an immortal unreality that would seem to activate itself in the interaction with other people (Neptune in the 7th). Edward Snowden also has this opposition falling in the same houses. His Mars-Sun conjunction opposes Neptune, and he famously leaked information about mass surveillance programs to the press. Neptune has everything to do with leaks and the dissolution of boundaries. He’s both been called a hero a traitor – which perfectly fits with the contradiction that the opposition represents. He certainly made a personal sacrifice by revealing the things he did so he is perfectly shouldering the martyr cape. In any case he did what he did for the public with the concern of other people in mind (Neptune 7th house) he took a non-selfish stance for the sake of a higher ideal and ethical conviction. Both Queen Elizabeth and Edward Snowden are quite extreme in their Neptunian capacity and has taken on fates of mythic magnitude.

#astrology #neptune in astrology #neptune aspecting mars #neptune conjunct mars #neptune trine mars #neptune sextile mars #neptune square mars #neptune opposite mars #neptune in aspect #natal chart aspects #natal chart analysis #pisces #garden of eden #planets in aspect #planets in astrology #astrology post #neptune rising #pisces rising #mars in the 12th house #mars aspects #neptune

[loveatfirstwriteblog]

A Complete Analysis of Harry Potter

Like a lot of kids, we probably grew up on Harry potter. We were obsessed and rightly so. The universe created in the world of Harry Potter was, and is, a hugely successful one because of the fact it gave kids a world where magic exists! It seemed to be a great world to live in and it made even better with the fact that it included elements of empowerment, Whether it be showing girls can be just as successful if not more in various pursuits(Hermione), or the fact that even if you have a history of bad events, you can have a good heart(Hagrid), Harry Potter teaches us a lot.

JKR has written a mind-blowing plot in a world of magic, wizards, witches, wands, potions, friendship, love. Our inner-five-year olds--and actually most of our young adult selves too--jumps around excitedly at the beautifully penned words that creates an exit out of this world and into one where magic does exist. 

As you get older, though, you begin to think of Harry Potter in a more critical fashion. The thought of “oh my god, it’s magic” no longer completely overrides my mind, but more of “but what are the laws regarding this? Can people just do this whenever they want? Are there no ethics?” 

No matter how much we’re going to expose the flaws and plot holes in HP now, we’ll always love the books--we grew up on them! But some things just niggle you as you get older, and that’s what we’re going to be focusing on in this post.

Something I adore about the HP books is that everyone, including the “good guys”, has flaws. Harry has a “save the world alone, do first, think later” complex, a driving force that makes him go save Sirius, Ron is very, very insecure to a point where he ditches Harry twice, probably when Harry needed him the most, Hermione is a judgemental, narrow-minded nag (her thoughts on Luna, divination, Trelawney, basically anything that doesn’t fit her black and white world), Molly Weasley is misogynistic and blatantly favourites her children—probably being one of the main factors behind Ron’s insecurities, Arthur is condescending towards Muggles and makes several comments you cringe at while reading the books as a young adult/adult, Sirius, Snape, and Lupin still haven’t let go of their childhood grudges and hatred, etc etc etc. 

These flaws are what make these characters so three-dimensional, so layered, so human. But the problem was, most of these flaws are never intentionally acknowledged. And honestly, that could have been such a good character arc, because the main characters are mostly students. No student is the same through their teenage years—they change, they evolve, they get over their flaws, they try to better themselves. I would have loved to see Ron becoming his own person, Hermione opening her mind up a little, etc. 

Neville is not one of my favourites, but I love his growth and development, from someone who was scared of his potions professor to a man who faced down Lord Voldemort. Ginny Weasley could have had character development, from the trauma she went through in second year, but that was never written in.  She went through this terrifying ordeal when she was only twelve years old, and jump to a year or two later and she’s absolutely fine, with no transition from her trauma whatsoever.

Some of JKR’s characters are brilliantly written and fleshed out, but some of her others lack the structure and complexity that usually comes with being vital to the plot—Ginny Weasley for one. Her internalised misogyny also plays a huge part in the way her female characters are written. We see this again in the case of how she wrote the character of Ginny. 

Ginny Weasley is not a favourite of ours (if you don’t know that by now). She feels a lot like a convenient male daydream—when she waits for Harry to notice her by dating other guys, gets annoyed by Hermione “not knowing quidditch”, etc etc—and fits the “not like other girls” archetype too much, almost like she was made for it (hint hint). She’s portrayed to be strong-willed, spunky, and independent, and I love the idea, but I really don’t see it. To me, she’s a very shallow character, the least fleshed out one. 

Just like James Potter wasn’t necessarily redeemed just because JKR said he was, and Ginny isn’t interesting just because JKR writes that she is. 

Hermione also fits the archetype, but she’s JKR’s self-insert, so we really can’t say much about that. 

To make things worse, Ginny and Hermione are pitted against each other in a very subtle way. Ginny is the sporty, pretty, flirty girl who’s never single from book 4. Hermione is the not-conventionally-attractive, nerdy girl who’s had a few dates here and there but never a relationship. They’re very different characters (the only thing they have in common is the archetype) but they’re against each other in the defence of Harry. 

Another place where JKR’s misogyny shows up is the way other girls are written. Lavender Brown is shown as vapid and immature, just because she likes clothes and boys and didn’t know how to handle her first relationship. Cho Chang is perceived as shallow because she’s emotional. Pansy Parkinson is seen to be throwing herself at Draco Malfoy. The Weasleys hated Fleur because she was beautiful and sexy and French, and that was ever really resolved in the end (Molly accepted her, but we never got Ginny’s and Hermione’s opinions again). You see where we’re getting at? The typical “girly girls” are portrayed as insipid, shallow, emotional, and boring, while girls like Hermione and Ginny are seen to be fun and multilayered. 

The problems with Harry Potter don’t just stop with non-fleshed out characters. There are plot devices that go unacknowledged, issues like blood purity—which is the basis of Voldemort’s tyranny—are never really resolved, huge Chekhov’s guns that aren’t fired. 

A common misconception, which if cleared up could probably expose a load of problems in wizarding society by itself, is that the wizarding world is racist. It’s not racist. Muggles and Muggleborns are not a different race, they’re a different class, at least according to pureblood wizards. Mudblood is a classist insult (a direct reference to nobility blueblood and aristocracy).

Another factor that wasn’t talked about but made the HP world so complex and realistic is the inherent classism in every single pureblooded wizard, including the Weasleys.

 The “Light” wizards all operate on the notion “at least I don’t kill or torture Muggles”. The Weasleys refuse to talk about Molly’s squib cousin who’s an accountant, the Longbottoms were so desperate for Neville to not be a squib they nearly killed him trying to force magic out of him, Ron makes fun of Filch for being a squib, thinks house-elves are beneath him, and confounds his driving instructor in his mid-thirties, the ministry workers kept obliviating that muggle at the quidditch World Cup, etc. 

This could have been a metaphor for how small prejudices and microaggressions (kind of the wizarding equivalent of white privilege) enable discrimination and murder, if JKR had actually acknowledged it. 

The parallel to Nazi Germany is very twisted and definitely shouldn’t be taken too far, but the Nazi ideology grew on the basis of everyday antisemitism, “that’s not that bad” little things. Voldemort’s circle and army grew because the wizard superiority complex festered and blew up in some people, egged on by a deeply classist society. 

Ultimately, Harry Potter has very, very shoddy worldbuilding, the kind of worldbuilding that’s obsessed with answering the “what” of the wizarding world, rather than the “how” or the “why”, which is strange, considering that fantasy or dystopian-era novels’ driving plots and conflicts are usually answering the questions the worldbuilding raises--The Hunger Games and The Shadowhunter Chronicles are two of the best examples of brilliantly written YA fantasy and dystopian novels. 

In HP, however, the main plot just avoids the questions the worldbuilding brings up like the bubonic plague. 

Voldemort’s agenda is built on prejudice towards Muggles and Muggleborns, but the plot just validates the negative perception of them—at the end of the day, being a wizard is what’s special. The Statute of Secrecy is the foundation of the main concept—blood supremacists believe wizards shouldn’t be hidden away—but only vague, barely-there answers are given to why it exists (a Chekhov’s gun that was never fired). 

There are love potions that function like date rape drugs (even Harry was given one by a girl who wanted him to ask her out), potions that force people to tell the truth, potions that literally let you disguise yourself as another person, but the ethics are never talked about, and the laws are so lax that three twelve-year-olds broke them and were never caught. 

But at the same time, the worldbuilding is so authentic, because it transforms the wizarding world into straight-up fridge horror. The everyday horrors are just accepted and rolled with. A corrupt government, constant obliviation of Muggles, slavery that isn’t even talked about. These things aren’t obvious to us as readers, or to the wizards as characters, because they match up to the real world, which is filled with things that are horrifying if you dig deeper. The multiple, normalised forms of abuse, police brutality, the violence in prisons that nothing is done about, the glaringly obvious cultural problems we have with consent, etc. 

The abusive authoritative figures in HP, like Rufus Scrimgeour, Cornelius Fudge, Dumbledore, Umbridge, etc, are so authentic because real-life politicians and people in high places of power behave that way, and their abuse is excused. 

The wizarding world is just like the real world. Corrupt, prejudiced, messed up, but if you’re privileged, or at least have certain privileges, you’re probably not going to notice. The ultimate problem is that the plot doesn’t acknowledge a lot of fridge horror things are messed up either, which is why it miserably fails. 

#harry potter #shoddy worldbuilding #flaws #plotholes #ron weasley #hermione granger #draco malfoy #jk rowling #tom riddle #lord voldemort #dumbledore #rufus scrimgeour #cornelius fudge #dolores umbridge #ginny weasley #molly weasley #arthur weasley #pansy parkinson #fleur delacour #luna lovegood #lavendar brown #cho chang #hagrid #sirius black #severus snape #james potter #remus lupin #amortentia #veritaserum #polyjuice potion

[witches-in-caravans]

My thoughts on a commonly used term when discussing kids cartoons.

One thing that often frustrates me about the argument "it's a kids show" when discussing the contents of a children show is that they don't think about why that term exists. Most kids shows back then got a somewhat fair amount of slack on criticism for a reason. A lot of it was because of the shows goals on what it wanted to be in service of.

Shows in the 80s had the purpose of action and fun, simple characters in order to sell merchandise (transformers, mlp g1). More shows back in the 90s/early 2000s had the goal on making its audience laugh or entertain if anything. Shows like dexters lab, Kim possible, spongebob or my life as a teenage robot were selling themselves on their gags or action rather than complex themes or drama. It might be fun to joke that spongebob was about communism and workers rights and shit, but we know that wasn't the creators or writers goals. So audiences tend to be gentler on criticism. And it's not like people never critic anything these shows produce. A lot of shows here dabbled or even went hogwild with homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic and sometimes even racist jokes.

If there were shows to teach lessons, they were relatively simple like ("sharing is a good thing", "don't make fun of children with 'weird habits'", ect..) in shows like Recess or Hey Arnold. Even then a lot of the "lesson" shows were set in world's with very low stakes, which was the real world in 90% of them. Many of the more dramatic kids shows weren't really high stakes, big action pieces. They were mostly mellow if anything. And they did get criticised as well.

This was probably what made avatar the last airbender so unforgettable to its young audience. It mainly had the premise and characters of your typical Saturday kids action series. Protagonist with a superpower, lots of fighting, a team of underdog kids fighting a big bad empire. It's premise was pretty trite and already flooded the cartoon market. But it was special at the time for exploring topics such as war, trauma and abuse in a way that was fun, respectful and most of all, easy for a younger audience to understand without being too overbearing with the topic. What made avatar work well for itself is that it treated the severity of most of these topics differently than the simple lesson programs at the time. Forgiving the person who personally bullied you in 1st grade is not the same as forgiving the man who caused you to see your mothers murdered corpse actually!!! The writers in avatar realised that if your gonna explore these kinds of themes in a world with larger stakes which include severe child abuse, war, trauma and mass genocide, you can't treat the people causing this as some cartoonist henchman or shitty little kid in the playground. You can give some of these characters sympathetic moments or explain the circumstances of how they were like this (azula, zuko), but you can't forget about what happened. At least you can't immediately as soon as they become the "good guy". Sadly the writers in atla seem to forget a lot of this information judging by their other shows such as lok or the dragon Prince.

I mention all this to explain why the "it's a kids show" doesn't apply as well to certain modern kids shows. Some of these shows are trying to cover pretty heavy topics such as abuse, imperialism and coloniasm, war, human experimentation and a whole list of rather dark concepts. And more so they are trying to teach lessons about them. But the creators want to have a "dark, angsty scene where the characters cry at the hands/actions of their colonizers/abusers" scene, but they don't want to actually think about how these atrocities affect the decision making of our horribly traumatised protagonists. Or how it would affect their feelings towards the antagonist. Writers usually only care about how the villain is going to get their redemption arc. And it's not like its inheritably bad that you give your antagonist a redemption story (though there's a limit to how far you can go depending on what they did). But when you give your antagonist 2 hours screentime about whatever angsty backstory you slapped onto them, and then you either completely ignore the pain and psychological state of your protagonists friends and even harshly criticise them for being angry and unforgiving at the antagonist for the miniscule actions of... Psychological or physical torture of you or loved ones, repeated attempted murder, mass genocide.... What I'm trying to say is that your message of empathising with the people around you falls a little flat in its face.

Subject matter and tone will heavily change how your audience perceives your theme.

This is why nobody complained about Dr Doofenshmirtz' rehabilitation. He was in a pure comedy show mainly focused on humour in which his eeevvviiiilllll plans includes ludicrous shit like ridding the world of mustaches cause he can't grow one. Absurd stuff. He ain't ozai or even azula. He didn't genocide a race of people, mutilate his kid and waged war against the world. He didn't travel around universes, pillaging cities or attempted to destroy the whole universe cause they were mad at one person. Stuff like that changes audience perception. He was so harmless for that his "arch nemises" often took his sweet time stopping and even indulged his ridiculous schemes.

This is why I don't criticise shows like she ra the same way I criticise kids programs like miraculous ladybug or the fucking winx club. The winx club has the rare emotional scene, but it's mostly a show about 6 fairy friends defeating a dully coloured comic book supervillain. It's conflicts are mostly simple and straightforward and it's purpose is to entertain children (and sell cheaply made plastic dolls). She ra as shown in its tone within the cartoon and by the creators intentions on twitter is different. It's clearly trying hard to explore themes of child abuse, war and imperialism. Its the font line topic of the show. And when exploring heavy themes such as this for a audience of children, you have to be careful. Because handling them poorly might have a chance of sending a wrong or muddled message to kids.

This is why the term "it's a kids show" isn't universal.

#writing #writing for children

[spiritualgateway]

The Next Wave

written by Steven Black:

We seem to be experiencing a boom of old conspiracy theories. Sometimes woven into a new coat, but at the core they are the same old black and white stories. Is it also true that all the conjecture, relativization, fake news and various conspiracy theories that are currently surfacing annoy the hell out of you? I have to be very careful about the sarcastic part of myself and therefore I keep myself from commenting. Not always, but mostly.

Whenever I open my FB Stream lately, I notice a real war being waged by the self-proclaimed awakened against the alleged sleeping sheep. One „have to know“ after the other is posted and „THE Truth About“ is announced – daily. I know this all too well.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Yes, I went through a phase myself where I believed a lot of bullshit or at least thought it was possible. It started in the late 90’s and ended in 2012, and during that time I probably inhaled every existing conspiracy theory and read all the authors who spread it with a fervor of conviction. Starting with David Icke, Jan van Helsing, Robin de Ruiter and countless others, up to Alex Jones. Hell, I myself have contributed to the spread of such stories. The subjects they dealt with back then were not really different from what they are today.  

Me and many other people, we thought we were „awakened“ then, because we believed we could understand the world more and better, like everyone else. Critical comments were countered with „inform yourself properly“ and immediately some links of „alternative points of view“ were thrown behind, which confirmed our own statement. And one could be sure that other participants who took the same bubble would shout down the critic as „mainstream sleep sheep“. No matter what argument came up – it did not reach anyone. In this phase one is not accessible to criticism, one fends it off. But if the criticism is so valid that it cannot be negated, one still had the recourse to some whataboutism.

It was a time when it was all about „the rise“ and all the political or economic daily news was seen as „there is light coming into the darkness“. We knew that the „end of the matrix“ was near and that a worldwide recalibration of consciousness was coming. We thought of ourselves as light warriors, critics of the system, rebels for the good and enlighteners. Fervently inspired by the conviction that we had all taken the „red pill“ and would now be the only ones to see clearly, we wanted to wake up and enlighten „the sleeping sheep“. In doing so, we constantly reminded them that it was absolutely (!) necessary to do research, think for oneself and question everything! Only WE knew, all others were of course stupid, brainwashed or sleeping. We were the judges, jurors and executioners of the worldly realities – self-proclaimed world policemen and smartass activists. We alone knew how the rabbit had to hop and how it „should be right“.

Pffff. When I look back on it now, I can laugh about it heartily. God, what a wonderful mindfuck.  

Yes, if we had done it like that.. If we had heeded this „winged advice“ that we had thrown at everyone, we would have taken it to heart ourselves. If we had questioned the sources we referred to and believed. Instead, our own thinking, research and questioning was limited to almost everything that came from alternative media and supported our views. Official facts, whether political, economic or otherwise, were „mainstream“ and thus fundamentally untrustworthy. It was all just propaganda … (yes no, that’s clear).

This made us susceptible to believe people and media that had either a political or other agenda. Starting with racist Jew haters, religiously dressed up ideologues, political muddle-heads, esoteric concepts without any grounding, up to „doomsday fanatics“.

But we had heard a call from the universe that the time had come for an expansion of consciousness. It felt like a kind of magical awakening. And I, as well as everyone else in that time who was like that, we were not the first. There have been recurring, rather small movements since the 1950s. But there was a really big, concentrated shift of consciousness in 1986, at the time of the so-called „Harmonic Convergence“. One can certainly call this the first great wave of lightworkers and truth seekers that the world has perceived.      

They did not fare much better either. These people, too, had to rummage through various horror scenarios, actual and imagined injustices, as well as their own overflowing imagination. But the basic themes were the same as they still are today. They are power topics (power and powerlessness), money topics, resistance to living, dying and all kinds of heavy, undigested emotional burdens. At that time, all of this was going on a little more quietly, at least in the eyes of the public. These topics were only discussed in small forums on the early Internet.

And today?

Today, the „social media“ are full of them and various shit storms are spilling over into the media mainstream.

Today the exact same process is taking place, in a new wave of people who have come in the beginning of their own awakening process. Awakened can not be spoken of, it is a slow awakening and it usually takes years.

One „wakes up“ from years of unconscious dwelling within one’s own personality structure, which has usually become quite rigid. One gradually enters into a new process of self-discovery, where many things are simply thrown over, which were normal and acceptable until then. The sense behind this is a broadening of perspective and a restructuring of mental expression.

Yeah, right. They got a call from the universe.

And at first you are thrown into confusion and disorientation. You will also have the feeling of stumbling around in a seemingly endless labyrinth. Individually varying degrees of identity loss can occur, which additionally creates fear. Many things seem to make no sense anymore, you part with friends, views and previously held beliefs, while at the same time you have the feeling that you can no longer find a secure hold anywhere. A well known, often observable reaction to this is a devaluation of the human being, the body, the mind or the human identity itself. In the course of this process one stumbles from one conspiracy theory to the next, constantly stepping on a bullshit cookie and sometimes not knowing whether one is male or female.

Can you prevent this? No idea. Most probably not.

That doesn’t mean that everyone who gets into this process is clinging to conspiracy theories and thinking they are THE thing or the only and pure truth. But a lot of people do just that. In a time of great personal uncertainty, the one-dimensional black and white images of conspiracy theories seem to simulate an unpleasant but seemingly stable reality.

Basically, an essential scenario is happening here – your consciousness is being twisted through the wringer and a kind of battle is taking place inside you. A battle between your old consciousness and the new, unknown. The old consciousness knows only defense and projection, but the new one wants to reflect and express itself mainly through self-reflection.

This inner fight has nothing to do with any Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Bill Gates, vaccinations, cash bans, paedophile satanists, mind control or whatever. In reality, „the universe“ is fucking your old consciousness to break you open and dissolve old encrusted structures. And the first, basic reaction is mostly projection and defense.

Hiking through your own darkness

There is a spiritual metaphor that says: „The dark night of the soul. This term goes back to the Spanish Carmelite and mystic John of the Cross. It is a poem written in the 15th century – in prison. For John of the Cross it was about the mystical union of the soul with God. Nowadays this metaphor is used to describe the difficult period of a spiritual development process, where the human personality has to struggle with disorientation, depression and confusion. Its purpose is actually to achieve a continuous, increasing and lasting reconnection with one’s own soul consciousness. This is a time when many things that once seemed normal and safe for the human personality simply seem to break away. Where instead depressive states are experienced, where crises, insecurity and loss of orientation prevail.

I actually believe that we are all in some kind of global dark night – the entire human species, the entire human family. And, of course, that means a process that will last for several years and probably decades. We are going through personal and global, very individual crises and we are coming into contact with our own darkness. With many things that we have been carrying for a long time, but which we are very often simply not really aware of. And a whole lot of situations and emotions are being washed up inside of us, so that we have the opportunity to check if it still fits for us. Yes, in the end it is years of trials …  

It takes a while to understand that expanding consciousness has little to do with any external enemies, but rather with what is going on inside and how to deal with it. Nevertheless, it is apparently unavoidable that you first shoot yourself on everything you find in the world of Scheixxe and what you judge to be „that shouldn’t be like that“. And so one wades for a while through all kinds of dirt, horror ideas, laments about injustice and deals with horror scenarios. Starting with worldwide mind control, up to some omnipotent enemies of mankind. As an antipole you read channelings or inform yourself about natural food.

Basically, projections are a defense mechanism of the psyche. The term projection describes the transfer and shifting of one or more inner psychological conflicts to other persons, groups of people, living beings or various objects of the outside world.

Relatively harmless projections are when we ascribe characteristics, deficiencies or problems to other people, which we ourselves carry openly or hidden within ourselves. A far more serious form of transference is when I believe that the whole world is conspiring against me (or humanity, the whole earth, health, freedom, morality, faith, etc.).

Whatever the case may be, when we project, we thus transfer our own issues, fears or worries, to other people, organizations or groups of people, so that we do not have to feel it with ourselves. And then link these fears to certain events or circumstances that we do not like, which is then considered „proof“. The point is – what we project and transfer to other people are either unrecognized, personal qualities or unprocessed, emotional problems from our past, which we transfer to the present. And often, both variants intermingle. Projection allows us to transfer self-experienced situations or predominant emotional states, in our own consciousness, that are perceived as unbearable, to ward off these emotions from ourselves by transferring them to x-any situation, people and organizations.

And this, whether we want it or not, is unavoidable in a real wake-up process.

We push away what is inside of us and project it onto politicians, Illuminati, cabal, deep state mind control or whatever. To explain to us why we have certain feelings or thoughts. In this way we can continue to fool ourselves that everything is okay with US – only with THOSE out there, there is something wrong with them.

Talmud: „We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are“.

You can of course now despise all this fear porn of various conspiracy theories and call it bullshit – which of course is a good 99% (in my opinion) of all conspiracy theories. But in the end, they seem to fulfill a need that is not quite visible on the surface.

When you get into such a wake-up process – process, mind you – your entire identity structure is „attacked“. All the things and experiences that we hid from ourselves and that we repressed will be flushed up from our inner self over time and our protective and defensive shields will become porous. Most of the time, we have buried them so deeply that we can no longer feel or perceive many things. Deep, formative experiences that reach far back into childhood. All our deep fears, the inner insecurity, the doubts or our real self-esteem will gradually creep to the surface and say hello. Everything that has been quietly there all along will suddenly start screaming very loudly inside us.

Conspiracy theories are theories, not facts. They are extremely simplified black-and-white images and, moreover, highly exaggerated descriptions of a seemingly alternative reality. Mixed and connected with actual, clearly criticizable, political, social or economic processes. Whereby, however, the really criticizable things are completely lost, because the context with which they are interpreted is completely far-fetched.

BUT …

Now, if a Xavier Naidoo in a video cries because allegedly thousands of children are being freed from an underground torture prison where they were abused as human lab rats to obtain an alleged super drug called Adrenochrome and you react emotionally to it, it is because this extremely shocking horror show is arguing with certain experiences of your own past. Maybe from a past life, maybe in this life – does not matter in the end.

But you can suddenly feel THAT. It breaks down your protective shields and your emotional numbness. You can feel this nameless horror inside you, what it must mean to be tortured, abused and trapped. Powerless, to be exposed innocently and helplessly to something. But at the moment you can’t realize that this might have something to do with yourself. And you do not want to feel all the unpleasant things that have to do with you personally. You do not want to feel your personal powerlessness, helplessness or fears. You want to get rid of that.

I’m not saying that conspiracy theories are good. But everyone has to go through his own processes, even if that means having to go through a nonsense of denial of reality. If you bought into it, then you have to go through it. Okay, whatever makes you descend into your own darkness is good.

Of course, there is no such underground bunker and no tortured children to produce adrenochromes. And of course, „St. Donald Trump“ has not freed anyone. This Q Anon story is completely free of meaning and serves nothing else but to secure Donald Trump’s re-election and keep his conservative voters happy. Apart from the fact that there is child trafficking, that there is organized sexual and also ritual abuse of children, there is no truth in the story itself.

These and other conspiracy theories, however, bring you in touch with your own feelings and emotions that are buried deep inside you. The stronger you react to it, the more outraged and angry your reaction is, the more emotional charge you have built up.

The dark and heavy energy, such formatted information, docks fundamentally to the inner parts of the person that are in pain, traumatized or disoriented. This inner pain is often so well hidden and suppressed, so great and unspeakable – because never processed or admitted by us that only a supermonstrous, absolutely malignant source can explain it, who must be behind it. This kind of milkmaid’s calculation, of an omnipotent conspiracy feeds and triggers the fragmented inner child within us, which then becomes angry and projects its hatred, its rage and despair onto the world.

What do you think it does to you when you wallow in assertions and views that the eternal sacrificial existence enshrines? What does it do to you when you think the world is in the iron grip of a global conspiracy, a supposed elite, with the aim of undermining moral principles and ultimately reducing humanity? If you believe that some malevolent aliens have allied themselves with various leaders or secret organizations to rule the earth? And you yourself are completely powerless in this?

Does it make life much more fun? Does it create meaning, love or harmony for yourself and more connection to the world? Does it produce improvements in your personal life? You will have to admit that this is not the case. On the contrary – you clearly feel worse. If you roll around in dirt, you don’t get cleaner, but naturally dirtier.

If you go through this phase, the day will come when you are „done with the world“. Where you feel so weakened, depressed and trapped in your own darkness that you will experience a kind of inner breakdown. You will approach a state where you give up. Which, as weird as this may sound, is a good thing. When your inner resistance and your defense strategies no longer work and collapse, there is only one way out – to work through your emotional burdens. In reality, this is not a breakdown, even if it feels that way – it is a breakthrough.

This is the moment when the real challenge begins and you are so „backed up“ that you are ready to face your own personal issues. And in the end it’s all about that and nothing else. It is about you, not about politics, economics, Illuminati, cabal, Donald Trump, Rothschilds, Soros, Bill Gates or Rockefeller. It is about you personally, in this process. How you feel with yourself, your body and your life.

The Rothschilds are not responsible for how you feel or whether you have too little money in your pocket. Donald Trump is not coming to save you, Germany or the world. God or the universe will not transport you to a light-filled 5 D world where you don’t have to feel all the pain anymore. George Soros is not to blame if you do not take responsibility for yourself. The pharmaceutical industry is not to blame if you are sick. The slaughterhouses are not to blame if you are meat. Reptilian shape-shifters have nothing to do with it if you don’t feel comfortable with yourself or your body. Illuminati or Kabale are not responsible if your relationship breaks down or you are no longer satisfied with it. No one is responsible for whether you can accept yourself, with all your apparent faults or inadequacies. No one, except ourselves …

All these are deeply personal issues and conflicts that should be looked at. No one will come to save you miraculously. You are the one you are waiting for. You are the one who can „save“ yourself.

It is about making new friends with yourself and life. It is about self-acceptance and self-acceptance, exactly as you are. And you will only achieve this if you really deal deeply with yourself. Everything else is just an attempt to avoid yourself. To avoid the pain, loneliness, loss, anger and many other conditions that have accumulated in you for years. And it takes a lot of courage to venture into a therapeutic reappraisal process and to face your personal stories mercilessly.

This is a very critical time when you are extremely vulnerable and unfortunately some people do not manage to take the necessary step and get stuck in the old stories. They get stuck in conspiracy theories and cling to them desperately. And bullet through one wave of outrage into the next. If you don’t do transformation work and don’t integrate all the unpleasant emotions into yourself, you can get stuck in it for a very long time.

I recommend to everyone who wants to hear it, an examination of the Inner Person Model. And I strongly recommend feeling work. Get professional help if you are in this process. You will find it very difficult to get through on your own and if so, you will have to spend much more time with it. So take care of yourself and your consciousness …

Man is basically not a prisoner of fate, Illuminati, Freemasons, aliens, etc., but of his own consciousness, which he does not care about. When you deal with your inner conflicts, your emotional nebulas and diffuse mental states, you regain clarity – above all clarity about yourself. If you are clear with yourself again, many strange convictions you had about x – any external processes will also be cleared. You will then realize that you don’t need conspiracy theories to criticize various processes or states in our society. There are enough factual, fact-based and also technically competent arguments for this.  

For those of us who have been through it for a long time, for those who find it a bit annoying to see all this old stuff reappearing so massively in the social media. But we should remember that we once experienced a similar phase and had to go through it. No, of course these people are not stupid, even if a part of me has the perception that the concentrated stupidity seems to take over the power at the moment. They are merely in a process of transition and one can only wish them good luck and good luck with it. They are not the first and will not be the last. In fact, I believe that this will intensify.

I have a part of me that thinks it could save people from their own experience if they only had enough information. This part of me thinks he would abandon his tribe if he didn’t say anything about it. And so I sometimes make comments to some people when I feel it would make sense to correct the statement. Most of the time it doesn’t take 2 minutes of googling to find out the facts. Meanwhile I make such comments only once, sometimes even twice. But if I constantly get answers to them, which my 20 years younger self has known for a long time, because he himself answered criticism like this, then I stop.

Because the adult in me knows that it makes no further sense and the person has to go through this experience until the end. Once you are in it, there is no other way out than to go all the way through it. Then I just keep my mouth shut and sometimes I unfriend or put people on „sleep“. Especially those who share particularly annoying „alternative theories“. This is pure self-protection. I just try to keep some distance to the experiences of others that don’t fit (anymore) to mine.

It took me a lot of persuasion to make this part of me understand that it cannot protect or prevent anyone from their personal experience. And to feel all the sadness and regret, at the thought that in this process some will „fall under the table“ and may not be able to rise from there. This part of my personality has now understood that his tribe has to do its own personal, very individual work to come to terms with the situation and that this is entirely his responsibility. Or he will get stuck in his experience.

I am also aware that the term conspiracy theorist is considered offensive by many who are in it. Well, they should thank those people who, by mixing up thoroughly criticizable topics with phobias, paranoia, hysteria and pure fantasy, led to a huge accumulation of absurd theories that no clear-thinking person can take seriously. And no, the term conspiracist was not invented by the CIA to silence critics of the Kennedy assassination. It goes back to the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper, who coined the term conspiracy theory as early as 1948.

From where I stand today, conspiracy theories make no sense at all. They are packed with emotional dramas and personal imbalances, cause doubt, create fear and feed the hysterical inner child. Never have conspiracy theories led to anything constructive. They simply invite you to let your hatred, resistance, lack of empathy and inner drama queen out and let the proverbial sow run free. To understand this, just look through the commentary columns under some VT Post.

And it is not at all about the fact that there have been or are actual conspiracies throughout human history. But all the things that are manufactured and suspected about it today, so bizarre and excessive, can’t be put on any cow skin anymore. Conspiracies are by definition top secret – they are so secret that any fool with computer access can find them neatly listed on the Internet. Michael from Recklinghausen knows them all, maybe the CIA should hire him …

Makes totally sense, right?

But okay, it’s just basic personal issues that are transported in this way. Apparently, for some of us it is necessary to exaggerate things so much that we are capable of an emotional reaction. Because no matter which horror story is given for the best – it is always MY personal fear that is then triggered. My anxiety, my paranoia, my hysteria – all kinds of emotional instability that exists within myself is reflected.    

And when you are in there, you believe that it is all real. That some reptiles rule the world, that George Soros is using refugees to destroy Christianity, that Angela Merkel, Barack Obama and white-vultures are still reptiles in human form, that the Corona crisis is a hoax, that it’s the pretext for establishing a dictatorship, that all the famous Hollywood actors or politicians are pedophiles and that Donald Trump is liberating Germany. That the Corona crisis would be the final wake-up call for the rise to 5D or would be used by the elite to initiate a system crash and abolish cash or put all of humanity under mind control … etc., etc., etc.

It’s like a huge buffet where you can eat according to your personal taste. You can buy into any of these narratives – but a real danger is that they will swallow and eat you.

Ironically, it doesn’t really matter if things actually have any truth to them. The only criterion is whether or not we believe the narrated things. And what we believe is in turn related to a certain kind of identity. If there is already a deep conviction in our identity structure that we are victims, helplessly exposed to things and life, then it is not very difficult to convince ourselves of a world in which ALL people are victims of a huge conspiracy.

We all know, the world can sometimes be a terrible, unfeeling and cold place. But it can also be a beautiful, uplifting place, full of beautiful people and experiences. Everything this world holds in store is always an expression of people, of dynamics and personal, national and global processes and the consequences of these. If you look at the world in general with a sober view, you can see what a long way we as humanity still have to go.

It is a war that is raging inside us and that reflects its expression on the outside. The war between all the unredeemed and burdensome emotional content, the mental beliefs built around it and the painful attempts to control it and keep it away from us – but which we always lose because the elaborate stories we tell ourselves about it to rationalize and explain the pain away collapse sooner or later and the pain comes back to us with all its force. We can’t run away from it, because we can’t run away from ourselves.

None of us can „save“ the world, but we can „save“ ourselves and do our inner processing work. Imagine that everyone would do this? In no time we would see a completely different world. But since we refuse most of it and think that we ourselves do not need it – it will probably take some time. Nevertheless, this is the path we must take.

Until next time same station …

DISCLAIMER: Nothing you read here is THE truth. It is my truth, my perception and how I see things – now, in this moment.

THE INFORMATION SPACE

#consciousness #conspiracy theory

[sterling-silvers]

Star Wars: The High Republic Informal Review

These are my initial thoughts and minutely biased opinion/review of the High Republic.

My basis is primarily founded on the first two issues of the High Republic comic book – written by Cavan Scott – along with a secondary basis, from a secondhand account of the book Light of the Jedi, written by Charles Soule. It is a secondary account because I don’t read books; I am not a book man. My friend loves to read books and he graciously gets on Discord with me basically every day and together we dissect and discern what’s going on in this new period of the galaxy. This evaluation will mainly concentrate on the book portion and while not all encompassing, will give you a significant gist of how I’m feeling about High Republic. Also, there will be SPOILERS – you have been warned.

Overall, the book seems to have a strong first third, gets into a lull in the second third, and somewhat recovers in the last third but, arguably not as strong as that first third. The strengths of the book are definitely world building, the focus on Starlight Beacon, and finally, the introduction to all the new (old) Jedi; the Jedi are the best thing about the book. Plot wise, the book centers on and around Starlight Beacon with hyperspace being the driving force of the conflict.

Starlight Beacon is akin to an amalgam of air traffic control, a mutli-cultural embassy, a Jedi Temple, and a bazaar. At this point, it housed the largest number of Jedi outside of Coruscant and used signals to guide travelers during their interplanetary journeys. It was made in response to the Great Disaster – a hyperspace tragedy that caused starships all across the galaxy to be abruptly launched out of hyperspace leading to several moons in the Trymant system, including Korbatal, to be destroyed. Beacon exists to better calibrate for, identity, and curtail these new anomalies as astromech droids are a rarity in this period of time.

Around the same time, a marauder group – called the Nihil – have found a way to board and raid ships while they are in hyperspace using hyperspace channels termed Paths. Through the use of devices - called Path Engines - Nihil ships are to make short-burst hyperspace jumps, allowing them to appear and disappear in a flash during battle. Their raids have led to deaths, including that of Jedi Jora Malli -  a Togruta Jedi Master that sees the Force as a force – always in competition with itself. She was also very close friends with Sskeer; a Trandoshan Jedi Master that lost an am during the raids. 

In accordance with that last point, hyperspace will be somewhat of the crux contention to fans (and really science fiction enthusiast in general) as this is not how hyperspace has generally been established to work in Star Wars yet, is the lynch pin in how conflicts happen. This even follies with the newly established way hyperspace works in The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker but, I digress…

I knew there were going to be some major plot holes in this super prequel series but, my best hope was that they wouldn’t be too gaping. Just knowing that this application exists, changes many aspects of space travel and what characters going forward should know about it. Canon mechanics aside, Charles Soule makes it clear why was given this duty; he has blatant skill for writing not only characters but, also taking the extra steps of having the individualized power of the character be an extension of them. He did this very well during his run in Uncanny Inhumans and he’s not disappointing here either (he’s had plenty of practice in the Star Wars realm already with books like Star Wars, Poe Dameron, and The Rise of Kylo Ren).

There are a multitude of Jedi brought in, which complements the time period and era of it being the High Republic but, the real asset of the book is Soule taking the needed time to give the reader a look at how each Jedi interprets the Force in their own way. Moreover, the pairings of different Jedi serve as accompaniments to each other in very noteworthy ways.

Jedi Master Loden Greatstorm, sees the Force as an ocean.

His Padawan, Bell Zettifar sees it as a flame – sometimes a raging inferno, sometimes glinting ember. (This is very fascination as usual flames are a motif associated with the Sith yet, here is Bell - a shining example of a Jedi - interpreting fire in a positive light. I also like how view of the Force allowed him to synch with his charhound, Ember).

Wookie Padawan Burryaga Agaburry, perceives it has a tree attached to a leaf of equal size.

Vernestra Rwoh, the one of the youngest Jedi Knight in the order, sees it as a river.

Reath Silas, see it as a spider web – strong in some spots, weak in others.

Elzar Mann, views it as an endless, bottomless sea which was impossible to be used up, not matter for what purpose or however many times it was called upon. (I’m curious to see if there will be a differentiation between how Mann sees the force when compared to Greatstorm; an ocean is deeper than that of a sea.)

Finally, Jedi Master Avar Kriss, hears the Force as a symphony – moreover, she can connect with minds of other Jedi and is able see how other see how they see the Force.

Hot take but, the character of Kriss feels like a Kathleen Kennedy character as Kennedy been prone to interject White, third wave feminism (if you’re not intersectional then you’re not a “feminist” to me) into Star Wars. One of her signatures is to take a White human female and make her the either the main character or a key figure in the narrative. Avar Kriss, a White blonde-haired human woman, is literally depicted as “the brightest, most noble example of Jedi-hood” so, I’m keeping a keen eye on her – doesn’t help that she just got assigned Marshall to Starlight Beacon but, if it’s any consolation (more like mitigation), she was the SECOND pick as the first died.

Ultimately, if you are able to get the major hurdle that is hyperspace Paths, this is a competent and enjoyable start. Soule even goes as far to add some interesting and even practical – yet lore breaking – devices in this age: he’s made a new (old) space ship called “Vectors” that are powered/steered by Force sensitive people with the lightsaber being the key to active it (even cooler, the hub takes the color of the lightsaber that activates it). 

That’s a great idea and makes sense within the universe as whole yet, collapses on itself when you remember what time period, we’re in – the past, so why was this not built upon in the future? It definitely feels like the books are 85% of the story while the comics (more on them in a later post) are – at their prime peak – a mere “intrinsic 15%”. The best part for me has been the characters; hopefully, the plot will come along to accent them justly. Arguably though, the best characters – that of Loden and Bell – should be depicted in the comics based on their gravitating dynamics and instant attachment with readers.

#star wars #the high republic #high republic #charles soule #light of the jedi #starlight beacon #loden greatstorm #bell zettifar #burryaga agaburry #vernestra rwoh #vern #reath silas #elzar mann #avar kriss #jora malli #sskeer #hyperspace #nihil #the path #vectors #kathleen kennedy #uncanny inhumans #the rise of kylo ren #poe dameron #the last jedi #rise of skywalker #cavan scott #white feminism #intersectional feminism

[waterrunstogether]

Rites of Passage in the Fifth World

I’ve been thinking lately about the absence of real rites of passage in modern “western culture”. A rite of passage is a sort of ritualized event (that may or may not be endorsed/organized by a community) in which a person is believed to exit from one stage of life and enter the next, usually from childhood to adulthood. Other than the humiliation of high school proms/frat hazing, or getting your driver’s license, or turning 21 and getting shitfaced, my culture in the United States has little to offer in the way of true rites of passage. 

The result is a population of confused, somewhat disillusioned children driving around and going to work or university and pretending to be adults while hopelessly stuck in the liminal space between youth and adulthood.

~ 20 year old me pretending to know what’s going on ~

I have thought about quinceañeras and baptisms, religious rites of passage commonly practiced still, but considering the traumatic experience that my parents’ organized religion was for me, I don’t believe now that my baptism was a helpful event facilitating my transition into maturity. I think it was a blindingly painful event whose toxicity I needed to overcome in what I now believe was the true rite of passage. 

I first dropped acid when I was traveling in Bulgaria. My partner was in her hometown across the country and I was visiting Plovdiv with a friend. We had just finished traveling the world, or at least Eurasia, meeting new faces and trying new things and taking wild risks in Thailand and Turkey and India and Malaysia, to name a few. I had also just escaped the cult I was born and raised in which had hammered into me from birth that my sexual and romantic orientation was an abomination, as a woman I was to obey men, God loved me and wanted me to fear him (that is to say, love = fear), the leaders of the church were to be obeyed and respected all the time (even if they were obviously wrong) and so on and so forth. It was an insane transition between being trapped in these religious handcuffs and learning that I could break free all along. In fact, I carried so much self hatred and internalized homophobia with me into my supposed new life that I didn’t know what to do with myself. Despite being outwardly happier than I had ever been before with a wonderful partner and community who truly loved and supported me for who I was, inwardly I was constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown due to all of the conflicting thoughts and beliefs I was carrying and creating within myself.

The experience of that first trip was an interesting one. Every step of the way my body seemed to pull me towards the letting go of all of the toxicity that was so thick and had built up like plaque in the arteries of my energetic being--yet, I remained me throughout the trip, at the end feeling somewhat empowered but not yet finished with the transformation.

A few months later I took psilocybin, AKA magic mushrooms, with my little brother on a rainy Summer day in D.C. The whole come up of the trip was talking to trees and observing the movements of leaves, running my fingers over the moss growing on the exposed, knotty roots of tree in front of our house. But at the end of the trip, something changed. Once again my body requested, begged me, to let go of the still-prevalent toxicity inside of me. My health was in rough shape, mentally and physically, and my body knew the culprit. But once more I felt I couldn’t let go just yet, it would be too much for me, I wasn’t ready. So I spent the entire come down and then some, maybe four hours, weeping uncontrollably on the basement floor.

The second time I dropped acid was yesterday, with my partner, here in Berlin. It changed everything.

During the come up I was taken aback by how strong the effect it had on me was. My partner, bless her heart, had taken a larger dose than me, yet felt no effect the entire time. Her tolerance has always been naturally higher than mine for every kind of intoxicating substance, and LSD was no exception. 

As time went on I came to realize that her high tolerance was incredibly fortunate for me and my trip. The initial come up was amusing, as flashes of white light began to fill up my eyes, closed and open; but very quickly I began to get paranoid, strange little thoughts about being set up and targeted running through my mind as my sense of self slowly began to dissipate, just nonsense that the ego conjures up to protect itself. But my partner’s calming reassurances that she loved me and that I was safe effectively calmed me down.

Once I began to enjoy the ride up, holding a half of a pomegranate and appreciating its beauty, touching a slice of orange and loving how soft it felt in my hands, admiring the fractals of color creating all kinds of geometric shapes on the walls and snow outside the window, I became comfortable with my loss of identity. At some point I realized that I didn’t even know my name, and I didn’t care, because it was irrelevant. All that was relevant was experience. 

Imagine experiencing and interacting with the world around you without the barrier of the thing that we are so used to that it’s difficult to think of it as a barrier at all: your concept of self. Ideas about names and races and gender and desire and anger and malice and hatred just made absolutely no sense whatsoever. In this state, all that made sense was goodness and beauty and love. All that I understood was harmony and mutually beneficial behavior. My preconceived notions about who I was and what that meant were being shattered and shredded before my very eyes, exposed for what they were: nonsense.

Once I plateaued and began to slowly come down after about four or five hours I was able to contemplate what these things meant, what they would mean for me going forward. I went into the bathroom around hour 7 and decided that it was time to look into the mirror.

Many people will tell you not to look into the mirror during an acid trip, that it’ll give you the dreaded “bad trip” and you’ll have a shit time. I completely disagree. If you are like me and need to come to terms with yourself through the wonderful, horrific, beautiful, terrifying experience that is an “ego death”, I’m afraid that you’ll have no choice but to look into the mirror at some point. 

So, I stared myself down in the mirror and admitted what I couldn’t admit for so long, due to being taught that I was essentially evil since the day I was born. I’d called myself a sinner, wicked, worthless, ugly, an abomination and just about every other mean word in the evangelical dictionary. But as I stood there looking at my body in the mirror, egoless and impartial, I said, “You have done and thought some cruel things to yourself for some time now. But you know what? You are a kind person. You are a wonderful person. You treat people with respect and love, you treat everyone you’ve ever met with so much empathy, so much caring. You love the truth, you love to be generous, you love to be a good friend. You must begin to treat yourself the same way. I know you’ve had so much hatred in your heart contaminating your energy for so long, but that is enough. That is enough. No more. I am a kind person. I am a kind person. I love you. Remember that night so long ago? Beneath the stars, where they submerged you in the baptismal water and tried to destroy you, saying these sacred waters would wash all your sins away, along with your fragile, meaningless identity? Well, they simply added more to your ego, a darker side. You built up so much negativity for so long. Well, look at you now. Your identity, all of the ideas and concepts that you’ve built up around who you really are to protect you from the hurt of Life, it’s all gone. Now you’re going to baptize yourself again. You’ll be truly reborn, this time dedicated not to destroying yourself for the sake of a religion, but dedicated to renewing and becoming and becoming and becoming.” As I looking into the mirror my silhouette became filled in with the velvet black of the night sky, full of bright stars.

I turned on the water and was baptized once again, by my own hands.

When I returned to the room I felt happier than I had ever felt in my life, light as air, free. I told several people about how much I love them and described my love for them in detail, not as this thing that’s an extension of my own ego, but my love for them was a little bit of energy that I had the honor of holding in me, in this body, and sharing between us for a time, for the wonderful events that we call our lives. I could actually see love. I understood that I was not all of the concepts I’ve built around myself, but an expression of energy in this space and time, connected to every other expression of energy in all of history, from the beginning and until the end. My matter, my body, was simply a vehicle for the energy, and would be recycled into new vehicles after I die. My energy would be transferred into new vehicles as well. That’s what we perceive as death: just a simple transfer of energy and recycling of matter. My ego would not live on, thankfully. My consciousness as conflated with ego would cease to exist with me. But the underlying animating force behind all things in the universe, the true source of consciousness, would never be destroyed or created, simply recycled again and again and again and again. Becoming and becoming and becoming and becoming.

The hilarious and bizarre world of reality is hilarious and bizarre. It’s so beautiful and mystical and wonderful and honestly, nothing I write here could ever explain how I experienced being alive in that sixteen hour trip. Words don’t convey it, words can’t convey it. Reality is visceral, experiential, impartial and impossible to quantify in something as crude as human language. 

All I know is that, today, I am a fundamentally changed person. I’d feared ego death for so long, feared that it would be too much, too painful. And it was so, so painful--but it was so worth it. I am happy and proud to exist, grateful for everything I have accomplished and can accomplish in this miraculous, tiny little vessel during this ephemeral event that is my life. I can’t wait to wake up tomorrow if tomorrow exists, and unleash all of my love on everyone who’ll have it. Love is the energy that unites us with our own bodies and the entire world around us. How lucky and strange it is to be anything at all.

May you have a peaceful day. The universe smiles upon you.

[killingeveperspectives]

Perspective: Can redeeming Villanelle make her character less iconic?

Have you ever heard of the Codex Gigas? Also known as ‘The Devil’s bible’, it is the largest illuminated manuscript in the world according to Wikipedia. It is told that a monk made a pact with the Devil himself and feverishly wrote the entire book in one night! As an acknowledgment to his partner he drew his monstrous figure in one of the pages. Said page looks different from the others, as if touched by some malignant magic. Today we know the reason for it: the page suffered the most deterioration for being the most exposed. For centuries people could not get enough of this character: The Devil. Indeed, we have codified ways to save ourselves from the metaphorical Devil – ourselves. We invented sins and crimes to tame something deeply primal within us. Freud called it id, the origin of all that which makes us tick: impulses, instinct, drives, libido. It reckons only two things: pleasure and satisfaction. If we could strip ourselves from all inhibition there would be impulse and sensation. It would be brutal ecstasy. But what would be of the world if all 7 billion of us would uncompromisingly seek to satisfy our impulses? Hell, so we don’t.

But through art we can glimpse at what this liberation would feel like. Some sort of existential voyeurism. Aristotle would call it catharsis, but what does he know? This is how some of the most remarkable characters were born, they mesmerize us by being their id – unapologetically, terrifyingly, charmingly – like the Devil himself. Characters like Hannibal Lecter, The Joker, Alex DeLarge; they are larger than life, unbind, amoral and extremely bright (and all male). Like Hannibal brilliantly put it in Silence of the Lambs: “Nothing happened to me, officer Starling, I happened” or like the perverted childlike Alex explain in A Clockwork Orange: “What I do I do because I like to do”. As simple as that. Pure satisfaction of impulse because they feel like it. When we, uneased by what they represent, want explanations or justifications, The Joker toys with us, always giving us a different version of his tragic background, as if he knew we want to give him an excuse and, in good joker fashion, he makes a huge joke out of it. They take it very seriously to explain to us what went wrong with them, because it doesn’t really matter.

While the id makes us organic, whole creatures, many attributes of it have been culturally dissociated from womanhood. The violent, self-preserving and egoistic impulses were replaced with nurturing, self-sacrifice and compassion – not surprisingly the only impulse afforded to women is motherhood (or sexual desire for the satisfaction of another). Therefore, women cannot fully materialize their humanity. These raging impulses feel alien to womanhood, something imposed on to them by circumstance so severe that it warps the nature of the female itself. Aggressive women are sad and broken, or vengeful, or mad, or sexualized – these are the portrayals we have been conditioned to expect from fiction. When compared to their male counterparts, even mild violence in a female character almost immediately requires an explanation: how someone betrayed them, or abused them, or they were conditioned into it. Rage and aggression are never theirs to own, it is always extrinsically sourced.

On a superficial level, the character of Villanelle doesn’t seem so unique. Immediately one could think of Nikita in La femme Nikita, who was a drug junkie teen, rescued and transformed into a cold-blooded femme-fatale assassin by the shadowy government group “The Centre” after they faked her death to break her from prison (Uncannily similar?). Or the movie Anna by the same writer, where a Russian girl accepts a KGB offer to be trained into an assassin in order to escape her abusive homelife. Or Marvel’s black widow who is also a Russian spy, apparently brainwashed by USSR to become an assassin. Other female assassins include The bride in Kill Bill who set off into a revenge killing spree after being brutally assaulted and left for dead, and other movies I vaguely remember about abused women becoming assassins to seek revenge, or shallow sexy female assassins with no purpose for existing other than being the sexy female assassin. However, all these characters were made into assassins by external factors. Villanelle is set apart from the typical femme-fatale assassin trope by owning her own joy of killing, by the rejection of the broken female narrative and the rejection of the objectifying male gaze. In order to unmistakably ground these traits alienated from women – violence, disregard, cruelty, indifference, sadism, risk-taking – in her nature, the character was written as a primary psychopath. Being an assassin fits her natural talents, not the other way around    

Villanelle could occupy a very special place among a roster of remarkable fictional characters like the ones mentioned earlier. She is the female embodiment of absolute, remorseless indulgence and rage, representing the unashamed satisfaction of women’s impulses, for her own enjoyment alone, with style and wit – A truly magnetic character and fresh perspective. In psychopathic Villanelle, women are allowed to reclaim these violent impulses, which is oddly empowering and humanizing. Give us that. Brilliantly, the cathartic element is mirrored by Eve herself. Eve too sees her unfulfilled and alienated impulses incarnated in Villanelle, which in turn sparks Eve’s exploration of her own identity. Ultimately Villanelle’s seduction to embrace impulse despite its danger is at the core of their electric attraction and conflict.

Thus, by retconning Villanelle in Season 3, the character no longer represents the provoking embodiment of female drive, managing to become an elevated female assassin trope, at best. The challenging take on womanhood, instead plays into all of the expectations. Villanelle is no longer a female true to her nature that gets a kick from being an assassin; but a troubled girl, tortured into becoming a killing machine by a past of abuse. A broken woman who rejects the violence instilled into her once she finds healing. Interestingly, it is not that she merely chooses not to kill but she is unable to carry on the act, signifying the deeper alienation of the violent impulse from her own self – the same impulse that once made her so iconic. This lack of impetus to kill is but a symptom of the decreased character’s libido in general: fewer shopping sprees, less savory eating, less unpretentious playfulness, less color, less eroticism, less aggression, less danger. Unfortunately, it also means the weakening of her dynamic with Eve. Villanelle is being tamed, and its well… not her best take.

We, the audience, perceive this lack of vitality oozing into the entire show, but once you shift what Villanelle represents this is inevitable. Villanelle becomes mundane, and it brings the nostalgia of the force of nature she once was. It leaves a similar taste as the brutal transformation of Alex from despicable nihilistic hedonist into a model citizen in A clockwork orange: a conflicted perverted sadness at the loss of Alex’s authenticity despite him turning into a “better” human being – ingeniously, his redemption was to gain his despicable impulses back. 

The initial character design of Villanelle was something unique and authentic. However, In the process of redeeming her, she might become a new iteration of a trope explored several times that simply reflect the current space of female characters and lack conceptual originality. Yet, there is still room for the recuperation of Villanelle’s transgressive power: a subversive redemption. By incorporating the impulsive indulgence and violence back into the character, Villanelle’s arc can be taken somewhere new, complex and truly special. A remarkable character we can’t get enough of – like the Devil herself.

#killingeveperspectives #killing eve #killingeve #killing eve retcon #killing eve analysis #killing eve review #villanelle #villanelle analysis

[alexanderpusheen]

what frustrates me the most abt this china narrative is that the US created al qaeda and ISIS, those groups are recruiting and causing terrorism in xinjiang, china has been trying to handle the situation with re-education programs often suggested by westerners, and its still being treated as this major human rights violation. there are actually dozens of countries with several robust anti radicalization programs that are just as strict, like singapore, colombia, yemen, bangladesh, saudi arabia, and indonesia. this paper ive linked to was even funded by the DHS so like...why has detaining someone and basically reverse brainwashing them out of being a terrorist been so acceptable for so long but now its an issue? 

if you take issue with chinas program, you have to prove its somehow exceptional to these other programs. since we really dont have any way of knowing what is truth or reality thanks to the enormous disinformation campaign going on, you fucking cant. we dont even know what the programs entail because even googling it gets you exclusively hyperbolic concentration camp accusations. 

what i will say is that relations between the han majority and the uyghur minority have been strained since at least the 80s. link is the notoriously conservative and pro US intervention human rights watch, so dont say im using pro commie sources or anything. every time i do any bit of research on this i seem to find an attempt from major news outlets in the early to mid 2000s or late 20-teens to prove this all started or became dramatically worse now, but things have always been tense. and its not really a surprise that things really got bad after the collapse of the soviet union, an event that was geographically close to china and the xinjiang region and also just like, a fucking major global event in general.

what i find to be very odd is just how dramatically the narrative has changed. the diplomat, one of my favorite periodicals, went from taking very nuanced and balanced positions on xinjiang that i almost completely agreed with to being just as aggressive as outlets like the BBC and CNN in the span of five years. they have eleven pages worth of articles on xinjiang, mostly covering the terrorism and beijings response (which i agree is too harsh) and xinjiang muslims’ relationships to the greater muslim world. 

an example is how this article talks about the conflict at the time which warns of escalating violence as a result of han chauvinism and beijing being unable to deal with the extremism holistically. it points out how there were uyghurs captured among taliban ranks in afghanistan and how many might have even been working with ISIL.

The threat will not be an existential one to the Chinese state, as most Uighurs would prefer a peaceful accommodation. But even if only 1 percent of Uighurs hold extreme views, there are 10 million in Xinjiang and even for a state security apparatus as formidable as China’s, 100,000 or more angry people present a tough challenge.

i think its totally right that china does not allow people in that area to have cars, woodcutting tools, and amonium nitrate (which is used in bombs) is very strictly regulated. i completely agree that this is not how you combat terrorism. most people do not want war and broadly punishing these people is itself a human rights violation that went unnoticed until now.

however, in that same year, the diplomat also published this article about the infamous turkestan islamic party. members of TIP are like, literal jihadists lmfao.

TIP fighters call on the world’s Muslims to join the jihad against Western countries in internet videos. Perhaps most worringly for China, the TIP believes that Muslims may fight locally using various means instead of coming to Syria and Iraq to conduct a “holy war” against the “infidel” Western regimes.  

yeah i definitely want to hear more about what these guys have to say. the article is really good because i think it highly illustrates just how dangerous these people are. theyve killed hundreds of people across china and want to establish a fascist religious state in xinjiang. while the article speaks for itself, i believe the last paragraph really highlights why china is being singled out whereas countries like france and canada are considered allies to muslims for whatever reason:

However, as experience has shown, China takes a passive position in the struggle against global Islamic jihad in Syria and Iraq. Beijing has not sent its troops to the Middle East to fight ISIS and has instead confined itself to diplomatic support for Russia and the United States. The Chinese government uses the attacks of Islamic jihadists to persuade Western countries to support Beijing’s position on Xinjiang and turn a blind eye when the freedom and rights of Uyghurs are harshly suppressed by Chinese security forces. Therefore, China is not perceived by the West as a reliable partner in the fight against terrorism. [emphasis mine]

im just a little surprised to see that a lot of these violent attacks from extremists throughout the years have targeted not just han chinese but also other uyghurs. in the west people do not typically sympathize with terrorists as freedom fighters, even on the left, because we know that no matter how angry or how seemingly justified the violence might seem, terrorism is unacceptable and it grossly misrepresents islam. it is a fascist act because those terrorists often follow an extremely right wing version of islam. also, we know that those who carry out terrorist attacks even outside of the west are middle class and professionals in some way, not poor and marginalized people. the level of nuance afforded to terrorists outside of xinjiang is pretty staggering. 

yet in china, there seems to be this excitement than they are killing chinese people, even if some of those chinese are other uyghers or otherwise muslims. those who carry out attacks in xinjiang dont get any nuance or analysis because theyre justified.

ive referenced the diplomat earlier but this article from 2013 says it perfectly: Call Tiananmen Attack What It Was: Terrorism. except terrorism is bad. and the west wants you to support the uyghurs. and make no mistake, they do not want you to support the millions of uyghurs who want to live peacefully, free of any repression, american or chinese. they want you to support the jihadists randomly blowing up chinese and tourists alike because you are meant to sympathize with their plight.

terrorism isnt something to be romantacized or cheered on. it is something someone or someones do when they feel they have no other option. people do not want to kill even those they feel they have every right to because thats a line you cant uncross. murder changes you, justified or not. see the last chapter of wretched of the earth for this.

terrorism is great, however, for destabilizing a region or a country, and xinjiang is resource-rich. establishing a US-friendly regime, no matter how good they are on human rights, is the goal. the US does not care about muslims. they do not care about human rights. china, also, does not really seem to care about muslims or human rights either. but we’ve seen this since vietnam, and the US has learned since vietnam. the vietnamese were sympathetic. they were minding their business. 

after vietnam, merely being communist isnt enough to warrant invasion. theyre killing their own people. nevermind that bolsonaro kills his own people and no one wants to invade (yet--biden has mention sanctions wrt us which is scary but again, thats got everything to do with making sure latin america is loyal to the west, not HR offenses). korea, although it was before vietnam, was less publicized and learning from vietnam gave the US a valuable lesson: always blame the victim. and thus, the US blames the victims of its violence. even if its ‘justified’, even if its ‘true,’ as was the case with saddam hussein, invading and occupying was the nightmare no one but the imperialists anticipated. because they dont broadcast what occupying forces do to the occupied. i am old enough to remember abu ghraib. have it seared in my memory forever. you perhaps are also old enough to remember, but also think millions of abu ghraibs and guantanamo bays are always worth it, always justified. 

i know people arent going to read this and remind me really rudely that they didnt read it but i want to really emphasize how one of imperialism and colonialisms features is ethnic and racial separatism. how the rwandan genocide couldnt have happened without previous belgian and french rule. how yugoslavia wouldve remained a single country had it not been for NATO. i think its easy to diminish the role of the colonizer in all of this, but it is actually one of its goals: divide and conquer. exacerbate the existing conflicts to the point of genocide. 

and if the west succeeds in balkanizing china, you will get more racism rather than less. you will see more violence against muslim minorities rather than less. they will feel less empowered rather than more. china has to learn that they are also to blame in a way that will be catastrophic for over a billion people. han chauvinism and outright racism must be addressed beyond window dressing.

wrapping up, china is in the wrong here. what theyre doing is racist and humiliating a population that has to be empowered. and the one child rule, even for the han majority, is imo fucking evil lol like sorry tankie tumblr im tankie too but i cannot for the life of me accept that as a good thing.... but i also dont buy the accusations of genocide, because even tho a lot of these articles are kind of glossing over it, china is trying to handle the terrorism in the region. imo theyre feeding into it by getting more han in the area, but also having more han but forcing them to take worse jobs would be a show of good will. idk, this situation is extremely complex and frankly, most uyghers do not want secession. 

i also take extreme issue with people saying that adrian zenz is somehow reliable. not only is he a nazi crackpot, hes also literally the only source for almost all of what we know about this in the west. that is not how you do journalism. i dont understand how people are saying ‘yeah hes an extremely fascist grifter but also i believe him because hes anti communist and also anti china’. thats also not really the point? the point is that hes also the ONLY SOURCE on almost all of this, which is alarming. 

i also find it very startling that in order to keep interest in the story, every few weeks the US has to remind people that the chinese are also doing what the US is doing to women in its own camps. forget that the US is separating minors from parents (since 2008). forget that the US is sterilizing women en masse (since 2017). forget that the US is raping women at the border (since there was a border). forget the US even has camps because now they arent even called that anymore. this is not that ‘you can be angry at two things at once’ but a clearly cynical attempt to get its citizens to forget that the US is detaining, deporting, sterilizing, and raping, and gassing non US nationals. 

they are not ‘your own people.’ they are me. the other. i am an immigrant to the US, currently in my country of birth, so i am the other to you, the american. the chinese are doing the evil crime of killing their own. but the americans could never kill their own because they dont consider black americans to be their own. latin american nationals are not their own. bombing millions globally is not their own. thats always justifiable. there is clearly an element of racism in how these crimes are perceived as more or less evil.

the way immigrants and black americans are brutalized in the US is almost naturalized. like its the way things are supposed to be. you can live with that. its upsetting that you have to hear about antiblackness and the like but you know thats just how life is. you dont necessarily call for the US to be sanctioned or bombed by other countries because you believe in the inherent goodness of white america. but countries like china and iran and north korea deserve to be starved and killed for their crimes. and you can never say ‘maybe bombing and starving a country isnt the answer’ because it means you agree with it. you can never say ‘this is clearly propaganda to make me hate another race so much’ because it means youre a genocide denier. im sorry, but again, i remember iraq in 2003, i remember libya in 2011. i dont buy it.

finally, theres been a lot of attacks on asian people in the US lately and if you cannot see the violent way the US talks about china the country and how that influences people to harm asians within the US then idk what else to tell you. people will really believe this shit and say the chinese are all blood thirsty islamaphobes and thus need to be harmed. ‘im not like that! i defend my asian friends from racism!’ thats nice and all but idk how spreading some sinophobic propaganda designed by the US to make you support some kind of violence against one billion chinese people isnt inherently racist. also its unhelpful because sanctions dont really solve problems. but ive spoken too much.

[armsdealing]

FENRIR + GODHOOD / WOLFHOOD.

although it is not explicitly expressed in any particular attestation (that i know of), i do chose to view fenrir as a god of wolves -- on top of being the norse god of destruction. this due to his status as the most significant, infamous wolf in the mythology, as well as the oldest, fiercest and largest of angrboda’s offspring. keeping this in mind, i choose to view him as the ultimate symbolic representative of what wolves are in norse mythology.

DESTRUCTIVENESS AND WOLF SYMBOLISM

wolves, in northern europe, were subject to an complex treatment: 

on one hand: they were a true threat for the average peasant, whose experience with them was that of a beastly predator that threatened their flocks and even the peasants themselves and their children. there’s even the case of the wolfssegner, typically destitute elderly men who made a living in certain germanic tribes selling charms against wolf attacks, or casting malevolent spells that would prompt them. their customers were, naturally, farmers and peasants. throughout the working class and the poor there’s this commonality of viewing wolves as destructive forces, as malevolent. yet, on the other hand, the warrior classes saw the wolf for his might -- his power, his wildness, and fierceness -- as well as social traits, his capability for pack bonds. wolves were also associated with odin, having two wolves as his pets (geri and freki) and of all berserkers it’s the wolf warriors (the úlfhéðnar) who are sometimes seen as odin’s special warriors. when they’re viewed on this angle they’re seen as noble, brave, loyal, and wise. 

as a rule, the pack was seen as a symbol of camaraderie, and it was lone wolves who were the problem. the word for outlaw in northern europe was "wolf's head", referring to the bounty on the severed heads of lone wolves who became a problem to settled villages and needed to be exterminated.

well, fenrir didn’t get to be seen as noble, loyal, or wise. in many ways he is the prototypical lone wolf figure -- kidnapped by the aesir, torn from his clan and family to keep him from becoming the predicted destructive force he was to become. he was denied a pack, and so ironically it only pushed him further toward rebellion and mayhem; he grows progressively but quickly and as he grows he turns even more of a ravenous threat in the gods’ eyes, forcing the gods to bind him. it’s easy to see the similarities, how commonfolk’s fear of wolves -- especially the lone wolf -- would be reflected in their deities. as a jotunn, and more specifically a rokkr, fenrir represents nature’s more destructive qualities, a chaotic primordial force that can be interpreted as downright hostile to mankind. yet, seeing him only in a negative light is limiting, in my opinion, everything that fenrir is, and it’s just plain inaccurate, as it is framing fenrir in the absolutist moral framework of christianity. the jotnar are not evil, they’re not demons, they’re merely oppositional to the aesir because of the inherent way their essences and wants (to be amongst nature and accept it as is, good and bad) clash with the aesir’s wants (to tame nature’s useful side for their benefit and fight against its more harmful aspects to protect themselves and mankind). the struggle against fenrir is one of the most elementary examples of this jotnar/aesir conflict.

fenris is, in many ways, jotun essence taken to its furthest point, its ultimate uncompromised end. this means understanding that when we say that the jotnar are, by nature, part of nature... that means also that they partake of the entirety of nature and not just the euphemized happy bits that we like to pretend are what nature "really is". every part of nature is dangerous and not terribly disposed to privilege humans over any other part. the sea eats people, the fire lays waste to countrysides, the ice storm freezes you, the earth will receive your corpse and fill it with maggots. our planet whirls around a sun that will burn out, in a galaxy that will wind down and disintegrate before it can explode again into life.

to understand these things as not only "not negative" but as awesome, mind‑bending, even beautiful ‑ that's how we understand jotun nature. it's terrifying, yes ‑ and there is also a good and benevolent side, but you don't get only that aimed at you, ever. it's about accepting the whole package without this secret fingers‑crossed idea that if they just like you enough, the forces of nature will make a special exception for you. and that doesn't work.

to see Fenris is to see a magnificent creature who must be chained, or he’ll eat the world. it’s seeing the grandeur of a hurricane, an earthquake, a solar flare, and knowing that this too is the hand of the divine… and at the same time knowing that they will do terrible harm. Fenris is what he is, entirely and fully, and he will not compromise himself to be anything else for anyone else… even if he must be bound. are there things about your nature that you would rather be imprisoned than compromise? If not, then perhaps you might not understand Fenris. he embodies our ambivalence toward the universe, which sees us as expendable flecks of dust. … and the only way to get around that is to see from a higher perspective, one that can appreciate the divinity of ambivalences.- X

fenrir is not just an agent of change. he is change itself, the ultimate threat on the status quo of the gods. and because of that, as he brings about ragnarok, he’s an agent of renewal and transformation. 

fenrir, like the wolf's hook cross, is a representation of unchangeable fate. there is an aura of fatality surrounding him that the gods sense, and none more so than odin, because it is primarily his existence which is subject to fenrir's whim. odin, having heard the prophecies of the volva (fenrir's own mother, angrboda) knew that his son balder would be slain, that his brother hodur would do this act. that the rökkr forces would break free of their bonds, and destroy the gods. and that finally he, odin, would die within the massive jaws of fenrir.

thus, the binding of fenrir with gleipner is nothing but a postponement of the inevitable. it is merely an instance of the gods, and odin in particular, performing, and realizing, their role. for, although the fate incurred by fenrir may be unavoidable and unchangeable, it does not necessarily mean defeat or resignation. one of the great lessons of the rökkr is that this life is nothing, that there is no integral meaning to it, and that it can all so easily be consumed by fenrir. the purpose of living, then, is to realize this truth, and then to build ones own worth and meaning from existence. - X

PATRON OF WOLVES, WARGS, AND WEREWOLVES

fenrir is not a friendly god, and he’s not an easy god to worship. he’s not even a welcoming god. he’s demanding, intense and he can see through the souls of the most hard-hearted individuals, and frighten them. for him, vacuous violence and bloodlust isn’t enough -- he demands your sincerity, your raw emotion, your anger; you need to be true to him or he will not bother with you, and in fact might even offend him and make him hostile. humans, in particular, need a specially strong connection to nature (physical nature, and their inner nature) in order to connect with him. and if you do manage that, he can make an unstoppable force out of you. he is, on top of everything else, a god of last resorts and if you’re ever in dire need of protection you can count on him to intervene.

this all being said, humans are not his only believers. they’re not even his main believers, since people tend to turn to more approachable (and relatable) deities like the aesir first. fenrir focuses mainly on wolves, and in midgard it’s not entirely rare for him to be near them, helping them, or using them as emissaries. he focuses on wargs, the norse wolf-like beings that inhabit ironwood alongside the volvas, considering he’s the oldest of them, and his mother reigns over them as chieftess. and he focuses lastly on werewolves. 

regardless of a werewolf’s origin, fenrir’s nature is such that most wolves will feel a connection to him. they will feel drawn to fenrir, and perceive his paradoxical otherness/familiarity and his power. however, it’s up to them how they will respond to it. a lot of them do worship him (there might be one or two doomsday cults/packs out there waiting for his reckoning), and there might be sacrifices done his name. but a lot of them, when encountered with his presence, chose to ignore his influence, or even respond defensively. regardless, fenrir does not take this personally. werewolves are just as human as they’re wolves and so they carry an egocentrism that is, in his opinion, wholly theirs. still, it’s not rare for him to occasionally encounter mortally wound werewolves (particularly lone werewolves!) and offer them a chance at survival, or keep them company while they feel alone and heal.

#* fenrir. #meta. #i love fenrir ugh king!!!

[linkspooky]

Synonyms or Antonyms: Dazai and Dostoevsky

From the moment they meet within Bungou Stray Dogs, Dazai and Fyodor are set up as foils. 

Foil Definition. In literature, a foil is a character that shows qualities that are in contrast with the qualities of another character. The objective is to highlight the traits of the other character.

That is to say from the moment they are drawn in panel together, the audience is naturally meant to compare and contrast them. Their entire first scene plays their similarities and differences up. First, Dazai dresses as Fyodor not only as a joke but to draw the eye to how similar they are, both of them dark haired skinny males with pale complexions who wear overcoats. 

Dazai explains he was able to predict where Fyodor would end up, because if he were in the same situation it was what he would do. When he says that, Fyodor shows Dazai the same smile he showed him earlier, like Dazai is looking in a mirror. 

Dazai and Dotsoevsky are able to read each other so well, knowing the other like they know themselves. Which allows both of them to continually one up the other and predict the other’s movements. However their relationship extends far beyond ‘Being the same’, or just the fact that they’re both highly skilled manipulators who are able to pull off complex plans. It’s even much more than Dazai and Fyodor are just smarter than everybody else in a way that isolates them. They are each other’s inverse in almost every way while appearing to be exactly the same. I’ll elaborate in detail beneath the cut.

1. No Longer Human

First off, while Fyodor’s character, such as being referred to as a demon and his ideology for crime and punishment draws from Dostoevsky’s novels, the relationship between Dazai and Fyodor is a direct literary reference to No Longer Human. 

The character Yozo (who Dazai is in part based off of due to his tendency towards buffoonery to use as a mask for his feelings, and his ability is directly named after the book) in the fourth Memorandum of No Longer Human discusses the antonym of crime with his ‘friend’ Horiki. Already from the way the narrator describes his friendship with Horiki you can see parallels in how Fyodor views his connection to Dazai. 

The conversation starts when Horiki refers to Yozo as a criminal. Don’t be so cheeky, I for one have never been tied up like a common criminal the way you have.” After that the conversation turns into an antonym game between the two of them. Yozo turns it into a game to distract from the serious accusation that he is actually a criminal and he got away with not only committing double suicide with a lady who amounts to a stranger to him, but he’s lived his life so far stealing money from the other women he’s been in relationship in. The “joke” of the conversation is that while it sounds deep, the two of them are just playing a game.

Any of these two words could be set up as antonyms as long as you give enough justification. It’s a joke of binary opposition and dualism. In short, you can give justification that things are opposites, or you can give justification that things are actually the same, there is no universal truth there is only differing justifications. 

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At the end of the conversation Yozo relents to this point, he tries to think of antonyms of crime but they are all synonyms. Crime, and god, Crime and repetance, Crime and confession, Crime and punishment  he finally questions whether the last is synonym or antonym but before he can finish the thought he’s interrupted. Just before then though, he believes himself having come to an understanding of the chaos of Dostoesvski’s mind. 

Hence the relationship between Dazai and Fyodor. We are meant to question, are they synonyms, persons with similar meaning, or are they antonyms absolutely incompatible ideas as irreconcilable as oil and water. Note that in the original novel Yozo does not really come to a conclusion on this thought, and in all of my thinking this over I don’t think we are meant to see them as all the way one way or the other just yet. 

Either way this conversation has already been referenced several times in Bungo Stray Dogs. “God, is the antonym of crime”. Then you have Dostoevsky who positions himself as the opposite of crime, and therefore sees it is his responsibility to become God. 

However, the antonym of God is posited by Yozo not to be crime, but rather satan. Therefore we have Dostoevsky not only taking on the role of God, but also of a demon. Despite being referred to as “Demon Fyodor” several times, Dotsoevsky actually positions himself as both at once, he is both God and his Antonym the devil, and therefore they are synonymous because they are both him. 

Horiki at one point in the conversation even references, that while talking philosophically about crime Yozo is also a criminal. What does Fyodor do, but get Dazai arrested and separated from the rest of the Detective Agency for the crimes he committed in the past, because despite which side Dazai is on in the eyes of the law he is just as much a criminal as Dostoevsky is. Even if they are on opposite sides of a conflict (antonyms) they will still be seen as the same in the eyes of society (synonyms). 

Then there’s of course the scene from the movie Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple which directly references not only this conversation with Horiki, but at the same time the novel Crime and Punishment.

Therefore in the original text Yozo may see them as antonyms, but Fyodor makes the argument they are synonyms. While he does so, both him and his shadow (his ability removed from him by the fog) are standing in juxtaposition of each other holding contrasting objects. A skull, and an apple. Apples can literally symbolize so many things, but here it’s just a symbol of binary opposites life and death. Or rather what is perceived as binary opposites. Life and death perceived as antonyms can also be seen as synonyms as Dazai explained to Chuuya. 

Death can be viewed as something opposite and entirely alien to life. That is life cannot possibly exist within death, because death by its nature kills life, or death can be viewed as a natural part of life. Therefore it is impossible to understand the value of life without contemplating it’s perceived opposite death. 

Poison and medicine can be seen as opposites, one kills and one saves, but if you overdose on medicine its easy to poison yourself with it. The more closely you examine them, the lines between supposed opposites begin to blur. 

Then you have Dostoevsky, crime and punishment are seen as opposites. Crime is unjust, and harms. Punishment is justice, the opposite of crime, it’s foil and prevention. Except, Justice can harm too, it just harms criminals. Except criminals can just be innocent people falsely accused. It’s never as black and white as it seems to be. Therefore, Dotsoevsky’s belief that they are not enemies but rather friends, it’s impossible to punish crime without thinking like a criminal. To punish crime, Dotsoevsky becomes a criminal. 

The apple, and the skull while seeming like opposite symbols can actually be the same thing, hence the title of the movie Dead Apple. 

2. Dead Apple

As the movie is canon material I also think it serves as a great introduction to the psychology of Dostoesvky’s character especially in comparison to Dazai. There are two subtextual psychological components to the movie, drawing from both Freud and Jung. 

In a brief summary of the movie itself, ability users are separated from their abilities due to a fog which causes their abilities to take form and attack them. This is really obvious Jungian shadow symbolism. Their abilities which always exist as a part of themselves and therefore a subconscious part of them are brought to the surface and they are forced to confront them. 

In Jungian psychology, the "shadow", "Id", or "shadow aspect/archetype" may refer to (1) an unconscious aspect of the personality which the conscious ego does not identify in itself, or (2) the entirety of the unconscious, i.e., everything of which a person is not fully conscious. In short, the shadow is the unknown side.

Because one tends to reject or remain ignorant of the least desirable aspects of one's personality, the shadow is largely negative. There are, however, positive aspects that may also remain hidden in one's shadow (especially in people with low self-esteem, anxieties, and false beliefs).

For example among the three main characters of the movie each of them are confronted with a shadow version of themselves, Rashomon for Akutagawa, Demon Snow for Kyoka and Beat under the Moonlight / The Tiger for Atsushi. There are several Jungian symbols associated with this process already, for one it’s specifically a fog that allows these shadows to manifest. The fog of the mind is what allows us not to be aware of the subconscious. When abilities are stolen they manifest with crystals that appear on the forehead, which also happens to be where the brain is. Neither of the three main characters are able to win their ability back until they accept something repressed about themselves.

(Pictured literally a tiger in shadow, two Jungian symbols the beastial instincts that represent the unconscious mind, and also the shadow which obfuscates). 

Kyouka that she does not want to hate Demon Snow even though the ability is responsible for killing her parents and also making her a murderer. Atsushi is the slowest of all to regain his ability back, due to the fact that he subconsciously rejects being an ability user. We see his flashback in the movie, first he blames the Tiger for his miserable life, he sees the tiger as the opposite of himself beast rather than man, an out of control monster. Then, when he realizes the tiger also protected him during life, despite being violent, Atsushi comes to the realization that his relationship is more complex than light and shadow, complete opposites.

People tend to deny their shadows, but the shadow is not necessarily the true self or more right than conscious mind, at the same time its still a part of yourself that needs to be acknowledged. Atsushi’s ability is even named “Beast under the Moonlight”, the moon is a classic symbol associated with Jung, because it represents the unconscious mind, the time of dreams, illusion, and when shadows are the longest. 

In the climax of the movie they literally ascend a tower, directly underneath the moonlight. 

Then there is Fyodor whose ability never separates from him and attacks him during the fog, and why is this? It’s because Fyodor already knowingly, willfully embraces his own shadow. He has no reason to deny what everybody else represses, because crime and punishment are friends. 

In other words Fyodor already is his own shadow. He’s a walking Id. 

The id, ego, and super-ego are three distinct, yet interacting agents in the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche.

The three parts are the theoretical constructs of how the activity and interaction in our mental life is described. According to this Freudian model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.

Why are both the protagonists and antagonists assembled in trios in dead apple? It’s because both of them are representative of the trio of the psyche. Fyodor, Dazai and Tatsuhiko are deliberately grouped as a trio, because they are Id, ego, and superego. 

Id, or I desire is uncoordinated instincts similar to the shadow. Reading the movie through this lens, it paints an interesting psychological portrait of Dotsoevsky. Of the trio he’s the most straightforward with his desires, he’s the one who seems to be ‘evil’ only for the sake of indulging in it and enjoying it. 

He plays the part of laughing villain the entire movie, and yet he also makes it clear this is an act to him. Therefore, when he claims that this is all for a laugh that’s not a statement that can be taken as a direct truth. 

As the symbolic Id of the movie, as the one who embraces his shadow he also plays the role of bringing the repressed truth that Tatsuhiko hides. He’s the one who encourages Tatsuhiko to rampage at the end of the movie. 

As he gives this speech Fyodor and his shadow overlap, because Fyodor is his own shadow, a walking shadow, he deliberately indulges in the worst of himself. That is why he sees himself as a demon, that is why he acts out on his god complex. That is the methodology which he chooses to bring forth his ideals, a world without Ability Users. 

Therefore his actions in the movie make perfect sense with his established motive in the manga, to commit a purge on ability users. Dazai even asks if Tatsuhiko will be saved by an angel or a demon before Dostoevsky introduces himself as a demon. 

It’s more binary opposite symbolism and the intention is clear. Dotsoevsky views himself as soemone who becomes a demon to save others, in line with his actions in his major introduction chapter in the manga. 

Demons are also in the bible, the creatures in charge of punishing sinners. Despite the fact that they are seen as rife with sin themselves. Another contradiction, for Fyodor a demon is something he has to become in order to punish crime, therefore he walks side by side with his shadow, therefore he indulges his id. 

Then, you have the other two serving as the opposing roles of the mind. Tatsuhiko is superego. Not only is he capable of controlling others to such an extent that he can make their abilities manifest against their will, but the extreme control he has makes him an utterly joyless existence. 

The balance between the two, the ego Dazai is the only one of the three of them who seems to have found any reason to live at all. His reason being the opposite of Fyodor. [Death] and release of the yoke of sin saves the soul. In comparison to Oda’s words. People live to save themselves huh, how true...

Dazai is the only one out of the three who has any semblance of control or purpose to his own life, and it comes from following Odasaku’s words. 

Ango’s summary of the three of them at the end of the movie shows that he does not quite understand Dazai, which makes sense as to why they never quite became friends. Demon Fyodor, Dazai “Disqualified from Humanity” and Tatsuhiko (turns into some kind of weird dragon) all three of them may seem inhuman but the moment you refer to them as aliens you fall for their illusion. All three characters are still undeniably and painfully human. They want to be seen as aliens to avoid being confronted by this, that’s the game all three play. 

Here’s the thing, Dazai is the only member of the trio who is not alone and part of that is because he had a friend who just saw him as he was, a flawed human being. 

3. The Demon Fyodor

For this final part I could list all the similarities and differences between Dazai and Fyodor, but that would just be a boring list so instead let’s analyze Fyodor who is currently the more mysterious character as to his motivations, using Dazai as a reference point. 

Before anything else, I’m going to use Oda’s words on Dazai as a reference point, because Oda had the best read on him. 

"Listen. You told me that you might find a reason to live if you lived in a world of violence and bloodshed. You won't find it. You must know that already. Whether you're on the side who kills people or the side who saves people, nothing beyond what you would expect will appear. Nothing in this world can fill that lonely hole you have. You will wander the darkness for eternity. (...) Be on the side that saves people. If both sides are the same, become a good man. Save the weak, and protect the orphans. Neither good nor evil means much to you, I know... but that'd make you at least a little bit better. (...) Of course I know. I know better than anyone. Because... I am your friend."

So, let’s define Dazai as a character who good nor evil means very little to, and is on the side of saving others simply by choice. He’s not motivated by lofty ideals. He’s not even a particularly moral person, willing to indulge in the unsavory sides of himself if it gets the results of ‘saving others’. 

He’s someone who can commit crimes with little foibles. Though I would not say he does not feel any guilt at all because there’s a clear difference between his mental health when he was in the mafia killing people, and when he was on the side of the Armed Detective Agency. He also has the ability to feel attachment to others, because he was clearly sad over Oda’s death. He’s not empty of all emotion, but at the same time a lot of Dazai’s life is spent in contemplation of his own emptiness. 

While Dazai moves pieces on a chess board and can see the bigger picture, I would argue that his motivations are much more personal and selfish than Fyodor, even though Fyodor is a cackling demon of a villain. Dazai is motivated by human beings and their individual stories, he leaves the Mafia not because of the hundreds of people he killed but because his one friend died. He is pushed to becoming a better mentor, because both Atsushi and Akutagawa need him to be. I’m not saying selfishness is bad, or selflessness is good the entire point of this essay is to deconstruct that simple black and white thinking. 

Let’s say simply put, Dazai is a selfish character, lacking in ideals but still motivated to save others. He contemplates life and death similiar to Fyodor, and the same way that Fyodor finds punishment for criminals in crime, Dazai tries to find a reason to live in pursuing death.

Even that, is a personal motivation. 

So then in comparison, Fyodor is impersonal and acts against his self interest. If Dazai is on a path of salvation, living to save himself, then Fyodor’s path is marked for self destruction. 

Starting with his formal introduction in chapter 42, Fyodor is introduced as a soulless man, lacking sympathy for anybody else. However, I would argue the opposite the chapter clearly shows Fyodor sympathizing with the child he spends most of the chapter talking to.

Remember the entire chapter Fyodor is playing Ace for a loop, he’s only letting Ace see him as he wants to be seen. Therefore everything he’s described as to others “Something more awful, and heinous than a villain” is the act he puts on. 

In the chapter we see a child honestly encourage and try to connect with Fyodor, only for his attempts to fall on deaf ears by the end of the chapter when Fyodor chooses to kill him as a witness. Fyodor gives the impression that he was not listening to the boy the entire time.

Yet, if Fyodor was ignoring him, if Fyodor did not feel a thing about the boy and was not sympathizing him in the least then why did he take the time to explain things and talk to him before sending him off at the end of the chapter? If Fyodor is able to kill him so easily so as to not see him as human, why does the boy feel like he is understood? 

Rather than just ignoring him and treating him like a piece on the board, I argue that Fyodor did see the boy as a person. The panel shown afterwards does not display the emotion of a remorseless slaughter. The entire panel is shown as empty. Fyodor regrets this action, killing the boy in such a way. 

At the same time he feels like he must do something he personally does not want to do. In order to punish evil he must become something even worse than evil. 

Therefore you have Dazai, living to save himself, attempting to be a better person than himself when he’s really just kind of a self obsessed person, and you have Fyodor, who lives to save not himself but the whole world and therefore he must damn himself to demonhood and become the worst version of himself. 

Dazai searches for life in death, hence why he constantly attempts suicide. In its own weird way, his suicide attempts, his getting involved with death, murder, it’s all him looking for a way to live.

Whereas Fyodor genuinely believes with all of his heart, that death is something that cures the sickness of life. Not only do we see him have the opportunity to save someone only to kill them as a witness, denying himself the possibility of redemption. We also see him manipulate a child into suicide in front of Kunikida. 

Because as he currently believes it, the world as it is will never bring salvation to those children. His act of manipulation is just a symptom of what is currently wrong with the world. After all, Dostoevsky pretty easily got this man to agree to arm his little brothers and sisters to the teeth and put them into danger. A child who exists in this world as it is cannot be saved. 

Every character who ideologically alligns with Fyodor is looking for freedom from the world, in some form. Fyodor’s style of manipulation itself is a paradox, he controls their every action even resorting to blatant mind control in some places, and therefore he frees them from the burden of making their own decisions. 

Then, if Fyodor is actually an idealist who genuinely does want a better world, and not just a laughing demon then why does he specifically target Kunakida the idealist of the detective agency? It’s because he’s an idealist, that Fyodor wants to crush him. In other words he wants to break weak and faulty ideals that cannot save the world. 

Yet, it’s also an act of self loathing. It’s not that Fyodor is necessarily evil, but rather someone who becomes evil for the sake of his ideals. The reason for that is ideals are so high and mighty he needs to become god to enforce them, he desires a world much better than this one therefore he carries the weight of the world of his shoulders. As a person, just like Kunikida, Fyodor is constantly being crushed under the weight of his own ideals. That is why he seeks to crush Kunikida, to prove that Kunikida is weak, and therefore he is strong.

If what he seeks is paradise, then it makes complete sense that he would see it necessary to become god in order to achieve that. However in the end, Fyodor is not a demon, nor god, nor alien, he’s infallibly human. He’s so completely obsessed with the bigger picture, with providing salvation to all, that he will never be allowed to moved by personal motivations. 

He sympathizes with the child who is wearing Ace’s collar, but cannot allow him to live even if he wants to. 

It’s not that he will never allow himself to be moved, it’s not in Fyodor’s own mind he cannot. If he were to cede to one personal bias then he would never be able to accomplish his goals that are so lofty that he would need to become god in order to accomplish them, therefore it’s better to become an inhuman monster rather than be tripped up by personal feelings.

Whereas Dazai is motivated towards good and saving others, almost exclusively by the fact that there are people in his life who he is personally invested in. 

It shows finally even in the difference for how they use people. Both Dazai and Fyodor rely on trickery and manipulation to move people, and sometimes it can seem like they only view others as mere pieces on a board. They have a tendency to also assume they know what is best for other people and move them without their consent. 

The difference being that at the end of the day Dazai still sees others as individuals. He always leaves the element of choice. While Dazai pushes Atsushi and Akutagawa together even though they hate each other, because he believes the two of them are what’s best for each other he always leaves Atsushi with the choice of how he wants to proceed. 

Therefore they remain individuals, therefore they are still people in his eyes. Even if Dazai always plays with his cards close to his chest, his plans fundamentally rely on trusting others, and others trusting him. Even in Dead Apple, his plan involved knowing Chuuya would use Corruption and that Chuuya would trust in him to stop him. 

So, let’s say Dazai is someone who generally needs other people to carry out his plans. This is in contrast to Fyodor who once again, takes the burden entirely on himself. 

Fyodor’s allies are more akin to slaves who worship him. 

He literally messes with their brains to free them from hardship. Which goes along with again the binary opposition, his brain is modified to feel unhappiess, therefore he is happy. Because by that black and white logic, unhappiness only exists as the opposite and antagonist to happiness. The extension to Fyodor’s extreme logic, that the absence of crime will therefore bring peace to the world. All of Fyodor’s direct subordinates are liberated in this way, if he takes on all the decision making for himself, takes on all the burden for himself, then they are freed. 

Goggol explains what are probably Fyodor’s own viewpoints via foiling, and being allies very well. That it is easier to imagine all of them as inhuman monsters who cannot possibly have a reason behind their actions. It’s more comforting, it’s freeing. 

To do what he needs to do to change the world, Fyodor must become an unfeeling villain and he does the same to his subordinates, he actually modifies them and removs them of their emotions. 

So therefore it’s a paradox, his allies and servants see themselves as completely free in their devotion to him, yet at the same time Fyodor’s manipulation is the opposite of Dazai’s. Rather than leaving it to choice and trust, he removes their ability to choose, he removes their ability to disobey him. It’s as if the only way he can think of for people to be righteous, is to remove their ability to sin in the first place. 

It’s even apparent in their joke question and answer session. Dazai tells Fyodor to just inspire his subordinates to be better people the way he does with Atsushi and Aktugawa, and it seems like the idea did not even occur to Fyodor. Fyodor tells Dazai the way to win a woman is to cut off everything else to the point where she becomes completely dependent on you. 

So, in conclusion it seems a lot of Fyodor’s mindset is a result of him purposefully taking on the burden of saving the entire world on himself, because he cannot allow himself to view others as equals. In order to continue justifying himself, he needs believe that he is the only person capable of doing these things and therefore he knows better than anyone else. 

Dazai and Fyodor are both smart enough to be aware of not only the emptiness of life, its lack of purpose, its senseless cruelty. Their reactions however are opposite, Dazai decided to live in spite of being unable to ever find meaning whereas Fyodor decided to dictate that meaning to everyone else and decide it for them, like his words are the word of god. 

Bestowing sins is the work of god. If god god does not Exist, I’ll become him. 

#bsd meta #meta #bungo stray dog meta #dazai osamu #OSAMU DAZAI #fyodor dostoevsky #no longer human #bungo stray dogs analysis #bungo stray dogs character analysis #bungo stray dogs theory #literature analysis

[auntbibby]

the things we DON’T share in our struggle, for cruel & arbitrary reasons

ohhhhhhhhhhhh...... sooo.... so, the "let's get down" part of "let's get down to business" would be a euphemism/innuendo for sex????? yeah, ohhh... okay, yeah, then i can see how that line in the song would imply something that was completely or mostly uninteresting to asexuals... A.K.A. a snoozefest for them lol

if i had caught on to THAT part then i probably wouldn't have stupidly asked "DuRrRrRr HoW dOeS aSeXuAlIsM CoNnEcT tO tHe AgEnDeRiSm MeNtIoNeD iN tHe LaSt CoMmEnT DuRrRrRr I tHoUgHt AcE oNlY mEaNt AsExUaL nOt AgEnDeR" but, i literally didn't percieve anything at all in your comment relating to or even referencing in any way Sex or Sexuality or Asexuality other than the word "Ace" itself...... so i moved on to the comment you were replying to and saw the word "Agender" and automatically assumed that that must have been what you were connecting the word "Ace" to, but i just had to confirm with you, because even THAT seemed to conflict with literally everything i had ever heard about the word "Ace" and what it was meant to refer to.... lmao...

being autistic in a neurotypical world is like having to successfully solve a really hard Professor Layton for Nintendo DS puzzle challenge everytime you interact with a specific piece of language, body language, gestural meaning, text, art, or architecture that was made by a neurotypical person... but if you fail at figuring it out, that's on YOU and you failed to meet the bare minimum requirement of Society (not neurotypical society, just Society... because we don't have an autistic society to compare this to, unfortunately, so our neurotypically-shaped society is assumed to be Default-shaped by law, morality & every other societal metric in every nation on earth). but when a neurotypical person even NOTICES you dropping your neurotypical-mask for a single second to react RATIONALLY to the reality you actually perceive 24/7, it's ALSO on you to change YOUR behavior to reflect a more acceptable neurotypical-style reaction to something that YOU YOURSELF ARE NOT ACTUALLY SEEING or, guess what? once again, you failed to meet the bare minimum requirement of Society......

you see, a lot of us autistic people don't realise it, but to the extent to which our autism is severe, it also makes the reality we perceive completely different than the "objectively-universal" reality that neurotypicals percieve. we may not realize this in part because the only shoes we've ever stepped in are our own, so to speak (a fish won't know about the existence of water if it's been swimming in it since it hatched), so we don't actually have a way of knowing exactly how differently we perceive reality than neurotypicals. but according to the intense world theory of autism as well as just broader notions of how autism works, autism is basically just a disorder of either 1) how your sensory organs report on your external reality to your brain thru your nervous system, or more likely 2) how your brain processes that sensory data before it starts trying to make sense of it (finding patterns, making predictions based on those patterns, scaling this process up in a hierarchical pattern)... but the thing is, of course, the brain itself has no way of knowing anything whatsoever about the world outside the skull it's encased in except thru this sensory data, so if it comes into the brain differently than another person's brain, this brain will effectively just be perceiving a different reality entirely...

so believe it or not, the fact that we can't filter out the annoying sound of the electric lights on the ceiling and the fact that we feel most comfortable eating the same set of foods over & over again without exploring new tastes because we actually will never get bored of the incredibly-rare few tastes that don't make us gag are actually just indicators of a larger difference in how we inherently & biologically perceive the entire universe that our eyes, ears, skin etc. sends data via nerves into our neurons.... and we had no choice in the matter about this....

we were born autistic, and therefor have no choice but to perceive a severely different reality than all neurotypical people to the precise extent that our autism is deemed to be severe.... just as trans people had no choice but to feel like they were born in a body that doesn't fit their gender identity, and gay people have no choice but to be attracted to the same gender from birth, and people of one race or another were born in a body that could only pass as being the races that it can pass as, with no choice in the matter, and no way to change this for the rest of their life.

in some ways ableism has a lot more similarity to queer oppression than racial oppression, because with queer and disabled people, the oppression stems from the oppressors refusal to accept that the oppressed group ARE inherently or biologically different for reasons that they have no control or choice over, and to be willing to make compromises for these very-different needs (mainly because they refuse to accept that they are, in fact, NEEDS and not WANTS)..........

....while with racial oppression, the oppression stems from the oppressors refusal to accept that there ISN'T anything inherently or biologically different with the oppressed group (other than skin color and other aspects of surface apperance) compared to the racial oppressor..... the fact that the oppressed group has a significantly-different culture (with differently defined and originated moral compasses & societal values) as well as higher statistical rates of failing to succeed in the oppressors allegedly fair-and-balanced society (The American Dream states that anyone can succeed from any origin in america) and also higher statistical rates of things like addiction & incarceration that the societies of the oppressor AND the oppressed both might see as a failure of the individual??? It's all proof of a problem with the racial oppressors society itself (systemic racism) that can't be explained by a few "bad apples" on one side or the other or both.....unless you believe that there IS something inherently or biologically different about an oppressed race, in which case you are simply a racist.....

so essentially, the way to view queer and disabled people as a NON-bigoted person, is the way to view people of systematically-oppressed races as a VERY BIGOTED person.... and vice-versa.....

which just shows that, racism is an arbitrary and unscientific cruelty based on the genuine belief of something that is a ludicrous fantasy (that people of certain races are somehow less human or have less capacity for Goodness than others) that LINGERS ON like A RESILIENT DELUSION THAT COULD ONLY HAVE COME FROM HUMANITY’S IRRATIONAL PAST, despite the acceleration at which WIDELY-KNOWN TRUTHS about HUGE GROUPS OF PEOPLE are distributed to families in the racist parts of the world over the DECADES, CENTURIES, MILLENNIA, and even right up to this day.......

while in contrast, homophobia, transphobia, & ableism are stubborn and selfish cruelties based on the lack of genuine knowledge of something that is an undeniable truth (that people with certain bodies are somehow differently human and yet still have the same capacity for Goodness as others) that COVER THEIR EYES like FRAGILE DELUSIONS THAT COULD EASILY ARISE FROM HUMANITY’S NAIVE ASSUMPTIONS despite the unchanging nature of CERTAIN SPECIFIC TRUTHS about SMALL PERCENTAGES OF PEOPLE that have been born to families all over the world for DECADES, CENTURIES, MILLENNIA, and even right up to this day.........

#race to the bottom #identity politics #suffering olympics #solidarity with the oppressed #allyship #intersectionalism #intersectional feminism #neurodivergence #neurodiversity #oppression #systematic oppression #systematic racism #transphobia #homophobia #actually autistic #neurological disorder #autism #autism spectrum disorder #ASD #aspergers #aspie #aspies #transwomen #anti-blackness #anti-racist #black lives matter #black trans lives matter #ableism #emotional labor #emotional labour

[hellzyeahwebwielingessays]

Super Heroes ARE NOT INHERENTLY a Conservative power fantasy

Master Post

I don’t really agree superheroes are inherently a Conservative power fantasy nor that they simplistically preach law and order and justice are necessary for a happy ending.

After all Superman was fighting corrupt politicians in his very first appearance. The X-Men are institutionally persecuted often by government forces. Stan Lee did an entire story arc in refutation to Law and Order politics in the early 1970s.

Yeah, they hit people to save the day but like...I honestly think that’s far more of a human power fantasy than something of any specific ideology. There have been examples of mythic and folklore figures doing that since forever. The broad appeal of those types of characters throughout history and across political ideologies speaks to how it’s not inherently a political power fantasy of one type or another.

I know someone who is incredibly Liberal and has himself and people he’s known been persecuted by the police and he’s outspoken against such institutional persecution. He loves Daredevil and more poignantly the Punisher, a character outright adored by the police themselves but who is near universally framed (even within his own stories) as not a good person and someone you shouldn’t aspire to be like. This was even the case in his debut in Daredevil season 2 where it was made explicit that he is self-destructive.

Obviously my friend would be disgusted by the Punisher in real life, as would we all (I’d hope). But the fantasy is still unto itself appealing despite it conflicting with his ideologies. Hence super heroes are not a power fantasy rooted in a specific political ideology. Now sure that is one anecdotal piece of evidence. But the Punisher is clearly very, very popular and the degree to which he is popular (especially in the 1990s) wouldn’t really add up if his fanbase were predominantly Conservatively leaning people with the occasional Liberal exception.

He’s very obviously a character people of either leaning or in-between enjoy and was after all created by an outspoken young Liberal in Gerry Conway. Batman too is often perceived as very conservative. But he is the most popular superhero ever so he obviously appeals across political ideologies. After all, the two most defining Batman writers (after Bill Finger) were the incredibly Conservative Frank Miller and the incredibly Liberal Denny O’Neil.

I also don’t think super heroes are analogous to stand your ground myths. For starters, super heroes are not enshrined by the law. The closest comparison you could draw is if you encountered a clear cut crime in progress and intervened non-lethally somehow. E.g. that scene in Spider-Man 2 where Peter Parker walks away from a mugging in progress, but for the purposes of what I’m saying actually tried to intervene.

I once received counterpoints to the above view that went something like this:

You are extrapolating specifically European myth created by white males and applying it to all humans. African myths are different. Native American myths are different. Asian myths are different. You’re making my point that comics are a dominant conservative culture - specifically white male - fantasy, not refuting it.

Actually I wasn’t. There examples of such figures in Eastern myths too such as Sun Wukong. Son Goku is a 1980s manga character based first and foremost upon him (and Jackie Chan) and is a veritable institution in Japan. There is a vast crossover between fans of him and fans of other superhero characters despite him not being directly based upon any of them, having distinctly Eastern cultural influences and also not being a crime fighter in the traditional sense.

Goku in truth is probably more comparable to figures like Theseus in spite of not being based or influenced by him. African myths and European myths may be different but most cultures involve figures who have beyond human abilities and among those figures those who engage in actions that, within the values of those cultures, are regarded as good. All human beings are innately attracted to stories that in one shape or form present them as physically more powerful than they are, a by-product of more innate survival instincts. On our absolute most deepest levels we are animals and because of this the fantasy of being stronger, faster, less vulnerable to injury or malnutrition and/or having the ability to defend our homes/territories/family units (which in superhero comics is usually extended to the general population of a native city) is incredibly potent and attractive.

The counter pointer continued:

“It’s not a female fantasy. Women tell very different myths, most of them lost because men wrote down the stories. The romance genre is dominated by female writers because those are the stories women are drawn to tell.”

Given the vast plethora of female fans of the genre from 1938-now I really do not see how we can honestly say this is a genre that is particular to the power fantasy of one gender or another. Wonder Woman was after all a distinctly female power fantasy created with a lot of input from two women very much ahead of their time.

But going into another culture Sailor Moon (and her predecessor Sailor V, who was more of a traditional crime fighter) was arguably even more of a female power fantasy. She was the singular vision of a female mangaka who was aiming at a young female audience and was very specifically creating a female power fantasy. In both cases they are people with secret identities who engage in physical violence to varying degrees against very clearly coded evil individuals who pose direct threats to innocent lives.

Now about the gun debate? Well, most superheroes use guns?

But for the sake of argument let’s extent ‘guns’ to mean stuff like:

Ray guns

Web-shooters

Firing concussive energy blasts, like Cyclops’ optic blasts

Any kind of projectile

Well, even if you define guns like that, the majority of superheroes’ weapons are non-lethal whereas guns are designed specifically to kill. Yeah you can wound or incapacitate but gun wounds can still be lethal or crippling. Plus you could in theory kill someone with a net but that wasn’t what it was designed to do.

Things get iffy if we count biological weaponry, like in Cyclops’ case. Whilst his super power is literally having a powerful gun for his eyes, it’s also part of who he is and he’s got no choice in that. This changes the context drastically from someone who owns a gun and seeks to use it.

In Cyclops’ case he’s forced to own that weapon and it’s an immense burden upon him . It curtails his ability to have physical and emotional intimacy with others the way anyone else would. I anything I’s more analogous to a disability. So it isn’t like this is a wonderful fantasy about how cool it’d be to own a big gun without the burden of choosing to own it in the first place

That doesn’t even make sense considering the real issue regarding American gun laws ultimately isn’t about people merely owning  guns but how they use  them upon  owning them. Cyclops still has to choose how to use his biological ‘big gun’ even if he didn’t get a choice in owning it one way or the other. It’s also a poor analogy considering Cyclops’ ‘Big Gun’ doesn’t even work properly due to a disability he has.

In fact, it’s posited superheroes are needed, especially vigilante heroes like Spider-Man who take law enforcement into their own hands despite being outside the law enforcement establishment, because the Marvel U is a dangerous, violent place. This is very similar to arguments used by conservative gun advocates in the US: we need guns to protect ourselves because our institutions can’t. Moving on let’s talk about the severity of crime. Is it not a Conservative power fantasy that the world of Marvel and DC comics is a dangerous and violent place? And therefore vigilantes who take the law into their own hands are needed?

That’s kind of similar to what Conservative gun advocates argue isn’t it? Guns are needed to protect one’s self.

Well for starters, the nature of the severity of crime is questionable in most Marvel or DC comics sans like Batman. It is made clear that superheroes absolutely do good but at the same time it wasn’t presented as though there was such a massive crime problem that say Marvel New York would’ve fallen apart without them.

That is exempting of course super villains.

Super villains however are cut from the same fantasy cloth as the heroes so how much to they really count towards representing real life concerns over crime anyway? They were after all literally created as a means to challenge the heroes. Action Comics #1 for example didn’t have any super villains.

Similarly modern interpretations of Batman do not seek to present the world or urban landscapes in general as inherently so riddled with dangerous crime that it necessitates Batman. They make it clear that Gotham is this extreme exception as opposed to the rule. Greg Rucka once spoke about this in an old documentary (for I think the History channel).The idea is that Gotham is exceptionally bad thus they need Batman.

In most versions of Superman post-1987 Lex Luthor has such a stranglehold on Metropolis that it needs Superman. And in Golden Age versions of Superman he was presented as just tackling general urban crime that existed amidst the Great Depression, most of which stemmed from organized crime or corrupt political figures. But it wasn’t as though Metropolis was on the brink if not for Superman’s intervention.

Really the levels of crime and such that exist in superhero stories exist purely to justify a superhero being a crime fighter in the first place; it’s a practicality issue not an ideological one. I think this is different to say police TV shows or films that present characters who allegedly exist in the real world, who represent real world police officers who do a real world job that involves them interacting with allegedly real world threat levels. In a superhero story, of course t here is more crime that actually exists in the real world but I don’t think anyone making the stories ever honestly thought otherwise or paid much thought to it one way or the other. It was just a means to an end of challenging the protagonists.

Okay, but how about the fact that heroes rarely (if ever) calling for gun control or gun bans? Surely that is a Conservative.

Well no not really. Again, it’s not really an ideologically driven factor in super hero stories. It’s more akin to how superhero comic books just do not touch for example the issue of abortion or how they rarely make it truly explicit what political leanings a character has one way or the other.*

John Byrne when discussing his iconic Superman run stated he felt the character was a card carrying Republican, but to the best of my knowledge no Superman comic before or since has ever come out and said that. No Punisher story to my knowledge has ever stated Punisher is a Conservative in spite of the fact that he obviously is. No Spider-Man story has stated Spider-Man is a Liberal/left leaning moderate. And yet he has been depicted that way in most stories and it’d just be incredibly likely given his age, where he lives and his family background. I don’t even know if any Captain America story has stated clearly and without question that Cap would obviously vote for the Democrats 100% of the time out of the two major parties, even though he was explicitly Liberal  from the very first piece of artwork depicting him. In ne of Bucky’s early adventures as Captain America though he simultaneously protected Democrat and Republican politicians.

So whilst superhero comics do not involve characters calling for the abolition of guns 99% of the time, that’s less because they are or are not a Conservative power fantasy and more because the companies do not want to touch what they at least perceive as an incredibly volatile issue.

If the gun debate in America (which to me shouldn’t even be a debate, just get rid of them) ever moves to a place where there is virtually nobody opposing the abolition of guns most superheroes would absolutely be depicted in support of that.

To strip back everything I’m saying, super heroes are intended more on, and consumed more on, a symbolic level  than something in line with a particular ideology.

They are vigilantes who fight crime. But it’s understood that the crime is in the story simply because it is universally understood as ‘a bad thing’ that can cause harm and damage. The superhero is you. You being a vigilante symbolises how you have to on an individual level deal with a problem, the ‘bad thing’.

And the super powers are the catharsis of how much easier it would be to deal with the ‘bad thing’ if you were more than what you are.

I don’t agree with 100% of this, but this video (which is interesting unto itself) touches upon this idea around the 15:30 mark.

It’s not as though a Liberal enjoys the genre for the escapism or the perverse indulgence in politics they wouldn’t agree with whilst a Conservative just loves it’s reaffirmation of their beliefs.

They love it for the same reasons and those are usually rooted in the human elements of the characters alongside the power fantasy. Which is why I maintain there is an innate human appeal to the genre regardless of what perspective you come at it from.

I mean Jesus, if we are really going to argue that superheroes are a Western  Conservative power fantasy why have countries with anti-Western  values, countries that American Conservatives are heavily in opposition to, devoured the genre on film?

Why is the MCU outright beloved  in China?

Why have they tried to create their own super heroes in a similar vein?

Because these characters are not a Conservative, or a white, or a male power fantasy. They are just a human  power fantasy.

*And contrary to what people who are hardline on one ideology or another think, not opposing an issue isn’t tantamount to supporting it. Neutrality exists. If you support abortion that’s Liberal stance on the issue. If you oppose gun control that’s a Conservative stance on that issue. If you do not care about them one way or another you ware not expressing a Liberal or Conservative view point.

The whole ‘With us or against us’ viewpoint is absolutely myopic and overly simplistic. By this logic America was supportive of Hitler before they joined the Allies in WWII. But they were also supportive of the Allies because they weren’t supporting the Axis powers either.

Neutrality can exist.

#MCU #marvel cinematic universe #Marvel #Marvel Comics #DC #DC Comics #Superman #Batman #John Byrne #Cyclops #Scott Summers #X-Men #Bruce Wayne #Clark Kent #Frank Miller #Denny O'Neil

[lightcreators]

a slightly altered timeline    2) the timeline in which they never met who would become the most influential or important person in their life, or that person was taken from them before they were capable of forming memories.  @witchingrey​

Okay. First of all, I have no idea how to start that answer unless you are going to have a heavily meta about the 'what if Lelouch had never met C.C how canon would have going?'. As a Code Geass veteran for be here since the first time it aired, and since how much I am emotionally conflicted with canon (hi Euphemia's death, hi R2, hi Zero Requiem), I have lot of thoughts, so many to say about the absence of Lelouch/C.C bond would impact canon. 

Take a seat, prepare a number of handkerchiefs, we are going into a trip. 

* Main divergence: Lelouch never received the Geass. From this information, the canon has a possibility of being transformed into two routes which I will call route a) Lelouch doesn't become by definition Zero since no possibility allows him to become it and to realize his greatest dream, which completely depend on his relationship with the future Black Knights following episode 1 of R1; route b) Lelouch nevertheless becomes Zero, conscious of his humanity, that he has no backup solution, that each movement on his part can no longer be recovered and that each error will be fatal. Besides how Lelouch can switch to route a) or b) and having a chance on itself depending if he survive the end of ep 1 of R1. You know, do you remember that soldiers were on the way to kill him? I prefer put that detail without a specific reason since it's cement the canon. Meaning that Lelouch would face three choices: 1) to be killed, 2) to escape but be wounded, 3) escape unwounded. I find myself offering open the three possibilities and depending of Lelouch's state, he will get either a) or b). 

* Lelouch would devote himself completely to Nunnally until she is his only anchor. Into that timeline, if his sister disappear of his care or if his sister ended up died or without his saving hands --- Lelouch would never recover of it and it would be an complete emotional death. Nunnally would be the only person in the world to have a glimpse of his true nature, of the gentleness and the softness that man possess, inclined to do anything for protect her --- however regardless of a) or b) the heavier traumas weighing his shoulders, the exposition of his pain and doubts towards circumstances, the duty he feel and the unfair sentiment that following him, the hatred he have towards his world...wouldn't be known. Into route b) Nunally wouldn't still supposed to know that Lelouch is Zero --- and losing her over that fact would be insupportable *waves at the end of R1/some parts of R2* Meaning that Lelouch is condemned to losing his will of life into this timeline, to be removed of the reason of his actions/desire without any way to take it back, to live an emotional death that will lead him to sacrifice everything about his mental health/his sanity/his dreams/his future for her sake. Because, compared to canon, there would be no emotional support that would be able to understood how much Nunnally is his entire life and be able to put sense on him. Into this timeline, maybe Suzaku would handle that duty instead however it won't be enough. 

* Remember into canon that Lelouch is the expert of mask himself under various personality traits, lie as he breathes, and tend to say the exact opposite of what he really thinks just to continue a general 'perception' that he wants under control? Canon can hold it beer. Into route a) it will change to an coping mechanism virally that his existence will deteriorate in this feeling of observing without being able to do anything, of having no possibility of reacting and finding himself in a feeling of being a 'bird in a cage until he runs out of oxygen'. He is doomed to lose interest in the world around him which he wants to destroy, which he refuses, but since he is nobody, remained nobody, will have to undergo the cruelty of his father's actions, will have to manage complicated situations with his family ... that his perspective will be similar to that of the canon but in a very bad way: he will detach himself so much from reality that he will no longer have any interest for it. Meaning, he will treat people like pieces of chessboard and shut himself up without letting anyone close. Into route b) Lelouch will cling to his role of Zero as second nature that he not allowed himself unless expected by some people into some instances (Nunnally, Suzaku, Kallen at some point, Euphemia when his identity is discovered) to reveal pieces of his true personality. Knowing that he is stuck without the potential to have a backup power, he will want to use his intelligence in every corner of opportunity that he has, to influence the people around him to play in his favor, will want to control the world around him insidiously and gaining power that way --- by hanging on to it even more and wanting to increase it even more. Allowed to be seen as a horrible person, to be seen as a heartless murderer, to have no consideration for the feelings of the people around him, he will play on each of these layers by pretending indifference of all the pain he feels proportionally to what he does. In this route, his true nature and his true ambitions will remain well locked inside him and alone he will face the mixture of guilt / regret / doubt / distress towards these actions...and since he is fated to an emotional death with the events of the canon, nothing can stop him. 

* It's a point which I have the feeling of necessary to note: Lelouch will never know the feeling of love or in his case an inexplicable bond with another person whom he wishes to protect and feels free into the already presented love interests canon (Shirley into an complexed one-sided from her part and a deep affection of Lelouch that already not asking himself how he feel really towards her, one-sided love from Kallen) or those who can be perceived as such (* waves at Suzaku *). I want to say that canon-wise, it's already complicated for Lelouch to show more than platonic interest in someone and he certainly has his own way of showing more which comes in several interpretations (I could almost write his relation with C.C is a mixture of platonic, denied romantic , something much more mystical that I can made a novel on their relation and their dynamic depending of the eyes of the observer about the way to take it... but that's not the subject). Meaning? Meaning that regardless of a) or b) Shirley/Lelouch would end up with barriers on their ways from my others points exposed earlier. Kallen/Lelouch is a little doomed since the beginning but depending how far their relationship develop coming from Lelouch statut with the Black Knights, they come to have more development that the presented show. Suzaku is the special case of 'I love you but I want to kill you' from the wonderful inversed dynamic of Kamui/Fûma from X or the major theme about complicated love by CLAMP --- it's neither the point of this post but the dynamic of Lelouch/Suzaku though their mutual friendship/hatred is wonderful and would be deeper into that timeline that canon would expose. 

* The traumas triggering by Charles vi Britannia would have been higher that canon, to the horrible point that even sending Lelouch into some therapy wouldn't help him. In canon, Lelouch was able to facing the immortality of his father because he have the Geass and a way to fighting back, to didn't turn out his pawn without be powerless --- here, whatever it's a) or b) Lelouch would have been fated to dealing with the fact without way to removing him of the picture and be fully 'used' by his father as a pawn. Since Lelouch wouldn't be able to becoming Emperor, that removing the entire Zero Requiem stuff...and since he hadn't the Geass and would have conscious of it otherwise into the OG timeline with Mao as first perspective of it...the show would have ended either into a) or b) into Lelouch having his dad as enemy...with high probability he get doomed by the same man into higher traumas. It would be the most ironic thing in existence since his name is a catchphrase, but Lelouch would hate to be a 'vi Britannia', to be one of these guys who destroyed the world...and will not having an occasion to coming in terms with his identity. He would fall into the holding 'Lamperouge' as much he can, feeling safety into 'Zero'...but in the end, would be entirely broken down by the actions of his father. Since...Charles would manage to bring up the Ragnarok to the world...and V.V wouldn't be stopped. Though it's a timeline in which Euphemia death doesn't happen and route b) showing hope about that peace be able to be created ---- route b) would exposing harder the emotional conflict Lelouch have with his siblings. Also, Lelouch is fated of not knowing the truth about his mother. 

* miscellaneous on R1 if route b) : Clovis's arc taking longer to be finalised, Lelouch/Ohgi relationship taking more time so settle down since Lelouch can't afford to doing a mistake into his manipulation, showing arguments he is an leader and can be trusted without his Britannia origin showing up, major emotional conflict about Suzaku be the Lancelot all along, Lelouch risking to die in Narita, Lelouch constant fear to losing Suzaku and that One Scene when he have to find another way to making him live and he won't end up killed with him, Jeremiah's arc turn out even more complicated to win, Lelouch/Euphemia managed to doing that peace and saving a part of the Japanese with the immediate consequences on it, some breakdown of Lelouch when his sister is gone, Lelouch reveal be even more heartbreaking that the canon, Mao be the real exposure of the power of the Geass for Lelouch, Shirley remembering that Lelouch is Zero and be emotionally conflicted...

* miscellaneous on R2 if route b) : Lelouch not having his memories back until a long while or something triggering it, his inability to coping with the lose of Nunnally following it, an further complexed relationship with Rolo, an complexed relationship with Suzaku if as canon he became one of the Emperor's Knight, Diethard becoming an horrible problem for Lelouch, Black Knights betrayal destroying emotionally him for once and all, Schneizel turning into a long-term enemy for Zero, Charles vi Britannia be the last problem to stop...

Such a nice timeline...

#witchingrey #( answered. ) #long post // #i have tried :'D #code geass spoilers //

[manifestationsmagic]

Did You Know Sound is one of the Most Powerful Tools For Healing in Existence?

They have known this for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Long before modern science, shamans used sound to induce a trancelike state into other people. Healers used sound and complex rituals to trigger the healing process of their patients and military leaders used sound to inspire and get their troops motivated for battle.

Sound is powerful. Actually, what is powerful is not the sound itself, what we perceive, but rather the vibration of sound. This interacts with us and which creates emotions and states into our body.

Now, I’m not talking about music.

Sure, music has a very strong effect too. Listen to a sad song and you’ll be sad. Listen to a happy song and you’ll boost your mood.

But while this is important, I’m talking rather about rhythmic frequencies that operate at certain frequencies and which interact both with the water in our bodies and with our DNA.

You can use sound to improve your health, to boost your creativity, to increase your focus and even to become a better communicator with those around you.

Yes, it’s that powerful.

But since you may have never heard of this before, let me explain how all of this works.

Click Here

https://bit.ly/2UJcTld

And the best way to do this is to play music to a two – three-year-old. You’ll notice something interesting.

He’ll dance. Even if he has no idea what dancing is, he will automatically dance on the music.

Most adults just find this amusing but it’s proof of a deeper truth, one that have been revealed through countless experiments. This is that we have a natural, automatic connection with the surrounding vibrations. We’re automatically influenced by them.

Rhythmic vibrations are something we naturally detect and follow. Scientists don’t really know why but some assume that this has an evolutionary purpose that we’ve developed this ability to better understand the world.

Others say since everything is matter vibrating at a high speed, since all that is around you is nothing but energy vibrating, giving the impression of solid matter, this ability to connect with the vibrations around us and to be affected by them is found in our DNA, as natural as life itself.

We don’t know for sure but we know it is true. Even weapons are developed and used to incapacitate people through sound. It’s real. It exists right now. And they have also used sound as a form of alternative medicine for thousands of years since ancient times.

Great leaders and minds of the past discovered that sound can be used for everything from inspiring fear to bringing comfort and joy to calming groups of people and even to healing grave diseases.

And this means two things for you.

First, you can learn how to protect yourself.

Sound is not used only offensively. There is a long history of using sound for keeping crowds under control, to stifle creativity and to dull the emotions. Sound as a pacifying weapon is nothing new and the Nazi Germany used this to great effect.

Back then, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, an evil man which used every tool at his disposal to sell the great Nazi lie used sound at 440 HZ to keep masses under control. He discovered through several experiments that people, when exposed to this frequency, even for a short time, are dulled and are less likely to rebel.

Some historians say his use of the 440 HZ in music, speeches and announcements has been a major tool for preventing the German people, tired of war and suffering from rebelling against the Nazi war machine.

While this is rare nowadays due to people’s access to information, some dictators and totalitarian leaders still use a sound at a 440 HZ frequency to keep crowds under control, dulling their instincts to rebel or to act against the interests of the leader.

Second, you can learn how to use sound to heal yourself and improve your life.

This may also be the most important thing you can do for your development as a person. If used properly, sound can change your life and it can change the frequencies on which you operate, so you become a better person.

You turn pain into joy.

You turn suffering into hope.

You turn conflict into love.

And all with the help of vibrations through the power of sound.

All healing frequencies are based on the seven solfeggio scales. These are ancient scales that can be tracked back to a medieval hymn of John the Baptist. It is the music of God and they have used it to heal and to bring comfort as early as 1000 AD.

Each frequency has a specific effect over your body.

The first one is 396 HZ. This turns grief into joy and it is a very strong natural anti-depressant. Use it if you are going through a period of pain or suffering and you would like to be happy again.

The second one is 417 HZ. Using this frequency, you’ll cleanse traumatic experiences and facilitate change. It’s useful if something bad happened to you and you can’t move on. They have also used it to treat stress, even stress disorders and to calm anxious patients.

The third one is very important. It is 528 HZ, and it is the natural frequency of the Earth. This is the frequency at which nature vibrates and they prove it to repair DNA.

It was used back in 1930 by Dr. Royal Raymond Rife to cure cancer patients, with a 100% success rate. Since cancer treatment is a big business, earnings hundreds of billions per year, this discovery was quickly buried and forgotten.

This frequency is also used to manifest miracles in your life. It’s the frequency at which you’ll manifest, you’ll attract whatever you desire most. The closer you operate to this frequency, the better in sync you are in nature and the more likely you are to attract everything you desire.

The fourth frequency is 638 HZ. Using this frequency you become a better spouse, a better friend and a better communicator. It promotes empathy and releases anger, allowing you to better connect with those around you.

It’s also a useful frequency to listen together with your spouse, as it creates a bridge of understanding and love between the two of you. It brings people together.

The fifth frequency 741 HZ. Use this to develop your power of self expression. It makes you a better writer and a better creative. Many famous authors exposed themselves to 741 HZ during their writing process to create their masterpieces.

It’s also known for cleaning you of toxins, improving your health and boosting your immune system.

The sixth frequency is 852 HZ. It is especially useful if you feel lost from a spiritual perspective. Many people testified that they’ve rediscovered God after being exposed to this frequency. While nobody knows how it works, it makes everything clear and to see life and existence as it truly is.

The seventh and final frequency is 963 HZ. This is the frequency of God. Listen to it, expose yourself to it to heal and to empower your inner child, to become once again filled with hope and joy and laughter and to restore yourself to who you once were.

I’ve seen people who lost all faith in living, all hope go through this and return with the same spirit, hope and ambition of a 20-year-old.

It is hard to understand how effective these are until you try them. It’s almost a miracle how 30 minutes of exposing yourself to a frequency like 396 HZ can take your sadness away and make you smile and grin and not even know how.

It is hard to believe how well people will react to you after you expose yourself to 638 HZ. You’ll be able to get your point across better and even make people fall in love with you. It’s so effective that you’ll see it as a miracle, this is how I’ve seen it when I’ve first started this.

But how does this work?

Why does it happen the way it does?

To help you understand, we must delve into the science of Cymatics and an experiment conducted by Masaru Emoto.

Mr. Emoto, a world renowned scientist tried a simple experiment. He exposed water to different frequencies and to music. Then he froze the water and photographed the crystals through a high-powered camera.

His findings surprised him.

The water that was exposed to the seven solfeggio scales developed beautiful, symmetrical geometrical shapes, similar to snowflakes. The water that was exposed to rock music and to unnatural frequencies like 440 HZ, the frequency used in Nazi Germany, looked polluted and monstrous by comparison.

This experiment has been repeated many times, and the results had always been the same. Classical music that is played mostly using 432 HZ, one of the seven solfeggio scales built beautiful geometric patterns. Unnatural tones that cause discomfort and pain to humans lead to uneven, ugly shapes.

But you know what?

While this is one of the best-known examples of cymatics, this is nothing new. They have known it as past as ancient Greece and Egypt. Long before laboratories and cameras existed, people in ancient times created geometrical shapes using sounds.

You may wonder though – why does it matter? Isn’t it just like a party trick?

Not really.

Your body is made up of about 80% water. Your body is also made 100% of energy, as everything is around us.

Energy vibrating at fast speeds give the impression of matter. This is elementary high-school physics.

Since water is one of the main building blocks of your body, how it reacts to the vibrations around you matters. And this is only what we can observe.

Some scientists think vibrations affect your DNA, at the most elementary level, but we don’t have the tools to observe this. We can only observe what it does to water and the effects are extraordinary.

And even without these tests, even without these experiments, you know this already. You know how some vibrations make you feel relaxed and happy while others make you sick. You know well that classical music will improve your concentration and make you smile while rock music can make you aggressive.

If you stop just for a second and observe the world around you, then all of this makes sense, with or without understanding the science behind it.

This is why I’ve finetuned and created Manifestation Magic around carefully selected solfeggio scales, especially around 432 HZ.

Click Here

https://bit.ly/2UJcTld

432 HZ is the favorite frequency of Mozart and Beethoven and it’s no surprise that many soon to be mothers play classical

music from these two composers to their unborn child. It boosts emotions; it brings joy and a state of well being, something that all the seven solfeggio scales achieve but this is especially effective.

Manifestation Magic is a program of brainwave entrainment built around the these solfeggio scales, enhanced with NLP hidden commands. This means it uses sound strategically to help your brain relax and improve, to bring you joy and creativity and to make you feel better in your own skin.

The NLP commands on the other hand are hidden, embedded messages that will rebuild who you are from the ground up so you can automatically become a successful person. It’s like an architect that changes your beliefs, eliminating what doesn’t work for you and adding new ones that do so you can be the best version of yourself.

So what can you expect when you use “Manifestation Magic”?

Well, it works on three different levels.

Let me explain them to you.

First, the selected solfeggio scales will boost your mood. It will make you happy. Some people who used it before reported feeling like they’ve eaten their favorite dessert after using “Manifestation Magic”.

I don’t know how it will work for you in particular but almost everyone who uses it ends up in a joyful state, full of hope and passion.

Second, the brainwave entrainment is acting like a vitamin C for your brain. This means it makes everything better. You’ll vibrate on the same frequency as your innermost desires and you’ll slowly manifest everything you desire in your life.

Brainwave entrainment will make you have a good day, every day, through the simple fact you’ll manifest small and big miracles in everything you do.

Third, the NLP commands change who you are at your core. It helps you get rid of beliefs like “I’m not good enough” or “Who am I to succeed?”. It helps you be confident and powerful and gives you that jolt to pursue the life you fully desire.

So with “Manifestation Magic”, you don’t get one benefit.

You get three.

You relax and improve your brain with the seven solfeggio scales and especially with the 432 HZ frequency. You help yourself vibrate at the level of what you truly desire so you can manifest those small and big miracles. You improve who you are by changing your beliefs at the most basic level, helping you eliminate limiting beliefs and replacing them with a sense of power and potential.

And how do you use all of this?

It’s as simple as putting your headsets on and listening to the program. You don’t have to do anything else. There’s no workbook. There’s nothing to study. You listen and let it happen.

I suggest you do it before sleep. Don’t do it while you drive because it may distract you but you can do it at home or at your office. If you feel like your spouse can enjoy this too, then do it together. “Manifestation Magic” is known to bring peace and happiness to couples, especially after a long period of stress and fighting.

There is just one thing you should do though.

It’s easy enough.

Think carefully of what you want. If you don’t get clear on your goals, on what you desire, it’s nearly impossible to manifest it. I’m not talking now to set goals or anything like that, although it is useful.

But instead, get clear.

Do you want love in your life?

How should this person look like? Tall? Short? What weight? What occupation? What music do they like?

I’ve had many customers do a simple exercise, write exactly what they wanted from their significant other, from the person who’d be ideal in their life, up to their ticks and small habits.

And guess what?

Many them attracted this person. Some got married in three months after listening to “Manifestation Magic”. Sometimes, the person they’ve attracted was so alike in their description it felt like they were casting for a movie role.

This is the power of manifestation.

And it can be more than love. It can be money. Do you want something in your life? Maybe a better paid job? Maybe a sum of money?

Click Here 

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Think about it. If it is a car, write the model, the color and even the extras. Does it come with one of those fancy iPads? Does it come with massage seats? Is it red or black or what color would you like?

The more specific you will get, the easier it will be for you to manifest it into your life. It’s hard to explain why it works but each time I visualize and think about what I desire, especially in great detail, I end up gaining it.

It’s not always the same. Maybe your ideal spouse is blonde and the person you attract is black-haired. But from experience, in my life and in the life of my friends, about 80% of it will come true, like you were creating it with your own mind.

And you are creating it with your own mind.

This is the definition of manifestation.

You manifest a new reality.

And for this, you need just to get clearer on what you want and my program “Manifestation Magic”. Get clear on what your heart wants and then listen to my program daily.

From a source unknown that you can’t even predict you’ll receive your gift from the universe. It’s so hard to explain or to understand until you experience it.

But once you do, you’ll be a believer for the rest of your life.

You’ll think you’ve been blind all your life and now you can finally see.

To get started and to discover how “Manifestation Magic” will help you manifest the life you deserve.

Click on the link here to discover more about how “Manifestation Magic” can help you.

CLICK HERE

https://bit.ly/2UJcTld

#menifest #lawofnature #vibratehigher #manifesting #spirituality #spiritualpath #spiritualinspiration #highvibes #highervibes #manifestyourdreams #lawofattraction #affirmations #positiveaffirmations #positive quotes

[robalchemy]

Coming Out Of The Empath Closet

Like most of these posts, I’m never really sure where to begin or how to lead in...But the title says it all; I’m an empath. So why write a blog post about this? Why make it public? Why make it a big deal? why even share it at all? Well, that last question is the biggest one I’ve been faced with most of my life. Why WOULD I share this about myself in such a close minded world? Why would anyone dare to allow the deepest parts of them out for all the world to see? It’s absolute insanity in our self-centered, closed minded, drive-through, fearful, dogmatic culture we call the western world in 2019. And I’m JUST bringing this out at the age of 35, so could you imagine trying to explain this to the school psychologists in the early 90′s? That would surely have been a one-way ticket to ALL the anti-psychotic drugs! Okay, so there’s a LOT to unpack here, so let’s just take it one spoonful at a time, yes? My biggest reason for bringing this aspect of myself out into the open is primarily for anyone else who’s in the same boat as me, but for a multitude of reasons, is perhaps conflicted by it. And believe me, I’ve been through ALL of these barriers time and time again. You never know what anyone will think. And this concept of normality and fitting in has been just pounded into us so hard for so long. Maybe you’re worried that your friends or family will think you’re crazy. Maybe you’re beginning to question your own sanity. Maybe people have TOLD you you’re crazy. Maybe people have put you down for it. Maybe people have made you feel like the absolute dumbest piece of shit that the face of the earth has ever seen for being so fake and ridiculous. Maybe religious people in your life want you to believe you’re all up in the devil. Maybe people have said it’s just a phase. Or that you’re fishing for attention. I’ve been to all of these places more times than I could recall.

And I WANT to tell you that this is all somehow not true, not real. I WANT to tell you that. But unfortunately, people’s judgments are VERY real, whether we like it or not. And so many of us can FEEL these judgments in so many ways. For me, I feel the intention other people have in conversation. I (more often than not) already know what their point is going to be before they’ve even finished the first sentence. I know when someone is lying to me. I know when someone’s trying to manipulate me. I even physically feel when someone is THINKING about me. (It feels like an extreme hot flash running up and down my spine and in my head.) So yes, judgement has, does and will happen. We can’t change that, nor is it our duty or right to change ANYONE. That’s not what any of us are here to do. So what should we do about both negative reactions or even just FEAR of negative reactions? Not a damn. Freaking. Thing. Which brings me to my second point of why I’m bringing this up: If we can’t be honest and true to ourselves, what CAN we be honest and true to? The truth here is that we all have the things and characteristics that make us US in this life. Would you be ashamed that maybe you have brown eyes? Would you shame someone else for liking ice cream? Of course not, it’s absolutely absurd! And these abilities that in truth, EVERYONE has - Are no different. These are just other characteristics of the way we are that are immutable. We can’t change them. We can’t delete them. So why not embrace them? That’s a question that would have made me VERY nervous even just months ago. In short, this is who I am. It’s who I’ve always been, since childhood. And it’s been a major factor in leading a VERY misunderstood life. Personally, I was VERY lucky to grow up in a family that was very open minded to these things. It’s not like I was identified as an empath and knew I was empathic when I was a kid. Back in the 90′s, that term was akin to ‘Witchcraft’ and late night infomercials for “JoJo’s Psychic Alliance Hotline for $5 a minute”. My Mom was strongly empathic, my sister is probably the strongest empath of any of us, and my Dad even developed some of his abilities later on in life, as well. (Although I’m probably closest with my Brother, but I really have no idea where he stands with any of this, and that’s completely okay too.) Growing up, my Mom always just described me as being very sensitive. And that really IS a very apt description. But she knew what I had from day one, whether she shared it with anyone or not. I’m not sure what my sister recognized in me at that time, but still, in some ways she could read me better than anyone. I also grew up OBSESSIVELY creative. And I haven’t changed even a little bit. This is a very common trait among empaths of all varieties - I don’t yet fully understand why, but somehow it also seems very fitting. As a creative soul, I can see possibilities that nobody else can. I can process certain kinds of abstract concepts intuitively and instantly. I can visualize almost to the level of hallucination, that’s how I always knew where to put the lines when I’m drawing. So even aside from all this empathic stuff, my brain was never wired “normally” to begin with. And growing up - The schools, psychologists and so many teachers saw this and insisted to my parents that something was wrong with me. I had to be “fixed” because back in those days, not fitting into the same box as everyone else was BAD. This was just the tip of the iceberg for a central theme in this life for me. So just for fun, I’d like to get into the specifics of some of the things I experience that maybe not EVERYONE else does. Since childhood, my main “odd” experience is that I feel the emotions and intentions of either those immediately around me, those I observe or those I interact with. This is actually the trickiest part of it all for me, because for decades, I had no idea that many of the things I was feeling weren’t mine. Can you imagine how screwed up that makes a person feel? The thing that made me aware and able to discern which emotions were and weren’t mine was...Well, it was freaking OBVIOUS once I began opening up to new perspectives. I knew I wasn’t perceiving the world incorrectly, yet my emotional reactions often did not remotely suit the circumstances I was in. I was just so used to it that it was just a part of life for me, and second guessing my own thoughts became normal. This caused me to repress it for so many years, but it never went away. It just kept getting more and more pushed down and compact over my lifetime until it reached critical mass and EVERYTHING I’d built up over this life began exploding out of me since it had nowhere else to go. I experienced this as chronic, severe long term depression and anxiety in recent years. That’s a long story unto itself that I’d rather not go too deep into, but the point is: Being THAT unhealthy and repressed nearly cost me my life. I became a borderline alcoholic, because that was the only way I knew to feel better. I also became obese. (Fun fact, in the last year, I’ve dropped ALL that weight!) And many times, I was borderline suicidal. I even went through several psychologists who were at a complete loss and fired me as a client because they couldn’t help me. Friends, THIS is what happens when we fall out of alignment with ourselves. This is why being true to ourselves goes FAR beyond a warm fuzzy sentiment. Now imagine being able to feel the intentions and emotions of anyone you direct your attention toward or interact with. Even through a screen. Now take a look around at the world we’re living in right now. It’s so disturbing and unspeakable to me that I don’t even want to go into examples, because even just tuning into the very concept of these negative emotions hits me so hard that I can feel it physically. And as much as I hate to say it, I live in Canada’s Arkansas. The part of the country I live in is Canada’s undisputed capital of bigotry, racism, xenophobia, selfishness and just fear driven hate in general. And I’ve lived here for 35 years. Just do the math on that and maybe you can begin to see how challenging it can really be just EXISTING as a person with empathic abilities. Now, the root word of ‘empathy’ is - You guessed it! So for me, this also goes the other way. When I see the VICTIMS of all this hate, I feel it exactly as they do. En masse. I can’t even begin to emphasize how strongly I feel it, and how much it hurts beyond what physical pain can offer. Because you can relieve physical pain sometimes, yes? This has created for me the challenge of even HAVING any faith or good will towards humanity when I can FEEL what we do to each other every minute of every day. Yet, in spite of all this - I’ve lived my life with an inexplicable and very deep sense of compassion and wanting to HELP this world, in spite of knowing what it’s capable of and the things we do to each other without so much as a second thought. I can’t even stomach how anyone can exist that way. On the flip side, I don’t come across genuinely highly positive people very often, but when I do - OMG WHAT A FREAKING RUSH!!!! I’ve never done cocaine, but that’s what I imagine it must feel like. Occasionally, I come across people who truly have the highest of intentions and hearts full of love and good humor. I feel it as soon as they approach me. When this happens, I get a very light headed rush, the world starts to look REALLY bright or “bleached” and the internal feeling is like a combination of excited butterflies in the stomach, an absolutely ELECTRIC surge throughout my entire body, very warm pins & needles that give me goosebumps, and I just instantly want to take this person, clone them 30 or 40 times and go to a party with only them. It is the starkest contrast I could imagine. So that’s the basic version. If we want to go even DEEPER into this rabbit hole, I would only tell you about the most recent MONTHS of my life. I can’t even begin to describe the work I’ve been doing on myself and where its taken me. (I will in the near future...) But in short, I’ve begun to accept, embrace and develop these parts of me. Well actually, they’ve kind of been developing themselves. So before, I was basically limited to the definition of a physical and emotional empath. In recent months however, I’ve been cracked so wide open that I’ve been experiencing things that I had no idea my mind was even CAPABLE of perceiving. To name just a couple - The degree of the sensitivities I’ve always had have increased ten fold. If I’m chatting with someone online, I can feel them to the point of their pulse. This is not an exaggeration. I’m willing to bet that some of my friends who are reading this right now are friends that I’ve been chatting with on messenger, and I’ve said something like “Okay, let’s change the topic because I just felt your heart rate spike and your adrenaline kick in”. (I actually feel much more than that, but I still want my friends to TALK to me, so I’ll leave it there for now!) I can feel the intentions and intensity of the energy of people around me in traffic. This tends to be not so much emotional, but rather I feel a spectrum of the quality of people’s energy from SHARP to GENTLE. Those are honestly the best words I can find. Not strong and weak, intense and mellow, but sharp and gentle. Another interesting thing I’ve noticed of late, is people will just randomly start pouring their hearts out to me. Perfect strangers, it can be just helping a customer at work or paying for gas at 7-11; And 2 sentences in, they begin rattling off their entire freaking life story. People give me EVERYTHING. Constantly. This used to happen occasionally, but in recent months, it’s been almost every day that I’m in public, often multiple times a day. This goes beyond just chatty people, it’s flat out rigorous. For me, this is kind of a trap, because once it starts - I can’t get people to stop even if I shout at them to shut up. (Not that I do, that one’s just an allusion.) I don’t understand exactly why this happens, but I have a faint idea that some part of people, probably subconsciously - Feel my receptivity and take it as an invitation to pour out everything they’re holding in. I’ve always been uncomfortable in large crowds. Hell, you don’t have to be even remotely empathic for this! Needless to say, this has also been taken to the extreme. But on the flip side, I can also feel nature every bit as strongly. Being in nature has become my drug in recent months. It takes absolutely everything in me that’s heavy, and replaces it with the most merciful rejuvenation and love that I think I’ve ever felt in this plane of existence. It’s like being beaten up at school by bullies all day, then going home and just crying in your Mom’s arms - It’s something I can’t even come close to putting into words. It’s sentient, and it feels me as I feel it. It’s beyond catharsis, it’s beyond being understood. That’s truly as close as I can get to describing it, I literally don’t have words for it. When I go walking in the ravine by my house, it feels like the trees are my oldest friends who know me better than I know myself. And they know exactly what I need and how I need it. 20 minutes among the trees does more for me than anything any human has ever been able to make me feel, with the sole exception of my wife. It’s unconditional mercy. And to think, I used to think this kind of stuff was for tree huggers...Well, maybe try actually hugging a tree, and see where that takes you! Like I said, there’s a LOT to unpack here, and I’ve only started to scratch the surface. But I can only type so much in one sitting, so I’m going to leave this post as it is here, save for a couple closing words for anyone who resonates with this... Again, the point here isn’t to show off these things or claim that I have something others don’t - We ALL have the exact same abilities to the exact same potential extent. Some of us are simply at different points along our own journey and evolution, there’s no rank to this or any sort of being above, below, ahead of or behind anyone else. We’re just all at different points of our own unique path, and no two among the approximately 8 billion people currently on this planet are the same. So truly, there’s no pissing contest here, so please don’t interpret it that way. The point is to simply SHARE for a couple purposes: To give anyone out there going through similar experiences validation and hopefully a bit of courage to embrace this aspect of their path rather than fear it, be ashamed of it or resent it. The second point is that in sharing this, I’m simply taking my own step towards being as authentic as I can be. This is simply who I am, it’s who I’ve always been. We can’t deny our truest nature and we should never be ashamed of it, and in putting this out there, I’m being true to myself so that hopefully others can be inspired to be true to themselves. Thankyou for helping me realize more of my own personal truth in sharing this with you!

#empath #empathy #intuition #intuitive #spiritual #spirituality #spiritualawakening #spiritualjourney

[tomasorban]

THE ZODIAC: SCORPIO THE SCORPION

Date of Rulership: 23rd October-21st November; Polarity: Negative, female; Quality: Fixed; Ruling planet: Mars/Pluto; Element: Water; Body part: Reproductive organs; Colour: Deep red; Gemstone: Opal; Metal:Steel or iron.

Attempting to make sense out of the eighth sign of the zodiac can sometimes mimic the insurmountable task of trying to answer a cosmological question as to why the universe came into being. If we could equate Scorpio with a physical object, it would be an iceberg. Why, you ask? Well everyone finds it difficult to relax and be uninhibited around an iceberg, especially when you’re on a ship and there’s simply no way of telling what lies beneath the surface of the water, how big it is, and if it will steadfast melt or simply tear a slit into your vessel and sink you. What you see or what you think you see isn’t always what you get, and that tenet is truer of Scorpio than it is for any other sign.

In equating the iceberg with the archetype of Scorpio, the part resting above the water would be the desolate, unapproachable, and cryptic exterior that doesn’t quite lend itself to close investigation for fear of judgement and ridicule, and the larger part beneath the water is the smouldering chamber of power-packed emotions and unconscious images that are left to proliferate there unchecked and are rarely, if ever, vented. Just as the iceberg severs itself from a main body and floats into territories foreign to its own nature, so too does Scorpio show the side of itself that is frequently incompatible with social rituals and codes, alienating it from the joys and benefits of social intercourse. Moreover, ice is a solid, concrete form of water and Scorpio’s watery but fixed nature indicates that it is a sign that can quickly become fixated with things. Scalding is usually associated with heat, though conditions of severe cold such as those facilitated by ice can generate analogous effects. Hence just as heat and cold can scald the skin so too can Scorpio’s behavioural extremes, brooding intensity, and fiery emotional outbursts leave people with psychic burns and scars that won’t easily be forgotten or forgiven. Scorpio, then, is the iceberg that drifts through the cosmic ocean, a block of ice that remains acutely aware of its own temporal existence, vulnerability, and composition while at the same time emanating a snow-white radioactive plume around it that alerts others to proceed with caution, or better still, stay away altogether.

The soul of a Scorpio man or woman is extremely delicate, soft, and pliable. Think of it in terms of a piece of twenty-four carat gold that can easily be bent, twisted, broken in half, amalgamated with other metals, and fashioned into material things that do not accurately express the spiritual worth of ‘gold’. Being the intuitive and proud gem that it is, Scorpio knows this and inherently feels that it’s only viable recourse is to raise gargantuan walls and set cunning traps in the immediate vicinity around itself as to thwart any foreign invasion which seeks to dismantle its bubbling motivations and innermost desires. The type and nature of defences employed by the Scorpion to ensure this never comes to pass varies from person to person, however one that exists in the arsenal of all is a belligerent, angry, and red-coloured force field that will not allow another cheap laughs at its own expense. In the mind of a Scorpio, any deliberate attempt to humiliate, threated, scold, or tease, vilify and slander either itself or a fellow conscious projection of the universe violates the most vital of moral codes and deserves shameless retaliation.

As we have thus far discerned, Scorpio possesses an innate sensitivity that renders it receptive to even the slightest changes in external temperatures and environment. Thus it seems only natural that the sign might become unnecessarily fixated on trying to control and manipulate everything around it for the sake of lessening its anxieties and maintaining harmony of its inner empire in the manner that a chess player strategically positions pawns, knights, bishops, and rooks to defend an inner sanctuary epitomized by the royal couple. Like the latter, souls incarnating under the stars of Scorpio enjoy playing games in which they can draw like-minded others into their private little worlds, identify their psychic dowry and talents as well as the positive and negative elementary characteristics of their personality, and henceforward advise them on what course of action and karmic life choices they should make. Scorpio enjoys proposing unsolicited makeovers that they believe will emphasize another’s finest characteristics, inside and out, and can be quite intrusive in prying for information that it perceives to be of utmost importance to the wellbeing of its significant other, its loved ones, and itself. Being the control freak that it is, Scorpios are aversed to and become apprehensive around obstinate and autonomous persons that will steer clear of Scorpionic manipulation, especially when the individual concerned is their own partner. Like its close cousin Cancer, Scorpio doesn’t like to be confronted about the way in which it operates or the manner in which it chooses to live its life and will often go to any length to protect its emotional security and hold onto the few momentous others that comprise its cryptic and often unintelligible chess game.

“One thing you’ll really like about me,” says Scorpio, “is the fact that I’m very understanding. I understand the conflict of interests between the outer and inner landscape that can cause one to feel like a social misfit, a reject, a loser, or simply undesired and unwanted. I don’t judge people who are different from the conforming majority; on the contrary, I embrace and honour them. I’m also really good at fixing things. I simply love to pick at something until it’s either fixed or it vanishes from the face of the earth. I’m also intensely self-aware. I’m aware of gestures, subtle energies, actions, and implications that often move in the opposite direction to that of the spoken word and might have their own story to tell. Really, I haven’t got a problem in diving down into the abyssal depths of the human soul, perusing an inner darkness that contains the carnal impulses, compulsions, instincts, and latent desires within you, and then re-emerging into the conscious light to reveal how your outer landscape will inevitably undergo a metamorphosis for the worse if you don’t confront it.

Life is about experiencing this world, but it is also about learning how to die and resurrect throughout the course of one’s lifetime in order to expand the psychic and spiritual fields of our collective consciousness. Alchemically speaking, we might say it involves a threefold cycle: necrosis, the corruption of death; leucosis, rebirth through intuition; and iosis, the conciliation of conscious and unconscious elements that leads to the much desired ruby-red state of illumination. We must all come to terms with the insecurities, hostilities, and boiling obstructions within the depths of our being that set this cycle into motion, as well as find a way of reconciling these qualities with our conscious personalities in order to attain closure. Why, you ask? Well in my search for the truth I have acquired a hunch that there are other dimensions of existence beyond our physical one, and so the plight of each human being should be to purge oneself of murky, carnal qualities that go far in inhibiting the attainment of illumination, inner purity, freedom and most importantly, unalloyed love. I, for one, come into the world karmically prepared for the emotional tribulations life will inevitably throw at me, and I know of no other sign that experiences such cheerful bliss, soaring through the boundless skies like a carefree eagle, when these obstacles are finally overcome.

Like every animal on this planet, I enjoy having sex and will often engage it purely to release tension and other psychic steam that has been collecting in the confines of my subconscious for weeks if not months. Hence, anyone lucky enough to tango with me will share in the providential gift of a mind-blowing and positively uplifting experience. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ll use sex as a method of exploitation, but one should never take me for easy, and I’m not particularly interested in dispassionate and no-strings-attached casual sex. For me, sex is extremely sacred and must involve love and intimacy between two people who care for one another otherwise the act becomes pointless and futile.”

There are two symbols associated with the zodiacal sign of Scorpio. The animal totem that represents the first of these really does correspond to the distribution of stars in the sign’s constellation, and it appears that all ancient cultures from the Chaldeans, Babylonians, and Indians to the Egyptians, Hellenes, and Romans were in unanimous agreement about this. The most significant stellar body in this vivid star group was Antares, a bright eye otherwise known as the Heart of the Scorpion and inextricably linked with the war god Mars. In ancient Egyptian cosmogony, Scorpio was ascribed prominence as the constellation of Seth, the primordial god of destruction, irruption, anger and chaos. In a book by archaeoastronomer Jane Sellers entitled The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, astronomy, archaeological evidence, and mythography come together to reveal that the eighty-year battle between the gods Horus and Seth had a precessional basis, the question being which constellation of the equinoxes, Scorpius (Seth) or Taurus (Horus), would gain the ascendency after Orion (Osiris) had been obliterated from the night skies of the northern hemisphere. Given the fervent preoccupation of our ancient ancestors with celestial events, the Predynastic Egyptians would have envisioned a harmonious balance in the annual circuit of the sun when Taurus (Horus) marked the spring equinox and Scorpio (Seth) marked the autumnal equinox. This was something of a Golden Age, a locus classicus when the v-shaped bovine head of Taurus manifested by the Hyades rose heliacally over the eastern horizon at the vernal point just before sunrise and the arachnid-like form of fiery Scorpio reappeared there exactly six months afterward to herald the autumnal equinox. According to Sellers, this Golden Age would have occurred between c. 6900-4867bce before the relentless yet subtle effect of the precessional cycle knocked it all out of allignment.    

The second, an astrological shorthand for the zodiacal sign utilized by astrologers in the creation of astrological charts, looks like the small letter “m” save for the fact that the third leg terminates with an upturned arrow. Many astrologers and symbologists have attempted to anatomically define the contemporary sigil, though it appears that none of the suggestions are wholly convincing. Hypotheses linking the modern shorthand symbol to the male reproductive organs, a severed scorpion tail, the tail of the Christian devil, the tail of a mythical dragon, and a coiled serpent have all been proposed. This particular symbol has undergone many changes through time. In Egypt, four demotic tablets were uncovered that recorded days and months in which the five visible planets entered the zodiacal signs over a twenty-eight year period. These revealed that the shorthand symbol used in ancient Egypt was a snake. Alternatively, medieval treatises show an actual scorpion.

In the northern hemisphere Scorpio appears at a time when the formative forces of Mother Nature are at their weakest, but it is also a time of turbulent change when fermentation has commenced and the scales are about to tip towards the proliferation of life energy. Evolving around the rudimentary myth relating the passions of the beneficent Osiris, ancient Egyptian belief ascertained that the latter suffered death and descent into the netherworld beneath the stars of the vigilant Scorpion. In Peri Isidos kai Osiridos, we learn that Osiris’s penis was the only body part that wasn’t found his wife, the mourning Isis, who solved the enigma of how she might conceive a son posthumously by equipping him with one hewn from a piece of wood. The myth’s preoccupation with the reproductive organs, sexuality, and resurrection fits in well with Scorpio as a spiritual archetype intensely preoccupied with the cosmic cycle of death, transformation, and rebirth.      

The Scorpion exudes an energy which works in indirect and often cryptic ways. Consequentially, this sign is one of the most misunderstood in the zodiac and will more often than not encounter hostile adversities and reactions from those that cannot comprehend the benevolent intent indigenous to the Scorpion’s nature. Having said that souls incarnating under this sign possess a psychic dowry that enables them to handle and cope with such situations, for one can be sure that the universe will never impose a blueprint onto something or someone unless it is sure that that something or someone can survive experiences and consequences that might be simulated as a result. When looking at the zodiacal image and the symbols as a whole, one intuitively feels that the poisonous stinger and sharp arrow imply sharp qualities and sentiments that cut like glass such as adroitness, cleverness, and smooth-tongued straightforwardness. They also recalls the Stygian depths of Scorpio’s psyche, a raw, windswept, and multifarious breeding ground of passion, charm, astuteness, creativity, intensity, and both sexual and romantic love. These fiery traits can be attributed to the immanence of Plutonian energy in the sign, a prominent planetary position formerly held by Mars.      

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