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evilwickedme · 1 year

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So if Superman is Moses and Captain America is David, do you think that Spider-Man is Job?

He's always miserable, with suffering piled upon suffering and loss piled upon loss. But he always has faith in the goodness of humanity and the righteousness of his duty. He maintains his faith throughout all of his trials, and that's what makes him a hero.

(I was thinking about how Judaism and Xianity see G-d differently, and more specifically how they see faith and obedience to G-d differently. In Judaism faith isn't about obedience, and G-d is often an allegory for the world just as the world is often an allegory for G-d — at least that's how I interpreted the fact that 90% of our prayers are thanking G-d for creating a specific aspect of material reality. So if the story of Job is, from a Jewish perspective, isn't about unwavering obedience to a single entity but instead about having unwavering faith in the goodness of the world, then it fits Peter Parker almost to a T, right?)

Wow ok I am SO pissed off that I wrote the answer to this for a full hour and now it's just fucking gone because Tumblr decided not to publish it when I hit post. What the very fuck. So I'm going to try to shorten what I wrote a little and hopefully it'll still make sense. But this is a great ask, for real.

Anyway. I feel like something that's been lost in my most popular posts is that my central thesis when it comes to the Jewish nature of superheroes is not that there's a 1:1 between every hero and a historical, mythological, or Tanakhi figure. The central thesis is, instead, that the very concept of heroism as presented in comics is tied to the Jews who created the genre; it's just very easy to demonstrate these kinds of concepts with direct allegories that have such clear parallels. I actually have a third secret parallel that'll probably never see the light of day, between Magneto and Aher (and like, does anybody even know who Aher is? he's not exactly a well known figure).

One of the reasons I haven't posted this comparison is that it is largely thematic, and therefore requires considerably more explanation, especially for goyim or those who aren't familiar with Aher's story (אלישע בן אבויה fyi if that means anything to y'all). But that's sort of my point - it's much easier to point that Superman is literally Moses and Cap and David serve very similar purposes as characters than to talk about the fact that superheroism is based in Jewish values and traditions: the very idea that heroes are meant to make the world better through action as opposed to sacrifice, the value assigned to every single life (he who saves one life etc), characters becoming better people over time rather than going through dedicated redemption arcs, etc (I can't remember what I wrote here and it's driving me nuts thank you very much for asking).

I gave a lot of context here to the difference between Golden Age and Silver Age writing here but honestly again that took forever and I don't feel like typing it all up, so I'll just point out the basic facts which are that the people creating the comic book industry in the late 30s and early 40s were desperate Jews trying to save their people across the ocean, and also were only about ten or twenty years removed from having lived in the Old Country themselves. Their life and culture was intensely Jewish, they'd grown up in specific Jewish tales. By the time we get to Spider-Man, the situation is entirely different. It's been 25 years of comics (Superman debuted in '38, Spider-Man in '63), and the Jewish foundations of comic books and heroism are already baked in to the genre. Yes, the industry is still overwhelmingly Jewish, but now the separation from a purely Jewish upbringing and Jewish separatism in the Old Country is forty years old. The attempt now is to specifically make stories that haven't already been told - for Spider-Man, the main concept was that there had never been a teen hero before who stood on his own - one that wasn't part of team like the fantastic four, or, more typically, a sidekick.

All these differences actually mean that the coding of these characters is very different. Superman being Moses was intentional; Cap was created as anti-Nazi propaganda. Spider-Man was and is Jewish because he is such a pure example of what Jewish heroism is. He's flawed, he's angry, but he can't help himself from trying to save... Well, everyone. It is, however, important to note that he debuted a long while before Magneto was confirmed Jewish (I don't actually know if he was the first, bc I'm having trouble finding that kind of info easily on the internet, but he's certainly one of the most notable Marvel Jews ever, and he was confirmed as a Holocaust survivor relatively early); it was a whole before Marvel realized you could make somewhat prominent characters Jewish, let alone heroes, and by then Spider-Man was one of their best selling characters, and they're still afraid to this day to alienate readers by confirming him as such.

But moving onto Job - I think I have a very different read of the Book of Job from you, but that's not surprising to me; the Book of Job is incredibly opaque, and I doubt that any two people will interpret it exactly the same. Also, I was raised Orthodox, and I often have very different perspectives on various Jewish things than the typical American Jew. Here's how I view it, though.

Firstly, Job absolutely does not maintain his faith throughout the entire story. Yes, initially he's presented as the most pure person ever, one who has never even been tempted to do a chet (חטא, closest translation is sin; another word would be aveira, which would best be translated as a transgression). And, indeed, it is not his deeds that lead to him losing everything; it is instead Satan who argues to test his faith by taking everything he holds dear away from his - his money, his cattle, his children, his health, his wife.

It's noteworthy, for any goyiche reader, that Satan in Judaism is not the Christian Devil who rules hell. He's an adversary, for sure, but he's more like an opposing counsel; his role is to argue for every human's guilt, especially when someone has committed a terrible aveirah. Forgive me for saying this, but he's essentially a devil's advocate. He can be viewed as the manifestation of yetzer hara on a wider scale (yetzer hara and yetzer hatov are the two natural impulses we all have in ourselves, the first to be selfish or to commit bad deeds and the other to commit good deeds and help others; this is a neutral fact rather than a condemnation of any person, and also I'm massively oversimplifying things here). Also, he's a tattle-tale.

Anyway, back to Job. Yes, at first he does maintain his faith, through the loss of his property, his children, even his health; his wife, before she dies, begs him to curse God, and yet he doesn't. But when she does die, he spends a chapter lamenting the day he was born, regretting that he wasn't stillborn. At first this doesn't look like a direct accusation at God, but it absolutely is, as God is in charge of life and death, but also evidence by the following:

So Job does lose his faith, because as far as he can tell, he has never done anything wrong in his life ever, and yet he has been cursed to grieve everything he has ever had, and he won't even die.

Most of the book is dedicated to dialogue between himself and three of his friends, who come to the common conclusion that he must have done something wrong to deserve this treatment. But Job remains adamant: I did not deserve this.

The general lesson that many people take from this book is that God works in mysterious ways, blah blah. But like... We know, in fact, exactly why this story happened. We saw it! We saw Satan advocate to try Job! So what's the point of the book?

The point is the Job keeps asking "why". The point is that Job hears that God won't forgive his friends, despite the fact they blame him for his misfortune, and he still chooses to pray for them. The point is that he refuses to take what has happened to him quietly. Not accepting that what happened to him was just, but not accepting others' injustice either.

Ugh. I phrased all of this way better in the first draft. I really truly hate this.

Anyway my point is that Job, despite being far richer than the average Jew by the standards of his time, actually is meant to represent a very common situation: what do you when bad things happen. Do you blame yourself, or do you blame God? Do you let other people beat you when you're down, or do you stand up for yourself?

And the thing is those themes are universal, but they're not really related to Peter Parker in particular. In the shallowest sense, the kind I used to compare Cap and David or Superman and Moses, they do not have similar stories or backgrounds. Job has everything, and he loses it all, and he mourns all of it, including the property and money; Peter Parker is working class, has never had enough money, but we see again and again that he views it as a tool rather than a goal in and of itself. Spider-Man's origin is about learning to battle your yetzer hara, your darkest impulses, and we see Peter again and again trying to do his best even though he's often being pulled by his instincts to use his power for selfish purposes. Job does not ever have to learn any such lesson; he never did anything wrong.

The one thing in common between the two stories is that they both believe that every life has value - well, if Peter is being written by a competent authors at least - with Job praying to save the men who are literally called the "resha'im", the evil ones, and with Peter being the little man's hero. But that can be said about most heroes, especially the notable ones. Hell, there's an entire double page spread dedicated to the concept in Batwoman: Elegy. This is more of another indication of Jewish values making their way into the foundations of superhero comics than it is a similarity between Job and Peter.

Also, I feel like I need to be clear. Our prayers thanking God for creating something? Traditionally are simply thanking God for creating something. I'm not saying you can't interpret it as a metaphor for the world if that's what works for you, if that's how you see God, but God was very literal to most Jews for thousands of years, and I could talk for ages and ages about the schools of thought regarding God and the world and Maimonides and shit.

Speaking of which, we need to discuss the fact that Job is literally just some guy. Like he's not a prophet, he's not a leader or a judge, he's just some rich dude who lost everything, mourned it, and then got it all back. I've talked about this before, but one of the foundational ideas of my thesis is that the similarity between prophets having powers (such as Samson but also really any judge being considered a higher authority despite not even communing directly with God) and superheroes invokes Maimonides' claim that the first degree of prophecy is the need to act for the better good, being unable to ignore the ills of the world and doing your best to fix them - that people who incapable of ignoring that urge (and Peter, despite his occasional selfishness, often prioritizes Spider-Man in his life specifically because of that urge) are possessed by the spirit of God. Literal prophecy, communing with God, cannot exist without this base level. So, in effect, Peter is significantly holier than Job.

Anyway. Again, I've definitely missed some points because of Tumblr's fuck up and I intentionally skipped most of the history lesson that gave a lot of context which I didn't feel like typing up again, but this is most of it. Sorry if this wasn't what you hoped for, but this was a really interesting thing to talk about anyway, and I'm very grateful you gave me the opportunity to think it over.

#spiderman #jew tag #jewish superheroes #jumblr #judaism #marvel comics #marvel #peter parker #gail speaks #ask #anonymous

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katyagrayce · 14 days

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If I had the time, and the resources, I would write an entire PhD about how Taylor Swift’s relationship with her fans has been variably represented through her songs, and how that representation has in turn shaped that relationship. And I have neither of those two things, but I do have the next-best options – a free evening and a Tumblr account. So here we go. As far as I can remember, there are only six songs where Taylor directly addresses her fans: Long Live, mirrorball, Dear Reader, and now But Daddy I Love Him, Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? and I Can Do It With a Broken Heart. I could be missing a few, because the woman does have a 20-year career. But even so, I think it’s telling that those are the six songs that come to mind: one huge feel-good ballad released when she first made it really big; then nothing for 10 years; then two quiet songs buried in their respective albums; and then, out of the blue, three loud, unforgettable bops released at the same time. From that alone, it’s pretty clear that Taylor has something that she wants to tell her fans – whether consciously or not, something about her relationship with them is increasingly weighing on her mind. And it doesn’t take much to figure out that said relationship is changing.

In Long Live, the fans are addressed mostly as a ‘we’ – a part of a collective that also includes Taylor, her band and her team, all of them with equal status and common goals. ‘Long live the mountains we moved / I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you.’ Later, those dragons are further described, are established as factions of the general public whom the fans stand separate from, in opposition to – ‘The cynics were outraged / Saying “this is absurd”.’ Basically, Taylor’s fans are shown to be fighting for her like an army ‘on the history book page’, which is not an uncommon metaphor in pop culture. But this is where things get interesting. Because, although Taylor creates that image of the army, she doesn’t structure it in the traditional way. Her fans are not footsoldiers defending her throne – they too are ‘the kings and the queens’, the ‘heroes’, hearing their names read out and holding up trophies. And because of that – because they stand equal with Taylor – they don’t look up to her even in victory, and she doesn’t claim to be anything more than a member of their bedraggled mob. Even at their pinnacle, all that they are is ‘a band of thieves in ripped-up jeans [who] got to rule the world.’

There’s only one point in Long Live where this total equality fractures – where the ‘we’ splits into a ‘me’ and a ‘you.’ And it’s in the bridge, where, for just a moment, Taylor steps outside of the present – she imagines herself and her fans growing up in the future. ‘Promise me this / That you’ll stand by me forever / But if, God forbid, fate should step in / And force us into a goodbye / If you have children someday / When they point to the pictures / Please tell them my name.’ This is usually the part of the song where you see audiences crying, and it’s easy to tell why – because even when Taylor separates herself from the fans, even when she doesn’t explicitly share her title of ‘queen’ with them, she still portrays them as the ones with the power. She asks them to stand by her, then to remember her. Scratch that, she pleads for them to do it. She’s expressing that she needs her fans, deeply. They’re not looking to her for guidance – it’s the other way around.

Fast forward 12 years, to Dear Reader, and you wonder how the hell did we get here?

Dear Reader is the exact opposite of Long Live. The fans are never part of a ‘we’ – in fact, they don’t play an active role in the song at all. All that they are is an omnipresent but silent entity, the titular ‘readers’, who hover offscreen as Taylor sings verse after verse of advice, then spends the chorus telling them not to follow it. This is Taylor as the long-crowned queen in the history book – the ex-thief, the grown-up revolutionary, who realised at some point that no matter how equally you fought alongside your people, no matter how young and inexperienced you all were, at some point they will need a ruler and then they will all look to you. Inch by inch, you will find yourself climbing up onto the throne, and you will be alone up there. The words you speak will fall down on the subjects sitting by your feet, and their power will be absolute, even when you didn’t mean them that way – even when they don’t have any conscious meaning, are just ‘desperate prayers of a cursed man / spilling out to you for free.’ And in the end – just like before – all you can do to rebalance the power is plead. ‘Darling, darling, please / You wouldn’t take my word for it / If you knew who was talking.’

And of course, this plea is interesting in itself, because it’s also the exact opposite of the plea in Long Live. In Long Live, Taylor is asking her fans to immortalise her in the future, to pass on her memory – the underlying assumption is that they can do this because they were there with her, they know her. But here, Taylor says that her fans wouldn’t listen ‘if they knew who was talking’, which implies – well, they don’t know. They don’t know the person behind the words. Despite all the mountains they moved – all the magic they made. Despite all the games they played together, the secret sessions, the Easter eggs, the friendship bracelets. Despite the songs spilled out like confessions. Despite it, or because of it. They don’t know her. They don’t know Taylor Swift.

In Dear Reader, this concept is portrayed as tragic. There is a lot of sadness in that image of Taylor alone above the crowd, a perceived ‘guiding light’ that is actually so lonely and broken in the way it shines – which is a good segue back to an earlier song on our list, mirrorball. The metaphor there was very similar to in Dear Reader, but the plea Taylor made was more in tune with Long Live – she begged for her fans to keep standing by her, keep listening to her. ‘When they called off the circus, burnt the disco down / When they sent home the horses and the rodeo clowns / I’m still on that tightrope, I’m still trying everything / To keep you looking at me.’ Basically, in mirrorball, she begs her fans to stay with her despite the new gap growing between them; in Dear Reader, she begs them to either take a step back or take a step forward, but not to leave things as they are. And then, we get to the songs of The Tortured Poets Department. And Taylor isn’t begging anymore. If anything, she is screaming.

TTPD was marketed as Taylor’s saddest album, but to me, it’s more obviously her angriest. Rage is not a new concept in her songs, but it’s previously always been directed at very specific people – Kanye West in Look What You Made Me Do, the haters and bigots in You Need to Calm Down, Jake Gyllenhaal in We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together and I Bet You Think About Me and All Too Well (10 Minute Version). Alternatively, it’s been couched in fiction, like how the story of Rebekah Harkness couches mad woman. But in TTPD, there is no couching – the very marketing leans into how personal each song is for Taylor – and nobody is safe. For the first time, Taylor’s fans are not represented as a separate entity protecting her against the rest of the world – they themselves are a part of that roiling mass who she needs protection from. That message becomes very pointed in the third line of But Daddy I Love Him, ‘I just learnt these people only raise you / To cage you.’ That line flags the entire song as directed not towards strangers, but towards the people who have surrounded Taylor since she was 16, who have shaped her career, who claim to care about her – the army of Long Live, the audience of mirrorball, the listeners of Dear Reader. Those people are the ‘Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best / Clutching their pearls, sighing “what a mess.”’ And that makes sense when you remember that it was Taylor’s fans who were most critical of her relationship with Matty Healy, and even with Travis Kelce. But it doesn’t make the song any less uncomfortable to listen to. For the first time, the ‘you’ Taylor is yelling at is actually you, and maybe that’s why she’s so unguarded and vicious in her choice of words – ‘I’ll tell you something right now / I’d rather burn my whole life down / Than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning.’ It also brings a new dimension to the lyrics ‘Time, doesn’t it give some perspective? / And no, you can’t come to the wedding’. Because of course, when things are going well in Taylor’s relationships, it’s her fans who want to share in that – her fans who want to hear updates from her, like her social media posts, listen out for wedding bells. And with those lyrics, Taylor’s taking that away from them. No, you don’t get to be there for the good parts. You haven’t earnt it. You didn’t respect me when I needed it. You don’t know me that well.

And that leads, of course, to the ultimate song about Taylor’s fans not knowing her – I Can Do It With a Broken Heart. Arguably, the song doesn’t quite belong on this list, because Taylor never directly addresses her fans either as a ‘you’ or as a ‘we’. But that’s telling in itself, because it’s a song where the fans play an active role in the narrative, and yet where they only appear as a foreign, menacing entity – the crowd that sees Taylor’s ‘broken pieces shattered’ and responds by ‘chanting “more.”’ There’s been a lot of debate online about whether this song will ever be performed live, and personally, I think that it’ll be just too uncomfortable an experience. Because this song is mirrorball without the plea in it. This song is so self-reflexive, its light burns your eyes. Every single syllable of this song is designed to say what you see is not who I am, and you don’t know me, and what you think is love is killing me. And how can a crowd cheer during a performance when that’s what their cheering means? I love you, you’re falling apart for me. I love you, it’s ruining your life.

Of course, the song was written about a very specific time in Taylor’s life, and I think that’s worth emphasising for every song on this list – they all capture a specific moment, immortalise a specific emotion like fixing a bug in amber, whereas in the real world, emotions come and go. The fact that Taylor felt like this about her fans at one stage doesn’t mean she always feels Iike this about them. The fact that she was hurt and furious doesn’t mean she can’t also be grateful and warm. But what angry songs do is disrupt the assumption that everything’s okay, form a crack in the glass, introduce doubt behind every smile. You only need to see through someone once to never take them at face value again. And when that experience is immortalised in a song, it’s even harder to forget it. What angry songs do is become self-fulfilling prophecies, echoing in the fans’ heads every time they see Taylor until, eventually, some distrust is inevitable. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing – to be more aware of how the mirrorball turns, the illusion of light, the real person underneath. But it’s a change. It’s a change, and even by singing about it, Taylor is ironically making it happen.

Which brings us, finally, to possibly the angriest song Taylor’s ever written – the last song I’m going to be talking about, Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? At first glance, this song isn’t necessarily directed at Taylor’s fans. It reuses a lot of imagery from my tears ricochet and mad woman, and it’s easy to write it off as also being about Big Machine Records or her detractors in the general public. But some of the lyrics in the bridge are very, very telling. The most obvious is ‘Put narcotics into all of my songs / And that’s why you’re still singing along.’ Then there are all the veiled references to obsessive people trying to get closer than they should be, closer than any stranger is allowed – ‘So all you kids can sneak into my house with all the cobwebs,’ ‘I’ll sue you if you step on my lawn.’ Elsewhere in the song, we also see the circus imagery of mirrorball turned threatening – ‘I was tame, I was gentle till the circus life made me mean’ – and the opening lines of But Daddy I Love Him come back, ‘You caged me and then you called me crazy / I am what I am because you trained me.’ This song has all the evolving messages about Taylor’s fans rolled into one – you don’t know me, you don’t own me, you’re ruining my life, you have no right to criticise. And then, for the first time, she says it in black-and-white – ‘You hurt me.’ No metaphors. No frills. It’s only three words, but it says volumes – You hurt me. You were meant to be on my side. We were meant to be fighting together. But, somehow, we’ve been split apart. You broke the promise I asked of you when I was 19 years old. You turned on me. And it hurts.

TTPD is an incredibly, incredibly angry album. Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? is an incredibly, incredibly angry song. But they are also both incredibly, incredibly sad. Taylor sings ‘You should be [afraid of me]’, when, 15 years earlier, she was singing ‘I’m not afraid / We will be remembered.’ And yes, a song is just a moment in time, but a series of songs – that’s a story. It’s a life. You can play through Taylor Swift’s discography, and you’ll hear the story of a 16-year-old girl whose trust was slowly destroyed. Sure, that might be the story of most 16-year-old girls. But most of them don’t go through it in the public eye. Most of them don’t have to balance being honest against perpetuating the cycle. And most of them listen to sad songs to get them through, instead of being the one putting those sad songs out into the world. ‘You don’t get to tell me about sad,’ Taylor sings, because of course she does. We don’t have to tell her about sad. For our generation, she is one of the people who defined what it means.

~~~

(Disclaimer: This essay is not intended to deal with the actual content of any criticism Taylor received from her fans, or the question of whether that criticism was justified. I’m leaving that discourse to other people. My aim was just to explore how Taylor’s writing about her fans has changed over time, and what that tells us about their relationship and her career as a whole).

#music #taylor swift #the tortured poets department #long live #mirrorball #dear reader #but daddy i love him #i can do it with a broken heart #who’s afraid of little old me?#fandom essay #original post #sorry for the long post #but i’m really really proud of it tbh

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mindfang-srevenge · 1 month

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Homestuck Kids and Which TMA Entity They're Associated With: A Second List By Static, with ADDITIONAL NOTATION That None Of This Is An Insult to Anyone

Read the first of these, featuring the OG troll gang: here

John: Desolation, and hear me out. Much like the argument I made for Sollux, everything gets ripped away from John over and over again. He loses his world, then his house, then his LIFE, then his DAD, then his FRIENDS, then his LIFE (again). John is continually losing everything he cares about, and it forms a weirdly core part of his character, especially considering the fact that he keeps repressing that loss and presenting a chipper face over it.

Rose: Eye. Rose is all about finding secrets (how she fell in with Doc Scratch) and breaking the game in the most interesting way possible. She stumbles across the game because she's looking for information about how to bring Jaspers back. She's constantly looking to shed light on secrets and discover answers, which is definitely eye-aligned. She's even willing to make a pact with the Horrorterrors to find out information about the Green Sun and the end of the game, which makes her an avatar in my book.

Dave: This might just be the overarching entity for all Time players, actually, but Dave-- much like Aradia-- is End aligned due to his reoccurring fascination with dead things. The man outright admits it several times-- he's just as fascinated by death as she is, with perhaps even a more morbid tilt than traditional archaeology. He's also a time traveler, which makes him continually privy to information about how the others will die unless he does something (with Davesprite as a noteable example). If he took on a more passive role (Knights are an active class) I think this might present itself a little more heavily, much like Aradia's connection is more prominent. Basically maybe aradia and dave should just hang outsometime they might be friends ahave we considered this yet hang on wait where are you going---

Jade: Vast, but heavily influenced by the Lonely. We can't talk about Jade without discussing the heavy influences that her isolation has had over her life, but her powers align so heavily with the Vast that that isolation takes on an entirely different context. She's separated from everyone but Bec by vast expanses of ocean. She has the ability to make things Vast or not-Vast by virtue of being a Space player. She is, once again, separated from everyone during the Yard by vast expanses of paradox space. She is continually alone, but in that alone-ness she's physically isolated, which overall pushes her from Lonely to a proper Vast categorization.

Jane: Extinction. In the alpha timeline, Jane is the herald of the end, but she's more than that. She's the heiress to CrockerCorp, the establishment that will eventually fucking TERRAFORM the entire earth-- which, if that doesn't classify as an extinction-level event, I don't know what does. Jane's also our introductory character for a dead session, wherein all of the consorts are literally extinct. Really the CrockerCorp stuff is more important, though-- Jane oftentimes remains loyal to the company, even going as far as to restart it on Earth C, despite what CrockerCorp has previously been responsible. She's constantly a herald of change, and death.

Roxy: Dark. It's low-hanging fruit, sure, but she's heavily textually involved with the obscuring of information. I DISTINCTLY REMEMBER, although I cannot find the text sources for it, that when she's drunk, Calliope can't see her, which is VERY Dark-aligned. Roxy's methods are also obscured, since she's a void player, and she's a Derse dreamer, which means her mental state is . . . also pretty dark, if just metaphorically. Due to her position in the retcon, as well, Roxy's past is obscured, lost to another universe entirely.

Dirk: This motherfucker is hard to sort, but in a pinch I think I'd say Stranger over Web. He does have definite ties to the Web-- if it were a thing in TMA, I'd say he serves both simultaneously, but that's a purely fanon construct so we're gonna play it safe. Dirk is constantly hiding his true self behind layers of masks, mirrors, and splinters. Nobody can every talk to the real Dirk Strider-- instead, they end up talking to Hal or DreamGhostDirk or some other similar entity. The puppet stuff draws into this, as well-- the original Lil Cal is Dirk's, before LE takes over the body, and Lil Cal is a horrorshow of Stranger imagery. (He's also just a horrorshow) Dirk is obsessed with building almost-human constructions (see Squarewave and Sawtooth), as well as hiding behind these constructs to conceal himself or his motives. Overall, Stranger, with heavy ties to the Web.

Jake: Lonely. Even when he's around people, Jake has trouble connecting. Whereas Jade is separated physically, Jake is also separated socially. He can't seem to make the relationship with Dirk ever work out (even if a chunk of that is Dirk's fault). He can't talk to Jane about anything, ever, especially that he's not interested in her.

#john egbert #rose lalonde #dave strider #jade harley #jane crocker #roxy lalonde #dirk strider #jake english #homestuck #mindfang-srevenge #tma

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shuttershocky · 1 year

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Do you think the magic prosthetic arm touko gave shiki can be used to grab objects from across the room or is it only for choking ghosts out sith style

It probably only works on non-corporeal entities, but it's cooler to think that Ryougi can just sucker punch you from across the room so I want to believe that extended arm could work on flesh and blood too. It would be so cool if she just has a range of Devil Breakers arms to use in battle.

But also now that you bring that up there's a rant I've been wanting to go on for a while.

I legitimately think Nasu forgot she can do that. Fate/Extra and Fate/Grand Order certainly forgot she could do that, if they even remember that she's got a prosthetic arm at all (which they don't)

Kara No Kyoukai is filled with so much incredibly cool shit that gets mentioned or brought up once or only written in material books and then (sadly, but probably for the better) get ignored afterwards in favor of Ryougi and Kokutou's love story, cool shit that I keep waiting for Sanda or Narita to bring back in some form because they weren't necessary to Kara No Kyoukai but, god. They were just so fucking cool.

Some examples

The aforementioned magic prosthetic arm Shiki wields. It can extend to grab enemies, is incredibly tough (an elephant can sit on it no problem) and has secret compartments to hold extra weapons

Azaka has no magic circuits at all and perceives the act of spellweaving by thinking of the spell as musical notes, which raises SO many questions about what it means to have magic potential in Type-Moon if someone without the most basic of requirements is still able to do it

Fujino developed short-ranged clairvoyance during her battle with Shiki, which she uses to get a bird's eye view of her surroundings. Given that she ends up bending the entire bridge while still being under it and bends a lamp post behind her in Extra Chorus, this implies that Fujino doesn't just use her Mystic Eyes of Distortion through her physical eyes, but can use it from the sight granted to her by clairvoyance since she can twist objects she's not even looking at.

Fujino becomes blind in Extra Chorus, and must go around with a walking stick. However, her control over her Mystic Eyes has not diminished in the slightest, and if Shiki is to be believed, Fujino will only become more powerful as she grows up.

Ryougi's Mystic Eyes of Death Perception are also growing in power over time. What this means is not entirely clear (perhaps she will be able to perceive death even on beings normally without the concept of death), but they're not killing her like they're killing Tohno.

Touko's prosthetics aren't entirely magical. You can see her programming them and hooking them up to her laptop while she inserts circuitry inside in the first movie. A mage using modern technology is rare, but Touko is straight up doing magic tech. Cybernetics with magecraft. Both Touko and Shiki are technically cyborgs.

The Hollow Shrine once had to produce an anime

Touko has a ring that renders the wearer invisible, even to powerful mages like Cornelius Alba. This gets never brought up again.

Shiki's family katana is able to destroy bounded fields around a mage's base merely by unsheathing, due to its advanced age.

Kurogiri is from Atlas

Touko and Riesbyfe are old friends. Riesbyfe is the headmaster of Reien Girls' Academy. People might argue this is a different RIesbyfe entirely due to how much that conflicts with Melty Blood, but Mother Riesbyfe has a violin in her room. It's likely meant to be the same character, retconned and repurposed for Melty Blood

Azaka met Touko and became her apprentice in a completely separate case that did not involve Mikiya at all. In fact, Tobimaru from Mahoyo is the one involved in their meeting. This story hasn't been written by Nasu yet lol.

#Kara no Kyoukai

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granulesofsand · 11 months

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Satanic Panic

I saw a post about Satanic Panic, so I felt the need to write an overview of what actually happened for those who don’t know.

What is Satanic Panic?

Satanic Panic can be viewed as either part of the Memory Wars or as an entirely separate entity. If viewed as aligned with the False Memory movement, it might be seen as proof of False Memories and a near complete lack of the existence of ritual abuse. The other takes Satanic Panic as still harmful, but removes the blame from those claiming to have experienced it.

I believe that a crucial part of enabling healing is giving survivors the benefit of the doubt. People who are speaking out about abuse might be doing so for the first time, and are particularly vulnerable to disbelief even if they have told their story before. Talking about maltreatment takes a lot of courage, especially when a stigma already exists around the topic.

Fundie Satanism

That said, the Satanic Panic was weaponized by Christian groups expecting to gain power from it. Some genuinely believed Satanic Ritual Abuse was a primary concern, others knew it was only a face for the politics.

Fundamentalist groups wanted to have the kind of attention they were no longer getting, and the instatement of mandated reporter laws and influx of unsupervised children gave them a fighting cause. They saw that child abuse was becoming popular in media, and they used it as leverage to frighten well-meaning folks into their way of thinking.

Satanic was the word for non-Christian, and Christians were quick to disown anything that hinted at rot within their own organization. Christianity was still popular, and nobody wanted to believe they could be involved with a group that caused harm. So they took any religious abuse, and some non-religious abuses, and slapped Satanic on it.

Satanic Ritual Abuse

Ritual abuse refers to maltreatment that is both standardized and associated with symbols or ideologies. At the time, many kinds of organized (involving multiple perpetrators and victims) and/or coercive (intentionally manipulative) abuse were grouped under that name. Extreme abuse was also called ritual abuse, and we still don’t have a solid definition for that one.

Given that all ritual abuse would have been considered Satanic, fundies basically screwed over anyone who was abused in this specific way. Ritual abuse as we know it now did and does happen. An abuser doesn’t have to believe in their symbolism or ideology to misuse it, and many forms of religion and other structured beliefs can be applied to hurt and intimidate people.

RAMCOA

Ritual Abuse, Mind Control, and Organized Abuse are grouped together under a metric ton of buzz words. The survivors of this collection of abuses are left with research that is out of date, chock full of misinformation, and unable to communicate with people outside of the community.

I know the words are conspiratorial. I get that the books have fear-mongering content. I need people to understand that there is no better option, and pretending bad things don’t happen doesn’t make them go away.

Government Mind Control

Mind control is manipulation with intent. Coercion. Using psychology to get your way. Implanting false memories would be mind control. Again, it doesn’t sound good because cultural contexts have evolved over time and clinical language for this kind of abuse has not. Not all mind control is abusive at all. McDonald’s using targeted ads is mind control. But also training children like dogs is mind control.

There have been government-sponsored projects on mind control. There probably still are. Governments do sketchy things like that for military advancement and because they don’t face consequences, and there was a time where government employees admitted to it. Similar to McDonald’s and their hot coffee campaign, there were some strategic moves to look better to newcomers.

The government has sponsored lots of things they don’t want to acknowledge, and people are still suffering the effects. People in poverty, black and brown communities, and so on can probably agree that government is not synonymous with benevolent.

One of the things the government did was talk to criminal organizations. I don’t know if this is news to anyone, but it was a good way to get information and resources. There were wartime experiments on drugs and interrogation, and those were mind control.

Enough survivors agree about their experiences that it doesn’t seem worthwhile to dismiss them, so until there’s better information we would do well to try to understand them. You don’t have to agree full heartedly to sit with people in their own stories.

Cult Mind Control

I would describe a cult as any group that uses unhealthy practices as a defining feature of their cultural norms. Not everyone agrees on what is or isn’t a cult, and that mostly fine. This is the definition I’m using because it makes the most sense to me in context.

Cults members are not the only ones to use or receive mind control tactics, but the post I saw mentions cults this way. The specific technique is called Trauma Based Mind Control, which is the application of psychological responses to danger and overwhelm for the purposes of an abuser.

TBMC is the primary method for what the RAMCOA survivor community calls programming. Programming is the use of cues associated with PTSD triggers to achieve a desired response in a subject. When programming is done to a small child (under age 6-12, depending on the source), a common response is Dissociative Identity Disorder.

HC-DID

Abusers create alternate self-states within one body to react to the cues given. Depending on how knowledgeable the perpetrator(s) is/are, a child might have a very structured system of alters with little control allocated to them. These systems are designed by and for abusers to create long term obedient subjects.

Not every DID system is formed this way. Most are naturally developed with the induction of trauma in a child’s life. Some organic systems have complex structures anyway, but not for anyone but themselves. These systems are polyfragmented, or C-DID systems.

The level of control and organization found within a programmed system is almost always more than those found in organic systems. In the RAMCOA community, this is called HC-DID. The key difference isn’t true complexity, but the type of prerequisites to qualify.

Highly Complex DID isn’t particularly difficult to groom in a child, but it does require intent. Cult groups, as well as other high control groups, are quite capable of figuring it out by sheer cruelty and observation.

Why Does It Matter?

Making blanket statements about what abuse is and isn’t real doesn’t actually help anyone. While people prone to worry who didn’t experience RAMCOA might feel temporarily safer, it’s likely they’ll figure out they were lied to.

People who did experience it struggle with doubt and disbelief from others, and may have been told that nobody would care. This field is still considered taboo, and there are victims of torture and adjacent who are ashamed or afraid because of the state of the larger population.

I survived RAMCOA. My family and friends survived RAMCOA. Not all of my friends survived RAMCOA. Watch yourself.

#did osdd #dissociative identity disorder #traumagenic system #actuallydid #ramcoa #tw ramcoa #did system #polyfragmented system #osddid #satanic panic #satanic ritual abuse #child abuse #tw child abuse #sysblr #system stuff #ritual abuse

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apollosgiftofprophecy · 11 months

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Your Apollo & Aphrodite response is making me excited and I'm kinda rambling now, but Aphrodite does have the domain of war 👀

HOWEVER, only Sparta, Kytheria, and some other cities acknowledged it while the rest of Greece erased and ignored it so maybe Rome's impression of Venus makes a huge impact on the slight differences between Venus and Aphrodite because this is the first time an entire civilization acknowledges her military aspect? 👀👀

It's very convenient that in my library book about Rome I came across a lil' something interesting about Venus.

Venus was originally an Italian goddess, and the book actually introduces her as "The Great Goddess Venus".

She was the goddess of substantial homely virtues, and was invoked regularly as Venus Cloacina - "Venus the Purifier"

And, well, Cloacina was the goddess of the Roman sewage system so her and Venus were kinda one in the same until younger people began associating her with Aphrodite in Greece.

Until that happened though, she wasn't a large presence in Rome.

This website talks in the Venus section about how her popularity went up during Rome's war with Carthage, and her (Venus Eurcina) cult was given approval via the infamous Sibylline Books.

She also had lots of different incarnations in Rome

Venus Eurcina

Venus Verticordia (change of the human heart)

Venus Genetrix ("the Mother"; mother of Aeneus; lover of Mars)

Her Genetrix aspect was highly venerated, especially by Julius Caesar and Augustus due to the whole "we're descended from Aeneus" thing (although, I'm raising my eyebrow at Julius because also in my book, I found out he was actually an atheist??? And used the religious system to fool the populace??? so I'm going "hmmm" on that if we're talking in-universe ToA canon)

Anyway. Genetrix aspect was even brought into the Imperial Cult because of that and she had many, many many temples in Rome.

(sidenote: that website also talking about the other gods and their Greek/Roman aspects!!! Take a look because I certainly am!)

So here's how I'm seeing it:

Venus and Aphrodite were separate entities up until Rome took over Greece and people began mixing Venus and Aphrodite together.

Venus was made primarily the goddess of love and beauty, while Cloacina took the sewage area, and Venus Genetrix shot up the popularity charts.

According to this website, Venus also actually became a symbol of imperial power, so that is probably where her war influences and domains got a bit of attention.

And the previous website has a bit more to say on it too! Temples were erected to her to gain her aid in battles, and both Julius Caesar and Augustus claimed her ancestry through Aeneus.

(going ToA canon, that mean Augustus has the blood of Venus and Apollo in him. Damn. Man's got a lot going for him)

The website also has a picture of a statue of Venus, and it used to have her bearing a shield - all in all, she was a symbol of military success and civic peace.

Also she took on more of a matronly persona, which led to empresses being regularly identified with her in carvings, busts, and etchings on coins.

Damn. Aphrodite/Venus has quite the resume.

PJO, HoO, and ToA fans give this woman the proper respect and love she deserves we stan a queen.

I found this thing to it's basically an entire essay on Venus's military importance in Rome. I've only read the first paragraph but damn.

I mean, just read it;

"The Roman goddess Venus is conventionally associated with love, sex, and beauty. However, these were only some of her areas of influence. In reality, her role within the Roman religious system was far more complex and multi-faceted, and was not confined to these associations. Venus, in the Roman mind, bore associations with warfare and military success that were just as prominent. On one hand, this is hardly surprising due to her divine status, especially as one of the Dii Consentes. All Roman deities could be thought of as ‘militaristic’ in some sense. However, even the Romans themselves made a sharp distinction between her role as the goddess of love, and her martial qualities. This indicates both her importance as a martial deity, and the surprising nature of her multi-faceted role in Roman religion."

DAMN

#the oracle speaks #aphrodite #venus #caesar augustus #julius caesar #rome #roman emperors #the trials of apollo #percy jackson and the olympians #the heroes of olympus #this is an aphrodite appreciation bloh now

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welcomewithmetonight-thechaos · 1 year

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The Evolution of Hob Gadling

(and Dreamling as its consequence)

This is inspired by this post. The person asked not to fight in the comment section and I want to respect their wishes. The premise was just too good to let it go entirely, they pointed out many accurate things; so I’d like to bring up some additional aspects I think are important to consider to understand the totality of the episode. (I’m drawing on the TV show, mainly, because I don’t have the comics present).

In their quest for immortality and defeating death there really is no difference between Burgess and Hob in 1389 and I’m pretty sure that if Hob had had the means, he, too, would have tried to capture Death and make a bargain, just as ruthlessly, might even have become greedy, same as Burgess.

Hob is self-centred and ignorant at the beginning and stays it for a long time. I’ve thought a lot about the meetings once a century from 1489 going onward and how in the first conversation Hob asks if Dream is interested in him, while Dream only cares about Hob’s experience of the world.

Dream pretty much intends to use Hob to prove a point, which is that Dream is justified in being tired of life himself.

Hob appears as the personification and representation of Western European/White humanity in the comic, which means he will not be non-conformist or critical of society; he just goes with the flow, following the currents of shady justification that is Western thought and philosophy over the centuries. He is not a creative or great mind. He will probably never write a book or learn a musical instrument; he’s just some guy.

It took Dream pointing out the cruelty of the slave trade for him to even consider it. Trying to protect Dream against Lady Johanna is a matter of civil courage, which people show no matter their political beliefs – it is a key trait of humanity.

In the 18th century, too, Hob just does things how they’re done. Calling Lushing Lou “the hospital” and thinking it funny, etc. However, I must point out that he is receptive to Dream’s assertions about her and beyond being quick to judge, as society is, he considers her as a person (if not becomes sympathetic towards her) when he learns more about her through Dream.

I do not think it is loneliness that motivates Hob to offer Dream friendship. Humans strive for connection, that is true, but in some way we can never totally achieve it. And Hob is not much more lonely then he was in the 14th century, before he became immortal: an age where death of close family was common and a force to be reckoned with; child mortality was high, plague was everywhere and people who got sick or hurt simply died. He probably grew up used to everyone around him dying. The loneliness that Hob might experience is simply the human condition of an individual that understands itself as a separate person/entity.

Just as instinctual is his reaching out to Dream for friendship, his need to connect with people. He sees human traits in Dream and relates to him.Hob basically says “I think I’m worthy of your friendship” to a clearly prideful eldritch being whom he knows nothing about.

It is simply the audacity of a humanity that considers itself worth of love, that considers itself equal. Hob is very much the personification of a life form that writes stories upon stories about their own cruelty and how it would be better if they didn’t exist at all but still found their right to existence on their capability to love, on their capability of creation, not least the creation of relationships of all kinds.

Whereupon Dream’s reaction is that of a god (I know he is not a god, but his role is very similar) who looks in disdain upon those he was meant to serve. Therefore, his acknowledgement of friendship is so important in 2022; he essentially deems humanity worthy of love. For this meta-level it is no importance if their relationship is platonic or romantic, what matters is their mutual respect and caring about one another.

As to why people ship Dreamling: Hob’s character is not only coined by his representation of humanity but by his love for and of life, his enjoyment of simple things (see: ale to drink, people to drink it with). Whereas Dream appears as simply fulfilling a duty, burdened by his role; depression is a recurring theme when it comes to his character. In loving Hob beyond the level of platonic friendship (again, it doesn’t matter if it’s queerplatonic or romantic) and seeking his company more frequently, Dream essentially ceases to be a tragically flawed character destined to bring about his own doom. He is in love with the love of life in a time where he struggles with loving life on his own accord. Hob is also one of the only characters in the TV show who is not either Dream’s enemy, his subject or his family; instead he appears as Dream’s opposite.

Hob in 2022 on the other hand is someone who lives in a pluralistic society, where go with the flow could be many things, which means that he cannot serve as the personification of humanity anymore, because the complexity of humanity is finally acknowledged and cannot be represented by a single person. He is thus free to find his own way in a individualistic society as one amongst many others, is basically forced to think for himself and make his own decisions. (The existential dread as described by Sartre). This impression is reinforced by the closing of the White Horse and Hob being stood up in 1989. It is obvious that without the consistency of the centennial meetings Hob’s purpose for live – that of telling about it, is no longer relevant. Hob feels adrift, so he decides to cling to the closest thing that he has to a constant and waits for Dream in the nearest Inn.

But it isn’t enough. Hob is forced to make a life in this new, everchanging world, so he becomes a teacher/professor (based on him grading papers). Now we do not know his profession in 1889 or 1989, but regardless this new position symbolizes the change Hob has gone through. It is his first profession over the centuries where its prestige is not based on the opinion of society (as were his previous knighthood or his status as a tradesman) but on respect and his own abilities. With teaching also comes responsibility which he previously preferred to brush off.

But still, he is anchorless, still he comes to the New Inn. When Dream comes back, he brings that needed affirmation with him.

In conclusion, over the course of their acquaintance, Dream and Hob drift towards each other, Dream overcomes his sense of superiority and learns to enjoy life again while Hob learns to become responsible for his actions, a responsibility that is superimposed on Dream as the ruler of a realm.

Both have done horrible, unforgivable things in their pasts, but both find themselves changing and encouraging change within the other. Neither of them are good people, not even in 2022 (judged by current morality standards they may even be the villains of other people’s stories) but they’re good for one another as in they complete each other. (It is this complexity which makes it so difficult to write these characters accurately in fanfiction; much of what comprises them is a metaphysical undercurrent and never said out loud but cannot be disregarded in characterizations.)

And then there is of course the tension underlying of all their interactions, 1489 “are you interested in me?”, 1589 Hob being jealous, 1689 the sadness and first moment of compassion in Dream’s eyes when he thinks Hob wants to die (which is also sadness for himself, for having been right), in 1789 especially their facial expressions and body language (think of Hob nervously tugging at his ear), Dream’s willingness to open up slowly in 1889 and their sickeningly fond smiles in 2022.

For Dreamling becoming a possibility, it is very important that we know nothing of how their conversation goes in 2022. We see only Dream’s relaxed posture and Hob’s broader than ever smile, which open a wide range of possibility for how their relationship proceeds. All of them are positive.

Do I think their relationship could have turned romantic anytime before 2022? No.

But by 2022 both of them have evolved enough that love between them becomes not only possible but also very probable.

#dreamling #netflix sandman #the sandman tv #dream of the endless #hob gadling #hob x morpheus #hob x dream #dream x hob #centennial boyfriends #morally grey characters #i have too much time #and it turns out i love doing literary (or media) analysis when it comes to the sandman #because there are so many layers of philosophical thought #which makes so many different interpretations possible

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midnights-dragon · 3 months

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I'm learning about Freud in my psychology class, and while most of it is borderline disturbing and uncomfortable, there was one part that really stuck with me, that I of course then went on to apply to Good Omens: Freudian Slips.

The Google definition of a Freudian Slip is, an unintentional error regarded as revealing unconscious feelings. This basically refers to any slip of the tongue or expression that reveals what you're really feeling; for example, if you were to hear a name in conversation of someone you dislike or have had a history with, your face may momentarily drop before you return to your previous expression. It is an indicator of what you are REALLY feeling.

In Good Omens, Freudian Slips are used, or dare I say weaponized, to demonstrate not only Aziraphale and Crowley's true feelings of one another, but also their feelings about their respective positions as angel and demon. Of course I could go on and on about the number of times Crowley's smiled with an uptick of his mouth while looking at Aziraphale before shuttering his expression, or the number of times Aziraphale has had those puppy dog eyes that he's so quick to blink and replace casting glances in Crowley's direction, but right now, I'm more focused on their separate entities as a whole.

First of all: Aziraphale. When he is around Crowley, he is, of course, happy, and at least for the most part, he is free. He allows himself to feel to the fullest extent that is allowed by Heaven. However, when he is more of under Heaven's thumb, such as when speaking to Gabriel, or when in Heaven itself, he shutters himself away; hides his true self. We see slips of that true personality in bits and pieces (Freudian Slips), but if we're being honest, we don't see his full personalty until even season two, and even then it seems slightly hidden.

Aziraphale is a bastard. He's kind, and soft, and caring and forgiving, but he is also a bastard. Angels are not supposed to be bastards. They're not supposed to be sarcastic or biting or asking questions, and they're not supposed to be so enthusiastically hedonistic. And so, of course, Aziraphale hides himself away. He allows himself brief comforts; his food, his books, his Crowley; but for the most part, he stays under Heaven's thumb, 'where he belongs.' This also is due in large part to his religious trauma, but that's for another post.

This relates to the concept of Freudian Slips because (especially when Aziraphale is around Crowley, but just himself as a whole), his entire being is one big Freudian Slip. He is not allowed to be the person who he is around Crowley. He is not supposed to be. If we were speaking in Freudian terms (at least to an extent, don't come at me, it's just a metaphor), Aziraphale's true self is his id, and the part of him, the angel part of him, that he is allowed to show, is his ego; only one is allowed to be shown, save for Freudian Slips that show who he really is, and how he really feels; how he really wants to feel.

When Aziraphale is finally freed from under that thumb (at least for a solid four years) after the failed Armageddon, it takes some time for that mask, of his metaphoric "ego", to fall. We see that in the Lockdown phone call, where he still rejects Crowley's offer to come to the bookshop; but in season 2 itself, he is very clearly so much more happier; so much more able to help people such as Maggie and even Jim when he arrives because even though Aziraphale is a bastard he is also kind, so much more able to allow himself to love.

The mask was so very ready to fall, that night at his cotillion ball.

We can only hope that he allows it to slip off completely, once he is able to; once he realizes that his love can be enough, because he is just enough of a bastard to be an angel who loves.

Moving forward to Crowley; he's a bit more self-explanatory, I believe. He is a demon on earth, the Serpent of Eden, and his given mission has always, always, always been to spread misery and pain and disarray among the humans, and yet.

Can you name one single time when he did something of a truly lasting effect to negatively impact someone's life, besides some angsty phone-addicted teenager in 2007?

That is Crowley's Freudian Slip: that he is not the big, bad, not-so-nice demon he wants everyone to believe that he is. Crowley is good, and he is kind, and he is someone who wants to see humans live and thrive and grow and be happy. Crowley gave us the apple so that we could question. Crowley rescued children through the ages from the Flood to the Land of Uz; Crowley stopped people from committing suicide; Crowley protected people, saved people, blessed people. Crowley did good, because Crowley is good.

Crowley's subconscious, Crowley's true self, is far, far closer to the surface than Aziraphale's, and yet, the one thing that he never allows higher than the crease of his heart is his love.

Demon's don't love. Demon's can't love.

Crowley is a demon, and Crowley loves.

And he, too, was ready to allow that mask to fall; that after everything, he and Aziraphale would go out for an extremely alcoholic breakfast at the Ritz, and he would give him that yellow rose, and he would kiss him, and a nightingale would once more sing in Berkeley Square.

And then Aziraphale's mask hardened, and Crowley's became the shattered fragments of his heart, reshaped into I forgive you.

So, what does all of these gradually-making-less-sense-as-I-go rambles mean about Freudian Slips? Well, in short since all the rest of this has been long and exceedingly spiraling: it means that Aziraphale and Crowley live in the limbo of one big Freudian Slip. Their love is their Freudian Slip. Their passion, their kindness, their being a bastard and being just a little bit a good person -- those are their Freudian Slips. They know it; we know it. They are afraid of it, because it is terrifying. The subconscious is a terrifying thing.

And yet, they were both so ready to lean into it. They were both almost free.

We live in hope, we wait and see, that perhaps as we see them lean into each other, we can see those masks finally fall -- and perhaps, the only Freudian Slips that will greet their future is Aziraphale's shrouded disgust at Crowley's cooking, and Crowley's hidden groans of exasperation at Aziraphale's sleight-of-hand.

Wait and see, I suppose. Wait and see.

#does this even make any sense #probably not #good omens meta #good omens meta post #meta post #crowley x aziraphale #character analysis #aziraphale character study #crowley character study #text post #long post #rambles #gomens

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honourablejester · 3 months

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Numenera Setting Notes: Points of Interest Part VI

Heading now to two very different and widely separated parts of the world: Vralk, a volcanic militarised nation to the northeast of the northern Beyond, and the Rayskel Cays, an island archipelago far out into the ocean west of the Steadfast.

I’m putting these together because, to be completely honest, I’m not really vibing with Vralk? There’s a couple of cool bits and bobs in there, so I wanted to include it somewhere, but it’s just not the bit of this world that’s exciting to me. If anyone else wants a survivalist expansionist military nation state that lives in a volcanic hellscape, Vralk is for you! But it’s not really my scene, so I’m gonna skim through it and then move on to the Rayskel Cays, an island chain that is very much more my speed. Most of this entry will be the Cays, to warn you. I love them a lot.

(Got a little long, because I love the Rayskels, allow me to burble about them)

Part VI: Vralk & the Rayskel Cays (Ninth World Guidebook)

Vralk:

Hellsfont, in the Firefang Mountains of Vralk. It’s a five mile radius field of living fire just hanging out. And by ‘living’, I mean fully intelligent and empathic, and therefore capable of being negotiated with to a limited extent, so you can, for example, ask it not to burn you. If you make it safely into the field, there’s lots of fire-immune lethal biomechanical monsters in there, and also the ‘cinder giants’, which are eleven 9ft tall humanoid skeletons in numenera armour just scattered randomly around the field, still standing but inert, coated in white ash, and immune to all attempts to loot them.

The Gate of Stars, in the city of Nabir Enthru, Vralk. Nabir Enthru is an industrial forge city with an ancient rivalry with Morlash Kor, the Vralkian capital, but the bit that intrigues me is the Gate of Stars, which is the main entrance to the city. The wall around the gate has been riddled with small alcoves that hold the ‘stars’, small motes of solidified light that were looted from the crystalline crown of a vast statue in the Firefangs. These lights flash under various circumstances, and several have been identified as flashing if, for example, an ultraterrestrial entity passes nearby, or an invisible creature passes nearby, or a weapon of level 7 or higher comes into range. But there’s a bunch more that flash and what they’re flashing for hasn’t been identified yet. IDK, it just feels really cool to me.

Norde, a port city on the River of Sorrows, Vralk. It’s built below the river, in a sunken depression 120ft down from the water level, with a thick wall and set of levees keeping it from being flooded. All the piers and docks are built at the top of this wall, and a single floodgate lets a cascade in from the river above to bring water into the town. The physical set-up of this place is just fantastic. There’s also three 3000ft spires in here, wide at top and bottom and narrowing in between, which makes me wonder if the depression was meant to be a foundation/base for something that the spires were meant to hold up. It’s just a cool town.

Mount Errow, in the Firefangs, Vralk. This is another of the mini-adventures scattered through this book, and it’s … It’s giving me Subnautica vibes? Despite being landlocked? Basically a nano named Demanisix Mal discovered that Mt Errow, a very active volcano, has a synth facility inside the caldera that is attached to a three mile deep shaft that deposits you into a vast magma chamber with an ancient subterranean city along one wall. Demanisix, before she vanished into the depths never to be seen again, left a journal naming this place the Errow Cascade and describing it as ‘a voluminous installation—possibly an entire hibernating city—that straddles a subterranean magma sea’. Which, you must admit, is cool as hell.

The Rayskel Cays:

The Slavering Falls, the central structure around which Rayskel culture is based. The Rayskels are a spiral archipelago that curl around the Slavering Falls at the centre of their inner sea. The Falls are what look like a circular underwater waterfall, actually cascades of silt falling over the ends of a massive circular pillar structure that, every so often, and randomly so no one knows when it’ll happen, becalms the seas around it and rises above the surface like a giant piston, causing an actual waterfall at the surface. It’ll stand up there for a week or so, and then plunge itself back down in under an hour, sucking anyone still on it down with it. All sort of things are collected on the Falls as they rise and fall, treasures and airels (spongefish used as currency and also considered living pieces of the moon), so trying predict when it’ll rise is a huge deal. And kids in the direct vicinity of the Falls are raised from birth to be ‘moonbabies’ to dive the Falls and search the tiny nooks and crannies for treasure even while it’s sunken.

As well as material gain, the Falls are the centre of Rayskel religion. While religion differs from island to island and settlement to settlement, most Rayskel religion is based around the worship of the moon, considering the sky another sea like theirs, and the moon as the mirror of the Falls in the sky. So the Falls are variously considered to be trying to mate with the moon as they rise, or perhaps a lover or sibling of the moon trying to reunite with her. And, the little detail from the Rayskel religion that I love so much, most of the islands consider that when a person dies, they need to be put under the waves for three days so that the soul can leave the body to become a bioluminescent creature in the skysea. I adore this. At the end of the three days, the body is pulled out, and can be recycled. If someone drowns and is not pulled out, or dies on land and is not able to be brought to the sea, they are considered lost forever and never mentioned again. That has so much pull for me. The stars are bioluminescent souls swimming in the skysea, and you have to spend your time beneath the waves after your death to join them. And if you can’t, you’re lost forever. There’s a lovely cultural thing to get teeth into, the tension and time limits around the care of the dead (also it’s just really beautiful).

I don’t know, this immediately feels so vibrant and real. I love this element so much, this central phenomenon of the islands, and the culture and beliefs that have grown around it. Also … when I die, I absolutely would not mind becoming a bioluminescent fish swimming the skysea. At all.

The Cays also have a bunch of cool transport options. You’ve got your normal range of small boats, of course, but there’s also things like iuskies, which are 40ft tall kite-like plants that you can use as natural sails for small craft and/or surfboards, and bubbleboats, which are hardened semi-circular top shells of duems, huge jellyfish looking creatures that shed their hydrophobic shells once or twice a year, that have been turned into quite efficient near-hover boats.

They also have very common non-human inhabitants that mingle with humans freely in the form of the Echryni, amphibious humanoids.

The Cays are known, somewhat, from the Steadfast, particular in Anculan and the Sea Kingdom of Ghan, and work is being done to confirm where the archipelago is and establish actual trade routes with it. I just. Further sight unseen, I’m already loving them as a setting. But. Some specifics:

Vonnai, on Darnali island, possibly the largest city in the archipelago, a massive, compact, walled construction that piles interlocking buildings on top of each other, docks tucked into their bases and passages and walkways running through buildings into each other. There are four lunar (tidal) powered gates that allow access in and out, two by land and two by sea, only during the day. The ruler lives in the only separate building, a four storey hovering tower, along with her husband, the architect behind most of the city, a man who specialises in harnessing tidal power. Which means this is a ninth world city, not a prior-world city, built by modern genius (with, granted, the usual understanding of prior-world numenera as a helping hand). I love it.

Kinider and the Terrible Exhale, down the southern end of Darnali island. The Terrible Exhale, or just The Hale, is a seasonal phenomenon of the southern peninsula of Darnali, where small bubbles of noxious fluid, containing small creatures, detritus and debris, are carried across the peninsula by a wind. The bubbles explode, releasing noxious gas and turning anything in them into shrapnel, laying waste to anything in their path. This happens several times a year. As a result, the village of Kinider is buried under a beach in strange structures called ‘sinkers’ to avoid it. Sinkers are strange, transparent, glasslike tubes buried in the earth, with webbed membranes across the top. There are exactly 100 of them, and no one knows what they are or how to make more, so the town is extremely pressed for space. Also, the tubes are fully transparent, and not much sticks to the inside of them, so privacy is also an issue, as well as seeing … crawling things in the earth around them. And stuff decaying in the earth around them. The views aren’t good, is the thing here. This is such a weird little town, and I love that it exists. Interestingly, because of the housing shortage, a shanty town village has sprung up on the surface a little up the beach, but it’s destroyed every Hale, and its survivors have to rebuild all over again every time. So there’s … tension. Heh.

Dyn’s Scar, on Augh-Chass island. A milky white stratified inland sea, the Scar has a cool top layer, a warm middle layer, and a lower layer that often freezes, sending sunken icebergs floating to the surface. The surface is covered in float pods, 10ft by 15ft floating plants. The shore is ringed by hyperfungi that sprout after rainstorms, shoot up to 6ft tall, and then violently fling spores everywhere, which would be fine, but each spore release includes one ‘hyperspore’, an intelligent spore that floats into a living creature’s ear and tries to steer them somewhere new to start a new colony by submerging the host in water. If you can’t resist the spore’s ‘suggestions’, you find yourself somewhere strange with no idea how you got there, and feeling the urge to go for a little swim. In the depths of Dyn’s Scar, in the warm middle layer, is a city of an extremely intelligent race of multi-eyed tentacled amphibians called gedyr, who think humans are mostly dumb animals to be hunted, and are fully capable of speaking human languages. This whole area is just fantastically weird, and I love it.

The Omaris kibics, on Omaris island. The whole island is scarred by hundreds of miles worth of open trenches called kibics, some of which are a mile wide and half a mile deep. The walls are golden cement inlaid with elaborate designs, including designs made of light, fossils of ancient or non-existent creatures, ancient languages, and inlaid technology. The floors of the kibics are made of a porous silvery substance with a consistency varying between packed earth and warm tar, and which secretes a viscous purple substance called glaili, which a group of local nanos have discovered can be compressed by certain machines, although the process is a work in progress and results vary from a pretty red stone, to a power source, to actual numenera. The walls of the kibics also contain entrances to various underground structures and complexes across the island, many still unexplored, with the potential to contain ancients know what. The whole island is just one massive weird constructed landscape full of weirdness and discovery.

Maer Outpost, on Omaris island. It’s a trading outpost built at the site of a collision between a ship and a young bellowing naek, which if I’m reading this right is basically a weird sky whale: “Bellowing nyeks are behemoth amphibian creatures with multiple finwings and a long, serpentine tail. They spend most of their lives in the air, flying and leaping above the ocean’s surface. Once they reach a certain size, however, they become waterbound, able to breach the surface only rarely. The sight of a fully grown bellowing nyek breaching is one of wonder to even the most hardened and experienced Ninth Worlders.” The Outpost is built in the midst of the wrecked ship and the naek corpse, and the survivors found that there was a lot more salvage than had been in the ship. Apparently naeks are full of numenera? Or possibly portals. Because the shipwreck camp developed into a trading outpost where anything can be got, and if you can’t find it the first time, you might be asked to come back in a couple days and it’ll miraculously be there now. Heh.

Edelmid island, as an environment. Because it’s weird. The whole island is covered in huge strange ring structures, called Grask’s Hoops, made of compressed dirt and sand that’s hard as rock and about as fertile. When dry, it runs in rivers, but hardens when wet into perfect rings, spreading outwards. They can go up as well as out, and the largest is 200 miles in diameter and a mile high. At the centre of these hoops are groups of plants called Crowns of Kavess, which gelatinous raspberry-red growths in crystalline shapes. They’ve adapted to Edelmid’s weird as hell weather, which rains sensations, including scent, sounds, and touch, which can be lethal if the sensation happens to be pain. The Crowns of Kavess ‘drink’ these sensations, and, after large storms, come together as colonies to ‘fruit’ numenera from the largest growth. Specifically artifacts, the most permanent and powerful of numenera. They defend these numenera and themselves during this vulnerable time by dusting the entire area in red dust that compels any creature it touches to defend the Crowns and their fruit to the death for 1 hour. So. This island is a fun and possibly lethal, but also possible profitable, time?

Rynach island, I’m only going to skim this, but it’s an island defended by psychic trees and housing a city-lab complex inhabited by transhumanist bioautomatons called kathons who believe firmly in self-improvement through self-modification, and have a lab complex made of light hovering above the forest. They have bioenhanced cybernetic symbiotic dolphin-like mounts/companions called guins that live in canals through their houses. It’s whole weird thing in there.

Darrad, a sprawling mining town on Angmorl island. It’s sprawling to cover the massive network of mining tunnels seeking ‘blue essence’, material found between rocks in the area that can power numenera, but is only sparsely inhabited, less than 2000 people. And possibly part of the reason for that is that, a while back, a rumour started circulating that the blue essence was the souls of creatures buried in the earth here, and the miners promptly rebelled, terrified they were messing with their own or other people’s ancestors. Blue Datasphere, the mining company running the town for a faraway investor, responded by basically massacring the town when the miners refused to cooperate, and built a second one, where miners have to agree to a temporary mutation that renders them mute to work there, in order to keep the rumour from re-spreading. But verbal communication isn’t the only communication, and keep that lid tight is still an issue.

The Rysors, between Angmorl and Augh-Chass, ten tall, towering, near identical ‘islands’ that rise hundreds of feet above sea level. And they move. They’re called the ‘Walking Islands’ or the ‘Walkers’, as if you’re watching from the shores of the nearby islands at exactly the right moment after twilight, you’ll see them get up, shake themselves off, and start weaving through each other as if interacting. Around when this happens, a high-pitched echolocation signal is emitted in their vicinity, and sometimes the Rysors glow during this event. People trying to go near the Rysors feel heavier and heavier the closer they get, and often find they’ve lost time when they return home. So like. Alien islands? Just hanging around.

The Rayskel Cays are definitely up there with Lostrei’s Glass Sea as one of my absolutely favourite parts of this world. I love them so much. Though, yes. If anyone is getting the impression that I like the maritime, watery parts of this setting a lot more than the burny bits of it, that’s probably true. But the whole thing about the dead needing to be placed under the waves in order to become a bioluminescent skyfish in the afterlife is just … I want to play someone from the Rayskels. In the Rayskels. I want to explore this place. It’s fantastic.

#numenera #ttrpgs #worldbuilding #setting #the rayskel cays #also vralk #mostly the cays though #what a fantastic setting #the religion here is amazing #what a worldbuilding thing to throw in #i want to be a bioluminescent skyfish after i die #lovely

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pippin-katz · 9 months

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RWRB Essay Part Fourteen: Final Thoughts & Cake

Word Count: 566

Congratulations if you've read this far! I did not expect this essay to be as long as it was, but everything I wanted to say needed more explanation, which led to more branch offs, and that's why I ended up sectioning it.

I can safely say that I absolutely adore this movie. I am going to be watching it on loop for the next couple days since I have the house to myself for the weekend.

This movie is definitely its own entity. It is unique from the book, and should not be judged by how "accurate" it is. It's a different telling of the story, and a fantastic one. It deserves to be appreciated, and gushed about.

If anyone tries to bring you down with their negativity towards this film, ignore them. I don't mean people who are politely providing valid criticism. I mean those people who have been basing their opinions entirely on how the movie compares to the book, and deciding that any changes made automatically makes it inferior. The people who are ignoring all of the fantastic aspects of the movie because they're so wrapped up in their own head.

I'm finishing this off with that reminder, that the movie is not trying to be the book. Please keep that in your mind when you watch it. For those who may have felt a similar feeling of unsatisfaction after watching it for the first time, rewatching with this as your focus may allow you to find what you were missing from the experience before.

To put it into a simple metaphor, Red, White, & Royal Blue is a cake. Yes, I'm aware of the irony, but it works very well here.

Let's say that the base story of Red, White, & Royal Blue is a chocolate cake.

The book can be a chocolate cake, with buttercream between the layers, pink icing, and sprinkles. The movie can be a chocolate cake with chocolate mousse between the layers, blue icing, and flowers.

They are both chocolate cakes. They are the same and different at the same time. Most people are going to have a preference, but that does not mean you can't enjoy both.

You have two chocolate cakes! It's a win-win!

And to the people who are simply trashing this movie, I'd like to stop and ask you something. How is it that the original author, and creator of these characters and story, approves and loves this adaptation, but you can't?

I'm an author myself, and I'm fiercely protective over my characters and ideas, and immediately get my claws out when someone suggests a major change I disagree with or a false interpretation of it.

Casey themselves has said basically the same thing I did at the start of this when I explained that the movie exists separately to the book, and they love it. If the original creator loves it, sorry, but I really don't give a damn what you have to say about its "accuracy".

To everyone else, remember to try and not let people's negativity influence you too much. If you love the movie, you don't need to justify it. You're allowed to.

Thank you for reading this. Seriously, fucking congrats if you made it this far. I'm expecting this to get like no notes and still spent an entire day writing this lmfao

previous part | master post

#red white and royal blue #rwrb #rwrb movie #rwrb book #rwrb thoughts #rwrb spoilers #alex claremont diaz #taylor zakhar perez #henry fox mountchristen windsor #henry hanover stuart fox #nicholas galitzine #matthew lopez #firstprince #history huh #bet we could make some

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dzthenerd490 · 29 days

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File: The Invasion of Godzilla

Original Creator: @jacob.animation

Go Support their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@jacob.animation

SCP#: AFA

Code Name: The Gojira Plague/ When Godzilla Breaks

Object Class: Keter

Special Containment Procedures: No samples of SCP-AFA are to be contained in any way by anyone other than the Department of the Impossible. Mobile Task Force Sigma-3 "Bibliographers" and Mobile Task Force Tau-9 "Bookworms" are to report any SCP-AFA instances they encounter to the Serpents Hand or Entities of Interest: the Librarians. It is the Foundation's best interest to allow them to deal with it and not interfere or attempt to contain.

Any SCP-AFA instance that makes it into our world much be exterminated at once. The area of its destruction must then be quarantined, the quarantine area must be at least 70 meters in diameter. Radiation Absorption Towers must be placed, and the area must be scanned to ensure all radiation is being delt with and no SCP-AFA flesh is still active. The Cover story is to be that chemical terrorists have spilled chemicals in the area. Once the area is confirmed free of SCP-AFA growth and infection the area is to be quarantined for an additional 30 days before allowing civilians back into the area, if the area was originally owned by civilians.

Description: SCP-AFA is the mutant living flesh of SCP-ABQ. The flesh is extremely hostile and mutagenic able to grow into its own fleshy instance of SCP-ABQ of various sizes and hazardous abilities. Though this can be perceived as rather confusing since SCP-ABQ is known to regenerate but can't make his flesh come to life. Furthermore, he is considered an ally of humanity that would never allow any Titan or himself to harm human life. This is because SCP-AFA is from another reality, one where the Foundation doesn't exist and has a completely different SCP-ABQ.

From this reality SCP-ABQ is a mutant monster that was given birth to the radiation of the bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It absorbed the radiation and grew in size and power; it was also thanks to the radiation it gained the anomalous ability to not only regenerate but adapt to any form of damage or obstacle it comes across. It eventually gained the anomalous ability to reproduce asexually but it failed to lay a single egg as humanity fought it. Instead, it mutated even more and gained the anomalous ability to turn any part of its body into its own anomalous monster. This is what gave birth to SCP-AFA.

Unfortunately, this was only the start of the terror, not only was its separated flesh able to turn into their own mutating monsters but the radiation became infectious. Any living organism that became infected with this radiation will mutate into an SCP-AFA instance. They will still have a basic resemblance of what they once where but overall, they will be an entirely different monster. Their bodies will grow bigger, they will have slimy and scaley skin, grow the signature Godzilla spikes on their back, and have an insatiable hunger for all noninfected organisms. These creatures regularly fuse with SCP-AFA flesh or eat it to grow bigger and stronger, thus they are referred to as SCP-AFA-1 instances.

Unfortunately, SCP-AFA-1 instances have the same properties as SCP-AFA flesh in that they regenerate quickly from damage and can be split into two separate instances. Though unlike SCP-AFA instances which are normally just blobs of flesh, SCP-AFA-1 instances retain the characteristics and abilities of their hosts, using these traits to become unique apex predators regardless of what they were before infection. It was because of this that they were able to wipe out their entire world in the span of a few short years. The only reason the Foundation knows any of this was thanks to books that tell the story of SCP-AFA and its world within the Wanderer's Library.

SCP-AFA was discovered in 2023 when an MTF unit from Sigma-3 found a book containing depictions of SCP-ABQ. However, it turned out to actually be an instance from another world that would be the progenitor of SCP-AFA. Afterwards every so often in our world there have been sightings of SCP-AFA blobs and SCP-AFA-1 instances getting into our world and killing innocent people. Thankfully the situation has always proven containable but the fact that [data expunged] incidents have happened since then is quite concerning. Especially when SCP-AFA instances are so difficult to kill. Theoretically it is possible to contain them but due to the massive risk and many hazards, containment has been discouraged by all Foundation staff. Instead, any further testing, research, and especially containment is to be left with the Department of the Impossible; if anyone can do it, its them.

SCP: Horror Movie Files Hub

#DZtheNerd #SCP: Horror Movie Files #SCP: HMF #SCP Foundation #SCP Fanfiction #SCP AU #SCP #Godzilla #Analog Horror #The Invasion of Godzilla #Department of the Impossible #SCP-AFA #Keter #jacob.animation #Jacob Animation

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qpr-competition · 1 year

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Introduction: John Doe and Arthur Lester from Malevolent

Quotes from submissions:

«They share a body. They have said that they want and care deeply for each other, that they are one of the most important things each of them have, but it is *not* romantic. It is love, but it just isn't romantic. They are codependent, but in a kind of fun way. They go through so much together and they are stronger for it. Both of them would totally self-sacrifice for the other. They are a set do not separate filled with so much love. Arthur only has eyes for him!!!»

«they're just so ♦️♠️»

«Arthur Lester lived a normal life as a 1920s private investigator. Or, at least, as normal of a life as you can lead when you live in Arkham, which is basically the cult capital of America, and when you have a history of personal tragedy so intensly horrible we can't even afford to get into it right now.

Enter John Doe. Or, the entity who will choose to be called John Doe. You see, when Arthur listened to a suspicious voice that told him to open that suspicious book, he didn't realize that he was agreeing to be possessed by… something. Even John doesn't remember who or what he is, anymore. He's been in the Dark World for too long.

The possession doesn't take entirely, though. In fact, the only part of Arthur's body that John ends up being in control of is Arthur's eyes. Arthur is now entirely separated from them, and has gone entirely blind, necessitating John to need to see for the both of them.

This is not only a great conceit for a podcast to have a built in narrator, it's also a recipie for two people who could have been opposed to each other to have a necessarily collaborative and incredibly intimate relationship.

John and Arthur's relationship defies real world definition, because no two people can ever be intimate in the same ways they are. Their fight to keep themselves safe, their struggle for control, eventually becomes a fight for each other, a mutual love that they would each give up absolutely EVERYTHING for. They are together, living in the same body, because they choose each other above all else. Arthur learns to be vulnerable, to trust someone and open up his heart again. John learns about empathy, humanity, the kind of being that he wants to be instead of what he was before, and he credits Arthur with showing him that.

And their relationship is not romantic, no matter what you may find on AO3 (just ask the creator of the podcast, lol). And still, the word "love" is used to describe how they feel about each other. They are devoted to each other, and, necessarily, partners in everything. No matter how many heated and destructive arguments they get into (what the fandom jokingly calls "divorces", and expect to see at least once every few episodes), they always come back together. More than any other pairing, they are defined by a queer love that cannot be put into socially acceptable boxes. They're something else entirely.»

#qpr competition #qpr introduction #reasons: john doe and arthur lester

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starlsssankt · 1 year

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// okay, I think I'm (semi) coherent on this, but far warning: it might get a bit rambly...

under a cut AND tagged because I will be spilling and spoiling things. (and it's bound to get a bit long)

Overall, I'd rate the season as very good. It had moments that I didn't feel invested in, but like, as long as you look at it as a separate entity from the books, it's actually entertaining. I know it felt rushed, (I had the same problem with it, myself) but I can see some of their reasons.

--Netflix might cancel (because they're stupid), and this way they at least got the main storyline in

--A lot of the last two books, if I remember correctly, was quiet contemplation, Alina's thoughts, things that can be shown on screen almost instantly, but take paragraphs and pages to do in a book.

Plus, there was almost no down time. Never a moment to breathe, which kept the pace going--even if it was a little too fast for me (and a lot of others, I see)

I've left different thoughts as I watched through the season over on my personal, so this is mostly dealing with "overall" and "last episode" thoughts.

She really did a shadow Cut at the end! That is a) interesting, b) foreboding, and c) a MUCH better ending for Alina (IMO) than the book one--losing powers and a quiet, contemplative life.

Does the Shadow Cut mean he's still floating around somehow? There's still an essence in the air? Because they did the infection of Nikolai (and for a moment I swore they weren't going to do it, we were running out of time), which leaves things OPEN for plotlines of the KoS duology to be incorporated. -shrug-

I love that they gave her a purpose OTHER than "quiet life with Mal in the country". I can't stress that enough. I get the love story, I do (I'm not the biggest fan but I GET it, okay), but like-- Mal needed a purpose outside Alina and Alina needed one outside of Mal.

They actually IMPROVED parts of the book in that ending, I admit.

Baghra. Was. Awesome. Her death (while I'm not sure which version I like the most) was something that had the impact it needed to. You didn't have Alina quietly contemplating that she feels Aleksander's pain, but you SAW it in Ben's performance.

Loved the way the show showed merzost eating him up. Destroying him. That it was in his blood this entire time, and by the end, he couldn't even control it-- That it was too overpowering and I just-- I had some HCs about that, and the show just took it to a whole other level.

I DO think I preferred Aleksander's death scene in the books, though, overall speaking. It was a quieter moment with Alina, not an audience, and the whole "just a boy" contemplation she does... I liked that in the book.

Jack-as-Wylan (and Lewis Tan as Tolya, all of the new cast but those were my faves) literally walked off the page and onto the screen.

I still love how the show basically has the Crows saving the world. What would they have done without them?!

And they didn't even give Genya & David ONE FREAKING MOMENT of happiness and peace? That's one thing the books did well--even if they killed David eventually, at least he and Genya got married and had some peaceful happy times before he died.

Ten is a nice number to stop at yeah? hah. I could probably ramble on more, and there's bound to be things I forgot, but like... that's where I'm at.

#ooc chatter / shut up megan #sab spoilers #spoilers #// this has not been proofread so read at your own risk

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witchesoz · 1 year

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Oz: What are the Famous Forty?

What are the « Famous Forty »?

Well, you must know by now that L. Frank Baum ended up writing fourteen Oz book, forming a series starting in 1900 and ending in 1920. The thing is, Reilly &Lee, the publishing house of Baum, knew very well how successful and popular the Oz series was, and refused to let it die with its creator. They hired new authors that became “Royal Oz Historians” and they were allowed to continue the Oz series – resulting in a total of forty “official” and “canon” book forming the full Oz series, as published by Reilly & Lee.

After Baum’s death, the publishing house put the Oz series in the care of Ruth Plumly Thompson. She ushered the second Oz era, by writing 19 Oz books, starting in 1921 and ending in 1939. Ruth Thompson style is quite different from the one of Baum: most notably, she tried to turn the Oz world into a more “classic fairytale” universe, by going a bit away from Baum’s innovations and novelties (for example, she turned the “Nomes” into “Gnomes”). Baum never had any male hero – Ruth had almost only male heroes. She was the one who introduced the most of the male protagonists of Oz, and she also had a greater focus on romance, weddings and royalty than Baum, a lot of her protagonists being princes and ending up married by the end of her novels. As a result, her books are quite controversial – for example, not everyone agrees with her decision to consider the Good Witch of the North’s old age a “curse” brought to her by enemies, that needs to be lifted so she can leave her job as the benevolent magic ruler of a region to become the pretty princess married to the kind of a city. But her presence in the Oz landscape stays very strong.

While she stopped participating in the Famous Forty in the 30s, she ended up releasing two more Oz books in the 70s: “Yankee in Oz” in 1972, and “The Enchanted Island of Oz” in 1976.

By this point, there were 33 Oz books.

The next official Oz historian was John R. Neill. He actually had participated in the Famous Forty before – he was the official Oz illustrator. He started illustrating the books with Baum’s “The Marvelous Land of Oz”, taking over from W. W. Denslow, and he ended up illustrating all of Baum’s and Thompson’s books. John Neill wrote three books for the Famous Forty, between 1940 and 1942: “The Wonder City of Oz”, “The Scalawagons of Oz” and “Lucky Bucky in Oz”. He actually had written a fourth Oz book for the Forty, but while he wrote it before his death he did not had time to illustrate it. The manuscript was however kept by his widow, and while not part of the Famous Forty, it was published in 1995, illustrated by Eric Shanower: “The Runaway in Oz”.

Neill’s take on Oz has been described as more… “manic”. Basically he had a children book illustrator’s mind when dealing with Oz, resulting in strong exaggerations – such as each quadrant of Oz being entirely of their associated color (from the sky to the skin color of people), or literally everything being alive in Oz, including houses.

After John Neill’s death, the next Oz Historian was Jack Snow. He was an avid fan of Baum’s writing as a child – in fact, when Baum died, Jack Snow offered to become the next Historian of Oz. It did not work, because he was only twelve years old at the time, but he ended up becoming the fourth Historian. He wrote two books for the Famous Forty: “The Magical Mimics of Oz” in 1946, and “The Shaggy Man of Oz” in 1949. It was rumored he had planned a third book, “Over the Rainbow to Oz”, but no manuscript was ever found. Snow wanted to return to a sort of Baum “fundamentalism”, by ignoring all the books of the previous Oz Historians and continuing right after Baum’s original books. Outside of his Oz writings, Snow was also a writer of ghost and horror stories for “Weird Tales”, and he notably produced a very daring short story – “A Murder in Oz”, trying to tie his two passions together by exploring the issue of the separate entities of Tip and Ozma. You must guess that the Oz editors refused to have such a story published, but it was eventually released by The Baum Bugle (the journal of the International Wizard of Oz Club, that started in 1957 and is still being published). Jack Snow also wrote “Who’s Who in Oz” in 1954, an extensive guide to all the characters in the Oz books. While the book was praised at the time and is still an important source of information, by now many have pointed several irregularities due to Jack Snow visibly misreading some of the characters (or simply losing track after reading 39 books in a row).

So, we are at a total of 38 books now. Only two were missing to form the Famous Forty.

The 39th book was written by Rachel R. Cosgrove: “The Hidden Valley of Oz”, released in 1951. She had written a second Oz book in 1954, “The Wicked Witch of Oz”, which tackled the issue of the missing Wicked Witch of the South, but she could not publish it, since Reilly & Lee considered the Oz books were not selling well anymore and wanted to close the series. The novel ended up however released by the International Wizard of Oz Club in 1993, illustrated by Eric Shanower. Rachel Cosgrove was notable for dismissing any kind of adult fan of Oz – she explained in the documentary “Oz: The American Fairyland” that she considered Oz to be a series for kids, that should not be enjoyed by adults.

The last book of the Famous Forty was “Merry Go Round in Oz”, released in 1963, and written by a collaboration: Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren Lynn McGraw (mother and daughter). The two published another Oz book in 1980 (The Forbidden Fountain of Oz), while Eloise published on her own “The Rundelstone of Oz” in 2000.

There. These are the Famous Forty Oz book, the “complete official series”.

After that, the International Wizard of Oz Club published several books: as I mentioned they published the books of Ruth Thompson that were not included in the Famous Forty, as well as “The Forbidden Fountain” of the McGraw duo and “The Wicked Witch of Oz” of Rachel Cosgrove.

To these already mentioned book you can add “The Ozmapolitan of Oz”, a 1986 book by Dick Martin ; and two books by Gina Wickwar, “The Hidden Prince of Oz” in 2000 and “Toto of Oz” in 2006.

Finally, The L. Frank Baum Family Trust authorized an author named Sherwood Smith to publish new Oz books, declaring them officially canon. With this authorization, Smith wrote a trilogy between 2005 and 2014: “The Emerald Wand of Oz”, “Trouble Under Oz” and “Sky Pyrates Over Oz”.

These are all the books that could be considered “canon”.

Of course there’s always one more; the “orthodox sequels”. Books that try their best to be sequels or continuations of the official Oz books and their canon, but were not officially recognized as canon. There are several of them, starting in 1985 with James Howe’s “Mr. Tinker in Oz” and ending with “A Nightmare in Oz”, published in 2020 by David M. Keyes. A lot of them were made by members of Baum’s family, though there is a debate as to whether they should be considered “orthodox sequels” or rather “alternate Oz” books, but that’s for another time.

#oz #the land of oz #oz franchise #oz authors #the famous forty

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johnhmcintosh · 1 year

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THE CURRENT FINANCIAL CHAOS - DREAM - Explained

JOHN MCINTOSH

For 7+ years in my articles and 25+ years in my books I have ‘pointed’ to “what is NOT Truth”. Truth cannot be taught or explained since IT is ‘infinite’ and cannot be placed in a frame but it ‘can’ be ‘revealed’ by dissolving that which is NOT True – ‘conditioning’.

What is NOT True may be compared to clouds that obscure the sun or ONE SELF You Really Are. When these clouds have been dissolved the ONE SELF ‘remembers’ or becomes ‘fully Aware of’ Who IT Really ‘IS’.

The manifested conditioning [clouds] is represented by the universe and ‘all’ that is within it, and the ONE SELF YOU Are slumbers [dreams] ‘in and of’ it while it experiences ITs ‘infinite’ potential. One such dream is the current SHIFT into an era [a repeating phenomena] of Peace and Light … which may be referred to as a ‘Happy Dream’ where the endless ‘opposites’ born of the belief in separation, come into a relative ‘balance’.

This SHIFT is expanding exponentially as the dysfunctional patriarchy [known by some as the deep state, cabal, elites, illuminati, etc.] - dissolves. The first ‘visible’ sign of this is the collapse of the financial system that kept humanity enslaved in one way or another for thousands of years. There are many other aspects of their tyrannical rule that are collapsing but are less obvious … as yet.

Be ‘assured’, that what is unfolding in this financial aspect of the ONE SELF’s Grand Dream is part of the Happy Dream that is now coming into manifestation. Soon most will begin to hear a term called NESARA/GESARA or …

National/Global Economic Security and Reformation Act.

It has 20 components and many sub-components and it will level the playing field for all of humanity in the areas of food, clothing, shelter, financial security and health. [If you wish a summary of its basic parts, please message me and I will send it to you].

This article focuses only on the current global chaos now occurring, which is a necessary aspect of the collapse of the tyrannical systems that have controlled humanity [mostly invisibly].

REMEMBER, WE ARE TALKING ABOUT A DREAM MOST CALL REALITY

At the moment [Spring of 2023] much of the global banking industry is melting down and many are deeply frightened. Fear NOT! What is ending is what is called the ‘fiat’ currency system. This means currency that has ‘value’ simply because some so-called ‘authority’ SAYS it has value … not because it is supported by anything. For example, when a bank receives a deposit [say $1,000] it is allowed to ‘loan’ out many times that amount [often 8-9 times or more] of money that DOES NOT EXIST. Multiply this times many hundreds of millions of transactions [some very, very large] and there exists a gigantic bubble of fiat – nothing-ness. ‘THIS’ is what is collapsing.

Recently certain banking rules came to fruition [part of Nesara/Gesara] that required banks to ‘hold’ a certain amount of REAL assets [usually gold] to ‘back up’ the amount of currency they had on their books … and as can be seen, many banks [some enormous entities] who cannot ‘comply’, at this very moment are closing their doors. These institutions are owned by these deep state [dysfunctional patriarchal] players and along with these collapsing houses of cards are affiliated businesses, investment markets and entire economies. What remains are those institutions that ‘are’ compliant and represent what will be the foundation of the Nesara/Gesara system that will ‘help’ change the world-dream into a Happy Dream. Far more could be added to this brief ‘overview’ but it has always been my way to POINT in the simplest way possible. Suffice it to say, humanity is SHIFTING quickly [in dream time] into a Glorious Era. You may be satisfied with this new phase of the Grand Dream or ‘use it’ to dive deeper into the Heart where True Peace/Freedom can be discovered. There is no right or wrong in this regard.

-image by Solveig Larsen

BOOKS by John McIntosh https://www.johnmcintosh.info/copy-of-books

#chaos chats #COLLAPSE #FINANCE #JOHNMCINTOSH

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