playing x, listening to all of my music on shuffle to see if i can "find poke!ren" in random lyrics, and so far all i have in his playlist is like. the go-to lighthearted and silly tracks for multiple vns and otome games HDHVDHDB. plus one arkn.ights song that i think will be the source of his tag name + a couple tv room tracks.
dude really and truly is Just Some Guy. even moreso than r!ren, who still has A Lot Of Things to work through...
i think our deal might be that he has to travel for work, if some big new discovery has been made in another region and his lab needs samples asap, so we foster a friendship through our holo casters / phones / whatever device i decide on. that way, things build up much slower and more naturally between us, so the emotions are less overpowering and explosive (obsessive) than the other rens.
and when he IS around, it's like. meet the family! ohh they love him, he's so funny and smart, let's have him over for dinner! we walk (read: i ride my horse bug LMAO) to a local lake with my art supplies, and we spend an afternoon drawing and talking about vns and games and music and art and poke.mon and local wild mushrooms vs regionwide variants vs cross-region variants, all while our poke.mon play together or watch over us... he might skitter off if he sees an interesting spore-producing pokemon in some bushes... just being a big ol' goof.
his work is much better here than in other verses; medicine and research seems to be a HEAVY focus in the pk.mn world, and what we see of it is generally very well-presented and helpful. there are some research facilities that are Less Than Stellar. cough. but those stand in contrast to all of the ones that are doing so much good.
like i cooooould consider a "this place is a [villain group] facility and some of the field study scientists don't know...? and when things implode due to some plucky teens lol, he's taken hostage and then is A Bit Fucked once he's out" plot... but i like the idea that this guy is allowed to have less trauma in one (1) AU brjbdjdbdh. at the VERY least i dont want this to be a villain arc au.
idk. maybe some song will come up that'll change all of this. we'll see!!
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At this point, I honestly do think that Angel and Angelus are the same person (I'll probably make a more detailed post about all this later).
Like, the whole Angel/Angelus debacle--and us fans asking whether they're the same person or not--is because the show first tells us that a vampire is not the human person left behind with a demon in them: instead, the demon takes over the human's body--almost possesses them, if you will--and may have the memories and even the personality of the person they inhabited, but really isn't that human and has nothing to do with them at all.
But later on, things in the show (like how Spike was handled) make fans begin to question this.
So fans then usually come up with the idea that the Watcher's Council was wrong in telling us this first thing that we heard. Or moreover, that that's probably what they want their Slayers to believe, for obvious reasons. But really, vampires are the person they once were, they just have a demon in them now and no soul/conscience.
Like I said: I might get into all of that in another post. But like a lot of fans have come up with, I do now think that Angel/Angelus are the same person, and that Angelus sort of developed split personalities.
And fanfic writers usually give the following reason for this, if they also buy into this idea.
That when Angelus' soul was restored to him--and all the Catholic teachings he believed in and adhered to as a human--he couldn't deal with it, so came up with the idea that it wasn't really him (and in some ways, it wasn't. Because with a soul/conscience and without the demon, he never would have done that stuff). It was the demon. And thus the Angelus and Angel split was born.
I think another idea similar to that (I don't know if I've seen it in fanfiction, though maybe I have) is that when Angelus' conscience is returned to him, he can't handle all of the horrible things that he did--the mind can only deal with so much, after all--and so in order to protect itself, it comes up with the idea it wasn't truly him--and the Angelus and Angel split is born.
But one thing I feel like I've never seen anyone mention (that I was having a discussion about with a friend once)... is the possibility is that the Romani curse itself could have been responsible for the split. Or at least partly responsible for it. Because there's the loophole in the curse, that after Angel gets his soul back, he'll lose it again if he ever knows a moment of true happiness. But doesn't this make it so there will always be a monstrous version of himself that he can turn back into? It almost makes it sound like to me that the conditions of the curse make it so that "Angelus" can never be rehabilitated, even if he got a chip or whatever like Spike did, so there would always be evil for Angel to turn back into, if he had his moment of true happiness, all so the Romani could have their revenge that way. Does that make sense to anyone else, or am I just crazy? ^_^'
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a panopticon is a prison designed with one guard station and cells around it in a circle, so that a guard in the station could theoretically see anyone in the prison. but the point of the design was that you didn't necessarily have to have guards in there all the time - as long as the prisoners knew they could be seen from the guard station, they would behave themselves. in the 1970s, french philosopher michel foucault used this as a metaphor for society, that we discipline ourselves and modify our behavior because we live our lives knowing that we are potentially being watched by our governments, employers, etc. while we are certainly under surveillance, even more so now than in the '70s, the point is that insitutions maintain their power not just by policing, but by convincing us to police ourselves.
the idea of internalized gaze shows up in a different form in feminist theory, as a critique of marketing pressuring women to engage in beauty culture "for themselves". in from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification: the resexualization of women's bodies in the media, scholar rosalind gill writes:
...I would argue that it represents a higher or deeper form of exploitation than objectification — one in which the objectifying male gaze is internalized to form a new disciplinary regime.
she acknowledges that of course, women don't just do things for men, but acting like women are completely freely choosing to sexualize themselves ignores the ways we internalize beauty standards and "cannot account for why, if we are just pleasing ourselves, the resulting valued ‘look’ is so similar".
anyways this post is about people saying "unalive" outside of tiktok
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The thing with the Mari Lwyd, though, is that it's being... I don't know, 'appropriated' is the wrong word, but certainly turned into something it isn't.
Thing is, this is a folk tradition in the Welsh language, and that's the most important aspect of it. I feel partly responsible for this, because I accidentally became a bit of an expert on the topic of the Mari Lwyd in a post that escaped Tumblr containment, and I clearly didn't stress it strongly enough there (in my defence, I wrote that post for ten likes and some attention); but this is a Welsh language tradition, conducted in Welsh, using Welsh language poetic forms that are older than the entire English language, and also a very specific sung melody (with a very specific first verse; that's Cân y Fari). It is not actually a 'rap battle'. It's not a recited poem. It is not any old rhyme scheme however you want.
It is not in English.
Given the extensive and frankly ongoing attempts by England to wipe out Welsh, and its attendant cultural traditions, the Mari is being revived across Wales as an act of linguistic-cultural defiance. She's a symbol of Welsh language culture, specifically; an icon to remind that we are a distinct people, with our own culture and traditions, and in spite of everyone and everything, we're still here. Separating her from that by removing the Welsh is, to put it mildly, wildly disrespectful.
...but it IS what I'm increasingly seeing, both online and in real world Mari Lwyd festivals. She's gained enormous pop-culture popularity in recent years, which is fantastic; but she's also been reduced from the tradition to just an aesthetic now.
So many people are talking/drawing about her as though she's a cryptid or a mythological figure, rather than the folk practice of shoving a skull on a stick and pretending to be a naughty horse for cheese and drunken larks. And I get it! It's an intriguing visual! Some of the artwork is great! But this is not what she is. She's not a Krampus equivalent for your Dark Christmas aesthetic.
I see people writing their own version of the pwnco (though never called the pwnco; almost always called some variant on 'Mari Lwyd rap battle'), and as fun as these are, they are never even written in the meter and poetic rules of Cân y Fari, much less in Welsh, and they never conclude with the promise to behave before letting the Mari into the house. The pwnco is the central part to the tradition; this is the Welsh language part, the bit that's important and matters.
Mari Lwyd festivals are increasingly just English wassail festivals with a Mari or two present. The Swansea one last weekend didn't even include a Mari trying to break into a building (insert Shrek meme); there was no pwnco at all. Even in the Chepstow ones, they didn't do actual Cân y Fari; just a couple of recited verses. Instead, the Maris are just an aesthetic, a way to make it look a bit more Welsh, without having to commit to the unfashionable inconvenience of actually including Welsh.
And I don't really know what the answers are to these. I can tell you what I'd like - I'd like art to include the Welsh somewhere, maybe incorporating the first line of Cân y Fari like this one did, to keep it connected to the actual Welsh tradition (or other Welsh, if other phrases are preferred). I'd like people who want to write their version of the pwnco to respect the actual tradition of it by using Cân y Fari's meter and rhyme scheme, finishing with the promise to behave, and actually calling it the pwnco rather than a rap battle (and preferably in Welsh, though I do understand that's not always possible lol). I'd like to see the festivals actually observe the tradition, and include a link on the booking website to an audio clip of Cân y Fari and the words to the first verse, so attendees who want to can learn it ahead of time. I don't know how feasible any of that is, of course! But that's what I'd like to see.
I don't know. This is rambly. But it's something I've been thinking about - and increasingly nettled by - for a while. There's was something so affirming and wonderful at first about seeing the Mari's climb into international recognition, but it's very much turned to dismay by now, because she's important to my endangered culture and yet that's the part that everyone apparently wants to drop for being too awkward and ruining the aesthetic. It's very frustrating.
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