#most destructive element

[postersbykeith]

#quotes #Dorothy Thompson #most destructive element #fear #aggressiveness #hostility

[jayninjago]

I hope that the reason for Jay's villain arc is not just his amnesia but also that hes one of the forbidden 5 teehee

#it would be so cool to have an element of creation be evil #the most destructive one non the less #i hope he uses shatter spin #jay tag

[detectivenyx]

is that character moment really wasted potential or is it a tragedy to further the themes of the text that you've decided is wasted potential because your beloved blorbo was just another victim instead of the hero who saved the day

#look this could apply to virtually any of your blorbos that you say this to #but for the sake of an example: kaede. #her sacrifice is a lot of things. positive and negative in both ways. #a thematically relevant sacrifice that haunts & drives the rest of the narrative including a destruction she could inspire but not perform. #a misogynistic move to market heavily with 'the first female protagonist!' and then immediately drop her for another boy. #but one thing she isn't is wasted potential. #kaede's potential is fully utilised. death is fucking powerful. #a death isn't just 'a cheap gut punch' #or where it is it shouldn't have to be. #a character might not be able to interact with the narrative in the traditional sense #but with death being the only one guarantee we have it is one of our most powerful narrative elements. #what that death means can be as diverse as what one's life means.

[rudjedet]

Ik lees KliFi van Adriaan van Dis want een mens is wel eens nieuwsgierig naar wat een Literair Schrijver doet met genrefictie-knuffelende narratieven en dergelijke, en mijn hemel waar ben ik aan begonnen. Het eerste hoofdstuk was nog interessant, pakkend zelfs, maar inmiddels halverwege hoofdstuk 4 voel ik me hartstikke bekocht. Niet dat het slécht geschreven is, maar wat een typische literaire hoogdravendheid die pretendeert met beide voeten op de grond te staan. En dan die Nederlands-literaire neiging om op de meest vettige manier over seks te schrijven, van het soort tussen-neus-en-lippen-door frases die onder je huid blijven plakken als vliegen. Na een orkaan die de kust verwoestte en lijken die in de achtertuin opgestapeld beginnen te worden: “Vrouwen met geschaafde rondingen zochten steun bij elkaar.” Adriaan, vriend, waarom?

#Dutchposting #I'd considered posting this in English but it just wouldn't hit the same #basically I'm reading a climate fiction book but written by a Dutch literary writer #this is somewhat of a Big Thing because literature lovers are notorious for being condescending about genrelit #(despite most literature writers like harry mulisch et al. actually utilising fantastical elements within their narratives #because it's never quite as clear-cut as purists want things to be) #but good lord it started out interesting and then just turns into the annoying middle aged man has opinions kind of voice #but the casual objectification of women /while describing wounded people after a destructive hurricane/ is what made it a DNF

[sapphcon-ic]

I love grrm's writing and how he aesthetically builds his world bc while I'm writing my own fantasy I'm like "man I can't make the morally grey villain in my story wear only red and black like that's so lame and predictable" and grrm has the coolest house in his books be dragonriders, wear only red and black, and uses names like blackfyre and hightower, and has a place called the shadow lands

#hotd #asoiaf #grrm #like not to praise grrm on main bc i know his books and stories have a lot of 😐😐 stuff but #i jusr like how he and most fantasy writers just do the most generic and predictable fantasy elements and its always so cool #like yeah the house with a lion as their sigil and their motto being hear me roar #is arrogant and always dressed in the finest clothes and they are always so gold #and the destruction of valyria is just called the doom #like you spend so much time as a writer aecond guessing all of your choices and the aesthetics you want bc you believe its lame #and some of the most successful fantasy writers are using generic material and its still cool!!! like there's a reason its cool!! #this did not make sense lmao

[senseiwu]

does Lar have any elemental powers? like since his mother is Maya and his father is Wu does he have like Creation of Sea life powers?

I'm trying to work on that actually. Someone suggested once Imagination, I believe? Which was a power in the Ninjago levels of some online Lego game that doesn't exist anymore? I've still gotta work out details. I think it was stuff like, being able to like, will things into existence? For a time? I've gotta look into it again 😅

It would probably help if we knew more about Lloyd's powers, if they had any relation to Garmadon's power of Destruction 😅

#asks #lar smith #family au #like creation and destruction arent exactly elements..... theyre a bit different #and i mean. garmadon still has his powers unlike tje other em parents #im not the most creative or smart person so its gonna take ame a while to figure out #thank you for the ask :) im really glad people are like.... interested...

[chaosgenasi]

having hishari thoughts. inchresting that 1) the lyth-priest's -- possibly ashton’s dad’s -- helmet, (once again could be a coincidence, but i keep thinking about "lith" being derived from "lithos," which means stone), is designed so that the leather "curls up like a living flame" 2) this passage:

[Thordak's] presence not only incinerated his enemies — it wounded the land itself. After the Cinder King’s defeat, the Tal’Dorei Council beseeched the Fire Ashari to travel from the distant lands of Issylra to Emon and lend their wisdom. The frightful Scar of the Cinder King and Thordak’s Crater, both twisted by the red dragon’s cancerous, fiery magic, were healed by the druids of the Fire Ashari over the course of about fifteen years, an act that the brightest minds of the Arcana Pansophical thought would take an epoch to achieve… Nevertheless, the Fire Ashari left behind a group of four druids, led by a female half-orc named Lorkathar. They dwell in a small stone fortress known as Flamereach Outpost — a defensive fortification used when the scar was still spawning beings of flame and hatred. They vehemently warn all who enter to avoid using elemental magic of any sort — especially fire magic — as these evocations could cause the still tender division between the Material Plane and the Elemental Plane of Fire to resonate and tear.

3) so far, the only artifacts we have from hishari are pieces of ceremonial, leather armor that appeared slightly worn, but cleaned. leather doesn't really burn.

#basil.ramblings #idk ashton definitely saw all of the elements but it's just the question of. where that actually happened #either they entered the gateway as part of the ritual or they fled to the gateway which both leads into them popping out in hellcatch #bc thin barriers / calamity also wounded the valley / leylines #but i'm still wondering if the town itself burned bc the elemental ritual they attempted kinda re-opened that wound; plus this happened #two decades ago / presumably before the fire ashari even finished doing what they could. #also the descriptions of the destruction caused by the town (in either plane) kinda matches imogen’s storms (esp in this most recent dream) #i really really wouldn't be surprised if there were other survivors & they went on to join or lead the rogue faction in issylra #can you imagine if ashton's parents lived. the DRAMA #there’s also the ultimate tinfoil theory which is that the cult disbanded & left the town to the elementals or burned it themselves after #the ritual backfired / ppl presumably didn’t come back from the elemental plane #also there is a resting molten titan in tal'dorei and like primordial seeds & shit which doesn't pertain to issylra but i'm still eyes #also it's interesting that we so far only have the ashari perspective on the town. i am curious about how it's a cautionary tale not only #against trying to presumably control/mess with raw elemental chaos but the reference to 'traditional wisdom' from cities such as vasselheim #i am now very eyes about that meeting between the fire ashari & the tal’dorei council

[the-boy-branithar]

Something I appreciate about Monkey Man is how doesn't try to frame revenge as just a pointlessly violent, self-destructive pursuit the way many films do. I think it's because Dev Patel was unafraid of adding a political element to the story. The kid wants to avenge his mother, but he also doesn't want what happened to them to keep happening to others. The presence of the hijras really drives this idea home. They fight with him not only because he's their friend, but because Baba and the nationalist party will bring violence literally to their door even if they don't fight back. I often roll my eyes at anti-revenge narratives. I think Dev Patel gets what it's like to be a victim of systematic violence in a way most filmmakers seem not to. Revenge isn't just a selfish pursuit that perpetuates the ~cycle of violence~, it can also be a desperate desire for the violence to end.

#monkey man #dev patel #someone smarter than me can probably word it better but yeah

[jessicalprice]

culture isn’t modular

I did a thread (actually several) on Twitter a few years ago about Christianity’s attempts to paint itself as modular, and I’ve been seeing them referenced here in the cultural christianity Discourse, and a few people have DMed me asking me to post it here, so here’s a rehash of several of those threads:

A big part of why Christian atheists have trouble seeing how culturally Christian they still are is that Christianity advertises itself as being modular, which is not how belief systems have worked for most of human history. 

A selling point of Christianity has always been the idea that it's plug-and-play: you don't have to stop being Irish or Korean or Nigerian to be Christian, you don't have to learn a new language, you keep your culture. 

And you’re just also Christian.

(You can see, then, why so many Christian atheists struggle with the idea that they’re still Christian--to them, Christianity is this modular belief in God and Jesus and a few other tenets, and everything else is... everything else. Which is, not to get ahead of myself, very compatible with some tacit white supremacy: the “everything else” is goes unexamined for its cultural specificity. It’s just Normal. Default. Neutral.)

Evangelicals in particular love to contrast this to Islam, to the idea that you have to learn Arabic and adopt elements of Arab culture to be Muslim, which helps fuel the image of Islam as a Foreign Ideology that's taking over the West.

The rest of us don’t have that particular jack

Meanwhile, Christians position Christianity as a modular component of your life. Keep your culture, your traditions, your language and just swap out your Other Religion Module for a Christianity Module.

The end game is, in theory, a rainbow of diverse people and cultures that are all one big happy family in Christ. We're going to come back to how Christianity isn't actually modular, but for the moment, let's talk about it as if it had succeeded in that design goal. 

Even if Christianity were successfully modular, if it were something that you could just plug in to the Belief System Receptor in a culture and leave the rest of it undisturbed, the problem is most cultures don't have a modular Belief System Receptor. Spirituality has, for the entirety of human history, not been something that's modular. It's deeply interwoven with the rest of culture and society. You can't just pull it out and plug something else in and have the culture remain stable.

(And to be clear, even using the term “spirituality” here is a sop to Christianity. What cultures have are worldviews that deal with humanity’s place in the universe/reality; people’s relationships to other people; the idea of individual, societal, or human purpose; how the culture defines membership; etc. These may or may not deal with the supernatural or “spiritual.”)

And so OF COURSE attempting to pull out a culture's indigenous belief system and replace it with Christianity has almost always had destructive effects on that culture.

Not only is Christianity not representative of "religion" full stop, it's actually arguably *anomalous* in its attempt to be modular (and thus universal to all cultures) rather than inextricable from culture.

Now, of course, it hasn't actually succeeded in that--the US is a thoroughly Christian culture--but it does lead to the idea that one can somehow parse out which pieces of culture are "religious" versus which are "secular". That framing is antithetical to most cultures. E.g. you can't separate the development of a lot of cultural practices around what people eat and how they get it from elements of their worldview that Christians would probably label "religious." But that entire *framing* of religious vs. secular is a Christian one.

Is Passover a religious holiday or a secular one? The answer isn't one or the other, or neither, or both. It's that the framing of this question is wrong.

And Christianity isn’t a plugin, however much it wants to be

Moreover, Christianity isn't actually culture-neutral or modular. 

It's easy for this to get obscured by seeing Christianity as a tool of particular cultures' colonialism (e.g. the British using Christianity to spread British culture) or of whiteness in general, and not seeing how Christianity itself is colonial. This helps protect the idea that “true” Christianity is good and innocent, and if priests or missionaries are converting people at swordpoint or claiming land for European powers or destroying indigenous cultures, that must be a misuse of Christianity, a “fake” or “corrupted” Christianity.

Never mind that for every other culture, that culture is what its members do. Christianity, uniquely, must be judged on what it says its ideals are, not what it actually is. 

Mistaking the engine for the exhaust

But it’s not just an otherwise innocent tool of colonialism: it’s a driver of it. 

At the end of the day, it’s really hard to construct a version of the Great Commission that isn’t inherently colonial. The end-goal of a world in which everyone is Christian is a world without non-Christian cultures. (As is the end goal of a world in which everyone is atheist by Christian definitions.)

Yet we focus on the way Christianity came with British or Spanish culture when they colonized a place--the churches are here because the Spaniards who conquered this area were Catholic--and miss how Christianity actually has its own cultural tropes that it brings with it. It's more subtle, of course, when Christianity didn't come in explicitly as the result of military conquest.

Or put another way, those cultures didn't just shape the Christianity they brought to places they colonized--they were shaped by it. How much of the commonality between European cultures is because of Christianity?

It’s not all a competition

A lot of Christians (cultural and practicing), if you push them, will eventually paint you a picture of a very Hobbesian world in which all religions, red in tooth and claw, are trying to take over the world. It's the "natural order" to attempt to eliminate all cultures but your own. 

If you point out to them that belief and worldview are deeply personal, and proselytizing is objectifying, because you're basically telling the person you're proselytizing to that who they are is wrong, you often get some version of "that's how everyone is, though."

Like we all go through life seeing other humans as incomplete and fundamentally flawed and the only way to "fix" them is to get them to believe what we believe. And, like, that is not how everyone relates to others?

But it's definitely how both practicing Christians and Christian antitheists relate to others. If, for Christians, your lack of Jesus is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed, for New Atheists, your “religion” (that is, your non-Christian culture) is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed. Neither Christians nor New Atheists are able to relate to anyone else as fine as they are. It's all a Hobbesian zero-sum game. It's all a game of conversion with only win and loss conditions. You are, essentially, only an NPC worth points.

The idea of being any other way is not only wrong, but impossible to them. If you claim to exist in any other way, you are either deluded or lying.

So, we get Christian atheists claiming that if you identify as Jewish, you can’t really be an atheist. Or sometimes they’ll make an exception for someone who’s “only ethnically Jewish.” If the only way you relate to your Jewishness is as ancestry, then you can be an atheist. Otherwise, you’re lying. 

Or, if you’re not lying, you’re deluded. You just don’t understand that there’s no need for you to keep any dietary practices or continue to engage in any form of ritual or celebrate any of those “religious” Jewish holidays, and by golly, this here “ex”-Christian atheist is here to separate out for you which parts of your culture are “religious” and which ones are “secular.”

Religious/secular is a Christian distinction

A lot of atheists from Christian backgrounds (whether or not they were raised explicitly Christian) have trouble seeing how Christian they are because they've accepted the Christian idea that “religion” is modular. (If we define “religion” the way Christians (whether practicing or cultural) define it, Christianity might be the only religion that actually exists. Maybe Islam?)

When people from non-Christian cultures talk about the hegemonically Christian and white supremacist nature of a lot of atheism, it reflects how outside of Christianity, spirituality/worldview isn't something you can just pull out of a culture.

Christian atheists tend to see the cultural practices of non-Christians as "religious" and think that they should give them up (talk to Jewish atheists who keep kosher about Christian atheist reactions to that). But because Christianity positions itself as modular, people from Christian backgrounds tend not to see how Christian the culture they imagine as "neutral" or "normal" actually is. In their minds, you just pull out the Christianity module and are left with a neutral, secular society.

So, if people from non-Christian backgrounds would just give up their superstitions, they'd look the same as Christian atheists. 

Your secularism is specifically post-Christian

Of course, that culture with the Christianity module pulled out ISN'T neutral. So the idea that that's what "secular society" should look like ends up following the same pattern as Christian colonialism throughout history: the promise that you can keep your culture and just plug in a different belief system (or, purportedly, a lack of a belief system), which has always, always been a lie. The secular, "enlightened" life that most Christian atheists envision is one that's still built on white, western Christianity, and the idea that people should conform to it is still attempting to homogenize society to a white Christian ideal. 

For people from cultures that don't see spirituality as modular, this is pretty obvious. It's obvious to a lot of people from non-white Christian cultures that have syncretized Christianity in a way that doesn't truck with the modularity illusion. 

I also think, even though they're not conceptualizing it in these terms, that it's actually obvious to a lot of evangelicals. (The difference being that white evangelical Christianity enthusiastically embraces white supremacy, so they see the destruction of non-Christian culture as good.) But I think it's invisible to a lot of mainline non-evangelical Christians, and it's definitely invisible to a lot of people who leave Christianity.

And that inability to see culture outside a Christian framing means that American secularism is still shaped like Christianity. It's basically the same text with a few sentences deleted and some terms replaced.

Which, again, is by design. The idea that you can deconvert to (Christian) atheism and not have to change much besides your opinions about God is the mirror of how easy it’s supposed to be to convert to Christianity.

Human societies don’t follow evolutionary biology

The Victorian Christian framing underlying current Western ideas of enlightened secularism, that religious practice (and human culture in general) is subject to the same sort of unilateral, simple evolution toward a superior state to which they, at the time, largely reduced biological evolution, is deeply white supremacist.

It posits religious evolution as a constantly self-refining process from "primitive" animism and polytheism to monotheism to white European/American Christianity. For Christians, that's the height of human culture. For ex-Christians, the next step is Christian-derived secularism.

Maybe you’ve seen this comic?

The thing is, animism isn’t more “primitive” than polytheism, and polytheism isn’t more “primitive” than monotheism. Older doesn’t mean less advanced/sophisticated/complex. Hinduism isn’t more “primitive” than Judaism just because it’s polytheistic and Judaism is monotheistic. 

Human cultures continue to change and adapt. (Arguably, older religions are more sophisticated than newer ones because they’ve had a lot more time to refine their practices and ideologies instead of having to define them.) Also, not all cultures are part of the same family tree. Christianity and Islam may be derived from Judaism, but Judaism and Hinduism have no real relationship to one another. 

But in this worldview, Christianity is "normal" religion, which is still more primitive than enlightened secularism, but more advanced than all those other primitive, superstitious, irrational beliefs.

Just like Christians, when Christian atheists do try to make room for cultures that aren't white and European-derived, the tacit demand is "okay, but you have to separate out the parts of your culture that the Christian sacred-secular divide would deem 'religious.'"

Either way, people from non-Christian cultures, if they’re to be equals, are supposed to get with the program and assimilate.

You’re not qualified to be a universal arbiter of what culture is good

Christian atheists usually want everyone to unplug that Religion module!

So, for example, you have ex-Christian atheists who are down with pluralism trying to get ex-Christian atheists who aren't to leave Jews alone by pointing out that you can be atheist and Jewish.

But some of us aren’t atheist. (I’m agnostic by Christian standards.) And the idea that Jews shouldn’t be targets for harassment because they can be atheists and therefore possibly have some common sense is still demanding that people from other cultures conform to one culture’s standard of what being “rational” is.  

Which, like, is kind of galling when y’all don’t even understand what “belief in G-d” means to Jews, and people from a culture that took until the 1800s to figure out that washing their hands was good are setting themselves up as the Universal Arbiters of Rationality.

(BTW, most of this also holds true for non-white Christianity, too. I guarantee you most white Christian atheists don’t have a good sense of what role church plays in the lives of Black communities, so maybe shut up about it.)

In any case, reducing Christianity--a massive, ambient phenomenon inextricable from Western culture--to the specific manifestation of Christian practice that you grew up with is, frankly, absurd. 

And you can’t be any help in deconstructing hegemony when you refuse to perceive it and understand that it isn’t something you can take off like a garment, and you probably won’t ever recognize and uproot all the ways in which it affects you, especially when you are continuing to live within it. 

What hegemony doesn’t want you to know

One of the ways hegemony sustains and perpetuates itself is by reinforcing the idea not so much that other ways of being and knowing are evil (although that’s usually a stage in an ideology becoming hegemonic), but that they’re impossible. That they don’t actually exist. 

See, again, the idea that anyone claiming to live differently is either lying or deluded.

There are few clearer examples of how pervasive Christian hegemony is than Christian atheists being certain every religion works like Christianity. Hegemonic Christianity wants you to think that all cultures work like Christianity because it wants their belief systems to be modular so you can just ...swap them. And it wants to pretend that culture/worldview is a free market where it can just outcompete other cultures.

But that’s... not how anything works. 

And the truth of the matter is that white nationalist Christians shoot at synagogues and Sikh temples and mosques because those other ways of being can’t be allowed to exist. 

They don’t shoot at atheist conventions because there’s room in hegemonic Christianity for Christian atheists precisely because Christian atheists are still culturally Christian. Their atheism is Christian-shaped.

They may not like you. They’re definitely going to try to convert you. They may not want you to be able to hold public office or teach their kids.

But the only challenge you’re providing is that of The Existence of Disbelief. And that’s fine. That makes you a really safe Other to have around. You can See The Light and not have to change much.

What you’re not doing is providing an example of a whole other way of being and knowing that (often) predates Christianity and is completely separate from it and has managed to survive it and continue to live and thrive (there’s a reason Christians like to speak of Jews and Judaism in the past tense, and it’s similar to the reason white people like to speak of indigenous peoples of the Americas in the past tense). 

That’s not a criticism--it’s fine to just... be post-Christian. There’s not actually anything wrong with being culturally Christian. The problems come in when you start denying that it’s a thing, or insisting that you, unique among humankind, are above Having A Culture.

But it does mean that you don’t pose the same sort of threat to Christianity that other cultures do, and hence, less violence. 

#cultural christianity #christian hegemony #christian atheists

[howtodrawyourdragon]

I can never think too much about Httyd 1 Astrid before I get too emotional.

At 15, this girl was so bitter and harsh and kept everyone at a distance and hard on everyone, including herself, and she didn't allow any emotions of hers to shine through beyond anger and its varying shades. I mean, how could she?

She grew up around blood and death, destined to inherit the same war her parents and grandparents did, stuck in an endless cycle of violence no one truly knew how it got started in the first place other than the very plausible reason that their enemy was simply cruel, unreasonable and would never stop coming. Not until one side finally eradicated the other, never knowing that the annihilation of one side would without a doubt automatically mean the destruction of the other before the unknown third party in this war, the Red Death, inevitably moved on to rinse and repeat elsewhere.

Astrid had no prospects for the future and she knew it. She would live out her life as a warrior, fight and get injured until the day she would inevitably die, probably in battle. Except maybe she would get to see her parents die a brutal death before she goes. Maybe even her future husband. Maybe even her future kids. That is, if she even got that far in life.

So no wonder she just stood by and watched with a vaguely sad look as Hiccup was bullied. No wonder her best pieces of advice were "he's never where he should be" and "pick which side you're on." No wonder she got pissed as hell at Hiccup when she fought to get just the littlest bit of an edge in a cruel and unjust world only to have it stolen right out from under her by the chief's son, who basically breezed his way through dragon training thanks to Toothless. No wonder she was ready to tell on Hiccup's ass when she found out he was making friends with the enemy, the same one who would come at night and steal their food and destroy their homes, leaving them to starve exposed to the elements.

And no wonder, when Hiccup shows her that a bleak future of endless cruelty isn't the only option for her anymore, she blooms open like the most beautiful goddamn flower in the entire north. She loves Snoggletog, experimenting with cooking, pranks, big romantic gestures. She gets truly in touch with her emotions and finds it important to build up the guy who literally gave her a future.

Astrid makes me so emotional, guys...

#httyd movies #httyd #how to train your dragon #astrid hofferson

[jewishvitya]

Pro-Israel people love both invalidating my Jewishness and giving me death threats by proxy.

And like. Their words aren't a magic spell that's going to erase my ethnicity, heritage, and cultural identity. Anti-zionist Jews have existed for as long as zionism has existed. Even if you disagree, I'm not the first Jew to think that the fight for our safety shouldn't mean an ethnostate, a concept that can only be maintained with violence and oppression towards other ethnic groups in the area.

And I have a lot of feelings about these softer definitions of zionism. Because what does this mean in practice. We've been moving places for thousands of years, immigration is not what I'm objecting to. I love this land, it's the only home I know, and my heart breaks for the destruction we cause here. From burning olive trees to poisoning the soil and the water with our weapons. This is not an expression of our connection to our ancestral homeland. This is violence on both people and land.

But the most jarring element of comments like this, especially now, is that they're treatening me with hatred from Gazans. I'm not scared of them right now. I'm scared and horrified for them.

A Gazan person I know lost contact with his family around a week ago and I've been praying for their safety while knowing that they're traumatized beyond anything I can imagine. And safety isn't even a word I can use for them even if they're alive. They've been homeless for a couple of months now, their house destroyed in the bombing. What safety can they find?

If I was in Gaza right now, I wouldn't be worrying about Palestinians learning I'm queer, I'd be worried about Israeli bombardment, about starvation and dehydration due to the siege, and about the diseases caused by the conditions Israel created there. The hostages that returned spoke about how they were more scared of the Israeli attacks than they could be of their captors.

Even ignoring the "they're not a monolith" and "some of them are queer" and "queerphobic people that hate me don't deserve this either" - how are you threatening me with their supposed queerphobia when the worst danger in Gaza right now is us?

You're not saying this because they want to hurt me. You're saying this because you want them to hurt me. They hardly know I exist. You want me to get hurt to satisfy your hatred of me for being against your movement, and to justify your dehumanization of Palestinians. You want me to be proven wrong for seeing them as people who deserve dignity and freedom and happiness. You're the one wishing violence on me. So don't be shy. Own your death threats instead of projecting them.

#riki babbles

[2corvusossifragus]

i wanted to make an oc ask game 😋 things i like to ask people abt their characters:

are they associated with a certain color? what color do they wear the most?

what sort of music would they like? have you thought about what genres or bands do they lean towards? do they have a favorite song?

weapon of choice? any particular reason they chose their weapon?

how crafty/resourceful are they?

how do they typically dress? does their wardrobe lean more towards practicality or aesthetics?

how do they wear their hair? do they care a lot how their hair looks?

favorite animal? why?

do they have a nickname? who gave it to them? if it's not derived from their real name, what's the story behind it?

favorite food? least favorite? are they a picky eater? do they have any dietary restrictions?

if they wear jewelry, what kind? do they prefer silver or gold? do they have a favorite gem?

what do they have in common with you? how are they different? would you get along with them?

how long have they been around? do you know their birthday? is their birthday the day you made them or another day? what do they think of celebrating birthdays?

what languages do they speak? how fluently?

are they any good with numbers?

how big or small is their family? who did they live with growing up? do they live with anyone now?

do they have any pets? what do they call their pets?

how did they spend their summers/free time as a child?

their opinion on lying, stealing, and killing?

are they quick to anger? what sets them off?

if applicable, can they drive? if they have their own, what color is their vehicle? is the inside neat and tidy, or a mess?

their favorite place to be?

do they sleep well at night?

how would you describe their voice? can they sing?

do they have any creative hobbies? (art, writing, music, etc)

how good/bad is their hearing? what about their eyesight?

how do they move? are they clumsy? light on their feet? do they use mobility aids?

if applicable, do they have a favorite sport? do they play any sports or prefer to watch?

how do they show that they care about someone? how do they express that they don't like someone?

are they associated with any particular element (air, earth, fire, water)?

do they smell like anything notable?

do they like receiving gifts? giving gifts? what is their ideal gift?

do they have any habits that aren't particularly self-destructive, just maybe odd?

if applicable, how would your other characters describe them? i mean specifically the people around them.

how would your character describe themselves? it doesn't have to line up with how they really are.

do they ever return home?

#static #long post

[celeatsrocks]

I have a fun little headcanon for white mage in ff14 that I never talk about. Very early on in the conjurer quest line, we're taught that white magic draws from the ambient aether of the world to create earth, wind, and water spells. One must keep a tenuous balance with the elements so as to not anger them like they were in the War of the Magi, because you cannot use your own aether to heal others since you are essentially trading life force and will eventually die. The effects of personal aether being used for destructive magics is discussed more in detail in the black mage questline - one of the major risks being self immolation.

Anyways, back to ambient aether. All the way from level 1 to 70, white mage spells were based in concrete elements (Stone, Aero, Fluid Aura, ect). Once we move into shadowbringers, more and more spells took on the aspect of light (Dia, Glare, ect). I believe this is because the First was so full of light that obviously white mage's use of ambient aether tainted their spells, changing to the most prevalent element in the land.

As for why the magic didn't return to the original elements in endwalker? Perhaps our experience on the First and nearly becoming a Lightwarden irrevocably tainted our spells towards the aspect of light, or the elemental aspect of light was so strong there that it's taking a while to regain a balanced elemental connection. Because while Glare, Dia, and Holy continue to get stronger, water based spells are introduced later into endwalker progression (Aquaveil and Liturgy of the Bell).

This may not be the most groundbreaking theory/headcanon I just think it's neat. Besides without job quests after level 70, we're just kinda left to theorize about the lore of the classes shadowbringers and onward.

#ffxiv #ff14 #final fantasy xiv #final fantasy 14 #white mage #shadowbringers #endwalker #shadowbringers spoilers

[kingkatsuki]

No idea where I was going with this but he makes it difficult for me to think.

More Dragon King Bakugou thoughts.

Tw: he calls us “little girl”, if that gives you the ick I’m soz.

It’s difficult for Dragon King Bakugou to treat your body with care. A man who was raised of violence and barbarity, intended from birth to be a vengeful successor who would pillage and rule over Kingdoms with his dragon by his side. The comforting embrace of his mothers hold long forgotten as he seeks pleasure in the death and destruction that follows him.

And although he may seem callous and cold, he’s wholly perceptive of the way you cower from him. Flinching as he moves to hold your arms or cup your face— as though you’re a frightened doe startled by the sudden snap of a twig. For the first time in his life he doesn’t want to be this brute of a man, the bloodthirsty King of Dragons that’s revered around the Country.

You don’t expect him to be soft. Your body already trembles as he steps inside the tent, pulling his thick cloak of furs from around his shoulders as he’s illuminated from the embers of the fire still burning outside. Throwing it down onto your makeshift bed as he tries to make it as comfortable as possible for you, a futile peace offering after stealing you from everything you once knew.

It’s difficult laying beside a man you barely know, even though you’ve been together months now. And you hate the way your body betrays you, turning towards the warmth that exudes from him.

An arm is usually strewn across you throughout the night— whether it’s to keep you from escaping or to keep you safe you’re never certain. But you always find yourself yearning for his touch, desperate to feel comfort from a man you once swore you despised.

His hands are rough, toughened by the harsh elements and fierce battles waged upon nations. The first rough grip of his hand against your hip has your stomach lurching, petrified of how he may handle you like the kill he brings home from hunting, a dead carcas that doesn’t require any sympathy. For Dragon King Bakugou refuses to mourn for the dead. But he fills you with bewilderment as rough callouses catch against your soft skin as he runs them along your body with surprising care.

Bakugou’s warm breath fans your cheek, chapped lips barely hover against your skin as he lingers. The faintest butterfly of a kiss pecks at the corner of your mouth as he lets you decide— for he knows once he starts he will not be able to stop. And you don’t want him to, bridging the gap as you pull him into a gentle kiss.

It’s nothing like you imagined it to be the nights you lay beside him. Allowing your mind to wonder as you pictured him capturing your lips in a bruising kiss, holding you tight and bending you over to claim you as his own.

You can tell he’s holding back, his soft touch nothing like you’ve seen before as he brushes his tongue against your lips. Exploring more unmarked territory as you feel yourself melting into him, finally allowing him to explore new lands as he chances an uncharacteristically gentle grope to your soft breast.

Dragon King Bakugou may be a ruthless, sadistic beast of a man— but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to handle his most prized possession with docious care.

And whilst you indulge in his touches, they’re not enough to satiate the burning hunger that swirls inside you like a molten volcano. The throb between your thighs incessant as you silently beg for him to touch you, to take you— to finally claim you as his own. And you can tell that he’s holding back, because he doesn’t want to hurt you.

Because he knows exactly what he’s capable of.

“There’s no need to be so gentle, my King.”

The words have the blood rushing directly to his cock, pulling the most depraved, sinful growl from deep in his throat as he bares his sharp teeth. As if trying to hold back the final fine threads of resolve that are holding him together— the rope that’s been wearing thin since the first moment he received you.

“I can take it.”

The words leave your lips, but you’re not sure you can. Not now this hulking brute of a man is hovering over you on sturdy knees, crimson eyes darken as he surveys his prey like a predatory wolf. Reaching down to wrap a large palm around the bare column of your neck as he follows the motion, leaning over you to press his lips against the shell of your ear.

“I’m not sure you can, little girl.”

#dragon king bakugou #Bakugou x reader

[moondirti]

animalic (6)

← chapter five // series masterlist

pairing: miguel o'hara x f!reader rating: mature word count: 4k summary: misery makes good company warnings: enemies to lovers, forced proximity, angst, i mean it guys, miguel o'hara is really not nice in this one, fighting, death/extinction, morally questionable characters, weapons of mass destruction, implied drug withdrawal, reader is given a backstory notes: apologies for what's to come. it's okay if you hate me after

“Don’t move. You’ll make it worse.” 

There’s a warm hand cupping the back of your head, callused fingers spread to steady the junction between it and your shoulder. It’s the first thing you notice when you wake; that, and the breath fanning across your face.

You think it odd. Signs of life pound beneath you like the febrile concoction of a dream, burning hot in emphasis that you’d survived. A heavy pulse behind your brow, the headache pinching at every sense until they all dim to conductive static. Your tongue, pasty on the roof of your mouth. The hind of your arm itches, the urge running bone-deep, humming from flesh gracelessly torn apart by a gutter. When you shift to examine it, a fire roars up your neck, the smouldering pain robbing you of any effort. 

(The only other time you’d been this uncomfortable, you were bitten by a spider the third month of your internship with Alchemax. The puncture site didn’t burn so much as the delirium that followed.)

“What did I just say?” 

And, there’s that voice. You find it difficult to discern its more unique attributes, words muffled from behind the wavering pane of your lucidity – yet, even still, it stands as the most tangible thing present. Deep, resonant. Smoked with a ruggedness you can feel in your teeth. It doesn’t occur to you why it seems so unfamiliar; perhaps it’s the fact that you catch it through its source, your ear pressed to a muscled chest. Or, that’s it’s whispering. 

You’ve never heard him whisper. Not to you. 

The need to retaliate swells once you realise who holds you. It’s nothing productive, not the string of questions you should be asking – what’s happening, where are we; but it’s the only natural instinct that overcomes you. When you attempt to make good on it, though, the clutter of jokes, gripes, and snubs tangle in your throat, emerging as little more than a groan. 

And the act wears you more than it probably should, exhausted tremors wracking your frame. A tender ache ripples from a point on your ribcage – separate from the area you’d fractured at the quarry. The pressure here is more centralised, a focused bruise you locate the source of with a wriggle of your elbow, when a rock comes loose and clatters to settle underneath you. It joins a mound of similar rubble, a pseudo-cushion of chalky cement broken off the larger slabs surrounding you.

You assume they do, at least – based on what you can tell of the terrain behind your back. In reality, you have no means to confirm your circumstances. The space around you swims in ink-blot darkness, the type that is almost material, where sheer absence of light could be considered an element of its own. You squeeze your eyes shut, then widen them, and find that there’s no difference between the two. 

So – dark, dusty and… cramped. You’re positioned across Miguel’s lap, his legs running under and perpendicular to yours. Neither of you can stretch them to their full extent, however, forced to cross and bend in unwieldy ways, tangling further in each other's limbs. Your clothes are worn out enough to allow you to detect when any surface of his body – tense abdomen and thick thighs – twitches, thrumming with a molasses-slow tension that starts to diffuse through you. 

Not a scenario of his own choosing, then. 

But the turn of events that might’ve converged to this are lost on you, white noise fluffing the space they’d evacuated. Last you recall, you were staring down a cop car, the lingering comfort of a child’s trust filling you with a remarkable sort of purpose, that which you cannot place. Had you acted against that convict? Or left it up to the man cradling you? 

As if on cue, he speaks. 

“You’re trapped under a collapsed building.”

He says you like he’s not a confounding variable in this equation. You know it’s meant to single your blame in this, stranding it somewhere where you can brood without cross-examining him or why he’s here too. It nests on a well of guilt you keep suppressed for good reason, irking you in a particularly special way. 

“Figured that out for myself, thanks.” Despite the trouble you put into getting the retort out undisturbed, it ends up sounding more unconvincing than not. Miguel waits for the coughing fit you have afterwards to subside before pitching in his acknowledgment. 

“Did you, now?” 

Little shit isn’t even trying to hide his sarcasm. 

You ignore him, continuing with your scepticism. “I’m just wondering why we’re still here.” 

Because it’s a genuine conjecture. While you’re not a part of the educated camp in spider-hero abilities – being so clueless to the extent of your own – you’re far too familiar with that infamous super strength. You’d sensed the difference for yourself; your increasing aptness in carrying hefty weights, the fluidity with which you cruise through life, physically unperturbed. And you’ve been on the receiving end of the spectrum too, your skin littered with scars that point to the sheer power of your companion. 

A few tonnes of demolished concrete should be a walk in the park for him.

He clicks his tongue like it’s obvious. “I pulled under a steel arc in time for the debris not to crush us. If I disturb this pocket, or try to rearrange a tunnel, then I run the risk again.” 

The logic makes sense, as much as you hate to admit it. Of course, that doesn’t stop you from picking at the contrivances in his language. It was you when discussing what went wrong, and now it’s I when it comes to the out. You realise it’s probably unintentional. Somehow, that makes it worse. He must truly believe you’re nothing beyond a malevolent fuck-up; some villain willing to sacrifice herself for the greater demise.

(The latter might have its validity. It’s the former you hold issue with.) 

Likewise, you also ascertain an easy fix to all this – on account of your spectral properties. And, if you were a better woman, it would’ve been feasible. Phase out, crawl through until you breach the open, get help.

It’s long since been established that you’re not that person, though – and you’ve come to accept your own incompetence. You don’t mean to die here; you’re not sure if you want him too either, for all your ire. But your immateriality is a fickle thing, recurring at the most inopportune times, in the smallest increments – a potential problem for the doubtlessly long crawl it’d take to escape. You don’t want to imagine what would happen should you solidify within the walls. 

Resignation seems easier than tempting it. 

Miguel must recognise the option as well. As it stands for him, he can’t afford to let you go, nor is he desperate enough to trust you yet despite it. You don’t bring it up then, maintaining the upper-hand by his misunderstanding of your capacity. 

(Maybe you are evil.

Or, just tired.)

“That’s okay. I think it would be funny if we passed like this.” You pitch, nudging your cheek to urge the smile clearly lacking in your tone. There’s no humour behind your choice of phrase, and it’s a jarring step back from where he’d been, expounding himself. You suppose it might be a clumsy distraction from the exact gravity of your predicament, yet even that rolls over in your brain, not quite satisfactory to dissolve as truth. “It’ll make a nice story for the people who dig us up.” 

His chest puffs, filling with an irritated inhale. In the same movement, his fingers constrict onto your cranial base; it has the adverse effect of bracing your neck for the sudden shift, minimising the soreness triggered by any activity. You decide to take it as the warning it’s meant to be instead. 

“Eres patética.” He murmurs, sinking back down. You wince when his clutch weakens, pain flaring. “And whiplashed.” 

You purse your lips, critical. “I’ve had worse.” 

“Sure.” 

“My arm–” 

“Will be fine.” As if to punctuate, he reaches for the wound. A clink sounds when he taps it. “Used the nanotech off my suit as a bandage.” 

You should have caught that it doesn’t sting like it would’ve if exposed. Similarly, his hands are gloveless. Bare – while the rest of him isn’t. You’d felt the dry surface of his palm, the fixed warmth it emanated, but for some oversight, you hadn’t considered that he was touching you. Skin-to-skin, the simple size of his fists dwarfing you in every measure. 

A stone lodges in your throat. 

“Did– How’d you know?” You pry, referencing the perpetual tenebrosity you’re suspended in. 

What he replies with shouldn't shock you, not as much as it does. But the air’s shifted to a nuanced degree, a hesitation substituting loud anger. It's the awareness that he's just as tuned in to you as you are him, sympathetic to try and redirect you off the brink of death. Or, more likely, it’s the poignant impression of his fangs, wedged in your flesh, his tongue lapping up the very same path. 

(And the wanton moan it’d triggered.)

“I could smell the blood.” 

Oh. 

Truthfully, you’ve no clue whether you respond aloud or keep your contemplation close to your psyche. He admits it almost… awkwardly, like it’s a condition he’s not so fond of himself. Yet it’s one that reverberates in the strained silence, plucking at taut strings that stretch with every passing second. You play it on repeat, stewing over the way in which he spoke; the diction, the stressors, the slight roll of his accent. 

I could smell it. I could smell you. The blood. 

Your life on the run hardly ever allows for moments like these. Over the past year, stress has anchored itself by the dock of your being, streamlining a flow of cortisol to every major organ. Continuity hinges on an alertness to the forces propelling you, and while the occasional wisecrack can alleviate some effects it has on your health, you don’t have the luxury of sinking into whatever fear bolsters it all. 

It’s with him, though – hanging from a crane, or cornered in a pen of his own design. Only ever with him are you slapped with the resounding, festering distress of your own weakness. It consumes you, gnawing on your gut with its brutal teeth, tearing away the indifference you’d built around your systems. How dissimilar the two of you are; a girl unwilling to fight for even herself, and a man capable of wrapping a slash in the dark. 

(He could smell it. And he can probably see, too. 

By just how much does he outmatch you?)

“You’re welcome.” Miguel growls. You scold yourself for your elongated reticence, the pace of your heart overtaking the anxious torrent of thoughts that pump through you. It’s good practice to thank the man who’d saved your life four times over. Be that as it may, does it really count if he’s the reason it was necessary to begin with? He’d dropped you off that crane, he’d swung you a hundred feet high. Him, him, him. 

You curl your tongue, desperate to quell the barrage of resentment that escalates at his prodding. Despite it pulling you from your rapid dissociation, your fight-or-flight peaks, forcing you to face a confrontation you don’t need. There’s nowhere to run – presently, you’re moored into place, his physicality and unique provocation blocking the possibility all together. 

You scoff to placate the spiralling desire to argue. 

It doesn’t work. 

“For what?” You hiss.

All too quickly, his legs spread, creating a trough for you to slide down into. When your ass hits the unforgiving floor, you involuntarily cringe at the contrast it poses to his leg. A calculated effect, you’re sure – so too is the newfound freedom of his grip releasing your head, the crossing of his forearms pushing you away from the post his pecs provided. 

It’s what you wanted, to distance yourself from his overbearing stature. And he manipulates it to his own favour; you’re made to bear your burden, the agony of your injured state tripling as if to exclaim: ‘see?’

Touché.

Nevertheless, it palliates your memory. The chill of the earth under you spikes your nerves, clearing the brume overcasting your day previous. You’d driven a car into that symbiote based on a groundless hypothesis; bold, any scientist would tell you. Yet, as far as your perception extends, it worked. 

“Selfish.” He announces, far from discrete. It’s so unlike him that it smites the ego beginning to coagulate at your remembered success.

Your eyes snap to where you assume his face is, squinting like your glare makes any difference. “Excuse me?” 

Undeterred by the threat inherent in your tone – that which is all talk – he persists. “Who do you think you are exactly, Wraith?” 

The interrogation holds a dangerous quality; again, it feels out of place, a spirit tugging at the strings of his hollow self. 

“Don’t call me that.” 

“Why? What would you prefer? Anomaly, banshee? You drag death behind you like it’s a curse, only you’ve opted into it. I told you it wasn’t our place to interfere, and you had to push it–” 

He can be jaded, or subtle. Oftentimes, he’s dismissive and passively rude. 

But Miguel O’Hara is never heedlessly hostile. Not like this. 

“That wasn’t my fault, asshole. I fucking glitched!” 

“¡Órale, estás bien pendeja! Nothing ever is, of course! Has it never occurred to you to take a good look in the mirror?” 

The irregularity scares you. Your voice breaks with it.

“O’Hara–” 

“Because I’ll tell you what I see; a girl who can’t face what she’s done.”

“You don’t know me.” You shake your head, tamping the stiffness in your shoulder. It does nothing to exercise the sharp unease that flays you alive. 

“A self-serving criminal who refuses to listen.” 

“I d– I tried.” Hiccupping, the edge worsens.

“You’d have gone back home–” 

“There’s nothing left for me there!” 

“Like there is anywhere else? You’ve devastated them!” 

“Stop it–” 

“Wrecked entire worlds! I’ve been the only one holding it all together,” He yells, pushing his knees closer to one another. You’re slowly crushed in the process, thighs drawing up to press against your torso. “You’re no victim. You’re no hero.” 

“Stop it!” 

“Tell me I’m wrong!” 

Feverish tears slice down your cheeks, spouting to escape the pressure that balloons within you. Your lungs tighten alongside it, heart aching. It’s progressed past the point of prevention – no longer do you retain control of how this turns out. All you can do is drift; a feather, seized in this tempest, stirred by a disembodied man.

When you don’t respond, preferring to preserve your energy for the sobs that rip from you, he inches closer. You sense it when he repeats himself, his hot breath lining the shell of your ear.

“Well,” His claws sharpen, grazing the small of your back. “Am I?” 

His lisp is more pronounced like this, fangs extended to affect the natural position of his mouth. It warps the undertone, like a pool does light, and sends it back more viscous than ever. He’s uninhibited – an addict missing his fix.

It’s almost impossible to choke the admission out against the hatred churning your stomach. When you unhinge your jaw, it’s a credible wager that you retch all over yourself instead.

“No.” You manage to warble, a mixture of snot and wet misery streaking down your chin. Your wrists stay plastered, allowing the mess to mask your countenance, tucking between your legs in a childlike attempt at comfort. Cruelty crackles – self-propagated now – assaulting your faux-confidence until it plummets to a fraction of what it was. 

Cursed. A wraith – haunting the multiverse with her unfinished business. 

There’s nothing left to declare as his impressions are confirmed. You both mark it, this changed, spoken into existence by your divulgence. By some miracle, if you were to slip his capture, it’d be no more of a victory than the gore crusting your fingernails. Proof for his belittlement; that you truly are so inconsiderate as to further endanger the lives of millions. 

(Would you be able to live with yourself?)

You relapse, agonising over the past week. Not a victim – you’d taken advantage of him with a kiss for an unsure opportunity. Not a hero – you’d punched a robber and gotten a civilian killed in the process. You’d run over a murderer and buried several under an early grave. 

(Can you live with yourself?)

And home–

Trapped, you boil in a pond of your transgressions. It’d been a long time coming – your fault, in fact. You should’ve noticed the water was gradually heating. 

There’d been a dam of careful construction at this bank, stacked tirelessly over the several nights you’d been given to think on what you’ve done. To prevent your clear culpability from catching up to you, to blind others to it too. He’s right, but not about all things. You’ve memorised your reflection at this point. Put it in a line up, and you’ll point your place in hell with facile certainty. 

So, there’s no need to admit anything else. Regardless, his sabotage compels you to. Here, loitering purgatory with the one person who’d never understand; what harm could confession do? His opinion of you skims rock bottom, and you’ve no hope at seeing a priest before you rot. 

Forgive me, for I have sinned.

“I’m not innocent.” You start. “Never have been.”

Alpha Centauri, that was the goal. 

Located only four light years away, it’s the closest star system to Earth; with suns Rigil Kentaurus, Toliman and Proxima Centauri forming a trinary network. All main sequence stars – like humanity’s very own Sol – orbited by suspected habitable exoplanets. With the average chemical rocket, it’d take upwards of six thousand years to get there. 

There lay alternatives, of course. Nuclear fission, with an energy yield of almost zero from its original mass. Fusion, ten times as efficient – still, not nearly enough. Ion accelerators, sunlight capture. Interstellar arks were of no interest; no, you’d wanted to achieve extrasolar travel within your lifetime. Warp drives and hyperspace – all theoretical. 

As an undergrad, you’d settled on matter-antimatter collision. 

The latter, antimatter, exists as an inverted twin to ordinary subatomic particles, with flipped states on every front. Antiprotons – negative protons with oppositely directed magnetism, and positrons – positively charged electrons. When the two meet their counterparts, their entire mass is converted into energy. And, when such annihilation is modelled within engines, a ship can accelerate to ninety percent the speed of light. 

Therein subsisted your only chance to touch the stars. 

Of course, like all hypotheticals, it came with its own array of issues. No natural reservoir of the substance is known, and producing at least one tonne would take more power than mankind has used in all its history. Moreover, it’s near nonviable to store. Any container that has ever touched regular matter would only cause preemptive decimation.

You wrote papers and studied computer-generated prototypes. You argued with professors, and attended pro-conferences. Months worth of minimum wage were blown on trips to Argentina,  where the neighbouring system can be spotted through a telescope, winking above the horizon. When it all started to appear fruitless, you caught wind of Alchemex’s exploits within the field.

It was a young company, hobbling on its feet after a rocky merger with Oscorp. But they were daring, and rich, endeavouring into categories that most deemed nonprofit. You’d applied for an internship, waited months to hear back. By some cosmic karma, it turned out to be good news when you eventually did.

They were already working on manufacturing the antimatter. It was your suggestion that encouraged them to use magnets to store it within a vacuum. 

It looked auspicious. It had been. 

Then, you were bit. 

The spider was from another division – radiation, you suppose. By some breach on account of a more negligent temp, the critter had found its way into your improvised cubicle. And so the story goes; it’d champed down on the webbing between your thumb and forefinger, before promptly suffocating under the cup you’d snared it in. The area stung for a while, venom having directly found your veins. Yet, by the time you’d returned to your dorm, your immunity seemed to have diluted its effects. 

Until, you’d gotten sick. The hysteria was slow to consolidate, starting as a sore throat. You’d used your one day off then, ignorant to just how bad it could get; because the fever only deepened, lesions on the lining of your oesophagus oozing ichor into bile. Your doctor waived the possibility of tuberculosis, mistrusting the notes your instructors sent with you, complaining of in-class fainting bouts. 

You couldn’t miss work, though. Never. Not when you were so close. 

So you stuffed sheets of pills in your pockets and braved each shift with trembling joints. You’d no friends to notice your suffering, and for such an ambitious company, overtime was expected. Sweating through multiple layers of clothing, you kept an eye on your poster of the galaxy and lagged on those long nights. At the rate you were going, you genuinely dreaded a life cut short before you could realise your objective. 

If nothing else, it urged you to work harder. 

Your first milestone came at the one kilogram mark. A party was hosted to celebrate, billionaires invited to gather around the vessel which held such a revolutionary feat. Despite your interloper status, you’d been summoned too, to play big girl scientist and present Alchemex’s future course of action. Your affliction was improving, and you were the inspiration behind the project’s advance. It felt like the biggest night of your career. 

(‘Magnets! What a genius solution.’ From a nobel prize runner up.

‘That ambition will get you far, mark my words.’ The CEO’s cousin.)

In truth, it was the last. 

Because the antimatter had taken centre stage, security slackening with its continued stability. So long as the magnetism wasn’t tampered with, so long as the vacuumed vessel remained airtight, things looked to be fine for your speech. You’d cycled through every known variable, staring down the container, a champagne flute tucked in your sweaty palms. 

Your skin prickled.

The glass smashed to the floor. In your embarrassment, you’d brushed it off as clumsiness prompted by the perspiration – notwithstanding your recount, having seen the drink fall through your mass. Did it matter, though? You couldn’t put it past your illness to cause such hallucinations. It was impossible, a trick of sight.

The festivities progressed, yet the tingle of your nerves didn’t subside. Anxiety – you chalked it up to common apprehension. So, when your boss announced your name for all to hear, and the agitation flared, it wasn’t alarming. You could think of nothing else anyway, honed in to the address you’d practised all morning. 

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

Your gut flipped. Your vision blackened. 

The steps lost depth; you stumbled up them with all the grace of a hunted fawn. 

Today–

Your skin prickled once more, and you collapsed. Through the antimatter’s vessel, through the floor. 

There’s nothing to recall after that. Not for a long while. 

“I don’t become intangible.” Your brow bone rests on the curve of your knee, body curled in a foetal position. “My particles merely… find the best way through something.” 

Miguel has remained eerily quiet throughout your chronicle. You try not to let it dissuade you. 

“So–” 

“Some came in contact with the antimatter.”

“Yeah.” You murmur, moved by an unnamed emotion. “It detonated, naturally, with a force roughly equivalent to a nuclear bomb. Wiped out everyone in the city upon discharge, then everyone in the state with its impact. Or– maybe, I don’t know. I was discarnate for weeks – the explosion had no effect on my immaterial self, and the radiation couldn’t hurt me when that spider damn well sought and failed at it already.” 

You hug yourself tighter. 

“I only witnessed the winter that followed. The blast was large-scale enough to trigger firestorms and a global climate cooling – similar to the one they scare you with when talking about nuclear warfare. Crop failure, famine. Millions died and my home devolved into cataclysm. It was mass extinction,” You school yourself, waving the snivel crawling up your nose. “Because of me.” 

An end by starvation or infection, confined to this tomb, seems a perfectly fitting penance. 

“Explain this to me, O’Hara – what just providence made me spider-woman to a barren land?”

chapter seven →

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[probablyasocialecologist]

Since Israel began its assault on Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, one of the most devastating architectural victims has been a historic, centuries-old mosque. Initially constructed as a Byzantine church in the fifth century, it became known as the Great Omari Mosque in the seventh century, the first-ever mosque to be established in Gaza during the period of Islamization. Gaza’s strategic coastal location has allowed it to bear witness to many changes: 11th-century Crusaders converted the mosque back into a church, which was converted to a mosque again a century later. The region has weathered much conflict, having played a role in many different empires. “Gaza was actually a sizable city under the Byzantines and, before them, the Romans, and was a [political] center…for the Mamluk Empire in the 13th through 15th centuries. And that’s when it probably reached its highest level of administrative power,” Nasser Rabbat, the director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT, tells me. “Gaza was the place where the [Mamluk] army would congregate on the way to their campaigns in northern Syria, in the Euphrates region, or in Anatolia against its host of enemies.” The Great Omari Mosque reflected this history. It had been damaged and rebuilt many times over the centuries: attacked by the Mongols in the 13th century, battered by an earthquake a few decades later, restored and expanded in the Ottoman era, and partially destroyed by British bombs in World War I, only to be restored once more. Now it’s been effectively obliterated; only some walls and one minaret remain. This is—make no mistake—a deliberate element of the Israeli campaign to erase all traces of Palestinian life.

#Great Omari Mosque #israel #palestine #gaza #zionism