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triviareads · 3 years

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I know nobody wants to hear about Penelope anymore but I want to get my two cents in. I never really cared much for her so I‘m not like one of her Stans or whatever, I feel like she should’ve faced more consequences for the whole Whistledown-thing. But about what she did in the show: It was bad like real bad and definitly could‘ve been solved differently but like Marina did not have the moral highground here. I get that she was pregnant and desperate because of her reputation. It was life and death but Marina could‘ve married some old dude who wouldn‘t care about the baby. Instead she uses Colin. Colin did not deserve to be deceived like that. He was nothing but nice to her and she used that against him. That was an awful thing to do. But I‘ll give her one thing it was understandable. Who wouldn‘t rather have the sweet young man instead of some old creep?

And here is where I come to Penelope. One thing I will say in her favor is that I understand why she didn‘t want Marina and Colin to marry. Not just because she is in love with him but also because she likes the Bridgertons. Eloise is her friend fo heaven‘s sake so I didn‘t find it too bad that she didn‘t want them to marry. She also did try to tell Colin that Marina was in love with someone else, to protect Marina from ruin and well stop them from marrying. Didn‘t work. And here comes where my opinion kinda differs from yours. I watched the show before I read the books but to me it seemed like Penelope did what she did not because of Colin but because of what Marina said to her. I honestly believe if that hadn‘t happened Penelope would‘ve kept quiet. I see a lot of people saying what Marina told her was the truth and yes it probably was but the way she said it well…. It was not nice. Penelope had up to that point been Marinas only friend and ally. I believe she felt betrayed by being dimissed like that. And that‘s what Marina did she dismissed Penelope and not even in a nice way. She basically didn‘t care for what Penelope had to say. I‘m not saying she had to say yes I won‘t marry him but like a litte more explanation and empathy and that she is sorry something like that would’ve been nice. I understood why Penelope was mad at her after that.

What Penelope did was awful. It was mean, petty and vindictive and she could‘ve done it in another way. She could‘ve gone straight to Colin/Violet/Anthony and tell them in private. But she didn‘t. Instead she printed it out for all to see. And the one thing that really stuck with me is that they way she did it was so stupid it couldn‘t have been like a real plan where she was like I want to destroy her but like something you didn‘t wholly think through. Because in the process of ruining Marina she ruins her entire family (herself included!). Everyone could‘ve known that would happen yet she did it anyway. The only reason why the Featheringtons surrived this is because of Daphne and the death of Mr. Featherington (since everyone feels bad now). Two things Penelope could‘ve not predicted at that point of time. I believe it was a splitsecond decision and here is were I kinda get it. Sometimes you make a really stupid mistake that hurt a lot of people and you can‘t take it back but it all comes to how you act after what happened. In my eyes Penelope can still be redeemed if they show that she truly regrets it and tries to make amends.

We have not seen much regret from her in season 1 but to be fair we are not supposed to know she is Whisteldown at that point so I can imagine that we might see something next season. If they go the same route as they did in the books where everyone pretends it‘s not a big deal than she is every bit as awful as you say she is. I for one am really curious for what is to come there. I honestly think they might can make her interesting because in the books she was just not.

And sidenote: No matter if they make Penelope take responsibility or not there is NO WAY the will keep the Marina Plotline, at least not the way it went down. If they come this far they will make Marina die from an illness or an accident. Phillips and her marriage will not be a loving one but one with friendship (because this is a romance show and you can only have one true love here). Even if they redeem Penelope I feel like more or less driving someone into suicide is a lot, especially if she is a good person again. Because no decent person I know could ever forgive themselves for that no matter how much they tried to make amends and regret what happened.

Thank you for taking the time to write all that out! I think your opinions differ a bit from mine, but I won't get too into it, mostly because I've posted my views on the subject in great detail in the past. Also, people ("stans") seem to love policing what I have to say on Penelope, and it's quite frankly getting exhausting, and a bit vulgar.

I guess the big question is, where do we go from here? There are certain givens in this series that we know, namely, that Penelope will end up with Colin. I think if the writers want people like me to root for Penelope once more, and like her as a person, they'll have to give Penelope some grand realization that she's fucking with people's lives as Whistledown, and then try to atone for her mistakes. Her work as Lady Whistledown is only a girlboss-esque triumph as long as the readers/viewers are convinced the people she writes about are horrible and deserved every rumor she spreads about them to her enormous audience- which they aren't, and therefore don't. Daphne is her target at some point, so is Colin indirectly, and of course Marina. So Penelope will need to understand that, in my opinion.

I would like her to beg Marina for her forgiveness, and whether Marina gives it or not will be entirely up to her and based on however decent (or not so decent, like book!Marina's circumstances when she struggles with depression) her circumstances are at that point in the story. I would also like Marina to not die to advance another white woman's love story.

#bridgerton #penelope featherington #marina thompson #ask

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queen-susans-revenge · 5 years

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I don’t have time to do it right now but one of these days I really need to write down everything I learned from alt.tarot back in the day Some of it is about tarot but more of it is about how to fight with people on the Internet. I was reminded re-reading the Dickwolf Discourse and how Mike’s hard-won lesson from that is that he could have Just Stopped much earlier. Just Stopping is a great skill that I learned through many bruising fights on Usenet and specifically alt.tarot. See, most people who think they are Knowledgeable About Tarot in fact are Jon Snows to the subject: they know nothing. The received wisdom on tarot is complete garbage; you can easily spend years and read dozens of published books and come away believing things like “tarot was invented by gypsies and contains secret wisdom smuggled out from the fall of the Library of Alexandria.” Insert Luke Skywalker gif: every part of that is wrong. Playing cards were actually invented by the Chinese, reached Europe around 1360, and in the middle of the fifteenth century Italian nobles started using tarot decks to play a trick-taking game resembling bridge. The so-called Major Arcana, or trump cards, were mostly drawn from Petrarch’s poem I Trionfi which translates to “The Triumphs” (triumph=trump). I Trionfi was enormously popular, especially in Italy, and you see imagery from it everywhere during the time period and all kinds of card decks using it. (Looks down at wall of text I have just produced. Whelp. Time for a read-more!)

So almost nobody knows this basic fact, that the structure of the Major Arcana and a lot of the imagery on the cards comes from Petrarch originally. Instead they spend years reading dumb newage books that all regurgitate the same content, like, “Death doesn’t mean death, it means change.” To Petrarch, and to the Renaissance Italians, and to the likes of Waite and Crowley, Death literally meant death. Now they all believed that there were things like Christian faith that could triumph over/trump even death: Petrarch’s poem is structured like a Roman triumphal parade except with metaphysical forces involved, so like the great conquering emperor is brought low by the power of love, and the lovers in turn are brought low by the power of chastity, and the chaste in turn are brought low by the power of death, but death is conquered by fame, and fame is conquered by time, and time is conquered by the eternal Kingdom of God. This is the basic procession that you see in the trump cards. And yes this does mean that tarot was also explicitly Christian, from the beginning, and remained so even as the robes-and-wands set started appropriating Jewish kabbalah and mapping tarot onto it. That happened in the eighteenth century, in France. The two dudes responsible are Antoine Court de Gébelin and M. le Comte de Mellet, two more names that most people who think they know a lot about tarot will never have heard of. The line goes from them through Eliphas Levi, Papus, Wirth, those guys, through to Waite and then Crowley. Now all these dudes were occultists, and occult means clandestine, hidden, secret, so as you might expect they were not at all good at clearly explicating their beliefs. Back on alt.tarot I used to use a Waite quote as my signature: “Superfluities and interpretations notwithstanding, it is directly, or indirectly, out of the recent view, thus tentatively designated, that the consideration of the present thesis emerges as its final term, though out of all knowledge thereof.” (That’s from The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal. It’s all like that.) So, it’s definitely not their fault that most people don’t know about Petrarch and kabbalah and what Crowley really meant when he made such a big goddamn deal about how “Tzaddi is not The Star.” Even when the likes of Crowley or Waite did write books supposedly detailing the meaning of the symbolism of their decks, they threw in lots of misdirection and outright lies “to mislead the uninitiated.” Kabbalah is the key, they’ll tell you, but they won’t tell you that they used it as an athbash--forward and back, just like the Fool’s Journey goes both up and down the Tree of Life; divine power can be called down into Malkuth, the physical world, but one born into Malkuth can also ascend to Kether, unmediated experience of the divine. (So The Star is both Tzaddi and Heh.) Anyway, if you can’t trust the newage books and you can’t trust the occult books, are there any good books on tarot? Yes, there are two: Gertrude Moakley's groundbreaking (and out of print) book The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family: An Iconographic and Historical Study, and the equally groundbreaking and equally out of print Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, a collection of essays by Court de Gébelin and M. le Comte de Mellet, with translation and commentary by J. Karlin, the terror of alt.tarot. Jess Karlin was not his real name. He knew more about tarot than, I gradually came to believe, anyone else in the world. He was a jerk, and proud of being a jerk: Thelema is a religion of war, he said, and he came not to affirm but to destroy. He was my teacher, and he taught me a lot, and I tried to repay him both with money and by acknowledging the debt whenever the subject comes up, like now. One of the things he taught me was how to learn from someone who is giving you an actual answer but insulting you while they do it. (Try ignoring the insult and saying thank you, for the answer. They may have more to teach.) I say Karlin knew more than anyone else in the world because the academics after Moakley were disappointing; the field became dominated by playing card historian Michael Dummett, who was so invested in debunking the occultists that he really doubled down on trying to argue that no link between tarot and fortune-telling existed before the French guys came along. Which is stupid, because the links between games of chance and systems of divination have always been super tight--Fate and Luck are the same damn bitch. And you can find (and Karlin did find) very early references to witchcraft performed with playing cards. So because the playing card historians would have nothing to do with the occultists, and Karlin was doing these serious deep dives into formerly-untranslated eighteenth century French occult texts and even earlier stuff, he ended up understanding the iconography and symbolism of tarot way better than the people like Dummett who were much too serious to touch the occult traditions. That was another thing Karlin taught me: that academic consensus can sometimes be just as wrong as newage gobbledegook, and it really is possible, when you start doing deep dives into niche subjects, to outstrip the experts. Sometimes it’s not just possible but frighteningly easy. Anyway, he knew a ton--and he knew it in a field where the vast majority of people think they understand the material, but are very wrong. I think this had the effect of making him quite crabby. Some people came to alt.tarot saying they wanted to learn tarot; and those people, J. Karlin was willing to teach, although he might yell at them some for believing stupid things, if they did. And they probably did--I remember being twenty-one, a shiny new-minted college graduate, proud of my A in an undergraduate Quantum Mechanics For Non Physics Majors class, trying out some “maybe fortunetelling is a quantum effect” angle and getting my ass handed to me, deservedly so. But many, many more people came to alt.tarot back in the day thinking they already knew tarot. And they very much did not want to be corrected. They just thought the cards looked cool and they were perfectly content with their own “I’ll just intuit what I think the cards mean” approach to tarot. And to those people, Karlin was a relentless asshole. Because the symbols did in fact have an original meaning, and it is possible to trace the evolution of the iconography through time, and in fact all those centuries of artists and writers and...I dunno, warlocks and whatnot...working on the cards has created a much, much, much deeper and richer symbolic framework than what most people can make up off the tops of their heads just by looking at a random image from The Tarot of the Cat People or whatever. So that was maybe the first important thing he taught me: there is a truth. Even in symbolic matters, even in stuff that was all “just made up” at some point, it is possible to distinguish what’s important and true from what’s just people spouting off the tops of their dumb heads. And fourth or fifth was that if you argue with someone long enough and you find yourself getting boxed into a corner, fighting desperately to support propositions you’re not even quite sure how you ended up needing to defend, you can just...stop. Usually that’s the cleanest and clearest path. Karlin would not let people save face and he would not let them have the last word: if they were wrong, they’d either have to admit it, or they’d have to flounce off to another Usenet group, orrrr...they’d have to learn how to fucking shut up. It’s a good skill to have. I learned it in alt.tarot, being wrong a lot. I had many fights with Jess Karlin on alt.tarot. But to my knowledge I was the only one from that group that he offered to formally initiate into Thelema. If I have siblings in this lineage I don’t know them; and I never considered myself a Thelemite, even after the initiation. But I have tried to pass on what he taught me. Crowley wrote that the adept “must teach; but he may make severe the ordeals” and I always sort of thought Karlin was living by that principle. At the same time he liked to point out that it’s not necessary to hide your pearls from swine: they won’t take ‘em no matter how brightly you polish and how neatly you letter the sign, FREE PEARLS OF WISDOM, PLEASE TAKE. My worst fights with J. Karlin were always when I was trying to do something nice for him. I still wince remembering when I tried to give him a copy of Alan Moore’s Promethea; that ended with us not speaking for several years. So if he reads this he’ll probably be mad at me all over again but anyway he eventually started using his real name, Glenn Wright, for his Internet writings instead of the Karlin nym. He hops around websites too fast for me to keep track, but as recently as 2015 he had a blog on Tumblr. Sometimes he offers tarot readings for sale--one card, yes or no question only. I recommend these without question whether you “believe” in tarot or not. (I’ve grown out of my quantum woo days and I don’t now think the cards are anything but a fantastic system for self-reflection). This is super long so I’m gonna stop now. Maybe it’ll do for that “what I learned from alt.tarot” post I always meant to make.

#tarot #stories from alt.tarot

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perseus-huntress · 7 years

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A Reyes Discussion: All you sinners stand up and sing hallelujah. Also Spoilers.

So, I have been thinking about this for a while, primarily from the writers prospective, what will happen between Ryder and Reyes in the future? As a ReyDer enthusiast, this is important to me. The result is below.

The die has been cast, Reyes is not a nice man, not by a long stretch. The game is peppered liberally with suggestions that there is more to him than just being the Charlatan. Perhaps he is responsible, however indirectly, for the Nexus uprising, Garson death, even involved with Cerberus in some way (a can of worms for another day). An agent of the Benefactor. And this is discounting all the shit he pulls in game.

So how can Ryder, the White Knight on a Shining Steed ever be involved with someone like that? In any capacity. When Reyes is the total antithesis to them, to their cause.

My knee jerk reaction is to think that they wouldn't. But then I thought about it more and realised that I am looking at it all wrong. It's not about Reyes, it never was. It's about Ryder.

As our protagonist, we like to think that Ryder is the force for good, most people do prefer to play the hero in their story, which is, you know, fair enough. But that does tend to equip us with rose tinted glasses. Ryder is good, Ryder helps the Angara, Ryder saves the cluster from the Khett, Ryder ensures the survival of their people in Heleus with minimal disruption to the native population, for now at least. All true.

But as a thought experiment, what are charges leveled against Reyes? He lies, he murders Sloane in an unfair fight, quite possibly Garson, runs a group which inflicts horrors upon Kadara, the list goes on. Also, all true, well possibly, the Garson thing is speculation, an attractive one though.

Now let’s look at Ryder. You know what Ryder does? Ryder murders indiscriminately though out the game. (Let’s set aside the mechanics of the game here, I realise it would be one hell of a dull ass game if we didn’t get to pwn some noobs). The problem is, it’s not only Khett we are killing here, the only legitimate enemy. I have particular beef with killing Roekar. Sure, they attack first, but their logic is pretty infallible. Ryder and Co are invaders. No way round that. Sure, they don’t show up and demand Aya surrenders to their might, they are polite and they are considerate. But that’s still a lot of people who suddenly pop out of nowhere. They need resources, they need a place to live, a place to expand. Ryder does circumvent the land problem by settling Meridian. But the humans are one of 6 major races that are there or will be there shortly. Where will the Turians and Quarians go? The Krogan? The Salarians? The Asari? And other miscellaneous races that will come with the Quarians? Unless the Jardan have 10 more of those Meridian things squirreled away somewhere, there will be a need to settle other worlds. Worlds which may be significant to the Angara, culturally or economically. The Roekar, are not wrong, they are not the antagonists here, the Initiative is. Which puts Ryder directly in the wrong here. Like really super wrong.

There is more. The Outcasts and the Collective. For all the millions of faults both of them have, they are at the end of the day in that situation because of the almighty Initiative, why wouldn’t they attack the Avatar of their Oppressor on sight? It is easier to justify fighting them than the Roekar, as they do pull some horrific shit. And yet if we hold Reyes accountable for Sloane, we should hold Ryder accountable for the exiles, it’s the same thing but on a larger scale. Sloane was a dick too.

Next, the thorny issue of direct interaction with Reyes. One name in particular springs to mind as the shining example of Ryder’s duchebaggery, Zia Cordier. Regardless how you interact with Reyes, love him, hate him, you still end up complicit in Zia’s murder, and it’s not even a poignant moment like Sloane where Ryder at least has the decency to pull a sad face, no you just put a bullet between her eyes and get on your merry way like nothing happened. Did Zia really deserve to die for getting pissed off at Reyes? In romance, it’s just vindictive, outside of it, it's an irrational reaction of a bad of dicks. What has she done to Ryder to deserve that? Nothing. Ever. She basically lets you go, she only wants Reyes. I am not suggesting there is anything noble in letting him die, but there is also nothing heroic in saving his ass either. The guiding principle seems to be “He is with me, therefore I shall protect him”. Hardly highly moral hero thinking there.

And now we come to the real reason for starting this silly essay. The murder of Sloane Kelly. It divisive, and that’s good, it should be. But let me just start by saying there is no “good ending” to the Kadara interaction. Reyes runs with the same shit as Kelly, they are basically identical, the only difference is that the game allows you to get to know Reyes better than Kelly. She too may be adorable and insecure, she could have a burning love for bunnies and counting stars. But we will never know (sorry my dudes, I am not reading that book.). But comparatively Reyes and Sloane are on par with each other, Reyes just tends to be friendlier. The two outcomes of High Noon are either Sloane dies, or Reyes gets shot. Sure, Kelly gets lured in and shots in the most cowardly way possible, but is it any better shooting Reyes in the back? I mean he does survive, and he did start the whole thing, but like they are basically the same person, neither is a good choice. Nobody wins in either outcome, not in that way anyway. It’s almost semantics at this point, an arbitrary tally of one up-manship on who is more evil. They are both awful.

To me, the whole thing boils down to one conclusion. That Reyes, Sloane and Ryder, in the crudest way possible, are the same person. All three are opportunists. Sloane helps the Angara, not only because she has a feeling of solidarity with them but also because she needs them on her side. Reyes helps the slum doctor not only because he is not complete dickwad, but because it is a giant fuck you to Sloane. Ryder helps the Angara not only because the hero instinct kicks in, but because they need them to survive in the cluster. Sloane creates addicts not because she is a massive evil mastermind, but because she needs their dependency and obedience to hold Kadara. Reyes kills Sloane not because he gets a kick out of murder but because he needs Sloane gone to rule. Ryder continues killing Roekar not because they are evil, but because they stand in their way.

That is not to suggest that everyone is a giant asshat and we should hate them all. No. What I am suggesting is that they are all complex characters, whose motivations are not boiled down to “I do this because I am evil”. They all have their beautiful moments of pure unselfishness, they have their moments of “YOLO This is convenient right now”.

Which leads me back to my original question. What would happen if Reyes really did turn out to be an agent of the Benefactor/Cerberus/Big Bad that killed Garson? And my honest answer is, nothing, nothing would happen. If the revelation comes it would come after the events of the game, after Ryder has actively engaged with less than morally upstanding practices. If there is one character that would understand Reyes, it would be Ryder. Killing Garson seems like a big thing but really the only difference between her and say, Zia? Garson was “important”, but her importance is questionable at best anyway. Sure, she was a symbol, but what is a symbol really? Alec could have easily stepped up had he not died, and if he wasn’t a stubborn idiot and shared the information he’s had with others so could have countless others. I would hope there were consequences, for Reyes and Ryder, but I would also like to think that out of everyone Ryder does not have a leg to stand on when it comes to judging Reyes. “I’ve killed countless people, in cold blood, but you know that one person you were involved in the killing of, well that’s just a step too far” just doesn’t fly with me.

This has been a long ass broadcast from my bored brain. Many thanks for getting this far, I love you.

#Spoilers #Mass Effect Andromeda #discorse #critical kinda?#I am equal opportunities kinda girl #they are all awful but I still love them

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