#and the silt verses is a piece of media that like... i end up having different thoughts every time i listen to it
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i think there's something really beautiful about carpenter distancing herself from the trawler man every chance she gets and still getting showered by miracles while faulker, oh he of strong convictions, gets to bring the miracle of the trawler man to everyone around him but never quite gets to ascend to glory himself. i just love that they're both perfectly poised to stare at each other and each think "your goals are backwards and your methodology is dumb and possibly sacrilegious" and then still end up as something close to friends
also let's talk about how, despite these dynamics, at the end of the day, the trawler man is really just trying to give each of them what they want from him.
MMM YEAH. carpenter being beloved by multiple gods despite being such an ornery bitch who wants NOTHING to do with their sacrificial bullshit..... it really gets me. as does faulkner's ongoing crisis of faith and spiral into Faithless Cult Leader (TM). SO GOOD.
perhaps only tangentially related, but.
i've been thinking a lot about faulkner killing roemont lately. i was surprised that roemont's death ended up Breaking My Fucking Heart -- a real testament to his voice actor!! the whole pathetic old man losing everything he's worked for really.... Got To Me. ough. "don't you recognize me?" OUGH.
but i've been thinking about it in the context of faulkner's crisis of faith, too. because like. faulkner Knows that roemont is faithful. he considers roemont a heretic for trying to legalize the worship of the trawler-man, but it's like....
i feel like. killing roemont was a test of the trawler-man that faulkner devised on purpose. because if roemont dies due to the prayer marks that faulkner scrawled, then there are two possibilities:
1. the trawler-man really IS furious that the high katabasians want to legitimize the faith; the trawler-man really IS on faulkner's side; this schism really IS necessary to keep the faith "pure," and faulkner has never done anything wrong;
OR
2. the trawler-man really IS nothing but a mouth. this isn't a god with a plan or with sentience or with feelings, this is just a living river that chews things up and spits them out, and it doesn't care for its followers at all. and if that's the case, then faulkner is betraying nothing by being a faithless cult leader lying repeatedly to his people.
faulkner is devastatingly clever and constantly being underestimated. but he's also completely alone in the world. and he's Desperate for any sign that the choices he's making are the right ones. and he can't find that sign in anybody close to him, because he keeps destroying the lives of those close to him. so he has to devise his own trials....
hrugh. my boy. my boy my boy my boy.
#replies#the silt verses#the silt verses meta#faulkner#carpenter#horrible godsaint trauma pals#i keep just thinking about like. the constant question of how much gods care and how much agency they have#how much of this worship is a social construct made by people and how much is natural to the world?#does it matter? is there a difference between those things?#as someone whose original fiction ALSO plays a lot with#'magic is real but the way it's perceived is based in social constructs'.... I FUCK WITH IT SO HARD.#and the silt verses is a piece of media that like... i end up having different thoughts every time i listen to it#so in a few days or weeks i might not even stand by this meta. i might have different thoughts/interpretations entirely!!#it's a different story every time i listen. it's SO GOOD.
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A wild 2023 recap post appears!
Stuff I made this year:
Fiction: Nope. Work continues to consume me. I DID write like 33k that maybe will be publicly accessible in the future, but who can say.
Playlists: I think the only two I remembered to share were Oleander (a playlist for my Wickedness character) and the vast and the void (what it says on the tin).
RPGs: Also a nope.
Knitting: Made a shawl! And a hat, technically, that I forgot to take pictures of.
Other stuff: Taught 5 classes, 4 of which were new preps! Did fieldwork in Japan for the first time since 2019! Gave an hour-long talk in Japanese! Presented on two conference panels! Finished two academic book reviews! Survived somehow! The period between August and December sort of doesn’t exist in my memory? I was doing things but almost all of those things were work, so. The isolation has been wearing on me, but with the combination of A. not having any time to do anything other than work and B. for Various Reasons questioning whether I want to stay at this job, it's been really hard to build local community. I'm going to try to work on that next year, but also I'm going to have two new preps again in the fall and one of my spring classes is already overenrolled, so who knows how effective that'll be.
Media I enjoyed this year:
Books: I read 46 books this year apparently! Top picks in no particular order: The Singing Hills Cycle (embarrassingly my jam), The Southern Reach Trilogy (shocking that it took me this long to read this), My Own Devices (even MORE shocking that it took me this long to read this), Imperial Radch (so AGGRESSIVELY my jam), She Who Became the Sun (this was a hilarious accompaniment to one of my fall classes), Camp Damascus (read this on a plane back from Japan which was An Experience), The Tale That Twines (loved the first book; the second book is even better), System Collapse (yeah, no one is surprised that I loved this).
TTRPG: Wickedness! This was the only new TTRPG I played this year, but it was really good.
Video games: Mask of the Rose and Saltsea Chronicles, both of which I want to/should poke at more. Special nod to 13 Sentinels which we enjoyed 90% of a lot.
Manga/comics: I think the only thing I read was The JOJOLands?
Fanfic: I didn’t actually wind up reading that much fanfic this year again, in part because I was reading so many books. A few picks, in no particular order: The Gardener (CR C2), Keys to the Castle (CR C2), Whistle Song (CR C2), pieces of (you) me (CR C2), Descriptions of a River Flowing (CR C2), Slip the Blindfold (CR C2), Heart to Heart (JJBA: JJL--PLEASE read this if you care about JJL at all), riverside beatitudes (JJBA: SDC), Fully formed, ready to run (ExU: Calamity). Honorable mention to Asking for More (Stranger of Paradise), which is a WIP but made me laugh so hard I hit myself in the face with my phone.
Films: I actually watched like eight movies this year! All but two of the new ones on a plane, to be fair, but. Top picks: Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse and Shoplifters (『万引き家族』). Honorary mention to Suzume.
TV: Finally finished Stone Ocean! It was good! Rowan and I are also like halfway through catching up on TGCF and it is also very good.
Podcasts: Continued to listen to way too many of these. Top picks: The Silt Verses, Trice Forgotten, Within the Wires (hey can we talk about the newest season? truly wild), and Re: Dracula. Honorable mentions to The Evaporated: Gone with the Gods, 『なんかIWAKAN！』 (WHICH IS TRAGICALLY ENDING???? where am I supposed to get my chaotic Japanese gender and sexuality discussion now :(((((), Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later, Critical Role, and Worlds Beyond Number.
Music: Dessa's Bury the Lede was excellent, of course. I also apparently listened to Maisie Peters' The Good Witch a lot (it was in my grading rotation in October). And then this past month there's been a lot of Hozier's Unreal Unearth. But a lot of my listening this year was either albums on the bus (rotating mainly between Quiet Company’s We Are All Where We Belong, Bury the Lede, yorushika’s entire discography that I can purchase, Wednesday Campanella, and various soundtracks) or putting something on loop and falling into a fugue state. Apparently my top song of the year on Spotify was “Square One,” which I think I put on looping while grading in the spring. My Spotify top songs list was even more inexplicable than usual this year.
Anyway, あけおめ！！！ 良いお年を！！！ (or else!!!!)
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