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helloitsthecynincalaesthete-blog · 5 years

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The Handmaid’s Tale: Prophecy or Inevitably?

Lydia Cole-November 2018

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.” It’s amazing how much the world has changed within the past decade, and even within the last few years. Eleven years ago, the first iPhone was released. Ten years ago, Obama was sworn in as the first African American President of the United States. Scientists are close to figuring out how to edit human DNA. Twenty-seven countries have legalized same sex marriage. This is truly the era of change. Sometimes, change happens so quickly that we don’t even really realize that life is different from what it was before.

The Handmaid’s Tale, a thrilling show set in a near future dystopia is all about change, big or small. The story itself isn’t new: it’s been around for over 30 years, since Margaret Atwood’s novel (by the same name) was published in 1985. Bruce Miller has done a better justice to the harrowing themes in Atwood’s novel than any other adaptation has; Atwood herself even stated that the realness of Miller’s story was too horrific to watch at times. It draws inspiration from different historical avenues: Lebensborn (a Nazi program that encouraged higher birth rates), America’s Puritan roots, and East Germany/The Iron Curtain, to name a few. The greatest accomplishment of Miller’s show is that it’s a feminist driven shock value, meant to prevent us from making the increasing anguish throughout the world our new normal. The Handmaid’s Tale is set in the Republic of Gilead, which was formerly the United States. The world is plagued with environmental disasters, as well as low fertility and birth rates. A religious extremist group took it upon themselves to make America great again; They made it look like their actions to abolish the government were the acts of Islamic terrorist groups. Once the religious extremists gained power, they forcibly separated fertile women from their families to create reproductive slaves or forced surrogates or ‘handmaids’. These handmaids are captives in the houses of a specific commander and his wife, who cannot bear children. Once a month, these women are held down and raped during ‘The Ceremony’. It was either this or exile to the Colonies, where these women would spend the rest of their lives cleaning up nuclear waste from the waging war.

Moss leads the cast as the protagonist, Offred, a feisty feminist trapped as a handmaid in a society where a single toe out of line could end her life. She can’t let that happen though. She has to stay alive so that she can find her daughter, Hannah, who was taken from her. Moss’s narration gives us an insight to all Offred’s snarky thoughts. Many people tend to find voice-over narration an example of lazy writing, or unnecessary exposition. But for a character who is allowed to speak very little (mostly in repeated phrases) the voice-over is a welcomed device.

We get to know Offred quite well throughout the show: not just through the narration of her thoughts, but also through flashbacks to her life before, with her family. These flashbacks allow the audience to piece together how not just Offred ended up in Gilead but also how little changes led to America becoming Gilead. . We see her and her colleagues being escorted out of the office because women can’t earn an income anymore. She can’t withdraw from an ATM or even use her debit card to pay for coffee. Flashbacks also tend to be an annoying narrative. But in this case, they work in favor of the story rather than against it.

It is not the flashbacks, narration, or dialogue, that shows off Moss’s spectacular acting. Rather, it’s the silence in between, the expressions on her face, the defiance that shows in Offred’s eyes as she is being slapped or tazed or whipped. Moss does have some of her work cut out for her because Offred is a brilliantly written character. I mean, what kind of person cracks jokes while looking at the dead bodies hanging above her? But Moss’s choice to play the character with astonishing nonchalance is audacious and sensational; her performance carries the show. You can’t have a well written protagonist without an equally enthralling villain. Or in this case, villains. We can say that the obvious villain is the patriarchy, or the system that designed the role of handmaids in the first place. But these are just ideas, mentalities. The Handmaid’s Tale is less about the patriarchy itself and more about the women who uphold it.

Acting alongside Moss is Yvonne Strahovski (Chuck) as Mrs. Waterford and Ann Dowd (Compliance) as Aunt Lydia, the tormenting handmaid handler. Neither of them are inherently evil. They believe that what they are doing is for the greater good of Gilead. What makes them great villains is the fact that they aren’t far off figures, like ‘Big Brother’, or whimsical in their villainy like Captain Hook. They’re written well because they’re so real, so raw. Mrs. Waterford helped create Gilead because she believes in love and in family. All she wants more than anything is a child. Aunt Lydia, though harsh and unwavering in her punishments, truly cares for the handmaids, ‘her girls’. She is a twisted motherlike figure; she punishes but only to ready the handmaids for their divine purpose. Miller has effectively created villains that you will love to hate.

Although the show has many strong points, there are many people that argue that it’s distastefully explicit. Even if you know it’s coming, there’s something new and unnerving about watching Offred lay on the lap of Mrs. Waterford while she is being raped by the Commander. We see the handmaids casually observe the bodies of hanging men, marked by their crimes: Catholic, gay, abortion clinic worker. There is a woman who is repeatedly shamed until she believes that it was her fault that she was gang-raped. These scenes don’t show everything, but they show enough. Margaret Atwood herself said that there were a few times where she had to avert her eyes because it was a scene was so horrific. The show tells a fantastic story but the violence show on screen is what’s preventing a wider audience from tuning in. it’s not a show for the faint of heart.

The show would be unwatchable if it was all doom and gloom; American Horror Story being the example that springs to mind. But, it isn’t. Just like in every story of oppression, there is resistance. There is a spark, hope, that crackles in the darkness. Many of the handmaids come together in resistance, the taste of freedom on the tip of their tongues. In our society, women resist by speaking up: they post on social media, they petition, they protest, and they march. They make themselves known, because how else will they make change happen?. But in Gilead, resistance is a quiet whisper that is carried on the wind: Mayday. Hope. Freedom. Reunion. It is human nature to resist oppression, and the Handmaid’s Tale provides a splendid exhibition of that fact.

The most horrific part of this show does not lie in its explicit nature.. It’s the extreme similarities to the reality that we live in, even though the story is based off of events that happened 30+ years ago. Moss herself thinks that using the violent nature of the show as a reason not to watch it is a weak excuse. She said, “I hate hearing that someone couldn’t watch it because it was too scary[…] I’m like, ‘Really? You don’t have the balls to watch a TV show? This is happening in your real life. Wake up, people. Wake up.’” The show’s timely premiere, close in hand with Trump’s inauguration seems coincidental. Was it? Either way, women have started dressing up in the iconic red robes and white bonnets worn by the handmaids when attending various women’s rights marches. Trump’s new policies, especially those in favor of anti-abortion, are being perceived as threatening to women. Discrimination against working mothers and women who choose not to be mothers are still battles that women continue to fight.

This ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ wasn’t written to be some urgent prophecy, but still as a potential warning of what might come to past. Aunt Lydia, a strong believer in the ‘greater good’ said it best: “Things may not seem ordinary to you right now. But they will.” It’s a dictation of the process that humans go through when they start to numb themselves towards the harrowing atrocities happening around the world, to the point where it’s becoming normal. It’s only when we look back on ‘the good ole days’ will we realize that it’s too late.

#the handmaid's tale #prophecy #abortion #trump #elizabeth moss #review #tv show #margaret atwood #book

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holydepths-blog · 5 years

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✩ jt & sienna

my wrist hurts from typing so eat ass

Disagreements:

Who is more likely to raise their voice? sienna … like we get it he’s in a gang so he has to b mean to other people but both of them know she’ll kill him if he ever talks to her loudly in any capacity Who threatens to leave but never actually does? i feel like he’s a dramatic mf … like ummmm i can go any time i WANT to im not actually ur bf !! and she’s like yeah ur right leave and he goes :pensive: Who actually keeps their word and leaves? sienna . she would storm out of her own house for dramatic effect . my girl doesn’t give a fuck Who trashes the house? she’ll throw sum at him …. prolly a pillow , she doesn’t need a lawsuit on her hands Do either of them get physical? not to imply domestic abuse is ever laughable but if (when? we dk) she ever came @ him … it’d be funny cos he cld literally just push against her forehead and her arms would not reach him How often do they argue/disagree? all the time, she disagrees simply to disagree w him Who is the first to apologise? her, solely because she’s Antagonistic on purpose and then feels bad

Sex:

Who is on top? she wants to take a ride on his disco stick Who is on the bottom? u heard me Who has the strangest desires? they both think the other person’s entirely normal behavior is freaky . jt wants to snuggle ? sienna: tf are we , puritans ? Any kinks? i refuse to take the bdsm test for her because i’m scared of what i’ll find so come back to me on this one Who’s dominant in bed? it’s exhausting being dominant in everything else so he takes the w on this one Is head ever in the equation? yethIf so, who is better at performing it? his beard is itchy so he compensates by being really fucking good at it Ever had sex in public? yes. they’ve had sex in the back room of the thrift shop more than they have upstairs in her apartment Who moans the most? can he shut the frick up Who leaves the most marks? sienna…………………………………. dont askWho screams the loudest? can SHE shut the frick up ….Who is the more experienced of the two? idk how experienced he is probably very but it’s important for me that u know she’s a whore Do they ‘fuck’ or ‘make love’? they frick Rough or soft? r**gh …. once a month she’s uwu ….How long do they usually last? for a long time , her poor thrussy Is protection used? yes. she’d kill herself before she got pregnant Does it ever get boring? no Where is the strangest place they’d have sex? they’ve had sex anywhere and everywhere

Family:

Do your muses plan on having children/or have children? she would literally rather DIE than be pregnant. FOR THE PURPOSES of this section … they adopt (one) kid when they’re too old to be raising a tot but still try, don’t @ me. If so, how many children do your muses want/have? her ? none lol but AGAIN … i cannot leave this section blank and …. future purposes dont @ meWho is the favorite parent? sienna’s not a regular mom, she’s a cool momWho is the authoritative parent? she’s also a bitch though, don’t forget it Who is more likely to allow the children to have a day off school? jt , mostly because sienna doesn’t want them around all day Who lets the children indulge in sweets and junk food when the other isn’t around? SIENNA …. yeah sorry that i don’t think it’s jordan ‘waahhh sienna i don’t want you to get mercury poisoning’ tucker …. mind ur fucking business maybe ? Who turns up to extra curricular activities to support their children? sienna , but she drags jt with her so she has someone to bitch about soccer moms and how long [ insert activity here ] is running with Who goes to parent teacher interviews? jt , sienna isn’t allowed there anymore. it’s a long story. Who changes the diapers? bold of u to assume she would ever go NEAR a diaperWho gets up in the middle of the night to feed the baby? she’s fully decided she is INDEPENDENT and does not NEED him to wake up for moral support or to warm up a bottle … her tit is good enough Who spends the most time with the children? jt , she’s an ankle biter anti . ( she still reads the kid bedtime stories every night )Who packs their lunch boxes? jt , sienna is not allowed to make health choices for ANYONE Who gives their children ‘the talk’? SIENNA … she tells them flat out what happens and why it happens , no bullshit . science babey ! Who cleans up after the kids? nothing ever gets cleaned up , ever. Who worries the most? jt . sienna is too cool and chill 2 have anxiety Who are the children more likely to learn their first swear word from? SIENNA

Affection:

Who likes to cuddle? he does … she’s super handsy casually but whenever it comes to actually hugging she takes a bit to warm up to it Who is the little spoon? she is …. he’s only allowed 2 snuggle her if she can fall asleep in his arms . nearly vomited writing that actually Who gets naughty in the most inappropriate of places? right now ? sienna , trying to convince everyone they’re like actually really a thing . Who struggles to keep their hands to themself? sienna , and she denies it until her dying breath How long can they cuddle until one becomes uncomfortable? sienna’s … ability to be uber affectionate with him is limited …. but she gets a lot better as time grows on . that’s character development Who gives the most kisses? jtWhat is their favourite non-sexual activity? dont ask me why my first thought was watching shitty b-rated horror movies …. she also makes him sort through clothes with her, and she promises it’s very theraputic Where is their favourite place to cuddle? bed . it’s much easier to get her to drop her mr tough guy act when she’s sleepy Who is more likely to playfully grope the other? neither , when they touch eachother it means BUSINESS , see two sections back How often do they get time to themselves? all the time , she runs away

Sleeping:

Who snores? i already know she does , dont judge her If both do, who snores the loudest? sienna Do they share a bed or sleep separately? share :3 not rn …… but they WLD If they sleep together, do they cozy up together or lay far apart? she’s ready to draw a partition down the middle of the bedWho talks in their sleep? sienna , and he makes fun of her for it What do they wear to bed? sienna steals clothes specifically from him to sleep in. she’s also 10/10 a morning showererer so she’ll lit sleep in her clothes from that day and not give a FUCK Are either of your muses insomniacs? sienna never sleeps she runs purely on red bull and annoyance Can sleeping pills be found by the bedside? yeah , she takes them most nights Do they wrap their limbs around each other or just lay side by side? side by side, though occasionally she’ll reach for his hand Who wakes up with bed hair? sienna, and it’s awful. he’ll get his ass beat if he mentions it Who wakes up first? jt. it takes her FOREVER to fall asleep , but once she’s out she’s out . think being awake for 24 hours then sleeping for 12+ Who prepares breakfast in bed for the other? he does, not to be romantic but because he’s sick and tired of her eating leftover fried rice in bed. What is their favourite sleeping position? she sprawls , and she doesn’t like to be touching him when she sleeps , but his presence is a good thing Who hogs the sheets? jt , simply because he’s so comparatively large next to her that using a reasonable amount of sheets reads as hogging Do they set an alarm each night? they both intend to — and always forget. when when it goes off, sienna sleeps through it Can a television be found in their bedroom? yes , but it doesn’t get cable like the one in the living room does. it’s exclusively for blockbuster rentals. Who has nightmares? she doesn’t have wake up in a cold sweat nightmares, but she has sad dreams a lot Who has ridiculous dreams? sienna makes up the craziest dreams to relay to him just to fuck with him Who sprawls out and takes up most of the bed? SIENNAWho makes the bed? neither have the time What time is bed time? either 8pm or 4am, no in between Any routines/rituals before bed? her SOLE form of self care is face masks, and she makes him do them on the top half of his face where green gunk wont get in his hair Who’s the grumpiest when they wake up? sienna is grumpy all the time, so it’d have to be him by comparison

Work:

Who is the busiest? she literally lives at work, so there’s always something Who rakes in the highest income? considering she is a SMART , STRONG , almost business owner ( omg they popping BIG bottles when the old bitch that actually owns the attic dies ) and he thrives on tips and gang bullshit ? do the math. Are any of your muses unemployed? nopeWho takes the most sick days? sienna just opens the store and goes back upstairs to fake supervise in her sleep, call her if there’s a fireWho is more likely to turn up late to work? he is, it’s LITERALLY impossible for her to do that Who sucks up to their boss? paging ed, she’s her own fucking boss What are their jobs? he’s a bartender/gang fREAK , she manages the attic thrift store Who stresses the most? jt has a lot of long days to to the antics of alcoholics , she likes her job even though she wishes she was somewhere else Do your muses enjoy or despise their careers/occupations? she likes it…. but she’s super depressed she isn’t following her dreams. i assume he likes whatever’s going on on the wrong side of town Are your muses financially stable? yes

Home:

Who does the washing? jtWho takes out the trash? jordan tucker Who does the ironing? jordanWho does the cooking? mr tuckerWho is more likely to burn the house down just trying? see i would say sienna, but she DOESN’T try. Who is messier? sienna, but she’s not as much messy as she is disorganizedWho leaves the toilet roll empty? siennaWho leaves their dirty clothes on the floor? jt, he lit just took his shoes off in the thread ….. literally get off her couch Who forgets to flush the toilet? that’s gross. Who is the prankster around the house? if he pulls anything over on her in her house he’s kicked 2 the curb. she bullying he is fair game tho Who loses the car keys when it comes time to go somewhere? sienna doesn’t drive, so him Who mows the lawn? what lawn Who answers the telephone? she pointedly ignores them Who does the vacuuming? see the other chore listWho does the groceries? ^Who takes the longest to shower? siennaWho spends the most time in the bathroom? neither of them , efficiency is key

Miscellaneous:

Is money a problem? mo money mo problems is what i always say . it isn’t overflowing , but it isn’t an issue How many cars do they own? he has a motorcycle , she has a bike and two working feet Do they own their home or do they rent? she rents , technically , until she gets the store Do they live near the coast or deep in the countryside? dont ask this again mads still has not told me where we are Do they live in the city or in the country? SHE lives downtown , he would have to move in with her Do they enjoy their surroundings? she hates it , she wants a big city What’s their song? she played this on her record player , and she had one too many drinks and tried to dance with him to it ….. What do they do when they’re away from each other? breathe a sigh of relief Where did they first meet? the thrift storeHow did they first meet? when she literally made out w him unprecedentedly Who spends the most money when out shopping? sienna is always buying things at garage sales and other thrift stores she insists are to resell but then a week later they show up in her house or she’s wearing them Who’s more likely to flash their assets? sienna owns one expensive thing and never lets it go. Who finds it amusing when the other trips over? they aren’t 10 Any mental issues? too many to countWho’s terrified of bugs? spiders are her friends Who kills the spiders around the house? if he does she’ll b mad at him that’s pablo , he lives in the corner Their favourite place? her apartment Who pays the bills? siennaDo they have any fears for their future? at this point probably the stress of staging a breakup Who’s more likely to surprise the other with a fancy dinner? LOOK … i know it’s not the question but she surprises him with spectacularly unfancy dinners …. he shows up and they’re eating pizza rolls by candlelight because if she doesn’t cook them ahead of time he won’t let her eat them Who uses up all of the hot water? SIENNAWho’s the tallest? he is , she’s 2ft Who’s more likely to just randomly hop into the shower with the other? sienna, the horndogWho wanders around in their underwear? [ me vc ] if he keeps barging in he’s seen her in a towel Who sings the loudest when singing along to the radio? neither of them , they DANCE What do they tease each other about? him about her poor life choices , her about his criticisms of her life choices . essentially she mocks him Who is more likely to cringe at the other’s fashion sense at times? sienna has to beg him to not wear a clean version of the same fucking clothes every day . he owns one outfit and washes it each night as far as she’s concerned Do they have mutual friends? no , they run in VERY different circles Who crushed first? [ tatbilb vc ] if anyone’s fallen in love with someone who doesn’t love them back, it’s not you. it’s kavinsky. he’s kavinsky. Any alcohol or substance related problems? the only water she drinks is watered down beer because it was cheaper, amiright lads? also she smokes a lot , have fun with lung cancer when you’re 40 sienna Who is more likely to stumble home, drunk, at 3am? sienna, and he was the bartenderWho swears the most? her

#soulsbled #006. sienna / kinney » featuring jordan.#004. sienna / kinney » all posts.

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janiedean · 5 years

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Tell me about "calvinist soulmates au of DOOM"?

OKAY SO

the calvinist soulmates au of DOOM was based on a concept where I’d do soulmate au but in like, 100% truly calvinist puritan england setting. the soulmates would be random tattoos with drawings or such which wouldn’t tell names so people might actually get judged by what they got even before they meet their soulmate and that was going to actually play a role also given the person’s social standing and obviously if someone got matched with either someone of the same sex and/or someone of lower class status it would be seen as a mark of They Are Actually Going To Hell And Not To Heaven As It Looked Like. also you know when you met your soulmate when you touch and your mark burns because they don’t match.

that was the basics, the specific fic was going to be theon/robb with side jon/ygritte with the following main plot points:

jon is still lyanna’s and was taken in by ned and cat who were very much sideeyed for that and that was gonna give him extra Issues also because since his soulmate is ygritte obviously his tattoo was a flame, so people decided OH WAIT HE EVEN HAS FLAMES HE’S DAMNED, so he’d try to atone for it by trying to become a priest and utterly failing at it when he runs into ygritte;

robb instead has a black cross so everyone assumes he should go for religion and after ned and cat die and they all end up living with lysa/littlefinger they actually try to convince him to do it but he’s not that convinced, this until he runs into the new gardener ie theon who at some point hurts himself or something, robb gives him a hand and they touch and OOOOPSSSS HEY SOULMATES

obv lysa and lf try to buy him off like WE’RE PAYING YOU IF YOU STAY AWAY FROM HIM and theon’s like yeah fuck you you’re too much above me anyway

except that then it turns out he’s ygritte’s neighbor and since robb helped jon get over his shit and get with her already she pays him back the favor

then there had to be an entire build up where robb and theon get to know each other and robb has the religious crisis because if they’re good together and meant to be HOW IN HELL CAN IT BE POSSIBLE THAT IT MEANS HE’S GOING TO HELL TO BE WITH SOMEONE LOWER CLASS THAN HIM

and at some point he ran into davos who in this case was the underground catholic priest with the Other View On This and basically told robb that predestination is shit and it’s not absolutely a given and actually other christian denominations don’t buy that shit at which robb decided you know what fuck it predestination is shit we should be together

meanwhile theon’s straight-up atheist and he’s just like ‘idg how this even happened but I love this idiot okay fine hey something went well’

I probably could expand that with other people because it was a nice idea if you ask me but that was the main plan, I could totally do the jb spinoff too but like I should find the force of will to finish it XD anyway let me find a snippet that actually makes sense because I wrote what I had very loosely:

One year later, not as many relatives are happy with Ned’s decision to take in her sister’s illegitimate baby.

It was an affair that caused quite a scandal. Young Lyanna suddenly disappeared after having met nobleman Rhaegar Targaryen at a party hosted by the latter’s father. Ned had gone and brought her with because he had business going on with Lord Targaryen. The two had seemed quite smitten with each other, but Ned hadn’t thought much of it – Lyanna was young, too young, and Rhaegar was engaged to another noblewoman. On top of that, the red wings of a predatory bird that covered Rhaegar’s palm did not match Lyanna’s sword on her forearm, and it’s a known custom to never look at another’s soulmate in a wrong way. After all, there’s a reason why God would destine people together and going against His will isn’t just contemplated, period.

And instead the both of them had fled London barely a month later.

Ned only found his sister nine months later, and because a kid from the slums who needed a bath brought him a message and told him to hurry.

He wasn’t surprised when he was brought to the Charing Cross general hospital and he had found his sister more dead than alive on a bed in a room with other five pregnant women.

Lyanna apologized for the shame she must have brought on them, and begged him to give her baby a chance even if she knew what children born out of soulmate unions were looked down upon, and said that Rhaegar just left when his family found them again and convinced him that it couldn’t be and she hasn’t seen him in two months.

A nurse nearby had the baby. The baby had his mother’s (and Ned’s) grey eyes and dark hair and almost-solemn face, and a small red flame on the inner part of his tiny arm.

Ned had known he should have said no and brought the baby to an orphanage the moment his sister couldn’t see him doing it. Babies born out of soulmate bonds are already seen badly when their parents are married, but one born out of a bond and out of wedlock?

“Promise me, Ned,” Lyanna had whispered, bursting into tears and grabbing at her brother’s hand, and then she had died at not even eighteen.

Ned had looked at the baby and thought, I can’t give him up.

Thankfully, Cat understands when he tells her. She shrugs and comes closer and tells him, “You know, I have family in Ireland.”

“I do. What of it?”

She looks at the baby in his arms. “I have never lived there and only see them sparsely, but over there – they don’t think the bonds matter that much. Or being born outside one means you can’t be saved. Or that having a baby outside a bond means the same. People might look at us wrong if you keep him, but if that’s what you want then I won’t say no.”

Sadly, the only other person who’s of that same mind is Robb.

Most of Cat’s relatives (the ones who don’t live in Ireland and aren’t Catholic) don’t approve. Ned doesn’t have that many left who would care, but most people who used to be friends with his brother or his father only stick to make business with him rather than come over for tea.

Sometimes he thinks, does it mean I was wrong, but then he sees his sister’s face in Jon’s – they named him after Ned’s godfather, with his blessing – and he decides that no, he wasn’t, and if he’s this sure when every other sign has been positive, then surely God approves.

#spoilers: i'm atheist but here I am writing a thing about how catholic free will > predestination #i read alchemy wars the month before planning this DON'T BLAME ME #lodessa #ask post

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otomeshistarlight-blog · 5 years

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Rant incoming

I was scrolling through the JoJo tag when I saw this post and I just ... I’m really tired y’all.

First of all, according to a google search it looks like the age of consent in Italy is 14 (if I’m wrong, please correct me) so Narancia is very legal, as is Giorno. America’s laws are not universal. The world is not so UScentric that whatever we as a country deem inappropriate is likewise considered to be inappropriate in other countries. There are varying standards throughout different societies and one is not necessarily more correct than the next. Whether or not I think real life fourteen year olds should be having sex is irrelevant- because even if I don’t agree with it, it’s gonna happen anyway - but Narancia is not a real fourteen year old so whatever the law dictates in America OR Italy is irrelevant.

What this boils down to is that there is no victim here. Narancia cannot be taken advantage of. Narancia cannot be sexually assaulted and face the physical/emotional consequences of such trauma. There is nothing inherently wrong with shipping him in ANY pairing, regardless of the ages involved. If I want to write about him getting wrecked by Bruno I will damn well do it because not a single person is being hurt by me doing so. If this is something that triggers you and causes you distress then don’t 👏🏻 fucking 👏🏻 look 👏🏻 at 👏🏻 it. 👏🏻

Fighting for the rights of fictional characters solves nothing. It helps no one. It doesn’t benefit real victims and it sure as hell does not stop real people from being victimized in the first place. This is a nonissue that people are taking up arms over for no reason other than a perceived moral superiority that makes them feel more in control of the world around them. It stems from feeling helpless and lost in a society that doesn’t bend to their every whim. Fandom space is the only place they feel like they have any power so they take on the role of morality police, try to dictate what people can and cannot like, and then accuse anyone who won’t do what they say of heinous crimes. It’s extremely toxic and harmful, not to mention it lessens the severity of sincere pedophile/abuse finger pointing so the chances of a real predator getting away with it are greatly heightened, and I’m just done with it at this point.

Let’s say I’m looking through the porn tags as I am won’t to do and I come across a post that features blatant child porn. Real child porn. The 3D kind that, yknow, actually features real children being exploited and assaulted for realsies. I’m understandably appalled so I file a report with tumblr and they don’t even look at it because they’ve been bombarded for the last year with false harm to minors reports and the user is never penalized for actually doing something inherently wrong and immoral. Y’all have heard about the girl who cried wolf right? Like, y’all know how that story ends don’t you?

But no. Instead of directing your efforts towards anything worthwhile, you’re going to keep going after shippers. And for what? Because oh no, the fictional seventeen year old who could just as likely be nineteen is being paired with a fictional twenty-five year old. The horror. What is the world coming to? Think of the children!

Except ... these supposed children don’t exist. How can you victimize a piece of paper? The same argument applies to loli/shotacon too mind you, and there is no crime in looking at drawings regardless of their perceived age, especially when the topic is anime where you can have a character who looks like a five year old girl and she is in fact a 400 year old vampire. Like?? There is absolutely no logic you can apply to this that has any internal consistency let alone actually makes sense.

Me: these fictional minors don’t even look like sixteen year olds, where have you seen a real teenager who looks like this?

Antis: they look like teens you pedo!! And ageing them up is still pedophilia because they are canonly sixteen so you’re still thinking about teenagers in a roundabout, highly contrived way

Me: *shows you a 300 year old loli vampire* okay so I can definitely fuck this one right? She’s unrealistically old!

Antis: no!!!! You’re just using her canon age as an excuse to be a freak who preys on children! She might be 300 years old but she still has the body of a child!!

Me: okay so I’ll just age myself down to self ship, no biggie.

Antis: absolutely not!! You’re still an adult and ageing yourself down doesn’t make it okay!! I’m reporting you to the authorities right now!

Me: but ... who am I supposed to imagine fucking then?

Antis: one of the few adults you find in anime, except this one because he’s an abuser, or this one because he tortured a little girl and not the serial killer either because wow problematic

Me: so what you’re telling me ... is that I’m only allowed to thirst after your preapproved, precious cinnamon roll faves even though my tastes or needs in a relationship might vary greatly from yours?

Antis: yes, exactly. I’m so glad you’re finally on my level of intelligence and moral superiority. : ^)

Me: oh, I see now. So what this boils down to is that you just don’t want people to enjoy something you don’t personally agree with. Got it.

Antis: absolutely not!! I’m thinking about the betterment of society by telling you what you can and cannot enjoy! You liking these questionable things is harmful against the greater good! Won’t you think of the children!?

Me: soooooo we’re just gonna ignore how much that sounds like a fascist/communist society or ...?

Antis: : ^)

Y’all should absolutely read 1984. It would do you some good. Because having an attraction to a fucking anime character is not a slippery slope, but this puritanical shit? It sure as hell is.

Let me pose this query: what is stopping an anti from going on a book burning campaign or fighting to get certain books banned? Lolita? Flowers in the Attic? All of the works by Marquis de Sade (a personal hero of mine)? Alternatively who are the only people who actually engage in book burning/banning?

Overzealous religious nuts. Everything about the anti movement is the same “our children shouldn’t be exposed to such filth” battle cry that religious sects - specifically the western ones - have screamed for decades now except with a cute little sjw hat on top. No rock n’ roll music. It’s Satan’s music. No porn. It’s tainting America’s youth. No alcohol. It’s leading our country down the path of sin. No violent video games or movies. They’re turning people into mass shooters. No problematic themes in fictional works because it’s turning people into pedophiles/abusers.

And that is just ... factually incorrect. There is absolutely no correlation between Lolita being published and an uptick in children being sexually assaulted. There is no correlation between lolicon or shotacon breeding more pedophiles. Because that’s literally not how it works. Period. I’m not going to accidentally stumble on a loli doujin and think “huh yknow what? This sounds fun!” I could even read loli doujins at length and that’s still not going to convince me that actually engaging in sexual situations with toddlers is okay. Like ... I don’t know why these people think we’re so stupid that we don’t know the difference between right and wrong but this is just insane. The only people who look at loli or shota and then go on to commit crimes against real children are the ones who were already having those kinds of thoughts in the first place. The only people who play Grand Theft Auto and then go shoot up a church are the ones who were already having violent thoughts to begin with. These thoughts are not magically implanted into our brains regardless of what media we consume and that’s just a goddamn fact.

Yes, media impacts reality but not the way you think it does. Even all those sources antis link to about the supposed correlation between the two are twisted to meet their own rhetoric. It’s called marketing and anyone with half a brain cell knows that it exists. It’s meant to encourage us into thinking we need some product so we spend money on junk and keep capitalism going strong. it works more often than not. However no amount of marketing is going to convince a mentally sound person that shooting up a mall is a valid life choice to make. It just doesn’t work like that and you could scream until your blue in the face that fucking kids is the bees knees and I still wouldn’t touch a real child because that’s gross. Period. And since I can’t touch Bakugou Katsuki or Narancia because they’re just figments of someone’s imagination and pen and paper ... then where lies the problem?? What is the issue with writing or drawing fictional characters, regardless of age or moral compass, in sexual situations?

I’m a CSA survivor that has been on the internet for a LONG time. I’ve seen some shit I sorely wish I could forget. Everything from real life gore, real life death, bestiality, necrophilia and yes even real life child porn. I don’t think there’s a single problematic thing I haven’t accidentally stumbled on and it’s horrific. It’s disgusting. I know all too well how awful these things are and I know even better how it feels to be a victim of rape and sexual assault and pedophilia and grooming. Like. That was my life growing up. I know what these things look like and I can assure you without a shadow of a doubt that whatever is going on in fandom space isn’t even comparable. Please. Draw your OC fucking a dragon mascot character instead of fucking a real animal. Please write about a fictional father fucking his fictional son instead of fucking a real child or a real sibling. Do whatever you want with your imagination - and I do mean WHATEVER. If you want to think about eating your favorite characters shit then by all means. Enjoy. It doesn’t effect reality in any way besides maybe giving someone a cathartic coping outlet and there’s nothing wrong with it.

There’s nothing wrong with ANY topic being explored in fiction.

The only problem is when someone commits a crime in reality. When someone hurts another living being. And consuming this so called problematic fiction does not lead someone to real life crimes. Period.

Finding myself on that stupid gore site when I was 14, BestGore I think it’s called? Did not make me want to try killing someone. I’ve never even seriously contemplated doing it because death is awful in every regard, I wouldn’t seriously wish that on anyone let alone convince myself that it’s okay. But according to antis me being exposed to that sort of content means I’m more likely to go out and commit murder?

Literally what crack are you smoking?

Get the fuck out of here and do something worthwhile with your time if you honestly find these topics so disturbing. If not then shut up, sit down and let people enjoy their fandom experience however they see fit. Because this right here? This treating fictional characters like they matter, like they’re real people? It’s not fucking cute. And as someone who was raped from the time I was eleven until I was eighteen by a family member I can safely say that you aren’t doing shit to help anyone with this holier than thou, I know better than you crusade.

And that is the goddamn truth whether you like it or not.

#discourse #anti #shipping

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tape-hiss · 6 years

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Hello! This month's Tape Hiss is an Aetherian history lesson and is a little late, because I did a whole comic that went along with this. You can read it here, although be warned, it's NSFW. It concerns Cuppra (one of the Aetherian founders) and Suuhl (one of the reifa, or as most people including me call them, the skullbirds.) This post will expound on the comic a little bit, talking about what Aetheri was like at the time, how the war and post-war stuff unfolded, what Cuppra and Suuhl had to do with it all, and even a bit about skullbird culture.

So I've talked about the founders and the war-post-war events before both inside and outside of the comic, but even so, I think this side comic shows some things I've never really talked about before. The most immediately noticeable one is that Cuppra is hanging out in the palace--what's up with that?

What's up with it is this: Cuppra was an ethkarin, which is essentially a very fancy courtesan-slash-journalist. This occupation doesn't really exist in the same form in present-day Aetheri for reasons that will become obvious. The gist of it is that it used to be very typical for the Cynn, their spouse, and most nobility to have one or many ethkarin on the side--it wasn't a secret at all. I've talked some about the attitude towards marriage or what passes for it in Aetheri, and the weird disconnect I've mentioned between how the upper and lower classes each view sex and relationships was even more severe in pre-war times. Upper class Aetherians arranged partnerships and had children with people chosen for good breeding, or whatever, but if you didn't really much care for your designated partner, then you had ethkarin to fill in for the rest of the relationship--intimacy, sex for the fun of it, and so on. Ethkarin were not employed just for sex, but also for their company and care. A little like hosting, but also not very much like hosting at all. Most ethkarin lived in-house; some of them had multiple clients, some of them did not.

The journalist bit of the job comes from the fact that part of being an ethkarin involved retaining all of the goings-on in the palace and noble circles, scandalous or otherwise, and relaying this in columns in the press under a psuedonym. At this time in Aetheri, ethkarin were the only way anyone knew what went on in the palace. This part of the ethkarin job was not exactly a secret from their clients, either--it's just the way things were.

Outside of the upper classes, ethkarin were viewed as essential parts of Aetherian society--an important ally to the regular people in keeping their rulers accountable. Aetheri has never had a puritanical view of sex, but the difference between classes is that outside of the nobility, the norm is to commit your life to whoever you like, good 'breeding' prospects aside. You love and have fun freely until you find the one person you really truly want to commit the rest of your hundreds of years to, and then you love and have fun with them for the rest of your days. Being an ethkarin was just a job, and usually this didn't clash with their actual love lives at all.

So Cuppra was one of the Cynn's ethkarin, in fact a favorite of theirs. Cynn Nadha, shown here in what used to be normal Aetherian royalty getup, was not a tyrant, or cruel, or careless...Cuppra would describe them as just sort of unable to relate to the people outside the Palace walls, which power will do to you, I suppose. Personally, the Cynn was quite nice, and Cuppra enjoyed working with them. So you can see immediately where Cuppra's role in the post-war revolution starts to appear.

(This occupation died out pretty soon after the revolt in the postwar period, because pretty much the entire upper class was deposed in one way or another, and the government that Escala instituted afterward was both way less extravagant and way more transparent. The transparency part has sort of faded over the years to present day--it's not that Numair or his predecessors take any extreme measures to hide what they're doing from the public, it's more that centuries of the government more or less being good stewards of the people has led the public to just expect the government to get on with it without having to be babysat. This has mostly worked, at least until recently.)

Aetheri in the immediate pre-war period was doing a lot of elbow-rubbing with other nations, though none so much as with the reifa, or skullbirds. To put it simply, the reifa were a very large nation with a tribal structure, and all of those tribes were represented by one figure who was voted in on an ad hoc basis. This figure during their interactions with Aetheri was Radh, the big cardinal-colored fella here.

What the Aetherian royal family wanted was to establish colonies offworld where the thyft weren't a problem; the reifa also wanted to spread abroad, as their world had little land suitable for them, apparently, and also they were adventurous types. The spirits had the magical means to establish and keep connection with offworld bases, and the reifa had the physical and otherwise strength necessary to help protect both the colonies and Aetherian cities from whatever lay beyond the borders. Thus, a partnership was born.

Suuhl was not a soldier--they were an artist. The reifa recorded things via drawings and etchings rather than through words. Even their simple hieroglyphic written language was really just shorthand drawings, and reading their language was not unlike reading road signs. Suuhl was essentially the historian brought along with the delegation to Aetheri to record whatever was worth taking note of. So Suuhl hung around the palace quite a bit, and that's how they and Cuppra met.

A note on the reifa: if you think the spirits are a little cavalier about sex, they're really nothing compared to the reifa. I'm not going to get too specific about these guys as more abut them will come out over time in the main comic, but suffice to say that sex in the culture of the reifa was a nexus for social bonding. It was as normal for friends to have sexual relationships as it would be for them to, like, plan a road trip together. Reifa were pretty loose in terms of romantic partnerships as well: polygamy was sort of the norm, but it didn't strike any of them as weird if a reifa were to have just one Big Favorite that they were romantic with. They also really, really did not care about species, so long as everyone involved was sentient and consenting.

The only strife that Cuppra and Suuhl had early on in their relationship was due to Aetherian attitude, not reifa. Most Aetherians did (still do) very much think that interspecies relationships were out of the question--it's probably rooted in their experiences with the thyft, which has hardwired them to regard anything that is clearly sentient but not a spirit to be a potential threat, or at least untrustworthy and beneath them. I think Cuppra felt for quite a while early on that, while they and Suuhl had been fooling around for a time, they would be crossing some sort of terrible line if it went any farther than that. Suuhl, obviously, thought this was incredibly stupid.

(And if you're wondering, the Cynn never knew about Cuppra's relationships outside of work. They never took much of an interest in their ethkarins' personal lives, not because they didn't care at all, but because you just don't do that with ethkarin.)

Now for a timeline of sorts:

The war starts to go bad when it becomes clear that Aetheri doesn't quite have the capability to make permanent doors between their world and Earth required for getting troops and supplies through consistently. They can't defend their colonies on Earth from the native monsters who very much want these literal aliens to fuck off. Someone in the world of the Palace gets it in their head that physically attaching their own universe to Earth's is the best way to make passage between the two stable, and the top magic users for that sort of thing began massaging this theory.

Meanwhile, the reifa living in Hymntup (the old name for Escalus, the capital city) have mostly integrated extremely well with the regular citizens. People have been organizing by neighborhood to drive off the thyft as they come hunting, and the reifa, having the physical ability to hurt the thyft where the spirits' magic cannot, are well-liked in their new home neighborhoods. Things are going well.

Then two things happen close together: a group of magic-users under the direction of the Cynn tries to move the universe and succeeds only in snuffing out a few others, followed by what can only be described as a culling, wherein a large group of the thyft all enter Hymntup at once and begin killing anyone they can get their hands on.

These two events completely destabilize both the war effort in the colonies and the home front in Aetheri. It doesn't take long for the reifa to realize that they suddenly cannot go home, that their world is gone, and that this was a result of Aetheri's little experiment. Radh totally and immediately withdraws the reifa from both the front lines and out of their communities in Hymntup, and they convene just outside the city in order to talk about what happened and what to do. The culling by the thyft starts immediately after this, while news is spreading to the rest of Hymntup about what they've inadvertently done to their new friends, and while the communities are now short of the people that were helping them defend against the thyft the most.

The Palace--completely protected from the thyft and out of touch with the rest of the city--was busy at this moment trying to do damage control elsewhere. The withdrawal of the reifa from Aetheri's Earth settlements kneecapped the forces there, and it was quickly turning into a slaughter. The monsters on Earth just Knew something Big had happened, but they didn't know what, only that Aetheri had done it. Aetherian forces were being routed out of their settlements so quickly that the most the Cynn could do was try to get them all evacuated before the monsters of Earth got them. At the same time, the Palace is trying to figure out what the hell just happened--no one had expected anything to go catastrophically wrong with the whole world-moving thing, more that it just wouldn't work at all, if anything. What the Cynn and the Palace was not paying attention to was any of the issues going on down in Hymntup, leaving everyone there to essentially fend for themselves.

This was when the fires were lit. Someone somewhere decided that, absent the help of the Aetherian army and the Palace and the reifa, people would have to take matters into their own hands to stop the culling the thyft were enacting on them. It was probably one of the neighborhood defense groups who thought they would do a controlled burn around the city to clear the trees away, ridding the thyft of their habitat, so that they'd have to cross miles of bare land to get to Hymntup and would be easily spotted as they did. It had been a normally damp year, and the trees were massive, so perhaps they poured more magic into it than was necessary. Or perhaps they just underestimated the amount of strength it would take to control the fires once even one tree was engulfed.

Either way, the fire got out of their control in the early morning hours, and by the time it was spotted by the city at large, it had multiplied and multiplied on itself, eating its way up a tree tens of stories tall. Hymntup was under-equipped to deal with a large fire at that moment as it was, what with the war and the culling taking its toll on their population, but brigades of people showed up to try and contain it, only to find that they couldn't. Instead they fell back and began encircling the city with fire repellent spells, in case the blaze in the tree did not burn itself out as they hoped.

Of course it didn't. There was a lot more dead wood in those trees than people had thought, and one by one, they all caught, until you could not see from Hymntup in any direction but for a wall of fire. The spells around the city offered protection from the brunt of it, but limbs kept dropping from overhead as they burned, damaging buildings and requiring constant response to keep the fires they brought with them from spreading within the city.

All of this time, no one in the Palace did anything about this. The only reason Hymntup did not burn to the ground was because of its own citizens turning out to protect it. And the people in Hymntup realized this, and resentment grew and grew. The fruitless war, the accident that destroyed whole worlds, the lack of any kind of help at all--what use was this government anyway?

Cuppra was at the Palace during much of this time, and they witnessed exactly what was going on. The government there was occupied with withdrawing from Earth, negotiating for prisoners of war with the different tribes of monsters on Earth who had taken them, trying to reverse whatever had happened to the worlds that had disappeared, trying to communicate with Radh and the reifa about this, and deciding what, exactly, to do and say if they couldn't reverse this problem. No one really raised the alarm about the fires until they had gotten totally out of control, and even then, upon finding out that Hymntup citizens had already worked to protect the city's borders, the Cynn sort of dismissed it. They figured, maybe, oh, great, so there's spells around the city, everything is already taken care of then--without another thought for what was actually going on down in Hymntup.

What they did not do, did not even think of doing, was try to send word ahead of the fires in any way to the other towns along the river. The people of Hymntup had to do that, too, using the river as a safe road to the next town, on bespelled boats to outrun the fire. Because of this, Ryvar and most other small towns along the river were able to spell their borders against the flames, and they weathered all right. There was nothing to be done, though, for the people that were still on the roads, or in camps and outposts farther out in the forest--there was no way to even find them all in time.

And then Aetherian soldiers began to come home from Earth. Most had not been warned ahead of time that their entire homeland was burning down. By the time they began arriving, the trees immediately around Hymntup had all completely crumbled, and in every direction the smoke was so thick that they couldn't see much beyond the nearest burned logs; the fires were still near enough that the smoke was luminous, meaning there was a constant, hellish orange glow about the place. The air quality was so bad above ground that most residents had to remain indoors or use the tunnels beneath Hymntup to travel, unless they had spelled masks so that they could breathe. After being so soundly and brutally defeated and driven off of the face of the Earth, this wasn't much of a welcome home.

As Suuhl explains in the comic, despite the fact that the reifa had every right to be completely furious with Aetheri, most couldn't really bring themselves to. They may never be able to go home, but they figured that if their world was truly destroyed, it would have gone so instantaneously that no one there would have noticed, before they simply ceased to exist. And, some of them postulated, there was always the chance that their world wasn't destroyed after all, merely made inaccessible and unable to be seen by the movement of the universes. Considering that in the face of the destruction around Aetheri--and the fact that their pulling out of the fighting on Earth and in Hymntup had gotten a lot of people killed--as a whole, the reifa couldn't do much more than grieve.

This is also where a lot of animosity starts to brew in certain groups of spirits towards the reifa. A lot of the Aetherian soldiers and the loved ones of those who had been killed placed a lot of the blame on the reifa's sudden pull-out on Earth. This is true and fair, to an extent--the war was already on its way to a loss when the whole world-moving thing happened. It wasn't just the reifa going AWOL that resulted in the war being lost, but it didn't help, and perhaps the routing at the end of it all wouldn't have been quite so bloody and brutal with them still fighting. This resentment stays with these Aetherians well after the last reifa had died...and it later served to reinforce the intense dislike by traditionalists for the immigrant monsters in Aetheri in present day.

But aside from those spirits, the reifa were mostly welcomed back. A lot of Aetherians felt they could relate to the intense sadness that the reifa were dealing with now in the face of losing their own world; it sort of bonded the two races together. Aetheri was the reifas' home now, whether they or the spirits liked it or not.

Meanwhile, the tensions between the Palace and Hymntup at large were growing. The Cynn was slowly realizing that things were about to get very bad, as stores of food in the city began to run low and it was clear that no current crops would be surviving or new ones growing for a while under the intense smoke. They didn't have a plan. No one had a plan. The Cynn was even loathe to open the Palace gates and its own stores of food to the populace--in fact, they sort of hid the fact that there were any stores of food in the Palace at all, though everyone in the city knew. Riots started, first just a few here and there, people attempting to get into the Palace one way or another and tangling with the Aetherian army guards in doing so, until pressure built and one day, seemingly out of nowhere, nearly a thousand people (Hymntup had a bigger population back then) showed up at the gates of the Palace and demanded to be let in. The Cynn didn't want them let in. A riot started. The people managed to overrun the guards at the gate, but the layout of the palace grounds worked against them as they would any attackers: they were shuffled into narrower paths between high walls as the land spiraled up around the hill to the Palace, and as they were, Aetherian soldiers were able to attack them from atop the walls...which they did. No one's really sure who gave those orders or if they were even given, but either way, this riot resulted in a couple hundred civilian casualties.

This, of course, escalated things. The Hymntupians (Hymntupites?) were furious, naturally, and more and more talk about undermining the Cynn's power one way or another was starting to be heard. The Cynn, meanwhile, was becoming paranoid--Cuppra would attest that they had almost a complete personality change after the riot at the Palace, becoming convinced that there was an organization of Aetherians out there who were plotting to kill them. This wasn't true (yet), but either way, the Cynn stepped up policing in Hymntup, which really only resulted in innocent people being subject to military brutality for anything that could even distantly be perceived as ill will towards the Cynn--including (and this was the last straw) publicly mourning for the Aetherians killed in the Palace riot.

So for some context, at this point, Cuppra and their siblings were already deeply involved with their communities. Escala (a bellfounder by trade) and Russi (a magical handyman? more or less) were part of their neighborhood's watch team, and they were working closely with the reifa in their neighborhood to help prevent more people from being hunted by the thyft. Ubis (an accomplished healer by this time) donated quite a lot of his time to holding health clinics in his community, doing things like teaching people very simple healing spells that anyone with a lick of magic could do for themselves. Cuppra and Suuhl were the ones that had convinced both of their communities to work together in the first place against the thyft, and they were both sort of well-known as liasons between the two (at this point, plenty of people suspected their relationship, but only Cuppra's siblings knew anything about it for certain.)

Their roles stepped up quite a bit after the fires started: Escala and the neighborhood watch team were now responsible for feeding the community, pooling resources between neighbors and receiving goods smuggled out of the Palace, a task that became more and more dangerous as time went on; Russi was now working overtime in crews keeping the fire wards around the city maintained, designing spells to filter the air through cloth masks, to filter the ash out of the water, and so on; Ubis's healing talents were well in demand between the smoke and fires and violence in the streets; and Cuppra, of course, was a vital link to knowing what was going on in the Palace.

Here is stuff that I am telling you is what happened, but that has never been actually historically confirmed in-universe, and most Aetherian scholars consider it matters of debate.

1) It was Escala's idea to do a coup, in the end. Escala had a magnetic personality even if he wasn't terribly charismatic, and he had a way of convincing people without really trying. Things were usually very simple to him, mostly because he rarely got emotional about much of anything and had a really sharp, concrete sense of justice. In his view, it went like this:

The Aetherian government has the means and obligation to aid the people, which it is not fulfilling.

The Aetherian government is also now getting in the way of the people helping themselves.

Therefore, get rid of the government and put their resources to better use.

If this cannot be done peacefully, then it will be done violently, because it must be done.

As time went on and things got more and more ugly, people started to come around to this point of view, first in Escala's neighborhood and then beyond, until there were actually enough people on board to even consider revolt.

2) Cuppra is the one who assassinated the Cynn. This was also Escala's idea, because to him it made the most sense to have the person who was already allowed in the Cynn's presence with no suspicion in their most intimate moments commit this act. He figured, this method had the lowest risk and highest chance of success. Like Escala, Cuppra also had a unique personality--they always came off as gentle and unassuming, and no one ever tended to suspect them of anything. Cuppra did not want to do this, because while they were never in love with the Cynn, Cuppra did have some affection for them, or used to. It saddened Cuppra a lot to see the change in the Cynn's personality after the war. Before, perhaps the Cynn could be described as a bit airheaded and careless, but with their paranoia came a cruel streak that slowly started to infect every interaction they had with everyone, including their ethkarin. Cuppra wasn't exactly in denial about this. They knew the Cynn wasn't going to just step down, and they knew that the cruelty that the Cynn displayed now hadn't come from nowhere and likely wouldn't be going away. But Cuppra wasn't much of a killer, and the whole thing haunted them in one way or another for the rest of their days.

Again, this bit is debated historically in Aetheri. All anyone really knows for sure is that the Cynn was murdered in their bed, stabbed once in the back through the heart. Only Cuppra ever knew exactly how it happened.

Things happened very quickly after that. Escala led the revolt, more or less, directing people up into the Palace grounds from the tunnels underneath, where they were able to surprise the army and the nobles. It was over fast, but it was bloody. There is very little violence in general in Aetherian history before and after this point (especially compared to human history) not because Aetherians are a particularly peaceful people, but because in a world where almost everyone has magic and most can use it to a lethal degree if they so choose, any violence at all usually escalates very quickly into atrocity. Generally more thought is put into things before physical force becomes an option for Aetherians...and it helps that there hasn't historically been much that seemed worth exacting that much violence over. In this case, however, the combination of everything built into a revolution that saw hundreds killed just in storming the Palace, and hundreds more later as revolutionary forces and the parts of the military that hadn't immediately abandoned their loyalties to the royal family clashed. At the end of the few weeks that the revolution took, what was left was a palace with quite a bit of the insides burned out (including the throne room), a completely extinguished royal family (and several noble houses as well), a dissolution of all of the retainers and officials that had reported to them, and quite a few revolutionaries who were surprised that they'd gotten this far.

The Palace's stores of food were opened up immediately to the public. It didn't solve the famine, but it was enough to feed the city for a few weeks while other plans could be made. The Palace was actually left pretty much empty while the Aetherians got to work expanding lrecca hatcheries and mushroom farms, harvesting river kelp, thinning out the livestock before they starved, spelling the food they had to be preserved indefinitely--anything they could think of. The other towns along the river were doing much the same, with their own stores of food. This was all happening under Escala's guidance, as he'd found himself in a weird position wherein he'd started giving good direction during the revolt, so people kept looking to him for more afterwards, so he just kept doing what made sense.

And then at some point Russi made her reappearance. She'd been largely absent during the revolt, because it turned out that she was busy creating a huge construct out of dragon bones and compacted earth. She didn't tell anyone she was doing this (these dragons were another ally of the spirits in their bid to colonize a bit of earth, and several of them had lived and died in Aetheri as the reifa did, so using their bones for this seemed a bit wrong--but on the other hand, this was big magic, and there wasn't much material better than bone to do a big magic like this.) Her plan, she explained, was that she was going to send this construct north until it had gotten far enough up into the mountains that it could see the sun. Then it would quite literally swallow the sunlight coming down on it, storing it in its stomach, before turning around and walking home. Then it would park itself in the fields around Aetheri, and shed light enough to grow crops by. Russi planned to make another one, too, so they'd always have one in the fields and one in the mountains, but she confessed she'd like some help doing this next one.

This is a lunatic plan, of course, and it was met with a mixture of wonder and laughter (and a little bit of revulsion, and a little bit of hope.) But Russi's siblings knew her plans usually panned out all right in one way or another, so Escala let her send the first construct shambling off northward and solicited enough volunteers to help her make the next one. And then more, to go afield to other cities and help them make their own constructs, because as nuts as Russi's idea was, it worked. Aetheri starts putting itself back together again, and life goes on, albeit leanly for a long while.

And now the falling action:

Escala sort of ends up as the new Cynn accidentally the way he fell into every other leadership role. He creates the Ettaldhmi to temper the Cynn's power. His Cynnship is long, fair, and humble; he rids it of the ostentation and ritual of the prior royal family, wears the same clothes he wore as a bellfounder, leaves the throne room burnt out and shut away, and takes office instead in a small suite at the top of the Palace, with what became a nice view eventually, when the skies cleared decades later and the ash lands started to absolutely burst with greenery again. The trees never came back, but neither did the thyft, and the ash-filled soil that was left was fertile enough that the Aetherians could hardly use all of the crops they grew.

Russi's constructs, even after the sky had cleared, continued to walk back and forth from Aetheri's river to the mountains in the far north, though eventually they stopped collecting sunlight. They seemed to gain a mind of their own, but eventually they each wound down at some point, resting wherever they fell out in the vast grasslands.

Ubis opened the university in the capital city, which I have already gone on about.

Cuppra and Suuhl both worked with Escala quite a lot, lending a little compassion to his otherwise reason-focused administration. They helped make peace with the Laith people to the north, who were very displeased with all of the smoke and the large constructs rambling through their territories, and they continued to each be a liason to the other's species. They were inseparable to the end of their days. Cuppra lived to the ripe old age of 1056, and Suuhl passed soon after--some would claim that they had died of grief. In fact, that's what Aetherians said about all of the reifa. The reifa were never the same after loosing their homeland, naturally, and one by one over the centuries, they just seemed to fade away. (This is actually another sticking point in the historical literature, because no one's sure if the description of the reifa 'fading' is literal or not.) Either way, Suuhl was not the last reifa in Aetheri, but they were one of them. The last one--Radh--outlived Escala's successor, and then seemed to evaporate from living memory.

Escala was succeeded by his child Yturra, who after their father's death (because he thought these ideas were nonsense in life) renamed Hymntup to Escalus, and oversaw raising the statues of the founders we see in the comic today. The newly-coined d'Escala family continues a quiet, unspectacular reign into the present day.

And now you know...........................the rest of the story.

Thanks for reading! I know this is a long one. I hope it strung some events together for you! It you have questions about this particular point in Aetherian history, let me know!

#worldbuilding #white noise #monsters #fantasy history #webcomics

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thataspdfeel · 7 years

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that book list I promised

//rubs my grubby hands together happily

Boy howdy do I ever have some book recommendations. This would’ve been posted earlier but mobile decided to go fuck itself. Just a heads up, this is gonna be long

I mostly read series because tbh teen fiction is some of the best. It tends to take the most risks with both style and characterization. (Granted, it also tends to fall risk to some of the worst tropes imo like abuse stalker creepy guy is hot cause he loves protag)

Anything Garth Nix has ever written in his whole life. He’s one of my favorite authors and tends to stick to series. Keys to the Kingdom is 7 books and the first is Mister Monday and you read in order of the days of the week. No really. You’ll see why. His Old Kingdom series is 5 books and a short story so far and starts with Sabriel. It’s about necromancers who keep the dead down rather than raise them. Like I have the biggest boner for this series it’s not even funny

Terry Pratchett is my absolute favorite author of all time (besides Shakespeare) and he’s written over 50 books. You don’t have to read them in any particular order but he does follow characters across books sometimes. I recommend starting with Monstrous Regiment, Small Gods, or Going Postal first. If you want to start in chronological order, I think The Colour of Magic was written first

If you’re patient, read the whole Lord of the Rings series from The Hobbit onward. Tolkien sucks his own dick and describes clouds for a whole page cause he’s a world builder kind of writer. I haven’t had a chance to try the series again but I remember enjoying The Hobbit. Just know this is a very tedious option and may result in more boredom

Less boring is The Chronicles of Narnia but there are a few books that are just an absolute bear to get through. I recommend this right after lotr because these stories are a result OF THE SAME DRUG TRIP because Clive Staples Lewis (no really that’s what CS stands for) and Tolkien were college roommates. And because Narnia is a fucking fun place to visit

George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire cause it includes more detail than Game of Thrones and because I’m always a slut for kingdom musical chairs and dragons

Speaking of dragons, The Inheritance Series which is Eragon etc because it’s like lotr for people who can’t stand reading about a cloud for two pages, almost entirely action. Plus, in one of the books, they (Eragon and Saphira) do a couple of really stupid, slightly offensive things to the elves and admit their mistakes which I thought was cool cause it feels like sometimes protagonists don’t apologize in books

Chris D'Lacey also writes these REALLY COOL books about dragons called The Last Dragon Chronicles where these ladies make dragons out of clay and I’m 90% sure The Fire Within is the first book. There are at least 7 and I really need to catch up

Angie Sage writes about a boy named Septimus Heap who’s the 7th son of a 7th son and those books start with Magyk and there are at least 6 maybe 9. They’re fucking awesome and full of magic and adventure and I’m pretty sure he gets a pet dragon somewhere

Suzanne Collins also writes a lot of great stuff but I REALLY like her Gregor the Overlander series. Think Alice in Wonderland with a guy and no drugs and it’s awesome

Anything Rick Riordan has ever written in his life. I love love love the Percy Jackson series and he also wrote Children of the Lamp which is the bomb dot com about djinn children

Douglas Adams has a whole Hitchhiker’s Guide series and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the first and it’s just bonkers and loads of fun. Basically earth gets blown up and the protagonist has to deal with it. An absolute riot

James Rollins writes the Blood Infernal series about vampires and were-beings not just werewolves. The first book is Sanguine and the protagonist’s best friend is a werewolf. The first two books don’t have much to do with each other aside from being in the same universe but book three picks up at the end of book one and ties them both together. I’m pretty sure there’s sex

I’d also recommend anything Edgar Allen Poe or Shakespeare ever wrote. I know that’s more Classical Canon or whatever the fuck but honestly? Delightful. Same sentiment for Stephen King

I can’t remember the names of all the series I’ve read but these I definitely do. So onto individual books!

I, Coriander by Sally Gardener set in 17th century London and has to do with a fairy world if I remember correctly

Fairest by Gail Carson Levine about a really ugly inn keeper’s daughter and it’s kind of a retelling of Snow White (She wrote other stand alones but I haven’t read them. Based off this, though, I’d recommend them)

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about a girl who immigrates from Nigeria(?) to the US and it’s just really really good

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe set in Nigeria(?) right when colonialism happens. The first part is pre-colonialism and then it gets into the beginnings of it and all this happens within the lifespan of one man. Trigger warning though for mentions of abuse, explicit child murder and explicit suicide. Like it’s a good book but it’s gonna be a rough ride if you don’t know what you’re in for

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is good, if tedious. It’s a Latin American book so the story is circular and told in spirals. I literally have no other way to describe it. Also don’t ignore the family chart at the very beginning because people get the same names across generations and it’s absolutely hellish. Trigger warning for incest, I think rape, definitely abuse, and a baby gets eaten by ants at the end which is more gross than anything

Black Rain by Kuroi Ame is about the bombing of Hiroshima. I’m pretty sure that’s all the trigger warning you’re going to need

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie is a collection of short stories about various Native American characters living on a reservation

Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt is about a Blackfoot medicine man who finally talks about his life but it’s less interview and more John interpreting things so this needs to be read a little critically

Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions by Richard Erdoes is a book where a Sioux medicine man talks directly to Erdoes from a Native perspective about various things from sex to politics. Was a joy to read honestly. Very enlightening

Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo basically entails the way of the bushido or the samurai code more or less. Kind of technical but I enjoyed it

Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause is about the werewolf protagonist trying to fit into her pack and figure out how to be a teenager. There’s at least one graphic mention of death (I think). It could also be suicide) so heads up

The Silver Kiss by Annette Curtis Klause is a vampire romance set in the 90′s and has absolutely nothing to do with the other book and was definitely something I loved. The protagonist watches her mother waste away from illness so avoid if that’s not something you can handle. Apparently, there are more stories (which I’d LOVE to read) and I’d recommend them just based off the two I have read

The Spook’s Apprentice by Joseph Delaney was amazing and I’ve just found out it’s a series not just a stand-alone so I know what’s going on my to-read list. It’s about an apprentice to The Spook who puts down evil things that hide in the dark. Kind of spine-tingling so if you don’t do horror, don’t read when it’s dark. It’s not horror-horror but if it’s not your thing, definitely read during the day

A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner is the only thing Faulkner ever wrote I can possibly stand. It’s a short story and the time is out of order but I still liked it

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is also a short story and my absolute favorite

Also not a book, but I greatly enjoy the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet but not everybody does because 1 early American literature and 2 Puritan but that’s something if poetry is up your alley

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell is about the life of a horse set from the horse’s perspective. No seriously. With I statements and everything. I thought it was very interesting. (I was also like 8)

White Fang by Jack London is by wolves. I don’t remember much more than that because of how long ago I read it but it was probably decent since it stuck in my mind

The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleischman is about a prince’s whipping boy which is a thing because you can’t spank a prince directly so you have to punish somebody else. V interesting

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl was very enjoyable. I like Roald Dahl anyway but the concept of a chocolate factory was awesome. I also read it before I saw either movie and before the remake

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is pretty good but skip the epistolary at the beginning and read it after if you want to spare yourself some headache

Dracula by Bram Stoker is a classic and just really fun and I can definitely see why it’s a classic

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman was really interesting and honestly, I’d read anything that man writes after I read that

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is even better than the movie but there’s abuse mentions in it like even more so than the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie, heads up for graphic depictions of miscarriage, racial violence, and I don’t remember if the one death mentioned is graphic or not but it’s a heavy book

I’d have more but I can’t remember their damned names right now and it’s bugging me. I also have obscure video game recs because I’m one of those indie freaks. They tend to really draw me in

Also, if you like manga, I’ve read like idk how many series but a shitload and the day onemanga shut down was the day my soul died

Anyway, I hope this is fine. It isn’t even the half of what I’ve read. Like I spent almost all of my childhood reading and I enjoyed most of it. I just wish I could remember book names. Their stories are floating around in my head, just not their names. If I remember any more, I’ll probably add to this list

#original post #words #i just recommended at least 500 books probably #maybe more even??? idk #kizamimai #god im so sorry i just love books so much #IF YALL HAVE READ ANY OF THESE HIT MY ASS UP #I AM ALWAYS FUCKIN DOWN TO TALK SOME LITERATURE #its why im an english major tbh

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phobio2000 · 7 years

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Currents of the Soul

Once upon a time I was babysitting like ten kids for a Bible study. It was more of a pushing Bill Gothard propaganda meeting and they couldn't find anybody who is willing to take on that many kids, and I don't think they were willing to hire two sitters, so there I was. Eventually there was some Bill Gothard older kids who saw it as an opportunity to serve God, but that was much later. Sure that family was nice to me, inviting me to their lake front home all the time to eat good food, and they never gave me shit, putting up that attitude of pride, which is something that I never got used to after I left that church, so props to them, giving credit where credit is due, that, even though they have so many problems, treating me with contempt was never one of them, but perhaps that could be due to me being there since when Is as a kid. OK, I'm rambling, but it's just my thought process, trying to figure out what went on back then. So I was babysitting, one of the girls needed a diaper change, I don't know how to do it, so eventually she stuffed her skirt in between her butt and the diaper and kept on playing, very creative? So why am I writing about this? Well, over the years, I found that women handle stress mostly I one of two ways, they either stuff it in or they abuse people. A third way is to get pampered, massages, facials, body rubs, pedicures; some people crutch on that and become incapable of handling stress and because pretty self absorbed and only care about keeping the stress low. A fourth way is to be expert at drawing boundaries and constantly be on the lookout of situations of taking on stress. I think the latter two ways are better than the former two, because at least they're taking care of themselves a little better, yet at the same time, they're not really responding to their feminine instinct of wanting to take care of everything and everyone, and that leads to a sense of unfulfillment. A lot of decent women would tend to just take it all in and suppress the stress. So I guess, four methods, two groups, and I think the two groups can learn from each other and achieve some sort of balance. And there's group three, people who just let themselves go. They just gotta pick themselves up and believe that they can make things better over time. When a woman starts to let herself go, it's like the beginning of the end. I've seen women who are kind of washed up and stopped caring, and they just look broken, but like, when they get some nourishment and a sense of hope, they start glowing again. I've seen those who are really good at stuffing it all in. They look well polished on the outside, like wax statues, but the moment they exhale the brokenness and weariness reveal themselves. I've seen those who have had bad experiences and just want to hide and avoid things. They are afraid of feeling bad again, so they're on constant lookout for possible sources that could cause or trigger those negative feelings, or anything that could possibly lead to them. I've seen those who just take it out on everybody. And like, a woman's present situation and behaviors can be traced back to these things, or at least, bee analyzed along this line, and if you can do a nice tune up based on these guidelines, like how cars inevitably need tune ups, then it's quite possible that things will become better and there will be positive changes, even turning a person from bad towards good, to some extent. Now, we all tend to think of people as being good or bad, based on their attitude and behaviors, but often times, sin and selfishness aside, which are totally valid and not to be dismissed, at the core of their being, there are all of these inner currents at play, and their outward attitude and behaviors could very well be a result of those currents not being well managed. Nevertheless, the inner turbulence could very well be merely the result of their decisions and their past actions and the people they deliberately choose to be, and, you can either think along the line of casting stones, which could be well deserved (yet Jesus said let he that has no sin cast the first stone), or see it as an opportunity to bring them to the presence of God and letting them know that God can restore their souls and they no longer have to feel this way on the inside, yet they have to repent, and at which point they'll have to choose between the practical benefits of sin and selfishness or inner wholeness and the freedom and joy of walking in the light with Jesus. So, no matter where you are in life, where you've been, whatever happened in the past and is happening presently, who you choose to be and what the environment pushed you to become, Jesus is here to save, with arms wide open, knocking on the door of your heart, beckoning you to respond so he could save you where you are at. You just got to be hungry for it, yet it doesn't take much, Jesus said "Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you." And then, as if he wasn't being straightforward and emphatic enough, he said "For anyone who asks shall receive, anyone who seeks finds, and anyone who knocks it shall be opened onto him." And then, he further elaborates, just beckoning people to respond, "think about it, if your child asks you for bread, are you going to give him a rock instead? If he asks for a fish, will you give him a snake? If you, being sinners, know better to give good things to your children, how much more your Father, who is perfect, is eager to give good things to those who ask him?" (I'm paraphrasing Matthew 7:7-11). It doesn't take much, there are still good churches out there, though a lot of churches are like salt that has lost its flavors and light being covered up by a basket, and then there are bad churches who are not teaching the right things and doing God disservice, but there are really good resources on YouTube. Bethel Church has hours and hours of musical worship, and I like Hillsong Church's messages, just allocate time and tune in, as you ask, seek, and knock, and slowly, things will get better and better. I mean, Bethel has good preachings and Hillsong has good music, but I'm referring to the YouTube availability. Jesus said "What good is it, when you gain the whole world, but lose your own soul? And what can a man give in exchange for his soul?" Now, the church I used to go, they don't really consider the human condition, so they just interpret that as eternal salvation or damnation. HOWEVER, there's a far more tangible and simple interpretation. When you sin, you may get stuff, whether it be money, sex, whatever, but when you walk the path of sin, it's inevitable that you will feel like crap inside eventually, and that's when Jesus lovingly beckons you with this question, "What good is it, that, even though your sinful ways got you some things that seem good, yet you feel like crap inside? And, of all the things you acquired through your sinful ways, which of these things can you possibly give in order to not feel like crap?" Stone casting theology stinks, but when I slowly learn to see God's word from the perspective of love, everything becomes so beautiful, and I'm still learning to Chang my perspectives. It's a really wonderful journey that is life changing all the time. And like, in the past, although I was a Christian and totally believe in God, yet I had so much reservations about Christianity, and I think a big part of it was due to this stone casting theology. In the back of my mind I kept questioning what is this gospel, is there any relevance for the here and now, rather than just the promise of eternal life? Jesus said he came to set the captive free, and sure, although technically we are delivered from eternal damnation, yet how is this doctrine setting people free now? And, it really isn't until like in recent years that I finally started to understand the gospel, and gradually I can talk about God with joy and confidence, that this doctrine is really "good news" that'll really help and save people and change lives, rather than being irrelevant for the here and now and helpless for the struggles of the human condition. I've been seeking this for a really long time, and finally it's starting to come through. The search might have been long, dark, and silent, with the path only getting more and more difficult, yet when things start to fall through, it's like constipation suddenly being relieved and all sorts of crap came out lol :D. Faith is like that sometimes, yet this very nature of faith gives hope, that no matter how difficult things may be, there is hope if we don't give up asking, seeking, and knocking. Hmmm, do you prefer watching cheerleaders or gymnasts? I prefer gymnasts. I'm just channel surfing while spending time with my friend's cat and I learned about college gymnastics. Teams actually go to one another's school to compete, like basketball, it's cool. Women look so attractive when they're focused and applying themselves. And then the scene suddenly changed to show sassy college cheerleaders, they may be better looking and have more sex appeal, but I just don't like it as much. To me, women are more attractive when they're focused and making something of themselves, they look attractive and their souls feel so beautiful, whether it's sport or study or anything, it' just better when they're setting goals and applying themselves with a good attitude. Party girls arouse curiosity and trigger certain senses, but like, I'm not looking for strippers or merely a good time, and objectively, those are of no values to me. To me, we are meant to have the best of both worlds and it was never meant to be a mutually exclusive choice between being a Puritan or a slut, but that's another topic for another time. Sure, you can argue that cheerleaders work hard too, and I'm sure there are really nice girls who are cheerleaders and there are gymnast who are total sluts, but like, you know what I'm talking about. Not much can be accomplished by being perfectly politically correct.

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theadmiringbog · 7 years

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Many philosophers, from Vice, to Foucault, have proposed that history moves in a tidal rhythm by which a dominant idea exerts its force for a time, then falls away, to be succeeded by a new idea of comparable magnetic power. One of the best expressions of this way of thinking about the past-sometimes called idealism-comes from Emerson:

"Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into a new idea, and they will disappear."

I shall now attempt to describe in sequence the three ideas -- God, nation, and . . . what? the market? the recreational self? -- by which Americans have tried to save themselves from the melancholy that threatens all reflective beings.

According to a less generous observer who lived in their own time, the real reason the Puritans left was their misanthropy:

"A Puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbour with all his heart."

One of the keywords of reformed Christianity is justification. Derived from the Latin verb justificare -- to judge, to forgive, to vindicate -- it took on a new meaning during the Renaissance from the new technology of printing. Bits of metal type could no more line themselves up into straight margins than Ezekiel's bones could dance. They were dead, inert -- and the compositor had to tap them into alignment with his "justifying" stick. Here was the Puritan image of man: ragged and disordered, out of harmony with his fellows and with himself, unless and until God acts to make him acceptable to his sight.

God was visibly at work in nature, too -- in every drought and plague, in every ray of sunlight and every storm. "I bless God," one Massachusetts man said a few months after the earthquake of 1727, for "his late providence the Earth-quake which made me have quick Apprehension of my own Sins and guilt."

When you strain to remember a forgotten name, James points out, and find that the harder you work at it the more it seems "jammed," it is only if you "give up the effort" that "the lost name comes sauntering into your mind." This was his metaphoric restatement of what Sibbes intended when he preached that "a holy despaire in ourselves is the ground of true hope."

From here it is a short trip -- the twelfth step for AA, the twelfth sign in Edwards's inventory of the signs of grace -- to the fundamental precept that the only salvation from "despair in ourselves" is service to others. When Puritans insisted in these terms that the self without God is utterly helpless and, indeed, pointless, they were not claiming to have discovered a new truth or a new God.

One tires of Samuel Sewall's incessant piety as he writes in his diary that God arranged for him to spill a can of drinking water in bed so he would remember the fragility and brevity of life.

Frances Trollope, one of a stream of English visitors who crossed the sea as if on a zoological expedition, split the difference along gender lines between those who thought religion was failing and those who thought it alive and well: "I never saw, or read, of any country," she wrote in 1832, "where religion had so strong a hold upon the women, or a slighter hold upon the men."'

Millerites (named for their leader, William Miller) expected the world to end in 1843.

Emerson heard that down south one could find Methodists "jumping about on all fours, imitating the barking of dogs & surrounding a tree in which they pretended they had `treed Jesus.”

The real nation was to be found not in anything external ("nothing strikes a European traveler in the United States more than the absence of what we would call government or administration") but in the outrushing of the mind by which the American self discovered it had no boundaries and could consume the world and turn it into a nutrient of the imagination.'' I have been calling this exuberant democracy a new religion, but, as Whitman rightly said, "all the religions, old and new," were in it.

The lesson of Lincoln's life -- the life he lived, and the life that endures in our national memory -- is that the quest for prosperity is no remedy for melancholy, but that a passion to secure justice by erasing the line that divides those with hope from those without hope can be.

If we worry that the presidency has fallen on evil times, it helps to remember that Henry Adams was convinced more than a hundred years ago that "the progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin."

If we think the civic fabric is coming apart, it helps to find Emerson saying so a long time ago: "Every man [is] for himself . . . the social sentiments are weak; the sentiment of patriotism is weak; veneration is low ... there is an universal resistance to ties and ligaments once supposed essential to civil society."

Emerson ticks off here just about every sign of civil decay we would be likely to find today in a catalogue of lamentations (as compiled, say, by Amitai Etzioni or Robert Putnam), except that people have dropped out of their bowling leagues in favor of bowling alone.'

New stories are also beginning to be told according to the same sequence of enslavement followed by deliverance: for instance, the story of how disabled people are coming out of their long confinement between shame and pity to within hailing distance of dignity, as heralded by the most significant piece of social legislation passed during the Bush administration, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990."

Sixty years ago, the Boys Athletic League of New York conducted a survey of 50,000 children between the ages of six and sixteen on the question, "Who do you think is the most loved man in the world?" In that poll, God finished second to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Last year, I heard a pediatrician remark that over his thirty years of practice the children he treats have become less and less responsive to his standard question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" In the past he got lots of answers following the formula "I want to be like ," with the name of a sports hero, or a scientist, or even a politician filling in the blank. Now he gets a shrug, or an "I dunno," or, sometimes, the name of a TV cartoon character. Nothing, it seems to me, is more alarming than the impoverishment of our children's capacity to imagine the future. Graham Greene once defined melancholy as the "logical belief in a hopeless future." Lionel Trilling once called it "the diminution of belief in human possibility." For us, I think, these definitions hit close to home because life seems, as in the favorite prefix of our post-industrial, post-modern, post-national, post-theistic age, just plain post-.

Dwight Macdonald, borrowed from and abbreviated Adorno's argument into the term "masscult," which he found exemplified, in 1960, in the quintessentially American Life Magazine.

"Nine color pages of Renoir paintings," he wrote, are "followed by a picture of a roller-skating horse . . . Just think, nine pages of Renoirs! But that roller-skating horse comes along, and the final impression is that Renoir is talented, but so is the horse."

Tocqueville's free individual, which he considered America's gift to the world, becomes the creature he so presciently described -- marooned in a perpetual present, playing alone with its trinkets and baubles. It is especially disheartening to see this process far advanced in a child.

Tocqueville's detection of a "strange melancholy in the midst of abundance"

While we have gotten very good at deconstructing old stories (the religion that was the subject of my first chapter was one such story; the nationalism that was the subject of the second chapter was another), when it comes to telling new ones, we are blocked.

New York Times Magazine seem to think so-as attested by their 1998 election issue, whose cover was emblazoned with a new preamble to the Declaration of Independence, in mock eighteenth-century cursive lettering on a faux parchment background:

We, the relatively unbothered and well off, hold these truths to be self-evident: that Big Government, Big Deficits and Big Tobacco are bad, but that big bathrooms and 4-by-4's are not; that American overseas involvement should be restricted to trade agreements, mutual funds and the visiting of certain beachfront resorts; that markets can take care of themselves as long as they take care of us; that an individual's sex life is nobody's business, though highly entertaining; and that the only rights that really matter are those which indulge the Self.

From the comfort of the academy, we look at our past and are quick to say that a culture with too little freedom and too much brutality was a bad culture. But do we have the nerve to say of ourselves that a culture locked in a soul-starving present, in which the highest aspiration for those who can afford to try is to keep the body forever young, is no culture at all?

There is much to be said against any scheme of periodization, including my own too-neat division of American history into two phases of coherent belief followed by a third phase of incoherence and nervous waiting. In the first period, Christians seldom agreed on what, exactly, Christianity meant. In the second period, violent conflict was commonplace over the nature and extent of citizenship rights. And the boundary between the two phases -- between Christian symbology and the civil religion -- was never as sharp as I have drawn it.

Let me close by recalling that when Emerson felt his fathers' version of Christianity ebbing in the 1830s he tried to discern whether a new faith was coming, and what it might be. He got it right, I think, when he gave up the effort, saying, "all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me in vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms."

Meanwhile, he added, in a wonderfully Emersonian contradiction, "let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering nigh quenched fire on the altar." For those of us engaged as teachers and writers with the history and literature of the United States, I can think of no more noble charge while we wait.

#The Real American Dream #book review

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