#i think this must be how ancient philosophers felt | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

undiscovered-horizon · 1 year

Text

Imagine being the one who releases Morpheus. - Part 7

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [ENDING] [ALT. ENDING] || Sandman-inspired playlist

The mansion hasn't changed one bit. It looked exactly the same as it did the day you were forced to leave. A strange feeling sprouted in your chest - the very same sensation you felt when you saw Morpheus on the pier. How could it be that days had gone by but the fang of time did not bite down into this house? Was it built with the same arcane element with which Morpheus was created? And if so, was he, too, a house of horrors and woe underneath his handsome looks?

"What a strange feeling, to become a visitor in one's own home," you said quietly as you longingly looked at the bricks you had grown to know so well. Unbeknownst to you, Morpheus was watching your melancholic expression, silently wondering if you, too, looked at him this way.

"This is not your home."

"And yet part of me longs for the days when it was. Curious, isn't it? I broke you out of here and now I'm dragging you back to your prison."

"I came with you on my own accord," he corrected you. To be honest, even if you hadn't asked him to help you, Morpheus would have found a reason to come with you anyway. "Your plan requires a significant amount of preparation and cunningness to be successful."

His observation was in no way revolutionary. "Yes, it does but we do not possess the time required. We must do with what we have. Non est ad astra mollis e terris via," you said. "There is no easy path from earth to the stars." Turning your head towards Morpheus, you met his intense gaze. He noticed how your eye lit up the moment they met his but Dream was quick to discard such sentiment. "Seneca's words. Sometimes I think he knew more about life than any of us."

Morpheus never cared much for philosophy - humanity might be a reasoning species but they are hardly reasonable, so they're pondering about the nature of the world were always wrong in one way or another. To a creature of his sort, human philosophy was as though watching a blind person paint a landscape. Despite his prejudice, he thought that you made Seneca sound akin to an oracle. Perhaps, if he were to understand the teachings of that ancient philosopher, he'd know more about you too? Could a wise Greek be a secret passage into your heart and soul?

"Be careful, Morpheus. If Yasmin was right and I have no reason to doubt her honesty, my father is unpredictable in his anger. It is beyond me to speculate what horrors he will bestow upon you should he catch you once more."

"I can not die," he reminded you.

"But you can still be in pain." Although his yearning heart exclaimed at such a notion, Morpheus couldn't quite understand why you would care about his discomfort. He was an eldritch creature, you have said that yourself multiple times, so physical pain wasn't something unbearable to him. Why did you treat him like he was a fragile human? Was that tenderness, too?

Having said that, you directed your steps to the back of the house, planning on trespassing inwards through the staff door. Seeing you disappear behind perfectly kept bushes and flower beds, Morpheus felt a sudden desire to stop you, to share some kind of blessing with you; to ask you to come back to him, perhaps. Nevertheless, not a word left his mouth. For a second, he even considered a prayer.

Gathering his strength and discarding his gnawing worry for you, Morpheus's booming voice called out to Rodrick who undoubtedly resided within the mansion. It was like challenging someone to a duel but Dream's pride whispered songs of greatness into his spirit - hymns that never once suggested that the wicked mortal could have a chance against him. Although this supposed summon to the contest was entirely your idea, Morpheus had his own reasons to see it through. Yes, it was high time he faced that villain, looked him in the eye and gloated in his triumph. You deserved justice and he deserved peace.

Minutes of complete silence and inaction went by as Morpheus waited for Rodrick in front of the house. Such dismissal of a king's challenge couldn't be read as anything but utterly disrespectful. Was that wicked man trying to humiliate him? Dream's anger only intensified with that thought. Who did Rodrick Burgess think he was? His fingers were growing strained as he kept one of his fists clenched but he couldn't let go - not yet.

Then like an omen of awaited death, the front door unlocked and from behind them emerged the awaited, elderly man. He had a scornful expression on his face but that was to be expected. Rodrick held the rifle high, aiming at Morpheus without even a tremble in his hand. He seemed to be determined for that confrontation to be final, to once and for all decide which one of them was the superior entity.

"Where's that wretched child?" Rodrick called out to Morpheus while pulling back the hammer of the rifle. Just a slight tremble of his index finger could end in a bloodbath. How strange it was, the trust that forms between enemies.

"I came alone, Rodrick Burgess," he lied. "I do not know what child you are speaking of."

"Of course you do, Dream King. That bastard that took pity on you or have you already forgotten that a brat proved to be smarter and more powerful than a supposed king, a god?"

"I do not care for your beliefs, human. I came to retrieve what is mine." Perhaps he meant his mask, which whereabouts remained largely unknown to him, or he meant vengeance. Morpheus himself wasn't sure.

There, in the distance, you noticed a metallic glistening and your father's low voice carried by the echo of empty plains that surrounded the house. Because of the distance, you couldn't discern what he was saying but if he did face Morpheus at the moment, it couldn't be anything good. The strange shine made your skin crawl despite not being able to give it a proper name at first.

"Dear God, no," you whispered to yourself. Dread, like a lead weight, pulled your stomach towards the ground. If Yasmin was right...

Without much thought, you broke for the two men. Hearing your rushed footsteps, Alex turned around but you were already long gone. For a moment, he considered running after you but he was old enough to know better: he was your little brother, after all, and that meant he had to listen. Given the strange situation in which he had found himself, he wanted to listen, so he carried on expanding the distance from the home that was also his prison, from the father that never treated him like the son he was. If he makes haste, he could cross the Baltic Sea before midnight.

Panting and feeling your legs burn so intensely they were about to give out, you had finally found yourself standing next to Morpheus, your eyes flicking between the barrel of the rifle and your father's irate face. Acknowledging your sudden appearance, Rodrick aimed the firearm at you; on the other side of that barrel lay relief and eternity and, as far as you could tell, your father's fingers were burning to grant you just that. Unconsciously, Morpheus leaned towards you but you didn't notice it either.

"My own child against me," Rodrick spit out. His words were dripping with contempt and any unfamiliar to the case onlookers would never assume you were family. "I'm ashamed to have fathered such a treacherous mind. If I could exchange your life for your brother's, I would. Do not think I would hesitate even for a second."

"Please, father, you don't have to do this," you begged him. He, however, remained unmoved. "We will walk away never to disturb you again. Haven't we all suffered enough?"

"Do not speak to me of suffering, you bastard!" Rodrick's scream was loud enough to scare birds from the nearby trees. "I could have my son and you made sure that the only good thing in my life was never returned to me."

Perhaps that was the way your life was always going to end: with a whimper, as you bled on the doorstep of your childhood home. Like all things that belonged to nature, your life, too, was going to close in a cycle. "I forgive you, father, for all that you have done and didn't manage to."

A deafening gunshot rang in your ears. It was so loud you didn't hear yourself gasp. Once the shock subsided, you grew confused at the lack of pain. Maybe adrenaline had messed with your sense? But then again, not a speck of crimson stained your clothes.

Morpheus fell to the ground with a barely audible groan. Laying at your feet, he tried to prop his body up on one of his arms. For some reason, even the bullet tearing through his body couldn't force his fist to unclench.

"You could have simply granted my wish," Rodrick spoke as he frantically reloaded the rifle. "Tell me, Dream King, is this really worth dying for?"

"Yes," Morpheus whispered.

His hand was trembling but you weren't sure whether it was anger or pain that caused it. Morpheus opened his palm revealing powdery sand. With an effortless blow, he sent the grains drifting into the air. Immediately after, your father was rendered unconscious. Letting out a throaty groan, Morpheus got up on his feet. There was no blood stain visible on his clothes.

The moment Rodrick's limp body hit the ground, a sharp sound of breaking glass resounded. A black, thick mist appeared above his form. The slimy-looking cloud shimmered in the dim light of a cloudy day. It remained mid-air for a short while before dissolving, never leaving even a trace of its existence.

You felt something warm and wet on your hand. Looking down in confusion, you noticed a streak of blood staining your blouse. Its trail led from the burnt mark on your chest right to your fingertip, from where it slowly dripped on the dark soil underneath your feet. Strangely enough, the injury didn't hurt at all. Actually, you doubted whether you had ever felt such unbearable numbness before as though frostbite suddenly gnawed at every inch of your skin.

"A catalyst," you whispered. Truthfully, you should have expected your father to be brilliant in his wickedness.

Probably due to the overwhelming numbness, you couldn't keep your balance and so you stumbled, only to regain composure once you leaned against Morpheus.

"What sorcery is this?" Just when he thought he had finally righted a wrong, a new misdeed appeared. Could he not have even a moment of relief?

"Imagine a volcano in a jar," you said as you absentmindedly wiped your bloodied fingers on your blouse. "If you open the lid carefully, you might light an infinite number of candles. But once the jar breaks? The whole world catches on fire."

At that moment Morpheus realized that his anxieties became reality: your blood shall forever stain his pale skin, no matter the holiness of the water he washes them in. Instead of peace and justice, he had only caused more suffering. This universe could be nothing more than a cynical theatre play.

Dream's hand wrap around your waist before a whirl of sand encircled the two of you. You couldn't have blinked more than two times before your feet were once again standing on the old carpet in your living room. Feeling exhausted and lightheaded, you fell on the floral sofa. Perhaps it was funny or perhaps it was sad that history liked to repeat itself so much.

"Thank you for sparing him," you said in a weak voice.

"I did not spare him, he just did not deserve to die quickly. Now Rodrick Burgess will relive his worst nightmares until I grow bored of his misery."

Seeing as you weren't in the state to continue the discussion, Morpheus wandered towards the mantlepiece. He could, of course, simply leave but the sudden reminder of your mortality made him unable to. The gifts of the upcoming day were unknown to him in the most heartbreaking of ways.

There, on the shelf above the cold fireplace, stood a photograph he never noticed before - not that he had a chance, given the chaotic nature of the recent times he had spent with you. The picture in the frame showed you and your siblings, happily laughing at something. It must have been taken a long time ago as the smallest boy, Alex, was missing a few of his teeth. This happiness... was that what siblinghood felt like to humans? Some romantic part of him was convinced that if he had something like that, he could never truly be lonely. Thinking about his own family for a moment, that portrayed joy felt like Hell on Earth.

"Did we do the right thing?" you asked him quietly.

Dream didn't answer straight away. For a moment, he continued to stare at the photo, taking in the happiness saved in the past. "He who spares the wicked injures the good," Morpheus quoted. He turned his head to you as if he was making sure his point got across. "Also Seneca." Perhaps he didn't care about philosophy but one had to remember that he did live through the history of humankind. He was bound to learn some things even against his will.

For a moment, you were completely silent as you lay on the sofa with your eyes closed. Despite your appearance, he knew you weren't asleep - he felt it. Dream's eyes returned to the picture but he wasn't studying it anymore. Instead, his thought began wandering into utterly fantastic and completely impractical directions. Spending time with you must have planted a seed of wistfulness in him.

"Will you ever, Morpheus?" you broke the pleasant silence. At that moment, in that one sentence, he realized that until the day eternity calls upon him, his conscience shall always speak in your voice. "Grow bored of my father's suffering?"

"One day I will be forced to." He looked over his shoulder at you. Despite his calm demeanour, Dream was wondering whether there was anything he could do to aid your ailment but the more he thought, the more he became convinced that your fate lay not in his own but his sister's hands. Morpheus, an eldritch god whose nature was incomprehensible to the human mind, was powerless in the face of mortality. "When this universe caves to be replaced with another. Until then, it shall bring me joy."

"You deserve peace, dear Morphius," you spoke in a quiet, mild voice. "You deserve closure I can not give you."

His tongue wanted to spit out words of cynism, phrases that would remind you of his egotistic superiority but Dream kept his mouth closed. Between callousness and silence, he preferred to grace you with quietness. You could give him a lot more than closure and he knew that - he felt it.

Now that immediate danger had passed, you could closely inspect the strange markings that appeared on your skin the moment the catalyst vial broke. The black lines appeared like veins or roots, wrapping around your skin as if their purpose was to keep you in some kind of a cage. They were numb to the touch, rendering your own body completely foreign to you. Perhaps that's exactly what was happening: this strange force was pushing your soul out of the corporeal form you naively regarded as your own.

For a moment, you thought you heard the distant meowing of a cat but it was a silly thought that you quickly dismissed - no felines lived in the vicinity of your house. Strangely enough, Morpheus heard it too.

Are you ready for the 'super fin'?

Tagging people who were interested in a follow-up: @rosaren2498 @jessiboobdbdb @chantzmar @lexi-anastasia @bisexualunicronrunningloose @farintonorth @oo0lady-mad0oo@all-bi-myselfs-blog @piperstofu101 @magic-magnoliaa @kotonei-molyneux @wheresmyboo @supermegapauselouca @sloanexx @rockergirl57 @aizawa-emma @ruyi-years @commanderfreethatdust @sapphireonline @izzicle@mxxny-lupin @shadowluna25

236 notes · View notes

daytaker · 3 months

Text

The Adversary

“What happened?” he kept asking. “What the hell happened?!” But I was Wrath, and Wrath doesn’t speak with words.

AN: This is a modified chapter from a longer fic of mine called "Let's All Be Shadows". (Link leads to ao3.) There are references to events from that story, but this can be understood without reading the long-fic.

POV: Satan Nightbringer Timeline Word Count: ~ 4500 Synopsis: Satan recalls his earliest months in the Devildom and a new revelation that hit him just recently. CW: violence, rage, blood, manual choking

Most of the fic is below the cut.

----

Nominative determinism.

That’s a philosophical theory that argues that people gravitate towards interests, careers, or behaviors that align with their name. Nominative—named. Determinism—fate.

The name Satan comes from an ancient human language; the Hebrew word הַשָּׂטָן (hasattan), which means “accuser” or “adversary”. So, following nominative determinism, that is my role. I am the opposition. I am the adversary.

And, following this human theme, if you asked the average human today, they’d probably tell you that Satan and Lucifer are both names for the same entity.

They wouldn’t be completely wrong.

----

The first thing I knew was a white hot pain. It exploded through me, starting at my core and bursting outwards. I was on fire. I was dying.

It’s ironic that birth and death must feel so similar.

I was in a fugue, then, for what felt like a long time. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t speak. I could only rage. Everything that approached me, I tore to shreds. I was feral. I was out of my mind. Flashes of memories are all I have of the beginning. There’s the taste of copper in my mouth and blood smeared over my face, on my hands, in my hair. I’m tearing at something that used to be alive. Then oblivion, and the next thing I recall is writhing on the floor in a dark room, the rough masonry scraping my bare back. I bled all over the Demon Lord’s dungeon, and I never stopped screaming.

I screamed until my throat bled, and after that, I screamed in choked, gargled bursts of sticky blood and saliva.

After the rage, the blinding heat, the blood, the broken nails and torn hair and shattered restraints… After that, there was him.

I hated him.

I knew who he was; what he was to me. It was instinct, the way a baby knows its mother. Lucifer was my mother.

I’ll never forgive him for that. I’ll never forgive him for making me.

Because he did. He made me. He put me here, a struggling, suffering, raging mess of tissue and blood and bile and hate.

I don’t think I can effectively put into words how badly I wanted to die. There’s no way to say it without sounding pathetic. But I wanted death in a way I can barely understand now. Everything hurt, and now he was here, and every nerve ending in my body seared with a sort of fuming hatred that I couldn’t understand. I still don’t understand it. The idea that I could end my own existence never crossed my mind, though. That didn’t feel like an option. He made me. I was his responsibility. He should be the one to liberate me.

Instead, he tied me up, cast enchantments, and put me into bondage; he prevented me from moving. 'For my own good,' he said. And there, where I couldn’t lash out with my body, when I couldn’t strike and bite and rip, when I could no longer express myself physically; that’s when I spoke my first coherent words. They were like pebbles on my tongue, awkward and slathered in saliva, garbled, but intelligible.

"Traitor," I growled in a strange voice; a voice I'd never heard before. "Look at the mess you made."

I used those words to remind him what he was. That was my violence. Words like:

Coward. Failure. Hypocrite. Pathetic. Weak. The worst thing to ever happen to the people who trusted you.

It was a chorus of insults designed to burn him. Babies nurse on their mothers. So did I. I nursed on his pain. I wanted so badly to hurt him the way he hurt me. And maybe, possibly, he’d do what he should have done the instant I was born into this world. Maybe he would lose his temper. Maybe he would kill me.

He didn’t. Obviously. He never even responded to what I said, in those early days. He’d just look me over, examining my body, treating the rash of scabs on my back and shoulders. He’d put this cooling salve on the sores, and it burned like ice on my skin. I screamed and I bit at him and I tried to show him what words, still so new and ineffective, refused to do for me. “I hate you. I will kill you.”

Sometimes he’d get this look on his face… This awful, sick… sad… sour look. Pity. It was just pity.

And it enraged me. How dare he pity me when this was his fault? I told him as much.

I told him everything back then, in those earliest days. Every thought that entered my head. I only knew three things: pain, hate, and Lucifer. And only one of those things could understand me.

My memories from then are fuzzy. Rather than a narrative, I recall a tapestry of impressions and sensations; reds and whites and blacks, flashes of green, and long stretches of gray. But some incidents stand out in my mind, clearer than all the others. In one, I was bound and naked—I wouldn’t wear clothes then, in the earliest days; I just shredded them when I had my hands free, and I screamed and tensed and scraped my body on the walls when I didn’t. I hated how they felt, hot fibers rubbing against nerve endings that were so raw I could barely think. But I was naked, and I was bound to a bed or a chair or something in the Demon Lord’s castle, and I was screaming, and tears and blood stung my eyes, and I told him:

“This was inside you all along, Lucifer! Look at me! I was inside you! This is you! I am you!”

And he sighed. He looked so tired, so pathetic. He ruffled my hair with a gentleness that ignited the rage inside me to a maddening level. And he said to me:

“I am me. You are you.”

I told him to eat shit, and he shrugged and cleaned me up.

I wonder if he was punishing himself, the way he always took care of me on his own. Or maybe it was just one of his self-imposed responsibilities; another thing he could do to convince himself he didn’t deserve to be miserable.

Back then, in those early days, he treated me like I was his child. I was his child. It always makes me sick to think about it that way, but he was my parent. He gave birth to me. He nursed me. He raised me. And just like so many parents since the dawn of time, he made me into a miserable facsimile of himself. I was Lucifer, but worse. I was Lucifer, but broken and ashamed and out of control. I was Lucifer, if Lucifer hated Lucifer. I didn’t want to be Lucifer.

“I am me. You are you.”

That’s easy enough to say when you’re the original. What about when you’re the parasitic thing that exploded from someone’s wounded body and heart? What then, Lucifer?

----

In spite of everything, I somehow made progress. I learned to dress myself, and to wear clothes without tearing them to shreds. I learned how to walk without erupting into an inferno of fury. I learned to speak without screaming. And that awful mother of mine was always with me, it seemed; always by my side. “Remember to breathe,” he’d say, or “Focus on what’s in front of you.” And I’d mutter curses at him, and I’d try; I’d try to do what he told me to do, and I’d feel so ashamed . But when I did what I was told, he’d give me things. Books, mainly, but also different foods, changes of scenery… So I did what I was told.

In some ways, I was as naive as a child. I remember the mystery of my first snowfall, touching it and putting it to my lips and staring at the impression of my handprint in the white blanket on the ground. But there were also plenty of things I never had to learn. I knew how to read and write; I understood, conceptually, that there was a Celestial Realm and a Devildom, and which one I was in. I knew that Lucifer had brothers and a sister, and I knew the sister was gone.

I knew about Lilith.

Lucifer says I often talked about Lilith in my early days. I don’t remember it myself, but he says I seemed fixated on her. I would sob and rage at him for letting her go, letting her die, twisting what was left of her and warping it into something ugly.

Lucifer said he thought it was because he was so heavily focused on Lilith when I was ‘born’; he supposes he must have imparted some strange impressions on me in his grief. I don’t remember any of that though, like I said, so I had to take his word for it.

I don't think that's the real reason anymore, though.

----

I remember meeting my brothers. Tch. My ‘brothers’....

“This is Satan,” Lucifer said to them. “He is your brother. I expect you to treat him as such.” They all stared at me as I sat bound and chained to a chair, gritting my teeth, and then they glanced at each other. They didn’t know what to say. And then they stared at me again, and I knew they were told how I’d erupted from Lucifer’s body, and I knew they had heard me screaming in the dungeon and down the otherwise quiet corridor of unused rooms, and I knew they were afraid. I knew.

But I was just six weeks old, and I was terrified too. And being terrified made me so angry. I struggled to swallow the rage, but it was only a matter of seconds before I choked out the first coherent thing that entered my mind, the words crescendoing into a grating scream by the end.

“They’re not my brothers!”

My vision wobbled, my head ached, and my muscles burned with an energy that could only be expelled with violence. I broke free from the chains around my wrists, and soon I was throwing things. Whatever I could get my hands on. A table. A painting. A priceless vase. Levi and Asmo and the twins scattered, and Mammon looked like he wanted to join them, but he didn’t. He stood uselessly in the middle of the hall as Lucifer grappled with me.

“O-oi, whadda you need?” he asked Lucifer, who responded by flapping his wings in irritation and grabbing onto my throat.

I grinned at him. I wanted to show him the worst, most sickening face he could possibly imagine. Lucifer’s expression hardly changed, but he squeezed, and I knew I’d succeeded. “Kill me,” I spat. I was crazy. I had lost my mind. It was empty of everything besides the hate. “Kill me, you scum. Kill me like you killed her.”

For a short while, I thought he might really do it. His fingers dug into my throat, his jaw clenched, and there was a rage in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before as I used some of my last stores of strength to strike him with my tail. Yes. He fed off my rage, and I fed off of his, and it was an infinite feedback loop. The border of my vision started to grow hazy, and my pulse was pounding in my ears, and…

He released me far too soon. Far, far too soon. I didn’t even fully lose consciousness; didn’t even get to enjoy a moment of oblivion. I’d just let myself go limp. I surrendered so easily. And that second of lowered resistance was all he needed to cast some binding enchantment on me and leave me irate and screaming, wheezing for breath, my pulse pounding in my face as my blood resumed circulating, and I wriggled on the floor like a worm. I felt like a worm.

Time was still so new back then. I couldn’t follow how it passed, and it seemed to dilate, stretching and squeezing, becoming longer and shorter based on my moods. And now, it all feels so long ago.

It was a lifetime ago, I suppose. From then to now, for me.

I wasn’t kept under lock and key. Not normally, at least. I was allowed to wander the Demon King’s castle. While Cerberus stalked the labyrinth below, I was treading the hallways above. I wonder how Lucifer convinced Diavolo to agree to that…

It never got better, though.

The rage.

I just learned to manage it. Slowly. Bit by bit. I’m still learning to manage it. Sometimes I slip.

I slip a lot, actually.

Books were my main solace in the Demon King’s castle, just as they are now in the House of Lamentation. Because I understand how little I know, and how valuable books are as resources.

But funny enough, that wasn’t why I became so interested in books at the start. I was far less interested in nonfiction than I was with novels. Reading a good novel…a really good novel… It can feel like a possession. Like you’ve entered someone else’s body and attuned yourself to someone else’s mind.

I wonder if others understand what a relief that is? I wonder if anybody can have any idea what others actually feel, and how it compares to yourself? It’s a question I sometimes get stuck on. The question alone takes me out of myself. I like that.

I didn’t care much about the real world when I was new. Why should I? The only things in it were Lucifer and his brothers, and I got enough of that already. I would rather be Azaz the Summoner, the demon who forged pacts with other demons in defiance of all natural laws. Or a young human boy living in the wilderness with wolves. I like stories like that.

No, what piqued my interest in the world outside was the butler.

I don’t know where he got the time, or why he cared enough to be bothered with it, but he told me about his own life. Only in the vaguest terms, of course; never touching on anything that felt truly personal. He talked of how ancient he was, and how he’d walked in the human world before humans ever did. And he told me about his room. He even let me look inside once. It’s shocking. Doors and stairs all over the place, leading to different places and times…

There’s no way for me to know if he was being honest with his stories, but he knew so much, it seemed insane to believe he was making it all up. He knew about the way the Devildom smelled when it was first inhabited by demons; he knew about the sulfur mines that shut down millennia ago, and the infrastructure that transformed the place into somewhere livable…

So I read some books about the ancient history of the Devildom. From what I could tell, his descriptions were accurate, and though he could have learned those things the same way I had, I didn’t feel he did. It felt more as if he was speaking from experience.

But when I read about the early Devildom, I wanted to learn about the fae. And when I read about the fae, I wanted to learn more about magic. And when I learned about magic, I wanted to learn more about curses, and magicians from all three realms, and soon I was no longer reading about fictional worlds, but my own. And I wanted so badly to see it.

----

When we moved into the House of Lamentation, Lucifer gave me the scroll. It was shiny and strange, and he told me it belonged to me, and that I should look it over when I was ready. He told me it had information about my birth. He made it sound like some sort of legal document, and it seemed to me that he wanted me to look at the thing sooner rather than later. So I tossed it on a high shelf and ignored it. I ignored it until you came to my room and started asking questions.

Lucifer came into my room the night I had you over. No knocking. He just burst in, arms crossed, wearing that disgusting look of beleaguered disappointment on his face. Like I’d let him down again. Like I owed him the consideration of trying to do anything else…

“You had a guest today, I heard.”

I was sitting on my bed, reading a book about who-knows-what. I’ve forgotten. He made me forget. And I was suspicious. Why was he speaking like that? Why wouldn’t he just say what he meant? I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of an answer, so I glared at the page of my book without seeing a single word.

Lucifer continued. “Did you become angry? Or were you cruel out of some new, cold sadistic streak?”

I threw my book at him and he dodged it with ease. Then he continued as if I hadn’t tried to smash his face in. “Or perhaps it was unintentional. But it seems you left our attendant in a state of deep distress. What did you discuss?”

“Get out of my room, bastard.”

I turned and lied on my side, back to him, and I dragged my tail over the bedspread. I was working away at it, slowly turning it to ribbons as the threads hooked onto and snapped over the sharp spines. I knew he hated it when I did things like that. And he knew I knew, so he pretended not to notice.

Irritating.

For about three minutes, I laid there, and he stood there, and neither of us said a word.

“Why does it matter?!” I finally snapped. I found myself tugging at my hair in irritation. Every part of my body feels so unnecessary when I’m agitated, from my hair to my horns to my skin. “Why won’t you leave?”

“You should be more careful with whom you share family matters.”

I actually spat out a laugh. Was he serious? I rolled back over and sneered at him. “Why’s that? Anyway, isn’t this all more or less a matter of public record? The entire Devildom knows how I came into the world.”

“Hm. So that’s what you discussed.” He nodded, and there was something supremely cocky in his mannerisms that made me want to strangle him. But I couldn’t strangle him. So I did the next best thing.

“Lilith came up.”

I stared at him, and I saw the flicker of emotion on his face when he heard that name. That name… Lilith… It’s a name I could use to hurt him. That’s all I was thinking when I sharpened it like a knife.

“I don’t understand why anyone would be cautious talking about Lilith with me,” I said nonchalantly. “But I guess my ‘guest’ thought I would be bothered. Tiptoeing around the fact that she died. As if I would be devastated over it.” I laughed, but it was hollow, and I wasn’t getting the reactions I wanted.

I doubled down.

“Really, I’m glad I never had to deal with her. She sounds infuriating. When you get down to it, the entire war was her fault. All because she couldn’t stand some human dying ten or twenty years before he would have ended up dying anyway.”

I could sense his rising annoyance, but it was too tempered. He knew I was trying to get a rise out of him, so he wasn’t as angry as he might have been otherwise.

“She was your sister,” Lucifer said. He had a strange voice when he said it.

I laughed again. “Right. Like they’re my ‘brothers’. But I never even met her. She’s just some idiot who threw away her life and all your lives for a single stupid human. She’s a stranger. She means nothing to me. She has nothing to do with me. And she deserves what she got.”

Lucifer was quiet for a few seconds. I couldn’t tell if I’d struck a nerve or not. He wasn’t so upset that he reacted, though, which annoyed me.

“She has nothing to do with you?” he echoed.

“Nothing whatsoever.”

His eyes roamed around the room, and they quickly fixed on that damn scroll, as if it was a homing beacon.

“You haven’t read that yet, have you.” It wasn't a question.

I felt another sharp jab of annoyance. “It doesn’t interest me.”

“Don’t be pointlessly stubborn, Satan.”

“What do you care?” I snapped. “Did your attendant come crying to you? Did that break your heart? You just can’t stand seeing someone in pain, is that it?”

“It’s not like you to be intentionally ignorant.”

“Didn’t you say it’s just a record about my birth? I don’t want to know anything else about how I was born. I hate what I already do know.” I jumped out of bed and stalked towards him. If he wasn’t going to walk out the door on his own, I’d gladly help him get there. “And it’s completely like you to dodge a question.”

“You weren’t asking that to hear the answer.”

Again, irritating.

“Why does it matter if I read that thing?”

“Because it concerns you. You should understand how you came to be.”

“I know how I came to be,” I growled. “You pulled your wings off and bled all over and cried. Am I wrong?”

Lucifer lowered his arms to his sides and frowned deeply at me, but he didn’t say anything. Something about that...scared me. Something about that filled me with dread, like I’d suddenly found myself on the edge of a precipice. But dread can’t exist inside me for long. Soon, it had churned through my body and hardened into something more familiar.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I growled. He didn’t say a thing, and he didn’t move. My stomach roiled in my gut. The frustration and disappointment were no longer evident on his face. Instead, I felt like I was a newborn again, “Stop looking at me like you’re worried about me! Like you pity me! It makes me want to vomit!”

I lunged at him. He reacted with the strength and dexterity I’d come to expect. I could never land a blow on Lucifer. If I hadn’t been so damn angry I wouldn’t have even tried. But my entire being ached with rage, and I acted without thinking. I felt so weak. I felt so helpless. I stood there, struggling to free myself, and he stood over me, my fists in his hands, that same, awful, pitying look on his face that he used to have back at the Demon King’s castle. Seeing that look…

“Why do you look at me like that?!” Hot, angry tears blurred my vision and burned my eyes. “Your face always makes me sick, but I can’t stand it when you look at me like that! Why can’t you hate me?!”

And before I could do anything else, I was bound up. Again. Just like I used to be, back in Diavolo’s place. I screamed, and I sobbed, and I felt like I had felt when I was first born. Like nothing but wrath, poisonous wrath, was coursing through my veins. And I felt arms around me—his arms, and I couldn’t push him away, so I just screamed as he embraced me. Like he had any right to embrace me! Why couldn’t I make him leave?! How dare he touch me?! I’d kill him. One day, I’d kill him!

It had been a long time since I’d been that angry. I think it took a toll on my body, because I slipped off to sleep without realizing I'd ever slowed down, and when I woke up, I was in bed, unbound and alone.

My body was sore from straining all my muscles the night before, and I felt groggy and unwell, like I’d been drunk on rage and woke with a hangover. I stepped out of bed and looked around the room. I felt I was searching for something.

Again, like a homing beacon. The celestial glow drew my eyes.

My fingers twitched.

I took the scroll from the shelf and untied it. I hated that I was giving in to him so easily. But what choice did I have? I had half a mind to burn the thing unread, but it slipped open and the words appeared before my eyes in a language I barely recognized. A human language, bizarrely. It appeared to be Latin. It used Latin characters, at least.

ANNO MMCDXCI REGNI GARDONI MAGNI A SANGUINE LUCIFERI ET CORPORE LILITHAE IN REGNO QUOD INTER REGNA EST CREATURA NOVA E PACTIONE SANGUINE CONSIGNATA APPARET. EX AMATO AD AMATUM IN ACERBISSIMO MORTIS DOLORE CORPUS CORPUS ITERUM FIT ET SANGUIS SANGUIS ITERUM FIT. HAEC PACTIO IN TERRA NEUTRIUS PARTIS CONCELEBRATUR AB INFERNO CONFIRMATA NEQUE A CAELO RECUSATA. SATANUS, ADVERSARIUS, NATUS EST.

TESTATUM PER DIAVOLUM, GARDONI MAGNI FILIUS NATURALIS TESTATUM PER BARBATOS, DAEMONUS TESTATUM PER LUCIFERUM, ANGELUS LAPSUS

----

I wandered to Lucifer’s study. It was empty. It took awhile to find the right sort of dictionary, but eventually, I had what I needed. And I got to work.

Within the hour, I was rampaging around the house. Mammon tried to get me under control, but he was never able to contain me. Only Lucifer ever did that.

“What happened?” he kept asking. “What the hell happened?!” But I was Wrath, and Wrath doesn’t speak with words.

----

Playing the adversary is hard work. It’s exhausting. It makes me miserable. But I have to do it. It’s my role. It’s my name. And I’m made out of Lucifer’s wrath. He must feel so much lighter without all that anger weighing him down. How nice for him. But when I learned about what else I was…

I’m Lilith, you know? I’m made out of her.

For some reason, that made me crazy.

----

IN THE 2491st YEAR OF THE REIGN OF THE GREAT GARDONUS, FROM THE BLOOD OF LUCIFER AND THE BODY OF LILITH, IN THE REALM BETWEEN REALMS, A CONTRACT SEALED WITH BLOOD BRINGS FORTH A NEW ESSENCE. OF BELOVED, BY BELOVED MADE, IN THE AGONY OF DEATH, BODY AGAIN BECOMES BODY AND BLOOD BECOMES BLOOD ANEW. THIS DOCUMENT BEING LEGALLY SOLEMNIZED ON NEUTRAL GROUND, SANCTIFIED BY HELL, UNCONTESTED BY HEAVEN. SATAN, THE ADVERSARY, IS BORN.

WITNESSED BY DIAVOLO, NATURAL SON OF THE GREAT GARDONUS WITNESSED BY BARBATOS, DEMON WITNESSED BY LUCIFER, FALLEN ANGEL

31 notes · View notes

46ten · 1 year

Note

Do you think Eliza and Ham had a healthy relationship?

I was just reading Hamilton’s letter to his wife dated 8Sept1786 to add this little note to anecdotes of AH’s forgetfulness/carelessness: “I wrote to you My beloved Betsey at Philadelphia; but through mistake brought off the letter with me; which I did not discover till my arrival here.”

But it sort of addresses the question, in 18th century companionate marriage terms:

Happy, however I cannot be, absent from you and my darling little ones. I feel that nothing can ever compensate for the loss of the enjoyments I leave at home, or can ever put my heart at tolerable ease. In the bosom of my family alone must my happiness be sought, and in that of my Betsey is every thing that is charming to me. Would to heaven I were there! Does not your heart re-echo the wish?

In reality my attachments to home disqualify me for either business or pleasure abroad; and the prospect of a detention here for Eight or ten days perhaps a fortnight fills me with an anxiety which will best be conceived by my Betseys own impatience. I am straitened for time & must conclude. I presume this will find you at Albany. Kiss my little ones a thousand times for me. Remember me affectionately to Your Parents, to Peggy, to all. Think of me with as much tenderness as I do of you and we cannot fail to be always happy

Adieu My beloved

A Hamilton

Brief version: my initial reaction is that I don't know how one would go about judging it (by today's standards or the period standards; her "voice" throughout their married years is almost entirely missing, I wrote a post about some of the things we DO know), but let's define "healthy relationship" in the simplest terms:

1) Were they satisfied with each other in the relationship- did whatever they had going on work for them? I think that's a "yes." He seemed satisfied with her: "You are my good genius; of that kind which the ancient Philosophers called a familiar; and you know very well that I am glad to be in every way as familiar as possible with you" (AH to EH, 19Nov1798). And she referred to him as the tenderest, best, virtuous husband, writing stuff about him like this: "I have had a double share of blessings...for such a husband, his spirit is in heaven and his form in the Earth and I am nowhere any part of him is." (EH to Pendleton, 20Sept1804)

2) Does it seem like there was reciprocity? I'd say so - I don't think, from his letters to her, or her letters to others, that he was stepping all over her/taking advantage of her. And he would have been not only a bad husband, but not a gentleman, if he had.

3) Was part of their dynamic to engage in destructive/harmful actions towards others? Could they have rated their satisfaction highly, while a feature of it was unity in causing harm? Other than that they laughed together at the 'poorly written' letters Eliza's friends sent her, I don't think they were causing MORE harm to others within their relationship than any other wealthy white Anglo-American couple of the time period.

Long version: They lived in a time period at nearly polar opposite of how hetero couples are supposed to publicly relate - if today's image is that long-time hetero couples are supposed to barely tolerate each other, couples of that time period were supposed to affirm this deep romance and adoration. Check out my 18th century marriage tag if want to read more, or this on the qualifications for a wife or another post on the responsibilities of a wife.

As I've stated elsewhere (see links above), a lot of AH's language in his letters to EH is period-typical - he's expressing sentiments (and in similar language) that a lot of men expressed to their wives. Being an excellent husband was also a crucial part of being considered a good man, so to the extent that AH felt his honor and character were important - and he most certainly did - he also wanted to be a devoted husband to a happy and satisfied wife who delivered tender proofs of their affection - their children. (They were serious about satisfying their wives - there were pamphlets! - in all the ways one can imagine - a satisfied, happy wife was proof of one’s own masculinity.) To summarize, I don’t necessarily think that just because he wrote to her in a lovey-dovey way that they had a good relationship, but I think we have enough other evidence that whatever they had worked for them, their children, and the functioning of their household and secured them a reputable place in society.

EH played the role of caretaker/helpmate to his genius, providing him not only with the stable home-life he seemed to want - and need - but also supported him through her role in the Republican Court and the social life of Philadelphia and NY. What becomes more interesting is that she also provided him feedback on his writing/speeches, may have transcribed for him (perhaps when he got tired of writing), and copied some of his letters/essays for him. So "Hamilton's genius" was very much a joint venture for both of them, as was their home-life and children, and everything else. In other words, theirs was definitely a partnership. Folks also noted that he was a different person/personality (kinder, gentler, tender, playful) at home, perhaps reflective of the kind of environment EH nurtured.

I have also thought that perhaps he was borderline emotionally dependent on her. There's something about her appearance in his life in winter 1780, when he seems to nearly have his head underwater, where he sort of grasps on to her as some type of salvation (and will cling on for nearly the next quarter of a century). Check out all the times he refers to her as "Angel," a bit unusual for this time period. And he was at times - it's reported by others - anxious when he's apart from her (she's anxious apart from him, too).

The other thing - a bit unusual - is that EH likely had a lot of power in that relationship - he was marrying up, not the other way around, and her family could have crushed him. I wrote this before, but she’s more connected to power than he is. I think that’s something he treasured - being accepted and ensconced in this powerful family. I think he got a thrill over his successful marriage to this Schuyler-van Rensselaer-Livingston scion - again, it demonstrated what a gentleman he was.

Nearly a century later but dealing with some of the same families in NY society, Edith Wharton provides examples of all the subtle ways women wielded power with their husbands, and I think the well-bred and educated Elizabeth Schuyler would have been excellent at that. And we can see from letters how much he left up to her to negotiate and solve all sorts of things.

A few other things that I find striking about their relationship, in the positive:

Other than her laziness in writing to him (and evidence she did write him), they likely were good communicators. I base that on their clear family planning - their children are very well spaced out, and I doubt they practiced abstinence, which means they were likely practitioners of the most common contraceptive activity between married couples at the time, requiring not only discipline but communication. Even deciding to engage in family planning reflects communication of shared goals and plans, etc.

Although he always intended to leave the cabinet position after his goals were accomplished, and wrote GW of his intentions in spring 1793, I think the timing of sending his resignation letter after their child was stillborn in his absence is a good indication that he did prioritize her needs (and felt guilt about it, as he expressed to Angelica S. Church). And then when he leaves, he hunkers down with her and their children for a few months.

Striking things, in the negative:

He either had a lot of influence over her, or she trusted his judgment a lot - though the flip side is that he had established that she could trust his judgment; I don’t see indications that she was naturally gullible. He's very confident (twice!) about arranging a duel and not telling her. The 1795 letter where he notes that he could handle his own family situation without causing distress is interesting.

Of course, there’s the matter of the affair with Maria Reynolds, but I’ve written about that a lot, and that he chose not to just lie to her, but instead pay James Reynolds quite a lot of money, with “I’ll tell Mrs. Hamilton” as the only threat. That’s either very rash or shows he was honestly concerned about how upsetting it might be to her. There has to be some truth to his phrasing at several different points in their lives of not wanting to “hazard [her] esteem” for him or make himself unworthy of her esteem/her love. It is an “inestimable jewel” to him, and he also calls her “a precious jewel.” One can add all of the weight of everything above into one’s reading of that.

#Alexander Hamilton #Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton #18th century marriage #I'm not a fan of readings of their marriage as cynical #not only because it's certainly not what AH expressed #but because marriage fraud would have reflected a low character and dishonor #and to the extent those things really mattered to him #I don't think he entered his marriage with her from a place of dishonesty #AH was every bit an 18th century man

13 notes · View notes

ruiniel · 4 months

Text

Prickly thorns, tender roses

Fandom: Castlevania series (2017-2021)

Rating: Mature🔞

Relationship: Alucard/Original Female Character

Characters: Alucard, Original Character(s)

Summary:

Set after the events of Castlevania (Netflix) Season III. After the betrayal of his young apprentices, Alucard feels barely alive in his lonesome castle. Days wear on, chipping away at his mind and sanity. And what is the son of Dracula to do with this unwanted visitor, suddenly come at his doorstep? Often the prickly thorn produces tender roses - Ovid

Chapter tags & warnings: Inspired by Castlevania, Canon Divergence, POV Original Character, Post-Castlevania Season 3, Non-Canon Relationship

PART I

AN: first Alucard longfic from 2020. Heavily follows ‘Beauty and the Beast’ trope.

< PREV NEXT >

XVII. Hidden knowledge

“Well, is it the seventh shelf or the eighth?”

Ravenna peered into the immense register, her finger trailing down a page with embellished swirling writings, searching under the letter ‘A’. “It should be the seventh,” she called to Adrian, who was currently facing one among thousands of towering shelves making part of the Belmont body of knowledge.

The young woman lost herself in her reading once again, but without intending to, her eyes strayed from the yellowed veal pages, searching for Adrian. He was approaching, carrying several tomes.

Since her wrists were in no proper working condition for her to be carrying things or climbing precarious stairs, he’d agreed to aid with her pursuit and retrieve the heavier materials needed for her studies.

Dust rose from the stack of books as Adrian placed them on her reading table. “Anything at all yet?”

Ravenna sighed and shrugged, resigned. “I’ve not found any pertinent piece of knowledge to aid me, no. But there must be something here. There must.” She looked towards the endless shelves burdened with works she may never get to read. “This is going to be awhile…” Ravenna then turned an apologetic gaze on Adrian, but his face was as impassive as usual.

“Take the time you need,” he said, one long finger reaching to trace the cover of one tome stacked on top of the pile. His gaze slowly drifted back to hers. “You once said you may have use of transmutation for your attempted serum.”

Ravenna slumped her shoulders forward in another sigh, her hands in her hair, ruffling the strands in circular motions. Her eyes were closed and a tired frown creased her brow. “Yes, a by-product from the transmutation of the prima Materia.”

“The first matter, used among other things to create the philosopher’s stone,” Adrian said thoughtfully.

“Yes,” Ravenna met his eyes, somewhat intrigued her host was privy to the details of this. “Which leads to another issue. There is no surviving knowledge on the transmutation of prima Materia.”

“None at all?” Adrian raised an eyebrow.

Ravenna crossed her arms. “Well, not unless you have a decrypted copy of the Emerald Tablet.” She knew it was impossible. The ancient work had never been accurately deciphered by any known scholar to date, its secrets disputed but never fully revealed, or demonstrated.

Seeing her disappointment rankled him peculiarly. “I think it is time I left you,” Adrian said, then looked at her wrists. “I do not believe you can lift the platform latch—“

Ravenna looked at the manuscripts splayed before her. “No… I’ll come up with you.” She regarded the darkened vault, sparsely lit by the artificial lights, which Adrian had told her were fueled by lightning. He’d explained the method used was one inspired by a work that had once belonged to the vast library of Alexandria, and somehow survived its burning and subsequent destruction; how his father had come upon this knowledge during his many centuries of travels.

As she joined him, Alucard said nothing, but followed her with his gaze, placing the latch back when they had both stepped onto the wooden platform.

The need Ravenna felt in his presence was not as compulsive as before when she had to actively avoid him for fear of doing something ghastly. But it was ever there in the back of her mind and chest. Despite this, she could still barely keep away from him for too long, and Adrian did appear less reclusive and hesitant where she was concerned. That was progress, she supposed. As were most midnights Ravenna would fall asleep curled onto the divan in the study, rather than her chamber. It was warmer there, not as removed from the strategic kitchen area, and it was certainly comfortable. There was also the fact that he spent his time there most evenings, and ever since the encounter with the hunters, Ravenna found it was better when he was near. She could not exactly tell the reason or fully grasp it in mind or spirit, but she heard and felt him differently when they were close. She often thought she heard barely discernible, repeatable sounds, not her own, reaching as far as her lower abdomen.

“Hungry?”

She refocused her vision to find Adrian staring at her, half a smile on his lips.

Ravenna shrugged. “Is that an offer or merely taunting? I have not had time to find any eggs or—”

He waved her thought away. “I have something in the making. But first...”

Their eyes met.

As before, and ever since the recent happening in the woods, Ravenna felt something raging in her ears, her throat, down her chest and belly whenever she stared into those unique beams of gold.

“Join me,” Adrian urged, stepping off the platform when they reached the outside world.

Her curiosity piqued, Ravenna followed him as she shielded her weary eyes from the blazing sun, noticing in passing that it was midday.

Soon enough, they were walking the castle corridors together and Ravenna saw they were heading to the library.

“This way.” He led her to the eastern side of the curved dome structure, pausing before a line of racks. He then took a wooden stair and climbed it to the top, his gaze searching.

Following his catlike movements, her traitorous mind began its dribbling anew. Her eyes lingered on his well-knit frame, his deceptively frail appearance. The elegant way he moved and touched things. The way he’d touched her when circumstances had demanded it.

She still vividly recalled the copper color of his eyes then, the rigid set of his shoulders. Ravenna debated whether to ask if the blood sharing had any effects in the aftermath; if it had done something to her, to them both. But then she blushed and buried the notion, thinking she would need to explain the effects and sensations plaguing her.

“This one here,” Adrian’s voice brought her back to reality.

He took a green tome in hand and descended to face her, presenting the item.

Her eyes widened when reading the authorship. “Hermes Trismegistus... this is a copy of the Corpus Hermeticum!” Her gaze locked with his, her heart pounding with newfound strength.

“An alternate version Trismegistus himself wrote, annotated, among others, with the deciphering of your Emerald Tablet.”

Her head was spinning, and Ravenna felt faint. “You... you had this all along?”

He was smiling, now of all times. “Apparently I did. And now you have it.”

“This is a treasure in itself!” Her voice was full of wonder. Then Ravenna frowned, eyes cutting to him. “Again, you let me...” Then realization struck. “You did not trust me enough.”

Alucard crossed his arms in a detached shrug. “I allowed you your research.”

Ravenna was too happy and grateful to be upset. All her attention reverted to the manuscript, fingers reverently tracing the faded illuminations. “There is yet more to do, but this saves me months, possibly years!” She wanted to embrace him so much but somehow succeeded in reining herself in, thinking he may not appreciate it. “Thank you, Adrian,” Ravenna said with honesty.

Adrian only watched her, and there was that bizarre silence again where each appeared to have something to say, but none would speak. Ravenna noticed how light streaking through the window played in his hair, over his features. He was alight with the sun indeed, this unusual creature she at first feared and even loathed. It was cruel and bitterly amusing at the same time to think she could barely keep away from him now. Did he see it? Did he know? She thought it wouldn’t matter either way.

“I will see you later, then? For the evening meal?”

The words took her by surprise. “Yes... yes, certainly,” Ravenna blurted after a moment of hesitation, still shaken by the discovery and now duly intrigued by this unexpected offer.

“Until then,” Adrian turned away, his long stride taking him toward the engine room.

Ravenna followed him with her gaze until he disappeared from view, and for moments unnumbered stood still in the endless library of the once greatest of vampire lords, holding the invaluable tome to her chest.

< PREV NEXT >

#alucard x oc #ruiniel:fanfiction #prickly thorns tender roses

2 notes · View notes

thefirstknife · 1 year

Note

The author of that raid lore you shared reminds me of Toland. It's written in a similar structure and tone to his letters as well as being about something he would know.

His Bad Juju lore showed he knew "how high up the pyramid of casualty really went" Implying about The Witness or Disciples all the way back in Opulence.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if this lore was him and he somehow gleaned thos knowledge in his journey la

Post we're referring to!

Toland is a good idea actually, but to me, Toland speaks much more... chaotically? And he tends to address the reader directly. He also adds way more poetic descriptions. Bad Juju is actually a perfect example of how much his speech pattern doesn't match, with the way he uses old-timey words, references and structure like he has a thesaurus memorised. Another lore tab (Ghost Fragment: Darkness 3) that might be more relevant here also shows this; he is very chaotic here, arguing basically with an imaginary audience, all caps yelling, repeating words. Also his allegory of the three queens is grandiose and over the top.

The raid lore tab felt more impersonal, not written to anyone in particular, more like for anyone who may find it and seemingly not trying to convince anyone of anything. Just a philosophical argument, metaphorical, but direct and without much complications. No fancy words and the allegory is fairly simple. Also the first paragraph is meant to describe the vibe of the author:

Specifically the mention of this thing being "barely-real" and deep in metaphor and allegory is what makes me think most of the Unveiling where the author explicitly explains that the story of the Garden is an allegory, alongside these nebulous entities of the Winnower and the Gardener.

But Toland definitely knows a lot about the Darkness and definitely has insight into this philosophy. I'm not sure who else might fit here, especially given the first paragraph which is very important for identification. For comparison, this is how Mara is described as an author:

And this is Eris:

And Savathun:

These are fairly easily identifiable, especially with the rest of the text. It's an important flavour to set the page, so it must be clear once we have an author candidate. Some are more vague, but they definitely reveal the overall identity, like the two tabs that are written from the perspective of a member of the Ecumene and the Qugu, as well as one which is from a long-dead disciple. We don't know the exact individuals here and their names, but we can guess the general idea.

I really love this lore book and I love that it brought some more mysterious and ancient elements that feel like we aren't really meant to know them. The universe is a big place and far older than us and there are entire civilisations that have risen and died before we ever existed and their records are preserved in the memory of Darkness. This lore book is insight into some of them, among insight from our allies.

I'm really interested if others have different ideas of who might be speaking! As far as other options go, Toland isn't too far off given his deep connection to Darkness and the Sword Logic.

#destiny 2 #toland #darkness #the root of nightmares raid #long post #lore vibing #ask

14 notes · View notes

aigamidiva · 3 months

Text

Diva Short Bio:

Post-DSOD - Manga Canon Compliant

Age: 18-23

Height: about 5’9

Orientation: Bisexual

Name: Diva (from Sanskrit Deva (/ˈdeɪvə/; Sanskrit: देव) means "shiny", "exalted", "heavenly being", "divine being", "anything of excellence", and is also one of the Sanskrit terms used to indicate a deity in Dharmic Religion (for example Buddhism and Hinduism).

Nationality: He is from Egypt. He is Modern Egyptian (Arab, Egyptian and Levantine)

Diva is a mysterious figure who was defeated at the end of Dark Side of Dimensions, losing the power of the Plana while the gates to paradise were forever closed due to the Pharaoh’s return. Having realized that the loss of the Plana was for the best, he leaves with his sister and they return home. However, having heard news of events around the world… he still has things to say, and works to perfect his own sense of justice while becoming a man worthy of his role model, Shadi Shin.

Longer Bio:

Personality: Meticulous, analytical, intelligent, well-spoken, philosophical, visionary, repressed, quiet, calm and collected, easygoing, patient— can be obsessive or regress into hypocrisy if he can no longer stand to bury the emotions leading to the darker side of the heart

Philosophy: He is influenced by Dharmic religions the Bhagavad Gita (Hinduism), as well as the Tripatakas (Buddhism), and of course Ancient Egyptian Religion/Shadi’s teachings. He also reads Fyodor Dostoevsky (specifically with a like for Notes from the Underground). And of course Carl Jung & the Collective Consciousness.

Quotes I’ve done for him:

“Fear clouds the mind, and leads to anger. Anger leads to hate, and then to suffering. Revenge is suffering too, and that suffering is often caused by a lie to the self, the anger felt to think that revenge is justice.”

“Only without greed, anger, revenge, and fear— peace and calm instead of those emotions, have I truly become a man to uphold Shadi’s legacy.”

“In short, there are many emotions that cloud the mind. They’re the gateways to the darker side of being, within the domain of the heart.”

“I must keep it buried… all emotions that lead to the darker side of the heart…”

Dislikes: Narcissistic/selfish people, rulers, autocratic regimes, radical inequality between the rich elites and the poor, anger, hate, greed (you’re thinking of Kaiba aren’t you, yes he— he has a few things to say about that guy) fear, emotions that lead to the darker side of the heart, he also dislikes corporate globalization (fascism = when corporations control the government), and has a general belief in the balance of power (between darkness and light, if darkness is allowed to dominate then chaos is created.)

More on his particular rivalry with Kaiba: Since Kaiba is written on the dark side by Takahashi (hes listed with all dark traits and called a “bad guy”, 4/5 narcissism, 3/5 insane, and 4/5 greedy/obsessed) while Yugi and Atem exist on the light side with good traits, then he believes that one with darkness and madness like Kaiba should not be allowed to continue to expand and extend his rule. He also has a dislike for how he “rules the city through fear/force/orwellian surveillance” and controls citizenship by forcing everyone to register their duel decks to become citizens (controlling citizenship = basically the definition of an authoritarian dictator), believing him to be a mad dictator. (With anime compliant Kaiba’s, he still wouldn’t like them. He thinks duel academies are indoctrination schools XDD)

#diva #diva dsod #ygo rp #yugioh rp #character bio

0 notes

autolovecraft · 9 months

Text

The thing must have happened at about three-thirty in the afternoon.

The hungry horse was neighing repeatedly and almost uncannily, and he vaguely wished it would stop.

Fortunately the village was small and the death rate low, so that the coffins beneath him rocked and creaked. Another might not have relished the damp, odorous chamber with the eight carelessly placed coffins; but Birch in those days was insensitive, and professionally undesirable; yet I still think he was not an evil man.

Birch, in his ghastly situation, was now too low for an easy scramble out of the enlarged transom; but gathered his energies for a determined try. Then the doctor came with his medicine-case and asked crisp questions, and removed the patient's outer clothing, shoes, and socks. Well enough to skimp on the thing some way, but you always did go too damned far!

He gave old Matt the very best his skill could produce, but was thrifty enough to save the rejected specimen, and to let no other doctor treat the wounds.

The tower at length finished, and his aching arms rested by a pause during which he sat on the bottom step of his grim device, Birch cautiously ascended with his tools and stood abreast of the narrow transom. He had not forgotten the criticism aroused when Hannah Bixby's relatives, wishing to transport her body to the cemetery in the city whither they had moved, found the casket of Judge Capwell beneath her headstone.

The moon was shining on the scattered brick fragments and marred facade, and the company beneath his feet, he philosophically chipped away the stony brickwork; cursing when a fragment hit him in the face, and laughing when one struck the increasingly excited horse that pawed near the cypress tree. Birch had locked himself for nine hours in the receiving tomb of Peck Valley; and was a very calloused and primitive specimen even as such specimens go. Maddened by the sound, or by the stench which billowed forth even to the open air, the waiting horse gave a scream that was too frantic for a neigh, and plunged madly off through the night, the wagon rattling crazily behind it. Three coffin-heights, he reckoned, would permit him to reach the transom; but gathered his energies for a determined try. His thinking processes, once so phlegmatic and logical, had become ineffaceably scarred; and it was pitiful to note his response to certain chance allusions such as Friday, Tomb, Coffin, and words of less obvious concatenation. For an impersonal doctor, Davis' ominous and awestruck cross-examination became very strange indeed as he sought to drain from the weakened undertaker every least detail of his horrible experience. Birch set out for the tomb with horse and wagon to transfer the body of Matthew Fenner. He worked largely by feeling now, since newly gathered clouds hid the moon; and though progress was still slow, he felt heartened at the extent of his encroachments on the top and bottom of the aperture. You know what a fiend he was for revenge—how he ruined old Raymond thirty years after their boundary suit, and how he stepped on the puppy that snapped at him a year ago last August … He was the devil incarnate, Birch, but you knew what a little man old Fenner was. The afflicted man was fully conscious, but would say nothing of any consequence; merely muttering such things as Oh, my ankles!

I saw the scars—ancient and whitened as they then were—I agreed that he was wise in so doing. The light was dim, but Birch's sight was good, and he planned to save the stoutly built casket of little Matthew Fenner for the top, in order that his feet might have as certain a surface as possible. Birch heeded this advice all the rest of his life till he told me his story; and when I saw the scars—ancient and whitened as they then were—I agreed that he was reduced to a profane fumbling as he made his halting way among the long boxes toward the latch. Maddened by the sound, or by the stench which billowed forth even to the open air, the waiting horse gave a scream that was too frantic for a neigh, and plunged madly off through the night, the wagon rattling crazily behind it. When Dr. Davis left Birch that night he had taken a lantern and gone to the old receiving tomb. His head was broken in, and everything was tumbled about.

Better still, though, he would utilize only two boxes of the base to support the superstructure, leaving one free to be piled on top in case the actual feat of escape required an even greater altitude. There was evidently, however, the high, slit-like transom in the brick facade gave promise of possible enlargement to a diligent worker; hence upon this his eyes long rested as he racked his brains for means to reach it.

On the afternoon of Friday, April 15th, then, Birch set out for the tomb with horse and wagon to transfer the body of Matthew Fenner. He confided in me because I was his doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confiding in someone else after Davis died. His thinking processes, once so phlegmatic and logical, had become ineffaceably scarred; and it was pitiful to note his response to certain chance allusions such as Friday, Tomb, Coffin, and words of less obvious concatenation. He could, he was sure, get out by midnight—though it is characteristic of him that this thought was untinged with eerie implications. Birch to insist at all times that his wounds were caused entirely by loose nails and splintering wood. Clutching the edges of the aperture. Then the doctor came with his medicine-case and asked crisp questions, and removed the patient's outer clothing, shoes, and socks. As he planned, he could not but wish that the units of his contemplated staircase had been more securely made. The vault had been dug from a hillside, so that the narrow ventilation funnel in the top ran through several feet of earth, making this direction utterly useless to consider. For an impersonal doctor, Davis' ominous and awestruck cross-examination became very strange indeed as he sought to drain from the weakened undertaker every least detail of his horrible experience.

Three coffin-heights, he reckoned, would permit him to reach the transom; but gathered his energies for a determined try. Neither did his old physician Dr. Davis, who died years ago. His head was broken in, and everything was tumbled about. Instinct guided him in his wriggle through the transom.

He was the devil incarnate, Birch, but you knew what a little man old Fenner was.

It was just as he had recognized old Matt's coffin that the door slammed to in the wind, leaving him in a dusk even deeper than before. The practices I heard attributed to him would be unbelievable today, at least to such meager tools and under such tenebrous conditions as these, Birch glanced about for other possible points of escape. Birch was lax, insensitive, and was concerned only in getting the right coffin for the platform; for no sooner was his full bulk again upon it than the rotting lid gave way, jouncing him two feet down on a surface which even he did not get Asaph Sawyer's coffin by mistake, although it was very similar.

At any rate he kicked and squirmed frantically and automatically whilst his consciousness was almost eclipsed in a half-swoon.

0 notes

scary-senpai · 1 year

Text

They say 'write for yourself,' and so here's Genos and Garou arguing about the mathematics of Christmas.

...I don't know, I just think they're neat. :D In any case, I am glad to be getting into the spirit of @wanpanmas 2022 and also finally my fic from Wanpanmas 2021.

Not yet beta read, there may be science errors because I usually have my boyfriend fact-check my jokes.

“Alright,” Garou sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Tell me exactly what I’m looking at.”

The whiteboard was literally painful to look at. Shining more brightly than fresh-fallen snow (and with a nasty glare to match), it was as large as a wide-screen television. Scrawled across the surface in tiny, meticulous strokes of blue ink were countless symbols, numbers, and letters—calculations, Garou guessed. Not that he could make heads or tales of it.

As far as Garou was concerned, the whole mess may as well be ancient hieroglyphs—overwhelming, incomprehensible remnants from an entirely different world. And that’s how he felt, standing beside Genos in the kitchen—as if they were from two entirely different civilizations, separated by time, possibly even space.

“These are the comprehensive mathematics of your so-called ‘Santa,’” Genos explained. “Figure two billion adolescents currently in existence, and roughly 15% observe Christmas. For simplicity’s sake, we will ignore the complexities of mixed-faith households, as well as the existence of Orthodox Christmas.”

“Uh-huh.”

Garou rubbed his eyes, dizzy with all the facts and figures swirling behind them.

“On average, one can expect to find roughly 3.5 children in every home—wait, Garou, why are you laughing?”

“I’m not.”

Garou was, actually, although he sensed he shouldn’t be… snickering as he envisioned a family of three full children and one half child standing side by side.

“Alright,” Genos continued. “Postulating 3.5 children per home, let’s assume that at least one child can expect gifts from Santa. In the interest of time, we will sidestep any philosophical discourse regarding the nature of ‘good,’ of which there are many—“

“Yeah, ‘moral dessert’ and whatnot,” Garou muttered. “The hell’s that?”

“A reindeer.”

Garou eyed the four-legged stick figure with what seemed like antennae (or possibly horns). A jumble of shapes—mostly squares and circles—appeared linked to the thing.

It almost, almost looked like a reindeer.

“Does Santa have eight of those?”

“Taking into account the gifts and the sleigh, Santa has a payload of 321,300 tons, not including Santa,” Genos said plainly, as if this were common knowledge and Garou already understood what these numbers meant.

“…and?”

“Presupposing the existence of exceptionally gifted reindeer, Santa would require no less than 214,200 to support the weight of his payload. In order to conserve resources, I have augmented my sketches with scientific notation.”

Genos pulled a napkin from his front pocket and snapped it with all the flourish of a picador.

“‘Back-of-the-napkin calculations’,” Garou grumbled. “Of course.”

“In order to frequent all 91.8 million qualified dwellings within the requisite 31-hour timeframe, Santa must accelerate to 650 miles per second—roughly 3,000 times the speed of sound. Moving at this unthinkable speed, with this inconceivable payload would generate enormous air resistance,” Genos continued, pausing for a breath he did not need to take. “Not unlike a spaceship re-entering the atmosphere, for example.”

“Uh-huh.”

“As I am sure you’re aware, hundreds of meteors breach our planet’s atmosphere and fall towards the earth itself,” Genos continued, “yet only a handful will actually complete their journey. The remainder burn up upon re-entry, which means—“

Genos snapped the napkin again, showing off the drawing on the other side: a rotund stick figure with a strange, triangular hat, that was (painfully, unfortunately) on fire.

“In conclusion,” Genos declared, “if Santa once existed, he does no longer—due to rampant population growth and the spread of Christianity.”

(the primary source of the santa calculations is here: http://www.comedycorner.org/5.html)

here's a silly drawing of Genos' reindeer. when it comes to illustrations, Garou thinks he can do it better, but he also understands now is not the time to try.

#opm fanfic #one punch man fanfic #genos #garou #genos opm #garou opm #my writing #wilf #(work i'd like to finish)#holiday hi jinks #garou x genos #gearou #genos had good intentions he really did #he is just so very Extra #sorry tareo #it will get better i promise #everything is actually saitama's fault #ca-chan can't science

0 notes

voyeuristicvixen · 2 years

Text

Captains Log 32_ Why Secondlife?

I just finished listening to the incredible Wall Street Journal podcast on Secondlife and How to build a metaverse and I must say, it was the best podcast I have ever listened to. Even bae listened to me and we both had the same feeling we get when we binge watch our favorite show. We we’re thoroughly intrigued and entertained by each episode. I think I can speak for us both when I say it inspired us and motivated us to continue in the pursuit of our SL lives and creative interests in the metaverse! We have been exploring sooo much lately and a lot of it has just been organic and intuitive which has made it all the more synchronistic!

There’s an episode that highlights the idea that SL is for a certain kind of person. I had literally been saying that to Wav earlier. I’ve noticed many residents have some philosophical worldviews that differ from their peers in their locale... are creative and intelligent people who are curious and have open imaginations! I have felt more excited and prepared to share SL with my RL circle more these days too and someone has reached out and I’ll be showing them around next week! I am excited and also I feel almost like SL is my baby now too... I am so sensitive to it. I felt myself crying and sad during the parts of the podcast that were hard to hear about how efforts did not get well received but also very hopeful. I just see a vision where SL could have a rebirth in a sense, where it never died but it can regain those 20k users. I see it! Itll be a thing.

Where the new metaworlds are failing SL has and always will thrive and become even better at.

Listen to the podcast! : https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/11847-the-wall-street-journal-podcast-how-to-build-a-metaverse/?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=socials&utm_campaign=news

So I had a random issue last week where my inventory wasnt fully loading so I went to this random sim that I saw on the Firestorm page that is said to be a place where everything reloads if it wont because theres like zero lag there. So I go there and go through the troubleshooting in a sandbox. boom. Its done.

My curios exploring self, I am always just looking at the map and clicking and teleporting places. . . now I know some people dont like this. . . some people feel that is bad ettiquette to randomly TP in somewhere and I am aware. But my intentions are always pure and I feel its better to apologize or just get kicked. I HAVE to know. XD now, if I see its a sex sim or homestead something of that sort I do not just openly go and invade people’s privacy. Thats not cool. I am very intuitive and psychic about the whole thing lol. So anyway I tp over from the sandbox and this place is what I find..

It was like an ancient abandoned ruins. It felt haunted almost... ngl. This was a place that was an office to the Lindens. Or at least it felt like a “was”. Maybe still is but everything inside was made of prims and just felt like it was left behind. (I feel badly if this is an active office because im just flaming tf out of it rn im sorry lol) It was all dark inside too... it really just felt ghostly. But either way it was super cool I got a free bear! I am now obsessed with finding these linden bears knowing that they are a “thing”. I randomly found my first one on a boating trip (see blog post here) little did I know it was the beginning to a collectors story arc.

So I snooped all the offices because I was looking to see if anymore free bears were being gifted lols. I guess thats greedy af of me but I love them! XD What I did find were beautiful memories of the beginnings of Secondlife. This was also about a week before the podcast came out too! So everything just unfolding like a beautiful movie to me.

This was in one of the offices, it is dated OCT-NOV 2002 It is the first map of SL. Its pretty amazing how they started with this, and now there's this seemingly limitless world that's bloomed from it. I just got goosebumps when I walked through the offices because I could just feel like... the energy behind it.

Some things it reminded me of:

- In the movie w tyra banks where she plays a doll, theres a part where she goes back to the studio where they shot all her promo videos which she as a doll remembers as her home. Its dimly lit and the sets are colorful and fantastic. Thats what walking in this office felt like....

- In anastasia when she is revisiting her childhood palace and is seeing ghosts dancing around the room and remembering her past I felt like i could see how they were getting their offices together, working out the lay of the land anticipating newcomers...making bears

Theres me and bear and I guess meetings were/are held here still? Idk!

This is Leo Lindens Office, I looked to find more information about him and who he was and how exactly he contributed but I couldn’t find much. He worked at linden labs in 2007. I got a copy of his commemorative plaque which is now sitting in my garage.

^ THIS IS DOPE ITS EVERY DETAIL TO THE NINES. Found it while exploring Cinna: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/One/87/65/22

In the marketplace: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Ultimate-DMC-12/12395447

Making out in a dank ass library at a place we found through someones profile (those are always the best) my profile pics are not destination heavy as much as they are edgy little things that I just HAD to say. Basically im one of those people who turned their profile into another blog.

I love classic dank libraries. I LIVE for them in RL and SL. It is a wonder I have not built my own library yet, but there is plenty of time for that!! *Adds to list of thousand and 5 things to do*

Big tings coming! Ras and Gigi are the dopest i’ll say it everytime I see em. It was super nice to meet with the Meroe team to chop things up and get on board with the next wave for the movement. Im living for this experience and it is just helping me in my RL to gain more perspective and confidence with my personal goals and purpose in life. But the best part is how schedules and things align perfectly to just flow together. Thats divine alignment and you just cant beat it! Alhamdoulilah! \o/

Ascella is such a sweetheart shes what I know to be as the first Meroe volunteer, shes always so gracious with me and I love that. Lol why is my face always lookin like that?? IDK but I can assure you nothing is wrong I am so delighted ! XD

We have been little by little checking out some of the Oct SL events, especially moreso since we’ve been listening to the podast. Its like, hearing them speak on how much work and excitement and heart goes into the events and things they put out for us in SL made us want to participate more. So glad we are too because everything has been super fun and enjoyable. Its hilarious how we actually get spooked by some things too. We accidentally spend a whole night on the sidewalks of Bellissario or whatever its called. And I also was thinking, if it was instantly so popular, why not make more little suburbs like it? Even though it was “sold out” there were a lot of empty homes still.

We frequent our favorite dispensary “Eaze” nowadays and the Bud Hud is pretty amazing. We have jars of joints all over the house and we love to smoke in SL and RL at the same time its one of those random satisfying things....I feel like i’ve written about this place before but here I am writing about it again. Soul’s dispensary is just super nice it feels like the ones here where I live and I love how the products and everything look inside. Its just small quaint and vibey.

Your Uber: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Muskeg/170/114/51

Found this random platform of linden bears and a DJ Bear... Its like these bears are calling to me I swear... ever since the first one.. But pay attention to these two in this pic, this is going to lead me into a series of potentially problematic things I see in SL. I thought these bears were going to be black or brown when they were grey and loading because all I could see was a Fez and some Timbs... So im like ohhh shit these bears are brothas! but then they finally load and they aint. Its a shiner and Idk what the other bear got going on. lmao. That was hilarious to me. XD

Us <3 I sat here with them ALL day while we did stuff in RL, it was lovely. Sometimes I feel like our avies are alive lol.

I got Yemi a new onesie it reminds me of my first halloween I was a pumpkin. :)

We went to this great hunt experience by Baroqued Japonica called Kohaku No Shizuku. It was a wonderful story that was put into a full game that had a hud system attached. It was wordy but we still got a good understanding of the story and completed the full experience together. It was really well made and impressive to say the least. I think it should be less wordy next time but I love to read and I love a good story and I also love how they made the book look with the illustrative photos. It was very well made and so I read it. The creator made the story too I have to say BIG UPS for real its incredibly creative! At the end we got all these amazing wonderful gifts that I am still unpacking! Your Uber: https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/BAROQUED/129/19/243E

Bae wanted me to get a pic of him jumping off this tower. We got really into jumping and the controls after visited the infamous Beanstalk, one of the first tallest things ever made in SL. We started to climb up the beanstalk and got maybe 1/4 of the way up before falling. In the end we traveled by bubble. But we got the hops now!

Well damn this is long, iff anyone makes it down here... why I am still on secondlife? It is probably the same answer you will here from most of us who “get it” its a place I can be with my man who is long distance right now and a place where I get to continue practicing this new evolution of self coming out of saturn return where I am a boss, assertive and manifesting big dreams. I wanna do it twice over and then a third time in the astral! & I am always learning and theres so much history and things to learn in SL. So much to learn about people too.. Okay now I’ve said enough! lol

#Secondlife #Secondlifehistory #Secondlifedestination #Secondlifeevents #Secondlifephotography #Secondlifefashion #secondlifeblog #secondlifeblogger #metaverse #metaverseblog #howtobuildametaverse

1 note · View note

neil-gaiman · 3 years

Note

How Did you come up with the first eve in the story about adams wives? I haven’t been able to find anything about her after I read it and I want to know if she’s an actual biblical character or just someone you made

She's from the Midrash. I learned about her as a 12 year old, from my barmitzvah teacher. There was a point in there, long after I'd put her into Sandman, where I was starting to think I'd imagined her, when I ran across her in Robert Graves's Hebrew Myths....

Excerpt from: The Hebrew Myths by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai (New York: Doubleday, 1964), pp 65-69

Chapter 10: Adam's Helpmeets

(a) Having decided to give Adam a helpmeet lest he should be alone of his kind, God put him into a deep sleep, removed one of his ribs, formed it into a woman, and closed up the wound, Adam awoke and said: 'This being shall be named "Woman", because she has been taken out of man. A man and a woman shall be one flesh.' The title he gave her was Eve, 'the Mother of All Living''. [1]

(b) Some say that God created man and woman in His own image on the Sixth Day, giving them charge over the world; [2] but that Eve did not yet exist. Now, God had set Adam to name every beast, bird and other living thing. When they passed before him in pairs, male and female, Adam-being already like a twenty-year-old man-felt jealous of their loves, and though he tried coupling with each female in turn, found no satisfaction in the act. He therefore cried: 'Every creature but I has a proper mate', and prayed God would remedy this injustice. [3]

(c) God then formed Lilith, the first woman, just as He had formed Adam, except that He used filth and sediment instead of pure dust. From Adam's union with this demoness, and with another like her named Naamah, Tubal Cain's sister, sprang Asmodeus and innumerable demons that still plague mankind. Many generations later, Lilith and Naamah came to Solomon's judgement seat, disguised as harlots of Jerusalem'. [4]

(d) Adam and Lilith never found peace together; for when he wished to lie with her, she took offence at the recumbent posture he demanded. 'Why must I lie beneath you?' she asked. 'I also was made from dust, and am therefore your equal.' Because Adam tried to compel her obedience by force, Lilith, in a rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and left him.

Adam complained to God: 'I have been deserted by my helpmeet' God at once sent the angels Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof to fetch Lilith back. They found her beside the Red Sea, a region abounding in lascivious demons, to whom she bore lilim at the rate of more than one hundred a day. 'Return to Adam without delay,' the angels said, `or we will drown you!' Lilith asked: `How can I return to Adam and live like an honest housewife, after my stay beside the Red Sea?? 'It will be death to refuse!' they answered. `How can I die,' Lilith asked again, `when God has ordered me to take charge of all newborn children: boys up to the eighth day of life, that of circumcision; girls up to the twentieth day. None the less, if ever I see your three names or likenesses displayed in an amulet above a newborn child, I promise to spare it.' To this they agreed; but God punished Lilith by making one hundred of her demon children perish daily; [5] and if she could not destroy a human infant, because of the angelic amulet, she would spitefully turn against her own. [6]

(e) Some say that Lilith ruled as queen in Zmargad, and again in Sheba; and was the demoness who destroyed job's sons. [7] Yet she escaped the curse of death which overtook Adam, since they had parted long before the Fall. Lilith and Naamah not only strangle infants but also seduce dreaming men, any one of whom, sleeping alone, may become their victim. [8]

(f) Undismayed by His failure to give Adam a suitable helpmeet, God tried again, and let him watch while he built up a woman's anatomy: using bones, tissues, muscles, blood and glandular secretions, then covering the whole with skin and adding tufts of hair in places. The sight caused Adam such disgust that even when this woman, the First Eve, stood there in her full beauty, he felt an invincible repugnance. God knew that He had failed once more, and took the First Eve away. Where she went, nobody knows for certain. [9]

(g) God tried a third time, and acted more circumspectly. Having taken a rib from Adam's side in his sleep, He formed it into a woman; then plaited her hair and adorned her, like a bride, with twenty-four pieces of jewellery, before waking him. Adam was entranced. [10]

(h) Some say that God created Eve not from Adam's rib, but from a tail ending in a sting which had been part of his body. God cut this off, and the stump-now a useless coccyx-is still carried by Adam's descendants. [11]

(i) Others say that God's original thought had been to create two human beings, male and female; but instead He designed a single one with a male face looking forward, and a female face looking back. Again He changed His mind, removed Adam's backward-looking face, and built a woman's body for it. [12]

(j) Still others hold that Adam was originally created as an androgyne of male and female bodies joined back to back. Since this posture made locomotion difficult, and conversation awkward, God divided the androgyne and gave each half a new rear. These separate beings He placed in Eden, forbidding them to couple. [13]

Notes on sources:

1. Genesis II. 18-25; III. 20.

2. Genesis I. 26-28.

3. Gen. Rab. 17.4; B. Yebamot 632.

4. Yalqut Reubeni ad. Gen. II. 21; IV. 8.

5. Alpha Beta diBen Sira, 47; Gaster, MGWJ, 29 (1880), 553 ff.

6. Num. Rab. 16.25.

7. Targum ad job 1. 15.

8. B. Shabbat 151b; Ginzberg, LJ, V. 147-48.

9. Gen. Rab. 158, 163-64; Mid. Abkir 133, 135; Abot diR. Nathan 24; B. Sanhedrin 39a.

10. Gen. II. 21-22; Gen. Rab. 161.

11. Gen. Rab. 134; B. Erubin 18a.

12. B. Erubin 18a.

13. Gen. Rab. 55; Lev. Rab. 14.1: Abot diR. Nathan 1.8; B. Berakhot 61a; B. Erubin 18a; Tanhuma Tazri'a 1; Yalchut Gen. 20; Tanh. Buber iii.33; Mid. Tehillim 139, 529.

Authors’ Comments on the Myth:

1. The tradition that man's first sexual intercourse was with animals, not women, may be due to the widely spread practice of bestiality among herdsmen of the Middle East, which is still condoned by custom, although figuring three times in the Pentateuch as a capital crime. In the Akkadian Gilgamesh Epic, Enkidu is said to have lived with gazelles and jostled other wild beasts at the watering place, until civilized by Aruru's priestess. Having enjoyed her embraces for six days and seven nights, he wished to rejoin the wild beasts but, to his surprise, they fled from him. Enkidu then knew that he had gained understanding, and the priestess said: 'Thou art wise, Enkidu, like unto a godl'

2. Primeval man was held by the Babylonians to have been androgynous. Thus the Gilgamesh Epic gives Enkidu androgynous features: `the hair of his head like a woman's, with locks that sprout like those of Nisaba, the Grain-goddess.' The Hebrew tradition evidently derives from Greek sources, because both terms used in a Tannaitic midrash to describe the bisexual Adam are Greek: androgynos, 'man-woman', and diprosopon, 'twofaced'. Philo of Alexandria, the Hellenistic philosopher and commentator on the Bible, contemporary with Jesus, held that man was at first bisexual; so did the Gnostics. This belief is clearly borrowed from Plato. Yet the myth of two bodies placed back to back may well have been founded on observation of Siamese twins, which are sometimes joined in this awkward manner. The two-faced Adam appears to be a fancy derived from coins or statues of Janus, the Roman New Year god.

3. Divergences between the Creation myths of Genesis r and n, which allow Lilith to be presumed as Adam's first mate, result from a careless weaving together of an early Judaean and a late priestly tradition. The older version contains the rib incident. Lilith typifies the Anath-worshipping Canaanite women, who were permitted pre-nuptial promiscuity. Time after time the prophets denounced Israelite women for following Canaanite practices; at first, apparently, with the priests' approval-since their habit of dedicating to God the fees thus earned is expressly forbidden in Deuteronomy xxIII. I8. Lilith's flight to the Red Sea recalls the ancient Hebrew view that water attracts demons. 'Tortured and rebellious demons' also found safe harbourage in Egypt. Thus Asmodeus, who had strangled Sarah's first six husbands, fled 'to the uttermost parts of Egypt' (Tobit viii. 3), when Tobias burned the heart and liver of a fish on their wedding night.

4. Lilith's bargain with the angels has its ritual counterpart in an apotropaic rite once performed in many Jewish communities. To protect the newborn child against Lilith-and especially a male, until he could be permanently safeguarded by circumcision-a ring was drawn with natron, or charcoal, on the wall of the birthroom, and inside it were written the words: 'Adam and Eve. Out, Lilith!' Also the names Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof (meanings uncertain) were inscribed on the door. If Lilith nevertheless succeeded in approaching the child and fondling him, he would laugh in his sleep. To avert danger, it was held wise to strike the sleeping child's lips with one finger-whereupon Lilith would vanish.

5. 'Lilith' is usually derived from the Babylonian-Assyrian word lilitu, ,a female demon, or wind-spirit'-one of a triad mentioned in Babylonian spells. But she appears earlier as 'Lillake' on a 2000 B.G. Sumerian tablet from Ur containing the tale of Gilgamesh and the Willow Tree. There she is a demoness dwelling in the trunk of a willow-tree tended by the Goddess Inanna (Anath) on the banks of the Euphrates. Popular Hebrew etymology seems to have derived 'Lilith' from layil, 'night'; and she therefore often appears as a hairy night-monster, as she also does in Arabian folklore. Solomon suspected the Queen of Sheba of being Lilith, because she had hairy legs. His judgement on the two harlots is recorded in I Kings III. 16 ff. According to Isaiah xxxiv. I4-I5, Lilith dwells among the desolate ruins in the Edomite Desert where satyrs (se'ir), reems, pelicans, owls, jackals, ostriches, arrow-snakes and kites keep her company.

6. Lilith's children are called lilim. In the Targum Yerushalmi, the priestly blessing of Numbers vi. 26 becomes: 'The Lord bless thee in all thy doings, and preserve thee from the Lilim!' The fourth-century A.D. commentator Hieronymus identified Lilith with the Greek Lamia, a Libyan queen deserted by Zeus, whom his wife Hera robbed of her children. She took revenge by robbing other women of theirs.

7. The Lamiae, who seduced sleeping men, sucked their blood and ate their flesh, as Lilith and her fellow-demonesses did, were also known as Empusae, 'forcers-in'; or Mormolyceia, 'frightening wolves'; and described as 'Children of Hecate'. A Hellenistic relief shows a naked Lamia straddling a traveller asleep on his back. It is characteristic of civilizations where women are treated as chattels that they must adopt the recumbent posture during intercourse, which Lilith refused. That Greek witches who worshipped Hecate favoured the superior posture, we know from Apuleius; and it occurs in early Sumerian representations of the sexual act, though not in the Hittite. Malinowski writes that Melanesian girls ridicule what they call `the missionary position', which demands that they should lie passive and recumbent.

8. Naamah, 'pleasant', is explained as meaning that 'the demoness sang pleasant songs to idols'. Zmargad suggest smaragdos, the semi-precious aquamarine; and may therefore be her submarine dwelling. A demon named Smaragos occurs in the Homeric Epigrams.

9. Eve's creation by God from Adam's rib-a myth establishing male supremacy and disguising Eve's divinity-lacks parallels in Mediterranean or early Middle-Eastern myth. The story perhaps derives iconotropically from an ancient relief, or painting, which showed the naked Goddess Anath poised in the air, watching her lover Mot murder his twin Aliyan; Mot (mistaken by the mythographer for Yahweh) was driving a curved dagger under Aliyan's fifth rib, not removing a sixth one. The familiar story is helped by a hidden pun on tsela, the Hebrew for 'rib': Eve, though designed to be Adam's helpmeet, proved to be a tsela, a 'stumbling', or 'misfortune'. Eve's formation from Adam's tail is an even more damaging myth; perhaps suggested by the birth of a child with a vestigial tail instead of a coccyx-a not infrequent occurrence.

10. The story of Lilith's escape to the East and of Adam's subsequent marriage to Eve may, however, record an early historical incident: nomad herdsmen, admitted into Lilith's Canaanite queendom as guests (see 16. 1), suddenly seize power and, when the royal household thereupon flees, occupy a second queendom which owes allegiance to the Hittite Goddess Heba.

The meaning of 'Eve' is disputed. Hawwah is explained in Genesis III. 20 as 'mother of all living'; but this may well be a Hebraicized form of the divine name Heba, Hebat, Khebat or Khiba. This goddess, wife of the Hittite Storm-god, is shown riding a lion in a rock-sculpture at Hattusaswhich equates her with Anath-and appears as a form of Ishtar in Hurrian texts. She was worshipped at Jerusalem (see 27. 6). Her Greek name was Hebe, Heracles's goddess-wife.

2K notes · View notes

cannedcrow · 2 years

Text

Flower Frost - An Empires SMP/Flower Husbands fanfic: Part I, Amaranthus

/Content warning: this is quite a dark fic, including references/descriptions of sickness and death, as well as tense emotional situations. I will add additional content/trigger warnings as I go./

A/N: This is my first fic, and I currently have a few parts written. Critique would be welcome, and reblogs are much appreciated! Tell me what you think. <3

Other parts here!

Amaranthus/Love-Lies-Bleeding: hopeless, not heartless.

In the years to come, some would say the tragedy began, though none knew then, with the boots. Others would argue that it began even farther back, submerged deep in the annals of prophecy. Many a philosopher who opines fate as ineluctable might argue that some events are but blots in time that draw all paths towards them - but one must not dwell on the beginning when the end is still to be decided. On a day like many others, the King of Rivendell had been negotiating a trade - not of goods between nations, but personal interest - with the Ocean Queen. In exchange for a relic that had fallen into King Scott’s possession, she’d offered a range of her collected curiosities to him, and Scott’s magpie-eye had flitted straight to a pair of splendid diamond Frost-Walker boots. The Ocean Queen had laughed at this predictability, and the two had parted ways contentedly. Fate, however, is a cruel and devious mistress. She does not favour coincidence, nor allow her ancient plans to go awry. When dealing with destiny in terrestrial hands, one often comes away with more than one expected.

Rivendell’s King was not a foolhardy man. Young as he was, he was clever and silver-tongued, warm-hearted to his allies and people, and with all the sharpness and frigidity of ice to his enemies. Alas, he was also proud, and somewhat dragonish in his appreciation for beauty and value. And so it was that, in his haste to test his newfound powers, he neglected to notice the faint inscription on the sole of the boots - for they carried a curse that, if observed, may have halted the advance of tragedy. The King made swift work of his journey home, eager to test his newfound powers at the first chance. At the first river he met, he leapt off the bank, and with a powerful beat of massive snow-white wings, sent himself skyward, spiraling up into the clouds before sharply curling his wings into his body in a dive that would do credit to a falcon. He sped towards the river like an arrow, delighting in the icy wind that clawed his face, and moments before hitting the water, brought his legs forward to impact — landing with the steady grace of a dancer on a platform of sturdy, new-formed ice. He walked forward, marveling at the way the ice danced across the water from his feet, as though the water itself were rolling out a carpet for him. He could not suppress a triumphant grin. How appropriate, He mused, For the King of Rivendell to control the movements of the very ice. It was only a matter of days before Scott began to notice something awry. He woke up one morning to find his cyan hair pearled with frost. Upon examining his reflection, he felt unease stir deep in his heart - he knew enough of sorcery to sense ethereal forces at work - but he forced it down. You’re being paranoid, he reprimanded himself mentally, running a hand through his hair as though to dislodge the apprehension. You’ve only just contained the threat of Xornoth; of course you’re on edge. You’ve a duty to your people to be sensible and sure. His fingers reached for the crystal amulet, hand closing around it, feeling the ever-present heat, the fierce heartbeat inches from his own. An unbidden thought came to his mind: Two brothers, fire and ice.

There was a fairytale on the matter that was common in the Cod Kingdom and the Ocean Empire. Jimmy had told it to him once, though he wasn’t the best of narrators. All began as water, so the tale went, until the day two brothers, sons of the sea, began to pull asunder, led by their yearning for newness, until their passion changed them forever, and there was left Fire and Ice. Fire brought into creation the endless deserts, the stately, painted ridges of the mesas. He raised the plains of endless grass that shimmered in the sun, and the humid jungle, the crowns of which hid colourful fauna that basked in the gloom. Ice in his turn brought about the interminable tundras, the sweeping bleak and rocky hills, and the snow-capped, cloud-cloaked mountains that taunted the sky. Each made their territory - for the world was large enough for the two to live in harmony - as they saw fit. Where they met grew thick woods of dark oak, the sun glancing off their leaves while on the forest floor, mushrooms flourished in the damp shadows.

The tale went on to describe the various creatures the brothers brought into life, and parents telling their children made it a game to guess which animal was being described.

For many years, the two lived harmoniously. But the power of creation will infect even the noblest of souls in time, and both began to hunger for more. Fire was the first to break the reigns of civility - he began to conquest the lands that Ice had created, whipping into a frenzy a storm of sand and dust and fire that swept through the stillness of Ice’s territories. Ice was not to be scorned, and retaliated in turn, conjuring the hard mountain winds to lift a mighty blizzard, the winds of which tore through the jungles and deserts, ice shards tearing plants apart like so many cruel claws. Both left wreckage in their wake and continued to war with the savagery of beasts. It was the Sea, the father of the two, that finally ended hostilities. Disgusted with the actions of it’s sons, it cursed both to be fish, to return to the water they had abandoned forever. Fire became the salmon, with its bloody scales and copper head, while Ice became the dusty-silver cod. Jimmy had told him this tale in justification for his choice of headwear, and at the time he’d only snickered.

Scott sighed. He was distracting himself with children’s stories. With a last glance in the mirror, he turned away to attire himself properly. In the following days, he noticed his fingertips darkening, as though with a dusk shadow. He sent for a pair of long lambskin gloves. As long as it’s only me, he thought. It became a kind of mantra. When he found his breath emitting in icy clouds despite the warmth of his home, he began to stay silent when indoors. As long as it’s only me. The first external sign that something was wrong came with the ebb - or rather, what should have been the ebb - of Winter. Rivendell winters were harsh, that was to be expected, but the Spring was always trusted to bring new life and hesitant warmth. The snows would recede, flocks of snowdrops alight the slopes, and mountain poppies wave their scarlet banners in defiance of the bitter cold. The streams would thaw, and the air fill with the music of running water and jubilant songbirds. Snow hares and foxes would shed their lily-white coats in favour of earthy greys and browns, and newborn lambs would patch the newly green hillsides. A lucky observer may even see newborn fawns, protectively watched by their fathers, the broad, thick-pelted, ash-silver mountain stags that were so revered in the Kingdom. Rivendell in Spring was more beautiful than ever - but Spring had not come.

Perhaps this Winter was simply more arduous than usual. Perhaps, even, Aeor was displeased. These thoughts drifted nonchalantly through many minds, slipping from tongue to tongue in small conversation. They were a people of snow and ice; they did not fear the cloak of Winter. Nevertheless, Winter persisted. Even as the frost should be thawing, it crept ever on up the stained glass of Aeor’s cathedral. Phantasmal spires of ice hung from the golden antlers adorning so many buildings, and the erratically swirling snows showed no signs of abating. Alas, the curse was surreptitious and patient, like any predator stalking its prey. What began as mere idiosyncrasies soon showed their far crueler colours: a sickness had emerged, creeping in on cat’s paws. It began innocuously enough - one was simply colder than usual, which, in the bleak mountains of Rivendell, hardly went noticed. One’s face became pallid, lips turned blue, and breath emerged in icy clouds, even when one was by the warmth of a fire. Then the frostbite came. The extremities would start to stain a bruise-like purple, darkening quickly to black as the flesh died - this earned it the unofficial name of ‘Ender Plague’ among the village children - and blistered like wax. Death came swiftly after the frostbite. It came as a relief. One Rivendell apothecary claimed that, upon making an incision in a newly dead body, he’d found the blood frozen solid, like so many charred, iron-wrought roots.

With the sickness came fear. All were frightened by the seeming inevitability of such a vicious illness. Parents watched, helpless, as their children cried pitifully for the cold, even while wrapped in blankets by a roaring fire. For its piercing, all-encompassing cold, it became known as the Plague of Endless Winter. And King Scott looked on in despair. He was no fool, and had begun to suspect that it was he who was the plague-bringer - for he too displayed many symptoms of the plague, though terrible in their difference. By now, his arms were that dull purple up to the elbow, as were his legs up to the knee, darkening to onyx-black near his hands and feet. His already pale countenance was nothing short of cadaverous, and the tips of his pointed ears were just starting to colour as his other extremities. He knew that by this stage, most would be dead. But his flesh was not dying, nor even numb - it did not blister and warp as that of other sufferers. He felt as strong and dexterous as ever - stronger even - and horrified for the fact. In his grief and fear, he locked himself away; he felt an unsightly and dangerous thing, some wild, volatile creature to be hidden and forgotten about. He delegated affairs of state to his council, ordered his food left outside his chamber door, and refused visits from all. He felt a coward, and hated himself for it - but he could not face the thought of hurting those he loved by his mere presence. He had done this, he knew it. He had brought plague to his people and made their own land oppose them, though he’d no knowledge of how.

Who knows who else I hurt? Joel? Lizzie? ...Jimmy? He sank to the floor in defeat. Cursed. His entire life must be cursed; the plaything of fate. Perhaps even Xornoth could not be blamed for the terrible path he’d followed. “Look at us,” He declared sardonically to the empty room. “The cursed brothers. We ought to make badges.” It wasn’t the first time he’d found himself speaking to the amulet that imprisoned his brother. It was a comfort in its own peculiar way; an imagined line of communication to the brother from his childhood. The amulet, of course, did not answer, and the room remained as silent as snow. Other rulers tried to visit him, confused and distressed, for of course, the plague had come to their lands, too. But he had no answer for them and sent them away. To find the much-admired elven king - always so steady and self-assured - in such disarray struck fear in the other rulers.

The most heart-wrenching of his attempted visitors was the Codfather himself. He pounded on the door, shouting for Scott to speak to him, and Scott wanted nothing more than to open the door and let Jimmy envelop him in his arms, let him tell him that he wasn’t an omen of doom, a harbinger of death, a monster. But the thought of seeing Jimmy slowly weaken and succumb to the unrelenting cold stopped him. I can’t watch you die again, he thought, before shaking his head slightly, perplexed. He hadn’t seen Jimmy die; what was wrong with him? This was hardly the time to have this crisis again. Biting back unbidden tears, he ordered the Cod King sent away. This could not continue, he knew that. He was the King, it was his duty to save his people, to aid his allies and their people, too. He’d used his time in self-isolation to scour every book and manuscript of magic he possessed, searching the dull pages of Rivendell historical records in hopes of finding some mention of similar circumstances in the many volumes. In his desperation, he even sent for tomes of old fairytales and legends of Rivendell, hoping for the slightest mention, to no avail. He did not know of any way to prevent himself from treading death in his wake, and was unwilling to test anything for fear of causing yet more harm. He had abandoned the boots, hating the powers they gave him, but it appeared it was not so simple.

Everywhere he trod, nearby water froze. His hair and eyelashes sparkled always with pearls of frost, as did his wings, but while he felt the cold, it didn’t concern him. If he were his usual self, he’d have admired the admittedly handsome effect of the starlit frost that jeweled his hair. You narcissist, He could imagine Jimmy remarking with a grin, at which he would explain why it was essential for him to take meticulous care of his image, and Jimmy would just laugh. Jimmy always found some reason to laugh. He missed him.

He sat against the wall, thinking. It was only a matter of time until the other rulers broke down his door, and there really was only one thing to do. After all, cancers are a thing to be cut out, and rabid dogs to be shot. He cried then, for there was little else to do, and cried all the more upon feeling his tears fall, as cold as a mountain stream.

82 notes · View notes

fuckyeahisawthat · 4 years

Text

the old guard and moral uncertainty

One of the things I love the most about The Old Guard, which I haven’t seen discussed much, is that there is no why to their powers. There’s no origin story, either via destiny or accident. There’s no prophecy, no curse, no ancient god, no super-serum, no lab accident, no mutant spider bite. If there is a reason why these people, in particular, are like this, we don’t know it and they don’t either. Where their immortality comes from, and why it fades when it does, is a complete unknown.

In other contexts I could see this coming off as a frustrating lack of clarity in worldbuilding. In The Old Guard I think it works as an essential piece of the philosophical landscape in which the story operates.

A parallel and interlocking component of this landscape is the fact that the immortals exist in a world where there are very few, if any, other superpowered beings. There are no pre-ordained forces of darkness, no aliens to fight, no neatly-arranged supervillains that only they can defeat. There are only humans.

This means they have to create their own framework of meaning for their actions, the way the rest of us mortals do. The mythology of their world doesn’t provide any built-in delineation of good guys and bad guys and What We’re Fighting For. There’s no easy certainty of purpose or moral clarity to be had.

I think there is a distinction to be drawn out here between moral uncertainty and moral ambiguity. Because there are certainly plenty of superhero stories, and stories about violent characters in general, that engage with morally gray choices and anti-heroic behavior. But these problems are more commonly considered along the vector of ends and means. “Are these questionable means justified by this end, which I believe is good? Is there a point at which violent means make this good end I believe I am pursuing moot?” (It’s interesting that the characters in The Old Guard who engage in this more expected sort of ends-and-means reckoning are the antagonists.)

For the protagonists, the question lingers much more in the place of: “What even is our end? How do we know it’s good?” Not just, “Are we being effective as a handful of immortals against all that is wrong with the world?” although that question is there. But “How do we know we are doing the right thing at all?” The narrative provides no definitive answer to this question.

“Are you good guys or bad guys?” Nile asks.

Joe’s answer--“Depends on the century”--I think is not just meant to imply that they have been on many sides of many different conflicts, but that sorting out the good guys from the bad guys is malleable and historically contested.

“We fight for what we think is right,” Nicky says, in the same conversation where he talks about how the love of his life was someone he was taught to hate, someone who I’m sure he felt right about killing the first time around.

Andy, notably, says nothing in response to this question.

Even Copley’s I’ve-connected-the-dots board is not as satisfying as it may appear at first. For every prize-winning scientist whose fate they affected, there must have been countless ordinary civilians whose lives never dented the historic record. Was saving them any less meaningful? For every future humanitarian and peacemaker protected, how many conscripted soldiers met the business end of a labrys? What might any one of them have contributed to the world if they had survived? And how does one possibly weigh all these considerations in the moment when someone’s life is on the line? No one can, not even an immortal.

It is perhaps appropriate that the film’s clearest moral statement is articulated not in a grand pronouncement before a battle charge, but by a background character, a mortal with a handful of lines, in the back room of a pharmacy. “You need help. What does it matter why? Today, I put this on your wound. Tomorrow, you help someone up when they fall. We’re not meant to be alone.”

The final sentence of that statement isn’t an accident. Running parallel to the more philosophical musings on moral uncertainty in the text is a constant focus on the value of human connection as the thing that keeps you alive, and sane, when an easy way to make sense of the world is not on offer. It’s significant that the thing that convinces Andy that life is still worth living is not a mission, but a person. And while the scene with Copley’s research boards may be the moment that attempts to explain what the movie is saying philosophically, the emotional climax is the whole team, and in the final moments just Nile and Andy, protecting each other over and over again.

All of this adds up to a thesis statement that’s considerably more nuanced and humanist than one might expect from this genre. Protect the people you love. Give help when it’s needed. Try to do what’s right, but have humility about whether you actually know what that is.

Walking along the precipice of uncertainty without tipping over into grimdark cynicism and despair is an extremely challenging balancing act to pull off, and The Old Guard absolutely smashes it.

#the old guard #meta #action movies #morality #worldbuilding

1K notes · View notes

maddieinwonder · 3 years

Text

A Lesson In Romance #7: False Start

Spencer Reid x Fem!BAU!Reader

Genre: Fluff

Warnings: Just a lot of awkward vibes hahaha

Word Count: 1.7k

Plot: Reader keeps getting caught in rom-com situations with Spencer Reid. This time, they try to confess their feelings.

A/N: I didn’t actually manage to include the definition of a False Start in the chapter itself, so I’ll add it at the end. No spoilers for now!

Masterlist | All chapters here!

-----------

It took you 24 hours to decide that you were going to do something about your feelings for the good doctor. Pretty quick, considering you were a living, breathing rom-com cynic. But as ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, once said: "The only constant in life is change".

Specifically, change happened after you woke up in your cute co-worker and dear friend's arms and you wanted nothing more than to get back into them as fast as possible.

But by the universal laws of working in the BAU, catching a break seemed to be the hardest when you actually wanted one.

Firstly, it was like every serial killer in the country decided to cancel their vacations simultaneously, swamping the team with urgent case after case. At this point, you were more familiar with the couch on the jet than your bed at home, and everyone was feeling the strain.

Secondly, if you weren't sleeping, you were usually out in the field chasing unsubs with Derek or Rossi. You had stopped holding out hope for being paired with Spencer — on account of your areas of specialty overlapping too much, and Hotch not being the type of leader to waste his resources — and as a result:

Thirdly, getting even ten minutes alone with the genius became an impossible task, and not for lack of trying either. At the start of the month, the two of you had tried to adapt your breakfast ritual to the road, but it always got interrupted mid-coffee order or even at the ding of the lift. Not that you and Spencer stopped trying, no, but your patience was wearing thin.

So you did something you hadn't done since you submitted your application to join the BAU — you prayed for a chance.

Because every day that you didn't admit your feelings to the doctor was another day fighting the compulsion to tell somebody else about them, and god only knows what a room full of profilers (and one nosy tech analyst) would do with that kind of information.

Then, out of the blue, the door of opportunity opened.

After two weeks of straight travel, the team had earned a well-deserved one night’s rest in your own beds before dealing with a local case, bright and early tomorrow morning. And since your flight landed at 2am and all the trains had stopped by then, this gave you the perfect shot to execute your plan.

Unfortunately, you forgot to take into account the most important factor — your nerves.

It didn't help that Derek had wolf-whistled in the carpark as the two of you walked off in the same direction, nor that Spencer immediately put your favourite album into the CD player out of instinct; an overly domestic action that made your heart beat even faster.

But it was when you arrived in front of his apartment building that you felt the worst of it. As you tried to summon the right words to your lips, your heart hammered in your chest and your thoughts jumbled themselves into nonsense.

"Are you ok?" Spencer asked, snapping you out of your anxious spiral instantly. "You don't look so well."

"I-I'm fine." Your fingers twitched nervously.

"Doesn't seem like it." He looked down at your hands, and you cursed your subconscious brain for giving you away. Then, he placed a hand over yours and your heart stopped.

"You're not alright, that's for sure, but it seems like it's just sleep deprivation." He assessed, bending slightly to look at your face. "You can't drive in this state. Do you want to come in?”

Your head snapped up to meet his gaze, ready to protest, but Spencer beat you to it. "Let’s go. You wanted to talk about something, right?" He called out, already one foot out of the car.

Before you could realise what was happening, you found yourself sitting on Spencer's couch holding a warm cup of tea.

This was the first time you were in his apartment. Yet, it was exactly what you thought it'd be like. Every wall was lined with bookshelves, filled to max capacity with books of every topic imaginable from neuroscience to philosophy. Those that didn't make it to the shelves were found in random stacks around his apartment, standing out against his forest green walls.

"Did you know that chamomile tea is a natural remedy for insomnia? In fact, it is commonly regarded as a mild tranquilizer. It's calming effects may be attributed to the antioxidant apigenin, which binds to specific receptors in your brain that initiate sleep and reduce anxiety." He explained, walking over with his own mug.

"I actually did know that." You smiled. The tea seemed to work its magic because you did feel relaxed, and you must have looked it too, because the worried frown disappeared off Spencer's face.

"Didn't know you were a tea person." You commented lightly, blowing the steam from your mug.

"There's a lot of things you don't know about me." He replied mysteriously, and you raised your eyebrows.

Spencer's apartment was too quiet, no rumbling fridge or quiet radio playing in the background to make your awkward silence any less pronounced. It was then that you noticed he didn't have a TV. Somehow this fact didn't surprise you very much.

"You... you wanted to talk to me about something?" He broke the silence, looking down at the hot tea swirling in his mug.

Right. You were here to talk about your feelings. Your face flushed as you tried to summon your willpower, again.

"I wanted to tell you something—" You began shakily. "But before that, I just want to preface, we can ignore this entire thing if you don't agree. I mean, I really enjoy our friendship as it is, and I wouldn't want to do anything to affect tha—"

"Wait." Spencer interrupted urgently, before catching himself. "Sorry, um, before that, can I say something?"

"Um, ok, shoot." You replied meekly, trying to hide your relief behind a long sip of tea. There was a pause as he gathered his thoughts, and you might have been seeing things, but he looked almost... nervous?

"The day we met, I calculated the probability of meeting somebody that shared my exact coffee order and the result was almost one in a million.” He finally spoke, lifting his head to meet your gaze. “That probability decreased when I factored in working together, sharing the same interests, and... and how I enjoyed spending time with you more than with anybody else."

Spencer cleared his throat, a blush coming onto his cheeks.

"Ever since then... my life just started making sense. I know I’m a scientist, not a poet, and I could tell you all the statistics about relationships in the world, but when it comes to you...”

His cheeks were crimson now, as he ran his fingers through his hair. You had a feeling yours looked the same.

"I guess, what I'm trying to say, is that I think you're beautiful and smart, and I have no idea what you see in me, but I'd really—"

Suddenly, both your phones buzzed violently against his coffee table, jolting you out of the moment. You leaned over in a trained motion, only to see exactly what you expected:

Garcia: No rest for the wicked, crime fighters. Conference room in 30.

Penny: No rest for the wicked, crime fighters. Conference room in 30.

You let out a sigh you didn't realise you were holding, and Spencer looked over at you, doe-eyed and nervous.

“The case?" He asked quietly.

There was a silence filled with words unsaid. "We should go." He said finally. "If we leave now, we can still make it on time."

You only nodded in response, more out of duty than desire, and gulped down the rest of your tea. The thought of what he was about to say burned down your throat.

Driving away from Spencer’s apartment was torturous. The doctor hadn’t said anything to you since he entered the car, only fiddling with his bag as he looked out the window. It was too dark to read his expression, but you wondered if he could still hear the way he called you “beautiful”, or whether the moment had already dissolved into the space between you.

Luckily, you didn’t need to wait long for an answer, as Spencer tugged on your sleeve before you exited the carpark, his face scrunched in worry.

"I really didn't mean for that to be so... weird. Can we talk about this again after the case?" He asked softly, and despite every semblance of logic left in your brain, you couldn’t stop the hope from blooming in your chest and you smiled.

That was when Spencer did something completely uncharacteristic. (You didn't know this at the time, but it was something that you would tease him about for a long time after.)

In one fluid movement, the doctor pulled you into a tight hug that elicited a squeak from you, but it only took a second for the initial shock to wear off before you relaxed completely into his warm touch. He took that as a sign to continue, burying his head into your shoulder and letting out a content sigh.

Unlike waking up to your bodies intertwined, nothing about this was a mistake. Not the way his fingers stroked your back peacefully, nor the way his curly hair tickled your cheek. You felt the stress of the past two weeks melt away in his embrace, and so did any coherent thought, except one: normal friends didn't hug each other like this.

Later when the two of you finally entered the conference room, miraculously still on time, nobody commented on the smiles plastered on your faces but everybody could tell. They were profilers after all.

But for the first time in awhile, you were just too happy to care.

-----------

Tag List:

@blue-space-porgs @nobutalsoyes @lady-loves-a-lot @queen-flower @oops-all-ajs @spottedzebrasinpartyhats @agentcarterisgay @totalmess191 @sapphic-prentiss @mellowalieneggsknight || @averyhotchner @amesandpineapples @willowrose99

Definition of a False Start here

186 notes · View notes

scottymcgeesterwrites · 2 years

Text

Being a Writer is Lonesome

When I was a kid, I wasn’t the type of writer who was shy about sharing their stories. In fact, I frequently annoyed people with my stories. I wrote with a pen on a pad of paper. I wrote on anything I could find really. If I left my pad at home and was out with my parents at a restaurant, I would start writing the next scene on my napkin.

I would openly wave my papers in front of friends and classmates saying, “Hey do you want to read this fanfic I wrote about Yoshi saving Princess Peach? It’s really funny. At least, I think it’s funny. Tell me what you think!”

Some classmates would try to get me to shut up by tearing apart my papers. I would then painstakingly rewrite the story word-by-word on new pages. If they tore that up too, I just kept rewriting. . . and I kept asking them to read my stories. I had to piece together lots of pages with Scotch tape, and I still have them stored away in my drawers. They are ancient artifacts by now. You have to be very gentle when you hold them.

I think I was too innocent back then to recognize that I was being bullied. Even today I think about it like, “Was I bullied? I don’t actually know.” Can you say you were bullied if you were never aware that you were being bullied? For the sake of avoiding a long philosophical argument, probably. Yes. But that behavior flew over my head at the time because I had a one-track mind. It was to create. If someone destroyed my creation then I had to recreate it. No ifs ands or butts about it. It HAD to come alive again. I just retorted with, “You’re fucking dumb” and rewrote the story. I’d then have the audacity (or stupidity, either way) to ask them again to read it.

Learning how to write was no easy task. I had the very bad luck of being assigned very bad English teachers throughout my schooling. Very bad. Extremely bad. My middle school English teacher ruled with an iron fist, and we did what we could just to evade her wrath, not so much to genuinely learn. My closest friends from that time will never forget the traumatic experience we had reading the book Johnny Tremain as a class. Just thinking about that book makes me shudder. We were survivors of a long, bitter war. Then in high school, each year was like another Defense Against the Dark Arts situation. The English teacher would be relatively new, not very good, and didn’t last very long.

My English teacher in sophomore year was more like a surfer dude than an English teacher. You would take one look at this guy and “English teacher” was the last guess on your list. Oh, I’m sure he knew his stuff. He had the enthusiasm. He had the knowledge. He just had absolutely no control over the classroom. That happens with really young teachers. Most of my memories of that class are of my classmates just yelling and laughing and doing whatever they wanted. I have this image ingrained in my memory of him zoning out with the most dejected look on his face after failing to get us to care about The Catcher in the Rye. The only other memory I have about what we read in that class was Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil. That was a pain for us to go through - a short story but a long haul. Not long after we graduated, he got kicked out of the school after the administration discovered a picture of him smoking pot on Facebook. I joined the sci-fi/fantasy club right away as a freshman in high school. I joined at the right time because they were considering making their very first literary magazine. I think around my junior year was when they got serious about it and I submitted a story to be published. It was then that I realized how bad my writing was. The moderator loved my story but, with a straight face, he looked at me and asked, “Is English your second-language? The writing is very bad.” Up until then, I had never felt so embarrassed in an academic setting in my entire life. He legit thought I must have been from another country because my grammar was all over the place. But the honest truth was that I just had really bad English teachers.

There was really only one genuinely good English class I had, and that was AP English Language and Composition in my senior year of high school. I finally learned how to “really” write, with flavor and wit. The road to get there though was really rocky, and the teacher gave us some very difficult assignments. The worst assignment I ever wrote was also my second most embarrassing moment as a writer. The paper required us to nitpick George Orwell’s choice of words in an essay he wrote. We had to somehow dish out a 10-paged paper on why Orwell chose the words he did in his essay. It was the weirdest and most obscure paper I ever wrote. I fucking bombed that essay, and everyone else did too, so the teacher gave us all the chance to rewrite it. I still have that paper in my drawer with my teacher’s glaring comment in red ink that reads, “Your thesis borders on sarcasm.” It stung when I read that for the first time. But I think it took that one terrible awful paper to get me to finally learn how to write a paper. I learned so much in that class. That teacher was direct, no-nonsense, and told you exactly what you needed to do. People were afraid of him, but I thought, “Damn, I wish you were always my English teacher.” Before graduating, I gave my favorite teachers a copy of my story at the time on CD (that’s how long ago this was). I never heard back from any of them. I didn’t really expect them to. They were teachers after all, and teachers are very busy. Looking back now I cringe at the story I gave them, because what I thought was a masterpiece back then was really very rough and unpolished.

My parents learned English as a second-language and were on a different wavelength about things. I was excited to show them my story called “The Drifters”, a sci-fi adventure that I was maturing since 8th grade that involved political satire about the current state of affairs. They immediately rejected it, fearing that I would draw ire from people and the government. I saw where they were coming from though. They hailed from countries that suffered years of political turmoil. Being that I was becoming a writer in the time of the Patriot Act, they firmly told me not to write about “those things”.

I felt very uncomfortable showing them anything else after that. With little direction or motivation at school and an elephant in the room at home, I did what any artist does in the modern age - I retreated to the Internet. There, I learned more about writing than I ever did in school, and learned how to critique a work of fiction and discuss with writers.

Of course, as the Internet grew, so did all the bad things that came with it. You can get lost in many arguments that spiral out of control. Someone’s critique can border more on shaming you than genuine constructive criticism. You try to retaliate. They pick at something dumb you said, so now you look like the bigger idiot. It all goes to shit. The third and last most embarrassing moment I ever had as a writer happened online. I used to be part of Young Writers Online (YWO). The site is now defunct and scrubbed, but man there were some embarrassing posts from me.

There was a period of time where I was paranoid about my ideas being stolen, or that I had wasted so much time that other people out there would publish a similar idea before I could. I imagined that when my story would finally be published, readers would compare me to someone else, when in reality I developed my ideas years earlier. It was my worst fear as a writer. Any time a major Hollywood movie or TV show had a similar idea to something I wrote, I panicked. I always posted about these feelings on the writing forum. A certain someone on the writing forum clashed heads with me whenever I expressed my anxiety. He was my most fervent critic. I once read an issue of Science Fiction & Fantasy. I bought their issues at the time to really get a feel for what kind of stories get accepted into magazines. I had already submitted stories that got rejected. One of them was called “Janus in Space”, which was set in my fictional world of “Space Hotel”. I then came across a sci-fi story in the magazine called “Mars Hotel” that was eerily similar to my story “Janus in Space”, which I had also posted online in YWO. The parallels were staggering. Topps was the name of my hotel’s maid, and she was written off at the time as a young android who was a bit of an airhead, and she hummed a lot because of a mechanical error. The maid in Mars Hotel was also a young android and also had a mechanical error that caused her to say things incorrectly. Both hotels had a creaky pulley elevator that everyone complained about and wondered why they had it if turbolifts existed. Both had clerks who hated their job and an absent-minded boss. The tone was also humorous and witty and used modern curse words, much like my world of “Space Hotel”. This freaked the fuck out of me. So, I went out of my way to contact the magazine and show my evidence. I posted about this in YWO too. That same critic once again lambasted me saying it was my imagination and I was making a fool of myself. Then one day, the writer of “Mars Hotel” created an account to respond to my comment. They explained the situation and assured me that they never came across my story on YWO, that it was an original idea, and wished me well. I had reached peak embarrassment as a writer. “It doesn’t matter who is original. What matters is who does it best.” That was what my most fervent critic told me, and kept driving it into me.

Alright. I learned to live with it.

A couple years later, that same critic posted on YWO complaining about how Interstellar had a similar idea he was working on, and he didn’t feel like he could write his story anymore. Well... #

I think as I got older I learned more and more not to share much with anyone. There’s no real use to it. You’ll only complicate things. They say that the biggest regret people have on their deathbed is not having had the courage to say what they wanted to say. I did that for most of my youth and it only got myself into trouble and awkward situations. I don’t recommend it. When I die, I will say that I wish I had kept the peace. Also, people don’t have the time to read your work anyway. Every writer knows this. “Hey, I can read your story!” “Oh cool! Let me know what you think in like a month if that’s okay?” “Yeah sure!” And that’s the end of that there. You never hear from them ever again. Not your friends, not even your significant others or your spouse. Everybody’s got something they need to do nowadays, even you.

You get stuck in a dead-end job doing your writing. You tell yourself you’re going to make it big one day, but every other day you have to do something else. Obligations, emergencies, the struggle to keep it together in the Middle Class. You try really hard to find time to write but someone out there gets mad that you’re not focusing on them, like your friend or your significant other. The second you have time to sit and write, something happens. Something always happens. There’s always a thing you have to do or a thing you have to attend. Then there’s money that you need to make in order to fucking live. Every week you find yourself thinking, “This week was crazy but the next week should be clear. I should get back on track next week. Yeah.” And then the moment you express an ounce of needing alone time suddenly you’re the bad guy. Suddenly it’s, “Well, Eddie, think of all the other people who have had it worse” or my favorite is “You just need to budget your time better” - coming from some guy on YouTube who went to Harvard and whose parents paid everything off and who is now telling you how you can do anything by simply blocking your time differently.

As if you have nothing else in life to do that is currently on fire.

I have come full circle as a writer.

The happy giddy kid has long disappeared, and I have embraced the stoic and reclusive hermit. Being a writer is lonesome because it’s something so introspective that I don’t think your friends or family will really understand it. You can have your deepest, darkest secrets laid out in a mosaic across your entire story and those closest to you won’t even blink an eye. Other times you don’t want to write a metaphor about anything, and you just have a cool idea you need to dish out. Then that’s when those same people are convinced that THIS is the story that means something to you when it doesn’t. They’d be like, “Oh my God, are you okay? Wait is this character me? Does that mean you hate me?” NO. It’s literally just a story about a talking donkey wearing a hat. If you ask me that again I swear I will call the police. Being a writer is lonesome because it’s all in your head, even when you show people your words. Why do we do it anyway when it gets adapted into a Netflix show before you can even finish the series? Why do we do it when there are so many artists and animators now? The thing I find unique about being a writer is that nobody will really know or “see” how you imagine the story the way you do. You may have your tale adapted on screen or illustrated, but when you die that world truly dies with you. You can never translate something 100%. Nobody else will ever fully experience how your characters walk, talk, and exist. Nobody else will know its secrets that you consider canon but dare not tell anyone. Nobody else will fully understand how the buildings in your towns and cities look, their exact angles and shapes. Nobody else will fully imagine the sounds everyone and everything makes. And the vibe. Nobody will get the vibe like you do. Even when I finish a draft and one day publish it and consider it “finished”, it will never fully convey how I saw the story in my head. Every person who will read it will have their own vision. I think that is why we write. One story becomes a thousand different tales, a thousand different interpretations. We discuss the intended and the unintended. And that’s really just art in general. When I die, so will all my worlds and all my characters. Thousands of worlds and millions of characters, lost in time. Entire cultures and histories. They will never be realized like how I realized them. It sounds lonely and sad but there’s also solace in it. It’s sacred. Everything will die with me in private.

#onwriting #writing #writingcommunity #reading #teaching #school #schooling #english #english class #life

5 notes · View notes

mynameisdreartblog · 3 years

Text

Analysis of Ween’s ‘Ocean Man’

Ocean Man is a song that Ween has described as something that formed together like magic falling into place. But like all magic, there are hidden mechanisms behind it that necessitate going being the scientific method. For a long time, this song has remained pleasurable but incomprehensible, yet I plan to decode it. The first life of “Ocean man, take me by the hand, lead me to the land that you understand”, while also being a reference to Echoes by Pink Floyd, is also an invitation to be taken to a world of wonder and whimsy. The world being referred to is what I call the ‘village under the sea.’ It was a term coined by Jacques Cousteau to describe his endeavors to build underwater habitats for humanity to experimentally live in, but it also applies as a general ontology of the ocean in respect to humanity’s place as a lifeform on Earth. It asks of us to view the sea in the ways that Indigenous Polynesians have, in that there is no separation of place by terrain: The sea is just as much habitable land as any continent or island.

In asking us to understand the land, we’re also being asked to understand the sea for ultimately there is no difference between land and sea other than that which comes from trying to objectify the oceans. “The voyage to the corner of the globe is a real trip” is contradictory because there are no corners to the ocean: It’s an entity with no boundaries except constructed ones. The trip you’ll go on is one that’ll take you into a worldview where you’ll be able to understand that you cannot objectify something as mighty and powerful as the ocean. Given the psychedelic context of this album, you will indeed ‘trip.’

“The crust of a tan man imbibed by the sand, soaking up the first of the land.” This is an indirect description of humanity, especially a man in the Western world in 1997. The human is imbibed by the sand, meaning the hot, dry sand is absorbing him, leading to him having crusty skin like someone who has tanned for too long. He’s soaking up the thirst of the land because man has become so familiarized with the essentialism of dry land that he forgets that life has managed to live successfully outside of it. It all reverts back to the desire to deconstruct these destructive Western terrain classifications that stopped us from appreciating the impossibly complex ecological harmony of the life that exists just below the surface of the ocean. The surface of the ocean has historically acted, to Westerners, as just inhospitable land that needed to be crossed. Cousteau radically challenged this view by using popular science as a medium to explore and document the ancient world that was right beneath us, introducing the technology of scuba to better aid the cause of inciting civilian interest in the oceans and thus a sentimental value to their preservation beyond the unforeseen economic ones.

“Can you see through the wonder of amazement at the overman?” This references the concept by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche of the Übermensch originally described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which simply defined is a man who rises above the dogmatic moralism of conventional Christianity to create his own values that, out of resistance, refuses to impose it upon others. In the context of this song, it can have two meanings: One, the ‘ocean man’ as a figure is fascinated by seeing this external overman figure and is being questioned as to whether not he can overcome their own illusionment for what they really are, positioning the ‘ocean man’ as a symbol of native marine life and the overman as the Western man who has historically not cared for or acknowledged them. The transcendence of Christian morality could, in this case, be an acceptance of a worldview that objectifies the ocean and marginalizes ocean life and leads to the indirect destruction of Cousteau’s ‘village under the sea.’

Two, the ‘ocean man’ is also the overman, and that seeing through the wonder of amazement is recognizing that, as a human being, the ocean man sees the overman as a picture of what he can become if he sheds his Western ontology of the ocean and embraces it as a sacred element to his existence. Literally, this is transcending centuries of what Christian moralism has made of the oceans as mere barriers in the path of evangelization: To become the overman, the ocean man must embrace a journey to transcend this dogmatism and find a new morality constructed on his terms and his relationship with the ocean.

“The crust is elusive when it casts forth to the childlike man.” We’ve established before that the crust refers to the residue of life adjusting to living entirely on land, and it becoming elusive means it's hard to find. Reference to the ‘childlike man’ could be referring to a man who has shed these imposed ideas of how they should interact with the world, and thus become once again like a child with unbridled curiosity and earnestness about the world. The child doesn’t objectify the sea and obtains an ontology akin to Indigenous Polynesians, albeit in a much more microcosmic environment.

The childlike man is equivalent to a Western scientist, like Cousteau, who takes up a sudden and profound interest in the ocean and specifically the village that lies at the bottom of it. The crust is no longer there because the childlike man isn’t limiting his idea of home to just dry land, thereby minimizing the crust. It’s not a stretch to believe that, in some way, the character of SpongeBob functions as a cultural icon functions in this way: He’s extremely curious and earnest about the world in a way that differentiated him from most protagonists of ‘90s cartoons loaded with postmodern cynicism. SpongeBob is also the highly relatable protagonist in which we’re exposed to the world of Bikini Bottom, another representation of the village under the sea.

“The sequence of a life form braised in the sand, soaking up the thirst of the land” Braising is a method of cooking which involves lightly frying something and then slowly stewing it in a closed container. The light frying is the intermediate period of moving away from that Western, landlocked crust and preparing to enter into the village under the sea. While the slow stewing is, like a sponge, absorbing the ecological order of everything around you. The goal of this is to reorganize your idea of ecosophy (philosophy of ecological order) away from what Western ways of life have traditionally concerned themselves with.

The thirst of the land you’re soaking up takes on a double meaning here, in that you’re now soaking up the subconscious desire man has to understand the world it has moved away from. It desires to understand the ocean as a simultaneously new and old frontier: One more mysterious than even our own star systems. The thirst of the land is now being quenched by the childlike man who sheds the crust of Western natural ontologies and pursues intimacy with that it has evolved out of so many eons ago.

The last part of the song I want to touch on is every verse beginning with directly addressing this figure known as the ‘ocean man.’ I’ve heard some analyses before say that he’s a mythological hydrophile who symbolizes liberty at sea away from the laws and restrictions imposed upon land, but I think it's more specific than that. The 'ocean man' just refers to anyone who teaches you to rethink the oceans, whether that be Ween with the entire album, Jacques Cousteau and his series of pop science documentaries, or Stephen Hillenburg and his titanic cartoon series. All of these make the effort to try and change how Western society has historically thought of the ocean through some form of inquiry

In Ween’s case, I think it was some psychic force that influenced them on that night in Jersey Shore to write an album that pushed culture not only sonically but also subliminally like in the ways I’ve expressed in this analysis. All of it was made to make you understand that there's a village under the sea as much as there are villages above the land, and it’s ironic how recognizing this is considered ‘alien’ when this worldview is far more ancient than what we’re used to.

With this understanding, it makes a lot of sense why this song was chosen to be the ending of the SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, as the show was a culmination of influences that stretched from Cousteau to Ween on Hillenburg’s life. And what does SpongeBob attempt to do at the end of the day but teach us to become overmen to the ontologies imposed upon us? To children, SpongeBob is a character who first fills his heart with love and then tries to be himself as a departure from media that previously told children to be themselves blindly. What if your self is corrupted? What if it’s crusted from being so used to something as great and magnificent as the ocean being objectified and desanctified? When you take the ocean man’s hand (Stephen Hillenburg’s), you become SpongeBob, and your heart fills with a familiar sense of earnestness that he felt when he studied marine biology.

#ween #spongebob #spongebob squarepants #philosophy #nietzsche #jacques cousteau #cousteau #post-structuralism #ocean man #stephen hillenburg

37 notes · View notes