#john does these rituals 2x a year: spring (depends on when the rainy season hits) and fall (always october)

[heavywithplot]

any chance you'd tell us more about John and the Harvester? 👀

even as someone who doesn't have strong opinions on mpreg, i find what little we know utterly FASCINATING

oh boy, okay, so it's like

to explain the whole harvest ritual thing that's going on, it's spinning together a couple of concepts, namely that the symbolic appearance of something in ritual is important for the intended effect. kind of like how in ye olde days (like, medieval/renaissance) for nobility, it wasn't that someone had to BE a virgin, but had to maintain an APPEARANCE of one in a high stakes political marriage (see lucrez/a borg/a) (so for it to work, john has to go through something like a pregnancy, but without doing the whole nine months and a baby part because its the symbolic appearance of it that matters for this)

the ritual itself is about how food harvests are necessary for a continuation of life, so a new harvest would require new life (or something representing new life) to continue. and harvests themselves are hard work, but so is living, so its analogous, ritually, to labor and birth. bringing forth new harvest (birth) to ensure a bountiful harvest (food) for the community (life).

the harvester is an old old old god who has always been where he is and this town was sort of came to life around him. you go where the land is fertile and the food is good, right? where else would that be than where an old god of a harvest is. the problem with old gods is that after awhile, people forget the names, which is where john comes in.

john is probably the first person in about five centuries who can actually see the harvester as he looks, and not just a person who's features you forget soon after or something that looks increasingly more wrong the longer you stare. john grew up around spooky stories and folklore traditions. he knows that you don't love a god like a person, you love a god by giving them something, with offerings and devotions, so: his body for ritual, which in turn let's the harvester act like the god of the land he is (the fuckin. pumpkin/whatever idol effigies that john gives birth to, they aren't a living thing, they're like the first crops of the season, so the harvester cracks them open and spreads the seeds to the fields)

(when he's not doing ritual devotions for an old harvest god, he works at a museum and writes for the local paper. he also gets coffee with the harvester on a semi regular basis and asks him questions about forgotten centuries of history)

(for context this is all set in some middle of fucking nowhere farm land town in new england. fields for miles, baby)

uhhhh. that's the general gist of it!! there's not a lot to it, the minor details change from ritual to ritual, I just really really wanted to create a setting where I could have a character get knocked up on the regular with enough flexibility to make it weirdly poetic or spooky scary depending on my mood hsshdhfhgh

#john does these rituals 2x a year: spring (depends on when the rainy season hits) and fall (always october) #there was one year when there was a really bad drought and they did a ritual in the summer because people prayed for a miracle #and what's a god if he doesn't answer prayers made even if they don't know the name of what they're praying to? #the harvester might also be a kind of demon btw. like he's a god but he's old and the lines get blurry when u go that far back