#never really found the right way to explain my worldview until i read about it

[weirdmageddon]

i posted this on twitter also but it’s still eating at me. i’m so fucking embarrassed to be jewish rn. i dont want to be associated with this ongoing bullshit from israel. why do we need our own state. theyre just making every jew across the globe look bad in general even though many of us are conflicted about zionism and the legitimacy of israel as a state

people have hated jews throughout history for no fuckin reason but now israel exists but now its like. GIVING people reasons to hate us as a group. note that i DON’T conflate zionism with jewishness, but a lot of people in the world don’t know the difference because theyre uninformed and been dripfed cultural antisemitic tropes their whole life and that’s the scary part is them falsely putting two and two together. like what the fuck israel stop youre just putting fuel on the fire for people around the world to hate an entire group of historically persecuted people if youre being this shitty with your insane colonialism and apartheid like……I Want No Fuckin Part Of This. you’re spelling our own doom. you cant just swoop in and go “mine now” and then oppress the people you took land from under a regime without my blood boiling at the injustice no matter WHO you are. even if my lineage is tied to you. so when news outlets support israel it doesn’t feel like they have the best interest of jews as a people in mind. it’s in the interest of a zionist ethnostate and whatever that christian zionism belief is about the jewish people returning to the holy land as prerequisite for the second coming of jesus. its not like they care about us as a dispersed ethnocultural group, it’s all for that religious narrative that a bunch of people in the US are backing.

saying you want all jews to die is antisemitic. beating someone up because they’re jewish and no other reason without knowing their views is antisemitic. criticizing human rights violations perpetrated by israel and the belief that one group deserves more rights another is not antisemitic. and the fact that israel has the ability to pull that antisemitism card in response to criticisms of the violations they commit because their state is the “jewish homeland” drives me fucking insane. take fucking accountability for your actions. and yes, there do exist full-on anti-jewish groups in the middle east that go beyond hatred of israel’s policies and existence as a state and i’m tired of people pretending there aren’t in fear of appearing to seem like they support the state of israel. on the other side of things many people overestimate this by fearmongering and saying EVERY arab is out to get jews worldwide, telling people like me “they want YOU dead”. this is not the belief every person in the middle east and it really rubs me the wrong way that people group millions of individuals into all-encompassing lumps like this. many people there do understand nuance of this political situation.

even if i have that “right of return” by israeli law or whatever, i don’t feel obliged to it; it does not register as fair. why do i have a “right of return” when i’ve never even been there in the first place while palestinians who have homes there can’t return to them? what’s the basis for that? substituting objective reality with an imaginary reality? i don’t think like that. i can hypothetically come and go whenever i please but palestinians are severely limited in mobility? what makes me more entitled to that land than the people who lived there for centuries? nothing that comes from natural law thats for sure. it’s all artificial and inflated.

but at the same time i also dont want to be the target of antisemitism and caught in the fray just for being ethnically jewish. once people start calling for the genocide of entire groups we’ve got issues (and you better believe this absolutely applies to the palestinian victims in gaza too), because people who dissent to the violence perpetrated by the loudest are caught in there with the people who are perpetrating the violence. lack of nuance. people conflating israel and its zionist apartheid policies with jewish ethnicity and culture worldwide. other people conflating being terrorist anti-jew with muslims worldwide (like that 6-year old palestinian-american boy that was just stabbed to death in chicago). scary times man. but as a jew i can’t just opt out of this if it’s how i was born as. i don’t have control over that. but i can control what i think and what my beliefs are

#israel palestine conflict #israel #palestine #what i feel is right most strongly resonates with secular humanist philosophy #never really found the right way to explain my worldview until i read about it

[gay-jesus-probably]

You're so right about the racist and imperialist bullshit, and something tragic to me is that this does not feel in the slightest like Zelda. In BOTW at LEAST, she's shown to actually be very smart, and while it's understandable (although not excusable) that she would have this worldview due to being raised thinking Hyrule is always right, it just really feels like she should be examining this more closely and seeing problems with it. But Nintendo won't do that, in no small part because they're cowards.

I would talk in detail about how mad I am at how they portray Ganondorf and the Gerudo, but I will spare you the 50 page essay

NO COME BACK I WANT THE ESSAY

Okay but in all seriousness though, idk, I do sort of feel like this is still fairly in character for this Zelda. I found BOTW (and Age of Calamity) characterized her as someone who is very... I don't know, traditional? To an aggressive degree, even when that adherence to tradition is actively hurting her. I mean, the closest she ever comes to actually trying to defy her fate is when she gets mad at a rock that one time. Which comes at the end of her having spent about 60% of her entire life standing in ponds and praying at said rocks in the hope that maybe this time it'll work out, because that's what she's supposed to be doing. It's canonically mentioned somewhere she almost killed herself accidentally as a kid, because she refused to get out of the damn prayer pond until she collapsed from hypothermia. Like yeah, it's fucked up that she was expected to do that... but she never thought there was anything wrong with her having to do that. She just figured she was the problem for not getting the magic at the right time.

And the narrative backs her up on this, because once she has her divine powers, BAM, all her problems are solved. She's a calm, confident leader who knows exactly what to do in every possible situation, no matter what. BOTW Zelda is an extremely passive character tbh; she seems very determined to be exactly the person she is expected to be, and she's not remotely interested in actually examining if those expectations are correct.

(though in regards to her being smart they did kinda do her dirty in TOTK; why the hell did Mineru need to fix the knockoff sheikah slate for her. zelda canonically is interested in sheikah tech. why tf does an ancient person that's never even seen a sheikah slate before need to repair it for her, NINTENDO EXPLAIN)

Anyways, and in regards to her morals... I gotta say, while she was at the point of being able to do the hard work to self examine and walk it back, BOTW Zelda definitely read as a possible baby nationalist to me. I mean, let's be real here, she is incredibly priviledged; she's the future ruler of the damn kingdom by Divine Right, and has spent her entire life being told that. And at the same time, she has really low self esteem... and no inclination to try and change the situation that's ruining her self worth. Which is how you get that one memory of Zelda using her privilege to abuse her indentured servant (indentured, because let's be real here, Link does not have the option to just quit his miserable job), knowingly tries to get him in trouble (if she runs off alone and gets hurt, it's Link's fault for losing her in the first place), and is disturbingly cool with dehumanizing him for being stuck doing his job ("It seems I'm the only one with a mind of my own around here"). And she uses her station to publicly humiliate him at one point, because that ceremony at the sacred ground was fucking painful to watch, and let's be honest here... there's no way in hell it was only the four champions attending this apparently really important ceremony; there was totally a crowd that was cut to avoid having to model all that shit.

Not that she was actively trying to humiliate him, but like... she's the one with all the power in this relationship. Link is a knight of the kingdom, and she's the soon to be Queen. Link is going through all those memories well aware that Zelda can and possibly will destroy his entire life the second she gets the chance. My point is, Zelda is extremely privileged, and it's her responsibility to understand that and be careful not to abuse her power. But the game never even suggests that she notices or cares about it. I mean fuck, even after she stops actively abusing Link, I still don't think she treats him very well. I mean for fucks sake, that one memory with the frog is really upsetting to me - she's certain her and Link and friends and everything is fine, but the power dynamics have not changed. She's still got him at a massive disadvantage, but she doesn't even hesitate to demand that he eat a live frog on the spot so she can see what happens. I liked to think that she was actually trying to make amends with Link for her mistreatment of him, but the game never really shows proof of her trying beyond the most shallow gestures possible (really? you gave him some food, and that makes up for abusing your indentured servant? that's the whole process?).

And all things considered, in TOTK, I... do not see any evidence of her having gotten better. She's just gotten worse, and I can see that as being a trauma reaction; she's basically lost everything, and now she needs to rule a kingdom after a century holding back an apocalypse. I understand why she wouldn't be in a place for self growth after that. But the unfortunate fact of life is that trauma and terrible situations can bring out the absolute worst in people - not to bring real politics into this, but after WW1 Germany was absolutely ruined, as the winners of the war imposed some completely impossible demands on them. People were starving and desperate, and that drove the country into fascism. So that's how we get TOTK Zelda - someone who is absolutely certain that divine forces make her the single most important person in the room at any given moment, Hyrule is a perfect and superior kingdom that can do no wrong, and anyone who disagrees is pure evil and must be destroyed. As for her treatment of Link... I honestly don't see it improving much. She still treats him as more of an object than a person, at least as far as I've seen - the last she saw of him, he'd suffered a horrible and traumatic injury, and yet she just takes it as a fact that he will be perfectly able and willing to take up her fight in the future; what else could he possibly be doing if not serving Zelda? That's his only purpose in life, of course he'll still be willing to do exactly as she orders.

Also jesus christ, the cult of personality built up around Zelda in game... there's so many red flags there. Despite all the genuinely monstorous shit that the fake Zelda pulls, nobody even considers being mad at her for it, even when they're still certain she's the real deal. She's the Divine Princess, of course she can torture and brainwash her subjects without consequences if she wants to, and her victims will still love her for it because they're certain they deserved it. No matter how dark things get, nobody even gets annoyed with 'Zelda' for hurting them. They're just scared that they've done something wrong to upset her, and worried they might not be able to serve her well enough.

(Can you tell the whole thing with Yunobo and the Fire Temple pissed me off, because that was infuriating)

It's good if a ruler is loved and respected by their people of course, but the level of blind devotion she's encouraged is... worrying. Of course, that's only there because the writers love Zelda and can't have let anyone question their precious favourite character, but I'm looking at this from a Watsonian perspective, and that perspective makes for a very disturbing picture. A good leader wants their people to feel safe contradicting them and asking questions. But instead we have people putting so much blind faith in her, they're completely willing to strip naked and walk into monster dens without weapons, because they think that was her orders, and they would never question Princess Zelda. And in universe, a group of researchers being ready to commit suicide on her orders is framed as being a touching sign of their devotion to her. If she was actually a good leader, then she would be horrified that her research team almost killed themselves over misheard orders; but Penn happily comments about how great it is that people would slit their own throats for her amusement, and Link never tries to correct him, suggesting that yeah, she actually does want her people to be willing to kill themselves at her command. Or at least Link finds that completely believable and in character for her.

And at the very least, things like that show that she's not interested in building an environment of equal communication and responsibility. Zelda is rebuilding a Hyrule where the royal family is the ultimate authority, and people should be willing to die before they even consider questioning her orders. So of course Ganondorf is pure evil and must be destroyed - he had to be asked repeatedly before he would kneel before the Hylian throne. Doesn't he know he's an outsider, and therefor inferior to the Divine Royalty? He refuses to accept that his race is inherently lesser to the Hylians, so he must be evil.

I mean, that in of itself is a pretty interesting story; the Hyrule established in TOTK is dark, and the entire culture is genuinely horrifying. This setting is extremely bleak, and I'd be interested if we could actually explore the implications of Link being expected to uphold this dystopian nightmare, and slowly turning against Zelda as he realizes how she truly sees the world.

But that's a nuanced and interesting story, so that's never going to happen; instead we just get this absolute shitshow of a plot, and like 75% of the fandom firmly ignores the racism and imperialism, because what kind of madman would actually want to be immersed in the story and worldbuilding of a role-playing game.

#tears of the kingdom spoilers #alright guess i wound up giving the essay #but yeah this whole plot has massive facist vibes and i hate it a lot #fuck zelda and fuck hyrule wheres my guillotine #ganon was 100% justified. sonia and rauru deserved to get their shit wrecked by him #i mean come on the arrogance of intentionally letting him try an assassination just so you can pull a 'gotcha'????? #unbelievable. and i hold zelda equally accountable for their decisions btw #because she's the one benefitting from them in the future during her own reign #she has ever reason to uphold the power of the throne and not let anyone question them. #dont think i didnt notice she was the only sage that didnt have to swear blind obedience to rauru. nintentdo whats up with that.

[foiazoli]

Hello Silm fans, I’m reading your book for the first time

Hi! So, I’m reading the Silmarillion for the first time and thought I’d post my thoughts as I went as I’ve heard that some silm fans enjoy hearing people’s first thoughts on the silm and also just as a way to keep track of my own thoughts on the thing. Before I launch right into it, I thought I’d explain some background on how I got here, to explain how I know a good many random things contained in this book I’ve never actually read before.  

First, I got into Tolkein as a kid when my dad read me the Hobbit and the entire LOTR trilogy as bedtime stories! It took from when I was about 8-10 and while the Balrog actually gave me a nightmare or two I thought it was a really cool series and tiny me was set off into the wide world of fantasy books and I’ve never given it up. I saw the Peter Jackson movie trilogy at some point and enjoyed them, several animated versions of the Hobbit that I enjoyed, and finally that trilogy of Hobbit movies which were overall meh with all the added extra stuff, but good otherwise. I hadn’t touched Tolkein specifically other than this, even though I knew the Silmarillion existed because I had been told it was “dense, uninteresting, confusing, disjointed, and not worth it overall.” So why am I reading it now? 

Several of you are gonna lose your minds at this, but I watched the Rings of Power show with my dad and kinda liked it. I went, “y’know this stuff is all really interesting but all the fans online are saying it got butchered. I wanna know what they mean.” and through the mystical ways of fandom delving I found out what exactly got butchered by that show (Celebrimbor’s entire storyline, anyone?) and here I am now several months and millions of words of fanfiction read later, actually reading the Silmarillion.

Now, this is not my first time reading a book written by someone from a significantly older time than myself (I read a lot of my dad’s favorite books from high school) so I am somewhat accustomed to sifting through cultural biases that have shifted over time and looking through both the frame of the time and my own cultural reference frame to analyze books and their themes and meanings. As such, I’m gonna list out some of my own biases that I think may be relevant here to help anyone who’s reading this figure out where I’m coming from.

Raised female, but no longer ID with that

Atheist raised by atheist parents, I really don’t jive with religion, especially organized religions and struggle to understand how anyone does, although I always do my best to be respectful of other people’s beliefs when interacting with them. I do have a soft spot for Jewish people though, on account of all of the bullshit that’s happened that they didn’t deserve (nobody deserves the level of death in their history to be clear) and also all of the memes I’ve seen that are like “3 Rabbis 5 opinions” which is incredibly funny and also exactly the kind of energy I intend to bring to the table here.

American, which isn’t totally relevant except that I live in the south, so christianity is pervasive enough here that I somehow ended up culturally christian without my parents or I noticing. I mean culturally christian in that I do things like celebrate christmas and have catholic guilt syndrome, but when I was like 7 I asked my mom why people sang about Jesus on the radio so much every December.

I’m white

I’m in college and everyone in my family has gone to college for three full generations so I have a skewed idea of how well educated everyone around me is, as in I used to expect everyone to know how the government works by age 12 (my parents started discussing politics at the dinner table when I was like 8 and I thought everyone did that) until I started working with kids and several six year olds have assumed batshit things like, that the marker of adulthood was being married and having children, not like, turning 18, and I had to yank my worldview around and am still in the process of figuring out how much other people know about things.

I might be autistic? Many of my autistic friends are like “that thing you do? That's autism. No neurotypical does that.” But my older sister is autistic and much of my childhood was shaped by being “the normal one.” so. Lots to unpack here.

My friend group has a token straight guy and it’s not me

I walk a very thin line between “I have to fit in with everyone and be normal and do things like them and never stand out ever” and “WHY does everyone do this thing the dumbest way possible FUCK that I will be doing this completely differently and you all may watch if it so pleases you” (but the second one is usually about like, wearing mens pants instead of womens because they have functioning pockets). This means my views on individuality culture vs communal culture are disjointed and contradictory af.

Not sure if it’ll come across in my posts here since most of the writing I’ve done in my life has been academic but I have a fuckin potty mouth. A friend analyzed my discord messages once and I averaged one fuck per five point something messages, other swears not included. Fuck is an excellent word and sometimes swears are just what you need to get the point across y’know?

In my fanfiction delving to get a basic understanding of the silm, I started with Elrond (as one does), and got interested in kidnap fam and stayed there for a good long while, so now I have many Feanorian murder babies who I will be seeking any and all information on during this read-through. Primary blorbo here is Maedhros, but all of them come along for the ride. 

When I say I’ve read millions of words of fanfiction I’m not kidding. A good part of what I’m intending to do with this read-through is separate fanon from canon, as I think there's enough fanon that all agrees with itself you could write several reference books containing it. And then do it again with alternative sets of fanon. This fandom is old and y’all have been busy.

I think that’s all, but I may come back to this later if something keeps popping up! I’ll be tagging all my posts about this with #baby’s first silm read if anyone wants to see what I’m up to!

Also, I am yelling into the void from a 10ish year-old blog that I’ve basically never done anything with so my post history will be undergoing renovations at some point so I can tag and actually find later all those useful references I found in the past couple weeks before they get buried. If you (the void) would like to yell back I would love that! Your thoughts on my thoughts, If you think I’ve misinterpreted something, you want to talk about blorbos together, anything!

#silmarillion #Baby's first silm read #yelling into the void in the hopes of making friends #will the void reply? #silm

[army-in-the-stars]

Jungkook for VOGUE Korea From the age of 15 to now, how Jung Kook has evolved and remained the same. Those who work in the public eye come under a lot of different influences, making it hard for them to formulate their own worldviews. The same is true of those who have had to mold themselves from a young age to achieve a certain goal. But Jung Kook is different. His pursuits outside BTS suggest that he has very clear ideas about what he wants to do and show that he can seal himself off from outside influences. This is one of the things we like about Jung Kook. How has he managed to foster his own ideas? Jung Kook, who listens attentively while making eye contact, replies, “I don’t have clear answers like, ‘This is how I’ll live!’ But what’s clear is that I want to decide for myself how to live my life. Perhaps there will be an afterlife, but who knows? This is the only life I’ve got, and it’s short. I’d never do something that everybody agrees is wrong, but where various ways are acceptable, I want to live on my own terms. I settled on this fairly early on.” Curious about Jung Kook’s thoughts on life’s fleeting nature, I respond, “They say that life is short, but art is eternal. What is eternal to you?” Jung Kook says, “Let’s assume that what I do is art. Would this be the most important thing? Isn’t life itself more important? The time I’ve lived is distilled in me. So, life is finite but also eternal.” Jung Kook is preoccupied with all sorts of art, not just music. Some fans want Jung Kook, the Golden Mangnae (youngest of the family) of BTS, to showcase his talents in other areas more, such as painting, photography and video editing. Jung Kook humbly says, “These are just some of my other interests, and I don’t feel the need to develop all of them.” But multitalented individuals must surely hear an inner voice urging them to make use of such talents. It must be difficult to ignore the desire to express oneself in various ways besides music. “I have realistic as well as idealistic goals,” says Jung Kook. “I used to be greedy and did what I wanted to do without giving it much thought. But the way one thinks changes over time, as does life in general, and relationships, too. These days, I’m more realistic. What I need to do is more important than what I want to do.” On top of this, Jung Kook doesn’t like to reveal his creations until he is fully satisfied with them. “They’ll never be perfect, but they at least have to be at a level I’m happy with,” he tells me. “I’ll work hard, and one day I’ll be able to unveil them to the public. Right now, I don’t have the mental energy to spend on improving them.” Over the past couple of years, it has not been easy for Jung Kook to work — even on his hobbies, like painting and photography. “If the stage set is the same every time one performs, there’ll be less excitement for the performing artist and the spectator alike,” he says. “I need to keep seeking change and challenge myself. The same goes for photography and painting. I carried a camera with me when we worked, but we couldn’t move around much due to Covid-19, so the photos all looked pretty similar. And going on risky trips that weren’t really necessary wasn’t an option.” Instead, Jung Kook found joy in books, portals into other worlds. He is making an effort to read more books in his spare time in order to become better at writing lyrics. His current fascination with writing lyrics links up with his other artistic pursuits. “My lyrics reflect my speech and individuality,” he explains. “This is another area where I can express myself.” Hopefully, Jung Kook will soon be enjoying a change of scenery. He was thrilled by the chance to visit the UN General Assembly to sing “Permission to Dance” in September 2021. “Every time we prepare an album and record a performance on stage, I have the same mindset,” he says. “But there was something extra when we filmed a video with dancers on the lawn in front of the UN General Assembly. Having fun dancing and singing together outdoors made me feel that better days were on the way. I felt that the day was drawing near when we’d be able to meet ARMY up close, or the day when I could go out alone at dawn and enjoy tasty snacks.” I ask whether it is even possible for a superstar to go to a late-night restaurant alone, but Jung Kook smiles and says, “There’s always a way.” BTS has changed Jung Kook’s life dramatically. In 2014, BTS went out on the street in Los Angeles and invited random passersby to attend their free concert. This was being filmed as part of a TV show, but they worked hard to promote their group by handing out flyers. Since then, BTS have skyrocketed: In 2021, tickets for their concert at SoFi Stadium, near LA, sold out in minutes. Comparing then to now, Jung Kook is tongue-tied. “I always wonder why people love and adore us,” he admits. “I’ve thought a lot about how I arrived at this point. Firstly, I was lucky to have talented team members! Secondly, we have a CEO who really loves music. Apart from that, perhaps the synergy of BTS’ songs, lyrics, messages, performances and public appearances attracted more and more fans? Lately, it’s become even more difficult for me to wrap my mind around the situation. I guess it’s because I’m unable to meet the audience members in person. I need to work harder to prove that I’m worth their support.” Jung Kook is also very mindful of BTS’ positive influence. “As I get older, I feel more pressure,” he confesses. “I’m not particularly great; and I’m not that good and virtuous. I’m a very ordinary person, and I’m often scolded by the other members for my immature behavior. If the world sees us as having a positive influence, then I need to try to adjust and match my actions and thoughts to those values.” ARMY has been putting BTS’ positive messages into action. Their environmental projects, like saving rainforests and whales, and their fundraising for vulnerable groups such as refugees and LGBTQ people have been astonishing in terms of their scope and speed. ARMY seems to have become a global cultural movement that goes beyond the fandom. Jung Kook is amazed and intrigued by ARMY. “I’m just someone who loves to sing and dance, but ARMY is achieving greater things for us,” he says. “I can’t thank them enough for their support for us, but they’re also doing such wonderful things. I’m deeply moved by ARMY, which started as a group of BTS supporters but has evolved into a real force for good. I’m inspired by them.” Jung Kook wanted to find a way to repay ARMY, the group’s proud flagbearers, but found himself at a loss. “It seemed there was nothing special I could do,” he says. “I’ve come to the conclusion that being good at my job, as I’ve been doing, is what I can do for ARMY.” Jung Kook has approached his work with excitement rather than apprehension. It’s not that he’s been free of anxiety because each album was a success or because he is loved by the fans, but because he has believed in himself and his groupmates. “We did our best with every album and on every stage,” Jung Kook says. “Nobody can be perfect, but I’ve been able to enjoy it because I do everything that’s required of me. That’s why I can accept an occasional poor result.” This seems to be Jung Kook’s attitude toward life. “I understand that hard work and the outcome are two separate things,” he explains. “I’ve learned how to accept the result. Of course, having the ambition to improve myself is another matter.” As Jung Kook debuted at age 15, he must surely have matured more than any other BTS member. On the other hand, they tell him, “It’s great that you haven’t changed at all.” What about him has changed the most and how has he remained the same over the past decade? “I was warmhearted and trusting as a child, and I still am,” he admits. “Until they break my heart, I give my all to those I love. My groupmates all acknowledge this. Sometimes, I worry about what’s going to happen, but I’m lucky enough to have my groupmates beside me, which is reassuring. But if I depended on them too much, it would be like hiding behind them, so I need to be able to stand on my own.” Except for this, he adds, everything from the way he speaks to the way he thinks has changed. I believe that another thing that remains the same is his energy. Jung Kook shows no signs of tiring during the photo shoot for Vogue , which proceeds at a fast pace and without a break. He raises the energy of the set, moving with the rhythm of the background music and approaching groupmates to massage their shoulders or straighten their clothes. As Jung Kook puts it, after an incredible 10 years, what will the next 10 be like? “Permission to Dance” contains the words, “We don’t need to worry. ’Cause when we fall, we know how to land.” I ask Jung Kook if he has thought much about how to land. “Obviously, many people are more successful than me, and as I get older and time goes by, my career is bound to taper off,” he reflects. “But I don’t think about landing. There are lots of things I still want to do. I want to continue expanding as an artist and achieve even greater things.”

#jungkook #vogue korea #vogue #BTS vogue #vogue magazine #btsxlvbyvoguegq #jeon jungkook #jeon jungguk #jung jungkook #jk #BTS jungkook #bts #bts jeongkook #bts jeon jungkook #bts jeon jeongguk #bts jk #bts x army #bts x vogue korea #bangtan #bangtan boys #bangtan sonyeondan #bts interview #jungkook interiew #army #army x bts

[slugtranslation-hypmic]

Here’s a pet tax!! This times he’s nuzzling against my arm!

Btw here’s your excuse to talk more about Dice. Or,,,any of Fling Posse! Have fun!

Oh, you enabler, you. Thank you for this opportunity and for the bunny picture.

A collection of thoughts on Dice and why he may very well be the most important character to Ramuda. Put under a cut for some slight TDD spoilers.

Dice’s Personality Traits

Compared to the other two nosy Nancies that make up Fling Posse, Dice himself is the king of minding his own business. While he does display definite interest in his friend’s lives - see asking Riou about his favorite food in the ARB event “Riou’s Kitchen” or discussing Gentarou’s latest story in FP/M chapter 7 - he tends to avoid discussing topics that make others feel uncomfortable.

This can make Dice appear oblivious, but Dice is much more emotionally observant than most characters give him credit for. Let’s take chapter 14 of FP/M for a great example of this. I’ll link it here, and I encourage you to read through it again paying careful attention to his facial expressions.

Dice begins the chapter deep in thought and adopts a solemn facial expression for the next few pages. Something is clearly preoccupying him.

However, the moment Ramuda appears, Dice begins acting much more animated and begins playing along with Ramuda in an attempt to cheer him up. Note that Dice observed Ramuda acting out of sorts for the entire battle in the previous chapters and hasn’t seen Ramuda awake since (according to chapter 15). He’s likely greatly concerned. It is arguable that his reactions are entirely food motivated...

... except for the fact that he returns to his previously somber state the moment Ramuda is no longer looking at him. Dice also doesn’t immediately accept Gentarou’s suggestion that Ramuda is trying to keep up appearances for their sake.

At the restaurant, Dice begins to play up the cheerful glutton again and attempts to directly cheer up Ramuda by operating under the assumption that Ramuda is disappointed by their loss.

When Ramuda goes to leave, the art emphasizes Gentarou’s concern, but the silhouette of Dice (and the lack of any bulging cheeks or cups carried up to his mouth) in the final panel indicates that he has once again returned to his more serious state. In this scene, Dice recognizes that something has gone terribly wrong.

Each member of Fling Posse is a performer putting on an act, and as noted by Ramuda’s reaction to Gentarou invading his privacy, Ramuda feels most comfortable when each actor plays his part. Dice is aware of this and thus acts the cheerful idiot for Ramuda in these scenes because he recognizes that Ramuda needs that stability.

If I may demonstrate another quick example, take a look at the scene from FP/M chapter 12 and compare how Dice acts without (first image) and with a visibly distressed Ramuda (other images) in the room.

The FP/M mangaka also says (in the afterword of volume 3), “I think [Dice] might have a good poker face and be able to control his facial expressions even when he’s flat out broke. But his posse doesn’t seem to understand that.“ Dice’s poker face is a boon here when he can use it to help the ones he cares about.

For Dice does care very greatly. Dice minds his own business and doesn’t make any overt actions as long as his friends are capable of handling situations on their own. However, the moment he recognizes that they are in over their heads, he takes swift and decisive action (which, in turn, can be harmful to others).

Take this scene in FP/M chapter 10 as a great example. Prior to Gentarou grabbing Hifumi, Dice was firmly a bystander, but he immediately leaps in when the situation escalates. Notice that he removes Hifumi from harm’s way but also serves a shield for Gentarou and focuses his attention on Gentarou’s wellbeing.

He then offers Gentarou physical reassurance with a hand on the shoulder and an out to the situation, which would have allowed Gentarou to move on as if his mask had never slipped if it were not for Hifumi’s next comment. Dice also shuts down Hifumi before it can escalate any further.

Although Hifumi is attempting to justify himself because he doesn’t understand Gentarou’s reaction and doesn’t see what he did wong, Dice recognizes that this statement also denies Gentarou the right to express his feelings on something which is clearly an enormous deal to him.

By labeling Hifumi’s comments as “disrespect” and “hurting people” while simultaneously stressing that this topic is “important”, he allows Gentarou the right to feel upset at Hifumi’s comments. He also continues to use defensive posture in order to keep Gentarou physically safe (which must be an intentional choice on the artist’s part, as Hifumi mirrors this pose a few pages later as he begins to defend Doppo). Even though Dice’s reaction crosses the line when he, in turn, begins to hurt someone else, removing Gentarou from the situation, validating his feelings, and making Hifumi stop is exactly what Gentarou needed but was unable to provide for himself.

Dice is a damn good friend and an exceptional person. If you ever find a friend like Dice, don’t let them get away from you.

Saving Ramuda’s Life

Let’s switch gears for a moment to take a look at what goes on in Ramuda’s mind. As a disposable pawn for the Party of Words, Ramuda has an atypical view of the world. He genuinely enjoys the company of others and can form real bonds, but his primary motivation in life is fully self-centered: keep himself alive. Every order he receives comes with the caveat of, “Failure brings death.” The fear of death is enough to drive him to betray his closest friends in TDD, even Jakurai, who clearly means a lot to him.

^ TDD chapter 13. Ramuda receives an order from Ichijiku to handle the Jakurai side of things in the TDD breakup and reflects on the time that Jakurai saw who his true personality and not only accepted it but welcomed it.

Bear with me if you’ve seen me talk about this before, but Ramuda’s ability to feel emotions is considered a fluke. Ichijiku describes it as a “malfunction” and a “nuisance” for his job. She also describes Ramuda himself as a “failure” and “worthless”, sometimes to Ramuda’s face.

Ramuda internalizes this. Notice’s Ramuda’s reactions to slipping up and having an emotional outburst in TDD chapter 9 and FP/M chapter 8.

The former of these features Ramuda looking frightened (either due to concern of losing his life for revealing more than he should have done or fear that Jakurai will consider him as “worthless” as everyone else does), insulting himself, and self-harming. While the insults and self-harm are as stereotypically cute as the rest of Ramuda’s facade, the core idea remains that he believes showing his true personality is as idiotic and worth of punishment as everyone else believes. The lack of self-worth is ingrained in him.

The slightly more grown-up Ramuda in FP/M does not react as dramatically, but I really want to draw your attention to the question, “Was I spooky?” It’s worded in a deliberately silly manner because of Ramuda’s speech style, but he is asking his supposed friends if the real version of himself is frightening. Tell me, Dice. Does seeing me scare you? Do you want to run away now before it’s too late? It’s an innocent question on the surface level, but considering the about face his last friend turned after learning more about Ramuda’s real life and job, this question demonstrates that Ramuda’s view of himself has hardly changed for the positive since then.

(Also please observe Dice’s reaction. The pause is him getting into character in order to cheer up Ramuda after a clear emotional upset.)

Therefore Ramuda is a person running entirely on self-preservation but with no sense of self-worth. He sees himself largely the same way Chuuouku does and expects everyone else to do the same. This greatly limits his worldview and prevents him from considering possible other options besides, “Do or die”.

If most of the other cast members found themselves in Ramuda’s shoes, they would have the knowledge and ability to consider other options such as running away, asking for help, or fighting back. Yet Ramuda never considers any of these. He does not have the life experiences the other cast members have to consider making any of these options. He has never observed them or had an outside source present them as options to him. Once the order comes down the pipeline from Ichijiku, it is set in stone. He can hate the order - take a look at another illustration from TDD chapter 13 - but he considers its execution inevitable.

This is why the order to hypnotize Jakurai in FP/M chapter 11 hits him so hard. Now “do or die” has become “die or die”, and his only decision comes down to the nature of his death.

Yes, this situation could have been avoided by talking to Jakurai. Jakurai gives him multiple opportunities to speak up before and during the battle, but Ramuda doesn’t have the ability to recognize those as options for help. In Ramuda’s book, people don’t help him. “Help” doesn’t exist.

In fact, the entire TDD situation could have been avoided as well if Ramuda had trusted his friends, spoken up, and explained the situation. Jakurai (not to mention Ichirou and Samatoki after a fashion) would almost certainly have helped, and that seems to be what Jakurai was waiting for. Once he pushed Ramuda too hard by accident and caused an outburst, he stepped back and waited for Ramuda to come forward on his own terms. But that’s utterly foolish, because Ramuda doesn’t operate on his own terms either. Ramuda doesn’t have his own terms. He lives and thinks the way the Party of Words wants him to think, and if the Party of Words does not want him to speak up and ask for help, then he will never, ever be able to.

The beauty is that Dice is not Jakurai. As mentioned above, Dice minds his own business up until the point a friend of his is over their head, and it’s when Ramuda starts to pull out the True Hypnosis Mic in order to kill himself for Chuuouku that Dice finally acts.

As is the case with Gentarou up above, Dice acknowledges that he doesn’t fully understand the situation but offers physical reassurance, advice, and the implicit argument that Ramuda’s real strength is something of value. Dice writes the word “help” into Ramuda’s dictionary with genuine love and affection.

While Ramuda still can’t consider any option other than “do or die”, it is Dice and Gentarou’s intervention that imbues him with enough self-worth to even consider placing his own wants and needs above Chuuouku’s.

It is this that lays the groundwork for The Loneliness, Tears, and Hope of a Puppet and gives Ramuda the basic agency to even consider acting for himself and, contrarily, acting in line with consideration for other people. It’s this that allows him to avoid ruining Jakurai’s life a second time and this that allows him to accept Gentarou and Dice’s promise of friendship. In the drama track itself, once again it is Dice and Gentarou intervening and challenging Ramuda’s preconceived notions in order to save his life.

Gentarou absolutely plays a vital role in this as well, but it is Dice that chooses to make the first move. Had he not said anything, Ramuda would have used the True Hypnosis Mic and died onstage in front of the audience.

It is sometimes the tiniest of actions and the smallest pieces of support that make all the difference. Sometimes all it takes is someone being unafraid to reach out and flip a die over so it lands on a different number.

#not a translation #asks #dice arisugawa

[queenlua]

You're a druid and an ex-evangelical, right? What does being a druid mean to you? How did you get from evangelicalism to where you are now? And of course feel free to ignore this if it's nosy. (sincerely, a Christian who wants to leave but who doesn't know what to do)

this is going to make me sound ignorant as hell, lol, but i'm happy to share

under a cut because this got very long, sorry, lol.

my personal progression was: "vaguely christian -> VERY christian -> christian agnostic -> agnostic/atheist -> agnostic/druid -> some sorta druid-neopagan-animist thing."  i guess i'll just go through what made me switch between each of those, and close out with some high-level thoughts that may be helpful for you?

okay, so when i was

VAGUELY CHRISTIAN,

i went to Sunday school every week because That's What You Do, and because my whole hometown was very southern Baptist, i never questioned the veracity of its teachings much... until they ran a whole weekly series on "why [x] is wrong," where [x] is some other group

e.g., we had a week on why Mormons are wrong, and i didn't bat an eye because i hadn't even known Mormons existed until that moment

then we had a week on why Muslims are wrong, and that... bothered me, because i had a friend who was Muslim, and she was just objectively a better person than me, and i was like "any universe where she goes to hell and i don't seems really fucked up"

then we had a week on why EVOLUTION was wrong, and that just absolutely threw me, because while i hadn't thought about evolution much (i think i was in fourth grade or so), it seemed common-sense? scientists thought highly of it? "adaptation over time" just seems logical?

so i went to the public library every day after school for like a week, read some Darwin and some science books, and came back to my Sunday school teacher with, like, an itemized list of objections to the whole "evolution is wrong" thing.  and he came up with some standard Answers In Genesis rebuttals, and i did more research and came back the next week with more science, and we repeated this a few times until he was like "lua, you just gotta take some things on faith"

which.  lmao.  full existential crisis time, because no matter how hard i thought, i couldn't *not* believe in the science, but i also didn't want to go to hell, so i was like "maybe if i believe SUPER HARD i will SOMEDAY be able to unbelieve the condemn-me-to-hell bits"

so i decided to become

VERY CHRISTIAN

and my frantic googling for shit like "proof of god" and "god and evolution" *eventually* broke me out of the Answers In Genesis circles of the internet, and into some decent Christian apologia, like, think First Things and various Catholic bloggers.  and there, i found some way to square my gut sense that evolution was right, with a spiritual worldview.

like, i remember finding some blogger who said:

"young earth creationists get tripped up when they try to explain stars that are millions of light-years away, and end up basically arguing that God's tricking us somehow, and—no!  my God lets you believe in the evidence of your eyes, my God does not demand that you make yourself ignorant or stupid, my God expects you to use your brain"

and i just started crying at my computer, because no one had ever said "using your brain is Good and part of God's will," i was like *finally* here's someone who won't tell me i'm going to hell for just *thinking* about things

(st. augustine does a much better riff on a similar theme, fwiw, but i only found him later)

still, it was an uneasy fit, because, the more i learned and read about world history, the more it seemed... weird... that the One And Singular Path To Salvation was... the successor to some niche desert cult... which didn't even occur at the *beginning* of written history, like, it was all predated by that whole Mithraism thing, etc... and like, sure, i could trot out all the standard theological talking points for why Actually This Makes Perfect Sense, but gut-level-wise, the aesthetics just seemed kinda dumb!  and no level of talking myself out of it made that feeling go away!

so at this point i started referring to myself as a

CHRISTIAN AGNOSTIC

i mean, not aloud.  i still lived in southernbaptistopia and i didn't want, like, my hair stylist to tell me i was a horrible person.  but in my *head* i called myself Christian agnostic and it felt right.

and i started church-hopping, which honestly was really fun, would recommend to anyone at any point.  i visited the fire-and-brimstone baptist church, the methodist church, the episcopalians, the universal unitarians, etc.

unfortunately, while this gave me *some* new perspectives, each of the places either had the same shitty theology as my old megachurch (i remember the *acute* sense of despair i felt when i was starting to jive with a methodist church... only for the dumbass youth minister to start going on about evolution), or, they just lacked any sense of the *sacred*.  like, the Church of Christ churches, with their a capella services, *definitely* had it; i felt more God there in one service than i did in a lifetime of shitty Christian rock at the megachurch.  but their beliefs were even *more* batshit, so.  big L on that one.

having failed to find a satisfactory church, i was basically

AGNOSTIC/ATHEIST

by the time i went to college, but honestly pretty unhappy about it; while it was harder than ever for me to actually *connect* with the divine, i didn't like thinking that my previous experiences of the divine were total lies.  because my shitty evangelical church, for all its faults, could not *completely* sabotage the sense of God's presence.  there were real moments in that church where i do believe i experienced something divine.  mostly mediated by one particular youth minister, who in hindsight was the only spiritual teacher in that church who didn't seem a bit rotten inside, but!  it was something!

so when i happened upon a bunch of writings on the now-defunct shii.org (that's the bit that makes me look WILDLY ignorant, lol), i was utterly captivated.

said author was a previous archdruid of the Reformed Druids of North America, an organization that was formed in the 1960s to troll the administration of Carleton College (there was a religious-service-attendance requirement; they made their own religion; their religion had whiskey and #chilltimes for its services).  however, this shii.org dude seemed to take it pretty seriously.  he was studying history of religion and blogged a lot about his studies, both academic and otherwise.  while RDNA had started out as a troll, that didn't mean they hadn't *discovered* something real in the process, he said.

this, already, was going to be innately appealing to me; i've got a soft spot for wow-we-were-doing-this-ironically-but-now-it's-kinda-real? stuff in general.

in particular, shii.org’s discussions on the separation of ritual from belief was really interesting to me: most religions/spiritualities have *both*, but like, you can do a ritual without having the Exact Right Beliefs (if there even is such a thing!), and it can still be useful to you, it can have real power.  (he had a really lovely essay, speculating on the origins of religion as just a form of art, but that essay is now lost to the sands of time, alas.)

(note that i wouldn't really recommend seeking out *recent* writing by the shii.org guy; he kinda went full tedious neoreactionary-blowhard-who-reads-a-lot-of-Spengler at some point?  sigh.)

the shii.org guy led me to checking out a bunch of books on the history of neopaganism & also books by scholars of religion in general, and the more i read, the more excited i became.  and i started doing little ritual/meditation stuff here and there.

then i was fortunate enough to attend some events with Earthspirit (this was when i lived in Boston), which cemented my hippie dalliances into something more real.  the folks there, being from Boston, were all ridiculously overeducated (a sensibility that appeals to me), but also, being the kind of folks who drive out to a mountain in the middle of nowhere for a spiritual retreat, they tolerated a full range of oddities (everyone from aging-70s-feminist-wiccans to living-on-a-farm-with-your-bros-Astaru to dude-who-started-having-weird-visions-and-is-just-trying-to-figure-out-the-deal to Nordic-spiritualist-with-two-phds-from-Scandanavian-universities-on-the-subject, etc), which gave me a lot of room to explore different types of rituals, ceremonies, "magic", etc.

(polytheism in general lends itself well to this sort of easy plurality!  i can believe other people are experiencing something real with their gods, and i can be talking to a totally different set of gods, and that’s just all very compatible, etc)

anyway, i started calling myself

AGNOSTIC/DRUID

around then, because i knew i'd found *something*, something that felt like all the realest moments i'd ever had in nature, and all the realest moments i'd ever had in that shitty megachurch, but i wasn't quite ready to put a theology to it.

but, idk, you do the thing for a while, and you start encountering some things that you may as well call gods, and you realize you're in pretty deep, and you ditch the "agnostic" bit and just throw hands and start describing yourself as

SOME SORTA DRUID-NEOPAGAN-ANIMIST THING

because that's the most precise thing you can muster.  in particular, the druid bit resonates because nature's still very much at the center of my practice; the neopagan bit resonates because i'm not especially interested in reconstructing older traditions or being faithful to any actual pre-Christian traditions, and animist resonates because what i sometimes call gods seem to be tied pretty tightly to the land itself.  it's all very experiential; all this mostly means i'm some weird chick who sometimes grabs a car and drives out someplace very lonely and hikes for a while and does some hippie shit to try and talk with the land or the god or whatever is there.  and sometimes i come back from it changed, or refocused, or what-have-you, and hopefully i'm better for it.  i'm aware this makes me look a little ridiculous, and is an unsatisfying answer, sorry!

WRT YOUR SITUATION

i don't know you or your situation, obviously, but if i wanted to give former-me some advice to save her some angst, i'd say

-> Christendom itself is far wilder and more diverse than many churches lead you to believe.  if you still want to be Christian on some level, and it's just a shitty church that's convinced you the whole project is fucked, i'd honestly explore, i dunno, your nearest Quaker meeting.  they're invoking the Holy Spirit with regularity but they're not raging douchenozzles about it.

-> if you're specifically interested in druidism, i found John Michael Greer's "A World Full of Gods" really nice.  (caveat: Greer has *also* gone full right-wing nutjob these days, sigh, so like.  would not recommend a great swath of his writing.  but that one's good)

-> deciding that a just God wouldn't give me a brain and then ask me not to use it was hugely comforting to me.  like, that was the start of the whole process, that was what made me feel ok searching for other churches and trying to find something that fit.  obviously you should take this with 800 grains of salt, because obviously i'm no longer Christian, and thus maybe i'm just some poor misguided fallen soul, but... i still kinda believe that!  maybe if you can make yourself believe that, it'll seem less scary?

idk, happy to answer more questions, sorry for the long ramble, hope it helped~

#druid stuff

[dahlia-coccinea]

Wuthering Heights - Chapter 3

This is a somewhat difficult chapter to discuss fully in a single post. It introduces so many important themes and has the first glimpse of the story of the earlier inhabitants of the Heights. Sorry if this is too long - I've tried to keep my comments concise. It is difficult for me to not mention every tiny detail I like lol 

We learn that Zillah has worked at the house a year or two and is aware that Catherine’s old room is off-limits but seems to know little else. It shows that despite the emotional unloading that Heathcliff does to Nelly he is very reserved about all that has happened in the past. 

It seems the house has been ruled by chaos for years and there is an instinctual need for the inhabits to defend themselves against it. We see this when Lockwood first climbs into the box bed and closes the doors he says he “felt secure against the vigilance of Heathcliff, and every one else.” The need to shut out the world and crawling into small spaces is repeated later in this chapter with Catherine's diary details how, with Heathcliff, in an attempt to avoid the cruelty of Hindley and Frances “made ourselves as snug as our means allowed in the arch of the dresser,” and closed off the world by fastening their pinafores together. 

We get some other interesting glimpses of Catherine and Heathcliff early friendship. It is quite popular to say that Heathcliff is Catherine’s whip and he is a blank slate for her, but I think this diary entry is another example of their oddly egalitarian relationship. First, we have this scene of Catherine lashing out against their ill-treatment:

I took my dingy volume by the scroop, and hurled it into the dog-kennel, vowing I hated a good book. Heathcliff kicked his to the same place. Then there was a hubbub! 

That Heathcliff swiftly follows her lead certainly shows a reciprocation of the other’s attitude and worldview - or simply that if one is going to get in trouble then the other will follow suit. Still, I do hold that he doesn’t just mimic her or do as she wishes. We get a number of examples that show neither play a clear leader in their antics with one happening shortly after this incident. Catherine's diary continues: 

I have got the time on with writing for twenty minutes; but my companion is impatient, and proposes that we should appropriate the dairywoman’s cloak, and have a scamper on the moors, under its shelter. A pleasant suggestion—and then, if the surly old man come in, he may believe his prophecy verified—we cannot be damper, or colder, in the rain than we are here.

Here Heathcliff takes the lead in coming up with more plans to get further into trouble and it seems Catherine is more than pleased to go along with it. 

There are other, now iconic, details of Catherine’s character in this chapter. Such as this description of the box bed from Lockwood:

The ledge, where I placed my candle, had a few mildewed books piled up in one corner; and it was covered with writing scratched on the paint. This writing, however, was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small—Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton.

And later:

Catherine’s library was select, and its state of dilapidation proved it to have been well used, though not altogether for a legitimate purpose: scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen-and-ink commentary—at least the appearance of one—covering every morsel of blank that the printer had left. Some were detached sentences; other parts took the form of a regular diary, scrawled in an unformed, childish hand. At the top of an extra page (quite a treasure, probably, when first lighted on) I was greatly amused to behold an excellent caricature of my friend Joseph,—rudely, yet powerfully sketched. An immediate interest kindled within me for the unknown Catherine, and I began forthwith to decipher her faded hieroglyphics.

Catherine holed up in the box bed and writing on every spare bit of paper she can get her hands on and scratching her name in the paint, tell of someone who has no one to talk to. She’s alone and is compelled to at least make sense of herself with ink and paper. Nelly does say later on that “there was not a soul else that she might fashion into an adviser” beside Nelly herself. Which is a poor adviser, considering how Nelly disliked her throughout her childhood. 

Adding to Catherine’s loneliness is the endless abuse of Heathcliff and herself, at the hands of seemingly everyone in the house. In this short excerpt from her diary, we are told Hindley’s treatment of Heathcliff is “atrocious,” and that now he is the new master they are no longer allowed to play, and “a mere titter is sufficient to send us into corners.” Heathcliff has his hair pulled by Frances, Catherine’s ears are boxed by Joseph and they’re both berated and verbally punished by him. Finally Hindley “seizing one of us by the collar, and the other by the arm, hurled both into the back-kitchen” where she says that outside on the moors “cannot be damper, or colder.” Upon their return and proceeding punishment she says she’s cried until her head ached. Consistent with what we later hear her tell Nelly, that Heathcliff’s miseries are her own, it is not her punishment or ill-treatment that makes her so upset but the casting out of Heathcliff. She writes: 

“Poor Heathcliff! Hindley calls him a vagabond, and won’t let him sit with us, nor eat with us any more; and, he says, he and I must not play together, and threatens to turn him out of the house if we break his orders. He has been blaming our father (how dared he?) for treating H. too liberally; and swears he will reduce him to his right place—”

Critics that suggest Catherine is glassy-eyed and naive idealist really gloss over these excerpts in my opinion. There is a constant downplaying of her abuse compared to the other characters among those that seemingly think she’s the only character with moral agency and therefore the cause of all problems in the story. 

I love how strange the encounter that Lockwood has with the book “Seventy Times Seven, and the First of the Seventy-First,” and the following dream is when first reading Wuthering Heights. Hardly anything in WH is superfluous and when rereading it this makes much more sense. This is quite an interesting segue into meeting Catherine’s ghost, and later learning more of her life. Forgiveness is such an important aspect in the book and will come up many times. Notably, while on her deathbed, Catherine tells Heathcliff she has forgiven him and that he should forgive her. 

I think it is amusing and also very interesting how in Lockwood’s dream he’s walking with Joseph (in itself is very metaphorical) and Joseph tells him he should have brought a “pilgrim’s staff” and that Joseph’s staff is really just a “heavy-headed cudgel.”

It’s unsurprising the appearance of Catherine’s ghost is so iconic. It’s impossible to discern if it is merely Lockwood’s dream or him actually encountering her spirit. There are details about her that Lockwood, at this point, does not yet know. Still, he does make many attempts to logically explain what happens. Either way, the imagery of the scene is both frightening and tragic. 

We get some really interesting glimpses of Heathcliff’s character in this scene. Normally he is very collected and if his emotions are out of control they tend towards anger, but here we see him truly terrified and unable to maintain composure after finding Lockwood in the room.

Heathcliff stood near the entrance, in his shirt and trousers; with a candle dripping over his fingers, and his face as white as the wall behind him. The first creak of the oak startled him like an electric shock: the light leaped from his hold to a distance of some feet, and his agitation was so extreme, that he could hardly pick it up.

Even after Lockwood identifies himself Heathcliff is said to have found it “impossible to hold it [the candle] steady” and was “crushing his nails into his palms, and grinding his teeth to subdue the maxillary convulsions.” It is interesting that Heathcliff doesn’t become so angry that he throws Lockwood out. It’s another oddly humanizing moment for him. An overly dramatic author would likely have him behave like a complete monster, but he instead tells him to finish the night there and not to scream like that again. This is a scene that I wish we could have some perspective from Heathcliff. Not only is he startled by a noise coming from Catherine’s old room but then Lockwood adds to his distress by rambling about Catherine saying:

And that minx, Catherine Linton, or Earnshaw, or however she was called—she must have been a changeling—wicked little soul! She told me she had been walking the earth these twenty years: a just punishment for her mortal transgressions, I’ve no doubt!

This and Lockwood’s further talk which makes it apparent he has snooped and glimpsed a little bit of Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s past, does set Heathcliff off: 

“What can you mean by talking in this way to me!” thundered Heathcliff with savage vehemence. “How—how dare you, under my roof?—God! he’s mad to speak so!” And he struck his forehead with rage.

Lockwood doesn’t quite understand this reaction saying:

I did not know whether to resent this language or pursue my explanation; but he seemed so powerfully affected that I took pity and proceeded with my dreams; affirming I had never heard the appellation of “Catherine Linton” before, but reading it often over produced an impression which personified itself when I had no longer my imagination under control. Heathcliff gradually fell back into the shelter of the bed, as I spoke; finally sitting down almost concealed behind it. I guessed, however, by his irregular and intercepted breathing, that he struggled to vanquish an excess of violent emotion. 

And later when watching Heathcliff call for Cathy through the window:

There was such anguish in the gush of grief that accompanied this raving, that my compassion made me overlook its folly, and I drew off, half angry to have listened at all, and vexed at having related my ridiculous nightmare, since it produced that agony; though why was beyond my comprehension. 

At one point Lockwood also believes Heathcliff to be “dashing a tear from his eyes” during their conversation. Of course, he is confused because he doesn’t know that one of Heathcliff’s few fixations has been looking for signs of Catherine for the last 17ish years. 

I’ve mentioned this before, but something that doesn’t happen in the book because Heathcliff never narrates it, but I think if someone retold the story or made a film adaptation it could be interesting to explore, is how Heathcliff came to find Catherine’s writing on the wall. She must have written it shortly before she talks to Nelly since she’s already considering marrying Linton, and Heathcliff must still be living at the Heights since his name is there also. When Heathcliff returns three years later we know that he takes over Catherine’s old room so really he should have discovered it the first night there, probably after having visited the Grange. 

@astrangechoiceoffavourites has mentioned this in one their posts, but another great aspect of the book is the background happenings that are very realistic for the time and particularly farm life. Cats and dogs roam about, Heathcliff mentions that the house goes to bed at “nine in winter, and rise at four,” and there are mentions of chores, etc. The details create a realistic backdrop and ground the characters in reality. I feel like the novel is never overly sentimental because of this and it really strengthens it. 

After Heathcliff comes down to the kitchen where the household is starting their day, we are instantly reminded how terrible Heathcliff can be when he swears at and threatens to hit Cathy for not making herself useful and working for her keep. Ironically, he tells her, “You shall pay me for the plague of having you eternally in my sight,” when, as I’ve mentioned before he has her sit at the dining table with everyone else. He also could just send her away if he despises her so much. 

I see a lot of similarity between the glimpse we get of Catherine Earnshaw from her diary and the current situation Cathy Heathcliff is in. Their situations are certainly different but both are in a similar state of abuse and neglect and both are quite self-possessed and antagonistic towards those that try to control them. They also are associated with books (Catherine filling them up with writing and Cathy reading) and have an affinity for animals. In this chapter it is mentioned that while Cathy is reading she has “to push away a dog, now and then, that snoozled its nose overforwardly into her face.” There are other similar encounters, such as when the dogs at the Heights come to greet Catherine Earnshaw upon her return from the Lintons. 

I’m sure I’m forgetting points I want to make in these posts. I’ll probably to a larger summary after I complete the book and try to tie together some of the ideas I’ve mentioned. Its also difficult because I keep wanting to bring up things that happen later in the book and I want to make a note of it now - but I’m also trying to reread as impartially as possible. Which is really an impossible task lol. 

@astrangechoiceoffavourites

#wuthering heights #wh reread 2021 #wh reread #emily brontë #chapter 3 #tw abuse #omg i did it

[coldwind-shiningstars]

also speaking of therapy I'm filling out this Adult Attachment Survey for my new therapist and it's really emphasizing to me just how much my mom utterly refuses to engage with me on my childhood? especially from an autistic perspective.

I'm thinking I'm struggling so much with this because it's affecting me significantly but it's so clearly not something she realizes she's doing, and she's so clearly not malicious.

my mom was very mentally ill when I was a kid, and she has a very bad memory about that time. she will admit this freely when, for example, we are at the dinner table talking about happy things that happened during that time, things like trips and things. She will laugh at herself when everyone else remembers stories that she has totally forgotten. however whenever I start to talk about "hey you did this thing and it hurt me" she instantly goes to "i don't remember that. you must have Fabricated The Memory Entirely"

she will freely laugh about Weird Things I Did. Always talking about dinosaurs! LOVED that chicken bone i found and said was a compthagnasus bone. Laugh about how I would just stand there and recite picture books all the way through. Tell me I never played with dolls right. say i was a weird kid for reading the same books over and over and over. but as SOON as i say 'yes i did all those things. because I am autistic" it's instantly You Were A Perfectly Normal Child. You're Not Autistic All Those Psychiatrists Are Wrong. You Were So Happy.

even now when I tell her things about myself she'll often immediately tell me I'm wrong? especially if they contradict what she wants to believe. She tells me "that's not true" when I... tell her I think about The Special Interest all the time even if I continually got in trouble in high school for only ever talking about the special interest.

It's not like she's gaslighting me because I don't think she intends to do it? it's just that she has SUCH an incredibly specific and rigid worldview that whenever I try to challenge the You Were Perfectly Normal And Fine Until You Were A Teen narrative she instantly retracts anything she ever said to the contrary, and gets very upset and insistent that my memories are wrong, I'm framing them wrong, and the memories I bring up BECAUSE SHE BROUGHT THEM UP FIRST are irrelevant, meaningless, or exaggerated

I don't know how to handle this. I've had autism in my chart since I was fourteen fucking years old and she still tells me "that's not right" every time she sees it in my medical records. it's been nine years of me having an official diagnosis. It's been about five of me suspecting she's also autistic (which I'm so sure she is). And I STILL can't ever explain myself, justify my actions, or offer "this is why I do this" to her Ever, Ever, Ever. She's so sure all of my mental health problems are because I have Ehlers Danlos, which... fair, most people are depressed when they have intractable pain, also EDS is highly correlated with autism, but like. I can never ever talk to her about this without her either getting mad at me OR crying and sobbing about how she's the worst mom and she never should have had kids and she regrets Making Humans with her DNA

#im real and i beat myself up behind the blockbusters #ask to tag #i am a stranger i am an alien

[hongism]

hi caly boo its ur 🌊 anon! i finally finished the most brilliant darkness and oh my lawd i’m in spain without the s. to put it shortly: U DID NOT DISAPPOINT BESTIE, and it seems unreal that u and ur mind and this fic even exists bc every moment is just polished to perfection, while simultaneously every character is polished to a sort of imperfect perfection(?). i have so many questions and things to say idek where to start, and tho im not good with words and even worse at deciphering hidden meanings, here are just some of my thoughts that i remember from the story.

hello my dear!!! eee im gonna answer separately since i think i’ll be very long-winded as usual but first of all thank you so much :(( this fic is actually very full of subliminal messages and hidden nuances that are weaved throughout which i think could be quite confusing so i apologize for that! if i had managed my time better, i would have adjusted when i started the fic to account for managing those aspects of the fic but alas i’m terrible at time management and i suck so. anyways.

first of all, ngl halfway into the story i lowkey forgot this was a wooyoung fic bc SANNN and also bc wooyoung appeared like 3 times lol. even after it finishing all that, i still had my doubts as to why this is a wooyoung fic, or more like why is san this significant in a wooyoung fic. im still a bit slow on these pls forgive me and im just curious why u made it like that.

i think yeah the most interesting thing about this fic is the emphasis on san over wooyoung. and when looking over it yeah i could have switched san and wooyoung’s characters and called it a day, but wooyoung really in my mind acts as the integral turning point for decisions made in the story. 

the goal with the fic wasn’t really to be hyperfocused on the pairing itself, but rather the emotions and thought processes of each character (aside from wooyoung). wooyoung was kept intentionally mysterious and a bit set apart from the rest of the fic because his role in story was moreso an abstract of hestia, the goddess of the hearth and home. wooyoung’s character appeared in times where y/n was struggling with the thought of home or adjusting to the new changes in her life! wooyoung’s pairing itself was actually intended to be solely platonic at first, but as the story went on i thought having mc develop feelings for him added another turning point in the fic!

moving on, the second biggest question i had is the whole hestia!wooyoung and cafe aurora situation. i did a bit of reading on hestia and only found out that she was the goddess of hearth, which might explain the fireplace and the kind of homey feeling to the cafe. and ‘cafe aurora not really existing to most’ part, which was already hinted at wooyoung randomly disappearing, mc never seeing the cafe before or wooyoung only bringing people he wants into it. i get that him inviting mc must suggest her significance to him, but why was he so adamant about his friends not mentioning him or the cafe to mc before that? wooyoung is quite a mysterious character i think, and given that this fic is supposed to be about him, it’s a bit odd that there’s still so many things left unknown, but its kinda cool that way nonetheless and im guessing u would also like to explain that further outside of the story too.

i think my biggest regret about this fic is the fucking summary.... i wrote that summary well before i even started writing the fic thinking it would go in that direction but it didn’t. and since this fic was for a collab, i left the summary as is because i genuinely cannot for the life of me figure out a better one. but i’m trying to figure out a better one. but i really fucking hate the current summary because it’s not at all what the fic is truly about and i hate it.

however, i don’t hate the fic itself, and the reason why i don’t is because i got to play with both my writing style and how i displayed the story. for this collab we were asked to pick a greek god and one of the seven deadly sins, and i selected hestia and sloth. and initially i had intended to have sloth be represented by the reader’s depression, and wooyoung be a more ‘real’ depiction of hestia. i shifted gears very early on in the fic but what it became is moreso abstract realizations in the characters.

san’s character is meant to be this idea of sloth, and it’s mentioned several times that he doesn’t want to move forward, he wants to go slow, he wants to stop moving so fast through life, and those things point to him being a depiction of sloth

wooyoung’s was harder to encapsulate in a more abstract way but you hit the nail on the head really with the homey feeling of the cafe. beyond that, mc talks about just naturally feeling at ease and comfortable with how things are with wooyoung and being around him, and he takes up this role of being the likeable, warm, cozy, comforting character. it all comes to a head in the last scene where he brings both y/n and san into the cafe.

and again wooyoung’s character is meant to be most mysterious and abstract, but if i had had more time to fully flesh out the fic, i think i would have liked to touch more on him. at the same time however i left it more open-ended and open to interpretation. the significance in him inviting mc in and not being mentioned by the others sooner is twofold. one; the others never really had any reason whatsoever to mention wooyoung. he was a friend outside the circle who never joined in with them when mc was around. i personally in my own friendships don’t mention friends outside the circle by name or anything, just kinda vaguely talking about them unless im certain the people know who this person is. the concept of wooyoung having to invite mc in was more nuanced and vague as well, intentionally so, but that was moreso meant to represent this idea of ‘you can’t make a home somewhere where you aren’t invited’ so y/n couldn’t fully make a home of the place she was in without being invited in and welcomed in, but again that’s something i wish i had more time to fully flesh out.

the hongjoong speech about love (and also the interaction with seonghwa after that) deserves a standing ovation of its own 👏 unfortunately, or not, im not actually going through the emotional turmoil regarding love the same way as hj or mc to be able to fully relate to his words, but the whole ‘if you dont love what u see in the mirror then u dont love it’ mentality really hit me hard, and i’d like to hang onto that when i make decisions in the future haha thank you wise caly! seonghwa and hongjoong’s story is also beautiful, and just like mc said, the more i look at it the more it hurts :’)

the hongjoong speech about love was meant to be something very jaded and specific to his worldview. it actually isn’t wholly how i view love personally, but it was a perfect description to how both he and y/n perceived the love in their own lives. mostly thanks to their own emotional turmoils. the mentality of the mirror quote is something that i think i also struggle with, which is why i included it. it’s hard to do, but even in friendships, i think it’s necessarily to stop and look at the person you were before this relationship and then the person during this relationship. if you don’t love the one you are now, then maybe it’s a sign to reflect and see the bigger picture, so that was a lil reminder to myself and i’m glad it touched you as well!!!

“do you love him, or do you love the idea of being in love with him?” - haha i see what u did there (or maybe i didnt please dont laugh at me if i didnt). its still so good everytime i see it bc i keep finding myself loving just the idea of things time and time again even when this makes total sense to me oof :/

heh yeah again with the more abstract concepts this one was more direct and ‘cliche’ but i fully wanted that cliche in the fic because i thought it suited the situation where mc was constantly struggling with a version of san that she thought she loved vs the version of san she got every time they were together

despite how enlightened she seems to be, mc still made the same choices, and i wanna smack her for it and pat her back at the same time. and maybe also bc of the fact that she feels so differently for the two men that i feel like no ending could really justify her decision, so ending in the vague is probably the best. your ending might kind of allude to someone more than the other already, and tho i still don’t think he’s the best one for her based on just my pov on love, i kinda agree with you. but again, this raises the question of, why a wooyoung fic and not a san fic?

and yeah the whole knife in the chest at the end of it all is that she was still too scared to face the music so to speak. but really i would say she made the same choices up until the conversation on the balcony with san. and you’re absolutely right, the reason i chose the ending the way i did was because either way, there’s no justification. and actually although it might seems like i was alluding to someone specific, san being in the cafe at the very end was moreso to represent that as much as they fought, he still very much loved her and wanted to be loved by her. it was kinda an open casket ending there were no nails in the coffin, the choice between wooyoung and san still stands and an argument could be made for either of them! i think this is a fic that i could see myself revisiting one day with two endings - one for san, and one for wooyoung.

something i didn’t mention earlier about wooyoung’s character being left intentionally mysterious was that he was representing a new and budding love. the honeymoon phase where you’re falling for someone you don’t even really know. you are the reader aren’t meant to really know who wooyoung is because of that beyond what you read about him, so his past and such was left out intentionally to represent that idea of ‘hey wow im in love with a stranger!’ whereas san was this gritty love that’s bad for you. and there are pros and cons to each just as with anything!!

so,,,, why a wooyoung fic and not a san fic? well i picked wooyoung for my collab so he was one of the main focuses of the fic regardless of which direction i took with it. as for why wooyoung wasn’t more forward, i already answered that but !!! i view it as both a wooyoung fic and a san fic. both are highlighted characters with main pairing roles!

i literally just woke up to write this and am going back to sleep ahaha so i apologize if this makes no sense. i somehow felt like i’ve read so much yet so little at the same time, maybe bc there are still so many things i havent fully made sense of, and that’s where i hope you come in and enlighten me. i still stand by my word that this fic deserves so much more recognition despite the lack of explicit smut bc of how much more you’ve explored through character building. love you caly and thank u for working so hard <3 — 🌊

no worries my beloved i hope you go back to sleep and get lots and lots of rest!! and i hope my response helps enlighten the not so clear things as well dgjdklfg but really thank you so much. it was a long fic and hard to get through at times, but as a whole, i’m proud of it and what i created, so thank you for recognizing my efforts and appreciating them 🥺

#🌊 anon #fic; the most brilliant darkness

[thecomfywriter]

Questions / Ask game

Hey guys! I haven’t posted in a while because school so I decided to do something nice, fun and simple because why not. At first I was gonna do a “ask me a question from this list!” kinda thing until I realized none of y’all will do that LOL

So I was like screw it. I’ll answer my own questions 😎

Imma put the questions as bolded, so if you would like to, answer these questions yourself. Consider this me tagging you lol. Alright, let’s begin:

1) Why did you join tumblr?

because I honestly feel it’s the most inclusive of all social medias, and the most chill. you have a community for everything here, and the writing community here >>>

2) Tea or coffee?

tea, 100% i grew up on chai (because i’m punjabi lol) but chai is now more a comfort/culture tea. my staple tea is green tea, especially for writing or studying.

I tried coffee, and it did nothing to keep me awake. All it really did for me was take my appetite away and considering i am recovering from an ed...? yeah no.

3) Who’s your favourite author?

i don’t think I have one specific favourite, to be honest. But i feel like i’m betraying uncle rick by saying that LOL

Okay but in all seriousness, my favourite authors would be Rick Riordan, Khaled Hosseni, Lois Lowry, HOMBOI HOMER (yes he counts), Emily Bronte, and Kristen Britain

4) What books are on your favourites shelf?

Glad you asked! Or didn’t lol.

My favourites shelf is right beside my desk so I can look at it every day. It included the books (not in order):

A Sense of the Infinite (i have a lot of memories with this book. it was the first thing i was able to read again when i started recovering from my ed)

The Vampire Diaries: I’m a whore for Damon. I hate Stefan because of this inexplicable grudge I have had on him from the very beginning. I love Elena since she acc has a personality and it’s completely diva at first. The angst had me rolling

The Last Dragon: a book translated from italian that I read in my childhood. it was the first book i ever pulled an all-nighter for and i’m pretty sure it’s the reason why I love dragons so much. 10/10 recommend

The Giver: if I could say one book out of all of them is my favourite, it’s the giver. it changed my entire perspective on life and my entire worldview. it got me thinking so much and, god, i still get emotional and think about what an amazing and impactful book it was to me. and i love the adaption to the movie because it made the brilliant decision to add the music scene. i still listen to rosemary’s lullaby whenever i need a pick me up or feel like crying LOL

A Thousand Splendid Suns: the first book to ever make me ball my eyes out. it was 1 am, I had just reached part 4 of the book and I was crying so hard and loud, I had to hide in my closet to muffle my tears so my parents didn’t wake up. Wow, it was such a beautiful and well written book. 10/10 recommend. Khaled Hosseni only likes my heart after he shatters it

Wuthering Heights: I have never read a book more well written or with such elegant and descriptive and captivating english than this book. from the very first description of heathcliff’s suspicious brows that darkened shadows under his eyes, god, it inspired my writing style so much. plus, i’m a whore for emily bronte

the ILIAD: i will always like the iliad more than the odyssey. it just hits different. the epicness of the war. the meddling of the gods. the tragedy of achilles and the fear and glory from his wrath. achilles was the biggest piece of shit asshole ever, after agamemnon, but god he was such a drama queen, it was kind of fashionable. it was epic to see him be such a glorified warrior and he was so humanized by patroclus. by the way, patrochilles. if you disagree, i don’t understand you and i will fight you on your opinion. the man almost took a dagger to his heart the moment he found out patroclus died, like...

Percy Jackson is not on the favourites shelf for one reason and one reason only. He has his own shelf dedicated to him. :)

Also, Kristen Britain’s green rider has their own shelf too. with the pretty pastel horse covers. god i love them

5) What am I studying in school:

I’m a senior in highschool in Canada, first of all. Second of all, I am in the SHSM (Specialist High School Major Program) for healthcare. I’m applying to universities for health/life sciences but I wanna get an english degree too, sometime in the future

6) My favourite OC’s and why?

Evan.

You knew I was gonna say him LOL

Okay acc fr tho. lemme rank them.

Evan is first, then Amaka, then Caramel, Blaire, Faer, Vranks and Shadow. And I can’t forget about Yozar, of course, but he kinda counts with Evan.

Now lemme explain why.

Evan is charismatic. He’s brave. He’s resilient. He tries to make the best of every shitty situation that is thrown his way and despite all the shit that he goes through, he believes that he deserves better and so he works and trying to get to the end of the tunnel, where there is light and happiness waiting for him. he tries his best and enjoys the process, even if the results aren’t guaranteed or success. he’s charming, and humourous because he knows how to have a good laugh. he doesn’t take life to seriously and i admire him for it.

I made evan’s charavter when i was going through a rough patch of life, and I would put him in similar situations to my own just so I can see him persevere and survive. to teach myself that you can be brave and strong, and that you can make it out at the end of the day. evan’s character gives me hope.

Amaka was a character I made as a child. i grew up with her, creating her, writing her, watching her grow, adoring her. She was so realistic about life. Not overly cheerful or optimistic. Not a jokester for everything. She was a bit more serious toned. A bit more mature. A bit more quiet natured and sordid. Serene. She has this quiet beauty to her; always thinking, always pondering, always wanting to learn more.

She went through it rough too. And she took her time to make it out. She accepted it for what happened to her, and she let herself feel. to grieve. Amaka taught me friendship. She taught me maturity. She taught me how to process emotions. And she inspired so much of my knowledge-lust.

Caramel was the first female character I had ever made. I made her in complete defiance to every stereotype I had ever faced or heard about girls. I made her the strongest in her lot, not because she was a girl or she was quirky, but because she worked hard and was determined. She was a thief, and a bit rowdy. She knew how to have fun and was the life of the party. A flirt, a romantic. She didn’t fancy reading only because she didn’t think she was good at it, but the things that she was good at, she worked to excel. She was a mentor, despite her impatience. She grew as a person, and learned selflessness. She wasn’t a natural mother or an empathetic person at all really. She had to figure that out and learn, but she took the time and she did. Caramel felt real to me, because she had her strengths and her flaws, but she was amazing nonetheless because she always tried to be better. And she was fun. Caramel was the character that gave me pride in being a girl.

This post will get too long if I continue on, so I will cut it off here. But this was fun so I might do this again :)

Tag yourself and respond to these questions. I’m curious about all your responses!

@p-tchaikovsky @bottleofspilledink @pretend-im-normal @writingismydrugs @genuinewriting @adelinemwriting @amarantine-amirite

#writing #writers #writer #writing community #ask game #tag yourself #tagging game #questions #qna #writing qna #writerblr #writers on tumblr #writers on instagram #readers #reading #reading list #bookshelf #favourites #books #book #author #bookblr #readers on tumblr

[raayllum]

so.. today i went deep into this tumblr blog and i had to read that “callum and rayla can say tons of nice things to each other but have generic interactions meanwhile callum got introspective things with claudia” honestly i’m still- (also, 1. this is not callum/claudia hate, i don’t mind people shipping them;; 2. you don’t have to answer this, sorry if i bothered you, i just wanted to vent for a bit)

oh we’ve all had cases of going way too down the rabbit hole for things we shouldn’t and don’t know until it’s too late, so i get you there. sometimes i’ve somehow clicked on a blog and seen loads of like, actual bullshit (aka shitty political opinions; fandom stuff doesn’t usually count) and been like “how did i even get here?”

Generic is usually one of the words I put under a “this is inherently subjective opinion” folder, including things like chemistry, whether something is natural or forced, and any particular personal preference.

As for introspective, that’s definitely fair! Callum is a pretty introspective guy, particularly about his emotions. The main discussion I can see being labelled as introspective in S2 with Claudia is about Dark Magic in 2x02. 

C: Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way, I just—I loved learning magic, and I feel sad now that I can’t. Cl: But you can. If you want to. C: I want to learn primal magic, but you have to be born with that magic inside you. Cl: That’s the great thing about Dark Magic. You just take creatures that are born with magic inside and squeeze it out of them. What—uh, you’re doing it again, Prince Judgey Face. Look, here’s how I think about it. Humans weren’t born with magic. We were born with nothing, but we still found a way to do amazing things. That’s what Dark Magic is really all about. C: I’m sorry, it’s just not for me.

Callum and Claudia have opposing opinions on it. That’s interesting! One of the reasons I love them as a dynamic (whether that would be defined as me shipping them or not is up in the air and on a touch-and-go basis, tbh) is due to their opposition. There’s something fascinating about childhood friends and crushes who fall out of favour with each other over a fundamental worldview. It’s definitely something I’ve explored both in my fics, headcanons, and a meta here and there. 

The above is a personal conversation between Callum and Claudia. It reveals a lot about them and their stance on Dark Magic. Going off of this, then, I will argue that if this is our standard for introspective interactions, then Callum and Rayla do have introspective conversations. 

For example, their discussion in 2x07 follows a very similar format. 

C: I don’t get it Rayla. Why are you so worried about a dragon that just set fire to a town? R: I’ve been thinking about something someone once told me. About how when one person hurts another, then that person hurts them back, it becomes a cycle that never ends. C: Who told you that? R: You did. C: Oh. R: But Callum, to break that cycle, someone has to take a stand when no one else will. C: You’re right. If we’re really going to change things, we can’t just watch while humans and Xadia keep hurting each other. But how do I take a stand?

Notice the similarities? One of the girls wants to do a thing, Callum doesn’t try get it, and she explains her worldview to him. Callum initially doesn’t go along with it, but later does - even binding these two events together. Callum agrees to go down to free the dragon with Rayla, but he does so with Dark Magic. 

Rayla also tutors Callum in magic, the same as Claudia, in early s1. Callum tells Claudia she’s lucky for getting to learn magic in 1x02; Callum later opens up to Rayla about how much magic means to him and why in 1x04 in a way that’s far more personal. 

“You’re so lucky you get to learn magic [...] I’d switch places in a second” VS “But I’ve always been kinda bad at well, everything. So when I tried that spell, I was sure I’d end up on fire, or covered in spiders… but it worked. And then you called me a mage, and that felt… right. I just have a feeling that cube thing could help me.” 

Callum stammers through admitting he smashed the primal stone to Claudia and she forgives him VS Callum being forced to re-examine his prejudice about elves (“Nothing I believed about elves is true”) and also admit his wrong doing in a much more high stakes scenario (1x06). Callum easily denying Dark Magic as an option to Claudia VS Rayla convincing him to enter a situation in which he uses it even though he knows she’d hate it. 

Claudia also doesn’t seem to ever struggle too much with the way she lies to Callum in 2x02 except about Harrow. Even once Claudia knows she’s lying to Callum, this is still how she responds when talking about how he trusts her and knows she’s going to continue lying to him (and take him by force if need be).

Callum doesn’t make Claudia question anything. Not the Egg; not her view on elves even though she knows one is his good friend; not her view/use of Dark Magic. (The closest she comes is in season three about Viren murdering the princes, but when a way is offered to not do so, she readily takes it.) Callum, meanwhile, questions all of those things, but not because of Claudia. In fact, he moves away from her stances on all of those things, and none of them are particularly good. 

The definition of introspective is “the examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes; self-analysis.” By this definition, Callum has more introspective interactions with Rayla than he does with Claudia.

He talks about his own changing self identity to and because of her in 1x04 (quite literally, as she’s the one who pushed him to try magic in the first place); she’s one of the people who pushes him to take a stand. She gives him a listening ear to properly work out the grief he feels from the loss of his father. She reaffirms his self worth time and time again (1x04, 2x04, 2x07, 3x01). Likewise, Callum changes Rayla enough that she inherits his worldview and then parrots it back to him to both explain her own choices and to lift his spirits. 

For Callum and Rayla, both characters who didn’t get a lot of praise growing up (Callum had Soren constantly ragging on him and Claudia never seems to mind, and Rayla’s is obvious, with Runaan’s “I brought you because you’re talented” barely registering at all because “[Her] heart isn’t hard enough” matters more), the fact that they consistently “say tons of nice things to each other” is massively important. 

Because those are more than heartfelt speeches. They’re speeches that reaffirm each other��s worth outside of all the things people told they had to be, or saying that they’ve lived up to who they want to become. Callum’s speech to her in 3x04 is a perfect rebuttal to basically every insecurity she’s ever had. 

It’s true that Callum and Claudia have a lot of varied interactions in their short time together (1x01, 1x02, 1x03, 2x02, 2x03, and 2x07) but it’s also true that it’s only 1/4th of Rayllum’s total runtime of 24 out of 27 episodes. 90% of what we know about either of them comes from their interactions with each other. I’m not saying that you can’t like a ship based mostly on their potential if canon doesn’t give you what you think it could/should with any given couple, but Callum and Claudia have scenes that fall into four main categories: talking about magic; flirting or each other; and dealing with fallouts. 

We’ve never seen Callum and Claudia grieve together; we’ve never seen them fight; we’ve never seen them make each other grow. We’ve never seen Claudia choose or defend Callum over anything or everyone else. We’ve never seen Callum trust Claudia over Rayla when it actually mattered in a life or death situation (and arguably mattered the most). We’ve never seen Callum and Claudia problem solve together. We’ve never seen them make up. 

Callum and Rayla talk about magic, and their vastly different families, and in depth insecurities, and breakdowns, and grieving, and Ezran, and strategies, and fears, and hopes, and morality / ethics, Claudia, disagreements, legacies, plans, self sacrifice, Soren, and so much more. 

I love Rayllum as much as I do because it gives us a lot of insight onto each of them as characters and because they help each other grow, largely through support, a listening ear, and introspection. Callum and Claudia also bring out really interesting things about each other’s characters, but to act like it’s the same amount simply isn’t true because they point blank don’t have the same run time or development. If that’s a story flaw in someone’s eyes, that is their prerogative and I’m not gonna act like any of this can change my mind.

But it seems like that person’s claim, objectively, reflects a subjective opinion that can be refuted very easily, and I’m not too concerned. 

#thanks for asking #anonymous #mini meta #analysis series #requests #analysis #rayllum #where can i put it down? #callum x claudia #s2 #parallels #sort of?? #i ship C/C for the same reasons i ship varrow but like #neither are healthy or long lasting relationships in canon for good reason #do i think callum and claudia would've been happy together in another life? yeah #100% #but is that also predicated on nothing changing #bc when things do change in canon they basically immediately start falling apart? oh yeah big time #also rayla Literally cares more about callum than claudia ever does #but i've talked about that before

[mrlnsfrt]

A Storm is Coming

Robertson asks the significant question: “Does the world hate us? If not, why not? Has the world become more Christian or Christians more worldly?” - Nichol, F. D. (Ed.). (1980). The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary (Vol. 5, p. 1044). Review and Herald Publishing Association.

This is an interesting question and one that I will discuss further in this post. This is my third post on John 15, the first one was The One Thing (John 15:1-8), my second post was Love and Joy (John 15:9-17), and on this post, I will be focusing on John 15:18-25.

Hate

“If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. - John 15:18 NKJV

So far in John 15, we have read Jesus’ words about us remaining in Him and bearing fruit, and how as we do that we experience joy, and how remaining and loving God and one another is also deeply connected with keeping God’s commandments. Now, in that context of love, joy, and obedience we discover we will experience hate.

Jesus loves us as the Father loves Him, we are to love Him and one another, yet this will cause the world to hate us. How? Why? Because it hated Jesus, even though that is exactly how He lived. Jesus loved and obeyed the Father perfectly, Jesus also loved those around Him with a greater and more perfect love than anyone ever did, and yet they killed Him. Jesus lived the perfect life, He is our perfect example, yet He was hated and killed!? This is difficult to accept, and challenging to understand. But let us keep reading to see what else Jesus has to say.

Aliens?

If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. John 15:19NKJV

As followers of Jesus, we are not of this world. We live according to different values, we have different goals, we serve a different authority. All these differences cause us to stand apart from everyone else. Many of you may already know this but I was born in Brazil and moved to the US when I was about 12 years old. At this point in my life, I have lived in the US longer than I lived in Brazil, however, people I interact with can still tell that I am not originally from here. The way I talk and interact signals to others that I am a little different. I have an accent, my sentence structure is sometimes awkward, and even in social interactions I sometimes behave differently from those around me.

The interesting thing is that even when I visit my home country, I don’t quite fit in. I have become too “Americanized.” So I am too Brazilian to completely fit in where I currently live in the United States, and I am too American to fit in in Brazil where I was born. It does not matter where I go I am always a little different, different enough to people to wonder where I am from. This feeling is what comes to mind when I read Jesus’ statement that we are not of this world. There should be something about us that causes others to wonder where we are from.

What should be strange about us needs to be shaped by our love for God and those around us. It should be because of our faithfulness to God and sacrificial love for others. (for more on this see Love and Joy)

Persecuted

Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours also. - John 15:20 NKJV

Jesus is our perfect example, we are called to live as He lived and as a result, we should also expect to suffer persecution as He did. However, I have witnessed a misinterpretation of this text that leads some to believe that persecution is a sign of faithfulness to God. Meaning that if you’re not being persecuted it must mean that you’re not being faithful to God. I can see the appeal of this interpretation, but I also see a danger. Would such an interpretation cause me to go out of my way to make enemies because persecution would validate the faithfulness of my approach?

What about what Jesus said in the Conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount?

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. - Matthew 5:11-12 NKJV

Jesus said we are blessed when we are persecuted for righteousness’ sake! Jesus says that you are blessed when the evil they say against you is false and it happens for His sake. This means that when you are not doing anything evil but are being falsely accused. When you are doing nothing wrong and being persecuted, there is a special blessing there. But there is no blessing when you are harassing people in the name of Jesus. When you make Jesus and the gospel your weapon of choice to attack those who disagree with you I feel like you’re not going to get the promised blessing.

Remember that John 15:20 is found in the context of John 15, of abiding in Jesus and bearing fruit. The persecution here is to be understood in that context. I understand this to mean people persecuting you for being honest, kind, loving, and faithful to God. This does not mean you go out looking for a fight or instigating persecution, but rather that you lovingly and firmly stand unmovable on the teachings of the word of God. You don’t go out of your way to look for trouble, but should trouble (persecution) find you, may it be because of your faithfulness to God, and may you stand firm for your beliefs.

Personal Story

Here’s a personal story that I believe illustrates this,

When I was in high school I worked at a fast-food restaurant. I had explained to them about my religious beliefs and how I would not work from sunset on Friday evening until sunset on Saturday evening since I kept the biblical seventh-day Sabbath. The manager never made an issue of it the whole time I worked there. A friend of mine also worked there. He also kept the biblical seventh-day Sabbath as I did, however, he was fired after a few months. He told everyone at church that he was fired because of religious persecution. I, however, never experienced this persecution he spoke of. I believe that his firing might have been connected to his work ethic. I noticed him coming in late, asking to leave early, calling in sick on Sundays when he went to the beach, etc. Interestingly among our Brazilian friends, he would say he was fired because the manager was racist against Brazilians, something that I also never experienced.

I say this just to say if we want others to respect our religious beliefs we should also make an effort to live up to those beliefs, to be an example among others. I have found that employers are willing to make accommodations for their best employees. When you are honest, dependable, dedicated, motivated, you are preaching the gospel to those at work, even if you don’t stand up to read your Bible out loud at work.

But the persecution can also come when you are behaving the best way possible. When you insist on being honest when everyone else wants you to be a little dishonest. Sometimes the boss wants you to turn a blind eye, or do something that goes against your biblical principles. When you stand up while those around you or above you want to be dishonest it can bring persecution. When you refuse to laugh at a joke that is racist or sexist, you may lose some friends. When you stand up for someone who is being picked on unfairly when you make your voice heard in the defense of those who cannot speak for themselves it may make you less popular or even cause you to be persecuted. I believe that this is what Jesus was talking about.

Whenever I feel persecuted, I stop and think about what could possibly be causing it. Am I doing something wrong or am I being persecuted for doing what is right?

I don’t know all the cases, I am not always sure of the answer, so I believe that prayer and Bible study are essential along with a sincere desire to do the will of God.

For Jesus’ Sake

But all these things they will do to you for My name’s sake, because they do not know Him who sent Me. - John 15:21 NKJV

Ultimately I must understand that those who do not know God will not see things the way I see them. They have a different worldview, different values, and to be honest that even limits the activities I can be involved in. But if I ever find myself persecuted, I want it to be because of Jesus, for His name’s sake, and not because of my personal failures.

Judgment

If I had not come and spoken to them, they would have no sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. - John 15:22 NKJV

Every time you preach the gospel you bring judgment to someone. When they hear the good news and reject it, they bring judgment on themselves. The good news about salvation in Jesus is an opportunity for someone to gain not only eternal life in the future but also a more abundant life right now. However, it is also an opportunity for them to reject God and His salvation and harden their hearts. The gospel demands a decision, a choice, you don’t get to hear it and continue to live life as usual. The gospel not only reveals God’s love it also reveals sin and removes any excuse from the sinner. That’s why reading the Bible is so dangerous, it brings judgment upon the reader by causing her to make a decision for or against God.

Without Cause

He who hates Me hates My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would have no sin; but now they have seen and also hated both Me and My Father. But this happened that the word might be fulfilled which is written in their law, ‘They hated Me without a cause.’ - John 15:23-25 NKJV

So here is the breakdown of this message. Jesus was hated without cause, and as His faithful followers, we can expect the same. I just really want to stress the importance of the hate and persecution to be without a legitimate cause. It should not be because you’re rude, lazy, dishonest, unreliable. In those cases, the hate would be justified. You must aim to live a life as Jesus lived. A life shaped by love for God and for others, and if people still hate and persecute you, well, they persecuted Jesus also.

How Do I Face Life’s Challenges?

“But when the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with Me from the beginning. - John 15:26-27 NKJV

I face life’s challenges by God’s grace and with the power of the Holy Spirit. I just continue to live a life that bears witness to Jesus. I invite Jesus into my heart, I accept Him as Lord and Savior. I remain in Him and allow Him to cause me to bear fruit for Him even if I am being persecuted.

Regardless of what is happening around me, I am called to remain in Jesus. I can leave the final consequences in His hands. God provided Manna for the Israelites when they were in the wilderness (Exodus 16) and caused ravens to bring food for Elijah (1 Kings 17) and I know that He can take care of my needs, after all, God has been providing for me since the day I was born.

I am not saying that following God is easy, I am saying it is worth it. My part is also simple, remain in Jesus, and allow Him to do for me and in me what needs to be done to cause me to bear fruit.

#Jesus #John #challenge

[onfdata]

[INTV] Singles Korea

Singles Korea, August 2020 Issue Interview with Hyojin & Wyatt

HYOJIN Individual interview

You became more loved: My favorite stage from Road to Kingdom is ‘The We Must Love’, which we did together with YooA sunbaenim. The original song ‘We Must Love’ was really great, but mashed up with ‘Moscow Moscow’, the new arrangement was pure art. The expressive performances given by YooA sunbaenim and the members made the stage feel reminiscent of a musical, and it helped boost public awareness around our team. Like the title suggests, we became more loved.

“This main vocalist is good at his job”: Out of all the feedback I received while on Road to Kingdom, this one made me feel the best. After ‘Everybody’ was uploaded, the top comment was “this main vocalist is good at his job”. It felt really awesome (laughs).

Opening Pandora’s box: We often hear that our songs like ‘We Must Love’ and ’New World’ benefit from their dramatic composition and integrated sense of storytelling. Actually, we started world building with our debut album. Our last stage on the program, ‘New World’, tells the story about setting off after finding a set of keys; each person opens their own Pandora’s box to usher them into the New World. We tried to help the public understand the stage more easily by setting up this worldview. But there’s one Pandora’s Box you should never open… an old video of me singing!

Maintaining one’s figure by eating once a day: In general, I eat more if I dance more. I thought dieting would work, but sadly I can’t hold back on food—as soon as I get my hands on it, I won’t stop eating until it’s all disappeared. For that reason, I’ve gone with eating once a day; I inevitably gain weight if I eat three meals a day. I’m simultaneously controlling myself and dieting to maintain my body. It’s important to maintain a weight and body condition that suits me. So rather than build up muscle for this shoot, I opted to keep my body and weight as is.

—

WYATT Individual interview

The truth behind the brave male rapper ‘Wyatt’: The name ‘Wyatt’ itself refers to a brave man. We picked the name because of my strong image, which makes me look as if I can protect everyone, when in reality… I’m afraid of ghosts and bugs. I’m also afraid of heights. I’m not actually brave, so I ended up getting the nickname ‘Princess’, contrasting with how I appear. It’s kind of like how people call Ma Dongseok sunbaenim ‘Mavely’** (laughs).

Visuals and a low, cave-like voice: There are a lot of people with cave-like voices, so I never gave mine much thought. But a lot of people who watched Road to Kingdom videos reacted kindly to my voice, which I’m very thankful for. There are pros and cons, though. My voice is sonorous and resonant; I sound calm when reading a book or explaining something, which puts people at ease. The con is that I can sound very muddled; since it also echoes, it’s easy for people to misunderstand what I say if I don’t pronounce things exactly right.

Krump: It’s a style of dance I showed on Road to Kingdom for our rearranged stage of SHINee sunbaenim’s ‘Everybody’. I didn’t know about krumping when I started out; I learned about it from a krump teacher after I transferred to Hanlim Art High School. It was then I first encountered the concept of a ‘dancer’ in itself, experienced krumping’s uniquely tough appeal, and even made a krumping team to participate in a contest with. I don’t krump any more. It’s an extremely difficult dance; being an ONF member comes first and foremost, so I’m focusing more on music.

Wyatt’s effort for abs: I worked hard for two weeks leading up to our ‘Everybody’ stage, where I showed my upper body. I didn’t eat any carbs and only had chicken breast and protein shakes. I filled my stomach only with fluids, so I weighed less then than I do now. I found out later on that Hongseok hyung had maintained a balanced diet and workout routine for three weeks. If only I’d had the extra week, I could’ve shown a better body, so it’s a shame.

**T/N: Ma + lovely

—

GROUP INTERVIEW Excerpts

This must be the first time the six of you from Pentagon, ONF, and TOO are meeting up like this.

Wyatt: I thought I’d be in trouble since I’m being reunited again with Hongseok hyung, so I haven’t skipped out on a single day of working out (laughs).

Hyojin: When I found out who I’d be doing the photoshoot with, I couldn’t help but think “is it right for me to even be there?” If you’re doing a shoot by the sea, there’s a certain level of exposure... fortunately, there wasn’t any shocking exposure, but it was still the most amount of exposure I’ve ever put out there (laughs).

What was your favorite stage from Road to Kingdom?

Wyatt: The 90-second face-to-face. I talked about this before, but it’s not that we did well so much as it was that there were so many things lacking about our performance. We saw that as an opportunity for growth in the coming stages. The face-to-face performance was a huge wake-up call for us.

What impact has Road to Kingdom had for you as an individual, and your team as a whole?

Hyojin: Despite how burdened my heart felt, or how impossible things seemed, I could do it. I just didn’t know because I’d never tried. To be honest, I was really worried when it came to our ’It’s Raining’ performance. The song was great, but I didn’t think I could pull it off. But we won first place—I realized that what I was seeing and hearing for myself wasn’t the right answer.

This program took on a tournament format to show the rise towards the ‘Kingdom’. In the end, only one team took the title of champion, but looking at the ‘rediscovered’ teams gathered here today, it doesn’t seem like your efforts have gone in vain. How much effort did each of you make?

Wyatt: By the time we got back to the office after the face-to-face performance, it was 6 AM. Overwhelmed by fear and stress and thinking that we couldn’t carry on the way we were, we held a meeting right away. From that day onwards, it was a constant struggle of man versus mind.

We got to see some amazing, high-quality camerawork only made possible by the 360° stage, which wasn’t present in Season 1’s Queendom, and the likes of which can only be seen at year-end awards ceremonies. What were the pros and cons of this new type of stage?

Hyojin: It was difficult at first because we weren’t acquainted with this type of stage before. I couldn’t adapt and kept thinking negatively, but seeing how the other teams were able to establish a fine balance and create such dynamic stages was so enlightening. We learned how to make our stages even more fantastic and were able to perform cool stages. It was a little disappointing that I couldn’t experience the audience’s real, live reaction, though.

(Translated by @onfdata)

#onf #hyojin #kim hyojin #wyatt #shim jaeyoung #t:interview #t:trans #200720

[janiedean]

When one of my favourite fic writers was asked why she doesn’t like brienne’s POV she said that she’s a minor character looking for two major characters whose location we already know, they lack suspense and it’s hard to see why they’re there :( I feel like a lot of people feel this way, but what do you think is the purpose of brienne’s chapters in the grand scheme of things?

well, there’s a lot to unpack here, but:

the fact that brienne is defined minor already says all because no, she’s a pove character. she can be a secondary or not one of the main ones, true enough, but minor character? yeah, nope. she has POVs. minor characters don’t have povs unless you count throwaways with just one, but then again, melisandre has one pov and you’d never say she was a minor character, would you? yeah, exactly;

also, ‘brienne is looking for sansa and we already know who she is’: yeah, except that it’s not about sansa whatsoever, it’s about lady stoneheart and brienne herself and their rship with jaime, which means that if you’re reading brienne’s chapters wanting to find stuff on sansa you’re already approaching it wrong because ofc we know where sansa is, but brienne’s arc in affc is about sansa as much as sansa is a pretext to show you a lot of things that grrm couldn’t do otherwise.

specifically, we have two main things: worldbuilding and brienne’s character development. in order:

worldbuilding:

now, what’s happened for the first three books? people went to war and it apparently ended (in westeros) with an unlawful massacre. all of our povs until now until davos have been from nobles/economically privileged people who have mostly survived the war. we had some inklings of how it went through a) the riverrun chapters in acok where you learn that edmure had let his people in, b) the cat chapters in general, c) something from davos because he has the not-noble perspective, but did we see how the war actually devastated the entire country? no. what do brienne’s chapters offer? brienne and pod going around one of the most war-torn areas of westeros (near where the red wedding had been) and showing you exactly how much it hurt the real people living it, and sorry but if grrm, a well-known conscience objector during the vietnam war who feels about the consequence of war and pacifism very deeply, has said in an interview that his favorite scene to write in the whole of asoiaf is brienne and maribald talking about how ptsd destroys soldiers’s lives in war and war ruins people, sure as hell I’m going to assume he thinks those povs were important enough to warrant their presence;

also, you get introduced in a very subtle but effective way to a lot of future key players. as in, randyll tarly is currently on the small council or should be soon, but we don’t see him first in a sam chapter, we see him in brienne’s affc chapters where he’s presented as being basically the asshole version of stannis who told her to go back home and find a husband when he technically saved her from the bet in renly’s camp, we find out sandor is alive (!!! THE QUIET ISLE!!!), we find out where the fuck gendry ended up, we find out where the bloody mummers have scattered, we have found out where the brotherhood ended up etc, and oh wait lady stoneheart shows up and scuse me but catelyn was a major character with a shitton of povs and you’re telling me it’s a coincidence she shows up with her purpose and all in the chapters of the female character she shared a bond with, that was sworn to her and who’d have fucking died for her even after cat herself died and it’s a coincidence? like, i know this fandom hates catelyn dead or alive but she’s important, deal with it;

this also means that through brienne’s chapters grrm deals with a lot of his favorite themes to touch in a general setting without going into character-specific things, specifically:a) war, the consequences of war on who fought it, which are all negative and peace being always the best choice over it;b) those same consequences on people who suffered it without fighting (ie: have a bunch of orphans being slaughtered by bandits because their parents died!)c) the fact that the people in power don’t give a single fuck about itd) justice and how it’s dealt (randyll tarly and his exemplary methods /sarcasm)

okay, all good, you say, and then why did brienne have to do it, couldn’t it have been anyone else?

no, it couldn’t have been anyone else, and this is where we touch the other point, as in, brienne’s character development. as in:

now, george is a good writer. he also knows that if you have to set a character up for something at the peak of the series, you have to build it up before (ie: if he knew that theon was gonna save jeyne and jump from that window after regretting he didn’t die with robb, he had to start working on it since his acok chapters which he did, but you couldn’t have told that would be his storyline reading acok, right...?) which means that you need to make sure the reader has a background and knows what the hell is going on with them and why they tick the way they tick. I have previously ranted about how you can guess a lot of things about brienne if you read just acok/asos when I explained why she’s important as a literary character and I refer to that for it, but until you get to asos, since you don’t have her pov, other than ‘she’s not conventionally attractive’, you can only go insofar as:a) at some point she was in love with renly enough she’d die for himb) she’s a very morally sound person who really believes in her knightly oaths to a point that’s maybe unhealthy sometimesc) she’d die for whoever she trustsd) she will change her mind if she misjudged someone but she needs to have proofe) she doesn’t trust people easilyf) she can fight pretty damn well and possibly best than any other man in westerosg) everyone thinks she’s a joke for wanting to be a knighth) she has conflicts about wearing dressesnow, that’s not little. but still, it’s not enough for what I think george has in plans for her. now, rewind a moment, because we need to establish another point, as in...

grrm has made A Damned Point in these books of deconstructing the concept of chivalry/knighthood and pointing out how people who are seen by others as perfect knights/Good People To Boot are actually anything but and people who tried to actually do knightly things aren’t seen as such for hypocrisy or because society sucks or both (jaime and sandor vs gregor vs jaime’s old kingsguard vs the gold cloaks etc) and he’s been pretty damn going at it with a flamethrower. what you know is that at the point in the narrative westeros is at knighthood is a corrupted institution, no one believes in it (or almost), no one fits the definition of what a true knight should be or if they do other people don’t see it, and not counting the above (sandor because he doesn’t see himself as one and he loathes it because the moment gregor got knighted he got his worldview of it tainted forever, jaime because he tried and he wanted to be it and all he got was the kingslayer name) no one in these books is a darned true knight and recognized as such. now, I’ll bring up the goddamned dunk and egg books again because in those books we have a) the actual knightly oath, b) an actual true knight, as in duncan, who is/was recognized as such by the entire damned realm and actually was one. now, the oath is:In the name of the Warrior I charge you to be brave. In the name of the Father I charge you to be just. In the name of the Mother I charge you to defend the young and innocent. In the name of the Maid I charge you to protect all women....now, I’m gonna drop the question: who, while going around westeros with a *valyrian sword* she doesn’t think she deserves handling and duncan’s actual shield that she takes because there was a similar one in the armory while being on a quest to save a princess:- shows bravery at every other corner (no chance and no choice guys)- dispenses justice as much as she’s allowed to (the bloody mummers and most likely lady stoneheart later) because she kills people who did horrible things- defended the young and innocent (pod and the kids in the inn, again, no chance and no choice)- protected women (she’s out to find sansa and most people in the inn were girls and if you want to rape someone rape me)?answer: brienne of tarth. yes, brienne. no, no other. and no one else could have done that, because, and here we go to the last two points...

we knew what we knew about brienne, but the moment we go into her head we find out exactly all the reasons why she does what she does, we find out what she thinks about her life, jaime, catelyn, pod, the situation she’s in and whatnot, we find out what drives her, we find out why she was going to die with renly, we find out that her core problem (other than hating that people see her as ugly) is that she can’t reconcile being a lady and a knight and she hates disappointing his father and that she’s been subjected to a really damn crappy time in her life on account of her looks, which means that we saw her as a young girl who was about to get herself killed over renly and finally finds a woman who doesn’t laugh at her in cat chapters, we saw her as what jaime sees her as ie someone who gets him/changed his mind about him/a paragon of knightly strength and vows-upholding, but we hadn’t seen her from inside her own head.from where we find out that she’s a human being with very human issues, that she’s actually not a fluke in the sense that yes she’s that good of a person, yes she’s that nice, no she doesn’t care for glory or money or fame beyond ending up in songs where she’s celebrated as beautiful and strong and not called names like in real life, no she doesn’t have some hidden agenda to fuck things up for someone, yes she really believes in knightly vows, yes she really cares for the people she swears herself to that much, yes she suffers over catelyn’s death forreal, yes she really is gone over jaime that much, yes her self-esteem is crap, no she’s not gregor clegane.and she’s also duncan’s direct descendant, even if george isn’t dropping that bomb on her yet. (and her brother’s name is galladon like one of the fairest knights in legends and wait, in arthuriana the perfect knight is galahad of which brienne is a deconstruction in herself.)now, not to presume anything, but if I was writing a series in which I 100% deconstruct knighthood in every possible way - as an institution and as ‘what people thinks a knight has to look like’ - and I was planning to have as a plot twist to have a person who doesn’t look like a proper knight according to the audience and the other characters in the narration actually be officially hailed as The Best Knight In This Entire Fucking Realm I’d probably give them POV chapters instead of having them always be seen by someone else, because you can’t know if that person is deserving of the title until it’s always other people talking about it. the moment you’re in their head you know if they have what it takes for the job or not...

which means that the brienne chapters are there because from the moment she gets them and separates from jaime she starts on a journey which ends with her having to face her worst fears about her own shortcomings and put her in front of enormous moral and ethical choices (ie jaime - the man she loves - or stoneheart as in her former liege lady gone mad, also her mission for sansa vs saving the girls at the inn because if she’s dead she can’t find sansa... but no chance and no choice) which until now have about broken everyone who has faced them (even good people at heart ie jaime and sandor got their lives turned on for the worst when knighthood ideals and vows failed them) and guess what the entire point is that while everyone else couldn’t coherently live up to those ideals and vows, brienne most likely will because she’s exactly everything a true knight TM should be, and the moment she gets over it she’s going to get the results, and since I doubt grrm wanted anyone to say that if she got that he had written an overpowered mary sue who can fight anyone and take the moral high ground without being conflicted most of the time, he’s showing you where she comes from, that she’s hella conflicted and she has a hell of a lot of issues which still don’t stop her from pursuing her dreams.

and sorry but if she’s being written to become that (and the fact that she’s duncan’s direct descendant seals it nvm the knighting in the show which I’m 99% sure is one of the three book canon things they might have done this year because like hell dnd would have cared for knighting her before kingsguarding her, they’d have forgotten it as usual) then she can’t not have povs because then she really would look like your usual mary sue just not standard attractive, but then again you don’t get how much that hurts her or weights on her until you read her chapters. then it hits you in the face. like, reading it really cemented for me that she was top three for me and my favorite female character in existence, if it stuck at asos I don’t know if i’d have gotten it that much.

also, giving a pov to the only goshdarned canonically not attractive woman who stays not attractive with her experiences and background that ever graced mainstream literature has (for me and a lot of others I know) meant that for the first time we saw someone with our darned crappy childhood self-esteem destroying experiences being the protagonist of one storyline and believe me that didn’t hurt either, and most surely grrm also meant her as that specific rep, and that would be enough of a reason if he felt like it, but nvm that.

tldr: the purpose of brienne’s chapters is showing you that war sucks and make you understand that brienne is The Knight That Was Promised and they’re there so when she’s knighted and hailed as the best one since her ancestor and most likely even better than him you don’t go like ‘what the hell where did that come from she has no pov I’ve barely seen her in these books how am I supposed to buy it’, never mind that she’s fundamental to the conclusion of catelyn’s storyline whichever it is, and catelyn’s coincidentally an extremely major character in these series and one grrm also really obviously cares about. and grrm is doing the work now so no one falls off the chair gaping and wondering what the hell was her deal in ADOS. so if anyone thinks the purpose in those chapters is finding sansa they’re imvho very far off the mark. sansa being actually the purpose of the quest happens next book after the stoneheart situation is solved, then we can discuss it. but for now, it’s not what these chapters are about - they’re about brienne and her relationships and her quest and knighthood and the worldbuilding and about how war devastates the places it happens in always, and the fact that people read those chapters and then think ‘yes but what about sansa’ and/or ‘yes but what was the point’ is imvho a self-showing proof that it’s exactly why they need them: because like that, they them and only think about the other main characters or the overachieving plot or immediate gratification when grrm wants the reader to stop and think for five minutes about what he’s telling you and he’s pointing neon lights at brienne like ‘hey SHE is the one you need to keep an eye on because She Is The Quintessential Good Guy’. but the fact that I see people dismissing her chapters as useless and boring on principle because no plot gratification and ‘she’s boring’ about says everything that has to be said imvho, and that was my tea for today, thanks for coming to my ted talk.

#brienne of tarth #asoiaf meta #gotbrienneoftarth #janie writes meta #*shrug* #long post for ts #I said what I said #Anonymous #ask post

[scrunchyharry]

on allowing translations of our fics: a non-native English speaker’s perspective

Here’s some 7am thoughts from my brain to your screens. This isn’t criticism, to be clear. I’m thinking out loud.

Under a cut because it’s pretty long and verging on Discourse.

I’ve been writing fics for 15 years, across four different fandoms and as many platforms. I’ve always allowed translations to be made of my fics because, I suppose que je comprends que certaines personnes ne disposent pas des capacités nécessaires pour lire des œuvres écrites en anglais.

I couldn’t comfortably read a novel in English until I was 17-18. It took me three weeks to get through Of Mice and Men in high school and when I was asked to read Dracula in my 9th grade ESL-A class, I found a French translation of it. I still can’t go to a Shakespeare play and hope to understand what’s going on. I’ve tried, numerous times. I’ve tried with Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet. I just do not understand them when they speak (to be fair, I have seen a handful of Molière plays and also struggled my way through the Ancien Régime French, so maybe I just have really bad hearing comprehension).

And I’m Canadian, so English is omnipresent in my life. I started learning when I was in the 4th grade, I only truly felt like I could call myself bilingual in my early twenties, after going to university in English. Je comprends donc que l’anglais n’est pas confortablement accessible à tous et à toutes.

the 1D fandom is the first where I see people being against translations, yet it is also the most "international" of the fandoms I’ve been in. I have to clarify: I never witnessed any discussions of translations in my previous fandoms, is what I mean by that. Whether for or against them, I never saw people talking about them. The 1D fandom is the first where I a) see it being talked about and b) see people against them.

It stands out as odd to me because I personally never had any objections to it, I never even gave it a second thought beyond making sure that I was properly credited and asking for a link to the final product so that I can verify that I was. I think, perhaps, it speaks to the fact that the English speaking world is so rarely confronted to works in a language inaccessible to them. The outcries around Parasite being in Korean with English subs come to mind, while the rest of the non-English world was like "this is a regular Monday for us? To have to contend with translated or subtitled works to be able to access the hegemonic culture?"

Being a non-English speaker in an Anglo-centric world means constantly readjusting what you thought you knew. I didn’t grow up watching The Lion King or reading Anne of Green Gables. I grew up watching Le Roi lion and reading Anne et la maison aux pignons verts. Translations are an integral part of my life. Hell, on days when I’m really tired, I’ll switch whatever I’m watching on Netflix to French (when it’s available, which is a topic for another discussion) so that my brain can catch a break.

When I say readjusting, I mean that you’re always reframing. “Oh, I didn’t know that Severus Rogue’s English name was Severus Snape. Let me keep that in mind throughout our entire discussion in my second language.” “Oh, right, Americans have middle school so I better remember what years that covers and speak accordingly so I don’t have to go down the longer road of explaining that, actually, my French-Canadian school system didn’t have middle school and oh, also, our high school ends in the 10th grade and...” you get my drift.

This post is getting away from me. I’ll try to reel it back in. When I was in undergrad, I took a lit class from the French department (remember my bit about giving my brain a break?) and it was about the early 20th century. After suffering through the inevitable Proust, we moved on to Milan Kundera, a Czech writer (I had to use autocorrect for that, see, for me Czech is Tchèque) who became a French citizen. I don’t have the exact quote, that notebook has been gone since 2012, but I remember that he considered translations to be entirely new works of fiction and that the translator’s touch made the book anew because of the interpretations they chose when translating. Here’s an excerpt from an abstract about this:

"Kundera showed displeasure at any translator who, however briefly, would impersonate the author and take some license in translating Kundera’s work. Further, Kundera decided that only his full authorial involvement in the process would ascertain “the same authenticity” of his translations as the original Czech works. Kundera thus becomes the omnipresent, omnipotent author, himself impersonating God controlling his own creation."

Margala, Miriam. (2011). The Unbearable Torment of Translation: Milan Kundera, Impersonation, and The Joke. TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies. 1. 10.21992/T9C62H.

I’m not just name dropping Milan Kundera to show that I’m Educated. I’m bringing this point up because this isn’t my personal perspective on translation, but I can understand how it can be other people’s. My stance on this is that I want my work to be as universally accessible as it can be. Once I’ve put a story out into the world, while I do retain the copyright of it, it isn’t mine anymore. Every person reading it will read a different story because of their own inner lives and what they bring to it. Similarly, translations may bring out other perspectives of it. My work is done, though, the moment I click "post" and send it out into the world. I am no longer in control of the way it will be understood. And I’m at peace with this. It is a true ego death to read comments and see people picking up on things you did not even notice yourself as the omnipotent little god of your own creation.

As I was revising this essay, memories of bygone discourse came back to my mind, from the time I was in the Les Misérables fandom. You can imagine that I got a kick out of being able to say I had read it in the original French, but beyond that, the most interesting conversations I had in those days were when comparing the various English translations of the novel to each other and to the original French. There were Opinions on who had done it best, and who got closer to the original, but then not quite as much, because “see, here this word that Hugo used can be interpreted in a different way and it changes the entire meaning of the next sentence.” 

More recently, a woman translated The Illiad or the Odyssey, I don’t quite remember, and her interpretation of certain scenes completely changed their meaning. I’m working off my memory, here, but I think I recall reading that where men had translated “prostitute”, she had translated “companion”, or something along those lines, and it showed how the translator brings their own worldview to a work, it’s inevitable.

I am not trying to compare One Direction fanfiction to The Illiad, let’s be clear. What I’m attempting to say in too many words is that fanfiction is derivative work, and so are translations. I, personally, will never be against people translating my work if I’m credited correctly. Without translations, I wouldn’t have known Disney growing up. I wouldn’t have known Anne of Green Gables, or Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, or Winnie the Pooh, or Alice in Wonderland, or any other work that have shaped my psyche as a child. Far from me to say that my native French culture is not rich in itself with works (I owe as much to the Comtesse de Ségur as I do to Lucy Maud Montgomery), but translations allow me to be able to take part of a global conversation, to be a part of the Internet’s collective unconscious.

At the same time, with the plague that are unauthorized reposts of our works, I understand why other people are wary of anything that involves a form of reposting. There is no easy answer to this, but I did want to share my thoughts on the matter as a non-native English speaker and, most importantly, writer. 

I’ll conclude by saying that, if anyone is wondering, I’m not writing in my native French because the mere thought of writing a sex scene in the same language I use to talk to my mother is enough to Catholic-guilt me off the face of the planet, without even breaching the topic of writing in the language that has the biggest potential reach.

so, huh, yeah. thank you for coming to my ted talk.

#I'm sure no one will read all of this but here it goes #my two cents on a topic that is close to my heart #dare I tag this #discourse #I hope no one feels attacked by this because it truly wasn't my intention

[tanadrin]

Reordberend

(part 21 of ?; first; previous; next)

(BTW, as of this update, Reordberend is, by my count, a little over 45k words long, putting it in the territory of a shortish novel. That also makes it one of the longest SF stories I’ve ever written. It’s not the most popular thing I’ve ever posted on Tumblr, but it has gotten a steady trickle of notes. Knowing there are people out there who enjoy your work, even if it’s fairly niche, is the best motivation there is to keep writing. Thank you for reading!)

Katherine Alice Green The Guest Room in the Village Hall The High Settlement McMurdo Dry Valleys ANTARCTICA

to Dr. Eunice Valerie Gordon Trinity College Dublin Dublin 2 IRELAND

Dear Dr. Gordon,

I am writing yet another letter I won’t be able to send, which, I realize might make me seem like kind of a crazy person. The only defense I can plead, I guess, is that the perpetual darkness of the winters here does funny things to you if you’re not used to it, and I’ve had a lot of down time lately that I need to do something productive with. I have already written to my parents, to a couple of friends, and to my cat, which leaves only you. And these letters seem to have a way of focusing my thoughts, so maybe it’s not an entirely useless exercise.

Where to begin? Well, first of all, I’m alive. That may come as a surprise. It occured to me not long after I was marooned here that perhaps nobody knows that. No one has come looking for me, and why would they? If any rescue parties did go looking for the Albatross, I doubt they’d come this far south. Not in winter. But I did in fact survive the ship going down. I don’t think anybody else did. The Dry Valleys People didn’t find anyone else on the shore, alive or dead. I try not to think about that too much, but, to be honest, it still has me kind of fucked up.

Oh, that’s the other things. I’ve made contact with the Dry Valleys People. I am, as the return address indicates, currently living with them. They have welcomed me, rather reluctantly, and I’ll be able to remain at least until the first sunrise of spring. This was not necessarily a widely popular decision, and I’ve come to learn that the political situation among the DVP is rather complicated. They have always guarded their isolation and their independence, and they’re keen to keep guarding it in the future, but there are some among them who worry how long that will really be possible. I think this is something Dr. Wright foresaw, and tried to warn them about in the letter he sent with me. But as you might expect, this is something a large part of their community doesn’t want to hear or even think about, and my presence here is definitely fraught.

As for my original mission… well, it’s an unqualified success, despite the difficulties. I’ve learned a lot. The language, to start with. You won’t believe this, but they speak Old English here. No, not thee and thou and maketh yon Old English. Not Chaucer, even. Older. From their books and what they’ve told me, their ancestors used the West Saxon dialect of Old English, as spoken about the year 1000 AD, as the basis for the language they taught their children. Dr. Wright knew this, of course. That’s how he was able to communicate them and win their trust; he showed an affinity for the same history and the same long-term perspective they cared about. If it seems weird that a bunch of people would move to Antarctica, forsake almost every modern convenience, and deliberately teach their kids a dead language that would be useless in the wider world, well, all I can say I guess is that humans have done a lot of weird shit for a lot of weird reasons throughout history. I think I am beginning to understand why the ancestors of the DVP did what they did. Some of them have tried to explain it to me, but there is a gap in our worldviews here that is difficult to bridge.

One of the DVP that I have befriended is a poet named Leofric. His sister, Leofe, taught me the language, but I’ve learned a lot more about their literature from him. It’s primarily an oral literature, although they do write some of it down. They like long, semi-narrative poetry that draws heavily on the imagery of the natural world, and I would say that it owes something to the ancient Anglo-Saxon poetry they keep in their books, except that, of course, the environment here is nothing like the environment of England one thousand years ago. But there are still some poetic traditions they have inherited from those earlier examples. For instance, their world is harsh, and unforgiving, and from a certain angle looks like a world in decline. The ancient English (so I am told) were surrounded by great Roman ruins they spoke of as being the work of metaphorical giants; here, they have the ruins of two hundred years of scientific and industrial exploration of the Antarctic coast. And their world, too, is enclosed by a vast cold sea, although this one has penguins in it at least.

Aside from the language, the founders of the DVP don’t seem to have intended to recreate medieval English society. There are no kings. There is a semi-formal system of village headship by seniority, but the social hierarchy is very flat. Marriage, inheritance, and choice of occupation all take place on fairly egalitarian terms, and their strictest taboos surround the sharing of labor and resources, not sexuality or religion. I wonder how much of their customs are the result of gradual cultural evolution, or some deliberate effort at creating a planned community. There are lots of funny Utopian experimental communities out there, but most tend to fail after a generation. In a way, this one couldn’t fail, because they had no way to leave Antarctica. They had to make it work. Is this what a real utopian project looks like after six or seven generations?

But honestly, one of the most fascinating aspects of the DVP is their material culture. As you might expect, their day-to-day existence is profoundly shaped by the environment they live in. Their houses are all heavy stone, designed to trap scarce heat, and arranged around the village halls as a windbreak against the dry katabatic gales that sweep the McMurdo Valleys clear of ice. Despite this being one of the driest locations on Earth, it’s still a better habitat for them than the glaciers of the Antarctic lowlands, or the rough, icy terrain of the mountains--here, you can actually build, and you don’t need skis and snowshoes to get around. But, as a consequence, much of their most important infrastructure is underground.

I don’t know if the ancestral DVP brought the right tools with them or if they scavenged them once here, but they have accumulated a small stockpile of laser borers, ultrasonic chisels, and crystalsteel digging equipment that they use to carve out underground chambers in the hills as meeting places and ritual sites. But they don’t do their agriculture there; that happens in networks of buried trenches just below the villages, where they grow cold-resistant mosses and lichens to supplement a meat-based diet, and what seems to be a form of genegineered fibergrass they use to weave their clothing and tapestries, and to make books.

Their art is very beautiful. Their coats, books, and tapestries--even their stone carvings--all depict elaborate lineate forms of plants and animals, inherited I suppose from ancestral memory, since none of the organisms in question are found in Antarctica. They also make images depicting the mountains, of course, and the sea, and the animals that live on the coast; even some of the coastal settlements, as seen from far off. They’re often abstracted, but these images are geographically grounded: they’re not just “generic mountains” or “generic coastline,” they’re specific mountains, specific coastlines, and they add up--if you are exposed to them every day of your life growing up--to something like a conceptual map of all of Victoria Land. It seems that if you dropped an average adult DVP individual anywhere from Oates Land to the Queen Elizabeth Range, they could probably find their way home, even during the dark months of winter.

(Oh! And the dark months! You’d think they’d be depressing, but I never imagined in my life I would see such a sight as the aurora australis, or even the clear polar stars! I can’t describe it to you. Maybe Leofric could, if I could do justice to his verse.)

They’re very communitarian, and great emphasis is placed on making sure no one goes without, but the price of that is, apparently, extremely elaborate dispute-resolution mechanisms; for a culture without courts, government, or attorneys, they are remarkably bureaucratic. Each physical object seems to have its own laws attached to it. Some may be shared by all objects of that type--for instance, if you need an electric firestarter, you always go to the house windward of yours to ask if they have one. If they don’t, you go to the next, and so on; firestarters pass from house to house, as needed, but only in one direction. Other objects may have completely unique rules. There is a knife with an elaborately carved handle meant to be used only by left-handed people. I don’t know why; nobody I asked knew, either. But that was the custom, and it was scrupulously obeyed. As a rule, the more elaborately decorated an object, the more particular the rules associated with it, but the elaboration of the object doesn’t seem to connote anything about the rules. It only marks it out as somehow special. The rules themselves are transmitted orally. All of these rules at bottom are about making sure that resources are evenly distributed--making sure nobody has to walk too far in bitterly cold weather to find a firestarter, for instance--and even the ones that don’t make sense now probably were created for good reason. For instance, the southpaw knife. Their knives for carving meat all have handles that curve in one way, to help separate flesh from bone, and I suspect that one is the result of a left-handed steelsmith getting fed up with with tools he couldn’t use very well. The blade is that of a carving-knife, though the handle attached to it is straight. The handle was probably later replaced when it broke, and somebody needed the knife for a different purpose--but the custom attached to it remained the same.

This system of sharing is, if anything, even more scrupulously observed when there’s a windfall. We went on a salvage expedition a month ago and brought back some much-needed supplies, and they spent days working out what would go where, first to each village and then, once we got back to the High Settlement, each house in each village--and even then, this was just what went to who first. Anything that’s not a finite supply, like food, will get passed from house to house. Leofric tells me that a few years ago, a whale--an entire blue whale, actually--beached itself to the north, and they had to have a weeklong assembly (on the beach, next to the whale, natch) to decide what do with every scrap of meat and bone. They still talk about the arguments that went down at the Whale Parliament sometimes (for which their word is hwaelthing, by the way. Literally it means exactly what it looks like: “whale-thing.”). Funny thing is, they also very carefully manage arguments in these discussions. That’s not normally the case--if two people have an argument and what to physically fight each other about it, that’s considered their business. But when it comes to disputes about food or metal or tools, everybody is very keen to show how Not Mad they are, even if they’re actually seething about it on the inside. And if voices get raised, people get hustled aside, and the whole matter is dropped completely until everybody has a chance to calm down. This looks like a system that was either deliberately designed to keep fights from breaking out and feelings getting permanently hurt, or one that sprung up after some nasty experiences of actual fights. I suspect the latter. It’s all very informal, but there’s a lot of social pressure that enforces it. The price for division and discord in an environment this hard to live in would be death, and I think all their social institutions are built around that reality.

I will admit, this has not been the easiest experience. I mean, there’s the almost dying part, and the part where all my cybernetics are broken, and I had a bad bout of something flulike a few weeks ago and almost died again, but I don’t actually mean the physical hardship. It is a more isolating experience than I thought it would be, being the lone outsider in such a close-knit community. Everyone knows everybody and everything, except me. They all have their own jokes and stories and long-running feuds, and they can communicate a great deal to one another with just a glance, and I’m left wondering what just happened when everybody laughs at something, or a fight breaks out. I have struggled sometimes to learn the language. I mean, I’ve had no other choice, and it’s amazing what you can learn when your survival depends on it, but even now I still sometimes find myself struggling to communicate ideas, or staying silent even when there is something I might want to say, just because I can’t find the words. It’s infuriating not being able to express yourself well, and maybe for good reason I sometimes think they all see me as this hapless idiot who almost got herself killed, who they have to put up with until the spring as a result.

Okay, I mean, I kind of am that. But I am also genuinely interested in their society, in the DVP as individuals, in their stories and their history. But I feel like the best I can hope for is being kind of a mascot. Or a well-meaning but dim-witted pet. A Labrador or something.

Not that I haven’t made friends. I would say Leofric is a friend. The salvagers--Eadwig and Andrac--they’re friends. And I seem to have won at least the grudging toleration of the ones like Aelfric who initially wanted to leave me to die. But sometimes I think I’ve made a connection, somehow bridged the unbridgeable gulf between my life experience and the world of the DVP, only to find out I’ve done no such thing. I thought Leofe was a friend; but now she’s not speaking to me, and she’s left the High Settlement for one of the other valleys. I don’t know why, and the others just shrug when I ask them.

Ugh. This is turning into whining. Now I know I’ll never send it. Sorry. It’s been a long day. It’s amazing how tired you can get when your muscles can’t rely on your augs to help them do shit.

But I need to find a way to bridge that gap. I mean really bridge it. Because I feel like I’m starting to understand something the DVP aren’t ready to hear. Their ancestors came to Antarctica at a time when the rest of the world wasn’t much interested in it. It was a wasteland, so sure, let’s treat it as an international, shared territory. Nobody goes there but scientists and the occasional tourist. And during the Collapse, not even that--Antarctica was truly empty for the first time in a hundred and fifty years when the ancestors of the DVP came to its shores. But it isn’t anymore. And it won’t ever be a real wasteland again. Every year the mining consortia move a little further down the Transantarctic Mountains. Every year a new outpost pops up on the coast, more ships come to Port Alexander, more icebreakers cut through the polar sea. Antarctica is warmer now that it’s been at any time in the past. Heck, without some global warming, I don’t think the Dry Valleys would be habitable. But that means more exposed rock, more open ground to build on, more people coming to the continent to work on the mining platforms or the offshore factories, and one day, I think, they’re going to come here.

What will the DVP do when that happens? This isn’t North Sentinel Island, which nobody ever goes to because there’s no reason. There’s gold in the hills here--the DVP make jewelry out of it--and maybe other precious metals, and you could build a geothermal station on Mount Erebus and power a small town, if you wanted to build some autofactories. The Antarctic Authority exists to promote “science and industry,” but with a big emphasis on industry. And by science they mostly mean, like, watching penguins bone and building telescopes at the South Pole. Not soft stuff like anthropology. And certainly not protecting three valleys full of cessionist oddballs whose parents had an unreasonable fondness for dead languages.

I think Dr. Wright knew this. I think maybe he tried to warn the DVP when he was here, but back then the danger was even further away. And it’s hard to get people to pay attention to danger that seems far away, even if it might be an existential threat. And when dealing with that danger would require you to completely change the only life you’d ever known… well, that’s a hard sell. The DVP don’t really like change. I can’t blame them. But one day things are going to change here, and if they’re not prepared for it, it could get really ugly, really fast. It’s one thing to shut yourself away when the world is ignoring you. It’s another when the world comes knocking.

If I think I can persuade them, I’m going to talk to the elders here, Aelfric and Wulf. Some of the DVP have had very fleeting contact with outsiders before me. I think one of them should come with me in the spring, as a sort of emissary. I’m not sure who they should talk to, yet. Maybe the Authority. Maybe somebody in Port Alexander’s local government? Or maybe we should just try to tell their story directly to the world. That might bring the DVP more attention than they’d like, but better a little good attention now than a lot of bad attention later. I would have asked Leofe--she’s smart, she’s tough, she could handle the culture shock--but that’s not an option now. Something to think about, anyway.

Well. I hope this letter finds the imaginary version of you well, my love to the imaginary family &c, hope the undergrads aren’t giving you too much trouble this year. If for some reason you do find this letter--like I freeze to death on my way to the weather station in September and they find this document on my corpse--please forgive my stubbornness, my insistence on going on this stupid trip, and any worry I’ve caused you as a result. And if I really am dead, please tell everybody I died doing something badass, like, I dunno, fighting a polar bear. I guess those are extinct and they never lived in Antarctica anyway, but something along those lines. Make it good.

All the best,

Kate

#tanadrin's fiction #*blows party horn* #sorry for the epistolary chapter #but it's a great way to do gratuitous expository worldbuilding