#sorry to all folklorists out there

[styusha-10]

Sherlock Holmes was an otherworldly creature indeed. I am no man of superstition, although I vaguely remember my grandmother’s tales of daione sìth. Holmes did not distinctly resemble any of the fair folk, these light, ethereally beautiful golden-haired men and women, and yet somehow he gave the same impression. His smooth, almost catlike movements reminded me of cait-sìth and, in all honesty, during investigations he often was the very picture of a predator pursuing the prey or cat playing with mice. I could easily imagine him in the highlands of my homeland, windy and boundless, as to my mind he had the soul of Scottish winds, but I also understood perfectly well that there was no place for him anywhere except in London, hustling and bustling and pulsating with life, crimes and mysteries.

He was not completely detached from the human world, basically having an excellent understanding of human affections, related to the motives of crimes, such as love or envy, though his knowledge clearly came from prolonged observation rather than from personal experience. He was wise enough to seek my aid when something eluded his understanding, which I prefer to consider as a sign of trust on his part.

He was too theatrical or too aloof at times — traits that I mostly attribute to the eccentricity inherent in genius. He also aged much more slowly than me, but this could easily be associated with our slightly spreading ages and his lack of habit of taking anything too personally, which I am often guilty of. Although in the decade we knew each other, I turned almost half gray, and he remained largely the same, except for a couple of new wrinkles and heavier bags under his eyes.

His voice was the voice of a siren or ben-varrey and he had a natural gift of instantly capturing the attention of everyone in the room with the help of said voice and some kind of internal magnetism, which made people instinctively trust him and obey him.

And yet my favourite of his many noble traits I dedicated myself to immortalise was perhaps his benevolence. With such a mind, such power, it would be too easy to use it for evil, something we had unfortunately seen too many times. His gaze on me which I felt quite often was never heavy or insolent and had not ever bothered me. Clients — those at least who seemed nice and did not irritate him immediately — he treated with kind patience, amiable interest and generous if sometimes mannered hospitality, being rude not out of intention to offend, but simply out of his energetic, eccentric nature.

“I am afraid I have accidentally enchanted you, my dear friend", he suddenly said, somewhat sadly and apologetically, one quiet evening on Baker Street. “That kind of devotion that you show to me cannot be expected from any man under normal circumstances.”

“That kind of devotion,” I thought to myself ruefully later that night, “has nothing in common with sidhe’s enchantments.”

This is my first attempt to capture Jeremy Brett's magnificence, and I feel like I haven't done him justice, so there will probably be other takes. Also first attempt in publishing something on Tumblr and nearly first — in writing in English, so feel free to point out any mistakes.

Following a long and good fandom tradition, I consider Watson to be Scottish, hence the writing of almost all the creatures mentioned in Scots.

The cat-sith, whose existence I learned about unacceptably late and did not change anything much, is hunting in the Scottish wastelands. It has an unhealthy addiction to corpses, so it is recommended to distract him with games and riddles, as well as warmth. Doesn't remind you of anyone? However, while writing, I mostly thought about the classic sidhe, adjusted for, uh, almost everything.

I don't know myself whether he is a magical creature, think what you want. To be honest, being portrayed as a magical creature seems unfair to Holmes as a character — part of his charm for me is precisely the fact that he is human, an outstanding human being.

#granada holmes #sherlock holmes #jeremy brett #ficlet #poorly blended fairytales #sorry to all folklorists out there

[genericpuff]

Sorry but I think you’re being super negative about the whole “Rachel Presents” announcement.

Rick Riordan is a white author who is passionate about mythology. After Greek mythology and briefly going into egyptology, he used his influence to give People of color a chance to write modern mythology stories from their own culture and experiences—and most importantly he stayed in his lane.

I think Rachel choosing to step back and give other people a voice is a great outcome, considering you guys all joked about how horrific it would be if she tried to appropriate another culture in her next series.

You also said she should have given LO to another creator who had the passion and dicipline to finish for her. That’s ESSENTIALLY what she’s going to be doing with RP. Maybe her true calling is just…being an Idea guy. She has wonderful concepts and cool ideas, but lacks commitment. In this scenario, we could end up with super amazing stories, with proper editing from Random house and proper commitment from new creators. I don’t really see the issue here, everyone wins.

(And lots of authors do the whole “___ presents” format. I don’t think she deliberately copied RR. Most likely her books sales did well and Penguin House approached her with this offer.)

lmao what? I was against the folks saying she should give it to another creator. I don't think not liking the series should mean she's obligated to "give it to someone else." The series is hers and so it's her responsibility to finish it. I do think she should have ended it a long time ago or if she was really miserable making it then she should step away, but she shouldn't be giving it to someone else to finish for her just because "boo you suck at writing your own comic". She started this, she should finish it.

And this is literally her doing exactly that - appropriating other cultures - with extra steps. Just instead of being on the front lines with her own work, she's sponsoring other works based on her own bar for quality (which we know is EXTREMELY low) and slapping her name on them so she can take a "backseat". It's really icky to see from a creator who practically failed upwards and is now using "herself" as a selling point, when she has no real legitimacy outside of LO, which was only as successful as it was because of WT constantly sinking money into it and advertising it over other series on the platform (and because it's based off a story that was VERY popular to romanticize at the time, the H x P myth. Like it was literally what was popular on Tumblr when it started as a hobby comic on Tumblr.)

I'm outlining all of these posts with "speculation" because obviously I don't know what's really going on behind the scenes here, but I think it's really disingenuous of Rachel to sell herself as some top tier brand name for mythological works as a whole when she's caused so much actual harm to the Greek myth community and its sources. It's furthering the notion that she has any credibility as a "folklorist" when really she just pulls whatever comes off the front page of Google. And the similarities between herself and Rick Riordan do matter here because of how commonplace it is these days for Rachel to rip off other works rather than take inspiration and make it into something that's organically her own.

That's my two cents. It's not me trying to be "negative", it's me being genuinely concerned over the blatant appropriation from a white woman gaining even more control over the depictions of cultures and mythologies that she claims she's educated on and isn't. Unlike Rick Riordan, Rachel does not have any formal education in the subject she's claiming to be educated about. Unlike Rick Riordan, Rachel allows her fanbase to use her work as a source on Greek myth and she obfuscates the line between "fiction" and "fact". Rick Riordan started Rick Riordan Presents after he had multiple hits under his belt that were celebrated and loved. Rachel is starting Rachel Smythe Presents after a one hit wonder that could be chalked up to a total fluke that wasn't even able to go out with a bang.

Rick Riordan writes fictional stories inspired by Greek myth for children. Rachel is writing fictional stories claiming to be "retellings" of Greek myth - and now other mythologies if the implications of this project follow through - for adults. It's disingenuous and it frankly deserves to be paid attention to and called out.

I do genuinely want to see creators given an avenue to monetize their work and that's why I think the thought of it is nice, but any amount of further digging just makes this feel like a grift that will lead young and inexperienced creators down a path that won't benefit them (or take advantage of them) due to the blatant lack of care and management exhibited by Rachel over the past 5 years. Just because Rachel had one massive hit that lined her pockets for years does NOT qualify her to be a titan of the industry. Not by a long shot.

To quote Super Eyepatch Wolf,

"Let's say you decide you want to become a carpenter, and particularly, how to build a nice chair. Think about the kind of person you'd want to learn that skill from - would it be from someone who's built nice chairs every day for 30 years, or would it be the guy who built ONE nice chair 5 years ago out of a special kind of wood that doesn't exist anymore, who has NO experience with the kind of wood available to you now?"

EDIT to add: it was more likely Rachel's representative, Britt Seiss who landed this deal for her, not Penguin House themselves. That's what agents are for.

EDIT EDIT: this is ALL assuming she even FOLLOWS THROUGH with this project, because god knows the only reason LO has even gone on as long as it has was because she was being held responsible via a contract, she's NOTORIOUSLY bad for committing to things and has even admitted to it in interviews. She barely even works on LO as it is. Spring of 2024 could roll around and this project could entirely fizzle out. Again, not me trying to be a negative nancy here, I'm just stating my own concerns based on what we all know about Rachel at this point and how she operates.

#ask me anything #ama #antiloreolympus #anon ama #lore olympus critical #lo critical #anti lore olympus #anon ask me anything

[nile-the-empathy-cleric]

Hello! I am just starting my journey on reconnecting with my traditional roots as an Italian practitioner. My great grandparents came from Italy in the mid 1900s, but unfortunately passed before I had the pleasure of asking about their practices. Can I ask a good starting point for someone who is trying to reconnect all on her own?

Hello!

I am so happy that you are wanting to reconnect with your roots! I'm sorry you didn't get the opportunity to ask your grandparents, my deepest condolences for your loss.

In terms of resources, my recommendation for anyone starting out is to go to folklore sources or to read books by authors who don't simply reference other witchcraft authors. I highly recommend reading Italian Folk Magic: Rue's Kitchen Witchery by Mary-Grace Fahrun. It's mostly her personal experience with Italian folk-Catholicism and magic with plenty of anecdotes, recipes, superstitions, and various rituals. I think it's probably the best widely available source out there. She also has a youtube channel! In a similar vein, the website Italian Folk Magic has some great posts about Southern Italian and Sicilian magic.

Other online resources I've found useful are Gail Faith Edwards' writings on Southern Italian healers and folk medicine (it's split into 2 parts–– there's a lot of great information if you're into herbalism/ green witchcraft). I also love this article detailing witchcraft history, superstition, and more throughout Italy. It goes into a lot of detail and has some information about herbal properties and their uses as well.

Here are some festivals and traditions from across Italy tied to folk belief: Focara of Novoli, The Campanacci in Basilicata, The Feast of San Domenico and the Ritual of Serpari of Cocullo, Naca Procession in Southern Italy, Dance of the Devils, Celebration of Santa Lucia, The Feast of Mamma Schiavona––There are many others (mostly Saint feasts) that have pre-Christian roots or have significant rituals attached.

Most information that I have collected comes from anthropological and folklore sources that aren't very accessible. There are some videos available of documentary footage of Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino's work detailing folk tradition: here's a clip of La Taranta. This documentary isn't in English, however you can still get a lot out of it even if you don't speak Italian (unfortunately there are no subtitles). The documentarian that worked with de Martino, Luigi Di Gianni gives some of his recollections here. Here is a clip documenting the Feast of Mamma Schiavona. Otherwise, everything else is behind a paywall on sites like jstor, sagepub, and other academic publishers. I would recommend reading anything by anthropologist and folklorist Sabina Magliocco (I have copies of her work), as well as de Martino's Magic: A Theory from the South (which I also have a pdf of). The academic texts can be a little dense and daunting, but they're worth the read.

I have uploaded some of what I have to WeTransfer, but it will only be up for 1 week (until July 10th) so if anyone else would like to download them, you can for a limited time!

#italian folk magic #folk magic #folk traditions #witchcraft #beginner witch #baby witch #witchblr #italian witchcraft #grimoire #book of shadows #streghe #stregoneria #benedicaria #witch tips #long post #witches of tumblr

[seananmcguire]

I'm not sure how to ask this, other than bluntly - how come there's no Black people in Toby Daye's San Fransisco?

Much as you weren't sure how to ask, I've been unsure how to answer, so hey! Awkwardness for all!

The short answer is that of course there are Black people in Toby's version of San Francisco. She just spends a minimal amount of time in the human world, and thus hasn't been interacting with very many humans, of any race. I don't tend to call out or describe people she passes on the street in the human world, but the police station she's at, on Valencia Street, is probably about 60% staffed by Black officers and desk workers, and they would have been there when she was. She just didn't describe them, and that's on me.

Your question made me curious, so I went and looked it up: there have been twenty-three named human characters across the span of the series.

Discounting the members of Shakespeare's company who appear in the Tybalt shorts, and Jude and Alan from Borderlands books, all of whom are (or were) real people, that leaves us with about eighteen humans. We know Bridget is white, and we can assume the same about Jonathan (Toby's father; IDK why I have such a thing for fathers named Jonathan), but beyond that, there hasn't been any real demographic data for any of the humans she's dealt with. The majority of them don't get any descriptive attributes beyond "human."

I know what my intentions were in some cases; Libby, Joe's wife, is meant to read as white, while Susie, his counter staff, is Asian-American. And both of them are in Portland, anyway. Jack, Walther's grad student, is intended to be native Californian (specifically Ohlone), but he's in Berkeley. In other cases, I do not know what I intended. Toby's boss at the Safeway, for example, gets a hair color and no other description.

This is not an excuse for the lack of open representation in the series. I've apologized, enough times that it's on the TV Tropes page for the books, for accidentally locking myself into a very Euro-centric world with the way I set things up (all fae are descended from Oberon, Maeve, or Titania, three figures from European mythology; we mostly deal with the fae; while many of them have darker skin, they're not Black in the human sense, and I would never claim that they were. By the same token, pale fae are not "white," they're fae, but they are European in descent). At the same time, I regret falling into the baby folklorist trap of "oh we call them fairies, they're up for grabs" with some of the Asian folkloric figures, like the Kitsune, and have apologized for that, too.

Despite this setup, there are Black fae, most notably among the Roane, where they married in, got their skins, and now live fully fae among the rest of Faerie.

I'm sorry if that isn't enough. I just didn't think to describe the humans around Toby in more detail during the early books, when she did spend more time around them, and then she wasn't spending a lot of time around humans anymore, and so there was less room for human-specific representation.

Anyway, I'm sorry, and there are Black people, Toby's just been avoiding humans almost entirely for several books now.

[aerkame]

Will there be antagonist(s) or rivals or some threats in the finfolk fic? Maybe some hunters who are experienced in tracking down and capturing mythological creatures, as in knows how to avoid getting caught, how to handle them, etc. Someone who actually possesses a threat to home? Or how about since Sally goes on killing spares it’s very likely that the murders will end up attracting attention of some curious puppets, maybe some wannabe crime detectives or a folklorist? Sorry for my rambling, you don’t have to answer this ask.

Oh nono, I love seeing asks so it's fine! :)

Warning: This is very short and not read well since it's 3am and my brain is half asleep writing this 👍

There are actually puppets aware that Finfolk exist, but usually they keep low and hide in fear of getting killed. It's those seeking revenge or seeking Finfolk out of curiosity that end up looking around for them.

But...

I did actually have a rival in mind and it's in relation to the wolf OC I made a day ago along with that bird squad I drew. It's the sheep (or ram, it's undecided) that has been tracking the neighbors down despite their efforts to throw them off. You'd think they would just kill the puppet, but they've had a hard time surprisingly. You see, when you kill enough puppets, there tends to be a growing number of witnesses left to take care of. And sometimes there's too many to just kill. You can't get rid of a town's entire population you know? So they do what they can to wipe memories and minds alike, but for once, they missed one. And it's that one puppet that grew aware of their presence. The neighbors are aware of the sheep/ram's whereabouts, they just can't decide how to take care of the situation. They're too suspicious of new people now, and any attempts at direct contact are met with threats of leaking evidence. They even tried infiltrating government officials to get them arrested but the sheep/ram had fled before then. There's a motive to this tracking, naturally. They want revenge on whoever killed their family. (It was probably Sally, Julie, or Wally)

I mean, all they have left is their crush (that being the wolf). And they'd do anything to keep their love safe. It just so happens to mean killing off whoever killed his family first.

I did want to draw a comic for the next bit on this backstory though.

Eventually, they did turn to drastic measures when a Finfolk had gravely wounded the sheep/ram. Using their own blood to summon a demon, they made a deal for half their lifespan in exchange for their power. (I am aiming for this character to kind of lose it really so tw in that I guess?) It does boil down to them being captured and held by Wally in front of Home though, having almost killed several Finfolk in a blind rage. Home does end up convincing the sheep/ram to give in and become a Finfolk for the guaranteed safety of the wolf lover and a chance at a happy life with their love (all of their actions caused Finfolk outside of Home to target the wolf as well as the sheep/ram). Which the sheep/ram accepts. Never finding out who killed their family. So now we got a demon sheep/ram, Finfolk hybrid ready that's completely crazed.

ANYWAYS, the comic I wanted to draw was when the wolf is slowly realizing the sheep/ram has lost it as a Finfolk now. That or some dialogue between Wally and the sheep/ram where they discuss a deal they're making between the love's safety and becoming a Finfolk willingly under Home.

I really need to just give them names so it's less confusing...

#welcome home #welcome home finfolk au #welcome home au #finfolk #welcome home arg #wally darling #au #welcome home wally darling #welcome home oc #oc #ocs #welcome home ocs

[hungeringheart]

How do you think a Sylph of Doom would affect the session? Like how would the aspect of doom be broken in the session in order for the Sylph to heal it? Would it be like a lack of rules/system in the game or would it affect the players fate? Sorry if this is a confusing question/if it's worded badly

This all really depends on what you as a writer want to do with your story. The class list is dyadic, sure, but people organize their dyads differently (heir-witch? heir-page? mage-witch? mage-seer? sylph-witch? sylph-maid? knight-sylph? over the years the fandom has persuasively argued for any of these).

That being said, you asked what I think! So here's what I think. This can be considered my analysis post for Sylphs and Doom :)

When I was a small girl, I walked through the market

Holding my dad's hand, mitten in gloved hand

At night there were roses, lit up in glass boxes

The heat lamps would keep them from freezing in winter

We never bought them, but somebody must have

Maybe they made it, or maybe they froze up

Before any person had put them in water

And hoped that they'd still be alive by the morning

- Sellers of Flowers (Regina Spektor)

What's a Sylph, anyway?

The fandom consensus seems to be that sylphs heal in some way, or offer other mysterious fae magical assistance. We don't know more than that and what Kanaya sort of facetiously says once, which is that a Sylph is "sort of like a Witch but more magical". Does she mean that? Does she mean that they're nothing alike?

In the end it's your own call what your Sylphs do, and I think you have to define that explicitly for your own fansession.

In my case, I never paid any attention to sylphs at all until someone who was too emotionally dependent on me assigned me Sylph of Heart, and I got so offended (for lack of a better word) that I fell into a research hole and never emerged.

That's coloured my personal interpretation of the class, which is that they're something like a maid but more remote, and something like a witch but more remote, and something like a mage but less remote, and something like a page but less remote.

I think sylphs are... well, ok, let's digress and travel in time for a moment.

You know about Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, a survey of (a limited set of) folklore that uncovered some archetypes that have since this time plagued psychologists with pseudoscience and folklorists with dubious methodology.

You may not know that all this had such a stranglehold on the world that people took it fully seriously as a way for a man to realize himself, in a way presaging the current manosphere. But then that begs the question, what about women?

Enter Maureen Murdock, a student of Campbell's who asked him if women could also have heroic journeys of actualization, and was met with a dumbfounded look out of eyes that had never thought women might need to develop at all.

Well no, said Campbell, women are the thing men are striving to be worthy of. Why would they need to mature?

So of course then in her work as a therapist (working mostly again with the certain type of women drawn to her practice), Murdock identified a common path towards women (in her own, American culture and ones like it) feeling like whole people. Mostly it's about a process of trying to figure out what a woman is, a real flesh and blood breathing woman, and how to be and do that in women's way; there is unfortunate and dated secondwavey phrasing, but it's a solid thing all told.

For a time this has floated around as a kind of Heroine's Journey. It never attempted to actually be folkloristics, and as psychology it suffered at first from the "Undergrad Students Desperate For Study Payments On One Specific Homogeneous Campus Have Really Fucked Lives, More At 11" thing, which also gave us the false idea that absolutely everyone fantasizes about being violated.

But it has a point: for a woman in a patriarchy (which, to return to Homestuck, is allegorized by the female-centric, but still reproductively oppressive society which Kanaya and Porrim are vital to, but readable as marginalized in) to figure out who she is, she has to figure out what a woman is, in a context without much of value to say on the issue. She has to go through sort of an attempt to become other things, things other people want from her, and then eventually find herself.

Personally this is not my culture or my take on womanhood in real life, but at this point we are talking about interpreting Homestuck through the culture that produced Andrew Hussie, and I think it's useful for classpecting purposes.

To me a Sylph is kind of a response to this. I don't want to get into authorial intent because no one can know about that, but in real life a sylph is sort of an amorphous, ageless, healing, positive elemental spirit. So then a Homestuck Sylph is always a player in a social role of their society that corresponds to that - passive, mysticized, anodyne. Mysterious, but not because there needs to be much there. Mysterious because it's irrelevant to the other heroes' journey, which the sylph is led to believe they're there to support.

Morgan Le Fay. The Lady of the Lake on her magical island. Vasilissa the Wise. Ninian, one supposes. Even Kanaya in her fertility-focused mystery cult. All those lovely flat marriageable wise jinni princesses.

Our two canon sylphs are Kanaya - obviously - and Aranea, whose narrative role is to help everyone mystically see and do a bunch of shit they need to, enable things to happen that ought to happen, and not particularly actively do anything else. But do they actually have to stay in that role, or is the point to transcend its limitations and come into one's own?

I would argue that it is, and that we can see that through the character of Porrim, who after all is sort of a parody of and response to the early fan response to Kanaya. We can also see it through the visceral imagery of how Kanaya saves the species (by killing her virgin mother-sister and extracting her womb/ootheca/budding clone).

So then: yes, sylphs heal or fix others and their fuck ups and life situations, but they also heal themselves and their world and their society's relation to the world. Their mystic function can be argued as something like restoring or finding balance, not necessarily the outcome their party wants or thinks it needs. In that way they might also be read as related to Pages, who go through the same journey of being everything but themselves but for the other binary gender.

Of course gender isn't really the important variable here, it's societal position -- your own sylph's journey can be about whatever you want, as long as it involves dealing with and negotiating the sort of mystic pedestal that people put them on for whatever reason.

That's what I think a Sylph is. They create, repair and preserve the appropriate amount of their aspect for the good of their group, but not because they're "only" good for that or "meant" to do it or somehow "ethereal creatures of [Aspect]" - just because it's necessary, because their aspect is out of balance, because someone has to look at it differently.

I have a fuchsia sylph (of hope) in an unfinished fanwork, Matsya, who might also be instructive as to sylphage and sylphing and so on; in that fanon trolls have a bit more obviously insectile biology, and Matsya is a laying worker, a "mutation" which is normally treated badly in a no longer hive-based society that got this way by chattelizing its queen morph.

But her position (as a queen, the feudal position, in the empire currently run by her biological aunt) gives her breathing room to think about it instead of being bioengineered into the "correct" morph or blacklisted from work appropriate to her caste, and the tension of having that breathing room and no idea what it's really like for others puts her into conflict with others in the setting. The point then isn't necessarily that a sylph Must be marginalized, but that the sylph has to be forced to confront the way that their society runs, react to it, and work to somehow "heal" the problem. Healing bodies and (or) minds can be a component of that -- Matsya for instance can passively inspire people, and insofar as she heals anyone before her gtier powers kick on, it's because all animals can heal themselves better when they don't feel pain and fear. But a Sylph of Rage would nurture and encourage or at least inspire something totally different - and in this way, a Sylph is like an active Muse.

Matsya accomplishes this in a way that restores Hope for a future (by integrating helpful ritual and mystic concepts from the past to serve the present), Kanaya does all this in canon for the aspect of Space by rescuing her species' potential and physical existence, and Aranea I think initially fails to do much more than literally helping Terezi see things because she's too busy playing Captain Save-a-Hoe to think of her role as fixing things in the world, in addition to problems in people.

Aranea's realization as a Sylph is too late for her party (and would probably have mostly benefited her anyway, as her aspect was Light - which is most directly luck, and she was by then working kind of blackhat hackerishly), but I think it comes at some point on the timeline tangential to Act 6, when she appears to be creating and manipulating circumstances and societal constants and understandings to get the Ring of Life (such as by putting John to sleep with her cerulean powers so that he can beat Tavros to it).

But anyhow, that's what I think a Sylph is -- someone who works with and resolves what they're given, in a somewhat more holistic and less servile way than a Maid -- insofar as I write Sylphs any particular way. As always, your mileage may vary.

Who's the winner?

Not the roses,

Not the buyers, not the sellers,

Not the tellers of the stories,

Not the fathers, not their children.

Not those walking on a dark night

Through a memory they're forgetting.

Who's the winner?

Who's the winner?

Maybe winter, maybe winter...

I like this, what about the aspect of Doom?

Doom is straightforwardly about Law, but not in the cyclic sense of Time - in the linear sense of the wyrd of Norse sagas. Inevitable things, death, endings, suffering, decay. But also the emergence of order, through restriction; the imposition of law, Law and Law (the difference is like the difference between the law that makes jaywalking a crime in the USA, sharia, and the law of gravity). In a way, the yin to life's yang -- the antithesis of struggle, striving, flourishing and self-definition, but equally concerned with the way of things. And uniquely concerned with justice; doom is the aspect that governs and introduces the Just and Heroic Death rule, after all.

In the Slavic languages (famously very fatalistic) and in Yiddish there are words that reflect something I think is good to know about Doom and inevitable things; sudba, a neutral word for destiny meaning the thing judged for you, and mazal, both one of a canonical set of lucky stars and luck or fortune as derived from your birth underneath them. People use these words somewhat fatalistically, as in, you miss a shot or lose money to a casino and you say, oh, well it wasn't destined anyway, or oh, my lucky star is off duty tonight I guess. And then you go on with your life, because it's not always all going to be death doom suffering peril death doom death, even if you think it is. Usually something good happens afterward and you remember that your deity or force of choice isn't always completely drunk, just a lot of the time -- and that it does still have to look out for you occasionally.

A Doom player doesn't necessarily need to be dark or unpersonable (my fankid Eden and her uncle Yoel, also a Doom player in a different timeline, aren't, and neither are canon's Sollux and Mituna) -- they just need to have a character arc resolving around some relation to inevitability, law, decline and decay. None of these are necessarily bad things, though Sollux's case might reflect manifestations that are! Inevitability is part of the way of things, and decay, as the Tumblr lore goes, exists as an extant form of life.

And both together now:

In a sylph's case, because their role is to generate, maintain, resolve, repair and re-examine their aspect, yes, the Doom of their session is probably somehow flawed -- or maybe there's a lack of Doom, altogether, and they need to be the one to direct and contextualize the team. The sylph's personal life and journey is probably strongly tied in with beliefs about law and destiny and (by extension) belonging, meaning and social thought -- they could be pathologically unlucky, they could just be a person who believes in justice in a broken system. My partner's Heir of Doom, Aryyeh, has an inversion of this arc where he's placed to uphold and perpetuate damaged systems, but has to grow into someone who can do something about it - Heir of Doom (future perpetrator of crimes against trollkind) to Heir of Doom (worthy instrument of a new and kinder Law).

Either Doom or the Sylph's relation to Doom or both are unhealthy, and in the spirit of their classpect, they're meant to dial down and take things slow and thoughtfully. And of course, maybe they were born to and moulded by it... but I think their bigger concern is that their session itself might be doomed from the get-go. Don't you? ;)

#sylph of doom #sylph #doom #classpect analysis #homestuck #asks

[imaginepirates]

Hello! I just found your page and bahhhh- you're freaking awesome! I was wondering if you still do ships? If it's okay? I really don't wanna bother you.

If it is okay; I'm 5'7, a bit of a goof, Infp, I've got purple hair, Scorpio, I'm impatient, I wanna be a folklorist, I avoid confrontations, and I have a somewhat fluxuating attention span.

Please let me know if I overstepped. I'm really sorry if I did.

I ship you with Elizabeth!

Honestly, Elizabeth would be fascinated with the folklore you study. She would want to know everything. Elizabeth is an avid listener, and loves all the stories you could tell her. I can just imagine the two of you curled up in a reading nook by the window, her in your arms (she loves the attention), idly playing with your colorful hair as you talk about the things you've recently learned. She likes it when you're funny; she's a bit of an endearing goof herself, so it matches up. Even so, opposites attract, and Lizzie can be very, very confrontational. (It's the "they asked for no pickles" meme). I also think she would be super interested in how you dye your hair. If you do it yourself, she'd love to watch, and to help if you'll let her. She'd probably try it out too; I can see her doing some pink sections. Also, you guys might be able to pull off the cuteness of sharing clothes, too, given you're the same height.

(Also, no worries. If my ship requests are closed I tend to just save them for when I can do them.)

#ask #matchups #ship requests

[fearsome-series]

BOOK ONE | BOOK TWO | [BOOK THREE]

Chapter One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | [Eight]

EIGHT Technically A Virus

“W-what happened?” Gef the mongoose stirred, emerging from the pocket of Laura, who was still unconscious on the carpet. He blinked blearily. “Where’s Malphas?”

Eliza crossed her arms. “He’s dead!”

“What?”

“He died saving you.”

“...oh.” Gef slunk low. “I’m sorry.”

“You should be. You were such an asshole to him all night, and that’s what his last night will always be. Why, Gef? Why?”

“Because - I…” He let whatever snide remark he was about to make die on the vine. “I can’t look at him without thinking about Clive!”

The two looked at each other. Eliza walked over to Manuel. “Are you alright?”

Manuel nodded, and pointed towards Eliza. ‘You too’, Eliza figured.

“Yeah…what did you see, when I was fighting the ghost?”

YOU WERE BEING TAKEN BY THE TENDRILS, AND YOU KEPT ASKING FOR SOMEONE CALLED

“Clive. Yeah…thanks for stopping it, Ghostboy.”

Manuel blinked, and then slowly smiled.

***

“No reason we can’t start going out again.” Eliza laid beside Clive.

“Yeah…”

They were together in Eliza’s room. It was Halloween night, and she would always remember how his face looked in the stark utilitarian light. His whiskers, and the gleam in his eyes, which she had thought was only happiness.

“You and me and Malphas and Gef. Or just us! No talking animals. Tomorrow?”

“Aye. It’s dangerous without them, though.”

“So? We have good luck now, remember?”

Eliza fell asleep next to him.

She woke up alone.

She waited a while, but when he didn’t return, she checked Clive’s room; the rec room, the lounge, even the zoo.

Nothing.

When she stormed into Sjöberg’s office after answers, she was crying. Sjöberg seemed ready for her.

“Where’s Clive?” Eliza asked.

“I am sorry.” Sjöberg answered. “He...he left in the night.”

“And...and you let him!?”

“We could not stop him. We tried.”

“Do...do you know where he is?”

Sjöberg did not answer.

When Eliza returned to her room, she saw a note on her desk.

Eliza,

I’m sorry. I had a chance to make a life on the outside. I had a chance to change things.

 I can’t tell you where I am, except that I am heading west. If I make it, if I make it better for both of us, I will send word. I want to make life better for all of us.

I am so sorry for leaving you. But I will return.

Te amo.

Clive

***

When Laura awoke, they were already there. Guess the alarm was lifted. Bezoar and the cop were taken away quickly by the Institute’s medic, Dr. Valley; Dr. Yang stayed with her and Jainaba.

Laura was too exhausted to give a coherent answer to anything. Jainaba, too. Eventually, they left; they told her to come back tomorrow. When she was ready to leave, only one remained.

Before they were ushered away for more questions, the people they rescued filed over one by one to thank them.

“Thank you, Laura,” Jainaba said, “I’ll see you soon, yes?” Laura nodded.

“Thank you for saving me,” said the man, Professor Kent Nemirsky.

“Thanks for answering the distress call of the heart,” Bezoar said. “I’ll write a song about all this…”

The cop was last. Faced with a chance to apologize, she just nodded and walked off.

“I am so sorry this happened,” Sjöberg said. “I will never put you in a situation this dangerous again, and I apologize greatly for the false alarm.”

Laura had wondered how much Sjöberg knew, but she did seem genuinely upset. She’d give her another chance, at least. She couldn’t judge Manuel’s reaction.

Sjöberg turned to Eliza. “I want to give you my apologies for Malphas. We all do.”

“Yeah… can I go?” Eliza said.

“Of course.” Sjöberg said. “We should have waited until we knew more. If our folklorist hadn’t been away, perhaps she would have recognized the -”

“If we waited, it would’ve gotten away with it.” Laura said. “Manuel’s the one who figured it out, anyway.”

“Yes...but still, this was no task for you. If you want to go, you…”

“Wait. I have one more question, if that’s okay?” Laura asked.

“Of course.” Sjöberg answered.

“We saved the people it took tonight, but there were all those other people who had already faded away. They were...they were still in there. Are they dead?”

“There’s...a good chance they are.”

“But you don’t know.”

“No.” Sjöberg said simply.

“...thanks.” Laura looked up in time to see Jessie walking around the corner, twigs in her hair. “You’ve gone through it, huh?”

“A ghost attacked me and threw me in a lake,” Jessie explained, brushing dirt off her face. “I had to not only swim back, but find a hidden place to transform back.”

“Well, the good news is the ghost’s dead.”

“Ghosts can die?”

“Yes,” Manuel said without further explanation.

“‘Long as everything turned out alright with y’all…” Jessie turned to Sjöberg. “Don’t ask any of my kids to do something like this, ever again.”

“Very well, Ashford.” Jessie walked on, brushing past Sjöberg; Sjöberg just stared forward.

“I did see something,” Eliza admitted as they walked down the path to the parking garage. “It was Clive, my ex-boyfriend. He was a rat man, and…”

“I saw something too,” Laura said.

IT SHOWED ME WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE IF I WAS BORING, Manuel wrote down. I SAID NO THANKS AND

“And what?”

STABBED IT.

“Wow. And I needed you two to pull me out.”

“It’s okay,” Eliza said. “It tempted me for a few seconds, too.”

“How long do you think that archer was hunting him? How many millenia?” Laura asked. “And now they’re both…are they dead? Re-dead? Who were they originally?”

THERE WERE LEGENDS FROM OTHER PLACES. IT WASN’T FROM HERE.

“Huh…”

Heather was walking to her car when they found her.

“Hi, mom.”

“Laura, it’s past nine! What were you -” She saw Eliza. “You’re…”

Eliza walked closer. She remembered how she hid herself before. Not anymore. She took off her pendant. A wall-mounted light revealed her face, all there for Heather to see: her black eyes, her spines, her scaled, reptilian face.

“Eliza.”

“Hello.” Heather said. “You’re the chupacabra, aren’t you?”

Laura, Manuel, and Eliza exchanged confused stares.

“Did you tell her?” Eliza asked.

“No.” Laura answered. “Did I tell you?”

“I’ve been doing research since I learned about everything strange. But don’t tell anyone. I have an image to keep.” Heather smiled. “Eliza, earlier I didn’t see your face…”

“I wear a pendant. I’m going to put it back on, but…I wanted you to see.”

“If you want to come over sometime...Chris would be excited to meet the chupacabra. What did you get up to downtown tonight?”

“Oh, just hanging out,” Laura said.

“Well, call your dad for a ride. I’m finishing up here.” She sighed. “I lost my award to some columnist in Appleton writing about their sick baby. You just can’t beat that. When you get home, you'll go right to bed, yes?”

“Ugh, alright, mom.” Laura pulled out her phone. “Later, Eliza.”

“Yeah…later.”

***

Eliza didn’t go inside immediately. She found a nice patch of grass, and laid on it, watching the stars. Relaxed. Listened to the wind, the distant sounds of campus, and a nearby flock of crows.

Crows.

It hit her. Malphas was gone. No more visits at her window. No more hacking up coins. One of her best friends was gone forever.

A crow flew in low, pecking at an abandoned bit of hot dog. She watched it. Thought of Malphas stealing pizza from Ian’s, of him keeping watch over her on her nighttime trips, of that time he crafted a statue out of twigs and gave it to Theophania.

Koff! Koff! Caw!

The crow flapped wildly, as if trying to shake something off. Eliza watched, fascinated, as it beat its wings, stamped its talons, tried to fly.

A low whispering and a flare of light. The crow’s eyes burned like fire, and settled into a cool shade of red.

“What!?” Eliza jumped. Was it the ghost? It couldn’t be…

“My goatslayer!” The same accent.

“Malphas?”

“Yes!”

The crow bounced over to a nearby puddle and studied his reflection.

“Ah, a crow. An American crow. I must die somewhere with class, next time…”

“Are you-you can’t-tell me something only Malphas would know!”

“Nickel, paperclip, 5 para.”

“Para?”

“Egyptian coin.”

“Malphas!”

Eliza stretched out her arm. The former raven perched on it.

“I...I thought you were dead!”

“My apologies for not explaining my true nature.”

“Your nature? Are you...you took over…”

“I took over this crow’s corporeal form, yes. But do not worry - when I stole its body, the crow’s personality did die.”

“Uh…”

“But why discuss such dark matters now? A thousand apologies, Goatslayer. I am just used to it - getting my neck wrung, that is. Endless curses, Diderot!”

“How are you alive?”

“Well, I’m technically a virus…”

Eliza pet the red-eyed crow; he cooed gently, and they watched the stars together.

[eirikrjs]

Whilst this may not exactly be a direct source, I believe it is where yubiyubis (sorry if I got the name wrong) may have first heard of that theory about YHVH:

https://megamitensei.fandom.com/wiki/Talk:YHVH

Under section 'If YHVH isn't the real problem, what is?'

I did look for that interview before, but regretfully I never found it. Would be awesome if someone did.

Please have a nice day

Damn, nice catch.

Kazuma Kaneko has gone on record saying that God (or YHVH) is not the source of all evil. In fact, I've heard that it's implied that YHVH's evil-doings are a symptom of something wrong with the bigger picture. But what could that be? Is it possible that part of Man's conception of God is responsible that part of God's character, and in turn responsible for the evil acts? Or is it something else entirely? 20:15, November 3, 2011 

And 10 years old. The interview in question is on Megatengaku. It’s the Q&A session from the Doublejump Nocturne guide and the particular question, about “why is the Judeo-Christian God the prominent villain in the series,” is the second to last. Here’s Kaneko’s answer:

This is a delicate question, but as mentioned in the last question there are many mysterious common motifs, like the flood legend, in mythology, so I like to investigate mythology from all around the world. For instance, the aforementioned flood legend, the creation process at the beginning of the universe, a hero going on a journey to overcome trials, and sights at the end of the world, etc etc.

 And when I thought about which mythology served as the basis, I concluded that it was the Old Testament. Which means YHWH, the god of the Old Testament, is the basis for all the gods around the world, from a folklorist’s standpoint. Now, I would like you to know that in Megaten, YHWH is not portrayed as the embodiment of evil.

I cut some out but Kaneko begins by talking about comparative mythology only to introduce the “YHVH is the basis for all gods” puzzler that we’ve found has certain corollaries to JJCAT (see Hachiman) and his other comments about Mesopotamian religions. But that’s veering off-topic.

So after not really answering the person’s question, Kaneko abruptly ends with the infamous statement that YHVH is not the embodiment of evil. And... there’s nothing more to it. From Kaneko’s perspective, YHVH is just who he is, the embodiment of Law. That YHVH needs to slaughter all of humanity to get his way may seem extreme, but that exact thing happens in the Bible. You know, the Flood and, eventually, Armageddon.

But on the wiki talk page, notice that Kaneko’s actual “YHVH is not the embodiment of evil” quote has been telephone’d to “YHVH is not the source of all evil.” Thus the onus is on finding a source of evil in the series (of which there isn’t one). And thus immediately after, there’s speculation of “something wrong with the bigger picture” that came from another, currently unknown, source. And this is where I’ll speculate: the idea that YHVH could act so mercilessly and cruel is difficult to reconcile for people living in predominantly Christian countries, where the “loving” God is the cultural standard. Example: the Giant Bomb YHVH page that’s mostly my work from a decade ago, including the deck at the top EXCEPT where someone else added to it “an evil version” and “whose true name is YHWH” (lol, what the fuck) which, as I’ve explained and will continue to explain, misses the point:

Thus, something has to be “wrong” about how this JAPANESE game portrays him (even if the largely Old Testament/Hebrew Bible version of Yahweh they use is somewhat obvious). And I do think that low-key racism has something to do with it. “How can ‘they' understand 'our’ religion?” says someone who doesn’t understand Japanese religion or Buddhism and has never set foot in the country. Alternatively, there’s the more common “why is God always the villain in Japanese RPGs, hur hur hur” line. 

But it’s very easy to understand why Japan doesn’t have the most positive views of Western monotheism, which can be traced to the Portuguese Jesuits who arrived on the Japanese islands in the 16th century. They had some limited success but, uh, let’s say things didn’t end well. So there’s the historical angle plus the fact that monotheism is simply antithetical to Japanese culture; (simplified) the Japanese worldview depends on spirits populating everything which informs everything from the veneration of nature to cultural festivals to views of death. Modern Japanese can be fascinated by the monotheistic religions but few actually adopt one as their own.

And think of how silly Christianity would sound to someone unfamiliar with it: the only God in existence had to manifest himself as his Son who had to be killed so that people could avoid eternal suffering before God himself in the end times brutally tortures and destroys all those who don’t accept his form as the Son. Now think about that but there’s white guys brandishing guns at you. Thankfully, Japan managed to avoid colonization.

Anyway, one problem I see in the western fanbase that leads to these types of theories is not fully understanding that most of SMT’s content is adopted from elsewhere (mythologies). Like it’s obviously commonly understood where the angels and YHVH are from but inversely most other demons can be unfamiliar and perceived as general RPG monsters (or caused if the writing is bad, like in Apocalypse), and existing religious explanations for, say, YHVH’s behavior are eschewed in favor of original theories. The game script becomes the only text that is studied or scoured for information and that’s how we get corrupted YHVH and stuff like Hijiri-Aleph. This is when “multiverse” thinking can become distracting and miss the forest for the trees.

Speaking of YHVH, there’s text of his cut from SMT2 that I think offers some pertinent advice in this situation:

Wow, uncanny, huh? But I agree that the official word is the most reliable source of information for SMT that we have. We’ll never know more than the actual creators; like, I would have never known JJCAT was relevant without Kaneko and the others talking about it. And even if Atlus recommends bad books, those books genuinely explain what happens in the games. Speculation is fun, but I think both knowing about and having access to these interviews & more could nip a lot of the wilder theories in the bud.

#shin megami tensei #yhvh #smt #atlus #megaten #kazuma kaneko

[finalvortex]

So... that hero's journey thing?

Hi anon! Sorry about taking such a long time to answer this, but I wanted to put the time in to make sure this response had the care it needed. Warning that this gets a little heavy towards the end.

(Word Count: 1,033)

To start with, we should talk about what the Hero’s Journey actually is.

The Hero’s Journey

In 1949, Joseph Campbell, a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, published his first major work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. This book was a study of comparative mythology which analyses the journey of the archetypal hero across various myths, folklore, and narratives.

I initially opened this with a big breakdown of all the steps in the Hero’s Journey and what they involved, but honestly, it was kind of nothing. If you want a proper examination of them, here’s a good youtube video on the topic.

Suffice to say that in creating the Hero’s Journey, Campbell was attempting to define a monomyth, a template of ideas and tropes that could be applied to narratives universally. Although the full Hero’s Journey gets a lot more specific, Campbell summarized the narrative he identified like this:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Campbell wasn’t the first or only person who attempted to come up with a monomyth, but it’s his version that has stuck in the popular consciousness. And yes, these ideas are pretty common! It’s a structure that scholars have applied to a wide range of stories, including Lord of the Rings, Moby Dick, Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, The Wizard of Oz, and so on. George Lucas even used them as a reference point when writing the original Star Wars trilogy.

The Problem

You may already be starting to see where the issue is here, but in case “a study of comparative mythology published in the 1940s” wasn’t raising red flags for you, let me explain. First of all, the idea that any single narrative structure can be applied universally across the board to all stories is patently ridiculous. I could probably name a half dozen stories that don’t fit this structure off-hand: Cinderella, for example, where the heroine doesn’t return from the world of wonder. Or any work of modernist literature that focuses exclusively on the ordinary. American folklorist Barre Tolkien wrote:

“Campbell could construct a monomyth of the hero only by citing those stories that fit his preconceived mold, and leaving out equally valid stories… which did not fit the pattern".

Similarly, the anthropologist Raymond Scupin said that “Joseph Campbell's theories have not been well received in anthropology because of his overgeneralizations,” and the author Robert S. Ellwood described Campbell as having a “tendency to make myth mean whatever he wanted it to mean.” In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell is only able to make his monomyth work by picking and choosing stories that already fit the mold. His monomyth fails, because, well, monomyth as a concept is inherently flawed.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the Hero’s Journey can’t still be a useful literary tool. Campbell has still identified a range of common tropes and narrative tools that, while not universal, occur frequently in literature. The Hero’s Journey can be an excellent reference point for exploring common ideas across a wide range of narratives. But there’s another, more insidious problem.

It’s fucking racist.

Comparative mythology

Comparative mythology is the branch of anthropology that examines myths from different cultures looking for shared themes and ideas, and I basically detest it. Now, there are legitimate anthropological reasons to look things that different cultures share in common. Looking for similarities in various people’s myths and stories isn’t inherently bad – we can trace the history of certain tales to see how cultures may have influenced each other, and languages may have developed, for example. But the field of comparative mythology has some major issues, all of which are abundantly clear in Campbell’s writing.

Perhaps the worst of these problems is that comparative mythology doesn’t limit itself to just fables and fairytales. It also seeks to compare religions. In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Campbell draws on the stories of figures like Krishna, Buddha and Jesus as examples of his monomyth. I hope I don’t need to explain to you the issues with treating the key figures of major world religions as basically interchangeable – it’s not only reductive but outright offensive.

More generally, treating myths as universal takes away from the importance of their historical and cultural context. A field like this shouldn’t just be looking at the similarities between cultures, but the differences – instead of celebrating and championing diversity, treating every story as the same stifles and quashes it. Campbell has, at different times, been accused of racism, antisemitism, and fascism. Professor of Sanskrit Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson once said of him,

“When I met Campbell at a public gathering, he was quoting Sanskrit verses. He had no clue as to what he was talking about; he had the most superficial knowledge of India but he could use it for his own aggrandizement. I remember thinking: this man is corrupt. I know that he was simply lying about his understanding.”

None of these chargers ever really stuck, however, so I can’t say for certain that Campbell actually was racist – at least, it may have been a lack of care on his part rather than outright malice. Regardless, by taking a wide variety of myths and boiling them down to a single idea, by generalizing everything to force it to fit into a single narrative, Campbell erases and overlooks the important sociohistorical context of stories, treating the cultures they came from with little respect.

There’s more I could say on this – I could talk about how Jungian psychology influenced Campbell, for instance, and how that still has an effect on literary criticism even today, despite the fact that Jung’s theories have largely been discredited. But I think I’ve said enough. Campbell’s work, and its importance and influence on the history of literary criticism, can’t be understated, and the Hero’s Journey can provide a useful tool for literary analysis, but when people try to shoehorn every story into following this structure, it does more harm than good.

#hero's journey #narrative

[fatehbaz]

Sorry. This might be annoying and excessively long. Among people interested in psychogeography, ecology, folklore, bioregionalism, urban geography (and Empire, hegemony, anti-imperialism, to a lesser extent, I guess?) there is a quote that gets circulated from time to time. I’ve seen the quote in academic articles, sure, but also on the W0rdpress blogs of, like, birders, hikers, gardeners, “bioregional animists,” and “woods aesthetic” fans. But why do both academic authors and popular/mainstream writers and bloggers and such consistently remove the end of this sentence from Michel de Certeau’s memorable statement: “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places  are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the panopticon.”

Gonna revel in the wonders of the garden, the forest, the landscape, the other-than-human lifeforms, and yet not willing to explicitly address the vulnerability, the cascading extinction, the tightening noose of imperial hegemony and carceral systems threatening it all, landscapes, lives, entire worlds? What de Certeau is referring to here is the way that imperial/dominant power structures (European modernity, Empire) try to subdue, erase, destroy smaller, alternate, and/or non-Western cosmologies, to make it seem like Empire is the only possible world that can be constructed. And so landscapes become sanitized, especially in cities, and de Certeau says that such sanitized places are “uninhabitable” because they are so cold, because Empire tries to standardize experience, rather than allowing localized connections tor regional landscape. But the alternative worldviews, the histories, have not been fully erased, and exist in the cracks and crevices of modernity, and so there are “ghosts” of alternative worlds which live on. And it is the remnants of other worlds, or the glimpses of other creatures (animals/plants/etc.) or other surviving worldviews (graffiti in the subway, which rejects order and control), or the hopes of possible better future worlds, crevices where the “failures” of modernity can be glimpsed, which make a place habitable. “Haunted geographies.”

Here’s a sentence fragment from a different author, writing about de Certeau:

“exotification and suppression, under a cloak of celebration”

This kinda thing.

This fragment comes from a criticism of early-20th-century Euro-American academia’s so-called “folklore studies” but I think it also describes much 21st-century academic interest in “ecological knowledge” and non-Western cultures. I have a feeling that this behavior is similar to what contemporary upper class careerist-academics in academic anthropology departments and those “studying the utility of traditional ecological knowledge” are doing when they superficially throw around words like “decolonial” or “Haraway’s Chthuluscene” in their article abstract for Cool Points without actually having given much through to the way they and their sponsoring institution, in their thirst for prestige or good optics or whatever, are in fact continuing to perpetuate dispossession and appropriation of Indigenous/non-Western knowledge. And on some level, it is deliberate and calculated, though not always a conscious act on the individual author/researcher’s part. Intentional power consolidation masked as passive chauvinism masked as benevolent paternalistic concern for “primitive peoples” masked as genuine respect. What’s happening is a recuperation, the subsuming of alternative cosmologies and ways of being. Hypothetical Nat/Geo article, variations of which you’ve probably seen before: “How can we utilize Indigenous knowledge? Can traditional knowledge help us battle climate change?” Empire, those in power, hegemonic institutions colonizing knowledge, thought, cosmology.

Plenty has been written, especially in recent years, of a “plurality/pluriverse of worlds in contrast to one imperial worldview/cosmology” and also the paternalistic attitudes of Euro-American anthropologists, but the mid-century work of Michel de Certeau, in my opinion, anticipated a lot of this disk horse. Here’s the fuller quote:

-----------------------

“In recent years, especially since 1960, scholarship in the service of popular culture has been of Marxist inspiration, or at least ‘populist’ in spirit,” de Certeau, Dominique Julia and Jacque Revel wrote in a 1980 essay, “but does the scientific operation it undertakes obey different laws than it did in the past? On the contrary, it seems to be dominated by the mechanisms of age-old excommunications…to conceal what it claims to show” (de Certeau 1986, 121). This opening statement encapsulates much of de Certeau’s thinking about the history of folklore studies. Tracing its development in successive stages from the late eighteenth century to the “heyday of folklore” in France’s Third Republic (1870-1940), the authors argue that the eighteenth century aristocratic vogue for “the popular” concealed a powerful movement toward the domination of the peasantry. This movement involved both exotification and suppression, under a cloak of celebration.“ The idealization of the “popular,” as they put it, “is made all the easier if it takes the form of a monologue. The people may not speak, but they can sing...The intent [of folklorists] is both to collect…and to reduce (de Certeau 1986, 122).[...] The governing ideologies driving the emergence of this obsession with the folk were not static, however, and therefore, in order to understand the development of the politics of culture in folklore studies, scholars must examine, at each point, its “subjacent postulates” (de Certeau 1986, 123). For instance, following the domination imbricated with the origins of folklore studies in the 18th century, by the mid-nineteenth century, the authors describe folklore as taking on a paternalist role vis-a-vis its subject. The collection of folklore by this time, embodied especially in the works of Charles Nisard (1808-1890), is not just a chronicle of its elimination by the elite, but a protective function executed by the elite on behalf of the incompetent peasant. In this view, de Certeau and his colleagues observe, “the people are children whose original purity it is befitting to preserve by guarding them against evil readings” (de Certeau 1986, 124, original emphasis). [...] This, then, is the basic outline of de Certeau’s historical critique of both the conceptualization of folklore and the discipline of folklore studies, as well as the core of his critique of cultural studies in the late 20th century. Interestingly, however, it is also the core of his larger understanding of the workings of modernity.

From: Anthony Bak Buccitelli. “Hybrid Tactics and Locative Legends: Re-reading de Certeau for the Future of Folkloristics.” Cultural Analysis, Volume 15.1. 2016.

--------------------------------

So there is a popular quote from Michel de Certeau (French interdisciplinary scholar, 1925-1986), which seems to have been yet more popular since, like:

(1) 2010-ish with elevation of Mark Fisher’s work; “object-oriented ontology”; “dark ecology”; apparent academic elevation of ontological turn in anthropology; and the white-washed Euro-American academic language of traditional ecological knowledge, “decolonization,” etc.,

And also since (2) 2014/2015 in “popular” media, with apparent mainstream-ing or “revival” of folk horror, alongside elevation of eco-horror, Anthropocene disk horse, etc.

(In my anecdotal experience, at least, reading about geography, folklore, psychogeography, etc. in online spaces from M.S.N chatroom days onwards.)

I’m of course very wary of de Certeau’s interest in and celebration of Freud (come on, bro) and also the implications of de Certeau’s Jesuit background and early interest in missionary stuff (gross). But de Certeau did write some thoughtful and nicely-phrased stuff (in my opinion) about the importance of subverting imperialist/hegemonic cosmologies; how Euro-American academic institutionalized knowledge reinforces power; imperative for combating hegemony/carceral thinking by connecting with landscape; the “memory” of places; the “hidden” histories of landscapes, etc. And he wrote this decades before academics started stealing from Indigenous people of Latin America and getting into pluriverse stuff.

Anyway, one quote in particular seems most popular. but almost every single instance where i’ve ever seen this quote shared, it always cuts out the last few words of the statement. The quote is from what might be his most widely-read work, the “Walking in the City” chapter of his 1984 book The Practice of Everyday Life. (it’s a pretty brief chapter which is available for free online; might take 30 minutes to read, if you’re interested.) The quote as translated by Steven Rendall: “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places  are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the panopticon.”

The “inversion of the panopticon” portion is almost always left out of the quote. even in academic writing or in the writing/blogs/whatever of people who otherwise seem like they would be down with anti-imperialism or something.

So, it comes across to me as if contemporary (2005-2020) academics and activists interested in, like, folklore or local horticulture or psychogeography will like ... take the “cute” fragments of these excerpts, but don’t want to “stir the pot” by presenting these writings in their fuller context, a fuller context which calls-out knowledge appropriation and explicitly trash-talks Empire.

And de Certeau’s not just writing about folklore or geography. He’s writing about taking action, about practicing alternative ways to relate to landscape in direct contrast to imperial cosmologies, academic/institutionalized/gatekept knowledge, and carceral thinking. (He’s famous for this; he emphasized “tactics” and “action.”)

So this guy is, of course, human, and had disagreeable and/or outright problematique associations. You can argue with his writing extensively. his publications are a mix of great, cool, iffy, “meh” and “bad take bruh.” But de Certeau was ahead of the curve in anticipating the way ambitious US academics would see “the decolonial turn” happening in academic anthropology in the 1990s/2000s and then weaponize it in a way that preserved their power dynamic and institutional power while still paying lip-service to “decolonization.”

But besides dunking on the imperialist foundations of Western institutionalized knowledge systems and the cunning employment of geographic re-worlding and re-naming in creating propaganda and imperial cosmology, and besides being ahead of the curve in anticipating re-enchantment trends and folk horror ... One thing I like about de Certeau’s writing is the emphasis on action, practice, and doing things to counter dominant/powerful cosmology’s attempt to destroy folk/non-Western worldview. Encouraging something like:

Take action. Books are cool, but books are not a substitute for action. Girl, you wanna study landscape, place-based identity, folklore, and how to escape the panopticon? Gotta put the theory texts down occasionally. Please go walk around in the forest; if you’re in the major city, don’t despair, just look at the moss growing in crevices betwixt the cobblestones. Imagine the ghosts, the histories, the stories, who died, what was lost, what’s come before. Power is trying to subsume all, but Empire gets anxious and flails because they know that there are gaps in their cosmology, cracks and breakages where other worlds seep through or can be glimpsed, retrieved, renewed. They know their cosmology can’t account for the diversity of life, the plurality of experience. There is not one world, but many. Find the crevices, the cracks, in the dominant power structures, and break them further. You can help to escape the tightening noose, the planetary-scale plantation, by using your imagination, cooking a meal, taking a walk.

#whatever #sorry for all this

[inkslingersworld]

Zusammen: Part IX

Link to all parts here.

Kagami was not someone who gave up easily, and she wasn’t about to give up on searching for Adrien’s mother just because they hadn’t discovered anything yet, but she found the lack of clues difficult to tolerate. She and Adrien had already covered three days of Emilie’s last week in Paris to no avail - the filming location of what would’ve been her fourth motion picture, the grocery store she’d visited on the Monday before she vanished, the hairdresser, the Louvre, and so on. They were now retracing Emilie’s steps on the Tuesday before her disappearance, which had taken place on Friday of the same week, and Adrien and Kagami still hadn’t uncovered any useful information. However, Kagami was still enjoying herself - she liked walking through the city with Adrien.

“Okay,” said Adrien, trying to sound optimistic as they exited the jewelry store, “I will admit, this isn’t going as smoothly as I’d hoped, but there are still plenty of places that could connect to Mother’s disappearance. It’s only the first day of our investigation.”

“I totally agree,” put in Kagami. “I am getting a bit hungry, though.”

They took a fifteen-minute break to pick up some lunch; with both of their energy and morale levels low, the sandwiches tasted extra good. Once they were finished, Adrien and Kagami discussed how best to proceed.

“Our current approach is working, it’s just that we haven’t found anything yet,” Adrien said.

“Yeah,” acknowledged Kagami. “I think we’re just gonna have to keep patient.”

“Well, it says here that the library’s next,” said Adrien, looking at Emilie’s personal organizer. “We’re pretty close.”

“I’ll say,” Kagami laughed. “It’s literally across the street.”

Adrien turned to the large marble-clad fortress just ahead of them.

“Huh,” he muttered, scratching his chin. “I guess you’re right.”

===========

The inside of the library was vast; bookshelves upon bookshelves stretched across the area, each of them brimmed with volumes of every kind. The help desk looked like a tiny island in the midst of it all, though the librarian didn’t seem to care. She didn’t make any reaction to her surroundings until Adrien and Kagami walked up to her.

“Ah,” she murmured ominously, eyeing the two teenagers from behind a giant tower of books. “I’ve seen you before.”

She pointed a crooked finger at Adrien, making him squirm a little.

“Uh-huh,” said Kagami dismissively, trying to prevent her boyfriend from growing uncomfortable. “We’re wondering if you have the check-out records on hand.”

“May I ask why?” questioned the librarian suspiciously, raising an eyebrow.

“We’re part of an investigation looking into the disappearance of Emilie Agreste,” explained Kagami. “We need to see which books she checked out on Tuesday, May 16 - if she checked out any books.”

“Fine by me,” the librarian drawled. “Do you have Mrs. Agreste’s library card at hand?”

Adrien pulled the card from his pocket and slid it across the desk to the librarian. She picked it up gingerly.

“Wait here.”

Adrien and Kagami watched the librarian shuffle away down one of the canyons of bookshelves. She returned less than five minutes later, a stack of files in her arms, with the library card rested on top.

“These are the complete records of each library book Emilie Agreste ever checked out,” the librarian told them, setting the files down and handing the library card back to Adrien. “She wasn’t a member of the Parisian Public Library System for very long; only for a couple months, in fact. I don’t think she ever really needed to be a member, with her mansion boasting its own library.”

“Thank you,” said Kagami and Adrien at the same time. The librarian smiled slightly.

As they walked off to a nearby table, Adrien asked, “How long do you think this’ll take?”

“Not very long,” Kagami responded shortly. “I doubt that Moreau’s murderer would hang around a public area, so I believe we’ll be safe splitting up inside the building. We don’t need to read the books cover to cover, just flip through them in case your mother left bookmarks or notes or whatever.”

It became apparent that their search would take even less time than Kagami had speculated. Emilie hadn’t checked out a lot of books; Adrien speculated that she only came here for publications not stocked at the mansion’s library. The books varied widely, from acting methods and obscure moments of the country’s past to rare amphibian species and child psychology. It was nearing four o’clock by the time Adrien and Kagami reconvened.

“Anything out of the ordinary?” asked Adrien.

Kagami shrugged. “I found out your mother read a good portion of Joris-Karl Huysmans, but that’s about it.”

Adrien sighed. “How many more books did she check out?”

Kagami looked down at the last remaining unopened file. “Two. The first one’s called Interpreter of Maladies. My mother’s read the Braille version and she told me it was brilliant - that’s high praise coming from the woman who literally tossed Harry Potter in the garbage.”

“Which book?!” Adrien asked, feeling outraged.

“Prisoner of Azkaban,” said Kagami regretfully. “She read the first few pages and just threw it in the trash can - and that’s luxury treatment compared to what she did with Order of the Phoenix. You don’t even wanna know.”

“Good lord, it’s fine she didn’t like them, but at least treat the physical book with a bit respect!” exclaimed Adrien. “Max doesn’t like them either, but you don’t see him chucking them out along with table scraps and whatnot!”

It took a bottle of water and several deep breaths for Adrien to regain control of himself, by which time it was four-thirty. They both knew that in order to remain within the guidelines Inspector Beaumont had set for them, they’d need to get back home within an hour.

“Sorry about that,” Adrien apologized, panting a little. “I got a little carried away. What’s the last book my mother checked out?”

“Let’s see,” said Kagami, flipping the file back open again. “The last book your mother checked out before she disappeared is called -”

Her eyes widened suddenly.

“What?” asked Adrien worriedly. “Which book is it?”

Kagami stared at him fearfully. “It’s called Eternally Intertwined: The Connections Between Magic and Human Emotions.”

Adrien’s heart skipped a beat. For him, the connections between magic and human emotions only related to one thing - Hawk Moth.

“Are... are you positive?” he gulped.

Kagami handed the file over to him. Sure enough, the title she’d just relayed to him was staring him in the face. Right as his eyes finished crossing over the words, Adrien clapped the file shut and strode over to the help desk, Kagami trotting behind him.

“Excuse me?” he asked the librarian, who’d stopped eating her salad to give Adrien her full attention. “I was wondering what you could tell me about this book.”

He placed the file down and tapped the ink with his finger. The librarian made a confused expression.

“Eternally Intertwined: The Connections Between Magic and Human Emotions? I have never heard of such a book,” the librarian admitted. “I’m sure it’s in the catalogue somewhere, though. Let me go check.”

She trundled down a hallway didn’t return until fifteen minutes had passed. The librarian sat back down and turned to Adrien and Kagami.

“Well, I think I’ve just discovered something of use to you,” she said, taking a bite of salad. “Eternally Intertwined was a recent publication back when Emilie Agreste checked it out. It wasn’t in wide circulation; the author, Madeleine Archambault, was a folklorist whose work had been repeatedly discredited for its alleged inaccuracies. Therefore, not many publishing companies were eager to accept her manuscripts. However, Archambault was able to convince a small, local press to give her a contract, entitling her to around ten thousand euros for a dozen books.”

“That’s it?” asked Adrien in surprise. His father had told him before that already published authors usually received more than twice that amount on one book.

“It wasn’t much,” continued the librarian, “but Archambault was desperate for work. She was able to get Eternally Intertwined published in the spring of that year. We only had a single copy in the library system; Emilie Agreste remains the only person to’ve checked it out.”

“How come?” Kagami asked. “It’s been five years since then, surely someone would’ve taken an interest in a book covering that kind of subject matter.”

Adrien nodded in agreement, thinking of Hawk Moth.

“I see where you’re coming from,” said the librarian, “but Eternally Intertwined was a commercial and critical flop. Critics panned it for resembling her previous work, which they said lacked backing evidence. The press Archambault had convinced to publish it rescinded her contract and she hasn’t produced any piece of writing since. Last time anyone had heard from her, she’d been working on a documentary in Alsace.”

She took another bite of her salad before saying, “Even if it’d been a success, no one would’ve checked it out, on account of it not being returned.”

“It wasn’t returned?” said Adrien in surprise.

The librarian shook her head. “Emilie Agreste never got the chance to give it back before she disappeared. But not to worry - Eternally Intertwined included Archambault’s watercolor pictures of objects mentioned in the text, and we have prints of some of those pictures in stock.”

She pointed to a thick roll of parchment paper that Adrien hadn’t noticed. Without a word, he picked it up and brought it to his and Kagami’s table, unrolling it hastily. The watercolor he saw first confirmed his fears.

It depicted two butterflies. One was pure white, the other was black and purple. Beneath the watercolor was a single word.

Akuma.

#inkslingersworld #inkslinger #ml #miraculous au #miraculous #miraculous ladybug #adrien #adrien agreste #kagami #kagami tsurugi #adrigami #adrigami au #adrigami fic #miraculous fanfic #zusammen #zusammen au #zusammen fic #zusammen miraculous #library #librarian #akuma #madeleine archambault #eternally intertwined #emilie #emilie agreste #the connections between magic and human emotions #hawk moth #potterhead #adrien is a potterhead #while tomoe is a potterhater

[propalahramota]

Today I`ve stumbled upon this tweet:

which made me realize that not a lot of people actually know the sad but fascinating story of Carol of the Bells. 

So listen up, kidz.

First of all, Carol of the Bells isn`t really called Carol of the Bells, and it`s not really a Christmas carol, and it`s also much older than most Christmas carols, like most likely pre-Christianity. 

Carol of the Bells, or at least its original version (well one of the original versions), is an ancient Ukrainian pagan chant called Shchedryk. It`s a shchedrivka which means it was traditionally sung on the night of the Shchedry Vechir (Bountiful Evening), January 13. Although some historians argue that it was originally associated with the celebration of the pagan New Year which would be in April. But now in Ukraine, it`s more of a go-to Christmas song. Bountiful Evening, however, is a very old Ukrainian holiday of the winter cycle which is believed to be a remnant of the old pagan traditions later combined with Christmas and Saint Mykolay`s Day (Ukrainian st.Nicholas) in one happy Christmas bundle. 

That`s why the original lyrics of Shchedryk have fuck all to do with Christmas. It`s about a little bird flying over to some dude`s house and praising him and wishing him to continue to be awesome in the following year:

Shchedryk, shchedryk, a shchedrivka A little swallow flew  and started to twitter, to summon the master: "Come out, come out, O master  look at the sheep pen, there the ewes have yeaned and the lambkins have been born Your goods are great, you will have a lot of money,  If not money, then chaff:  you have a dark-eyebrowed [beautiful] wife.  Shchedryk, shchedryk, a shchedrivka, A little swallow flew.

Also, yeah, we, Ukrainians, kinda have a thing about brown eyes and dark bold eyebrows, so to every person with dark eyes reading this: if you have ever been led to believe that your eye color is plain and not romantic, check out Ukrainian folklore.

So, you probably think: “Gee, how did this weird Ukrainian pagan song has become Carol of the Bells?”

Well, meet the man responsible for the job! 

Mykola Leontovych!

Born in 1877 in Monastyrok village, in Podolia (Поділля), which is a historical region in the south-western part of Ukraine, Leontovych was a Ukrainian composer, conductor, and a folklorist. According to the story, during one Christmas season somewhere between 1905-1909 he went to visit his parents for the holidays and heard the locals singing Shchedryk. At the time, Leontovych had already started his lifelong work of collecting and preserving traditional Ukrainian songs. Naturally, he was captivated by the haunting melody and in the following years, he wrote a version of Shchedryk for a choir.

In 1914 his best friend, also a composer, Kyrylo Stetsenko finally convinced Leontovych to show his renditions of the folk songs to Oleksandr Koshyts who was a pretty cool guy actually. He also collected folk songs, he made a lot of effort to help popularize Ukrainian music and Ukrainian culture in the world, he conducted the first mixed choir of Kyiv University when women had been finally allowed to attend (which is also where I got my Bachelor`s degree, hey!) as well as the choir for the local school for the blind. 

Koshyts was completely enchanted with Leontovych`s work and asked for permission to let the university choir perform his renditions. On 26 December in 1916 Shchedryk was performed on stage in Kyiv, modern capital of Ukraine and back then one of the cultural centers of the Russian Empire. It was a huge success. It basically made Leontovych famous overnight and started his career in Kyiv.

In 1922 Koshyts went on tour to the United States and Canada with his new choir. He never went back home settling in Canada instead. They had left independent Ukraine and at the end of their tour in 1926, it had already become a part of the Soviet Union. However, before that, the choir had performed Shchedryk for the New York audience in 1922. This was the first time Carol of the Bells was heard in America. 

In 1936 a Ukrainian-American composer Peter (Petro) J. Wilhousky wrote English lyrics for the song for NBC radio creating the name - Carol of the Bells. And then John Williams made it super popular by using the melody for his Home Alone soundtrack. He received an Oscar nomination and he`s never acknowledged any of the people mentioned above. 

As for Leontovych, his story ended strangely and tragically. For years the circumstances of his death were covered in mystery and his name and his work have been forgotten. 

A few days after Bountiful Evening of the year 1921 Leontovych and his family were staying at his parents` house where he had first heard Shchedryk many years ago. A stranger came to their door. He asked to stay the night. It would be considered disrespectful to turn a guest away during the holiday season so Leontovych invited him in.  At dawn, he shot the composer and let him bled to death while he was robbing the house. The true motive was uncovered only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A declassified document shows that the murderer was a Soviet agent, a Chekist. Most historians believe that Leontovych was killed out of suspicion that he could flee the country like Koshyts but he was too popular at the time to just arrest him. So they decided to assassinate the composer quietly instead.

Sorry for such a bummer ending for this Christmas story but I`m not finished making you sad yet. 

Ok, this part is actually more for the Ukrainian Tumblr as we are the only ones who can do something with this information. The very house where Carol of the Bells was born now lies in ruin. Completely neglected and forgotten during the period of the Soviet Union, Leontovych`s house remained to be ignored even after Independence. It was dragged into some petty land dispute and even pronounced “fake” by the local bureaucrats who want to destroy it. It continues to slowly fall apart today. 

What can we do to stop this? Well, not much, really, but we can spread the information! Not enough people know about this place and how important it is. Also, you can follow these guys. They seek out abandoned cultural landmarks including Leontovych`s house, map them out, spread awareness and soon they are even planning to start a big crowdfunding campaign to restore at least some of them. So you can watch out for the start. 

As Mykola Leontovych once said, “we need to show how these dreams touch lives”. 

Thank you for reading all this. At least now you have a cool weird story to tell at your next holiday party. 

Happy Holidays, everyone! 

#long post #carol of the bells #christmas #Mykola Leontovych #Ukraine #Ukrainian history #Shchedryk #christmas carol

[seananmcguire]

I'm a few books into the October Daye series and I keep wondering, are we ever going to see fae of North/South American origin, or was the colonial genocide shockingly effective on the fae side? (I'm aware 'spoilers' may be the only answer I get and that's fine, I just feel compelled to ask because I keep wondering about it.)

So in the October Daye universe, the fae essentially exist and keep their world about six degrees to the side of the human world. It's entirely possible that magical things other than the fae exist, but if that's so, the fae are no more capable of seeing them than humans are of seeing the fae. From a fae perspective, it's them and humans, full stop, nothing else is out there.

All fae in this setting are descended from Oberon, Maeve, and Titania, three European mythological figures. I regret that there are some Asian fae types that were created in the early days of setting up the universe, and could not be extracted when I realized that was uncool. It's cultural appropriation to say that all the nifty mythological things in the world are descended from these three European figures. I am sorry, and would remove the Kitsune and related fae types from the setting if I could. Sadly, traditional publishing comes with very few opportunities to iterate and revise like that once something has been published, but it was inappropriate for me to include them, given the way the rest of the world works.

(As a footnote, and speaking as a folklorist--as in, I went to university to study folklore, it's literally my academic background--insisting that the Hidden People of non-European cultures are or must be treated as fae is also an act of cultural appropriation. "Fae" is a European word, and the structure of "the fae" as we commonly understand it is inextricably tied to that cultural background. So even if it weren't just the fae in this setting, you wouldn't likely be meeting fae from other parts of the world. You'd be meeting other kinds of Hidden Folk, with whatever origins were culturally appropriate.)

So while you may encounter changelings and fae with strong ties to human families of North or South American origin, you will not encounter fae with that direct origin, as the fae are explicitly European in origin.

If you want a more "everything exists, if there have been stories about it, it's probably real, and we can probably find it if we go looking" setting, look at my InCryptid books, which are much more tied to world folklore and mythology, and do not rely on a single point of origin for their "magical world."

[twobitmulder]

In Defense of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

This may be a controversial statement. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a pretty good movie--and at that--isn’t all that incongruous with the rest of the franchise. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out when I was 12--but because I’d been raised on the first three movies (and the Marvel and Darkhorse Comics and the Young Indy Show) I was a pretty big Indy fan already. I don’t actually remember what I thought of the movie when I saw it in theaters, but I remember the opinion that formed afterwards.

Very quickly the rest of the world had decided this was a bad movie--an unworthy followup that ruined the “ride into the sunset” ending of Last Crusade (in addition to invalidating a such a meaningful title). As a teenager I was perfectly willing to agree because when you’re a teenager there’s some kind of genetic impulse to agree with anyone who says something is lame. The best thing I ever said about it in those years was that it felt like someone’s very good fanfic--well plotted, fun action, a little derivative of the previous movies, and fulfilling the wish that Marion would come back and she and Indy would end up together but ultimately not really feeling like a “true” Indy movie (whatever the hell that means). In the years since, I’ve come around on it, and after my latest rewatch of the whole saga I’ve come to the conclusion that I actually really like it and I think it fits nicely thematically and aesthetically with the other three. Now if you truly don’t like it, that’s fine. Movie opinions aren’t moral imperatives but if you’re interested in a positive spin on it, read on.

One of the major arguments was that it didn’t “feel” like Indiana Jones. The 50′s aesthetic, the Soviet villains and most of all the aliens (sorry, inter-dimensional beings)...and yeah, it’s a little incongruous at first blush. Obviously it had to be set in the 50′s because Harrison Ford was old and already playing almost a decade younger than his actual age. The color pallet is a little weird too, more vibrant than the other movies and the CGI is distractingly 2008 but...I don’t think any of that is actually out of line with the first three movies. Indiana Jones was always set in a cartoon/comic book universe. For Pete’s sake in Raiders there’s a giant, perfectly round boulder that chases him. That is literally ripped out of a Scrooge McDuck comic. In Temple of Doom there’s a big musical number and in Crusade Young Indy escapes via magic trick.  Indiana Jones was always an amalgam of things from old adventure stories. On that note, I’d like to take a moment to defend Mutt’s vine swinging. Now, it’s a weirdly staged scene and if it doesn’t work for you I totally get it, but Tarzan is just about the last classic adventure story Indy never took from. It may not have worked for everyone, but it’s exactly the kind of gamble they took with the boulder.

Now...the aliens. Fate of Atlantis did Aliens long before Crystal Skull but that’s neither here nor there. I think what eventually won me over to the aliens was that they were classic Roswell Greys in a flying saucer. To make my point, let me refer to another property--comic and movie--that are throwbacks in the same way Indy is. In the Rocketeer (both the comic and movie) he fights a bad guy modeled on horror actor Rondo Hatton and in the comic his girlfriend is basically just Bettie Page with a slightly different name. And we accept this because it’s a fun nod to the period and stories that inspired it and if the Rocketeer made it to the 50′s it would make all the sense in the world for him to encounter Roswell Greys in flying saucers. Same for Indy as far as I’m concerned. As for the existence of aliens at all...Like I said, it’s a comic book world that has an active Abrahamic God, active Hindu gods and if we take the Young Indy as canon vampires (and if we take the comics as canon Greek gods, Dragons, Mesoamerican gods, Celtic gods and even some borderline Lovecraftian “old gods” out in the arctic). Saying aliens don’t make sense in this universe is like saying magic shouldn’t exist in the DCU because it’s more heavily weighted toward aliens and sci-fi.

Now, I think that a lot of what makes this all feel wrong is the special effects, which definitely make it all feel less grounded than the previous films. I don’t deny that and I do wish they had kept the effects a little more practical--but my real point is that the things that feel silly, cartoony, or corny are all really still in line with the stuff from the old movies--it’s just that those were constrained by technology and for better or worse these weren’t. So Marion drives off a cliff--Indy rafted out of a plane. So Mutt swings on vines--Indy got chased by a Scrooge McDuck Bolder. So some CGI prairie dogs have a cartoonish reaction the rocket sled going by--a f**king monkey did a Nazi salute, silly animal antics are baked into this franchise’s DNA. Basically, it was always silly and over the top--the practical effects just convinced us it wasn’t.

Now, in the interest of fairness, there’s a fair amount I don’t care for and can’t really defend or spin another way. The Ancient Aliens hypothesis is a stock plot in stories like this but it is--ask any archaeologist or folklorist--absolutely steeped in and birthed from racist ideas that non-white cultures couldn’t achieve the things they did. I’m not saying the filmmakers were actively racist--I think they took a stock plot that needs to die and didn’t consider the implications, but it puts a damper on the movie. And the portrayal of indigenous people in this movie absolutely leaves something to be desired (understatement). It’s a problem with the colonialism that’s baked into the genre and I don’t think it’s unavoidable but I do think it’s far too easy to slip into writing a movie like this and it’s a problem all of the Indy Movies have.  

Also, yes, the fridge scene is dumb. It stretches suspension of disbelief just a rope bridge too far. Spielberg and Lucas are really creative and talented men who also come up with a lot of silly ideas and sometimes one gets past the goalie. It happens. And, again, the CGI is jarring, no two ways about it.

But this is also the movie where Indy and Marion get back together and get married. This is a movie where we get to see a good balance Indy the Professor and Indy the Adventurer. He’s past “fortune and glory” but he still still gets giddy looking at all the history stored in Akator. This is a movie where we see and Indy who has actively grown since the past movies, he’s not a glory seeker and he repaired his relationship with his father but there’s still something missing and in the end he gets it. Also, Shia Labouf is not a bad actor and was, in fact, fairly good in this. Look at how he tears up in the sanitarium when he realizes what’s happened to Oxley. Look at how even after a fight with his parents in the Soviet convoy he’s able to jump into action mode because survival trumps personal issues in that moment. Look at how he cares for Oxley and Marion in all the group shots. It’s not a perfect movie...it’s not the best of these movies, but I think it’s better than we’ve been giving it credit for.

#Indiana Jones #Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

[bounward]

t2.4 ⟨ i SPECIFICALLY told you NOT to talk to ELECTROHEAD ⟩ 👨‍🚒 < re: o’malley || attn: dawson

The admission he’d both simultaneously been waiting for and dreading had finally arrived and it's clear by his expression that he's absolutely furious to the point where he doesn’t realize he’s ... locked in a vote for Starscream? 

At least it doesn’t look like you’re in for another one of his Wild Theories that Conveniently Ignore Evidence but is what’s coming any better?

“FIRST OF ALL the only people who fuckin’ knew what those pills did before you went ahead and said it were YOU, ME, AND BULLY. YOU wouldn’t kill Vixen, BULLY wouldn’t do it either, and I’M not a fuckin’ COWARD who’d have to use those. SECOND OF ALL if I was gonna use that shit as a WEAPON why the FUCK wouldn’t I just feed ‘em to Vixen and call it a day, huh?! Shit could’ve been swiped for those other weird pills the rat left out for us real easy, hell in that case it could’ve been anyone, you ever think of that?!”

Sorry to the people immediately next to him. And the people immediately next to those people. And the-.. probably everyone actually.

“LASTLY you’re a moron! I TOLD you what that shit does and you still went and put it on your mouth?! Dude, I know you're obsessed with me but what the FUCK! You’re goddamn LUCKY you did that while the rat was fuckin’ babysitting you ‘cause it means you didn’t take enough for her to call poison control on your ass! ‘Four Loko’ my ass I oughta--”

He cuts himself off with an exasperated sound and shakes his head. Okay refocus.

“Dawson!”

He waves a hand as he calls out to the folklorist.

“You found somethin’ didn’t you? Some kinda fabric that you were all nervous about. It was like... white. Made of the same shit jean’s’re made outta-”

Denim. The word’s denim-

“Didn’t look real close at anyone else’s clothes ‘cause I’m not a weirdo but you end up findin’ somethin’ that matched while we were lookin’ at rooms?”

#ch2 #trial #chuck #submission