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the-darkestminds · 11 days

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“Elain actually wants Azriel! They already have strong feelings for each other!”

Okay. So now what? Their book starts with them already on the verge of falling in love (ridiculous lol) and to deal with this they do…what? If Feyre learned that they love each other, she would never be okay with Rhys forbidding them from being together. It would take a single conversation between Feyre and Rhys to clear this up. And sjm has repeatedly let us know that Lucien is more courtier than warrior. There would be no blood duel. Also, as Rhys said, it’s illegal in his lands, and Elriels are adamant that Elain WILL NOT leave the Night Court, so they’d be protected by that law.

But say Azriel ignores Rhys’s order, and Lucien invokes the blood duel and Rhys allows it to happen. We are told Azriel would destroy Lucien with “little effort.” So now Lucien’s dead…and apparently Elain is fine with this. Does Beron declare war on the Night Court? And is Eris no longer their ally, even though we’ve yet to see them truly working together? Beron is already an enemy, so we don’t need that extra reason for him to fight against the NC. Vassa and Jurian would turn on the IC but they have no forces to command right now, so not sure what they could really do about it. Does the Spring Court remain desolate indefinitely because there’s no one left to care about it? I’m genuinely trying to wrap my head around how this could play out but I’m struggling to see it.

Say they do decide to sneak around for a bit until Elain and Lucien “mutually” reject the bond. What happens then? The scene with Cassian and Eris at the very end of ACOSF told us what to expect for the next book:

“Koschei remains in play, and Beron might very well be stupid enough to establish an alliance with him, too.”

Beron and Koschei. How does Elriel play into that? Elain has visions of Koschei, so she could fit into this plot line. But is Azriel more connected to Beron and Koschei than Lucien? Lucien has a connection to Vassa, who is enslaved by Koschei’s curse. And all of Prythian still believes Beron to be Lucien’s father. Plus, there’s Eris’s plot to overthrow Beron. We learned that Lucien and Eris are on speaking terms again. Sjm has left several hints that Eris cares for Lucien and has secretly protected him. So there’s potential for a reconciliation between them. But I fail to see how Azriel fits into this story in an interesting way, aside from being useful in a fight. Will Elain and Azriel take on Koschei and Beron while Lucien happily assists them?

Say they’ve defeated Koschei and Beron, Elain and Azriel are happy, Lucien is still tied to Elain but ultimately they are fine to go their separate ways. What’s the next book about? Vassa and Lucien falling in love? She’d be free from her curse by then, and we know she desperately wants to return to her people. Or maybe this happens in the “Elriel book” as well. So if Azriel and Elain’s story is concluded, AND Lucien’s story is tied up, what’s next? A full length novel about Emerie and Mor?

I’m just not seeing it. Are you?

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umiokami · 2 months

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The way Neuvillette got so happy when we said we loved his ladle 🥺

#baby grandpa's first ladle #also quite the contrast to him almost getting close to murdering Zhongli on an afternoon outing #like damn....Lantern Rite almost ended in blood 😬#genshin impact #neuvillette #genshin neuvillette

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foxylady13 · 3 months

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Saw this and thought it was perfect for these two 👌

#gwyneth berdara #winner of the Blood Rite #azriel shadowsinger #Gwyn and Azriel are equal #pro gwynriel #acosf #azriel x gwyn #gwyn x azriel #gwyn acosf #gwynriel

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countesspetofi · 6 months

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Hammer Studios' Dracula series.

#dracula #count dracula #hammer studios #hammer horror #horror movies #vampire movies #horror of dracula #the brides of dracula #dracula prince of darkness #dracula has risen from the grave #taste the blood of dracula #scars of dracula #dracula ad 1972 #the satanic rites of dracula #countess dracula #peter cushing #christopher lee #ingrid pitt

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leslie-nicole-07 · 6 months

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I woke up early and grabbed my cell phone to check my Facebook, and I found this new thing. A new statue horror of Dracula 😱, Van Helsing vs Dracula, on the Infinite Statue page facebook. You can reclaim your order starting in November 😊. Link here.

#christopher lee #dracula prince of darkness #hammer dracula #dracula hammer #dracula has risen from the grave #hammer films #hammer horror #the satanic rites of dracula #vancula #christopher lee dracula #dracula #dracula ad 1972 #horror of dracula #scars of dracula #taste the blood of dracula #the rites satanic rites of dracula #count dracula #dracula christopher lee

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yourpaceangel · 8 months

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It’s unfortunate that I say “oh wow I love cannibalism” and mean it as like “I love the symbolism of needing and wanting someone So Much that you have to have a part of them Inside Of You in a way that is stronger than a sexual need” or like “this is a form of holy communion” or like “this is one of the oldest ways to show desperation and fear and raw animalism with the consumption of another” and people just hear “I’m a weirdo that wants to eat someone”

#text #not good omens #OKAY BUT LISTEN #it’s about how some cultures practice cannibalism as a part of honor for the body and soul during death rites #and its about how some cultures throw out the word cannibal the same way they would murderer #and like it’s about growing up being told that to be holy you have to consume the flesh and blood of another #and they try to make it sound pretty but that’s what it IS #the literal consumption of the divine!#it’s about how we consume the body to feed the SOUL #and like it’s about how you can elevate another person to that holy status #that you can love them so much you need to have a part of them inside of you #it’s about the SYMBOLISM #and it’s about honoring other people even if you don’t understand them #i need to be clear about that

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dreamsandstars24 · 15 days

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So, during the infernal training ring where the Illyrians saw how my three amazing Valkyries killed it, it is mentioned how Azriel stared them down until they left.

And I just have the feeling that the sole reason of this was because he needed to make sure that they didn't gave the Valkyries a bad glance. I am sure that if any of them had look at either of the Valkyries with murder in their eyes, Azriel would have killed them right there and then.

And if they had even sneered towards Gwyn, Emerie or Nesta?

They would have wished for death.

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lost-sunset-canine · 6 months

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Angeltober 2023 Day 12 - Rite

A Rite aka Ritual with some goat slaughter from an angel itself. The pose took so long to get right, man i swear humanoid bodies are so so wierd to draw sometimes. And yeah lots and lots of gore, but no guts :) I wanted to somewhat do a design of a room where that kind of stull would happen often, tiled floor, fridge with potential left overs, meat hooks, slaughter table with the rest of the goat. Harder than expected to come up with a coherent room, still not perfect btu loads better than an empty room uwu -dairiem

prompt by @ultrainfinitepit

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random-thought-depository · 3 months

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"The imperative of protecting the vulnerable young in a predator-rich environment no doubt played a major role in shaping human sex differences and sexuality. La difference - the sexual dimorphism characteristic of humans and many other animals - is now believed to reflect, in large part, the greater role of males in actual combat with predators. Hunting, too, if it were a male-only activity, would have favored bigger, stronger males. But long before the male hunting band, males were probably deployed as baboon males are: to guard the periphery of the group." - Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites.

Some years back I read a post about how war is basically an exercise in sending barely adult young men to kill each other, but this is made more palatable by honoring the young men used so. Blood Rites seems like basically an attempt to offer a theoretical model of the origins of that behavior; not so much the origins of the war part as the origins of the honoring part.

I've only read the parts I could find for free on the internet cause my local library doesn't seem to have the book and my financial situation is not great so I'm reluctant to buy it, I'm wondering if she talks more about how her theory relates to gender, especially masculinity, cause, like...

... Yeah, let's talk about those hypothetical proto-humans making their camp in the Pleistocene savanna, deploying in that gendered defensive formation, the fighting age adult males deployed in a ring at the periphery of the camp, clutching their sharpened sticks and stone hand axes (the mightiest human weapons of this era), deployed out there to watch for and defend against and absorb the violence of the savanna's predators, while the more vulnerable immature young and more demographically valuable females and the few elders who've managed to live long enough to become enfeebled get the relative safety of the camp's center.

If the masculine gender role originally emerged from that situation, I think that would explain a lot about what it looks like! In the context of that defensive formation might emerge association of maleness with combat and an idea that able-bodied adult males should participate in group violence, masculine protectiveness toward women and children and division of humanity into fighting men and protected ones (women, children, the old and disabled), valuing and honoring of courage in combat especially in males, shaming and ostracism and punishment of young males who very understandably show noticeable reluctance to leave the relative safety of the group's core and take a place in the peripheral defensive ring when they reach maturity, females using gifts, affection, and sex as ways to reward males who show willingness to put themselves at risk for the sake of the group, honoring of heroes (the male who drove a sharpened stick into the lioness's side), honoring of the memory of martyrs (the male who threw little stones at the dinofelis and drew its hunger and rage down upon him so it would kill him instead of a woman or a child).

There's a paragraph, like, right after that quote that speculates that human playful/social non-reproductive sexuality may have evolved in that context, which, yeah, if we're going to talk about the gendered aspect of this we should talk about some of the stuff I talked about here. When I first conceptualized the first sentence of my response to that quote the phrasing that bubbled into my mind was "barely legal adult," which, lol, "barely legal" is a porn category, usually meaning an 18 year old young actress IIRC, but actually I think there might be something in noticing that parallel, pulling on that thread! Also, I see a possible intersection with the Sex At Dawn kind of monogamy as a relatively recent innovation hypothesis in this. In this gendered anti-predator defense formation males would work together to defend the females and immature young of the group as a collectivity. If you're going to use male-female sexual bonding to strengthen that relationship, it would probably work better if it was polyamorous so most or all of the group's fighting males would feel that attraction-affection-gratitude-protectiveness tangle of emotions toward many of the group's females.

Re: hunting hypothesis vs. defense hypothesis for the origins of human organized violence, which is something Ms. Ehrenreich talks about (she's strongly on the side of the defense hypothesis) - as I pointed out here, I think the human tendency to honor courage is suggestive; courage is the virtue of a prey species that engages in collective defense; a smart predator attacks the weak, avoids fights with the strong, and quickly retreats if it loses the advantage. Then again, bravery is also useful in intra-species competition, so that's not conclusive (notably, I think the "a smart predator isn't brave" thing isn't so obvious to a lot of humans because present and recent historical human hunting is often partly an intra-species social activity oriented toward gaining prestige by killing big, strong, dangerous animals and taking impressive trophies). I also think that stuff like that visceral dislike of deserters David Graeber talked about fits better with this model. Like, yeah, I guess big game hunting might have been vital to survival sometimes, but it's hard to see "all men must be hunters!" as a strong imperative unless it's really about something else (like enforcing gender conformity). But an able-bodied adult male who runs away instead of defending the women and children when the hungry lions come? Yeah, I could see emotions that incline toward very strongly disincentivizing that behavior getting strongly selected for. Then again, the threat that encouraged strong negative attitudes toward deserters might have been organized violence by other human groups, we've had at least multiple millennia when the animal most likely to kill a human was another human, so again, not conclusive.

IDK though I'm probably biased toward this model cause it's extremely congruent with my kinks and damage lol. Like, one of my "maybe I'm an outlier and shouldn't be counted, but..." issues with 2010s flavor feminism was "if you're going to talk about masculinity, I'm a cis-in-the-expansive-sense male and I don't really see myself at all in this figure of the entitled misogynistic 'bro' you seem to think is the default state of men in our society, but I once ignored a severe and painful toe infection cause I just kind of didn't want to be a bother about it and didn't want to inflict a doctor's bill on my family, and something in my brain shivers in dark rapture at the 'I will stay and be thy husband / though it be the death of me' line in The Maiden and the Selkie."

Another thing I'm wondering about is if the book touches on the situation I talked about here and here, where early humans got smart enough to imagine pre-emptive self-defense with a long planning horizon and revenge and started to turn the tables and actively hunt human-eaters. Because if we're suggesting that the "put them in white robes and give them gold bands" aspect of war is originally derived from our responses to predation, that seems like it might have been a very important stage in the emergence of that!

There's a bit in the book speculating that the primordial situation religious sacrifice reconstructs is a group of proto-humans being attacked by a predator and one of them being killed and carried away, possibly with one of the proto-humans either voluntarily offering themselves to the predator so it doesn't hurt the others or being chosen as a designated victim (note: this was Barbara Ehrenreich relating somebody else's idea). And, yeah, I guess that might be a harrowing formative collective trauma of our species, but it doesn't leave much time for ceremony and it's an inherently unpredictable fast messy process. It really wouldn't be a promising nucleus for rituals to grow around. It might get associated grief rituals that happen afterward, but the kind of ceremonialization of war Barbara Ehrenreich is talking about is more about the preparation for organized violence, the build-up. Also, I think a big part of the emotional appeal of that ceremonialization of war is that it generates a feeling of power, whereas watching one of your friends get dragged away by a lion would have exactly the opposite effect, it would make you feel weak and afraid.

You know what would offer time for ceremony and a prolonged period of fearful-angry-mournful-but-also-hopeful emotional build-up? When some clever proto-humans get a bright idea. They already hunt small weak animals like monkeys (chimps do), they are already used to fighting their predators with simple weapons, they have already learned to track predators to some extent to better avoid them, now combine these skill sets! Instead of waiting for the predator to come to them again and have the fight on its terms and hope to just drive it off so everyone gets to live one more day, they can seek its trail, find its lair, fight it in circumstances of their choosing, kill it and the end the threat of it forever, invert the ancient relationship between its species and theirs, hunt the dinofelis or megantereon or whatever that predator is! Now give it maybe a few generations or centuries or millennia for that practice to become an institution...

Here is the opportunity for vows of revenge choked out through tears as what's left of the predator's latest victim is buried in honor. Here is the opportunity for the selection of champions. Here is the opportunity for rituals to prepare the chosen for their terrible and glorious task (dream image: an old woman opening a shallow cut on her left arm with an obsidian butchery flake and using a thumb to smear a little of her blood on the foreheads of five 16-26 year old boys). Here is the opportunity for the chosen to dance around the fire and sing confident war songs ("you big dumb cat, you don't know what's coming! You think we'll wait for you to come again and eat another of us like the dumb antelope! You'll be so surprised when we hunt you instead, when we trap you in your hole and kill you! I'll cut your stomach open to get my niece's bones back! I'll cut off your head and cut out the teeth you tore up my niece with and give them to my mother and my aunt to wear in their hair!"). Here is the opportunity for the community to luxuriate in the promise of power and deliverance their cleverness offers them (the big dumb cat indeed is oblivious to the danger it's in, no other prey species has the cognitive capacity for the kind of strategic thought these early humans are doing, this kind of prey behavior is an outside context problem its instincts do not prepare it for) and dream of a better future when the enemy is defeated. Here is the opportunity for the chosen to be indulgently pampered with food, affection, and sex as a reward for their selflessness, with the promise that they will be given more of the same treatment if they come back from their great task victorious and their memory will be honored if they die during their mission.

Imagine the high that might be for a prey species, especially if they still remember the long age of fear and grief and impotent anger before they realized they could turn the tables, hunt the hunter. Something something that Frantz Fanon-ish therapeutic value of inflicting violence on your tormentor idea.

“One of the most dangerous things in the universe is an ignorant people with real grievances. That is nowhere near as dangerous, however, as an informed and intelligent society with grievances. The damage that vengeful intelligence can wreak, you cannot even imagine.” - Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune.

Aside: I know some nonhuman animals do sometimes attack their predators pro-actively, e.g. I've heard about cape buffalo doing that, but I don't think they do anything like try to systematically exterminate every individual predator that attacks a member of their group including tracking them and hunting them down with days-to-weeks planning horizons; you'd need some pretty serious cognitive capacity for that kind of strategic thought which I don't think cape buffalo and the like have.

In a different corner of Tumblr somebody made a post arguing that it's absurd to think that men experience gender oppression qua being men because there's no uniquely male experience of oppression. It's not an argument I particularly want to get into, but I think what I've just written is kind of a counter-argument against that idea, though admittedly a very weak one; highly speculative, and Anglophone internet feminists are usually talking centrally about relatively peaceful societies where being a man isn't particularly dangerous, and societies where being a man is dangerous are often really dangerous for women too.

#Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites #gender #my big ideas #human evolution #i don't know what to tag this #warning: long

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lucienarcheron · 3 months

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nobody messes with the High Lady’s family 😌

Balthazar you will always be famous 😌♥️

#nesta archeron #balthazar #gigi reads acosf #I know yall ship emorie and all but my crackship is emerie x balthazar lol #together reshaping the Illyrians? as blood rite winners and Valkyrie?#bring the Illyrians into a new age? 🤌🏼🤌🏼#big fan tbh

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colorlesschristmastree · 9 months

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Why is it that you can’t bring up how silly the valks winning the blood rite was without one of their stans being like “b-b-but feyre 😖😖” What about her?

The walked away from the fight with the wyrm about to get sepsis and die from her injuries. She walked away from the rainbow because she wasn’t just fighting with a sword she had her magic that she had been training extensively for months at that point. She’s able to winnow and get away from opponents, none of her fighting in that scene was one on one and she had many many resources available to her. Then Im sure someone will bring up the twins from Hybern and that fight.. yk the one where she was fighting side by side with Lucien and again had the ability to winnow and would’ve lost were it not for that ability, Lucien’s presence, and her quick thinking to burn one of them. All of those fights were pretty reasonable? She’d already been training for some time in acowar and acomaf, has always been canonically a quick thinker and someone who is very observant and in tune with her surroundings.

Meanwhile the blood rite erased already established canon in order to ensure they’d win. The monsters of the illyrian steppes that were said to attack anything they find suddenly having magic noses that exclusively detect illyrians? The illyrian males present simultaneously being willing to put aside anything in order to hunt those three down because they’re females and the illyrians are sexist while also being too distracted fighting each other because they actually don’t care that much about the females to bother hunting the valks down? Which is it? Are they evil monsters who will stop at nothing to hunt down women or are they stupid brutes who only care about fighting each other? Those same illyrian males who at this point in their training are meant to be some of the best sword wielders in Prythian actually can’t fight for shit and despite being brutally trained from a young age are blundering fools who actually can’t fight well and are sloppy and careless. Don’t even get me started on the friendship bracelets situation because that was just so stupid. At least when Lucien helped Feyre in acowar it’s because he was already there, not because his eye is actually magically connected to her bc of their beautiful friendship and bond and he can find her anywhere.

It’s totally ok to have enjoyed the blood rite in that book but admit you enjoyed it because it was entertaining, not because it made any sense. Don’t try to deflect the poor writing in that plot onto fight scenes that are nowhere near as nonsensical.

#my posts #pro feyre #feyre archeron #feyre #pro feyre archeron #acowar #anti nesta #anti nesta archeron #anti valkyries #anti blood rite plot

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