#and I'm using that to level instead bc otherwise this would be impossible

[affectionatealien]

Playing the clunkiest grindiest jrpg on earth that only wants me to suffer bc I NEED to see more of randam. Suffering for love etc etc

[your-turn-to-role]

Don't know if this has been said before, but what if Molly's soul is still hidden away in the body, although still around about the level when he died, so it's when Lucien gets taken to 0 hit points or something he's weak enough for Molly to finish him off from the inside

(I don't say it as a "this is what I think's going to happen" sort of thing, it'd just be cool & I'm thinking out loud)

so, i’m gonna ramble a lot about this before i get to your question, because this actually gives me a really good opportunity to talk about something i’ve been wanting to for a while and haven’t made the post yet

i’ve, honestly been really confused by everyone going “oh what if molly’s soul is still in there”, as if molly and lucien are two separate souls fighting over a body, and one’s possessed the other or whatever (especially when beacon theories get involved)

but like... that’s not what happened. to explain, lucien was the original soul. weird cult shit aside, he was an otherwise normal tiefling from shadycreek, who hired vess derogna to help him cast some kind of ritual involving that book

she went along with it, but didn’t actually want lucien’s plans to succeed. she’d read the book extensively herself, she also had nine eyes across her body, but she wanted no part of whatever the somnovem is doing. so when she cast the ritual on lucien, she modified it, and instead of its intended purpose, it shattered lucien’s soul into pieces, intending to make it impossible for him to be resurrected. the tombtakers found his body, seemingly dead, buried him in the woods outside their hideout, and scattered across the continent per lucien’s emergency instructions, plan lost

until the one piece of his soul left in his body slowly managed to wake up. a full soul isn’t actually required to keep a body alive, especially if there’s other weird magic involved, and this piece is very determined. it’s missing the rest of itself, and trying to come to terms with that - doesn’t remember anything, takes months to be able to speak, other than one word, haunted by the emptiness it’s now feeling, and the only other vague memory in their head is of the dark dark magic that brought them here. eventually, like any living creature, they grow, and develop, and move on from that. they were given a new start, a new name, and a family that loved them. molly learned how to be a person, not knowing anything different, and gave himself a whole new identity, had friends, had family, that lucien didn’t. but nothing new was added to the mix other than the love he got from the circus, everything else he built himself

(i’ve had a couple people say to me “well lucien isn’t a reliable source, he could be lying or mistaken about what happened”, and just from my personal insight, i don’t think he’s lying, but even if he was wrong about molly being a piece of his soul and not a whole new soul entirely - molly doesn’t match the symptoms of being a soul given to a new body. but you know what he does match near perfectly? egtw’s description of a hollow one, a being resurrected without a soul)

(he had at least part of one, we know that, we can see it, in lucien, they’re too similar, and molly doesn’t register as undead like hollow ones do. but i’m guessing if a fractured piece of a soul found itself back in its body without the rest of it? it would sound something like this)

“Yet some beings find that, days after they died, they awaken, clutching to life, with only a terrible emptiness inside to remind them of their death.”

“The transition from life to becoming a Hollow One affects different people to different degrees. Some let their anger and regret consume them. Others use their second chance to become a brighter force in the world. However, all Hollow Ones are marked by their new existence: feelings of unease, dread or sadness cling to them like tattered rags of their past life.”

so then he dies. and the mighty nein tell cree. and she spends months looking for a way to bring lucien back. i don’t know exactly how she does it, but she does, collects all (or at least more of, he may be missing some things still) those fragments of his very shattered soul and puts them back together. lucien doesn’t remember everything that molly did, the person he grew to be, and who’s to say really which part of a soul is responsible for memories? if you were to shatter his soul again in the same way, would the part that was molly remember, or would it have to go through the same thing all over again?

but it also leads us to an interesting question of, how does a soul get made. a baby still waiting to be born doesn’t have a soul yet, we know that because of how the beacon works

is each new child not connected to the luxon given a soul by the gods? or do they grow their own, as they learn to be their own person

did molly essentially turn a soul fragment into a whole soul, just by living? and if he did... what part is in lucien now

i’m honestly inclined to believe that lucien’s soul is back together, including the molly part, because of all the ways they’re similar, i think those all came from that fragment. but there’s three options here, 1) the soul fragment that was molly is back as just another puzzle piece, he’s essentially dead, and the purpose of his story is that you don’t have to keep living to keep having an impact on the world, molly has changed things permanently despite how short he lived 2) he did grow a second soul, and that fragment they share is shared, back in lucien’s body, but either molly in the afterlife is missing a piece, or there’s more than 100% of a soul in that body, weirdly stuck together and probably not that noticeable as wrong because there’s already a thousand other voices in there 3) he did grow a second soul, and it’s gone. he left for the afterlife and that piece was unrecoverable, and now lucien’s walking around with 80% of a soul

the first is my belief, honestly, and the only way to get molly back is to shatter lucien in the same way, and hope he still has those repressed memories. the third is what would make molly resurrectable, if you were to kill lucien.

the second, however, is the only thing that really makes sense with molly being “still in there”, and if that 80% of a new soul can manage to wake up from whatever’s going on in lucien’s head, it’s possible!

it would also be pretty symbolically cool bc, while matt changed the blood hunter class a lot recently so it’s no longer a feature (give me back the cool ghostslayer, pls), back when molly was alive, the subtype he was? at high levels he’d get the ability to keep fighting in ghost form after his body fell unconscious, as long as he didn’t die. and i mean fuck if that’s not exactly what he’d be doing here

[lesbeet]

hi im sorry to just come out of nowhere with this but could I ask about the relationship between white jewish people and i mean...whiteness I guess? the way I've been racialized since childhood has been painful and I'm not really sure what to make of it. I would never say I'm not white or that I don't experience white privilege because I do but the othering has been so confusing and hard to handle and it makes you feel so alien

you p much summarized my take on it, actually. i'm white + glean the benefits of white privilege and would never deny that, however there's no question that a majority of antisemitic rhetoric is based on the racialization of ethnic jews. aka nazis and white supremacists do not consider jews to be white.i've seen people say "i refuse to let hate groups define my identity" which i think is a misguided but understandable sentiment, and i've seen people adamantly pull the "i'm not white, i'm jewish" line which is incorrect and harmful imo.the reason jewish racial identity is complicated is because a) race is artificially constructed and b) there are different levels or iterations of racism in society.what i mean by that is that there are different ways that racism manifests, and for an ethnic group like jews, some of those ways position us as the oppressors or beneficiaries and some of them position us as the oppressed.while "jewish features" are absolutely a thing, white jewish people do not have to fear police brutality on racial grounds. the color of our skin does not automatically deny us rights or opportunities. we can usually hide our jewishness if we need to. the same cannot be said for poc, jewish poc included.but again, much/most of antisemitism (especially from white supremacist groups) focuses on judaism as an ethnicity, and not purely as a religion that often includes non-ethnic converts. they speak of The Jewish Race, use caricatures of ethnic jewish features in their propaganda, etc.and accordingly, some laws have been passed in history that affected jews! what first comes to mind for me is the idea of jewish quotas at universities in the us to make sure that "too many" jews were not being admitted to these schools (obviously this is no longer in effect)so, to answer your question of "are jews white?" all i can say is "sometimes"which i really don't like to do bc there are definitely white jews, like i said, who cling to the white supremacist idea of racializing ethnic jews in order to present themselves as poc, which is just plainly incorrect and does a great disservice to poc, jewish or otherwise, who have to live every day with the unfair and dangerous realities of not being white. the fact that there can be jewish poc says to me that, on the whole, jews can also be white. i'm a white jew. i have a big schnoz and i wear a chamsa and a lot of the clothing i wear has hebrew on it (old camp shirts and stuff), so i'm often easily identified as jewish, but i can take off my necklace and wear other clothes. i can stop being jewish in public and therefore be safe from the immediate dangers of being racialized in public. this is not the case for the majority of poc, again, jewish or otherwise.i've literally seen white non-ethnic converts posit that their racial identity changed when they converted, so that they're now white-passing instead of white. like that's just objectively false and impossible, but people do it. and i bring that up bc (in addition to wanting to specifically call out those types of people) i want to stress yet again that me saying that jews have a complex racial identity as a group that's usually not as straightforward as either white or not white does NOT mean that i think it's ok for white jews to deny the implications of our whiteness.antisemitism is real and harmful and it has and does kill jewish people, and like i said a big portion of it is based on racializing the jewish ethnicity. but that doesn't automatically revoke our whiteness, nor does it stop white jews from benefiting from our white privilege. this was a really long response and i feel like it kind of went all over the place without really answering your question lmao but i hope it was helpful in some way

[maidenofsophia]

Can I just say how much I love your new URL? I've always really liked the 'married to God' idea, but of course it comes with a lot of heteronormativity because the only people who 'marry God' are women, and God takes the roll of a man. So the idea of being married to Our Lady really resonates with me, actually, bc I've considered taking a vow of celibacy at least for a while (I'm sure I will want to marry & raise a family at one point) and I like the idea of being spiritually married to our Lady

Thank you! Yes, this is absolutely my thing at the moment! ^_^

The idea came about when I saw a post mentioning the Virgin Mary being referred to as the bride of the Holy Spirit. Of course the Holy Spirit is typically referred to as male in mainstream Christianity but not according to early Christian texts, nor in Jewish mystic literature in regards to the Shekinah (presence of God) who is also feminine. As I satirised in a recent post of mine, early Gnostics argued how a woman could conceive of a woman, which I always took as a way of dismissing the idea that Yeshua had no earthly father (something I do still believe in). But in regards to the actual question put forward my answer would be; “Dude, She’s God! If She wanted to impregnate a human woman, do you think She would need a penis? She managed to craft the whole Universe without one!” Even Yeshua himself mentions having two mothers in the Gospel of Thomas. 

I know with the whole ‘married to God’ idea, the image that most often comes to mind to us Westerners is that of Catholic nuns becoming “Brides of Christ”. Or the Church/Ecclesia itself being recognised as the Bride. But what I experienced is actually influenced more by Sikhi, one of my all time favourite religions! Their holy book, Guru Granth Sahib, is filled with verses describing the human soul as a bride in love with her ‘divine husband’, being God (who is only symbolically male, but supposed to be genderless). And that all souls are female in that respect, regardless of whether or not the body is that of a man or a woman, and thus all are considered equal. This is part of why Sikhi is a rather egalitarian religion compared to most other mainstream faiths. However with that in mind, as you say, the issue of heteronormativity comes up again. And LGBT issues are being heavily debated in Sikhi as they are in the Abrahamic religions. 

Almost every bloody Gnostic sect I come across as well, hoping to find my place in a community, also has this problem. Many of them try to be these beacons of feminism and LGBT-acceptance, and while their actions don’t necessarily negate this, their spiritual language still reflect that which is misogynistic and heteronormative. The Ecclesia Gnostica states in its Catechism that God must be referred to in male pronouns, with the titles of ‘Father’ and Son’ instead of ‘Parent and Child’ because “their holy names would lose their power otherwise”. They revere Sophia but her shrine is a small corner of the church while the very masculine Deity is placed in the center at the front. Sophia is also spoken of as a ‘poor, misguided damsel in distress who as rescued by Christ’ and that the Bridal Chamber sacrament is where a soul is wed to Christ to become ‘male/pure’ like “His”. The Sophian Gnostics led by Tau Malachi are a little better, with more focus on referring to God in feminine language, yet they still draw these arbitrary lines between that which is ‘masculine and feminine’.  Mary Magdalene is honoured as ‘the Bride’ rather than the Holy Daughter, her relationship to God in her own right taking a backseat to her relationship with Christ, which of course must have been sexual and romantic(!), as that is apparently the only way he could have loved and admired her as the Gnostic gospels claim (despite that they never confirm the two were wed). Malachi even says in his book “Living Gnosis” that, while souls are genderless, soul mates can apparently only meet when in male and female bodies! I challenged him on this on his forum and he sort of gave a wriggled his way out of it, saying it wasn’t impossible for same-sex partners to be soul mates, but made it sound like it was some sort of anomaly. He at least tried to reiterate the idea that male and female are just illusions of ‘duality’ and that there is really only One, in that all souls are the same and equal. 

So while I see the positives of believing all souls are the same gender, the ‘female’ is still regarded as that which is lesser and needs a superior, saviour ‘male’ husband, who is elevated to ‘God’. This may only be a metaphor for some but language and representation in religion is VERY important, no matter what the ‘traditionalists’ may say. It’s all about how an individual is able to connect with God and that will be different for everyone. This is why I distance myself more and more each day from Gnosticism and Christianity, having the Father and Son as quiet, background figures, and putting the Mother, Daughter and Holy (Lady) Spirit at the center. While I do believe God, in truth, is beyond the duality we know as gender, They appear to us as we may personally connect them best, which for me is almost always in the Sophianic (Divine Feminine) form. And obviously I reject the notion that my soul needs to be of an opposite gender in order to be joined with Her. 

I can strive to be a good daughter of the Mother, I can strive to be a noble sister of the Daughter, and I can strive to be a loyal bride of the Lady Spirit. ^_^ 

As for the celibacy thing, I don’t personally see it as a necessity for being a bride of the Lady but it depends on how you want to commit to that relationship, as each would be different. I myself have very little sex-drive (though I wouldn’t go as far to call myself asexual) and am also rubbish at going on dates so it’s kind of a non issue for me right now. However if I did meet a lovely woman to spend my life with, I wouldn’t consider my relationship and/or marriage to her something that voids my marriage to My Lady - as Her soul would be just as present in the woman I love. If anything I would see it as loving my Lady more through her, if that makes sense. On the other hand I can also see how a celibate lifestyle, meditating and focusing on the Lady, could lead to less distractions and feel closer to Her on a different level. I am honestly fine with either, I will trust in where She leads me. :)