blamgranules

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Today, I mourn the loss of Worlds Beyond Number and begin the process of welcoming Worlds Beyond Number.

When this podcast started, Suvi’s story hooked me right away. By the end of Arc 1, I was super excited for this story about complex morality and the heroes getting deeper and deeper into a world where everything was a compromise. There were no right answers because every option had some gut-wrenching downside.

With ‘The Battle of Twelve Brooks Pt 2’, that no longer seems to be the case. It looks like the morality is pretty clean. The world is dark and the main characters have to be the light in it, which is uncomfortably close to a chosen one story.

I’m realizing that I’m not going to get what I wanted. Which is not to say that what I got was bad, but I was really excited for a story of moral quagmire. I wanted an intellectually challenging story and now it seems the people that were along for the emotional ride were right.

Damn.

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At a certain point, violence is the answer.

"But if we resort to violence we're just as bad as them!"

One man did with 3 bullets what decades of peaceful protesting failed to do. It sent a message. For the first time in decades, the ruling class was afraid.

And now, barely 3 months later, things are back as they were. Not because Luigi's act of violence wasn't effective, but because it was forgotten as a one-off thing and treated as a trend. People Idolized him for his actions but not for the reason they were done.

One man's act of violence was enough to shake the foundations on which this country is built, the rot that had eaten away the hearts and minds of the people had been pushed back, and for the first time, there was clarity in the minds of everyone. There was no Left or Right, there was simply the Working VS the Ruling.

One man was enough to cause the closest this country has ever come to class consciousness, to solving real problems. Imagine ten, a hundred, a thousand more just like him.

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Truly crazy to watch people pop off on Silver and Sworn for having Suvi’s back and letting Ame know that despite her intentions, her actions were out of place and unhelpful.

Silver and Sworn, the ones that were *actually* by her side when she was on her way to the horses to make sure no one starved, because Eursulon outright refused to help (and spoke of not wanting to be there at all) and Ame was bopping from fraught conversation to fraught conversation.

Silver, the one who understood that what Suvi actually needed when they were finally alone was to put down the devastating burden of trying to keep three dozen people alive behind enemy lines for a night and rest.

Sworn, the one that volunteered to handle the horse problem since he saw how much it gutted her to resort to it.

Feel however you want to feel about their phrasing or tone, but neither was wrong for taking Ame to the side and speaking with her on points Suvi’s also made to her in the past. It is neither empathetic nor community-serving to repeatedly refuse to adapt to a different culture’s way of doing things.

Truth is, Sworn and Silver are the ones being a good friend to Suvi right now, and if you can’t see that it’s because your Citadel-blinders make you instantly dismissive of anything Suvi wants or needs that diverges from Ame and Eursulon’s preferences. And that sucks to see. Again.

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My way out theory…

The Great Bullfrog won. All those soldiers that came in and said Silence neutralized him? Shapeshifters. Silence and his company were captured and the shifters are luring the rest of the imperial troops into an ambush.

Twelve Brooks is a trap.

That family who said the Empire was kidnapping kids? Liars. They were trying to turn Eursulon on Suvi.

That call with Steel? Not Steel. One of the witches intercepted Rasp but the spider was gone.

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Interlude 2: The Clearing

Okay, so what do we have here? Spooky ass trees? No, thank you. Singing moss? Oooh…if we have to. Poison colored mushrooms? Hahaha, uh uh. Moss that’s eating a person? No, no, no, no, no! Panther with a bunch of horns? Okay, that’s sick! Toothless, eyeless children full of mushrooms wailing that the spirits of their loved ones are broken? Fuck this!

Wizards blast the whole place with sand and fire? Thank God! That was a glade built of nope. That was freaky shit from start to finish and you cannot convince me that you wouldn’t, in real life, be down with blasting a forest full of screaming ghosts and man-eating moss to glass.

And bear in mind that this is not a Judeo-Christian fantasy. Humans are not spiritual amphibians here. The spirit world and the physical world are not layers, but separate spheres that rub against each other. A grove full of spirits is not a blessed, holy place—“sacred”, the man says, but sacred to whom?—it’s a colony, an invasion. Spirits set up shop in this human-world forest and made inhospitable to humans.

I don’t care what the choir says. I’m with the Citadel on this one.

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Evil guided meditation is just humiliation kink edging.

Evil Guided Meditation

Everyone stop breathing

Think about what you did wrong.

Dig deeper. It was wronger than you think.

Dig deeper. It was wronger than you think.

There's a problem, and you need to figure it out, and you don't get to sleep until you do.

Figure out the problem.

Panic.

Do it harder. Do it a little bit better.

Everyone's mad at you.

EVERYONE'S mad at you.

Clap your hands so hard that your hands blow up.

And everyone cum.

- Brennan Lee Mulligan

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“I came here to change the hearts of witches and believe that I may have left no heart more changed than yours.

“I believe that. I believe that I showed you things that you and the world needs to know are true. But I also know that truth, real truth, is quickly and shatteringly ignored by the stout-hearted when the objects of their affection demand it be ignored.”

…huh. Well, now, that’s shockingly similar to what a male coworker in his fifties told me when I was sixteen after he came out as gay to everyone we worked with. I half expected Tefmet to put their hand on Eursulon’s thigh and say “it’s okay if you’re scared. You can’t be courageous if you’re not scared, but courage is doing things you’re afraid of. Your courage has always impressed me.”

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…because the Pilgrim Under Stars doesn’t particularly care about the tech to control spirits. He does, but it’s like legal abortion; yes, it is a thing that Theocrats want gone and it’s just one coat saving a seat when what they want is the entire theater.

The other side of the issue is that the technology to enslave spirits is an atomic bomb. If the spirits have the means to remake humanity according to one tall, dark, and handsome stranger’s vision, then having the ability to do roughly the same to spirits is a nice insurance policy.

It illustrates one interpretation of the Fermi Paradox: at a certain level of sophistication, societies destroy themselves. In a primeval form, humans needed spirits, needed to cooperate; thus the Coven of Elders. This cooperation benefited the spirits in ways we haven’t explored yet. But once humans reached a point where that cooperation was no longer necessary, the spirits began to lose their privileges and we all know how privileged groups feel about that.

The spirits aren’t gods anymore. Humans want to take their thrones. So, it’s down to human society agreeing to halt its progress, one side or the other getting enslaved, or both sides decimating each other into a restart.

WHY are “support and enable the destructive technology of the Citadel to enslave spirits” and “destroy the entire thing under the banner of the Pilgrim Under Stars” the ONLY TWO OPTIONS??

Is it not possible to destroy the tech and such and return the Citadel to the more academic, university-esque state it had when Kalaya was there?? Or at the very least, just not ally with the Man in Black? (genuine) (is this truly not possible?)

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Exactly. That presentation was weak tea. She didn’t demonstrate that any of those things actually came from the Citadel.

If you heard Tefmet's testimony and immediately went "I KNEW IT!" you are legally prohibited from ever speaking about Suvi's "justification machine" again.

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WWW: What's the "reflexive indicative"?

I've been meaning to write this for a while, but I wasn't sure what it really meant and now I have a theory. I am a professional linguist. I teach translation, so grammar/syntax is something I have spent a lot of time on.

Now, brace yourselves, because I'm going to be explaining modern English grammar and most schools in the English-speaking world are still teaching traditional grammar. I don't know how well versed BLeeM is in modern grammar, but we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Let's start with the basics. Indicative is a grammatical mood. Moods effect the reality or truth of a clause. The indicative mood is one of the realis moods, meaning that the clause is true in the tense. (Irrealis moods can make the clause possible, hypothetical, desired, etc.) The other realis mood in English is declarative. The difference is that a declarative clause uses a verb as its predicate and an indicative clause uses a noun or adjective as its predicate.

In modern grammar, the predicate is the word or phrase with the most important meaning. To put it another way, the predicate is the word or phrase that the rest of the sentence "depends" on (see: Parse Tree). So, "I am running" is declarative and "There is a shotgun in the drawer" is indicative.

Whatever magic's "reflexive indicative" is, it's roughly equivalent to "a thing exists" or "a thing is [adjective]".

Next, reflexive is term used in grammar to refer to anaphoric nouns. An anaphor is a word that refers back to another word or concept. In "we climbed a mountain and said mountain was tall", the participial adjective 'said' marks the following noun as an anaphor. Anaphoric nouns are usually analyzed as pronouns; e.g. "itself". Some English pronouns are only sometimes reflexive, like "that".

This means that the "reflexive indicative" has to be a couple things. First, we know it's somatic, so sign language basically. Second, it's a full clause. One gesture for a full clause isn't difficult. In many languages, there are verbs that do not need any nouns to be satisfied. Consider: "It is raining". 'It' is a dummy pronoun; it doesn't mean anything. In ASL, it is a single gesture. However, a reflexive indicative clause must have a noun. In short, the somatic gesture most likely means "a thing mentioned before exists".

My theory is that the reflexive indicative is used as a kind of anchor. It may be a conjunction between two magical actions: "Control the edges of the tear. Those edges are there. Bring them together." It might also be used as punctuation to end an action: "Bring the edges of the tear together. That tear does not exist." or "Connect the edges of the fabric. That fabric is whole."

If this is true, I would theorize that early in the development of wizardry, the reflexive indicative was used either 1) to assist the wizard in their focus (assuming that WWW's magic is the manifestation of will) or 2) doing magic this way was so new that it was "low context". Low context communication involves a lot of specifics and reflexive nouns are more frequent in low than high context communication. Insulated communication systems tend to become higher context over time.

Brennan mentioned that the more people who know a particular spell, the less potent it becomes; hence the Citadel tightly controlling who has access to spells. However, more people knowing a spell might also increase the level of context the spell has, thus making the reflexive indicative unnecessary.

This would make even more sense if magic was always an interaction with the spirit world. Whatever spirit is making Mending possible has become so familiar with it that the reflexive indicative is understood.

But at this point, we are into untethered speculation. That's the theory. We'll see what info Brennan drips out next and if my theory holds up.

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For the record, if WWW was in a NSBU kind of world, my takes on things would be very different.

WWWO Fireside Chat: ep31 "The Souvenir"

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Like declaring war on Brazil for deforesting the Amazon. People are wilding out here!

Thinking about Hakea's vote and remembering what the Irulian desert used to be :)))))))))))

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Witch stans hate fascism, but love a small number of people wielding tremendous power without even the pretense of accountability.

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Episode 33

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@dilfosaur

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Something that I find very interesting about the idea that the Witch of the World's Heart is the only station that deals with people in any way is that that seems to be by active choice rather than anything inherent. All of the other witch stations that we know of so far, while they are perhaps further from centering the human experience, could very much interface with it. Humans are not separate from the ecosystem of plants and animals, for example, and their links to them could be included in the purview of the Woodland Green and the Wild Hunt, but it seems as though those connections are intentionally neglected.

The witches are presumably at least partially human, so by their very nature, they embody how people can interact with their domains. Indri has observatories to study the stars, which exemplifies how people can and do form a relationship to the subject of her station. And certainly the moon has tremendous meaning for many people, which could be part of Mirara's consideration.

But it seems like there have been choices made to shunt the entirety of humanity to one station and refuse to recognize that, similar to how there are bridges between the spirit and the material world, clear delineations cannot be drawn between the human and the inhuman or natural worlds. I wonder when or why those choices were made and how or if they relate to the attempt to destroy the Witch of the World's Heart, and I can't wait to learn more about the coven in future episodes.

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I'm not actually shocked Suvi just submitted to the geas but also man I can't believe she didn't resist she doesn't even ask Steele any questions......