mercurialharpy

[mercurialharpy]

Disappointment even when you don't meet your shitty heroes, but they still haunt you.

Step into my own personal wayback machine for a moment. It was Fall of 1992, I was rooming with five young women I barely knew in a college dorm suite, at a college I'd transferred to the year before. I remember looking at an end table and on it, was a comic book. I'd never been into comics personally. Like most folks at the time I'd imagine, I (incorrectly) assumed that comics were for kids, and strictly for superheroes.

I was about to learn how wrong I was. This happened to be an issue of The Sandman, and was borrowed by one of my roommates from her boyfriend. He happened to be there when I was thumbing through it. I don't remember exactly what we said; all I recall was he disappeared, and re-appeared a half an hour later with Preludes and Nocturnes, a collection of The Sandman issues 1-8. I was hooked. Completely and absolutely. From that moment forward, I was a Neil Gaiman fan, and although I wasn't a hardcore consumer of every piece he's done, I would stan him and defend him and his work to anyone who would listen. My roommate and her (now) husband, who remained friends with me for decades after college, have had more than one book signed for me from the man himself.

Following the end of the original Sandman series, the novel American Gods became my second favorite. When, in the late 2010s and early 2020s, I learned my two favorite works were finally in production for television, I was beside myself with joy. Vindication. At least for me, being a fan of Gaiman was like being in a club no one else wanted to be in but you.

In following the threads of the main plot of the series, Morpheus himself was an outcast because of the trauma he suffered at the hands of vile people. In turn, he was not a particularly nice guy. I absolutely got the message that you could be a literal god, and be broken at the same time. This, paired with learning about Greek Mythology while in school, gave me a deep and satisfying understanding of the material that persisted for years. Almost a decade before The Sopranos or Breaking Bad lit a fire under the antihero archetype, Gaiman had it on lock with his work. The best foreshadowing is when you don't see it coming at all, I suppose. I will always be a fan of the work. But I'm not in the club anymore. Even now, I'm gazing at a bound version of the entire Sandman series on the shelf, and I've given serious consideration to tossing it out with the trash bin entirely. In all honesty, I had a sinking feeling when I watched the premier of American Gods on Starz (a now defunct network). It was at once a very good show, and a very flawed adaptation of the novel. In one of the promo pieces for the show, I remember reading that Gaiman was immediately at odds with Producer Bryan Fuller, and the differences ultimately caused Fuller to leave the project while taking some of the A list actors with him. All I could think was "uh-oh. This isn't going to make it to the end." And boy was I right. But not exactly for the reasons I thought.

So now we know. All of the articles I could find discussing the allegations against Gaiman and his current wife are behind paywalls, so I'm not going to link them here. I would recommend heading to Reddit for the ugly details. Both the decades-old assault allegations, and Gaiman's jaw-dropping responses, have left me questioning what exactly I should do with a piece of foundational literature that as a writer, I depended on as one of my touch stones. Another creator on Tumblr (of course I can't find the blog NOW when I need it) mentioned that supporting the remaining seasons of The Sandman TV series and Good Omens is probably a good thing despite a moral imperative to stop supporting the author; it helps maintain an ecosystem of actors and TV/film production that has suffered terribly in the wake of the Covid Pandemic and the recent writer's strike. But that doesn't solve my internal struggle. In discussing the situation with my partner, he quipped "Well, why would he stop being an asshole, if he was consistently rewarded for it? Networks were tripping over themselves to offer this guy deals. Someone had to know what was really going on, and chose to ignore it." Oof. Late-stage capitalism strikes again. While researching this post, I came across a quote from actor Norm MacDonald, from his memoir "Based On A True Story:" “It's true what they say. Never meet your heroes. It turns out they're all a bunch of fucking assholes. They're probably the reason you turned into such a fucking asshole - because they were your heroes and you spent all your time trying to be like them.”

Yup. Accurate. A good Wiccan friend, who has since passed into the Summerlands, told me during a particularly ugly divorce "Harpy, remember the opposite of love is indifference, not hate. " This quote is often attributed to Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. The source notwithstanding, this quote never sat right with me. In America, we are now contending with an almost terminal lack of empathy, as the authoritarian shit-show circus revs its engine. We are, again, a place where the cruelty is the point, and it appears co-conspirators are literally lining up to inflict as much damage as possible on weaker individuals without agency. I care. I'll never stop caring. This is my fatal flaw, my hubris. My middle-finger to the gods that be, telling me not to care, and look the other way. I will not obey in advance. And I will not pretend that something I loved dearly wasn’t created and elevated via the suffering of other women, directly or indirectly. In short, I refuse to be haunted by an author I once had boundless respect for. As a Norse Pagan, I don't pray to the gods for forgiveness per se. We (or as least I, in my practice) make offerings, and ask for help in just being a better person; take responsibility for missteps and hurtful things, as we know not even the Gods are immune from consequences.

I see none of this kind of contrition coming from Gaiman. I see a lot of narcissistic self-soothing and justification that just, well...turns my stomach. Musician Tori Amos's response to the allegations alone made me sob. I know well, having been the victim of narcissistic bullshit in the past. This avoidance may be a strategy for side-stepping potential legal exposure. Or, it could be that he's just an actual predatory asshole. For now, the book stays on the shelf. But I won't be touching it, or looking at it for a while. The ghosts will just have to chill for a minute, and be content with indifference for now.

[mercurialharpy]

Winter Standard

I went to war with winter, Guess who won? Not the Turkey Vulture, Wobbling on the Northeast wind. Not the tow truck driver, Kicking his tires, cursing the snow. Not the creeping dawn, Struggling against the icy fog, Intent on raining sunshine, To the frozen, brown ground. The cold holds on tight, Like a thief to a stolen gun, Still he runs. There is no visible retreat. Black ice fades into asphalt. Leftover slush stretches out, Pleading for more time, But its case has been heard. Spring did not breach the line, It’s already here. In the dry, brittle bark of every season Lies the spark of all others to come. You cannot rage against the Gods. You cannot delay what’s to come. I went to war with myself, And winter won.

[mercurialharpy]

Glad to know I’m not alone

Hey!!! I really don't know how to start this, but first of all I would like to thank you for the help you provide to the community. I am an asatru and would like to connect with others here in Tumblr, but I am really afraid to bump on white supremacists, racists or homophobes. I already had some experiences with them and it has been awful, so an advice would be really useful for me! Thank you a lot if you're reading!!! ^^

you’re welcome :) it’s honestly my pleasure, i love having the opportunity to do what i do here!Ah yes, definitely one of the biggest problems we, as Norse pagans, face in our community - I could probably speak a fair bit as to certain behaviours and mindsets coming from social norms and conditioning outside of Heathenry that make it easier for the fascist creep to insert itself here (and in other paths of paganism), but I feel like that would probably be best presented through a separate post (and with a lot of time, research, and planning so for now, here is:

Ash’s Checklist for nazi-vetting

Check their username: If it has the numbers “14″, “88″, or “18″ that can be a red flag. That’s not to say that the existence of these numbers in a username instantly points to nazism (or white nationalism, etc.) because it’s just as possible that they’re favourite numbers, birth years, or ages (one of my favourite terrible jokes is that online antifascist culture is being eternally suspicious of everyone born in 1988) but it’s good to keep an eye out for those numbers and take a close look at any blogs that use them, just in case. Also be on the lookout for the terms “odinist” and “folkish/folkist”, there can be non-racists (mostly newbies) that use the terms but 99.9% of the time that’s not the case and pretty much any anti-racist Norse pagan with a couple years of experience knows the connotation that they widely hold and thus avoid using them.

Check everyone’s content and “likes”: When you find someone new to follow or when someone new follows you make sure you go to their page and check through what they’ve been posting and, if you can, “liking” (if a blog doesn’t have a link to their “likes” you can try adding /likes to the end of the blog url or typing tumblr.com/liked/by/username into the address bar - it won’t always work, but it can)to see if you can spot any white supremacist/nationalist/nazi/etc. symbology or talking points such as; historical nazi Germany photography and propaganda, the schwarze sonne/sonnenrad/black sun or “it’s okay to be white” - in fact here’s the ADL’s list of hate symbols, there’s a lot of them but most are fairly unoriginal and once you’re familiar with a few you can generally recognise the similarities in others. It’s also important to note that not only racist shit spills can have historical photographs of nazi Germany or the black sun symbol and these things can be legitimately displayed by non-racist individuals, however in my experience that’s extremely rare (a bit less so with the black sun because some people just don’t know about its history with nazis) and it pays to check thoroughly just to be sure.��Another instance of this not-only-used-by-racists scenario is the “Nine Noble Virtues” or NNV - a lot of everyday perfectly fine Norse pagans subscribe to them (including younger me, so please don’t think i’m judging you if you do/have, it’s not your fault if you’ve been misled but it is your responsibility to inform yourself and fix that mistake, we are all perpetually learning and growing). To put it bluntly the NNV are misconstrued, ahistorical, sterilised garbage made up by racist pukebags, but for a more in-depth perspective I highly suggest Thorraborinn’s ( 1 & 2 ) and Grumpylokeanelder’s ( 1 & 2 ) posts on them.

Check who they’re following: Not all racist fuckery is overt, some bigots can be very low key and not post anything explicitly wrong or immediately identifiable as bigotry - It’s worth doing a quick check of who they reblog from, ‘cause even if they’re only reblogging the ostensibly safe stuff from an otherwise hateful blog they’re still seeing everything else that they don’t reblog and either silently agreeing with it or not considering it an issue worth unfollowing over - either way this is a problem and the most sinister possibility of their reason for doing this is that they’re attempting to hide their true motivations and beliefs in order to try and infiltrate more moderate circles that would otherwise reject them so as to gently introduce their concepts and ideals and plant the seed of their ideology under the guise of reasonable discourse (this is what’s called “the fascist creep”). I feel like I can and should go into more depth on these and other concepts, tactics and how we as a community can develop a strong antifascist mindset, culture and solidarity so I’m now planning on making a separate post for it all (perhaps several ‘cause it could be a lot), it’ll require some considerable time, planning, and research though so unfortunately it won’t be soon, but it will be coming

The Valkyrie Squad: @valkyriesquad is a kickass blog that I strongly recommend you all go and follow which posts alerts about users that engage in bigotry within the Norse pagan and other pagan communities on tumblr, they also maintain a very useful list of vetted and safe blogs that you can ask to be added to and/or if you’re looking for a suggested follow-list (be aware only one mod is operating the blog at the moment and the requests to be added to the safe list have backed up a little, so it’s worth checking back regularly for new additions and being patient if you request to be added)

Explicitly state your stance against bigotry: Put it in your blog description, make posts about it, reblog posts about inclusivity within pagan spaces and communities, make sure that anyone who looks into your blog just a little will know just how much you fucking despise nazis, white supremacists, homophobes, transphobes, and all the rest - they won’t all necessarily see it but at least some will and won’t even bother with you (although the tradeoff is that some dipshits may send you messages full of every slur they can possibly imagine in the hope that one of them might set you off, but personally i view this as a positive ‘cause it just makes it that much easier for me to identify who to block - really it depends on how sensitive to that sort of thing you are, but I think it’s worth it)

And I think that’s it for now, I hope you can put my advice to good use and find a lot of great Norse pagan connections, I’m also always happy to have a chat if you want!Seel!

[mercurialharpy]

So, there is a legit mean girl clique at work. I was kind of shocked, mostly because the young women in the clique are difficult to deal with even without knowing this, to the point where others go out of their way not to deal with them. So I stay away. Not to mention I’m way too far into my 40s to give a shit over workplace popularity contests. One of these chicks, let’s call her “Myrtle,” was putting up a mean spirited sign on the refrigerator, basically calling attention to the fact that somebody had left something in there too long. Which management had already dressed several days before. She huffed me as she stuck up her sign and walked away, and I was like WTF? My friend Beth finally told me that Myrtle is part of the mean girls clique, and every Friday they wear pink or some shit to make a point that they were the coolest women who work there, and we are all garbage. I guess I’m just kind of dumbfounded, but I guess some women think this way. Even well past the age where they should be acting like that. I’ve always been better friends with men than with women, and this is exactly why. I mean, who does that? Bitch, wear pink all day, every day. Make a shrine at your desk to Lindsay Lohan, or Regina George, I give a fuck. These dumb women literally didn’t get the fact that the group of girls in the movie were being satirized. It would be the same if I showed up to work wearing a conehead. Cool, huh?. 🧐 Maybe I will put up at Saint Elmo‘s fire poster at my desk. Nah, that will just make me feel old. Er. Why so petty? I’ll never understand.

[mercurialharpy]

The most beautiful bagel in the world… 🎨🍭🍥

[mercurialharpy]

On a scale of one to supervillain origin story, how bad was your day?

[mercurialharpy]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n89D0-KEJe4)