#19thc avatars

[ceaseless-bitcher]

Hamilton-style musical of rendition of Robert Smirke’s crew and the fallout between himself, Jonah Magnus, and the rest of them.

Ambitious Scottish upstart Jonah Magnus, plunging into the scene of higher society and academia

Interpersonal drama in the esoteric research and philosophy sphere

A power ballad aria from Smirke as he describes his grand, utopian plans for balance

Jonah seeing the wonders of this new world and getting increasingly involved in it, probably getting in some heated theoretical debates with Rayner et al. about it because, being Beholding- and Dark-aligned, their fundamental views would be diametrically opposed

A slowly-shifting musical motif for Jonah as his intentions develop over the course of the play

Barnabas pleading with Jonah through his letter; they’re in separate parts of the stage with different lightings and they can’t see each other. Jonah is reading, rather than listening to, his words

SPOTLIGHTS REMINISCENT OF EYES

Harrowing solo as Jonah sinks deeper into fearing the possibility of rituals

More below the cut because I’m going nuts about this.

I would feel like there’s too much ground to cover (c. 1809 [estimated year Jonah gets introduced to the Fears if he established the Institute in 1818 and talked Smirke into working on Millbank 1815-1821] all the way to 1867 [year of Smirke’s death and the final decommissioning of Millbank: the year in which I place Jonah’s first attempt at the Watcher’s Crown]) if it weren’t for the several decades covered in Hamilton. It provides a pretty good guide for such a varied timeline.

More insane scenes:

Contrast of Albrecht Von Closen’s 1816 letter informing Jonah of his findings at his nephew’s estate vs Dr. Johnathan Fanshawe’s 1831 letter revealing how Jonah knowingly caused Von Closen’s death by stealing his books and got him filled with eyes

Smirke watching the group he formed fall to the Fears in turn, clinging to his alliance with Jonah and therefore being blind to his own turn towards Beholding

Jonah’s financial wheedling with Mordechai Lukas and other donors for his fledgling Institute

Jonah being so gleeful about his brand new Magnus Institute in Edinburgh, after several years of compiling statements informally

HE GETS TO DELIGHT IN ALL THE SCHEDULING AND LOGISTICS!!!

Just. all the letters we have record of. I haven’t even gotten to Dr. Algernon Moss or the conflict between George Gilbert Scott and Sampson Kempthorne

PETTY architecture drama

[daisyachain]

The nature of time is that (culturally) Christian Euro/Anglo colonial consumers (hereafter white ‘people’) fetishize the idea of being ‘close to nature’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ and latch on to the idea that there are groups of people in the world who are somehow bestial or who have some kind of special powers from holding animist beliefs/beliefs that acknowledge the body as opposed to the Christian belief that the body is a kind of useless appendage to a person. We see this across decades from the 19thC to today in the racist fetishization of indigenous people across the globe, particularly residents of the Americas, Australasia, and southern/eastern Africa.

White consumers use a warped conception of other cultures to live out the fantasies that the Christian soul/body stuff engenders. You keep getting told that your emotions and physical sensations are the devil’s work? You want to get in touch with those physical sensations, but you don’t want it to interfere with your worldview? Simply project them on to a convenient group of people with slightly different conventions from you. Imagine how cool it would be to be 100% physical sensation (especially those pesky violent and/or sexual urges) and no mental burden, then unleash that in a way that causes millions of deaths worldwide via the dehumanization of entire nations of people just trying to live their lives. White consumers love a Proud Warrior Race Guy.

Flash forward to the 2010s, it’s generally considered impolite to spread the same propaganda that justified the genocide and dispossession of many different groups of people. However white culture hasn’t changed that much and normal human activities still need to be explained away to maintain the veneer of white intellectualism that has been used to justify white violence for years and years. You can’t just stomp around and clap your hands and dance badly, you’ve got to project it somewhere else.

But wait! There’s a community of people considered ‘tribal’ and ‘savage’, considered violent and bestial, who were never colonized! It’s…the Norse. Fetishizing early medieval North Sea raiders can’t be cultural appropriation, see, they’re white! It’s not offensive to replace an entire culture with white (male) ideas of what’s cool if that culture is totally unassociated with colonizer stereotypes and is in fact a culture of colonizers!

And that’s my theory on why there are so many Norse-inspired folk bands/video games/tv shows/memes/literally anything in the 2010s. VSaga not counted because that manga has been running since 2003 and is actually well-researched and comes out of a culture with a similar but distinct tradition of racism. The Euro storytelling tendencies of needing some kind of violent avatar have taken on ye anciente Norseman now that people care a little bit about the gallons of blood used to sketch other ethnic stereotypes. Done and dusted. Except the other side is that the fetishization of early medieval Norse culture is literally just white supremacist 101 and a lot of artists don’t step around that nearly as carefully as they should