#DEI in death

[ruporas]

i killed. i murdered. i'm nothing like these sleepy people here… nevertheless, you can actually be grateful? bastard… i’m saying… thank you. because you spilled blood, you saved all of these people’s lives. i couldn’t have done it without you. (ID in alt)

[u3pxx]

PREORDERS ARE OPEN! 🫁💛🌿

incredibly psyched to have been an artist for @delysiumzine where i got to go a liiiiittle crazy painting a spread featuring (who some might consider) the greatest innocence of all time 🫁🌿 this zine is full of jaw-dropping incredible stuff and it was truly an honor to be a part of it, i can't wait for you all to see the whole zine in all of its hardcore glory! :^D

preorders are open until MAR 14! 🪩💥✨

🪩 more information about the bundles here! (all stretch goals have been unlocked too, wow!!!!!)

🪩 consider donating to zine's ko-fi to help fund community copies!

[rawliverandgoronspice]

re: sympathetic ganondorf vs evil for evil’s sake ganondorf, i think this is misrepresenting and underselling what’s actually offputting to people

“i’m evil because i’m evil” or “i’m evil because demise is evil” and the associated lust for power simply for its own sake has always been lame and low effort. there’s a reason it’s “shit tier” on the classic “villain motive tiers” thing

“i’m evil but there’s enough nuance to make the player at least somewhat sympathetic to me even if i’m still ultimately a bad guy” is a good thing that people like? i’ve never personally interacted with a zelda player who thinks windwaker ganondorf ruined the character or anything - he’s generally regarded as the gold standard of villain writing both in and out of zelda. this is roughly “high tier” on the tier chart

“actually TWIST i’m not evil at all, it’s the good guys who were evil all along, i’ve done nothing wrong and i’m completely justified in my righteous quest against the status quo, you’re the real secret true villain for being complicit in preserving it” is technically regarded as “elder god tier” on the motive tier chart but i would personally label it as “oscar bait tier”. these things *can* be compelling in conversation with the existing landscape, but often it comes across as a deliberate effort to subvert the audience’s expectations for the sake of being unpredictable (or worse, for the sake of proving you’re the smartest one in the room). in separate works where this conversation/critique is the entire point (eg. Watchmen or The Boys), that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the audience sets their expectations accordingly. in an established, long-running franchise, however, this almost always reads as dripping with contempt for the audience, like walking into a room and going “you morons like this shit? let me, a person much smarter than you, explain what it’s Actually about, because you’re an idiot if you’ve been a fan of this series before now”

on top of that, in the context of a series like zelda, this type of story feels myopic and disrespectful to the future of the series. “welp i burned down the 20+ years of lore behind this character so i could do a deconstruction, good luck using them in any capacity in the future, sounds like a you problem”

all this is to say, i think it’s a bit disingenuous/strawman-y to suggest that people put off by this want ganondorf to have 0 depth at all. there’s a lot of room for different kinds of depth, it’s just that the trend of the last decade has been for “depth” to mean “condescending deconstruction”

Hey!

Thanks for taking the time to write this ask, I think it warrants an interesting conversation. To me, there's like, a lot of things about what you're saying, and tbh I do see where you're coming from --in part.

First thing first... No yeah unfortunately some people Are hostile to even WW Ganondorf. It's been a rising trend in the fandom since TotK was released --people being very against the concept of any additional complexity to the character, either not getting it or considering anything he says pure manipulation that doesn't even warrant a conversation, literally making fun of people who were intrigued by this and wanting more out of this particular thread. This position not only absolutely exists within the fandom --less so on tumblr, I'll agree there-- but it's not even hard to stumble upon as a pretty regular opinion that gets tossed around. I had some interesting asks thrown my way, let's say. The idea that Ganondorf is a remotely interesting character that deserves more thought than what he gets is very much Extremely not the norm, and the very fact that you, as a fan, likes him as a guy is perceived as weird and missing the point by a lot of people. Like a lot a lot of people.

So I'll just... I guess I haven't clarified my position in a while, so I will reclarify my position on our favorite evil dude: I do like him perfectly fine as a villain, I do not want him to be "redeemed" by the narrative, I think he works fantastically as an ongoing threat, I think they could make him even scarier and more offputting and that would be super fun and thrilling... and I also think he already is complex. Like, inherently. Everything Nintendo has been putting into him since his first appearance is complicated --even their attempts at flattening him back in TotK do not fully work because they can't scrub him of the extremely loaded ideas they injected into him from the get-go. Nobody forced Nintendo to do a Mega Orientalism when inventing him, nobody made them write the NPCs to have this super weird antagonistic relationship to the gerudos in OoT, nobody made them have all this lore of the one man born every hundred years, raised by twin witches --and then nobody made them press on that tension point in Wind Waker explicitely, and then, in a more subtle fashion, in TP too. Nobody forced their hand when it came to having the strange "round ear" situation, suggesting (confirmed even, in additional canon) gerudos are born unblessed. The fact of the matter is: everything to make the relationship between Hyrule and the gerudos complicated has been there since 1998. There's no need for a Switcharoo to prove that anyone is smarter than the audience: everything messy has always been baked within the worldbuilding itself. It's in the cartridges already!!

Perspective on it is what could change, though --because, except in Wind Waker, we never get even a hint of a sense that we should think, as an audience, that Hyrule's super weird relationship to the gerudos is maybe questionable. Worth thinking about at least. Which, given the optics, is wild to me that to bring this particular can of worms up is still very largely considered crazy talk within the fandom (that, or the Sheikah situation across the series, also insane in many ways). And yes, it would perhaps lead to themes that are a bit heavier than what Zelda has been overtly dealing with (though, again, Majora's Mask exists --and I do find a lot of unpacked ideas in the Wild Era, like the very unquestionned gerudo bridal pipeline, very uhhh unfortunate already if I'm being honest --even moreso because it is unquestioned). But Zelda, when well handled narratively, can do wonderful things with evocative subtext, open doors never fully crossed, a lynchian pressure on what should feel offputting. We don't even need a sad monologue about it. It doesn't even need to be handled explicitely. But I think the pressure point is just better when understood and incorporated in some form, instead of being denied so hard the world itself start to feel incomplete and unlived.

I do want to say... I get what you mean with the whole "oscar bait" thing. There has been, historically and in recent years, a tendency to be driven by an external, almost panicked sense of morality rather than by the internal drive of a story, its internal thematic logic. I also do think it can feel very corporate, very "Disney looking back at its own movies and scrubbing off everything Buzzfeed deemed problematic in 2014 while making everything glossy and lifeless and awful" and it's not that great!!! and tbh I can't say I would trust Nintendo to handle any appreciation for the fact that the story of an eternal golden kingdom cheering on beating the evil outsiders who want to corrupt everything good and pure and blonde about that perfect inherently good place, is like, extremely not neutral. It absolutely is a delicate thread to weave, and I agree that putting a definitive end to Hyrule is probably not the smartest IP move to do. But, Hyrule doesn't have to be condemned as Bad, it can be merely complicated. And ongoing, regardless. To keep on with the Disney parallel: The Lion King would feel weird if we started to peel off the internal politics of the hyenas, it's just not the right place for it, when everything about this story revolves around the Righteousness of the Divine Right to Rule. But if the Lion King was an ongoing series that had been looping on itself for a while... wouldn't it make sense to figure out how to achieve majesty by studying other angles too, eventually? Is it that strange to suggest the exercise is like, possible? That it can be handled with artistry and soul?

I feel like... Yes, to acknowledge Ganondorf's humanity --not even to coddle it, just to acknowledge it-- implies taking in everything that makes him who he is, and that might rattle some foundational ideas about why this ancestral fight is even happening in the first place. I also do not think it means that he must be Good now. He can still punch a child and cackle maniacally, he can still be unredeemable --he can still destroy himself and others out of the most unconstructive spite ever, and we can still see the purpose in defeating him while basking in the "yea....." left in his wake (Wind Waker did that!!! Wind Waker did that and then we had more Zelda games!! crazy how that happened). This is hardly undoable. It does take some narrative skill, and some commitment to taking a bit of a risk, but Ganondorf is genuinely unmanageable as a character if you insist on your refusal to acknowledge his foundations --and I think it's partially why TotK's story is such a mess. He sells a TON, but you can't have him breathe slightly too loud without risking the entire world falling apart. They did try in TotK, so very hard, and to me they still failed--as insane as he behaves, Hyrule still doesn't come out of this looking good or particularly justified, because the very central core of Ganondorf's character is to be subjugated, and then rebelling in a destructive and brutally selfish, uncompromising manner that ends up robbing him of humanity --and the discomfort of that premise will therefore always haunt the conversation. Nintendo dug themselves into that mess. I feel like a lot of the Ganondorf fans I know merely... point at that. At the mess. And I feel like the longer the games avoid this mess, the more coats of spinach green they slather ontop of his skin, and the more nonsensical characterization they pile up, and the more Ganondorf will become a parody of who he once was, and what made him compelling to begin with.

And to top it all off, as if he wasn't contentious and complicated enough to handle already, they leaned into the internet turning him into a sex symbol for some fucking reason??? Yeah I genuinely have no idea how Nintendo will manage this dude moving forward, because to me, he is, at best, an endless source of (very lucrative) headaches, and at worst a ticking time bomb. I'm not sure how long they can get away with that TotKification strategy, is what I mean.

(Also: I tried to not overdwell on all the incredibly complicated conversation re: race and orientalism, but it's borderline impossible to have this conversation without acknowledging that I have never seen a major pop culture villain receive more pushback against "woobification" than him, and I don't think it's a complete coincidence let's say :) )

[cinematicjourney]

Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods (1972) | dir. Sauro Scavolini

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

The heartbreak is sacramental. You look out and you see the evil and the violence and the cruel dehumanization. And your heart breaks.

God's heart breaks too. It may be low comfort, but it is the best I can offer you. God sees the abuse, he is El Roi, the God who Sees. But sometimes the enslaved aren't liberated yet. And the mothers aren't whole yet. And the children aren't safe yet. They will be, but not yet.

And his heart breaks too.

I don't know why he doesn't intervene as quickly as I want him to. I don't know why Hagar had to return to her abusers. I don't know why he didn't save all the babies in the Nile. But I know his heart broke at the outcry of his children.

So cry. Let the liquid love stream down your face. And just... know that he's crying with you.

[warriorbrother]

[evilmark999]

I've been trying to think this through, and would like to know what others foresee...

[ PREFACE ] I'm not going to try to rehash or recap everything going on within the US and its Republican Party. If you need that from me, just disqualify yourself from this thought exercise for stupidly being part of the problem. FUCK OFF & DIE if this offends you...

We, the American people, need Congress to officially declare War with Russia!

Among other things, this would legally open up the death penalty to those who intercede - who provide aid and comfort - on behalf of Russia...

Can you see where I'm going with this?

Instead of talking DEI, the conversation needs to be more focused on DIE. We need an Orange Scare that works for us!

This administration and those that support it - such as the New NAZIs at Heritage, Elon Musk Evil Incorporated, all of the PACs, and those cowardly candy-ass Billionaire & Business backers - need to be instantly on notice that they should be fearing for their lives - WHICH IS WHAT WE'VE BEEN DOING!

Are you still reading this?

WE THE PEOPLE are the majority in this country, and HEADS NEED TO ROLL!

[ REMINDER ] The last time that Congress declared war - after the attack on Pearl Harbor - it took less than a day...

[basedonconjecture]

Hello! Do you 🫵 also enjoy the Necropolis in Veilguard? Would you like to learn about a real life ossuary you could potentially visit if you wanted? If yes, then I would like to introduce you to:

The Capuchin Crypt

talk of death and human bones below the cut!

The Capuchin Crypt is a 17th century ossuary located below Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini (Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchins) located in Rome, Italy. Led by Cardinal Antonio Barberini, a member of the Capuchin order, the church’s construction began in 1626 and was completed by 1631.

When the friars moved in, they brought 300 cartloads of remains with them. A friar by the name of Michael of Bergamo oversaw arranging the remains within the crypt. They also continued to add additional remains as friars in the order died along with poor Romans who couldn’t pay for burial. When a new body was to be added, they would exhume the oldest buried friar to make room and then add those bones to the decorative motifs. Today, there are over 3,700 bodies believed to be friars buried in the crypt.

But it didn’t always look like it does today!

In fact, there’s a bit of a mystery that surrounds who transformed the crypt from a simple ossuary into the artful resting place it is now. Though the likeliest explanation is that it was done by one or several artists within the Capuchin order who were often in residence in the friary (Caravaggio is suspected to be one of them), there are legends about a penitent-but-unidentified artist who did the work. Writings from the Marquis de Sade, who visited the crypt during his travels in Rome, suggest the artist might even be a German priest by the name of Norman Baumgartner. However, the identity of the artist has never been confirmed.

Though access to the crypt used to be restricted to the days surrounding All Soul’s Day, when a mass is still typically held in the crypt’s chapel for the holiday, it is open to museum goers for most of the year (as of 2018, anyway, and the most recent article I could find confirmed this was still the case in 2022). There are 5 separate rooms that display bones in the crypt and they’re pretty neat. Unlike what you might expect, each room (or alcove) is named and contain intentionally decorative arrangements.

One of the most interesting rooms, or chapels, is the Crypt of the Three Skeletons, as seen below:

From the Wikipedia page on the Crypt:

The center skeleton is enclosed in an oval, the symbol of life coming to birth. In its right hand it holds a scythe, symbol of death which cuts down everyone, like grass in a field, while its left hand holds the scales, symbolizing the good and evil deeds weighed by God when he judges the human soul. A placard in five languages declares: "What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be."

And this clock nearby made of pelvic bones, femurs, and thigh bones:

And this butterfly motif from the Crypt of the Skulls:

Normal visitors to the crypt are not allowed to take pictures (as was the case when I visited in 2018), so all of these photos have been sourced from this Smithsonian Magazine article which I do recommend giving a read if you’re interested in learning more or seeing more of the crypt!

While many people who have visited the crypt at Santa Maria have declared it a macabre sight, much like the Mourn Watch, the Capuchin order itself maintains it is meant as a silent reminder of mortality and how fleeting life can be.

A crypt-sized memento mori :)

sources:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/decorated-with-4000-skeletons-this-roman-church-will-have-you-pondering-your-own-mortality-180981573/

https://www.turismoroma.it/en/node/222

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capuchin_Crypt

[guhamun]

𝐀𝐍𝐒𝐖𝐄𝐑 𝐒𝐎𝐌𝐄 𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐈'𝐋𝐋 𝐀𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐆𝐍 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐀 𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐎𝐓 𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐃.

the fool.

there is an endless road ahead of you. long and winding, it is impossible to imagine every fork, every path you could take. like looking down from a high place, the sheer magnitude is dizzying. but it is freeing. god, it is feeding. you have all the time in the world to explore– endless choices to make; take time to appreciate it all. just be careful not to lose yourself to the recklessness that comes with such wondrous freedom.

NUMBER: 0

UPRIGHT: beginnings, innocence, spontaneity, a free spirit

REVERSED: holding back, recklessness, risk-taking

death.

you need rest. more than anything, you must allow yourself rest. death is frightening– it is inevitable, it is unstoppable– but, it can also be a thing of great beauty. it is an agent of change. it is the forest fire that paves way for new life. allow yourself this rest, and be prepared for the change to come. brace yourself. it will be hard, it will not be kind, but you are more than ready. you just need to rest first.

NUMBER: 13

UPRIGHT: endings, change, transformation, transition

REVERSED: resistance to change, personal transformation, inner purging

─── ⋆⋅☼⋅⋆ ───

Tagged by: @reginrokkr (tyyyy /////)

Tagging: @incandescentia, @enruint, @dayscorch, @yukikorogashi, @soverina + anyone!

[precinct57]

Kisses, kisses, kisses.

[ultraviolet-cello]

Hello all! I'm back at it again! I disappeared for like 5 months whoops! But I refuse to leave this place you have to drag me out ^_^ misc gungho guns for your viewing pleasure

[mrswardh]

Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods (1972), dir. Sauro Scavolini

[taviavi]

SEARCH THE TEXT. IT COMES RIGHT UP ON TWITTER.

[its-gambit]

OH MY GOD GET OUT OF MY HOUSE 😰

No -w-