#I grew up in the Mormon church so I get it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fox-bright · 2 months

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#though it IS fun to watch their faces when I say shit like 'when I was eight they told me if I was very very good now #I'd get to be white in the Celestial kingdom'

to put it mildly, HUH???????

Oh, man! So. It was once stated Doctrine (and is now just under-the-table doctrine) that the Mark of Cain was Black skin; that everyone of Black ethnicity was supposed to be enslaved, to work off the debt of Cain.

There's a whole bunch of scripture in the Book of Mormon about two purportedly Native American peoples, the Nephites and the Lamanites, who frequently were at odds. One civilization would gain righteousness and the other would lose it, typical adventure novel epic style bullshit--but the righteousness was marked, among other things, by the darkening or lightening of their skin. The darker skin, then, of the Native Americans in Joseph Smith's time, was used as justification for Mormons enslaving and massacring them.

This belief mutated, some, as Joseph Smith tuned the scriptures; eventually it was decided that there had been a war in heaven before any of us were born, and those of us who hewed to God's side from the start showed our righteousness on our skin and were born white. Everyone who had been less valiant could be marked by the various darknesses of theirs, and Black people were the very lowest of all, probably having sided with Satan for a while and then turned coat.

But righteous acts in life could make you paler, and while they'd never make you (the individual) white, they would lighten your family, so that hopefully in a few generations you'd be such a righteous family that only the most righteous souls were sent to be born in it, and all your grandchildren would be white.

This belief continued to be stated very baldly for a long time. In 1960, Church President Spencer W. Kimball said: "I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today … they are fast becoming a white and delightsome people…For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised…The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation."

So, big yikes, right?

I was born into the Church in Anaheim, CA in 1982, daughter of a FilAm woman and a white man, both of them converts, both of them also born and raised in California. We stayed there for the first few years of my life, and then moved to Arizona, where I grew up in a town that despite its mere 8k population could support multiple LDS church wards. Our attendance at church was only fitful until I turned eight, when my parents really buckled down about us getting there every Sunday. Eight years old is the Age of Accountability; that is, the time when you can be expected to have learned good from bad, and have the agency to decide which way to walk. While there's a lot of poison you'll take in as a Mormon kid before that age, it really ramps up after you're baptized at eight.

So it was when I was eight that I heard for the first time (though far from the last) that my choosing to accept baptism put me on the right path, and that if I continued to Choose the Right for all my life--that is, I stayed chaste, earned all my blessings through righteousness, married a returned missionary in a Temple marriage and bore him a quiverful of children, raised them in the knowledge of God and the Church, and eventually died as a good matriarch--then when I made it to the Celestial Kingdom (the highest of the LDS' tiered heavens), I would find myself remade. No longer would I have the mark of my Preexistence sin; I'd be washed clean. Blue-eyed. Blonde-haired. And skin as white as cream.

#my actual life #mormon #exmormon #exmo

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laniusbignaturals · 4 months

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OBSESSED with your posts 💗💖💗🐥 do you think edward & joshua grew to be the men that they are due to their upbringing? when looking at them both, i’m reminded of leopold & loeb and how much of their wealth and sense of superiority played into the assholes they became—and why they ultimately believed they could get away with committing the perfect crime

this doesn’t make much sense sorry lol but the tldr; i’d love to read your thoughts on these two bone heads and their parents 💗

Content Warning: discussion of cult tactics, abuse, neglect, infanticide and general harm unto infants, pregnancy complications, emotional inc*st and inappropriate age gaps. This is also just a complicated read with a lot of moving parts, so be prepared for that.

No need to apologize! That’s a very astute comparison. If there’s a deviation between Leopold & Loeb and Edward & Joshua in terms of their social background, it would probably be that the former (to my knowledge) grew up in similar environments, while Edward and Joshua were raised in ostensibly very different cultures which they coalesced into one far more monstrous entity.

“Ostensibly” is carrying a lot of weight there. The Followers don’t necessarily embody these qualities, but historically, academia in the west has represented a font of organized racism and misogyny, legitimizing and promoting ideas that we nowadays look back on as cruel and ridiculous, like phrenology and such. (I fully accepted the popular hc of Edward’s family being from the ruins of USC partly for this reason, on top of the Trojans reference.) The fact that Caesar sprung from the only organized academic body in the wasteland can be taken as a continuation of that ugly tradition, and the Mormon Church’s ties to colonialism and it’s status as a modern day cult speak for themselves. Honest Hearts doesn’t engage with Mormonism critically, so the way Joshua’s upbringing in such a setting impacted him has to be inserted by us the players.

There’s a few articles you can read about the practices that make the modern day Mormon church a cult, and the impact these practices have on children raised in this environments. But some core tenants that seem relevant to Joshua’s growth are the instillment of fear and uncertainty into every aspect of one’s life, especially family and community, the hyperfocus on “cleaning” (both physically, to ensure members are always busy, and mentally/spiritually, as an exercise in paralyzing self-doubt,) and of course a tremendous amount of restriction placed on gender and sexual expression from an early age.

And this is draconian institutional abuse, not responsibility or healthy self-reflection or what have you. It’s a small wonder Joshua has something of a martyr complex when we meet him in-game: having been brought up in an environment that encouraged close surveillance over all human impulses, no matter how natural or innocuous, and never experienced a version of accountability that wasn’t a smokescreen for torture and control, all his desires need to be neatly wrapped up in diversion and justification to avoid giving credence to the idea that he’s sullied, disgusting, subhuman, unworthy of love. These themes of being taught that the loss of autonomy is virtuous/necessary so that the sufferer begins to perpetuate it themselves, and of being perpetually denied stability in spite of a seemingly endless mandate of labor, are the ones that I try to carry over into his mother’s story.

Her name is Dinah Graham, née Gardner. I work on her characterization with @dustwhirlsandrainbows. She has five co-wives.

She was very close with her mother, whose name was Madeline Gardner (née Talmage.) She, along with the rest of the community, raised Dinah to idealize a version of motherhood that revolved around obedience, self-sacrifice and participation in the colonial machine. Dinah’s mother died as a result of pregnancy complications, (as many women and children do in Quiverfull-esc religious sects,) altering but not deconstructing the way her daughter engaged with the edicts of their community.

Like her mother, Dinah got married at a very young age. She named her firstborn daughter after her mother: Joshua was her second child. She was close with her husband’s second wife Abigail, who struggled with her fertility, but by the time the third Rebecca came along her husband was beginning to be less considerate towards her, which caused contention between them. The fourth abandoned New Canaan, to be subsequently treated like she’d never existed, and the fifth wed Mr. Graham when she was a teenager. He married the sixth soon after Joshua founded The Legion, which should tell you something about the way Mr. Graham related to his children.

Joshua bonded less with his father and more with his maternal Grandfather, Dinah’s dad and Madeline’s widower. He also becomes closer with his second-to-last stepmother Elizabeth after he returns from the burning: since he left New Canaan when her children were infants, they weren’t as affected by their relation to a war criminal as his other half/step siblings. She also had personal history which made her particularly sympathetic to his plight, but that’s another post. I usually use Laura Galán of “Piggy” as a fancast for her in her youth.

Ingrid Torelli of “Late Night With The Devil” is a good representation of how I imagine Dinah in her youth, especially with the off-putting, ragdollish body language. She’s playing a 13 year old here, but the actress is 18. Dinah was in that age range when she got married to Mr. Graham, who was a couple years older than her. Saint Olga of Kyiv bears a close resemblance to her in adulthood: fittingly, since she’s the patron saint of defiance, defense and vengeance.

Wives were offered to men in New Canaan as rewards for good service to the church, and conversely, to be married to an accomplished clergyman was considered an achievement for young girls. As such, Mr. Graham was generally inattentive to the welfare of his family, and put his myriad of children and step-children into the position of constantly competing for his attention and favor, which was connected to their social life external to the household by virtue of his own status. The vastness of their family is part of the reason why Joshua always references them in such nondescript terms: he had siblings, half siblings, aunts, uncles, stepmothers and step-grandparents, etc. His children suffered as a result of the infighting, resentment and awkwardness between their mothers, and some of them came into the family with pre-existing issues which caused them to lash out at the other kids.

(For example, during Rebecca’s previous marriage, her youngest child had been a victim of infanticide by a co-wife who was going through pregnancy induced psychosis. The incident caused her then-husband, Mr.Ballard, to abandon New Canaan, opening Rebecca up to be wed again. Her two surviving children, Jobe and Ethel, were left severely traumatized, and Jobe actually pressed Joshua’s hand to a hot pan when they were both still young. He’s become less aggressive by the time Joshua returns from the Legion, but his actions are re-contextualized by Joshua’s botched execution, so. There’s that.)

Here’s a good representation of Joshua’s relationship with his daddy.

It’s also an excellent segue into talking about Edward!

So there’s a theory that the breakdown of Joshua and him’s three decade long relationship was due in part to Edward’s personality changing from his untreated brain tumor. And while that idea makes the storyline more interesting, I think the game offers a more explicit example of a shift in Edward’s neurology within his stated backstory. The implication of Caesar’s mother taking him to The Boneyard after his father’s death is that whatever home they had been living in was destroyed in the same incident. Raiders don’t attack for no reason - maybe they were landholders. The loss of that kind of generational wealth would certainly contribute to that sense of aggrieved entitlement we see Edward display so aggressively in game. Growing up in the Boneyard, he wouldn’t have any direct connection to whatever rural culture they’d previously been apart of, except that which he would get through his mother. Maybe that’s where his need to assert himself as a supreme intellect comes from: insecurity about the fact that his people were (in his mind) uncultured and uneducated.

But the transition from one setting to another is less important than the circumstances in which that transition occurred. Having a parent killed and a home destroyed, then being taken on foot to another settlement by the remaining one, would represent an extreme disruption to the established patterns of safety in which infants are supposed to exist. “Neural development occurs most rapidly in early childhood and is shaped by experience,”and reactions to trauma in small children with limited expressive & defensive capacities are markedly similar to signs of cognitive impairment in adults: symptoms like the loss of previously established movement and language skills, detachment from & disinterest in their surroundings, appearing “frozen” or sustained periods of blank staring, sleeplessness and nightmares, etc.

The sleep one is sticking with me. Insomnia can cause brain damage even in adults subjects, and babies with undeveloped brains are far more vulnerable to serious consequences from such disruptions. Consistency and routine are also important to a young child’s ability to rest: not only having it disrupted by an incident of violence, but being uprooted and taken to a new place in the immediate aftermath, could’ve severely damaged his ability to cope with the stress of that situation as it was happening, let alone in the years afterwards.

And that’s why I think going through something that would’ve been taxing & traumatizing for a grown adult as a baby with an extremely delicate brain is much more likely to have had an adverse impact on Edward’s neuroanatomy - and subsequently changed his personality for the worse on a physiological level - than a tumor that popped up when he was well into manhood. It’s difficult to ascertain, since two year old children don’t have full personalities in the first place. He essentially lives his whole life in the aftermath of that event.

These two themes - of the psychological interplaying with the physiological, and of growing up in reaction to traumatic experiences that preceded all other sense of identity - are the ones that I try to carry over into my writing for his mother. There’s also comparison & contrast made between Edward’s family and Joshua’s, my attempt to explore how people in vastly different situations can end up in similar circumstances. A key difference is that the Grahams are much more thoroughly influenced by their community and extended family, while the Sallows are more self-contained.

I call Edward’s mother Clarice. I’ve put down a frankly obscene amount of plotting, backstory, and analysis for her (and her associates,) but very little actual writing, unfortunately. Her full name is Clarice Belinda Sallow. She was born to Earl Sallow and his then girlfriend Lola on a ranch not far from the dilapidated USC campus, on October 28th of 2189, the same year the NCR was founded. A charming but emotionally unstable philanderer, Earl had several other illegitimate children by various women, but he didn’t pay any of them half the attention he paid Clarice. Clarice was Earl’s only daughter, and as such he (subconsciously) saw her birth as an opportunity to mold a woman from scratch, suited to his needs and incapable of abandoning him. Lola fled the family when Clarice was a toddler on account of Earl’s habitual adultery and intense jealousy, leaving her to be raised exclusively by her father. She spent her childhood performing the duties of a wife, tending the ranch, cooking and cleaning, washing and mending, etc.

Though Earl never SA’d his daughter, his emotional attachment to her was wildly inappropriate. He leaned on her for support, barred her from an outside education, and kept her largely isolated from other children, especially boys. He also dictated the clothes she wore, her spending habits and personal interests, and kept her on her toes with guilt trips and episodes of rage. The most aggressive of these incidents was when Clarice got her first boyfriend at the age of fourteen. When her father found out, he threatened her in extremely graphic terms which I can’t repeat on tumblr, and assaulted the kid she’d been dating.

Earl died after a grueling battle with spinal cancer in 2209, when Clarice was twenty years old. The last year of his life was painful and lonely, and he had little contact with anyone but Clarice. (This sounds cathartic on paper, but the legacy of this period is just further damage to his daughter’s mental health, so. Don’t cheer too loud.) In the aftermath of her father’s passing, Clarice was severely distraught, lacking a tangible identity after spending her formative years so devoted to one man. She fell in with Earl’s friend and neighbor, a carpenter named Frank Abendroth (nicknamed “Roth”) who managed his affairs after his death. Roth ended up abandoning his own family and bringing Clarice with him to a settlement in the north. There, he took a second mistress, an east coast transplant named Vanessa.

Roth and other businessmen in the USC area had had a handshake agreement with the local NCR which allowed them to store raw materials like lumber off the books, so they couldn’t be taxed for importing them. Roth assumed that the authorities in the north operated on the same terms. They didn’t, and he was arrested for customs fraud and sent to prison when Clarice was about twenty one. She found out she was pregnant with his child soon before, but was spared having to tell him by his arrest, and Vanessa helped her get an abortion. Together, the two girls went in search of Clarice’s oldest brother Paul, who was living in a flophouse in a semi-urban mining town. They moved in with him and quickly became enmeshed with his friend group, which included a bounty hunter, his wife, and her longtime friend, a native of the Boneyard named Roy Tillman.

(Never thought I’d get the chance to post this incredibly niche meme, but here you go.)

Leaving out some major life events for brevity (and because I might end up changing them,) Clarice eventually married Roy, and they settled on her father’s ranch before it was burned down. Theirs was a common law marriage, since Roy had already legally married someone else when he was younger, though they’d long since separated. That, (and the fact that property ownership in the wasteland is easier to prove when you share the surname of the former owner,) is why Edward has his mom’s last name.

Roy was something of a slimeball, being influenced largely by the opportunistic bastard trope and a willingness to tacitly profit off of, if not participate in, unjust systems. He spent a long time working as a moonshiner, outselling his competitors by producing cheap rotgut liquor. He met Paul when the latter was a bouncer at a dogfighting ring where he liked to gamble. His first love, the bounty hunters wife, had been a victim of labor trafficking, and Clarice also had unusually low standards as a result of her past. But whatever else Roy was, he was also markedly less dangerous and unpleasant than his male peers, causing Clarice to see him through rose tinted glasses and feel as if she owed him something. She gave birth to Edward when she was thirty five, and died of cancer around the age of fifty seven.

On that note, fun fact about the USC area: they, as a community, consumed irradiated food in huge quantities. For some families, it was all they ever ate. This practice began before the NCR was around to incentivize widespread sharecropping and educate wastelanders on the specific dangers of an irradiated diet. USC was landlocked and ecologically devastated, with the remnants of pre-war urbanization making it difficult to institute sustainable livestock farming. So eating radioactive food with every meal started out as a matter of desperation, when the area was still widely impoverished. By the time Clarice was in her teens, the practice had evolved into more of a rural masculinity ritual, the sort of habit meant to affect that one was tough and down to earth, (like beer, whiskey and meat in the South.) Earl partook, and he taught Clarice to partake, and Edward came out of Clarice.

That’s why they all get cancer.

As other people have discussed, Edward’s father’s murder at the hands of raiders and the destruction of their pastoral, patriarchally inherited land makes for excellent propaganda, and he’s used to using those events as a rhetorical tool when trying to recruit people. On an emotional level, Edward tends to look on his father with ambivalence or active disgust. To be killed in a failed attempt to defend their home, leaving his son in the care of a woman who was significantly younger and weaker than him, is a massive blow to the image of the kind of man Edward would like to believe he came from.

His relationship with his mother started out stable if not healthy, but became more fraught as he entered his teens. From the start, Clarice was deeply afraid of recreating the pseudo-incestuous bond her father had with her, especially after Roy was killed and they were left a family of two, much like she and Earl had been. Lacking positive examples of what parenting should look like, she embraced an authoritarian style of motherhood with firmly delineated parent-child roles, and had periods of neglect and abusiveness, like breaking/hitting things in rage when he was around or giving him alcohol to put him to sleep. Though these behaviors cooled as Clarice got older, and her life become more anchored, Edward resented his mother’s growing inability to (in his mind) justify her misgivings as a domestic authority by remaining a strong, imposing figure worthy of obedience. Part of the reason he accepted the assignment to the Grand Canyon was because Clarice was nearing the end of her life, and he didn’t want to be around for her demise.

Clarice’s face is square, and like her son she has a hooked nose, broad shoulders, brown eyes and blonde hair - a combination which is very difficult to find representation for when hunting for fancasts. But Olga Mironova in “Come And See” looks similar to her, as well as Leah from TLOU2, Kirsten Dunst in “Melancholia,” and Tammy Barnes from Far Cry 5. The woman in the black and white photograph is Andrei Tarkovsky’s mother. (Final image is from this gif)

#asks #joshua graham #edward sallow #roberthouse69 #oc: Dinah #oc: Clarice #oc: roy #wasteland #worldbuilding #new canaan #USC

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onlycosmere · 1 year

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OUTSIDE by Brandon Sanderson

Snow is falling. So I look up.

The world mystifies when you stare up through falling snow. Even standing still, you can soar. Even alone, you are surrounded. Even mundane, you find magic. I’ve spent my life chasing the fantastical, yet everything I’ve ever imagined can be casually matched by someone tilting their head up. The soft. Settling. Aspiration.

Of snow on an otherwise ordinary day.

When I was eighteen, I moved from Nebraska to Utah. Here, snow is fleeting, embarrassed to be an obstruction. But in Nebraska, snow squats. It claims land, builds empires. You fight it all winter, carving pathways, reconquering your sidewalks. The cold digs inside, frosting your bones with a chill that lingers, even after you return to warmth.

I often think of those snowy days, now that I live in a desert. But each year my memories are a little less fresh. We build our lives with layer upon layers of years, like falling snow. And like the new snow, most experiences melt away. In interviews, I’ve been asked to recount my most frightening experience. I struggle to answer because it’s the lost memories that scare me—the unnerving knowledge that I’ve forgotten the majority of moments that made me who I am. Those dribbled away when I wasn’t looking and joined the spring runoff of life.

Fortunately, some experiences do remain. In one, I’m fourteen, and it’s a cold night in Nebraska. My best friend at the time was a boy we’ll call John. Though we went to different schools, he was one of the only other Mormon kids around, so our parents often had us play together. When you’re very young, it’s proximity—not shared interests—that makes friends. This often changes as you age. By fourteen, John had found his way to basketball, parties, and popularity. I had not.

On that day, after a youth activity, another friend suggested we leave to go have some fun. I don’t remember where. Strange, that I’ve lost what this was about, though the rest of the scene is etched into the glacial part of my brain. One of us was old enough to drive, so we headed out to their car.

Five seats. Six teens. They’d already counted.

Without a word to me, the others climbed in. John gave me one hesitant look, then settled into the front passenger seat and closed the door. They left me on the curb. The car vanished, taillights flaring in the night like lit cigarettes.

The memory settled in for the long winter. That night. Watching. Remembering John’s face, which was so strikingly conflicted. Half ashamed. Half resigned.

I was no stranger to being outside. It happens when you’re one of three Mormon kids in a large school. You’ll be at a birthday party, and the wine coolers will come out. Everyone stands there worrying you’ll judge them—while you just want them to stop staring. But you leave anyway, because you know they’ll enjoy themselves more if you and your unusual morals aren’t there to loom.

It should have been different that night though, watching John and the others drive away. They were in my church group—ostensibly, my tribe. They’d still left me outside.

This event shocked me in how dramatic it was, as I wasn’t generally bullied. I tended to be adept at social settings. People generally liked me. At the same time, there was something I’d begun to notice. Something distancing about me.

It happens still. It isn’t that people shun me or don’t want me around; indeed, they seem to appreciate me. When I join a group, I generally end up leading it in some way, and I never sense resentment to this fact. But I also have an air around me. Some writer friends call me the “adult in the room.” I tend to attack projects too aggressively, tend to be the one who steps in and gets things done—even when they don’t need to be done immediately, and when everyone else would rather relax.

This comes, in part, from a certain…oddity about me that started in my young teens, around the time that John drove off. As my friends grew hit puberty, they became more emotional. The opposite happened to me. Instead of experiencing the wild mood swings of adolescence, my emotions calcified. I started waking up each day feeling roughly the same as the day before. Without variation.

Around me, people felt passion, and agony, and hatred, and ecstasy. They loved, and hated, and argued, and screamed, and kissed, and seemed to explode every day with a pressurized confetti of unsettling emotions.

While I was just me. Not euphoric, not miserable. Just…normal. All the time.

Often, it genuinely seems like I exist outside of human experience. It’s not sociopathy. I’m quite empathetic—in fact, empathy is one of the ways that I can feel stronger emotions. I’m not autistic. I don’t have a single hallmark of that notable brand of neurodivergence. It’s also not what is called alexithymia, which is a condition where someone doesn’t feel emotions (or can’t describe them).

I care about people, and I feel. I’m not empty or apathetic. My emotions are simply muted and hover in a narrow band. If human experience ranges between a morose one and an ecstatic ten, I’m almost always a seven. Every day. All day. My emotional “needle” tends to be very hard to budge—and when it does move, the change is not aggressive. When others would be livid or weeping, I feel a sense of discomfort and disquiet.

My emotions do go a little further than this on occasion, maybe once a year. It takes something incredible—such as being deeply betrayed by someone I trusted.

I’m not looking for sympathy; I don’t want to be fixed. I appreciate this aspect of my makeup—and it’s part of what makes me so consistent at writing. When everyone else is in crisis, I’ll just steam along. At the same time, when everyone else is elated by some good news…I’ll just steam along, unable to feel the heights of the joy they feel.

It makes people uncomfortable sometimes. Makes them think I’m judging them. While I’m absolutely not, I do try to be careful how I talk about my condition. Not as something to fear. Something, instead, I’m proud of—not because it makes me better than anyone else, but because it’s me. I like being me.

My neurodivergence came up in a recent interview I did. The interviewer latched onto the fact that I don’t feel pain like others do. (More accurately, some mild pains don’t cause in me the same response they do others.) I asked the interviewer not to mention it in his article, as I felt the tone to our discussion was wrong. I worry about my oddity changing the way people think of me, as I don’t want to be seen as an emotionless zombie. So I try to speak of it with nuance.

As the interviewer ignored my request, I thought I’d talk about it here. Profile myself for you—because this aspect of who I am has deep ties to another happening from my teenage years. In this, I want to answer a big question for you, the one everyone wonders about. The key to understanding Brandon Sanderson.

Why do I write?

Why do I write so much?

Why do I write so much fantasy?

Let me tell you about the first day, that beautiful day, when I found myself inside.

It was when I opened a fantasy novel. I was an isolated kid whose emotions were doing something bizarre. Even John leaving had left me feeling…disturbed more than angry. Alone, and outside. Then I opened a book where I found emotion.

In that story about dragons, and wonder, and people trying impossible things, I found myself. I felt a variety of powerful emotions through the characters—emotions that I remembered from when I’d been younger.

I hadn’t tried reading fiction in a long while, so I was blindsided by this perfect book. The experience transformed me, quick as a boy tilting his head back, looking up, and finding a new world.

When I read or write from the eyes of other people, I legitimately feel what they do. There’s magic to any kind of story, yes—but for me, it is transformative. I live those lives. For a brief time, I remember exactly what passion, and agony, and hatred, and ecstasy feel like. My emotions mold to the story, and I cry sometimes. I legitimately cry. I haven’t done that outside of a story in three decades.

Stories bring me inside.

My second published novel is called Mistborn. It’s about a world where ash falls like snow, and I can linger, looking up through it via a character’s eyes. Near the beginning of Mistborn, the teenage protagonist finds herself standing outside a room. It is full of light and laughter and warmth. But she knows, she knows she doesn’t belong inside that room.

She’s wrong.

Nearer the end of the book, I linger on as similar scene—only now, she’s sitting with the others. Light and laughter. Warmth. Mistborn was the first novel I wrote after getting the call offering me a book deal. Finally—after slaving over a dozen unpublished manuscripts—I knew I was going to be a professional writer. With that knowledge, I wrote Mistborn, the book about a girl who learns to come inside.

While writing Mistborn, I changed. Now that I’d made it inside of publishing—now that I’d joined those authors I’d loved for so long—why would I keep writing? I needed a new goal, and I discovered it that year.

So let me tell you why I write. It isn’t about worldbuilding; that’s a mistake everyone makes about me. Assuming I write because of worldbuilding is like assuming someone makes cars because they love cup holders. It’s also not because I’m Mormon, as some profiles bizarrely conclude. My faith and cultural heritage are both important to me, but if I were any other religion, that aspect of me would rightly be a footnote—not a headline.

I don’t write for plot twists, or dragons, or clever turns of phrase—though I enjoy all of these. I write because stories bring people inside. And I sincerely, genuinely believe that is what the world needs.

Lately, I’ve seen a resurgence of something that genuinely disquiets me: an attempt by some members of our community to hold others outside. Science fiction and fantasy is forever gatekeeping what constitutes good or worthy stories. Like my old friend John, who sought cooler friends, we renounce anything accessible—part of our perpetual (and largely fruitless) plea for legitimacy with the literary establishment.

Thing is, I can’t really get mad when someone does this, because I’ve done it myself in the past. The unfortunate truth is that we all probably have at times. The moment a group finds cohesion—discovering the warmth and peace of being inside—we decide there aren’t enough seats, so we start muscling and pushing. Readers who came in because of the latest popular teen novel? Outside. Fans of the film version of a story, instead of the book version? Outside. People who don’t look the same as the supposedly conventional fan? I suspect they know this struggle far better than I do.

To use a thematic metaphor, it’s like we’re dragons on our hoard of gold, jealously keeping watch, worrying that if anyone new enters, their presence will somehow dilute our enjoyment. The irony is that there is infinite space inside, and if we open the way, we’ll find many of these newcomers are the very treasure we’re seeking.

Fantasy, out of all genres, should embrace the different, even if it doesn’t match our specific taste. This is the genre where anything can happen—and should, therefore, be the most open genre. Only fantasy offers me the full range of emotion. The wonder of exploration. The magnificent highs of epic scope and the miserable lows of cataclysmic terror. In writing it, I can learn. Monomaniacal, I hunt experiences of people different from myself, then explore them in prose until I feel—in some small part—what they do.

This is why I write. To understand. To make people feel seen. I type away, hoping some lonely reader out there, left on a curb, will pick up one of my books. And in so doing learn that even if there is no place for them elsewhere, I will make one for them between these pages.

Those who interview me seem to have trouble understanding this fundamental part of who I am: that writing for me isn’t so much about performance as it is about exploration and elevation. I love prose both literary and commercial. And I think I write great prose. I’ve slaved over my style, practicing for decades, honing it for crisp clarity. My prose is usually intended to convey ideas, theme, and character, then get out of the way—because this is how I strive to bring everyone inside.

That said, I know my goal is impossible. Occasional strolls through the outside are part of being human, and I can’t eliminate that. And even I have to admit that there are lessons to be learned on those lonely paths. For example, contrast is the only way to appraise growth. Emotional alien I may be, but that very alienation has motivated me to understand. I value the connections I’ve made so much more for that struggle.

Moreover, I find that occasionally looking in through a window at everyone else gives a person a more complete perspective. Inside, things can get messy, and a streak of color finds it hard to comprehend the painting. I’m a better writer because of my time spent looking in. I don’t know that I could have written Mistborn if I hadn’t been left on that curb.

This isn’t to discount the pain of those who have been forced outside. Nor is it an advocacy for extended periods spent in the cold. I also don’t know if I could have written Mistborn if the wonderful people of the science fiction and fantasy community (including many of the friends I now work with) hadn’t latched on to me in college and—at times—forcibly pulled me inside to be with them. Beyond that, as I’ve grown older, I’ve found people like Emily, who love me in spite of (and partially because of) my quirks. Blessedly, because of this, my times outside have been increasingly brief.

My goal here is merely to point out (as I’ve had occasion to remember recently) that beautiful moments do accompany the isolation. You can only watch the snow fall when you’re outside. Only then can you look up and experience that mystifying world, where fragments of the sky drift past and lift you toward the heavens.

I’m forty-seven now, enjoying desert snowfalls in early April. The man I am is separated by distance and time from that boy who stood on the curb, and I’ve forgotten most of the steps that led between the two. I still don’t feel strong emotions outside of stories—but I did tell an interviewer lately that I sometimes cry when writing scenes in my books. They just aren’t the scenes that I thought he’d expect.

I don’t necessarily cry when characters die, or when they marry, or even when they find victory. I cry when it works. When it all comes together, and in a beautiful shimmering burst of humanity, I feel what it is to be that character. At those times, I remember what I learned twenty years ago writing Mistborn. That there’s a reason I do this. And even if I’ve lost more memories than I retain, each of them had a point, because they collectively brought me here.

So when you find yourself in the cold, know that sometimes, there’s a purpose to it. Trust me; I’ve been there. I might be there right now. Feeling the cold on my cheeks—but these days, no longer in my bones. Knowing that this will pass, and that it might be for my good. Most of all, looking up so I can appreciate it. The still. Solemn. Perspective.

Of one who stands outside.

#brandon sanderson #cosmere #cfsbf #root #branderson #wob #kind of #long post

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nolanhattrick · 3 months

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if you want to go more into the utah thing, pls do

okay, so i feel the need to preface all of this with

tij iginla deserved to be drafted high in the first round. i'm glad he went high in the first round. he worked hard to earn the place he was drafted. that being said, i do not think his technical ability is the only reason utah drafted him.

let's take a look at utah's owners.

the smiths are mormon, and follow most standard hypocritical mormon doctrine. they have five children and live in provo. can't find much on ashley but ryan went to business school at BYU provo because his dad worked there before he got cancer and also that's what good little mormon boys are expected to do after they go on their colonizer missions to brown countries.

link to the archived deseret interview, written by the mormon church

he often speaks to church officials about money and tech, since he owns multiple businesses in the tech space and owns four sports franchises. the above link is an interview he did with a mormon elder about allocation of church funds. from the horse's mouth, they admit to hoarding billions of dollars and wanting to convert essentially the entire african continent to mormonism for clout.

now. this is where we get into tij's selection.

if you aren't as autistic about mormon history as i am, tl;dr up until about like pshhh iirc it was like 10 or 15 years ago it was literally like not possible for black mormons to hold positions of power in the church. mormon children were taught that dark skin was a sign of being "cut off from god" (lamanites) and depending on where you lived, that if you weren't white, you wouldn't be able to reach the highest level of heaven (in mormonism there are different tiers of the afterlife - three levels of heaven [celestial, terrestrial, and telestial] and then "outer darkness" which is basically just hell. you can only reach the celestial kingdom if you're the perfect mormon and pretty much anyone goes to the telestial kingdom, even like. rapists and murderers. you go to outer darkness if you defy god to his face basically. mormons are wild. yes i am judging you) which is like beaten into you from birth to be the worst fucking thing in the world because if you don't reach the highest level of glory you're separated from your family in the afterlife, and that would suck! that's what you spent your entire life trying to do! so by default getting denied that simply because you produce more melanin is. rancid!

so. career mormons, as i call them - or mormons that come from long lineages of pre-established mormons, especially utah or texas or idaho mormons (like ryan's family, and i'm going to assume ashley's family) - they very very very often have deep racism beat into them practically since birth. they might not think so, but it's there, and it comes out at the wildest times in the wildest ways. like, i grew up in an area with a LARGE mormon minority. a group of mormons tried to lynch one of my friends as a "joke". they literally tried to fucking lynch him. one of the only black kids in the area. because they thought it was funny, and couldn't conceptualize why that was wrong or why that action - committed by that specific religion, too - carried immense weight.

moving onto the hockey part of the ask.

i stared at coyotes stats for way too long last night.

tij iginla is a left shot forward.

we all know arizona was uhh. not the greatest when they made their exit from the league. tij put up some gorgeous numbers when he finished out this year in the w, and if he does well at development camp i think he does have a very good chance at being a name on the roster. i do.

i don't think he was the smartest choice for them technically, though.

like, come the fuck on.

and like i get that they're. they still have all summer. it's whatever. but out of their thirteen forwards, nine are left shots. they are not hurting for him!!

and like. okay. you could argue like. of those, bh and bo38 are rfa at the end of this season, mc53 and ak15 and mm63 and jm22 are ufa next season, they're practically bled dry for RWs.

and they have signed defensemen since day one of the draft. unsure how td33 is going to do with his injury over the summer, but if he comes back they'll be at the numbers they need.

i still don't think he was the pick utah needed technically. i don't think he was the perfect fit. i think the owners decided for the franchise and were able to justify it well enough with his numbers to themselves and everyone else to make it work, but i really truly deep down think that part of it was "look at us we are a brand new team. we are two perfect people that wear cool youth pastor clothes to fancy pants events. we're so hip and chill, we're going to make this black kid's dreams come true by drafting him higher than his dad. we're going to make him the face of the Utah Hockey Club" and then IMMEDIATELY put him in a fucking jersey that says property of. like that is deranged.

i know from an outsider's perspective this all can seem very reach-y but when you have lived with these people and been inside their minds and been raised inside the culture it is all very very thought out. it's deliberate. everything these people do is intentional. so i really honestly can't see these people doing this for any other reason than to make themselves look good. yes, i think tij is a very talented hockey player that deserved to be drafted high in the first round. but i think he belongs somewhere else, somewhere that will treat him well and somewhere he will be safe. because i guarantee you, he is not safe on that team. not when ryan and ashley smith own it.

#jayposting #nhl #will #iamidentical #asks #answered #offseason 2024 #ex fundie posting #intentionally keeping this out of his + uhc's tags so that i don't get jumped lol

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