#Like that takes a permanent loss of divine power to make such a child so most gods won't make them | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

carnalpleasure · 4 years

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Michael x Angel!Reader 👼

hi!! i’ve had this idea in my head for months and finally felt inspired to start it tonight. i’m still working on my other two fics.. but Michael’s been calling to me lately💕

Summary: The reader assigns herself to be Michael’s guardian angel. This takes place at the beginning of Sojourn, with Michael in the wilderness. But takes a slightly different turn <3

Every human being in the history of humanity had been born with a guardian angel. The precious moment a newborn baby breathes its first breath of life, an angel is assigned to be their lifelong guardian. The angel’s main mission being to protect their human ward from the dark forces that had plagued the earth for all eternity. Ever since the serpent seduced Eve into her first bite of the knowledge of Good and Evil.

But that streak was broken one day in late March of 2012, when Vivian Harmon gave birth to Satan’s only begotten son.

She was the Anti-Mary. Instead of a blessed virgin being touched by an angel, she was a victim of a demonic sexual assault. She died giving birth to the Antichrist.

Michael Langdon was Satan’s very first creation. Because he was not a child of God, he was not born with a guardian angel. His father didn’t bother to assign him a guardian demon either. The spawn of Satan was left in the hands of none other than his grandmother Constance, whom his father felt was perfect for raising the little monster.

When Michael outgrew her, his father introduced him to Anton Lavey, one of his most trusted followers, who would then introduce Michael as the heir to the Church of Satan.

Michael, however, didn’t really take to Anton. He felt much closer to another key member of the church, Miriam Mead. She took a liking to the boy too and lovingly welcomed him into her home, where she taught him all about rituals, prayers, Black Mass, satanic prophecy.. She was preparing him for the apocalypse. His destiny, as they’d all say.

Once Michael began becoming aware of his powers, his father then led him into the hands of the Warlocks. They thought they were training him to be their next Supreme, but he only needed them to show him how to use his powers. They were disposable beyond that.

Michael was a loyal son, never questioning his father’s decisions, until his beloved Ms. Mead was permanently taken from him by the witches. Cordelia was right, why did he let this happen?

In search of answers, Michael fled to the wilderness on a quest. Jesus had spent 40 days out in the desert being tempted by Satan himself before his own Father finally spoke to him. Michael decided he had to do the same.

That’s when he wandered out into the forest on the outskirts of LA and started to trace a pentagram in the dirt, tired and out of options.

“I’m not going any further,” he sulked, dragging the jagged stone across the ground. “Father, tell me what to do, and I’ll do it,” he pleaded, out of breath as he finished carving his sigil into the soil.

“I’m not leaving this circle until you talk to me,” he pouted stubbornly. “They’re gone.. the warlocks.. my Ms. Mead. Burned alive at the stake by the witches. Until nothing was left but ash and smoke,” his voice was breaking but he was too exhausted to cry.

“You tell me what to do,” he sighed, “or you let me die here.” Then he fell to his knees in the center of the circle and waited for a sign.

He watched the sun set and rise four times before he finally had a vision. But even then, he couldn’t be sure if he was seeing a sign or just suffering from severe dehydration.

He saw a little boy offering a cold grape Fanta, and a little girl holding a basket of red apples, and he thought maybe God was trying to tempt him into the light now. To distract him from his mission and derail him from his destiny.

He refused, “No, I’m on a mission. I have to talk to my father,” he said weakly. “Leave me alone.” Then the visions turned dark. He was taunted by Ms. Mead and then praised by Anton Lavey.

“You’re not real. None of this is.. re-real.” He shook his head and raised his hand to shield his face from the blinding light that was radiating from the High Priest before him.

“You’ve done a great job.” The Satanist proudly smiled. “No..” Michael protested, “I failed. I-I’m lost. I don’t understand my purpose,” he was out of breath and at a loss for words. He was tired of games, all he wanted was his father’s help. Everything was spinning.

The vision of Anton continued reciting to him from the prophecy in Revelation, calling him the Alpha and the Omega. Michael couldn’t take it anymore. He made a lunge for Anton, wrapping a hand around his throat to choke him out. Only seconds later, the vision vanished altogether.

And that’s when he saw you. The last thing he remembered was an impossibly beautiful girl with big white wings and a little white dress. He fell to his knees again, in shock and exhaustion, and collapsed into her arms. He felt the warm, soft embrace of feathers, and then he fell into a much needed sleep.

When he awoke a day later, he was still pretty disoriented from the lack of food, water, and sleep. His mind was a haze. He didn’t realize where he was, he only knew that this bed was softer than anything he’d ever felt.

The blankets felt like fluffed up clouds and the pillows smelled like lavender. A cool breeze caressed his skin, and he noticed the temperature of the room was significantly cooler than anything he’d felt in a long time. That radiating heat that seemed to consume him constantly just wasn’t there.

He reached his hand out to feel along the bed. Empty. He opened his eyes, hoping to see the angel from his dreams sitting there watching over him. But the room was empty too.

He sat up in bed, clutching the sheets and looking around anxiously. The room was nice, but it wasn’t anything extreme. It was kinda charming actually, soft and cozy. It didn’t look like anyone had been living here for very long.

Michael climbed out of bed, stepping foot on the soft, plush carpet and smiling at the touch. He walked towards the bedroom door which was just barely cracked open, and stuck his head out slowly to peak outside.

You were in the kitchen, digging around in the refrigerator when you heard him come out. You twisted around, bumping the fridge door shut with your hip and then dropping everything on the counter.

“You’re up already? Are you feeling okay?” The pained look on his face made you worry. He looked exhausted still, leaning against the doorway just to hold himself up.

You rushed to his side, a little faster than humanly possible, and wrapped an arm around his waist to help him steady himself. He leaned into your embrace but winced a little at your touch. His body was sore everywhere.

He couldn’t stop staring at you. Almost glaring, looking at you like you’d just lied straight to his face. You walked him to the counter, sitting him down across from you and then running back to quickly check the stove. He didn’t take his eyes off you the whole time.

“I’m making you a breakfast feast,” you smiled at him over your shoulder. “You look like you haven’t eaten in days..”

“I’m sorry,” he interjected. “But wh-who are you? How did I get here?”

You smiled gently, passing him a plate of bacon and eggs to get him started while you finished the french toast. “I’m Y/N, I brought you here,” you said happily.

He kept looking you up and down. You looked exactly like he remembered, but you were now missing one unique, defining feature..

“Are you-“ he couldn’t bring himself to say the word out loud. It didn’t seem possible to him. “You had.. wings before,” his brow furrowed in confusion and his glare returned.

You simply nodded, glancing over at him and frying a piece of toast in the pan. “You remembered,” you said with a smile.

His confusion only grew. You poured him a glass of milk and then slid the fork closer to him. “Eat, please. We have plenty of time to talk later. I’ll tell you everything you want to know,” you brushed his blonde curls out of his face and the divine touch of your fingers briefly lingered on his skin, sending shivers down his spine.

He hesitated, picking up his fork and taking a bite. It wasn’t just the starvation talking, he genuinely enjoyed your food. He immediately started feeling his strength and energy coming back. He felt revitalized.

It wasn’t just the food. Something about your presence was so satisfying to him. You brought him a kind of merciful peace that was only reserved for the saints. He didn’t need confirmation, he knew in his heart you were something holy. And he only hoped that you didn’t know what he truly was. If you ever fell in love with him, it would be your fall from grace.

“You’re an angel,” he whispered softly. His heart was pounding. He felt like he was committing a crime just by being in your presence. He felt like God would smite him any minute just for laying eyes on you.

You cupped his face in your hands gently, wiping away a stray tear that fell from his eyes. “As of today, I’m officially a guardian angel,” you smiled proudly. Your eyes actually twinkled, it completely captivated him.

“Guardian? Who’s guardian?” his pouty lip quivered and you could see all the new emotions swirling around him like a hurricane. He couldn’t believe any of this was really happening. He thought he must’ve been dreaming. He wasn’t dead, he knew that. He was destined for hell and there’s no one like her down there.

He was so cute. “Yours, duh” you giggled, letting go of his face and playfully tousling his blonde locks. He looked up at you with a small smirk that spread into a big smile. He couldn’t wrap his head around it. “How?-“ he silently mouthed as the words he was looking for escaped him.

“You didn’t have one,” you shrugged. “So I.. guess you could say I volunteered.” You didn’t want to overwhelm him with too many details, but the adorable confused puppy look on his face was begging for answers. “Volunteered?” he repeated, cocking his head to the side curiously. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“I just thought you should have someone looking out for you too.. you know. You didn’t deserve to be abandoned. Not by God or anyone.” You said it with such sincerity, he could see it on your face how strongly you felt about those words.

His eyes started to overflow with tears but he couldn’t help but smile. It was the single kindest thing anyone had ever said to him. That’s when it hit him. You already knew what he was. You knew who he was. And you were willing to go against both God’s will and Satan’s to take over as his protector. You left heaven just for him.

He pulled you into his lap, wrapping his arms around you and quietly sobbing into your chest. Tears of pure joy and gratitude. Little “thank yous” whispered on repeat against your skin, so close you can feel his lips brushing across your collarbones with each word.

He snaked his arms around your waist tighter and tighter, pulling you as close to him as physics would allow. It melted your heart how close he wanted to be to you.

“Aw.. you just want to be held,” you giggled, putting your arms around his shoulders and hugging his body closer to yours. “I’m here, Michael. I’ve got you now. You’re safe, you’re mine,” you cooed, your lips brushing against his temple.

His eyes were closed and his face was pressed against your chest, all he heard was a swift whoosh as your wings suddenly appeared, folding around both of your bodies like a soft shield tucking him into you. He’d never felt so safe before, all nestled in your feathers.

He peaked his eyes open to look around at them. “That’s fucking awesome,” he muttered softly, his jaw dropping as his eyes shot up to meet yours. You smiled down at him, kissing his forehead. You couldn’t help but giggle. He made you feel giddy, the way he looked at you. Like you were made of magic.

“My own guardian angel,” he said quietly to himself, still in awe of it all. He refused to let go of you for the rest of the day after that. All he wanted to do was lie in your arms. Feel your embrace. And you were happy to oblige because he needed to rest anyway. The two of you returned to your bed where he spent the rest of the night on your chest, fast asleep in your arms. The safest place he could ever be.

💕taglist: @sexwon131 @jimmason @whatcodysaid @angelicmichael @thewarriorprincessxo

#michael langdon x reader #michael langdon imagine #michael langdon au #michael langdon fanfic #michael langdon x angel!reader #sojourn!michael #ahs au #michael langdon x female reader #michael x angel!reader

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nekokoaa · 4 years

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Phantom Pain- Overhaul (Chisaki Kai) x Reader (NSFW)

Summary: “Do as you wish,” he whispered and closed his eyes. You smiled slightly, not saying a word as you caressed the scar on his forehead with your thumb. You then pressed your lips on it, hands holding the sides of his face, and you pulled away to find his golden irises looking up at you in a trance. The faint light spilling through the cracked window behind you haloed around your figure, giving you the appearance of divinity that he found himself wanting to worship you. The urge to grab you soon consumed him, yet the action fell dead as there was nothing he could do except to express it by the twitch of his mutilated limbs.

In other words, thank God Shigaraki didn’t cut off his dick.

Warnings: angst, birds and the bees, dry humping, blowjobs, boobjobs, amputated Overhaul

Part of the NSFW series Euphoria

Also on AO3

AC: Always wanted to write Overhaul, this was so fun! Enjoy, loves!

Phantom Pain – sensations or pain that feels like it's coming from a body part that's no longer there.

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Phantom Pain – Chisaki Kai (Overhaul) x Reader

For how long you knew Chisaki, you have never seen such despair in his eyes—such lost. A dull shade of gold that was usually shimmering with determination and authority was now without light and harbored a sort of emptiness that looked foreign. It was like he no longer existed, but he was in fact there, no matter how much he felt like he wasn’t.

It’s been days since you heard his voice, the last of it was that strangled scream that echoed into the skies. A scream that exhibited regret, pain, and the shuddering factor that his initial plan to revive the power of the yakuza was taken away from him permanently. A scream that shook your very soul and froze you—refusing to believe that it belonged to the prideful young head you’ve known since childhood.

You wrung the wet rag above a bucket and squeezed the water held within the fabrics. The splashes resonated through the abandoned building along with the squeaky floorboards that would sound every time your feet would press into it. You sucked in your dry lips, briefly lathering it with your tongue before you let out a soft sigh and pressed the rag to Chisaki’s shoulder, watching it collect the dirt that has been accumulating. You soon dipped the rag back in the bucket and repeated your actions.

Chisaki sat still in his chair, shirtless with his golden eyes as far away as his expression. They were lowered and away from you, not on purpose but because he had no energy to lift them. Those golden irises were surrounded by bloodshot red pigments from his lack of sleep and under and around the skin was dark, nearly reaching a purplish tint to his normally cream hue. His head was also low, a striking difference from the Chisaki you knew who never lowered his head for anyone. You shivered to the fact that the Chisaki in front of you may very well be different—not humbled or submissive—but broken, perhaps, beyond repair.

You dragged the rag across his skin, cleaning his shoulders and chest. You noticed his skin was developing hives under the rag once it left. It wasn’t by your touch since Chisaki deemed long ago that only you were fit to touch him, it was instead the lingering phantom pain of losing his limbs. It still plagued his thoughts and he relived that moment ever since he had gone through it. Shigaraki hacking away at his arm, his blood splattering every time the knife came hurling down, and that taunting smile so large that it took up his face all because the fall of Overhaul was caused by his own hands. Chisaki flinched, more hives appearing around his shoulders when the rag followed down his arm until it stopped, nowhere to go as his forearm and hand were gone—nothing but a stump of his upper arm left.

Chisaki’s subtle movement made you glance at him and grimace. Hatred boiling within you as you remembered how you found Chisaki, bleeding from both his decapitated arms after you had followed the gut-wrenching scream. He already passed out from the blood loss and you broke him out of his bindings and carried him to safety before the heroes could arrive to arrest him. You had then found an abandoned building near the outskirts of the city and that’s where you and Chisaki had been staying for the past couple of days. The media had already been alerted about the young head’s escape and his face has been plastered on every screen around the city—labeling him as extremely violent and dangerous. Some part of you couldn’t help but snort at it, seeing Chisaki right now—violent and dangerous just wasn’t the words to describe him anymore. Though the police had no idea what had become of him, so you understood the panic.

“Kai,” you called his name for his attention, more to warn him about your hand that went to hold his cheek and the wet rag that pressed against his other. You wiped his cheek and the side of his face slowly. You wiped through his forehead, treading over the faint scar near his hairline. You then lined the rag with his jawline, making his head rise. It’s been so long since his eyes fell upon your face. You couldn’t help but briefly meet his gaze while you cleaned him.

Faintly, there was light in his eyes as if he had just noticed you were in front of him. You had missed the subtle change in his blank expression as you were more focused on getting him cleaned. Though Chisaki was looking at you like it was the first time he saw you in a while. Ever since he lost his limbs, he’s been dissociating, living in his head. A tactic to escape reality because his once strong mind couldn’t handle the trauma he had experience. His naturally stubborn personality couldn’t admit that he had lost—that everything he built for years was all in vain. Where had he gone wrong? He wasn’t sure because that was how confident he was in his plan. It was foolproof, so why did it turn out with these odds?

He closed his eyes. And then there was you, a woman who’s been by his side since he was a child, who had followed him to the hells of this earth and yet was still the only thing pure in this diseased filled world. You scoured the streets with him until you were both picked up by boss and together, you rose from street rats to yakuza members and earned the trust of the Shie Hassaikai. Even when Chisaki proposed his plan to restore the yakuza and eliminate quirks to you, you accepted it with a smile, agreeing that it was something that must be done to save the world. Every time he remembered your smile on that day, it urged him to work harder into making his vision a reality. That smile was hopeful, loving, and there was nothing in this world as pure as it. It wasn’t long before he asked you to rule by his side when this was over and word to word, he would always recite what had you said. I was always by your side. Such a simple response yet at the time it sent his heart racing and the sides of his mask stretched from his smile that grew behind it, golden pools that you thought weren’t capable of such softness proved you wrong. Only you were allowed to see such a look from him.

Through thick and thin, you stayed with him.

So, he knew it would take some convincing, but he didn’t want to see you fall to the same fate as him. With all he could muster, he spoke, voice heavy with rasp in every syllable sounded, pain stinging his strained throat, regardless he spoke.

“You should leave…”

“No,” immediately, you responded and even though you were surprised that Chisaki spoke, you didn’t show it in your face. Your ‘no’ felt like a reflex, like you were trying to convince yourself first before Chisaki. He began coughing right after, the sudden intake of air through his dry mouth made his throat squeeze in pain. You quickly dropped the rag in the bucket and reached for the water bottle on the floor. Chisaki took a few slow gulps, a bit of water spilling down his chin. You took a clean cloth and wiped him dry, but it did nothing to the filth that Chisaki felt under his skin.

He pulled in his cracked lips, trying to lather them with his remoistened tongue as he continued speaking. “…before the heroes come. Don’t let them take us both…”

“I’m not going anywhere. Remember,” you smiled lightly and caressed his cheek. “We’re supposed to rebuild the yakuza together.”

“It’s… it’s futile,” he cleared his throat. It did nothing to the rasp. “it’s no longer possible. The heroes… they have her—our pawn… the villains… with my drugs and I can’t do anything without… my… my…” he gritted his teeth, wanting to close his hands into fists. He felt the ghost of the action, and the stumps of his arms just shook in response. “This world can’t be cured. Everything we worked for—what I worked for…”

“is not in vain, Kai. It’s only a setback. The Shie Hassaikai will rise as it always does with you as their leader and me by your side.” It was a dream. A dream that both of you sought after for years to restore the yakuza and cure the world of the wretched quirk disease. As long as Chisaki was still alive, you believed that dream was too. But Chisaki thought differently, his face contorted into a grimace at your words like he was insulted that you still held such values after everything that had happened. You were well aware of how lost Chisaki was. The ego-filled yakuza boss you admired was crushed, shattered into pieces that if you were to pick them up would crumble into dust in your fingers. You have never seen him so fragile, so hopeless, but without his arms, his quirk—his purpose, without the very thing that was key to saving this world, how ever could he go on? You had to save him.

“Please,” Chisaki had never begged before in his life and he didn’t think he would ever start but his pride was lost along with his arms and his words flowed out of him like a water jutting out of the small crack of a dam, spurting and pausing, spurting and pausing. He was tired. “It’s… over. The Shie Hassaikai… is gone and there’s nothing left… for you to do but leave.”

“I’m not leaving.”

He growled your name, but you weren’t sure if it was because of the rasp in his voice or if he was truly losing his patience with you. His golden eyes were dull, but you could’ve sworn they hardened. And it excited you.

“I’m not leaving, and this isn’t over, Kai.”

“You’re acting like… there’s some hope.”

“I’m not acting. There is.”

“Are you blind, woman…?” His voice cracked when he raised it and he cleared the lingering gunk from his throat immediately after. He glared at you through his red-shot eyes. His hives becoming increasingly present as they appeared one after the other on his face and body. He had the urge to scratch himself, but he couldn’t, so he started visibly shaking to deal with it. It was unsightly but nevertheless, it was your Chisaki. “Do you not see what I have become? My arms! My quirk! It’s gone! The very thing I needed to save this world—to cleanse it from its filth! So, don’t you dare look at me as if there’s some hope!”

“You’re still here so of course I’ll believe there’s hope!”

“The only thing you should hope for is to leave me. There’s nothing I can offer you but a prison sentence in Tartarus.”

A brief kiss on his neck was all it took to stun him out of his rage. “What are you talking about…? You can offer me plenty, Kai. You could scream at me, insult me, hurt me, do anything to push me away but you must know that I will never leave your side. We’ve been together forever, through all the hardships… and pleasure,” your hand squeezed his thigh. “So why on earth would I choose to leave you because of this? You’re a smart man. I know that better than anyone.”

“I just don’t… want you to get hurt,” he spoke quietly, eyes lowering.

“I am already hurt. As long as you feel pain, I do too,” he gritted teeth to your words. A small grunt leaving him when you slid off your chair and onto his lap. You swiftly unbuttoned your collared shirt, leaving it open and revealing your black bra underneath it. “Let’s make each other feel better… like what we always do when we’re having a rough day,” you whispered before you pressed your lips to his ear lobe and felt the cold metal of his earrings. Your arms were perched on his shoulders and he already gasped to the small roll of your hips creating friction for the growing swell in his pants. “That’s something you can offer me… Hm, Kai…?” You wanted an answer, pulling back to gaze into his face. With his tired eyes, he searched within yours, not even sure what he was searching for but all he knew was that he was tired and maybe if there was a chance to forget about what had happened—even for a couple of minutes, he would take it.

“Do as you wish,” he whispered and closed his eyes. You smiled slightly, not saying a word as you caressed the scar on his forehead with your thumb. You then pressed your lips on it, hands holding the sides of his face, and you pulled away to find his golden irises looking up at you in a trance. The faint light spilling through the cracked window behind you haloed around your figure, giving you the appearance of divinity that he found himself wanting to worship you. The urge to grab you soon consumed him, yet the action fell dead as there was nothing he could do except to express it by the twitch of his mutilated limbs.

You pressed your lips to his cheek, a feathery touch that still had his heart fluttering ever since you first did it as children. Your lips traced his cheek, kissing through some disappearing hives, until you found the corner of his lips and he pursed them as soon as you touched it, longing to feel your soft lips against his own. But you pulled away slightly after and he sighed irritably. You brushed your fingers through his short hair to calm him, but it didn’t stop his tired glare from being directed at you.

“Patience.” You told him.

But he wasn’t having it. “Darling,” he husked, leaning forward just as you were leaning back. “Kiss me already.”

Chisaki’s patience was always thin. As a child, he had zero patience. If he didn’t get what he wanted right away, he would forcibly take it by murder. It wasn’t until after he was taken in by boss where he developed a thin layer of patience masked behind a calm, gentle persona, luring those in with kindness to get what he wanted and if he didn’t, his mask would slip, and he would become increasing irritable and dangerous with a killer’s intent. He wasn’t anywhere near that irritated right now but you saw a trace of old Chisaki that riled you up so much that you had to suppress your smirk with the bite of your lips. He wasn’t completely gone, and that relieved you.

Still, for the first time ever, Chisaki was at your mercy and if you wanted to, you could disobey him without having to worry about any precautions. But you knew what it would’ve done to a once prideful man so broken like him. This was about building Overhaul back up, not breaking him down.

You smiled at his glare, one hand caressing the side of his face while the other drew circles on his shoulder around his hives. “It’s the first time I’ll be on top. I’m a little nervous,” you told him.

“That’s not true. You did it before.”

“Kai, you know very well that you didn’t let me do anything last time I was on top,” you thought you saw a suppression of a smirk. “So, I don’t count that time. Just relax and let me love you…” you whispered your last words before sealing them with a kiss to his lips that had the both of you humming softly. He closed his eyes, angling his head slightly while you moved to slip your arms out of your shirt and it dropped to floor with a gentle thud. You were kissing Chisaki so softly, so different than your usual sexual endeavors that are fueled with pent-up stress and anger from work but it’s also because you didn’t want to hurt him as his arms were partially wrapped up and still healing.

But as the kisses grew longer, Chisaki grew hungrier. He nibbled and sucked on your bottom lip, at times his tongue would brush against it, urging you to open up for him. And when you didn’t in time, your lips were forcibly split by his intruding tongue and you succumbed to the feeling of it exploring your insides, treading over your teeth and inside cheeks and wrestling your own wet muscle. You pressed yourself closer to his body, your bra scratching his chest and your arms anchored around his neck as your nails lightly scratched his skin.

He separated from you with saliva connecting your lips together and you felt that wetness when his kisses went to your jaw and traveled to your neck. You sighed softly, and he felt you shivering against him. He wished that he could’ve held you, wrap his arms around your body, feel your delicious curves under his fingertips as you would melt against his touch. He was amazed how you weren’t turned off by him, that you still looked at him like he was the greatest man you ever saw.

“Still… even when I’m like this…?” He was uncertain, so he whispered that against your neck while he nuzzled his head into yours and you leaned your head on his, bringing a hand to stroke the side of his face.

“Yes…” you moaned at the ticklish feeling of his kisses. “You’re still my handsome man, my Overhaul.”

Even though he hated everything this universe had to offer, you were the one thing he loved. You didn’t weaken him. No. You empowered him unlike no other.

You soon found yourself gazing into gold when Chisaki lifted his head, passion oozing from his eyes that it nearly took your breath away. He couldn’t stand to be apart from you any longer. He pressed his lips against yours, resuming the aggression he had before but without his tongue.

You reached behind your back for your bra and unhooked it with a single tug and slipped the straps off your arms. Your bra fell between your bodies until you yanked it out and it fell on the ground. Chisaki was so excited to see your breasts, the perfect size and shape to his liking. He wished he could squeeze them in his hands like always, but he would have to make do with what he could do. He didn’t hesitate to abandon your lips to have your nipples between his.

“Hmn… Kai…” you arched your back and moaned against your pulled-in lips. You cupped your breast under your hand, lifting it up for Chisaki to have better access to them while he engulfed your entire nipple into his mouth, circling his tongue around it, sucking and pulling like he’s been reduced to a child wanting his mother’s milk. A growl rumbled within his chest when he swapped to your other tit and you started grinding on his lap to ease the warmth pooling at your lower belly. You felt the bulge of his pants pressing against your crotch, directly where your clit was, and you whined as you felt the sensitive nub rubbing on the cloth of your underwear.

Chisaki dragged his tongue all over your breasts and kissed your upper chest and collarbones when he left them. He glanced into your eyes and you caught sight of the darkness hiding behind those rich irises. A single look was all it took to know how much he wanted you.

You quickly hopped off of him, tugging at the button of your pants until it unleashed, and you threw your pants to the side. Chisaki eyed your body, subconsciously licking his lips as you saw them travel south from your face to your boobs, then your waist and legs. He had never felt the urge to grab you more than he did now. He wanted to destroy your underwear, carry you in the air, and fuck you gloriously under the shimmering sun rays from the window. How painful it was for it to only be a mere daydream.

“Like what you see…?” You smiled cloyingly as you stood between his legs, your fingers tugging at the stings of your underwear to tease.

“Yes, darling, you know I love it when you strip for me,” he loved the purr you gave after his words.

“You’re going to love what I do next,” you discarded your underwear shortly before dropping to your knees in front of him—in front of his bulge. You unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his black pants before you slid it off of him. His underwear was next, and his dick nearly hit your face when it bounced out and stood with all of its glory, reddened, veiny, and glistening with precum leaking from its head, and his pubic hairs were neatly trimmed as always.

He had to stop himself from cumming right on the spot from watching your voluptuous lips bounce back into shape after you had licked them. He couldn’t wait to see them wrap around his cock.

And he didn’t have to wait long. He groaned when you submerged his entire dick in your mouth, feeling the hot walls surround his girth as your lips nearly met with his pubic hairs and the head of his dick touched the back of your throat.

Your name was a breathless whisper from Chisaki, cheeks flushed, eyebrows furrowed as you began to bob your head. You loved how sonorous his moans sounded. It rattled something within, adding to the heat pool bubbling between your legs. You brought your fingers to your clit, rubbing in the same speed as you moved your head while your other hand was squeezing his inner thigh. There was something about seeing your mouth stretch to his length that had him jerking his hips into your bobs and although he couldn’t exactly move as fast as he wanted to, he marveled at the fact that he still had a bit of control.

He was writhing in his chair now, legs shaking, stumps of his arms trembling, heavy breathing with an occasional crack moan. You were driving him nuts. And just when he thought you would let up on his cock as you finally released it from the fleshy walls of your inner cheeks, you replaced it by surrounding him with your voluptuous breasts. You frantically stroke his length as it was being swallowed by the tits he wished could squeeze in his palms.

You gazed up at him with blushing cheeks and eyes so dazed that Chisaki’s heart nearly stopped at the sight of them. Your mouth returned to licking and sucking on the head of his dick, leaving him shuddering in his seat. You worked tremendously hard to pleasure him, to make him feel like he was still worth it despite what he went through, despite that he was reduced to mutilated monster. How you looked at him with eyes of pure adoration when your sight was filled with nothing but a powerless, armless man was still beyond him. Any woman would have left, but you stayed faithful to him. Truly, what did he do to deserve such a woman like you?

A shudder of your name was enough for you to give him a break, so you slowly slide your mouth and breasts off his cock, enjoying the sight of your saliva coating his length. It left a shiny hue like if the sun rays were to hit it, it would shimmer, while your breasts were wet with your own saliva and his precum.

“A little pent up, are we…?” You began to stroke his inner thigh, smiling slightly at his disheveled form. He responded with a breathless whisper.

“It’s… been a while.”

“I know,” you gave his thigh a small lick before you stood up and slid yourself onto his lap. His penis was pushed against your stomach. “Same,” and then you kissed him feverishly, arms around his neck, fingers digging into his scalp. He moaned into your mouth and thrust his tongue inside and explored around like he was on uncharted lands. And you fought diligently against his strong tongue, the faint, stale flavor of iron upon your taste buds.

“Kai,” you whined, breaking the kiss sooner than expected while grinding your needy hips on his lap. You couldn’t wait any longer. “Can I…? I need this… I need you inside…” He knew very well that you didn’t need his permission to do so, so the fact that he still had that over you renewed some of his vigor. Something shined in his golden eyes, something deadly that if you were to disobey him, you would surely regret it.

“Sit on my cock.”

You shivered, his eyes, they reminded you of the very man you fell in love with. “Yes, Overhaul…”

You hovered over him. Your hands rested on his shoulders and you aligned your sopping entrance with his dick and slowly sank down. Your mouth went wide for a silent gasp to escape as you felt his length stretched your walls. You could feel it pulsing, twitching within you and your legs began to quiver the moment he was all the way in. A shaky sigh sounded from Chisaki as he felt himself nuzzled deep within you. He wanted nothing more than to grab your hips and guide you but unfortunately, he was at your mercy.

“God…” you moaned, fingers curled into his shoulders. Still, he was delighted that he could still make you feel this way—that he could still make you tremble with his cock. You then started to move, rolling and lifting your hips to no rhythm, squeaking and moaning every time you would slam yourself down on him while you balanced on the balls of your feet to keep you steady. Your breasts would shake to your movement when you slammed down while your nipples would lightly tap his chest when you lifted slightly.

You watched as Chisaki’s face contorted into what anyone would believe was anger and they would be too distracted by that assumption to notice the softness in his rich eyes as they stared into yours, mouth open for his frantic breaths to puff out just centimeters of your own. Sweat had gathered at his forehead giving it a light sheen whenever the sunlight would peek through from behind you.

“How are you this wet… when I haven’t even touched you…?” He breathed, and puffs of his breath hit your lips just as he heard your juices swirl to his cock.

You whimpered to answer him, your eyes teared in response to the overwhelming pleasure knocking at your core.

“Come on,” he grunted and pressed his lips to your neck. He bit and sucked on your skin until it blossomed in color. “Use your words…”

“B-Because it’s you, Kai… Ahn—just your presence is enough to get me wet… it’s just enough…”

He let out a shaky sigh and briefly closed his eyes. “Naughty girl…” you didn’t have any idea how happy that made him. He leaned forward because of the sudden desire to hold you close to his body. Your arms went around his shoulders sharing that same feeling of his. Your breasts were squeezed to his pecs as you continued to roll your hips, mouth full of nothing but his name and former alias, like you were somehow hoping there was magic in his name and all would be revived by just a simple hymn from you, and you would once again feel his hands on you. You were careful not to touch what was left of his arms because he was still healing and also a gentle brush was enough to have his hives break out, a subconscious reaction to the trauma he suffered.

Thankfully, Chisaki was too focus on how your vagina swallowed his dick like you trying to milk him for all he had. He was thrusting upwards, sloppy, he was trying not to give you full control but having him use most of his ab muscles to move was exerting a lot of energy. He couldn’t go as fast as he wanted to.

“Kai… I…!” He could feel it without you telling him. The end was near. You were already holding on to him with all of your strength while your instincts kept your hips moving against his. You were slamming your body so hard on him that it had your ass jiggling, skin slapping and your nails clawing his back because somehow his dick manage to hit the right spot every fucking time. Oh, you could barely keep up your rhythm as pleasure struck like lightning and rolled through your pelvis like thunder. You rested your head on his shoulder and mapped it out with open mouthed kisses, tasting the salt of his sweat on your tongue.

Chisaki’s breathing was loud in your ear and his groans were heavy, almost angry sounding when he pressed the side of his face against your head. He felt himself reaching his peak. He shut his eyes and focused solely on the pressure building until it finally released. A strangled moan sounded from Chisaki and he jerked his hips as hard as he could as spurts of his cum spilled into your womb and you felt so full of not only his cock but his warm seed as well. And shortly after a few more thrusts, you had reached orgasm, legs quivering, and moans so loud you swore anyone from the outside would’ve heard you.

You slumped against his body as your chin rested on the crook of his neck. Your arms were still firmly holding on to him and the room was silent except for the breathing of you and Chisaki filling your lungs with much needed air. You were exhausted. You spent most of your energy taking care of Chisaki and the rest of it fucking him. Your eyelids felt heavy and you surely would’ve fell asleep if you weren’t missing that one thing. The warmth of Chisaki’s arms.

There was no doubt in your mind that you had missed the feeling. Chisaki would always surround you in his warmth by pulling you into his chest with his arms around you after sex. He couldn’t bear to separate from you after. He would pull the covers over your sweaty bodies and hold you until you fell asleep. Then he would get up and shower because going to sleep in his own filth bothered him.

But now, all he could do was just lean against you as you hugged him. You hated this. You hated everything that made Chisaki this way. You hated Shigaraki. You hated the heroes. You hated that green haired kid for fighting him. You hated everyone that harmed him when all he tried to do was save this pathetic world.

You didn’t notice at first, but you were shaking. Suddenly, the memories that were masked by desire revealed itself and you were left to think about what had happened. And really, all you felt was rage, so much rage that you wanted to either hurt yourself or any innocent victim. You wanted to ruin someone’s life just so they could feel as horrible about this world as you.

But that anger soon dissipated as you felt something poking your sides. You gasped when you noticed Chisaki desperately trying to hold you by lifting his stumps and pressing them into your sides, fighting the feeling of his hives appearing one after the other across his limbs and shoulders. In his mind, he was holding you tightly. He felt you in his arms, a faint feeling like a ghost of his movement, a phantom born from the pain of his lost limbs. But to you, all you felt was reality. And your body continued to shake but this time with sorrow. Fat tears fell down your cheeks and the first sob that came from you was the ugliest thing you’ve ever heard. You were supposed to be strong for him, but you were just as broken as him.

You couldn’t remember the last time you cried but you knew Chisaki must’ve been there as he’s been there all of your life. The kisses on your shoulder was there to soothed you yet it did nothing to the fuming rage still sitting within your heart. You pulled away from him slightly and held his head in your hands, bloodshot eyes drenched in shiny tears laced with nothing but pure wrath was staring straight into his own eyes. Your voice was shaky, yet determination shown itself proudly.

“I swear... I’ll get your arms back...”

Chisaki’s eyes widened slightly. He didn’t take the tone of your voice lightly nor your eyes that looked as if he was staring into the fiery depths of hell. “How...?”

Your mouth twisted into a shaky smile. The look in your eyes changed to something psychotic yet a glimmer of hope, relief, and the gold reflection of his eyes shined through. A simple name was all that passed through your lips like the solution was there all along. “Eri.”

#bnha #bnha fanfiction #boku no hero academia #bnha x reader #mha #mha x reader #my hero academia #my hero academia x reader #boku no hero academia x reader #overhaul #overhaul x reader #chisaki kai #chisaki kai x reader #chisaki kai fanfiction #overhaul fanfiction #fanfiction #fanfic #angst #angst fanfic

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princessamericachavez · 4 years

Text

Traveler Con is over. It’s hard to believe, after all the craziness that the week has been (not to mention the days leading to it with all the Vokodo thing and the planing) but the celebration is finally over. Artagan is free of his responsibilities, as far as the other acolytes are concerned he’s busy being a big god and will be blessing them from afar and Jester has her best friend back all for herself. She’s still soaking in the excitement when Fjord catches up to her, by the beach.

“Jester, that was amazing!” He exclaims, and she’s delighted to hear that child-like excitement in his voice. He’s been hiding it less and less since he stopped using his fake accent but it still makes her heart beat a little faster.

“Wasn’t it so cool?!” She yells, bouncing on her tip toes. “Did you see their faces?”

“Everyone was mesmerized! You did an incredible job!”

“Thanks,” she chuckles, blushing only a little. “You were great too. That major illusion you did for the divine gate was a very nice touch.”

“I’m just glad I could help,” he says, with a small shrug that doesn’t do much to hide the earnestness in his voice. He clears his throat before speaking again. “You... you were right about him, after all. He really was telling the truth about the whole faking it thing.”

“Yeah. I mean, I think he still kinda likes the god thing but he never really wanted it for real, you know.”

“I’m glad he didn’t let you down.”

“Me too,” she admits.

“I think I get it, you know?”

“What?”

“Why he was better than any of us really gave him credit for. It was for you, wasn’t it? You believed in him and that... that’s has power.”

“You think I made him do that?” She arches both eyebrows. “Fjord, he’s way more powerful than me. You know that.”

“Not that kind of power,” he shakes his head. “I mean... when you believe in someone, Jester, it’s really something magical. Look at all of us, we’ve all changed for the better and I think it’s because none of us wanted to let you down. When you believed in us... when you believed in me, I think that made me want to change and be better. I think maybe it was the same for him.”

Jester opens her mouth and closes it again, at a loss. She can’t even begin to process what he’s telling her. The honesty in his voice is disarming. She’s touched, really, that he thinks she gets any credit for how much he’s grown in the past months.

“You’ve always been pretty amazing, Fjord. That was all you.”

He shakes his head, smiling. “I’m better now, thanks to you. I just want you to know that I appreciate it, as I’m sure Artagan does.”

“Thanks,” she whispers, trying to get a grip of her emotions. Her chest feels like it might burst with butterflies at any given moment.

“Okay,” Fjord says, trying to cut the awkward silence between them.

“Fjord?” She interjects, feeling her heart on her throat.

“Yes?” He replies almost too quickly, taking a step closer. She thinks he might be holding his breath.

“Do you... do you like me?”

The tension in his shoulders dissipates. He smiles.

“Of course I like you, Jester,” he sighs.

“No, I mean. Do you like me like me. Like... more?”

She can see the shock crossing his features and wants to kick herself for even asking. Stupid. Stupid. That was such a dumb thing to say. Why did she have to go and ruin everything like that?

“Yes. I- I do. Is that... okay?”

Wait. What?

“Yes it’s okay!” She jumps in quickly. “I- I like you too.”

“Like... more?” He ventures and she could almost swear his tone is suddenly confident, teasing.

“Like more,” she chuckles, feeling her face burn. He smiles back. “Do you... would you like to do something about it? I mean... should we do something about it?”

His brow furrows slightly. It’s so cute. Gods she likes him so much.

“Like what?”

Jester bites her lower lip, nervously. She reminds herself that he just admitted to liking her back.

“You could kiss me,” she finally ventures.

She expects Fjord to panic, honestly, to blush and reel back like he used to do when she was still trying to flirt with him in their earlier days. Instead, he steps a little closer and gives her a breathtaking half smile.

“I think I already did once, right?”

“I didn’t know if that counted. We never talked about it.”

“I didn’t know if you wanted it to count,” he says. “I mean... did you?”

“I did. I do. I mean, it was nice... for a first kiss. Maybe not the drowning part.”

“Definitely not that part,” a shadow crosses his features but it passes quickly.

“I think we could do better, though, you know? Like something more...”

“Romantic?” He offers.

Her heart nearly stops.

“Well, I mean, this beach is very nice. And the sun is setting. It’s almost like a romance novel,” she mumbles quickly, nervously, as her fingers twist the front of her skirt. “It could be nice.”

Fjord takes another step forward. His hand comes up to the back of her head, fingers intertwining with locks of her hair. He leans forward, close enough for Jester to smell that faint ocean scent that permanently surrounds him.

“Like this?” He asks, voice deep and gentle, his hot breath lightly crashing against her mouth right before his lips press against hers.

The sound she makes is nearly a squeak. Her hands come up to hold his neck and pull herself closer to him to deepen the kiss. Her lips move on their own account, as if she knew what she’s doing. When Fjord pulls back, they are both breathless and several shades darker than usual. Her smile feels wider than ever before.

“Like that, yes,” she whispers. “That was very nice.”

“It was,” Fjord agrees with a laugh. What a lovely sound his happiness is.

She pulls him back in for another kiss, hungrier, happier, bolder. He replies with just as much enthusiasm.

“Jester?” He grumbles against her mouth after a while. “Can we... slow down?”

She pulls back immediately. If her mama taught her anything, it was the importance of consent. The faintest doubt was enough reason to pull the breaks.

“Sorry.”

“No, no, no,” Fjord closes the distance between them again to hold her hands. “I’m sorry. I just... my experience with these things hasn’t always been the... the best, you know?” He explains, sheepish and nervous.

Gods. If Avantika wasn’t dead already Jester would be vowing to murder her right now. She tries to push back the sudden flare of anger to focus on him for now, though.

“I would just like to take this... slow, you know? I know you probably have a lot more experience than I do with this so-“

“I don’t.”

“What?”

“I don’t... have... any. Not really,” she admits.

She’s not sure if Fjord is surprised or relieved or confused.

“Oh,” he says. “Okay. So... so is it okay if we just... not rush it?”

The tension eases a little inside her. She squeezes his hands.

“Of course, Fjord,” she smiles at him. “We can take it slow. Alright maybe not as slow as we have been taking it so far,” she chuckles, “because holy shit!”

He chuckles loudly and again she feels the world brighten with his joy. She would do anything to make him this happy forever.

“Definitely not that slow,” he says, still laughing.

“Okay,” she smiles.

“Okay.”

“So... should we go find the others to get the ship ready, Captain?” She asks, and maybe her tone is a little suggestive with that last word and maybe she’s more than a little delighted to see a blush spread through his cheeks again.

“Oh. Uh... Erm. Yes. Yes, probably. We should.”

He still hasn’t let go of her hands. Jester, out of habit, convinces herself that maybe he just forgot about it. But then he gives her fingers a squeeze as he pulls her along towards the rest of the group.

He really does like her. This is the best day ever.

#i couldnt sleep until i typed this out once i thought about it #fjorester #fjord stone #jester lavorre #critical role #sofia’s nonsense #fanfic

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monkeyspawnskydiamond · 3 years

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Transcript of Interview

Q: What do you see as the origins of violence against women? Is it cultural? Is it biological?

I believe that the origins of violence against women are completely in systems of gender inequity. In systems of basically male supremacy and although many proponents of male supremacy would have us believe that this is always existed on the planet, that it's biologically endemic, that it's inevitable, there's nothing we can do about it, etc., that's not true at all. Patriarchy is a relatively new institution, the last five thousand years or so. And you can find a lot of evidence for this in archaeology, in myth, in legend, things that are discredited by contemporary modes of knowledge which have to be understood as patriarchal in and of themselves.

The emphasis on rationality of this kind of direct evidence that myth is seen as just a fable, something that never existed. For examine, in the very area here, New Mexico, the creator of all is spider grandmother who thought, spun, dream wove the world into being. And there was a whole different system, that Allen writes about very eloquently in her book, The Sacred Hoop, which she calls a gynecentric system, in which the emphasis is not on competition, power over, domination, but rather on equality, harmony, balance, tolerance for a wide diversity of life styles, the centrality of powerful women, being absolutely necessary for society to function well, not any kind of belief in corporal punishment of children, extremely low incidence of rape, no idea of an institution of prostitution or pornography because sex as sacred and not associated with any kind of negativity. So, these systems did exist on the planet everywhere, in Europe. When I was a child all I wanted to read was myth, and stories of goddesses or I knew that this betokened another kind of reality, that this one that we live in now is not permanent and it was not here always forever.

Q: What causes men to be violent against women? Does it boil down to an underlying inequality between men and women? Does this mean that the answer is equality between the sexes?

What causes men to be violent then is basically an enforcement. That if you have a system of oppression, one group is being subordinated, in this case we're talking about women, and in some way you can propagandize and brain wash the subordinated group into agreeing to this. Well, I really am more passive, I really am subordinate. You know, we're given those messages all the time through the mass media, through religion, in which we're told that women are premordally evil, etc. But obviously, that's not going to work completely, we're going to resist. And we're not going to buy into all that ideology so the second level of enforcement is violence, actual violence. So I see the whole gamut from sexual harassment on the streets, in the office, through rape, through battery, through incest, through sexual murder, through a level of enforcement, to keep women in our place, to tell us that we can't speak out against atrocities and to serve as a lesson to all of the women. This is what will happen to you. You are prey in this culture, you are an object, you be obedient or you're off basically, so I see that violence serves an absolute function. It's not a deviation, it's not a monster from Mars. We have to look at it as absolutely functional to keeping the status quo going, to keeping the system of male supremacy working.

Q: You've said abusive men aren't abnormal or deviant, but the norm. Can you explain? What about rape in the home? You've made an interesting comment that these behaviors are not taboo, that it's talking about them which is taboo.

In that violence, it's not the norm in that everyone does it. It's just I think that there's some deception going on about it that we don't really want incest to happen. There's really an incest taboo. According to a 1992 government finance study, 36 percent of all rapes of women in this country are rapes by a family member. There's some deception going on. What is really taboo is speaking out about that, saying that the nuclear family is not really this haven of comfort and warmth, but that really according to the FBI women are nine times safer on the street than they are in the family. That's where you're most likely to be beaten, most likely to be raped. Eleven percent of all rapes take place of girls under the age, I mean, excuse me, 67 percent of all rapes are under the age of 18. About 29 percent of the girls under the age of 11 -- these are taking place in the home. Eleven percent of all rapes are rapes by a father or step-father. People who talk about family values, it's really a code word for a racist, sexist enforcement of family values, gender inequality, the idea that women and children are the property of the father. These are the values. It's really about control.

Q: What about the theory that violence is an inherent part of male biology?

I think the real stress on biological essentialism right now saying that men are born this way, women are born this way and we also see it in term of racism. For example, when something like the Bell curve, saying that whites or Africans are necessarily more, less intelligent, whites a little bit more so, the Japanese the highest. They put that in to make them not look like white racists. But, you know, all this kind of stuff is a backlash to thirty years of activism saying the culture is responsible for these kind of differences. That even I would argue that what we understand as biology is filtered through our cultural preconceptions. For example, think of the scenario that we all see, whether it be in a movie like "Look Whose Talking" or just what we've understood through education, of when a woman gets pregnant. The sperm is seen as this kind of heroic warrior, traveling up through this dangerous territory to penetrate and conquet the egg. We see that all the time. Really, why don't we look at that as the egg as this magnificent huge dominant fascinating force that draws the sperm to her, etc. We understand biology through cultural lenses. And what is, what was biology in the 19th century is now understood as scientific racism. The sciences of, for example, measuring skulls to prove that women of all races or Africans or Native Americans had smaller skulls and therefore lesser intellectual capacity. I would say that what's happening right now in all this emphasis on men are innately more violent and women are innately more passive and stuff like that is scientific sexism, nothing more.

Q: What sort of role has religion played? Does religion teach that men are superior to women, that female sexuality is linked to evil?

Religion is one of the most important sources of violence against, of the ideology for violence against women. It first gives us this idea of sex negativity. That sex in which women are really always implicated as the sex, we are the sexual ones. Be we mothers or prostitutes or temptresses or whatever. The whole story of Adam and Eve, that Eve was the one responsible.

Religion is absolutely fundamental in perpetrating violence against women. It is one of the key ways to communicate the ideology of male supremacy. First of all, God is male. There is no female principle. It was the people who demanded that Mary even in the Christian religion be given a place of honor. The cathedrals in Europe were built to her to recognize people's understanding that there is something feminine about the divine as well. But patriarchal religions would have us believe that all divinity is male and only male. And that coupled with the idea that female sexuality in women is evil, as for example in the Garden of Eden myth and that it is up to men to dominate both women and the earth, give us a script for all kinds of violence against women, which, of course, I connect up with violence against the earth in that the earth and women are seen as passive, as submissive, as out of control and thereby need to be controlled, dominated, etc. God tells Eve, "This is your husband, Adam, you will submit to him, he will lord it over you and basically you'll love it.” Yeah, right. That's the Bible.

So, religion often promotes an ideology of male supremacy, which as I said I see as the root of violence against women. We also get this whole idea of sex negativity. That sexuality is sinful, that the body is shameful. Then of course women are the sex, so it is our bodies that are seen as somehow contaminated, that we are seen as somehow kind of filthy. And so therefore you're given the choice to be this Madonna, this absolutely pure virgin mother or whatever or the whore, the one who epitomizes sex. These are of course both aspects of one persona. So it seems to me that therefore, it's also Christianity that even though, for example, fundamentalist Christianity rails against pornography that pornography is really Christianity's evil twin, to use soap opera jargon, that it's really the same thing. That both of them depend upon women and the idea of sex negativity, that the body and sexuality is somehow obscene, filthy and dirty. You don't have pornography without that, you don't have Christianity without that. On the submission of women, on a rather deadness, a kind of loss of the sacred involving sexuality that I see in both, in Christianity, the only kind of sex you can possibly have and then you're not supposed to enjoy it too much except as marital heterosexual procreative sex. No idea of ecstasy, of communing with the Universe, in any kind of sacred sexuality which characterizes what are seen as pagan cultures. So, pornography is of course the off-shoot of this terrible negativity, of sex as really just objectification, filthy, obscene, behavior.

Q: Doesn't this also lead to eroticizing the forbidden?

Okay, so what I see as happening in the Garden of Eden Myth is that sex supposedly was the sin that Adam and Eve committed. So then there's this injunction like that's considered to be the forbidden fruit. So we have this whole notion of the forbidden as being something that is also extremely desirable. And it seems to me that what patriarchal culture is about is about eroticizing the forbidden and therefore sanctioning taboo violation, making taboo violation itself an act of sex. An act that someone's supposed to get off on in a way which I see therefore as feeding, for example, incest. It's the forbidden that actually becomes more appealing, it's the violation of innocence. You're really acting out the culture's dicta. I mean, think of "Star Trek," to boldly go where no man has gone before. So there is no limit. No taboo, we just sort of march in uninvited and I think that's an injunction that is tied to this idea of the taboo. That rules are made really to be broken. It's thrilling to march in without invitation, justifying everything from incest to manifest destiny to all kinds of cultural imperialism.

Q: And so we have incest as an ultimate taboo?

Well, as I talk about incest in the nuclear family, obviously incest is not a real taboo. It's committed at an alarming rate. And that's just what is reported. We all know that these kinds of crimes are grievously unreported because of ideas of shame, because of pushing the memories so far back you don't have ready access to them, etc. So, incest in the nuclear family or child sexual abuse by priests, has been hushed up forever. You know, it's not really taboo. Everybody knows it's going on. But the taboo of silence is breaking up. That's what the feminist movement has been about. Breaking that conspiracy of silence: be it against child sexual abuse, wife beating, etc.

Think of what happened to Sinead O'Connor when she was on "Saturday Night Live." That time, I think it was in 1992, when she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II. And she was making a political statement. She was protesting the church's complicity in covering up incidences of child sexual abuse by the priesthood. She was excoriated for that in the press and the very next week Joe Peshi comes on and says, "I'm Italian and thank God it's Columbus Day.” And then goes into saying how he wants to smack her around and the crowd is roaring its approval of him smacking her around. So clearly here we see what I'm talking about -- about violence against women as enforcement of women staying in their place. Not speaking out and naming the atrocity, that's the taboo, not committing it. And I find it very interesting that when feminists are always accused of censorship, here's a real incident of censorship, in that when Saturday Night Live repeats these episodes, they censor Sinead O'Connor. They do not censor Joe Peshi advocating battery as a solution to women speaking out against abuses.

Q: What of the inherent differences between the sexes? Doesn't it all boil down to gender difference? Can we discuss these things without discussing gender differences?

I think absolutely we have these ideas that there are these genders, masculinity and feminity and that masculinity is something that all beings with certain kind of hormones and male genitalia have and there's this femininity. I think that differences between men and women, this whole creation of the opposite sex is a way to create male supremacy. You create difference and then you repress one-half of it and you create enmity, you create this kind of opposition. So, I really look at and then everybody says it's nature and it's innate. But why do we have so many cultural, so much cultural brainwashing to make it happen. Little boys, what you wear, how people can speak to you. You know the whole masculine or feminine conditioning which begins right at birth if not before. How you know now that everybody's finding out the sex of their child and probably even treating it differently in the womb when it's a fetus. But okay, what were we going on? I'm thinking, okay, the cultural construction of masculinity.

It seems to me that masculinity in all of the culturally approved avocations of masculinity is somehow associated with force and violence. That men are suppose to be identified by their bodily strength and that almost all the male initiation rights, all the whole culture of masculinity, the heros that we see be it Indiana Jones or Rambo or John Wayne or Charles Bronson, or whomever, they're all predicated on some kind of violent action. Therefore we understand that to be a man and that being a man, you're not born a man, you become a man according to how the culture says what a man is. The culture makes you into a creature who is ruled by a commitment to violence and that male heroes and male villains, be they cops, be they criminals, they're all bonded by their commitment to violence. And so I think what we really need to do is deconstruct masculinity, destroy notions of cultural masculinity and femininity. I would be much more in favor of a world in which we didn't see ourselves as opposite sexes but as existing on a continuum in which the feminine within men as well as within women was honored. And there would be women who be more traditionally masculine even than some men, etc. Understand that we're on a co-continuum, we have much more in common than we have separating us.

Q: What do you think of Robert Bly and his theories?

Robert Bly. I mean, I find him interesting in that I basically like his response of going back to the old tradition, but my liking of it stops about there. He goes back to an extremely sexist fairy tale in which the guy becomes a hero by basically winning in war and then capturing as his prize a princess. I mean this is absolute sexism. Violence initiation, and then you know the princess as object trophy prize. So, the women is a sex object. I think what he preaches basically is that women are inadequate. That men need to find themselves in a separatist community with other men. And I find historically that men having separatist communities, and even right now culturally male fraternities, male sports, etc. These are the sites of some of the worst violence against women. And that's where I think men are suppose to, the way in which one becomes a man in this culture is by rooting out the feminine within the self. By denying the mother, which Robert Bly is all about. Bonding with the father and rooting out all traces of the feminine within the self which he says you can only do in all male communities. That's completely the patriarchal root to manhood. And women are inadequate for this. What Sheri Hite's research shows is that boys who grow up in households run by single women are far more respectful to women, show lower incidence of violence, etc. So you know, I think that's absolute nonsense that women can't really create men. So what my problem with Bly is that I think he's profoundly misogynist. Women are again a lesser contaminating presence and need to be conquered or overcome in order to actualize manhood. That's again the patriarchal script.

Q: Hasn't violence against women been legally sanctioned for centuries?

It's been different throughout the history of patriarchal culture. For example, we talked about patriarchal religion in the early modern period, around the same time as the voyages to the new world, beginning with the use of Africans in slavery, you had the European and the whole enlightenment, the whole ascendence of rationality. You had the burning of women as witches, throughout early modern Europe, and some men. Probably anywhere from 300 thousand to a million. And this was completely legitimated by both church and state. So violence against women there was the law. You had to do it, it was absolutely approved.

Now a'days, we live in this time of that kind of pseudo taboo I was talking about. It's supposed to be taboo but we all know that on "General Hospital" when Luke raped Laura. It makes it glamorous, it eroticizes that kind of violence against women and it makes it appear consensual. As if women seek this out and want it. It makes it extremely normal as well. Let me just think of a few examples. I mean, we all know the notorious "General Hospital" where Luke raped Laura and then later married her, so it made it seem as though rape was some kind of courtship ritual (laughter). I mean Calvin Kline sells this obsession and gives us these very erotic images of a man, of a naked man carrying a naked woman over his shoulders.

It's underscoring both male dominance but also the idea that love is somehow synonymous with obsession. I mean that's what leads to four women in this country every day being killed by men who say they love them (chuckle) but most women in the country who are killed are killed by men who say they love them. That's really obsession and we should never confuse the two, obsession and feeling that the woman is somehow your property. But we're taught this all the time. And "Pretty Woman" considered a light-hearted flick and Richard Gere decides that he wants to marry Julia Roberts after he realizes that marriage is really ownership, he's not just renting her as a prostitute any more. He can actually own her. Remember the scene where he looks at the jewelry and says, "Oh, I don't have to just rent this, I can own it.” And he's talking about her too. So, I think in all kinds of ways it's made to seem either very normative, very happy and beneficial, or very erotic, a very heroic, be it these constructions of masculinity as violent enforcer, such as Rambo, etc.

Q: So, does the media contribute to these notions or merely reflect them?

Well, I think it's a dialogic process. The media both sells us what we want but also decides and conditions us to want what we want. So it's a two-way street. It's always going back and forth. And it's not just sort of an injection, but media puts these things in our heads. But it shapes what we want as well as then satisfying that want.

We all react differently to those messages. That's a real common theme in contemporary cultural studies, that people can negotiate meanings and take something out of it that somebody else didn't get out. For example, and you'll see that argument used to justify pornography all the time. Well, I read pornography and I haven't raped anyone, etc. etc. But what we need to do is take collective responsibility that, for example, the most common sexual activity of serial murders according to the justice department is using pornography. And that even if an individual can look at a particular type of pornography and not cultivate a desire to go out and sexually murder, we have to take responsibility for that a significant portion of the population does use this material to feed those fantasies and to provide a script for carrying out that kind of behavior. And so it's not a question, I think that a capitalist consumer culture always emphasizes, we have this kind of liberal emphasis on individual rights, my rights, my rights, my rights. How about cultural responsibility. Again I think that's a feature of a gynesophical or gynecentric system. That we really do have to look for a common good in some way and take some responsibility. Understand, set some limits. And again, we live in a culture in which limits are there only to be transgressed.

Q: Is the solution censorship?

I would veer away from censorship. That's why I like the law that Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnin drafted that would make it that a woman or anyone injured by pornography could sue in civil court. So I would never give the police power to seize materials and to prohibit because I think that we could go into the kind of society that Margaret Atwood describes in the Hand Maid's Tale in which you have what I talked about as the right wing side of the women oppressive agenda that sort of the Christian woman as object, woman as reproductive breeder and maybe whore on the side and that's it. Right, that kind of circumscription of women's freedom. But I don't want the purely pornographic libertarian you know, all the women getting raped and incested that we have right now either. So, we're allowed to swing back and forth between modes but never to get beyond them. I'd like to get beyond that. So no, I'm not in favor of censorship.

I'm in favor of one kind of collective responsibility, maybe suing in civil court, there's some legal remedies that have been proposed but I'd never give the police power to seize materials. That would be immediately abused. What I think we need is to really create an alternative consciousness and to create change in the culture through what I call in psychic activism, through generating alternative forms of eroticism, alternative forms of erotica, alternative myths, narratives, symbols, stories. And I think what I would call upon women to do is to reverse the kind of sex negativism. Part of our oppression has been to tell us that we're either these pornographic whores or we're completely asexual. To demand and exercise our sexual autonomy, to become what I think of as bawdy women. You know, were really to speak. I mean we're not really suppose to express our sexual desires outside of pornography. Its seen as some how very lacking in taste, a very unlady like or whatever. I think whenever we criticize pornography we have to do it in a bawdy way to affirm sexuality, to reverse the kind of sex negativism of that strain of patriarchy of the Christian side. To be vulgar in the sense of like bawdy, earthy, in touch with our sexuality. And therefore, I think we break those false opposites of sex negativism or pornography. And move into a new paradigm.

Q: There's some controversy as to whether rape is a crime of violence or a crime of sexuality? How are violence and sex intertwined?

I think it's really specious to separate violence and sexuality. I would disagree with some of the early feminists who you know we all change our minds as the theory gets worked out, who would say rape is a crime of violence, not a crime of sex. Because unfortunately in this culture, sex is completely interfused with violence, with notions of dominance and subordination. As I said, I believe our gender roles are constructed so we have these two constructed genders, masculine and feminine that are defined by one being powerful and one being powerless. And so therefore, powerlessness and power themselves become eroticized. And in that violence becomes eroticized. Domination, subordination become eroticized so that whether you know somebody is actually exerting dominance in a sexually explicit way as in pornography or doing it in a mainstream way, for example. That's seen as somehow sexual. Because the domination itself, the violation itself has become sexual according to this gender hierarchy system.

I realize that there are some biologists that would say that violence is just a means men use to get sex as if sex were just this sort of innate thing that we're all born knowing what it is and wanting. Rather I see sex as a culturally constructed in the way our sexuality is expressed. For example, the idea that intercourse between a man and a woman is sex. Right? Preferably with him on top penetrating and thrusting and her lying still. Right? I mean that's a cultural notion and one induced by male supremacy. So this sex that he's getting is really a model to justify, that he's saying is innate, is a model to justify a very oppressive male dominant form of sexuality that is completely culturally conditioned. Rape is sexual, yes in that force and domination of women has been sexualized. That's how it's both violent and sexual at the same time. We need to recognize how they work in tandem.

Also, I mean, some theorists who I would see as whether consciously or not in complicity would rape would say, "Well, it's just that there's this very attractive woman and rape is the only way I can get her or something like that,” that this justifies. But that in no way speaks to the reality of rape in which extremely old women who are seen in this country or in this culture again in a patriarchal culture as completely undesirable are raped, in which little babies are raped, in which it's just a question of which woman is most vulnerable at a particular time, is most easy to be preyed upon. That theory doesn't jive at all with the way that rape is actually promoted. It's based on there's an available victim that I can intimidate and conquer at this particular point.

Q: What do you think about developing alternate notions of eroticism?

Anything that I talk about with pornography, I stress the needs of developing an alternative notions of sexuality alternative notions of erotica. I think we have to have a counter culture. I know Newt Gingrich has declared war on the counter culture. But that's because I think that's the reason he does it, I think is because that's where the most powerful force is for change. If we change cultural attitudes, behaviors, desires, I mean, all these things are culturally constructed to begin with. Male dominance is a cultural construct. It can be deconstructed and changed and we do that through every day acts, through subversions, as a title of a book by a woman I don't know but it's a good title, Every Day Acts in Small Subversions. That we don't believe them that it's inevitable. And that power is only exercised from the top to the bottom. That we recognize that creation is ongoing every day.

There's a social construction of reality that we participate in and that we can become the creators of an emerging alternative reality. It's happening now. Thirty years ago you would go to medical journals and find no references to wife beating. Not its they're trying to put it back they're trying to say incest is all false memory, etc. They can't completely put it back in the box, we have broken that conspiracy of silence and we're not going to shut up. And not only do we have to tell the truth about the abuses that are heaped on us, but we have to articulate a new emerging consciousness in reality and practice of sexuality that is not based upon that sex negative norm of what the heterosexual monogamous procreative couple, etc. We have to encourage sexual experimentation, the wiring and production of erotic materials, the infusion of the resacrilization of sexuality. Understanding that is why I really hate porography because it teaches us that the life force can be commodified, packaged and sold.

There has been a division in the feminist movement between feminists who are opposed to pornography and feminists who say we shouldn't concentrate on that because it's antisexual. But I see and I think they have a point but I think we need a medium ground here and I understand that pornography is anti-sexual, its about destroying packaging containing exploiting, abusing the life force. Pornography teaches us that the life force can be consumed, used and abused. Then women, children can be consumed, used, abused, the planet can be consumed, used and abused, etc. I see pornography as paradigmatic of other kind of abuses that are taking on. So I think some of the solutions would be to treat, to teach notions of respect for other life forms whether they are human or not, to understand that if you don't treat the life force with respect, understand that you cannot take without giving back, that you have to respect limits, boundaries. The life force will strike back at you. We're always told that there's no limits, that we can boldly go where no man has gone before, a dictum that I see justifying both incest and manifest destiny. I might have said that already.

Q: So how do we begin to change things? How do you inculcate a sense of respect for all life?

This notion, celebrated on "Star Trek," that we can boldly go where no man has gone before, recognizing that's a dictum that justifies everything from incest to manifest destiny, and that what we really need to understand is that we can't go everywhere, that we need to expect an invitation, to understand that you can't take something without giving back in equal measure. That we need to respect, not only other human beings, but all creatures in the land, the land, I would say herself. And then if we don't, the life force will strike back. We talk about with such arrogance that humans can save the planet or not. I mean, you know, we'll only destroy ourselves if we go on in this way. I see all this violence against women as very apocalyptic in some way. I mean it is about destroying and contaminating the future and the life force itself and it's folly. An absolute folly!

Some people say that for things to change the punishment for crimes against women must be severe. What do you think?

Oh, punishment. I have to say in terms of punishment, I mean yes, I think that some abusers are so far gone they're just going to keep doing it and they have to be kept away from the rest of the population. While I certainly agree that we have to say this is not allowable, you know clearly many rapists get off, I mean, it's not a highly prosecuted and convicted crime rate, etc. Batterers continue to do this, people see it as just a lover's quarrel. We do have to change cultural attitudes about that. I'm not in favor of any kind of police state idea of avenge, punish, torture, etc. I'm much more in favor of a model that if somebody cannot change, if somebody is really a danger they should be banished in some kind of segregated way. They have to be, and all modes should be put toward prevention. I mean, I just see sadomasochism and even like punishment itself has become so sexualized under the parent of patriarchal pornographic role view that I'm seeing, that I think we need to really break with all those kind of attitudes.

Q: So how do we break with all those attitudes?

Remember I talked before about grandmother spider creating the world through telling stories, story-telling is what creates consciousness and through consciousness reality is created. And, so the media is our contemporary story teller, and it's in a way, very much like religion. It gives us parables, it gives us values to live by, it gives us role models to emulate, saints or whatever. If you will, new deities almost whom we worship, as in celebrities. So the media has to be recognized as the cultural story teller and understand that it is there to enforce the status quo. We can resist it occasionally. For example, in horror films are where you'll see the most vehement critique of family values. I mean, families are always insane and the father's always out to kill everybody in families, if you think about it, he's like the step father.

I think some people talk about teaching media literacy and I would completely agree with that, that we need to be able to critique the advertising , recognize when there's pictures of little girls posed like Marilyn Monroe when they're four years old. Recognize that images of rape in the ads selling us jeans or something like that so we are consciously aware of them, and I think they lose some of their power over us. But I think on the other hand, we have to get beyond that because these images are meant to appeal like cocoa, he says, they're going to the back of your mind, to your subconscious and we are programmed by our culture to respond to certain things, to react in certain ways and what we as activists have to do is reprogram, recondition, create, and that is through generating what I talked about before, these alternative myth narrative. If we give people an alternative erotica which I see in some women's communities, a lot of lesbian erotica. There's something like Four Fat Dikes, and it's this movie in which women, fat lesbians, who are despised by this culture, right, who are seen as everything a woman should not be, celebrate their bodies and their sexuality. That to me is fabulous and it is also erotic. And it is about celebrating the life force. So those are the direction I think we need to move in as well.

Q: Tell us about your book, The Age of Sex Crime.

The Age of Sex Crime is my first book in which I analyze the phenomena of how serial sex killers have become hero figures in this culture, which goes back to my argument that these are not deviants, these are not monsters from nowhere, they're actually performing a cultural function in enforcing misogyny in showing that women are prey, etc. and acting out masculinity in totally dominating the feminine. So that's the base, and what I mean by that is that the characteristic act of the serial sex killer like Jack the Ripper, sort of the founding father of the movement was the mutilation of a woman's body. And leaving her out for display and it seems to me that the mutilation, particularly of the sex organs is a paradigmatic, a model for the other kinds of abuses that are going on. Be it splitting the atom, be it raising an entire old growth forest or whatever, that kind of again destruction focused on the life force, the generator.

I think particularly in native American philosophy, we're taught that you can only go so far with that before retaliation sets in, that the life force will not let you, the life force does strike back. So do women. Can I say something about "Thelma and Louise?" Why was that movie hated so much? It was one movie in which women bonded, and in which women fought back. They killed one man, who had initiated the violence. But it was seen as this terribly violent movie. And I think that shows about the power of the kind of narratives that I'm talking about. The power to just as Jack the Ripper has become legend, we hear that "Thelma and Louise" live forever on the T-shirts or the bumper stickers. So we've projected into that legendary realm and are able to fight at that level too.

Q: Not all men obviously are violent and they all grow up in the same culture. So, why do you think some men are violent?

As to why individual men are violent, there isn't just one cause. I mean patriarchal science would tell us there's cause and effect and you have to be able to scientifically study it and link it, well experiment on all these college students and see if after watching pornography they'll go rape or something. That's nonsense. That's not how it works. Listen to the anecdotal stories of narratives of people who have lived through violence and abuse and there's always different kinds of reasons. I mean, we can all watch a beer commercial and some of us will go out and drink beer and some of us will even become alcoholics, so there's complex reasons - what happened in the boy's childhood, how much violence he was exposed to. How susceptible he was to images from the media, how strong an influence his mother was in his life, etc. and I mean usually the influence of the mother is a good one generating respect for women as opposed to what movies like Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's patriarchal narratives, would have us believe. Does that answer it well enough?

What of the media? How does its portrayal of women reinforce certain notions,particularly in advertising?

We see these kinds of advertisements everywhere. I mentioned Calvin Cline's Obsession. There are adds for jeans in which women are shown licking the floor. That's a common technique in domestic violence, not just hitting the woman, but humiliating her. Either with words or through making her perform demeaning acts, etc. Lots of images of couples seeming to tussle and the woman on high heels ready to topple over which we're told again. It normalizes violence, it makes it seem as just a love spat, etc. What other ones did I talk about? Movies? Movies, even if you go back. "Gone with the Wind” is of course classic in that we do see a scene of marital rape and the woman is made to smile as if seeming to enjoy it. Now, hopefully race, consciousness of racist oppression has made us realize that the slaves weren't really enjoying life on the plantation as "Gone with the Wind” shows. I think we should also recognize that Scarlet would not in actuality have enjoyed being raped.

Another movie I love to hate (and I found profoundly distressing because so many children see it and see it uncritically), it's Disney, it's "Beauty and the Beast." If you look at that movie, a young girl, no mother, there's never any mothers in these movies. She lives alone with her father, she ends up getting taken prisoner by the beast. She's literally a prisoner, all the household help conspire to hide the fact of how violent he is and then he actually turns violent on her, breaking furniture, threatening her, a scene of absolute domestic abuse, but we're told that she just loves him enough, he can change and the beast will turn into a prince. That is an extremely dangerous myth to give young girls. That if you just love a man enough you can change him. It also says that it's men's nature. They're beastly. The bestial nature. Not a cultural construction that makes men violent towards women. So I think the movie is deceptive on all these counts but also in particularly in telling the young girl, if she just loves the beast enough, he'll turn into the prince and that keeps a lot of women waiting around, hoping, hoping he'll change. And he keeps telling her that.

We see this also graphically in an adult movie, "Internal Affairs,” in which the character played by Andy Garcia, and both these movies are very racist. The beast when he turns into the prince changes from being bestial into being like Apollo or something like that. This blonde god and the darkness and the bestial is associated with I think people of color very graphically. Andy Garcia in "Internal Affairs” beats his wife in public. And then, he breaks into Spanish right after beating her in public which makes it seem as if you know this hot Latino kind of thing. So again, it's somehow associated with race here, not with just male supremacy and privilege. And then he goes home the next day and she fights back. She's angry at him for beating her in public and he tells her he's jealous of her and he's seen her with another man and he's saying....He goes and spends the night drinking and with women of color are whores, so again the racism and I mean whores, oh, I'll have to start again. He beats his wife in public and she of course is a blonde, white trophy kind of desirable woman in a racist-sexist culture. He goes and then spends the night with the so-called despised women, women of color who are then whores. He then goes home the next day and confronts her and starts accusing her of sleeping with other men, etc. and tells her if you ever do that I'll kill you, I'll kill you!. At this point they fall to the floor and make passionate love while he keeps reminding her - I'll kill you, I'll kill you. This is not foreplay, these are not words of endearment. When women hear that they should get out and not be told by the movies that this is a prelude to the greatest sex you're ever going to have.

Q: What about portrayals of women in music videos and elsewhere?

Guns and Roses in, for example, Axl Rose has been accused by two of his former wives and/or girl friends of beating them. And he shows women being beaten and murdered by himself, by him in many of his videos including "Don't Cry,” "November Rains,” etc. So, very clearly there's this idea that it's completely normal and acceptable for a heroic figure like Axl Rose to beat women. What else on MTV? I know because I've done some of these.

Q: It goes all the way back to Shakespeare. Think of "Othello."

I've never read "Othello," so I can't tell. Again, you know you're getting into this where it's so much easier for a racist culture to select out men of color and say they're the ones who are doing this. They're the rapists, they're the beasts, etc. And I'm saying that men of color don't abuse women, they do. I'm just saying they're given disproportionate attention in a racist media. And its all, they're scapegoated. It's all put on. They're the ones who are doing it. And then women we're told, we're sex objects, white women particularly young, blonde white women are said to be the trophy objects, the objects to claim and of course, the most common reason men give for abusing and/or killing women is the jealousy and the idea that if I can't have her, no one can. She's my property. There's a T-shirt that's actually sold that says, "If you love something, set it free, and if it doesn't come back, gun it down and kill it." Yeah, which I see as like the mantra for the abusive generally femicidal man.

But think how often in the media that when we're taught that when a man begins to show jealousy, that's when he's in love, no that's when he's obsessed and use you as property. And you should get the hell out. But you know "Pretty Woman,” that's one where the minute Richard Gear begins showing jealousy, the audience says, Oh good, he loves her. You know, that kind of thing and that's again one way we're seduced to these attitudes that condone, legitimize and endorse in this case wife beating.

Q: How does the mass media make women sex objects?

Women being sex objects and what we mean by that is that we're reduced to things. Property, objects to consume, to use, to abuse, to own. Which is related obviously to the issue of jealousy. But if you look at the mass media you'll see an endless supply of women being portrayed as what I call fem-bots, these kind of sex robots. For example, there's a very famous, not famous, it's famous on college campuses because it shows, it's up so much in the men's dorms. It's an ad for a motorcycle that just shows a woman's body fused into the motorcycle. And her rump is where the man sits and drives her. So woman as the object that you can own and use at your pleasure, at your will, that image says it but all the kind of rituals in which women are -- the cheese cake things. The cultural rituals or the images that show us as objects, that we are there to be looked at, that we are there. Let me think of some other images I have that show this kind of objectification going on. But see when I'm saying that, I can give you some images of women as that motorcycle image -- the woman as yeah, that we are therefore, we're not recognized as significant human beings. We are rendered soulless when actually it's the ones who are soulless who are trying to portray women as like these kind of simple dolls, objects, puppets, and it's very curious. Ted Bundy, and many people think that he wasn't, that he was just copying this idea that pornography made him do it the last minute. He talked about that since he was caught in 1979 how pornography, not just pornography but Coppertone ads in which women were just shown as display items, were used, you know, draped on cars, that he became identified with the car. That women were literally sex objects to them. He says he never talked about the women as she but as the object, the puppet, the doll.

Q: Can you think of responsible portrayals of women?

"Thelma and Louise" Let's see. It's harder to come up with responsible portrayals of women I think that we can certainly find some. I think Allison Anders film, "Gas, Food and Lodging" is a very complex, it's a female initiation story. It's a female coming of age story. There's a movie called "Desert Bloom,” that's again interesting. I think "Thelma and Louise” is genuine feminist art. "Daughter's of the Dust” by Julie Desh which is, she the first African-American female filmmaker to make a feature film. You know which shows the combined racism and sexism in the system that thus far there have been, she was the first just 19, just three years ago I believe. Ah, the responsible portrayals of women.

Roseann. I think Roseann is marvelous. I mean, you know obviously I'm going to quibble sometimes, but Roseann proclaims her autonomy, her power, her sexuality. The show deals with complex issues. I love it.

I'm going to surprise you with this, but I think that sometimes in soap operas, because they are pitched toward a women audience, that you will find, for example, on the "Young and the Restless,” more responsible treatments of date rape, battery. For example, in movies like "Sleeping With the Enemy,” we see a woman stranded. She's being beaten by her husband and she has nowhere to go. She's completely on her own. There is no social system to support her. On the "Young and the Restless” there are friends who intervene. She goes to a battered woman's shelter and talks about her problem. They all give her the support to leave her husband. So that I consider that to be a genuine feminist portrayal. And another instance of a treatment of a date rape on the "Young and the Restless,” the sexual harassment, excuse me, an episode of examining sexual harassment on the "Young and the Restless,” which again has a lot of problems. I'm not portraying it as pure feminist intentionality or anything like that, but there was a very interesting treatment of sexual harassment in which the male lawyer harassing the younger female lawyer at the end tells her, "You know, just between me and you, you really wanted it, you really desired it. And you know you secretly were yearning for it.” She faces him down and says "Absolutely not. You were trying to use your power to dominate me. You get off on power. I don't get off on powerlessness.” something to that effect. I'm not quoting her exactly. Again, these kind of shining feminist moments on soap operas. Which is, of course, seen as a degraded women's kind of form of amusement.

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sinnhelmingr · 4 years

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aloe, belladonna, fern, sage for DS Hel // @royal-dragonslayer-ornstein

ALOE : how does your muse handle grief ?

Honestly? Very, very differently from how others seem to process it. Especially when younger, given her life being built around the tending of the dead and that in their dark rest they know peace. For a long while, Hel saw no reason for lamenting death, knowing what lay beyond, though she understood it hurt others to have their time with a loved one cut short. This actually bit her in the ass at one point in an ask with a Gwynevere in that she got chewed out for not showing due contrition over the loss of others.

It took forging many bonds in the world beyond that she began to understand grief -- especially, I think, at the loss of Artorias. His death was meaningless, and cruel, and wholly avoidable, and there was nothing to celebrate in his passing. Lost to the Dark, there was surely no peace for him. I think that cut her the most deeply at first, and the impact his death had on those he left behind. It was only later on, when alone to think on it of her own accord, that she registered she missed him, and she wished he had come back after all, and that was her first brush with personal grief.

Even so, it has been fleeting in her life. She’s more likely to echo it as per decorum than truly feel it. When Gwyn died, she was more upset for his children than the loss of the king. She grieved that the king never appreciated his youngest as she should have been appreciated, that he never made amends with his firstborn, that he pushed such responsibility onto his already struggling eldest daughter. She grieved his failings and their impact, not his death, a secret she keeps close to the chest knowing how further deified the godfather has become in the centuries since.

I think this silent sense of grief for lives unlived deepens once she takes on Nito’s dominion and is further separated from others. Others will die, in time, god and human, king and beggar, all passing into what is now her keeping -- but she never will. She will stand and watch all things fall, and in the dark of the grave all will be reunited. Her grief is exhausting then, to watch old friends enter her dominion without a word, to see children she once doted upon be broken and put out of their misery during the final sputters of the light. In its final form, her grief is unexpressed but it is powerful, and she presses on because someone must when the rest are gone.

That said, at it’s deepest, Hel is seen to express her grief violently. For a brief period in the story, she’s openly gunning for the Undead after they kill Nito, pulled back from claiming them permanently only by their own undying nature and the firm rebuke of the Dark Sun. In turn, the loss of her beloved, even though they had been separated for at least a few decades, is expressed in the fact she’s hunting members of the Church of the Deep for sport. Just a widow and her scythe, demanding blood black as ichor for divine blood as if it can ever measure up.

BELLADONNA : how does your muse respond to silence ? do they take comfort in soundlessness , or seek to fill the void with noise ?

It depends on the situation, honestly! Silence is sort of the resting state of her home, where ones duties as a servant of the Graves should be done peacefully and with care taken not to disturb the dead. This manifests in a lack of light and treating the deceased with a sort of hushed reverence so their rest will be as comfortable as possible. The Fenito keep their work sacrosanct, though there are certain regions within their Lord’s dominion where the dead do not reach where japery and more open fraternization is encouraged. Even so, some of her siblings prefer to keep their silences, and so Hel is always comfortable with it. Silence, when comfortable or sacred, feels like home to her, and so she cherishes it.

However, she’s well aware that is the way of the Graves, and that the world outside is not beholden to such practices. Sometimes silences can be downright eerie even to her, a mark of the Darkness, a reminder of how far the splendor of a city has fallen. It can be an omen of violence past or present, or a mystery best left unpursued. In those moments, she might retreat from perceived threat as quietly as possible, or fill the still air with song or some other distraction from empty halls and paths.

In the good old days, especially, she sought to fill silences, eager to ask questions and make merry and in some way belong to the world of Light and all its decadence. Laughter was her calling card then, and fast-moving feet as she fled from whatever innocent mischief she wrought in Gwyn’s hall. Yet she loved more than anything to make those around her join in her mirth, whether by word or deed, and so she coveted the sound of other voices, of approval in her actions.

FERN : does your muse believe in magic or cosmic forces , or are they more likely to think their life is ultimately a matter of their own control ?

Magic is real and her dearest companion is a master of the craft. There are energies across all levels of the world which lend themself to those dedicated to their pursuit, and Hel thinks that’s actually pretty neat. Except for when it, like, drives the Paledrake mad or causes women to go missing in the night or -- Okay, maybe magic is far more a neutral force in this world. Neutral in that it falls to the wielder to decide what to do with it, rather than magic defining the user as some assume.

Hel is a staunch believer in accountability and the power of personal decision. be it in magic or life. She has, in the flow of the age, seen a lot of people do terrible things and then blame it on tradition, on necessity, on doing wrong for the right reasons. Perhaps due to her morality having developed separately from most surface-dwellers, she is very against the end justifies the means. Honestly the only reason she didn’t pull back from the plot to keep the flame burning sooner was just because the Undead needed to be dealt with, and at least this way the curse served some purpose. Notably, the second others spoke of using a living child as kindling she balked and abandoned everything she loved and called home after the loss of her Lord.

You can justify your choices through the Flame, through Gwyn, through your Covenant, through your orders, but at the end, all are left with how far they chose to go in that pursuit, and in that they must reflect and, if finally able to assert themself as more than pawn, atone. You cannot blame any force or power for personal failing, no matter if it might help you sleep at night -- or so Hel sees it.

SAGE : what is your muse’s legacy ? what do they want to be remembered for & what might they actually be remembered for ?

There’s actually a little headcanon title I gave Hel that really sums it up in certain time periods. Lunar Shadow -- that is, the shadow cast by the moon as depicted by Gwyndolin. She is the shade and mystery that clings fast to Luna in a lonely sky, the reflection of her will and power. Hel is never her lover’s pawn the way others accuse her, as shown in that she’s willing to butt heads with Gwyndolin on certain facets of the plan and her place in it, but she is inextricably linked to her all the same. Many will remember her as ally and acolyte of the Holy City in its twilight, bound to its cause like marriage vows.

In the golden age, however, she was the Mourning Princess, grey-clad and dust-soaked, a death that was both fair and welcoming. Others cossetted the strange creature, looked to her for amusement she, as already outlined, was all too willing to provide. Many godkin who fled will remember her for that, her good nature and sharp tongue, and a generous nature that adored even the most wretched creature that slithered across her host’s hall. The ending that most write is that she’s still in that city today, entangled in the arms and scaled limbs of that which she loved most dearly -- and for a time, they are not wrong.

Time shifts, however. In a far flung future, her Lord has been forgotten by all but her siblings, and she has risen to take Nito’s place. She’s revered as a goddess of death, Death-Who-Walks among the inhabitants of some far-flung land, black-clad and with a voice like song, ever-watchful. But Gods rise anew, in a land of snow and moonlight, and she is Queen, she is Beloved, she is the future of a people she never quite belonged to, the silk to glove her patron’s iron will. Her statues stand in the courtyards and palace, commissioned by one who loves her and wanted to depict what she saw as beauty. These stand even after that love has faded into opposition. And after her lover is gone, she is Avenger, Warrior, the Bane of heretics.

What I’m getting at here is that Hel’s legacy is different things to different people, from a stately queen of the dead to a curiosity in the eyes of gods. She’s the widow and divorcee depending on whose record you follow in her love life, and she’s both the hunter of heretics who spites the Church of the Deep and the vocal defender of a certain Prince’s choice to damn the Flame. She can’t really be neatly divided into simple lore because so much of what she is seems contradictory. That’s perfectly valid, too, as many that will be reduced to simple legacies were so much more than a condensed story as well.

All Hel wants, really, after she leaves the Land of Lord’s behind once there is no one left to tether here there, is to be remembered as someone who tried for others. Someone who fought for more than the legacy of a fool and the flame he coveted, someone who was able to see the bigger picture and hopefully leave an impact through her words and actions. But then, after all her life was over the extended age, I think the most she hopes for is to be forgotten and allowed to slip safely out of the narrative to make her own somewhere in the growing Dark.

#royaldragonslayerornstein #they can't get into my head [HEADCANON]#i can no longer close my eyes while the world around me dies [V: DARK SOULS]#I TOOK MY TIME WITH THESE I AM... CONTENT.

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monstersdownthepath · 5 years

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Spiritual Spotlight: Phlegyas, the Consort of Atheists

True Neutral Psychopomp Usher of Atheists, Legacies, and Reincarnation

Domains: Artifice, Earth, Knowledge, Repose Subdomains*: Industry, Petrification, Memory, Psychopomp

Concordance of Rivals, pg. 16

Obedience: Spend an hour creating something from the dead, such as by making jewelry or clothing from hair, flesh, bones, or teeth. Alternately, mummify or embalm a corpse. Benefit: Gain a +2 insight bonus on saving throws against Divine magic.

(*IMPORTANT NOTE: The Subdomains are my best guess; Subdomains are not listed in Concordance of Rivals.)

Macabre! I hope you’ve got a good explanation for your party about why you’re being a ghoulish scavenger, but personally I’ve yet to be in a party where there were no scavenger types. It seems that every group of people has at least one person who takes handfuls of teeth or other trophies from their kills, but that may just be a bigger signifier about what kinds of people that I hang out with than a true analysis of this Obedience.

It’s an easy Obedience to do if you can quell your party’s fears about your chosen medium for your arts and crafts, because as an adventurer, you’re not likely to have a shortage of usable parts. Hell, just ONE complete body has enough materials to carry you through several days or even weeks of this Obedience because you can just perform some scrimshaw on the larger bones before using the smaller ones as pieces for a larger work. For people who want a bit more oomph in their crafting, I’m not 100% certain on Pharasma and the Usher’s tolerance of using the dead as crafting material for your own Construct minions, but ‘creating something from the dead’ lends itself to some pretty broad interpretations. You can, technically, use them to make Wondrous Items like weaving their leather into a Bag of Holding, even. Crafting magic items takes way more than 1 hour to do, obviously, so you can really only combine this Obedience with your crafting during downtime... Unless they’re potions, in which case they take a mere 2 hours if they cost less than 250gp.

That counts, right? All else fails, though, a Sack Of Rats can be used here. Just pull one out, clonk it dead, and preserve that tiny corpse.

And while my mind is on it, this Obedience couples phenomenally with the Harvest Parts, Grisly Ornament, and Monstrous Crafter feats.

Also, the benefit is great. A blanket +2 on saves versus Divine spells from any source and any alignment? Sign me up! Unfortunately, it doesn’t really protect you from spell-like abilities, and the bonus by itself is rather small, but it’s always nice to have just an always-on bit of extra protection you don’t need to think about. Like Mage Armor!

Boons are gained slowly, gained at levels 12, 16, and 20. Servants of the Monitors, though, can enter the Proctor Prestige Class as early as level 8. If entered as early as possible, you can earn your Boons at levels 10, 14, and 16. You MUST take the Monitor Obedience feat, NOT Deific Obedience. Monitors grant only a single set of Boons.

Boon 1: Creator's Whispers. Gain Crafter's Fortune 3/day, Object Reading 2/day, or Detect Anxieties 1/day.

Crafter’s Fortune and Object Reading aren’t too useful in the day-to-day, lets get that out of the way. Fortune grants a target a +5 bonus to the next Craft check they make, which is GREAT for people in your party who actually create things (like you, potentially), but you don’t need it 3/day unless everyone is making stuff. You can also use it in tandem with the Fabricate spell, of course, but in general you likely won’t need it more than once a day.

Object Reading has its niche uses in a Whodunnit mystery or tracking down the owner of a particular item, allowing you to quickly gather information of whose hands the target has passed, but the +10 Appraise check is actually only worth +1 fact, giving you a minimum of +2 facts... which is all you probably need anyway. It’s up to you whether or not that means this ability is useful, but know that the +10 means that a mere 2 or 3 points in Appraise makes it impossible to fail your reading.

Which leaves Detect Anxieties, which works as Detect Thoughts, but instead of the infinitely more useful analysis of the victim’s surface thoughts, you instead learn of whatever anxieties and fears are plaguing its mind. While still potentially useful, this translates in-game to only providing a paltry +2 to Intimidation checks, which I think should be significantly higher. Perhaps you could also get bonuses to other skill checks if you choose to sooth their anxieties rather than exploiting them?

That being said, it’s a useful spell for scanning hallways and rooms for concealed enemies, and its ability to pass through the same materials Detect Thoughts can means you can peer into some rooms without opening the doors and get a general feel of the room’s mood. All three of these spells, however, remain pretty niche, making it difficult to pick which one to take each day.

Boon 2: Evader of Consequence. You can cast Reincarnate or Mindwipe 1/day as a spell-like ability. You must select which when you perform the obedience for that day.

Mindwipe slaps a target with 2 temporary negative levels if they fail their save, with the side-effect of instantly wiping out the target’s two highest-level spells or spell slots, as well as erasing the knowledge of two of their highest-level spells known. It’s an alright spell in the hands of players, shaving -10 HP off the enemy and hitting them with a -2 penalty to every roll they make, and eating two of the caster’s most powerful tools in one go can cripple whatever trump card they had in their pocket.

Unfortunately, it’s negated entirely by a save, and a Will save at that. It’s going to be difficult to actually have it land on a caster for its full effect, but at the very least you can still aim it at the enemy frontline to debuff them for a few days.

That being said, Reincarnation is an interesting choice. Normally costing 1,000gp to cast, you pay nothing for this power. It requires only a small portion of a dead body to use and creates a new one in the prime of their youth, allowing the caster to bypass the usual “no old age” restriction of life-granting magic, allowing it to bring back people living way past their time. Also, since Reincarnate works on bodies less than a week old, you can just keep preparing Mindwipe until someone dies!

The true power of this Boon, however, is that it’s essentially a free Raise Dead that needs only a pinch of corpse dust to work, provided you’re feeling lucky on the slot machine of potential races to come back as. Some... complications may arise if they reincarnate as a race that doesn’t mesh well with their build, but the fact you get the spell for free means that you can just keep trying day after day if you need to. On a morbid note, this means you’ll never really be at a loss for parts for your Obedience! ... Or food, I suppose.

Boon 3: Though Only Breath. After completing your Obedience, choose one Craft, Perform, or Profession skill. Until you next perform your Obedience, you gain a +10 insight bonus on checks to create something permanent with your chosen skill, such as carving a statue, writing a play, or drafting meaningful legislature. A check result of 40 or higher indicates that the object you create is of such astonishing quality that it will remain in the public consciousness for generations to come. This bonus does not apply to checks made to earn money.

I hope you’re the party craftsman, because come level 16, everything you do has a chance of becoming something famous and beautiful. Note that, while this ability cannot be used to craft scrolls or potions, using it to craft magical items is perfectly valid. ALSO NOTE, though, that this affects your Craft check, not your Spellcraft check, so allocate your skill points accordingly. Spellcraft allows you to construct any magical item, but specific Craft checks are needed for things like working leather, carving stone, etc.

On the plus side, golems and other magical Constructs often require specific Craft checks to build rather than just relying on Spellcraft, allowing you to craft mechanical minions with greater accuracy than ever before. If your items cost less than 1000gp to create you can get them finished in one day, allowing you to swap your bonuses to another one if need be.

Two things about this Boon are cute: The first is that you can also use it to bolster Perform or Profession, and the second is the final portion, in which an especially impressive construction will endure “in the public consciousness for generations to come,” implying that whatever you make will either be so astonishingly breathtaking or so unbelievably horrifying that people won’t be able to stop thinking about it for centuries. Amusing as that is when making something that costs less than 1000gp, it’s still apparently noteworthy enough to have whispers of it passed from parent to child.

This makes spreading propaganda pathetically easy, by the way. Since Profession checks can be just about anything, you can go buck wild with Profession (Lawmaker) or Profession (Mayor) or Profession (Novelist)! ... Or, as my DM pointed out, a futuristic setting could have you use your Profession (Blogger) or Profession (Instagram Influencer) clout to shape the public zeitgeist. Even if they don’t like you or your ideas, they’ll be talking about you, possibly until long after you’re gone.

Even if you can’t change the world, but you can sure as hell leave your mark in it.

You can read more about her here.

#Spiritual Spotlight #Neutrality Notes #Pathfinder #Dungeons and Dragons

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judesowndaughter · 5 years

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NOTE: Alright fuck it discussion of why Helen is the way she is and her relationship with Kate is impossible to salvage/make better under the cut. Content warnings tagged below. This is by no means a fun read, but it is meant to flesh out Helen’s character and provide a reason as to why she resorts to victim blaming and abuse even in instances where Kate comes to severe harm. Context is important, so before getting into it, I would encourage people to read this post about Richard and Helen, and this post about Helen’s view of Kate.

Helen Brewer and her siblings were taught that family is a divinely-ordered hierarchy: a woman is subordinate to her husband, and children are subject to both husband and wife. Papa Brewer was thus given carte blanche to abuse, humiliate, and control both his wife and children. As an adult, Helen herself faced a considerable amount of resistance from her family due to attending college and having a lucrative career. But the more she successfully rebelled against her father, the more Helen’s view of family changed. Her victories were proof that anyone in her family could resist her father, and Helen began to despise her mother for "taking it like a doormat”. According to Helen, God’s hierarchy was merely a set of loose guidelines; family was a permanent struggle to seize or maintain control. Everyone is a competitor---including one’s own children. By the time Kate is 16, Helen is confident that her husband is (unbeknownst to him) subordinate to her, although she worries that her eldest daughter will undercut her authority and usurp control over the family. In Helen’s mind, she has good reason to fear Kate: her firstborn is loved by her siblings, and Richard wouldn’t take Kate’s side if her ever discovered the extent of Helen’s abuse. Helen’s fear of Kate is why she resorts to physically abusing and belittling her own daughter: so long as Kate believes she is powerless, then Helen’s paranoia is temporarily soothed. Hurting Kate is also an outlet for Helen’s fear and repressed resentment towards her husband and other adults that she cannot directly hurt or control. The thought or even reality of Kate dying is a source of profound relief to Helen precisely because she views her daughter as the greatest threat to her authority. While Kate’s death may bring negative attention to the family, the impact is softened by pity and condolences---two emotions that are easy for Helen to weaponize in her quest to maintain power and reputation. Not only is Kate’s death a darkly ironic boon to Helen, it also vindicates her toxic belief that Kate was always a disappointment. It is ultimately easier for Helen to cope with her firstborn child as a martyr or tragic figure than Kate living and (consequently) becoming her own person. The latter possibility endangers Helen's worldview, and (according to her, at least) could result in a significant loss of influence over her family. But Helen’s malice serves as her downfall: her lack of concern over Kate’s wellbeing is something that even a neglectful Richard will refuse to tolerate. Should Kate be severely injured (either by Helen’s hand or a third party) her callous disregard for her daughter is ultimately her marriage’s undoing.

#;;selling faith on the go tell crusade #;;down to the river we will run #tw suicide #tw internalized misogyny #tw neglect #tw abuse #tw victim blaming

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shakespearerants · 7 years

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Book Review #2

Blurb: According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world’s only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner. So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing. Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon - both of whom have lived amongst Earth’s mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle - are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture. And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist ...

Some Stats: first published 1990, ISBN-13: 978-0-06-085398-3; ISBN-10: 0-06-08598-0, 419 pages in the paperback edition (including foreword and authors’ notes). No chapters but divided into nine parts of varying length, third-person omniscient narrator, written in past tense. Style is standard to colloquial, lots of dialogue. Took me about four to five hours to get through, but I read very very fast, so I’d estimate about eight to fifteen hours for the average to slow reader.

Synopsis: At the beginning of the story, we follow the demon Crowley, who receives an assignment from his superiors who contact him through his car radio. The scene switches to a small hospital on the British countryside, where three women are simultaneously giving birth to sons. Crowley enters, bringing in another baby, who is revealed to be the antichrist. The nuns who run the hospital and are members of a satanic order are instructed to switch the antichrist with the son of the American Cultural Attaché, who’s wife is one of the three women giving birth, but through a misunderstanding, he is switched with the son of Mr. and Mrs. Young, two very ordinary people, instead. This leads to the forces of Heaven and Hell trying to influence the wrong child, as The Plan foresees that the antichrist will bring the end of the world at age eleven, and both sides are trying to gain the upper hand. Meanwhile, Crowley and his friend, the angel Aziraphale, who collects rare books and owns a bookshop in Soho, are the only ones who have realised the mistake, but, out of fear for punishment, decide to keep quiet on the matter and search for the boy themselves. The Apocalypse won’t be put off, though, and the four horsemen War, Famine, Pollution, and Death begin to gather in order to start the last big war that will destroy the planet earth. The only person who realises this is Anathema Device, a legacy of Agnes Nutter, the author of the only one hundred percent correct book of prophecies, The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter Being a Certaine and Presice History from the Present Day Unto the Endinge of this World. She recently moved to the town where the antichrist, who was named Adam, is growing up, though she has no idea who the angelic looking boy that comes to asks her if she is a witch really is. One evening, she crashes into Crowley’s car with her bike, which results in Aziraphale, who was accompanying the demon in his search for the hospital to which he long ago delivered Adam, insisting they give her a ride home and Anathema forgetting the book containing the prophecies in the car, where Aziraphale eventually finds it and, without telling Crowley, takes it with him and begins decoding the thing. The two supernatural beings didn’t find the antichrist, and soon, the situation begins to escalate: Crowley’s superiors find out about the mistake and want to drag him back to hell, and Aziraphale’s superiors unexpectedly call him back to heaven. The antichrist, provoked by some occult magazines he borrowed from Anathema, begins to show his powers, and it seems as though the world is ending. The Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse try to launch all of the world’s nuclear weapons and are stopped by Adam, who has come to his senses, his friends, Anathema, Crowley, Aziraphale, and Witchfinder Private Newton Pulsiver, who has befriended Anathema. The epic showdown at the end consists of Adam and his friends fighting agains the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse. Adam then restores the world to its previous state (with the slight exception of Aziraphale’s bookshop) and erases everyone’s memory.

Personal Opinion: Read it it’s awesome. This is the first time that I’ve actually fully agreed with all those newspaper statement thingies they print on the covers of books nowadays go read it it’s hilarious. You can literally see the authors sitting in front of their typewriters and dying of laughter if you squint at the text hard enough. Aziraphale and Crowley are so well thought out and the whole thing is just one giant epic heavenly fuck up it’s beautiful.

Critique: I was a bit irritated towards the middle when most of the side characters were introduced and the story stopped following mostly Crowley and Aziraphale and started switching around more, but you get used to it quickly, because they don’t just pop up totally out of the blue, they’re introduced at times when it makes sense to widen the PoV a bit. Also one might get the feeling that the events leading to the final show-down are drawn out a bit, but only if you stop reading to think about how long it’s been Friday, and, really, you can overlook that.

Would I recommend this book? If yes for whom? If no why? Yes, I would recommend this book to anyone who’s a fan of end-of-the-world humour a la The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or to anyone who’s got a bit of time and wants something to laugh. It’s one of those books that really suck you in, and there’s dozens of side characters, so you might want to read it all in one go. Ideal for cold, rainy autumn days.

Do not read this book if...

...You're looking for a book that takes itself seriously.

...You despise British and/or black humour.

...You don’t like footnotes.

T/W: Satanism (non-explicit; not graphic); religious, extraterrestrial and supernatural themes; character death (explicit and non-explicit); Apocalypse (natural disasters); loss of memory; witchcraft; temporary destruction of a bookshop; permanent destruction of valuable/rare books; gore; car and motorcycle crashes (some with fatal outcome)

#books #book rec #book review #terry pratchett #neil gaiman #good omens #the nice and accurate prophecies of agnes nutter

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angelofdirewolves · 7 years

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Underneath the Stars Playlist

This is a playlist of songs that I listened to when writing this story, or that have special meaning in regards to the characters. Apologies for length despite that it’s only songs long, because I got very meta-y in compiling this and quoting the songs and explaining why they fit. Spoilers for the entire fic are present in the meta paragraphs, and links to each song are embedded in the name.

Songs Mentioned in Fic:

Light on the Horizon by determamfidd “There’s a light on the horizon, there’s a ship upon the sea, now the world is so much wider, for you wander it with me.” This song is one of many that was written, composed, and performed by the author of the absolutely stunning LoTR fanfic Sansúkh. Sansúkh is a story about family and healing and what it means to forgive yourself and to forgive others, even if it is too late, thus making it extremely fitting for the end of this story, because all of them need to learn to forgive each other, to heal the breaches that time has wrought, and nothing exemplifies that better than this fic, and no song promises that better future than Light on the Horizon.

The Star Cycle: A series of three songs that are all based on the stars, not an official term, just one coined by me for the fic, because Aoife would have little playlists of three or four songs and call them pretentious names, mostly created when she was a child with Amanda.

Underneath the Stars by Kate Rusby. “Underneath the stars you met me, underneath the stars you left me … they come and go of their own free will, go gently.” Jenny’s favorite song of the Star Cycle, and the titular song of the fic. While Jenny adored this song long before the events of this fic, it becomes especially poignant once Aoife abandons her to go complete the Kolavar. The song speaks of being abandoned by one who loves you for your own good, and about someone who has no friends but the stars. It rings painfully true both before and after the events of this story.

All the Stars by the Wailin Jennys “All the Stars in the sky say goodbye say goodbye, we were here yesterday now it seems so far away … oh you don’t know me, you know one side of the story.” Keith’s favorite song of the Star Cycle. Again, this becomes very poignant when Keith is on earth, because no one can truly know him there, and he has no one but Shiro, and even he leaves to go to Kerberos eventually. Even into canon, no one really knows him because he keeps shut about his relationship to Zarkon, and to Aoife and Jenny because he’s always been trained to keep quiet about that, even with people who he’s supposed to trust, and trusting is still a difficult concept for him.

Starlight by the Wailin Jennys “I have come back to you broken, take me home … kingdom come their will was done, and now the earth is far away from any kind of heaven, take us home.” Aoife’s favorite song of the Star Cycle and the song Jenny was singing when Shiro found her. Aoife has always internalized her relationship with Zarkon and Lotor and Haggar more than Keith has, and Jenny is the only other one that comes close. She was raised in part by them, and if not for the interference of her mother, she would have thought that the way they were raising her, to be the unbreakable face of the empire was the way things always were, the only way things could be. The only thing that she doesn’t like about this song is a line about the singer being in need of mercy, because she doesn’t feel that she deserves mercy for anything she has done.

Ave Maria by Kevin Memley “Ave Maria, gratia plena (translated) Hail Mary Full of Grace.” This song is rerecorded by Aoife to be Ave Amanda, because she reveres her mother in a way that elevates her almost to sainthood. Also rings true because due to science, Amanda does not have children in the normal way- Aoife enjoys those particular coincidences. Jana’s name also means Grace, and Amanda was the one that named her, so there’s also that connection.

Aoife’s Songs:

Uneven Odds by Sleeping at Last “I once knew your father well. … As your guardian I was instructed well, to make sense of their love in these fires of hell.” Aoife’s song for Keith and Jenny, because she was the one that raised them all on her own from the time that she was fifteen, still half a child herself. She loves Keith and Jenny with everything that she has, but sometimes that isn’t enough, because she knows that Keith deserves Amanda, and she knows that sometimes she can’t even look at Jenny without thinking about the trauma Aoife suffered at the hands of Jenny’s unknown father. So she sees herself both as the guardian and as the fires of hell for them both.

Sun by Sleeping at Last “We are the dust of dust, the apple of God’s eye. … We are infinite as the universe you hold inside. … let there be light let me be right.” Aoife was Zarkon’s beloved granddaughter, and he was the closest thing to a god that exists for the majority of the universe. She was also Haggar’s niece and protégé. Aoife is the most powerful manipulator of the fabric of universe ever recorded by the druids and ‘taught’ by the next most powerful quintessence user. She’s constantly hoping that she is the one that is right, the one that will prevail against these two night divine beings.

Third Eye by Florence and the Machine “That original lifeline. … There’s a whole where your heart lies and I can see it with my third eye, and my touch it magnifies… I’m the same, I’m the same, I’m trying to change.” In the battle that kills Zarkon, Aoife loses Thace, who she’s been bonded with at the brain since they were children, as seen in the interludes, the person that kept her alive by his mental support after the death of her mother, and he’s gone, so she gets much, much worse, which leads her to the Kolavar. At the end of the story, coming out of the healing pod into Keith and Jana’s arms, Aoife recognizes how much she has hurt her children by her actions and her lessons. She has a lot of amends to make, and she’s trying to change, but it’s a difficult process that will take time and a lot of effort, and not a few relapses. But she’s trying, and for now, that’s enough.

Jenny’s Songs:

North by Sleeping at Last “We will call this place our home … We’ll tell our stories on these walls … We call this fixer upper home.” Jenny’s main issue beyond her family, is that she never had a place to call home. They never stayed anywhere more than a few days, a few weeks if she was lucky. The closest thing to a permanent home she had was the ship Aoife stole when she escaped, and while that was where she lived, it wasn’t home, because it was so incredibly small and so confining to all of them. Once they landed on a new planet the basic way it went was to leave the ship and stay outside it as long as they could before they had to leave again. Jenny knows every piece of the machinery, but it wasn’t her home. Aoife had a home for six to fourteen years, and Keith (from her viewpoint) had a home for five years, but Jenny has never had one and feels that loss keenly.

Pluto by Sleeping at Last “I leaned in and let it hurt, let my body feel the dirt. … Show me where my armor ends, show me where my skin begins.” Jenny right as she starts to fight with Keith. She’s been strong for so very long, her whole life. Repressing her anger towards her mother, repressing her anger towards Keith, and when Keith said everything would go back to the way it was she just snapped and let all those walls she built over her life down. She loves her mother, loves her little uncle, but she had to wear armor to be around them, after those five years of Aoife’s grief, and Keith not being there. She doesn’t quite know where her love for them and her anger for them meet, but with time and a thousand apologies and honest open conversation, facilitated by Coran, she will be able to get there, eventually.

Queen of Peace by Florence and the Machine “Oh the King gone mad within his suffering … And now you have me on the run, the damage is already done … like a boat into oblivion because you’re driving me away.” For Jenny after Keith ‘died’ this was her life, Aoife gone mad because of his loss, and damaging her daughter in her wake. She’s asking Aoife if this is what she wanted. The fact that Light on the Horizon at the end of the story mentions there being a ship upon the sea indicated that the love between them has been drawn back from oblivion, but not quite to solid land yet.

Keith’s Songs:

East by Sleeping at Last “I set out to rule the world … so I draw my sword with the morning sun… I bear little resemblance to the king I once was, I bear little resemblance to the king I could become, maybe paper is paper, maybe kids will be kids.” Even though Keith was the younger sibling, he was the second in line to the imperial throne right after Lotor. Jenny was after him, then Haggar, and then Aoife after her, because Druids are automatically placed at the bottom of the line of inheritance because it’s more important to the Galra that they serve the Ladies first and then the clan. So Keith always knew, even though he wasn’t living with the Galra that he was in the line to rule the Galaxy, and when he was a little toddler he thought that was awesome, but as he grew up and realized the damage that the Galra Empire did, he went nope away from the thought. And now he’s a member of Voltron, and entity that while not ruling the Universe, is going to rebuild it, which is a different type of ‘kingship’ than what he idolized as a kid, but is more suited to the realities of the universe as it is.

Mercury by Sleeping at Last “In a holding pattern to find myself, … I’ll go anywhere you want, anywhere you want me. … to know the worth of my life made of precious metals.” Keith basically stifled on Earth for five years because he was desperate to know where Amanda came from, because he didn’t worship her the way Aoife did, but he needed to know about who she was where she came from, if she could have ever loved him. The precious metals line and the fact that his made-up-by-necessity last name means gold is just a bonus.

Which Witch by Florence and the Machine “I’ve had enough, it’s obvious, and I’m getting tired of crawling all the way … been in the dark since the day we met, fire help me to forget.” Keith is actually, genuinely surprised that he wasn’t recognized by anyone before Jenny. Allura and Coran he can let slide as they were asleep while Amanda and Aoife were in the universe, but everyone else? The Olkari and the Taujeeri, and the Galra, and the Balmerans? Amanda was well popularized, she went to events at Zarkon’s and Lotor’s sides and was praised as mother to the next generation of the empire, and Keith looks scarily like Amanda. He’s fairly sure that Zarkon recognized him when they fought while the others were rescuing Allura, when he started the taunting about ‘you fight like a Galra soldier’, to which Keith was internally like, ‘DUH of COURSE, because I was ENGINEERED THIS WAY TO YOUR SPECIFICATIONS’ while he wasn’t terrified out of his mind. Zarkon and Lotor and Haggar have been a shadow over him for his entire life, and he’s ready to cast them off and cast them away.

Miscellaneous Songs:

Why We Build The Wall? By Anais Mitchell This song doesn’t get a quote, because if I started quoting it I’d never stop. This describes perfectly the mentality of the Galra Empire, their teaching strategies, call and response echoing back ten thousand years, so that the ones in charge don’t even need to give the answer, because it’s so ingrained into their subjects. Jenny will listen to this and cry whenever she’s feeling particularly maudlin over her family.

Leave my Body by Florence and the Machine “I don’t want no future, I don’t need no past, one bright moment is all I ask. I’m going to leave my body, I’m gonna lose my mind. (Moving up to higher ground.)” The inspiration behind the Kolavar ritual in song format. The total subjugation of your past, any chance at a future, for one moment of judgement. Ignoring the needs of the body and becoming lost in your mind for weeks beforehand.

Daughter of Heaven by Kate Rusby “Oh Daughter of Heaven, oh daughter of now, the stars are your jewels, the rubies your crown, we all stand in awe of your right to astound, she’s gone to a new place now” This is the way that the universe as a whole sees Allelee and Aoife. Allelee as the daughter of traitor Altea, saved by her love for the Galra King-turned-Emperor. Aoife as the granddaughter of that same Emperor. They ultimately wind up leaving the reach of the Empire, Allelee through death, and Aoife though escaping into the border lands and never leaving it. Also Zarkon called Aoife his jewel, and she wore rubies as part of her ceremonial dress, as Allelee did. (They went surprisingly well with her hair, which was more of a red orange, than her little brother’s neon orange.)

Only if For a Night by Florence and the Machine “My body was bruised and I was set alight, … and although I was burning, you’re the only light, only if for a night.” This is Aoife and Thace in a nutshell. They’re each other’s light, each other’s source of hope, of sanity in a world gone mad at the whim of a family of dictators. They were tied together by a mental bond, one that wasn’t romantic, but was in the process of developing in that direction before it was interrupted by Haggar and then by Aoife’s pregnancy. They only saw each other in the flesh twice after Aoife ran away from her family, once before Lotor caught Aoife and once after, which marked the turning point in her use of illusions of Keith, only for a day and a night each time, because Aoife could never stay in the same place, and Thace had two opposing masters who he could almost never flee from. Thace would have sent her an apology through the bond before he died in the season 2 finale, and Aoife screamed and then went silent, though her mind was never silent, it was just a wail of anguish until she could speak to Jenny again.

#underneath the stars #playlist #MUSIC #my playlists

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memcriae · 7 years

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100 ᴅᴀʏs ᴏꜰ ʜᴇᴀᴅᴄᴀɴᴏɴs. Cross Marian. ( 1 - 16 )

day #001 : : childhood

as an orphaned child, cross resented adults for a good portion of his childhood, and often acted out against any authority imposed upon him. he was an especially great nuisance to the pastor who took him in, although his growing years gradually sobered him up to the old man.

it was because of this that, although cross behaves largely the same way now, he was able to distinguish a manner of authority he didn’t agree with versus that which sought for his own well-being or compelled true justice. he doesn’t agree with the way central runs things, and so he pointedly acts out against regulations put in place by them; on the other hand, he respects komui, even if he does act like a little shit to him.

day #002 : : family

cross never knew his biological family, and had begrudgingly come to regard the pastor he was raised by as a father figure. when he met nea and mana, and eventually allen, he considered them the closest things to family he had otherwise, but he still wouldn’t think of them as more than friends.

day #003 : : dreams

once upon a time, cross dreamt of divine salvation, when he sought solace in god and truly believed he might achieve it one day. then he dreamt of freedom, independence, the discretion to decide what to do with his own life. and then, when both dreams were forcibly taken from him, he dreamt only of peace. peace of mind, peace in life, and to rest in peace. he knows he has duties to fulfill before that dream can become a reality, but for the most part, it’s all he has to hold onto most days.

day #004 : : smile

cross is a man of few words and many masks. one could reasonably argue that he has one for almost every situation one could imagine. of course, at that point it was left to the question of whether or not what he showed was actually a mask. few of his expressions are exactly of the happy variety, but he could scrounge together a good few if he tried hard enough. most of his smiles are sarcastic and leering, while others yet can be deceitfully warm and welcoming. few and infrequent are his smiles that deceive no one and mean no harm, but they exist. they just take a good bit of coaxing to draw out.

day #005 : : strength

the word “strength” has a few different meanings when it comes to cross. he has strength in power, in physical endowment, in knowledge. he has strength in personality—at least he finds his encrypted expressions and fickle moods to be “strong” traits that he’s developed. defense mechanisms, as it were. he garners strength from himself every day he doesn’t give in. to the order, to the noah, to his own self-destruction.

day #006 : : weakness

when it comes right down to it, cross thinks himself weak for several reasons. he’s been forced into a position that has encumbered his ability to act upon his own will, not just in one way, but in two. the order confines him, and nea binds him. he’s come too far, caused too much damage, to back out and start over again now. he is weak in that he hides his weakness, drowns out his immoral deeds, and seeks artificial solace any way he can just for temporary relief. he tries to forget how weak he is, truly, so he can focus on his duty and one day achieve permanent solace.

day #007 : : hope

hope isn’t something that cross holds dear. the way he sees it, hope sets up people for failure. hope is a distraction. despite the standards he claims to hold everything and everyone to, he really holds no expectations for future outcomes. he’s learned that it only leads to disappointment. and besides, when you’re a pessimist, you’re either always right or you get a pleasant surprise. it’s really a win-win situation.

day #008 : : loss

loss is something cross is very familiar with. the loss of his parents, the loss of his faith, the loss of his friends, and, of course, the inevitable loss of his freedom. and this isn’t the freedom of what it means to be a general of the black order. being able to travel the world and go about his own cause is something necessary to his ulterior motive. and, if you think about it, aren’t we all slaves to fate anyway?

day #009 : : desire

everyone is familiar with the rumours about general cross marian’s luxuriant romances, most notably the sheer number. it is not unlikely that one might re-trace cross’s path and find a former lover in most, if not all, town and village he’s happened across. probably rich, own brothels, have parent issues—you know the type. it’s no secret that cross has a way with the ladies ( and even the gentlemen ), and if one followed through with re-tracing his steps, they might find that he’s no stranger to the finer pleasures of life, if you catch the drift. it’s all part of this grand scheme to “fill the void”, as the hot punk bands are singing these days, and leave behind a bigger hole than when he got there. after all, despite what many might claim, he imparts a piece of himself to each and every one of his lovers, and he makes sure they know it.

day #010 : : clothes

one thing you can be sure of when it comes to cross is his impeccable sense of fashion. screw the trends and even the “i hate life too much to be normal”; cross dignifies his own style. he’ll splurge to find the most expensive fabrics—that’s the only way to get good quality, after all. his favourite statement in particular is the kind-of-pirate-kind-of-ballroom-gentleman look, or as he likes to call it, “medial”. clever, right?

day #011 : : destiny

cross may not acknowledge “fate” and “destiny” and all that noise, but he won’t necessarily renounce it either. if so many cultures have devised ways to foresee the future—especially in the case of innocence—then there must be some degree of predictability to life. he prefers not to think about it, seeing as he’s constantly reminded that his own fate is sealed.

day #012 : : school

being raised by a priest had its ups and downs. the downside was that his education had a very skewed perception. as a man who claimed never to have strayed from the “word of god” ( whatever that means nowadays ), father angus was as strict a mentor as he was a surrogate father. he denounced any and all forms of deviant behaviour ( which only made cross want to rebel more ) and delivered due punishment, so all that cross really learned was “make the teacher happy so he’ll leave you alone so you can sneak out later”. needless to say, cross and his adoptive father had something of a strained relationship for a time. but, on the upside of being raised by a priest, he got to call people “sinners” all the time.

day #014 : : work

cross’s responsibilities don’t end as a general of the black order. he’s still a chemist despite the full-time job of traveling the world ( in addition to working for nea, that is ) . when he isn’t on the hunt for innocence and its accommodators, cross is often developing some new serum or executing some reckless experiment. he rather enjoys it, honestly, and has provided his services to the medical department of the order to assist with new medications.

day #016 : : bed

cross’s tastes for luxury extends to most if not all aspects of his life. he managed to slip a four-poster, king-sized mattress into his chamber at headquarters, and along with it extravagant bed dressings and a canopy. of course it’s rarely used, seeing as he rarely ever stays at headquarters long enough to sleep in it during the few and infrequent visits he does take to headquarters.

#&&. ❛ ( cross. chronicles )#i likely will Not be finishing this #so have a compilation of what i did get to

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after-the-fxll · 8 years

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Mortal Healing vs. Divine Healing: The Mechanics of Healing Magic in Aryx’s World

Mortal/Common Healing vs. Divine Healing: The Mechanics of Healing Magic in Aryx’s World

In Aryx’s world, not all healing magic is created equal. It varies by the source of the magical energy and the species of the caster. Mortal magic can only be wielded by humans, while divine magic can be wielded by humans or angels, depending on the situation. Hopefully this will give you some idea of how healing mechanics are managed in Aryx’s world, and where he falls as far as what he is able to cast and how.

Effect of Caster Species on Healing Magic

There are three major species on earth in Aryx’s world that have the ability to cast magic of various types depending on the situation: demons, humans, and angels. As far as healing magic, only humans and angels are capable of casting it, while demons are not. This is because, just purely by biological nature and not considering morality at all, demons are physically permeated with negative energy, humans can be a combination of positive and negative energy skewed accordingly by their actions, and angels are permeated with positive energy. All healing magic is positive, so if a demon were to try to cast healing magic (if such a thing was possible, which it is not) he would injure himself in the process. When casting healing magic, one needs to be capable of one of two things: producing the positive energy to do so oneself, or having the favor of one of the Light deities for them to permit you to channel Their energy to do so. Demons… don’t have either.

The majority of humans do not cast magic in Aryx’s world. This is just because it is a complex, energy-draining, and specialized thing that most humans do not have the strength, education, need, desire, etc. to be able to do so. Only humans with natural talent (sorcerers, soul knights) or who are actually in the ranks of the church of either light god (priest, soul knight, etc.) usually cast magic. Among them, both types of healing are found: mortal healing (soul knights) and divine healing (priests). The types of magic will be covered with energy source and effect on the caster in the next section. All humans can do with their healing spells, regardless of their methods, is heal wounds and illnesses. They cannot regenerate limbs, reattach severed limbs, or bring back the dead. They can, however, remove scars and other deformities from injuries that have already healed.

Angels can only heal through divine means. (Except in really rare, weird cases, which I’ll cover in the next section). Whether created directly by the gods or born of other angels on earth, angels are physically designed to channel divine energy. All their magic, not just healing, is divine in nature. The species of angel, however, greatly affects the strength and nature of the healing spells they can cast. While there are only two power levels of humans (new souls and reincarnated souls), there are three ranks of demons and angels. There are common demons (imps, harpies, succubae, incubi, etc.), archdemons (fiends, devils, etc.), and infernal seraphim. Likewise, there are common angels (natural-borns on earth, common created angels; can exist on earth or in the heavens; one relatively small pair of wings), archangels (guardian angels, gate soldiers; only found in the heavens unless they fall; two medium- and equal-sized pairs of wings), and holy seraphim (three pairs of wings: one small, one medium, and one large sized; only found in the heavens except through intervention of The One). Rank determines power, and therefore the abilities of their healing spells:

Common Angels – Their healing magic is much like that of humans. All they can do is heal illnesses and wounds and correct scarring or deformity.

Archangels – Everything a common angel can do plus they can do it much faster. In addition, they can save severed limbs if the limb is available to reattach and a healing spell can be cast within minutes of it being severed. They are also capable of wound-transference spells, in which a protection spell is cast on a subject by the archangel, and then should that subject become wounded, the archangel would incur the wounds in the subject’s place. Wound-transference is especially performed by archangels in service to the Father of Protection, as they are defensive spells designed to protect innocents and/or those not able to defend themselves by letting the angel shoulder the damage and pain of the wounds instead.

Holy Seraphim – They can do everything archangels can do but no prayer is needed, the spells can be cast almost instantly. While not even holy seraphim can bring back the dead (only the greater gods and The One can do that), they can regenerate lost limbs and other body parts, even after wounds have healed and the limb or body part may be long gone. So for example if an angel loses a wing or a human loses an arm, years after the fact a holy seraph would be able to regrow the wing or arm from the site of the wound with a powerful spell. This spell is not instant, however, and can take up to an hour to complete, depending upon the size and complexity of the body part to be regenerated.

Effect of Energy Source on Healing Magic

Healing is not without its cost, and that cost must always be paid. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it must always be balanced… unless you are The One, heh. She is the only being with the power to create or permanently destroy energy. Even the greater gods of Light and Darkness must expend or absorb energy to balance the actions of their followers. So when healing magic is cast, essentially what is happening is that outside energy is being infused into the wounded person (because it is positive energy, its basic forms are light and heat) to replace what he/she has lost. Illness is either a loss of positive energy or an infusion of negative energy, and a wound is the disruption of a person’s aura by damaging the body. In both cases, warmth, energy, and flesh can be lost or disrupted such that repairs and replacements are needed. What healing spells do is convert positive light and heat energy into life force or flesh as needed to repair and replace what the sick or injured person has lost. This energy needs to come from somewhere (other than the wounded person) to maintain the energy balance of the universe, heh. So, it must either come from the spell caster or an outside source.

Mortal and common healers use their own energy (so their own life force) to heal illnesses and wounds. What this means is that the person is either naturally skilled from birth (a soul knight for example) or has been trained how to (a priest) infuse someone else with a portion of their own life force. This is perfectly fine to do as far as the wounded or ill person is concerned, for their missing or damaged energy is replaced and repaired respectively by the life force of the caster. For the caster, however, this can have dire consequences.

First of all, because they are parting with a portion of their life force, they will be weakened by it. They may experience fatigue, confusion, or other side effects, depending upon their skill level, amount of practice, and how many other spells they’ve cast that day. It is possible for a spell caster to inadvertently kill themselves by casting too many mortal healing spells in too little time.

Secondly, because the energy is coming from them, their bodies will mirror the illnesses and wounds of the person they are healing. For example, if I use my own energy to heal your stab wound, what will be missing from me is whatever energy was used to fill in and repair your wound, so I will end up with the same wound on my body. This might seem kindof a dumb tradeoff at first glance, but you have to keep in mind that most healers serve the Stag, the Father of Protection. It is not only their job but their deep desire to protect others, even at great cost to themselves. An adult priest can survive a lot longer with a stab wound than a small child, and so they may transfer the wound to their own body and then wait for divine healing to arrive. At least the child is safe. That is the mentality of those who serve the Stag.

Divine healers certainly have the advantage over mortal healers in that they do not fatigue or suffer negative consequences from healing, nor must they use their own life force. Angels and human priests need only have enough favor with either the Dove or the Stag to cast such spells, and then they can basically do so until the god caps it for some reason, haha, usually if too many are cast in one day. With divine magic, the energy comes from the god whose favor the caster has, and not from the caster’s own life force. In this way, the balance is kept, and the god is weakened in a very minor way for each healing spell that is cast. Gods regenerate their auras fast, though, heh.

Aryx is a divine healer. He gets the energy for all his healing spells, wards, protections, wound-transference spells, etc. from the Stag. So he heals without sustaining damage to himself, except in cases of wound-transference, since that’s what those spells are designed to do.

Exceptions to the Rule

Now… all angels get all their magic, not just healing, from their respective deities, so all of it is divine magic. Humans can go either way depending upon their religion and skill set. However… there have been a couple of very rare cases that have been exceptions to this, namely the cases of Ison and Elestra, two human lovers who, nearly a thousand years after they died, were reborn as angels, Elandrian and Elleth. (Long story, they were very special and valuable souls to the Light gods and so were given special treatment, but I don’t wanna go into all that here.) So essentially, they were common angels with human souls. They were reborn and not new souls, and they were very old, all of which makes them more powerful than the average human or angel. Plus, Elestra was a sorceress who essentially founded the Dove’s church back in the day and was (still is) her highest priestess, and Ison was a soul knight (the most powerful ever seen to date) of the Stag. Both individuals, reborn into common angel bodies, were not only permitted divine magic, but they were permitted to keep whatever natural magic they had as human sorcerers and healers. So they… totally stomped all over all the rules for healing magic, haha. Well, the spells still work the same, it is only that Elandrian can actually choose to heal using his own energy or his god’s, which is a choice 99.9% of other healers in the world do not have.

#aryx #angels and demons #healing magic #world building #the vulture and the dove

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dimartblog · 8 years

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—by Dorothea Konteletzidou*—

About his work, which haw been acclaimed since 1979, Cy Twombly offers little information, admitting that he intentionally ascribes a mysterious power to certain words and images. Influenced by American Abstract Expressionism and Old Word past, the artist came by way of initial process of exploration and investigation to adopt a plastic sensibility that conveys the essence, which is the gesture.

Of course, in no way does his abstract tendency parallel that of american abstraction, despite the fact that in 1950, having already met Robert Rauschenberg, he realized that the painting surface interested him as a surface on which no physical visual experience takes place except a working progress of execution.

Still life, Black Mountain College, 1951

Twombly is an adherent to gestural painting and is opposed to every notion of representation.

His 1953 reference to automatic writing seems to have liberated him from every cultural consideration.

His pictorial “image” corresponds to an inner spirit that has led him to those sacred childhood years when the child, drawing and scribbling, shifts his thoughts away from any speech and image.

The gestural trace becomes the representation of the artist’s thinking, the absence of signifier is replaced by the presence of being. The non-signifying thought is for the artist the first stage before the crystallization, before and culture convention.

At the time, young Twombly was moving in search of the essence, the invisible, which would lead him to what Jean-Jacques Rousseau calls “perfect Harmony with the nature”.[1] Motherwell’s theoretical exploration (for him art had to spark contemplation of fundamentally concerns life, the “essence”)[2] led Twombly to continue his investigations into creative activity at the expense of the illusion.

His image records his gestural movements, setting up a personal relationship between the image and the product. The result is that the “scribblings” of this period function as starting points to artistic creation. Twombly has mentioned his specific concerns for the pleasure in what takes place, thereby literally impelling the instinctual dynamism of his gestural movement to reveal a forgotten memory.

With his reference to automatic and gestural writing, with the vibrancy of his gesture, with his intense scribblings, Twombly goes beyond Pollock’s chicken scratches and drippings. Pollock, in his denial of al personal history, all experience and know-ledge, created a tabula rasa in his desire to approach the collective subconscious.

Letter of Resignation, 1969-1967

In contrast, Twombly does not categorically deny the connection between consciousness and the mechanisms of subconscious. For him the touch of the hand-via the itinerary of thinking and surface, the base of thinking- is fundamental, since it brings creative thinking into direct contact with human life.

He neither seeks to express nor to represent a reaction or an emotion; he simply uses the picture surface as the base for all the movements of his mental life and thinking, so the gestural writing becomes the means of expression that allows him to leave his traces.

Twombly’s 1975 installation in Rome confronted the organic union of past and present that is history. With a cultural tradition, “be it about an idea of God, be it about an idea of man” the Old World,linked to the consciousness of historical time, “emphasizes” for the artist the violence of time through historical monuments that are nothing but “ a degenerate and distorted past”.[3]

Compared with poetry of the monument and ruins, the reference created by their decay turns them into “objects”.[4] Offered up to his gaze, they are testaments to the absence of the sacred. Works of man, they demonstrate the dissolution of form, and abandoned, secluded, reintegrated into nature, they end up being constant reference for Cy Twombly.

Roma (1957) does not portray the city, but takes on an end in itself as writing. “Words have the power to make thinks disappear, to make them appear as disappeared, appearance which is that of a disappearance, presence that returns to absence…”[5]

Untitled (Bolsena). House paint, crayon and pencil on canvas, 200 χ 240 cm (Collection Nicola del Roscio).

Leda and the Swan. Oil, pencil and crayon on canvas, 190.5 χ 200 cm (Private Collectίon, on loan to The Kunstmuseum, Bonn).

In other words, one could regard the image perceived and represented by Twombly, vested with time and experience, as not the same as the one the ancients perceived.

The artist apprehended what knowledge dictated to him- which is nothing more than a piecemeal knowledge of the reality presented- so that the ruins, the inscriptions of the funerary steles, worn by time, leaving few traces of their former meanings, appear in his work without any near past. At last visual language comprises the painting’s main image, so that even the dim shadow of the past appears via the glow of the pictorial image.

As substantial change appeared in his work with use of alphabet script, since up until then his writing was intended to describe personal experience.

By using words as monads reflecting the nature of words, Twombly clarifies language proper as the work, allowing the person, the artist, to appear in a second reading.

The period of the seventies has been characterized by Roland Barthes as the manifestation of “a remembrance, an irony, a posture”; by Roberta smith as a determination to render life through Greco-Roman mythology. Neither of them, however, elaborated on the direct relationship between the artist and the myth.

According to Levi-Strauss, “myth is always the discourse on the origin, the story of the foundation”[6] where legitimacy and arbitrariness, reality and images blend without any particular distinction to define modern man just as easily as they do the man of antiquity and his gods. But in the telling, it dissembles and in this way is unable to reconstruct a “representation that is already distance, loss”.[7]

Twombly’s consequent return to myths, to the genesis of the world, produced a loss of the notion of the primordial myth. Narcissus, Venus, Dionysus, Leda are subjects in which the artist, though a process other than that of imitation, effects a dual reading: one of painting, one of the text.

In Mythologie, Roland Barthes notes that each “object” is open to society’s appropriation and can pass from a real historical state into an oral state, and thus come back to “life”.[8] The object in this case, the myth of Narcissus, appropriated from the artist’s imagination, returns via a personal way of seeing. Distance from all iconography, the artist sets the viewer free to alter the original myth, since his writing defines but an idea.

“Writing is added to speech, affixed like an image or a representation, “writes Derrida, so that, presented as a mirror of speech, it compromises the representation of immediate thought. The result lies in the determination of (indefinite) speech as myth, defining it by plastic means or writing. With the creative act, Twombly detached the myth from the “sacred space where it is preserved”,[9] there be creating in a visual space his own other “myth”, that of the work.

The “myths”, such as Dionysus (1975), Venus (1975), Pan (1975), Orpheus (1975), detached from their identities, are surrendered to a personal appropriation of their meaning that differs from that of classical painting, whose aim is the representation of the “real”.

Classical painting structures its language by the following concepts: the signifier (which encompasses figures, object, forms, lines, colors, perspectives, etc.), the referent (meaning that real to which a similar organization refers) and the signifiant (the symbolic speech that unites the signifier to the referent). These are concepts in which there is a subject of writing and reading that decodifies the picture’s code, referencing a story (religious, secular, etc.). This painting has a constant relationship to the sign, for the pictorial sign is permanently in reference to the real (sign), and in this manner guides thinking with the assistance of the pictorial signifier towards something else, which is the narrative. But knowing that “the most faithfully represented thing is no longer present”,[10] we find ourselves faced with not only a probable change of narrative, but also with an absence of the thing that the painter initially wanted to represent.

Finally, by attempting with visual materials to ignore this absence, classical painting ended up referring with the aid of the signifiant to a sign other than the primary one. Its language since then has referenced a religious or other type of thinking in which speech, as in language, is Being.

Thus we observe that this visual language references the great absence that takes the form of God. The thing that classical painting presents, says Marc Devade, is that which is absent.

In other words, the classical picture doesn’t only exist in the space of its essential representation (pictoral object-real object), but through its visual code it evokes a significative process that impels an interpretation, a “ becoming” text. Just as religion is the interpretation of the Divine Word, likewise visual writing in classical painting refers to a symbolic word; it guides us to what existed in the beginning, to the Divine Word.

Thus Cy Twomly writes names, sometimes rapidly, sometimes nonchalantly, illegibly or not, in an attempt to bring into the space of painting those who are essentially absent. With no reference whatsoever to the real, the artist demonstrates that writing, his writing, helps him to that non-real, other world of Gods. This time it is not through a pictorial sign that the painter wants to narrate, as occurs in classical, but through the letters that directly reference speech.

In contrast to what occurs in classical painting, Twombly has no need of the referent, of a real, because on the one hand, the essential referent as sole reality is the word itself, and on the other, his writing in the form of line that transforms into linear phonetic notation-uniting vocal sounds-references that which preexisted: the Gods.

So if his writing is clumsy, nonchalant, and/or even calligraphic, it does not hinder what he himself wishes to present within the pictorial space: speech, sound, the beginning.

“Each line is inhabited by its own history, it does not explain, it is the event of its own materialization”[11], Twombly remarks. And is detaching the line from the word he frees it from the sign, from the language, in an effort to also utilize and create the pictorial space.

His writing, whether lectical or not, “in ceasing to be the prose of the world”,[12] become free. By producing the visual autonomy of the signs, the artist structures the space in the work around what truly compromises it: words, letters.

As opposed to the Futurist, for who writing had to be readable since it formed the basic element of equilibrium between the visual signs and the ideograms in the work, Twombly appropriating writing, infiltrates the space of graffiti art, where words comprise the plastic syntheses of production of the work. The point of reference in his creative act is not the liberation of words so as approach the immediate language of reality, but the appraisal of the plastic writing behind the names, behind the words.

“Of writing, Twombly keeps the gesture, not the product”[13] In the end, it is the artist’s gesture does not divulge the act of painting (translator’s note: in Greek to paint is a synthesis of to live and to write), since gesture is a pause, an interruption, and not the projection of the self, as we presume.

On this very point also lies the reason for its existence; the significance of the instantaneous painting act registers the moment in time when it acts, not earlier, not later.

Before the “arrival” of the final moment, the gesture is the sole manifestation of the artist’s being, noting however, in its passing the stoppage of time of the past- in other words, death. As a result, the writing exposed to the eyes does not contain life, nor does it manifest the trace of the painting act. What is left of this gestural act is the work itself. By means of plastic syntheses, it constitutes the sole presence.

Cy Twombly’s art has no wish to be either dedication, nor translation of an idea or sentiment:

He creates without appropriating He acts without expecting anything His work accomplished, He does not cling to it, And since he does not cling to it, His work will las.

(Tao Te Ching)

Untitled. House paint and wax on fabric and wood with twine, wire and nails, 39 χ 25.4 χ 10.1 cm (Collection Robert Rauschenberg).

* * *

[1] Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Oeuvres completes. Ed. Gallimard, Paris 1981.

[2] Scarpetta, Guy: Robert Motherwell, Art Press. July, 1977.

[3] Mortier, Roland: La poetique des ruines en France, Ed. Librairies Droz, Geneva, 1975.

[4] lbid.

[5] Blanchot, Maurice: L ‘espace litteraire, Ed, Gallimard, 1955.

[6] Levi-Strauss, Claude: Anthropologie structural, Ed. Plon, Paris, 1974.

[7] lbid.

[8] Barthes, Roland: Mythologies. Ed. Seuil, 1957.

[9] Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques: Art, Mythe et creation, Ed. le Hameau, 1988.

[10] Derrida, Jacques: De la Grammatologie, Ε . Minuit, Paris, 1967.

[11] Barthes, Roland: L’Obvie et l’Obtus, Ed. Seuil, Col. “Tel Oue,” Paris, 1981.

[12] Foucault, Michel: Les mots et les choses, Ε . Gallimard, Paris, 1977.

[13] Barthes, Roland: L’Obvie et l’Obtus, op. cit.

* Dorothea Konteletzidou is an art historian, Phd of theory of art

The text is part of her thesis: L’ écriture alphabétique à l’œuvre de Cy Tombly, 1989, Strasbourg

First published in Arti, v. 23, σ.108-122, Αθήνα, 1995

Cy Twombly in Rome, photo by Robert Rauschenberg, 1952

* * *

More dim/art in english

Cy Twombly: The Deconstruction of Painting through Gesture —by Dorothea Konteletzidou*— About his work, which haw been acclaimed since 1979, Cy Twombly offers little information, admitting that he intentionally ascribes a mysterious power to certain words and images.

#Cy Twombly #Dorothea Konteletzidou #painting

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deitism · 4 years

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100 ᴅᴀʏs ᴏꜰ ʜᴇᴀᴅᴄᴀɴᴏɴs. Cross Marian. ( 1 - 16 )

day #001 : : childhood

day #002 : : family

day #003 : : dreams

day #004 : : smile

day #005 : : strength

day #006 : : weakness

day #007 : : hope

day #008 : : loss

day #009 : : desire

day #010 : : clothes

day #011 : : destiny

day #012 : : school

day #014 : : work

day #016 : : bed

#࿐ ˚ . ✦ cross . ❝ chronicles ❞

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yogaadvise · 7 years

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30 Wisest Words Ever Said About Weight Loss

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