#OP YOU WATERED MY CROPS!!!!!!!!!!1 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

monitorchakas · 3 years

Text

Im going to rate and write my onions of the halo games. I will be very fair 😏 in my ratings 🙂🙂🙂:

Halo Combat Evolved: my favorite halo game +1. I love how the weapons shoot, love the story, the sounds. I dont care if weapons are imbalanced or whatever its still fun on multiplayer. Only time plasma pistol is actually decent. The game that started it all.I still like playing the 2001 graphics oddly. They dont look ugly, just retro I might be looking through nostalgia lens but I don't think so. 11/10

Halo CEA : beautiful remake although lighting did detract from the spooky in some parts -1. Wish we had blur graphics, the graphics are starting to age. Loved the terminals and how they complemented primordium at the time which released a few months later 9/10

Halo 2: arbiter story introduced was such a brave move, weapons feel different from 1 but still good. Story is great even if they rushed. Makes me wonder what we missed. The ghosting issue was really annoying. (Referring to when images would imprint on screen for rest of mission) sword introduction nicee. Soundtrack is best one in the series and nkt because of the random artists that were brought in I could care less for those. Graphics aged pretty badly in some parts I feel like halo ce feels better. Might be because game was unfinished? 10/10

Halo 2A : blur graphics make me drool. Wish they made everything with blur. Its its the best thing ever to happen to halo. Wish they did ce. Terminals of sesa and spark chatting were great I really loved this, was a topic I always wanted them to explore. Spark's redesign is ugly and breaks canon -1. This game was very broken on launch, it would completely crash the xbox with no way to save coop campaign progress during the crashes -1 but thats prob because mcc was a hot mess 8/10 no you know what Im being a petty Spark fan. The blur graphics make this 10/10

Halo 3: I like the story but recent conversations with friends has made me realize how "damsel in distress" this game is among other stuff. Still some epic moments - finally seeing the ark 💕. Weapons sound awful -1 Like toys. They also are awful, most are useless -1 Punching seems to be very powerful. I used to think everyone dying was sad but starting to think bungie just was doing it to end the series those text terminals were great I legit printed them and read them at school. Hi Mendicant bias. Cortana and gravemind shaking the screen was the worst feature in halo history. -1 theres a lot of nostalgia attached to this game, I remember the incredible hype around it leading to release. But to be honest I can look past my nostalgia glasses on this one. Cutscenes are old but not awful. music was epic 7/10

Halo 3a : where the fuck is it

Halo 4 : forerunner trilogy based 💕 emotional chief. Beautiful graphics. Great story. I hate Chief's armor and it breaks canon -1 I don't like killing prometheans and most their guns -1 It didn't feel halo gameplay wise. Dunno why. Story felt halo although a bit complicated for some, but that shouldn't be an issue? Those terminals are everything I ever wanted and Im sad that we don't have more. Also Spartan ops was amazing omg. Music was meh could have been better 8/10

Halo 5 : hurr durr evil cortana -100 killed jul mdama -100 no coop -1000 chief and loce fistfight -100 ruined halo forever -100 ok ok positives, lets see. Blue team, the purple girl monitor, osiris team, arbiter, hunt the truth +100 Hunt the truth had nothing to do with the actual game -200 I missed out on renegades because halo 5 turned me off halo for like two years -100 halo 5 soiled the water supply burned our crops and delivered a plague onto our houses. I never played this game just watched it on youtube -1689/10

Halo Infinite : ok here we go... rushed game, not finished no coop -1 multiplayer broken -1 storyline is... very simple... doesn't feel epic like the others, but, its not a bad story (for the most part) so no subtraction. 0 mention of primordium.... Im not too thrilled at the boss battles concept simply because legendary is a breeze up until boss battles. So its imbalanced. No saving at checkpoints -1 eviltana is not an interesting story but I guess they had to solve it somehow. Her destroying the brutes homeworld was cringe -1 no video terminals-1 love the open world, love the look of the environments although we definitely need more environments. I love the weapons feel. The grapple is so incredibly fun. New characters are definitely loveable. Music is beautiful. 5/10 rating will change if they update it

Halo Reach : Noble team is awesome, music is awesome, story is awesome except for the fact that it breaks canon at some point in the end so -3 its a fun game, love getting something different from the usual Chief stories. Butts +1 Rogue one of halo franchise. 8/10

Halo ODST: so personal opinion... I can't stand how they act. That tough boy wanna piece of me funny guy machito is not my cup of tea -2 I loved Sadie's story/superintendent the guns are fun the game is still fun, I just dont enjoy the story from personal preference. Having to collect beacons to unlock story was extremely annoying -1 music was def a vibe but I didn't really download any of them either (not a negative, it def fit the game) I love non Chief games we nedd more. 7/10

The next games Ive barely played, but not by choice just don't have energy for rts

(Dang no more images allowed)

Halo Wars 1 : solid storyline. Beautiful graphics. The little I played was fun up until anders started dying. Music is epic. Watched it all as a movie on youtube. 10/10

Halo Wars 2: that was blur again right? *Drools* new ai is baby. Good banished introduction. The ark looks beautiful. Good cliffhanger 10/10 Wheres my continuation?

Overall with all the extended lore we have a lot of good but boy does the bad have lasting repercussions...

#halo #long post

16 notes · View notes

theramseyloft · 3 years

Text

Trichomonas gallinae from Pigeons to Raptors

I talk a lot about why feral pigeons should be treated like stray dogs in other posts, from the perspective of them being being a species as purely domesticated as Dogs, which can’t survive away from humans.

They should not be clogging up wildlife rehabs, whose resources should be reserved exclusively for the native wildlife for which they were set up.

(Not one sane person would advocate releasing stray dogs among rehabbed wolves or coyotes, no matter how many generations of them had been born in that alley.)

There is no benefit to releasing feral pigeons “back into the wild”.

Certainly not for the pigeons... who are exclusively dependent on human hand outs or garbage for food and building to roost and nest.

Not for the people, who are generally disgusted by the byproduct of sick, hungry ferals, which does serious structural damage because of the high uric acid content of feces from birds who have not been able to get enough to eat.

Not even for their predators.

Because of the way their medical care is traditionally handled, lost pigeons and their feral decedents are unsafe for predatory birds to eat.

As stated in the previous post, Performing breed breeders and fliers go one of two ways regarding birds with any symptoms of illness:

Either

1. They don’t waste money on treating a sick a sick bird. If it’s sick enough to affect its performance, that specific one is just killed.

2. They use a fraction of the dose of the meds designed to treat an actively symptomatic bird as a monthly “preventive” for the entire flock.

Killing off a bird that’s symptomatic doesn’t mean the other birds in that loft and flying from it don’t have that pathogen.

It just means that they aren’t showing symptoms.

Aaaand using small doses of a treatment as a monthly “preventive” would have any one anywhere near the fields of pathology and epedimiology tearing their hair out in horrified frustration...

Because that is praaactically step by step instructions in how to build up a pathogen’s immunity to a treatment.

Whish brings us to this heinous little bastard;

which causes Trichomoniasis; Trich/canker/frounce.

Trichomonas gallinae eats epithelial cells lining the sinus, crop, and trachea, and forms plaques that make it very difficult for meds to get to as a defense mechanism against the immune system of its host.

Individuals are highly motile, moving with three sets of flagella.

Making it very easy to go septic.

There are three ways this parasite spreads:

1. Mouth to mouth feeding between mates or from parent to nestling.

(By far the most common in columbids)

2. Eating seeds thrown up by a starving late stage bird who physically can’t swallow them

(A common way to transmit it to song birds)

3. Eating an infected prey bird.

Pretty much any bird can catch and transmit the protozoan parasite Trichomonas gallinae, which causes Trichomoniasis; Trich/canker/frounce.

But most wild birds die from it very quickly, leaving it only a brief opportunity to spread to a new host.

What makes the feral descendants of racers and other performance breeds of domestic pigeon in particular especially dangerous carriers to raptors is their high immunity to it.

While a pigeon would have to have an active infection to spread trich to song bird (via vomited seed), an infected pigeon doesn’t have to be symptomatic to spread the parasite to a raptor, who is exposed directly by eating them in bite-sized pieces.

I have purchased birds from grand champion show breeders who looked to be in perfect health on arrival...

But their throats were swarming with Trich when swabbed. (part of my standard quarantine procedure)

Nearly every feral that’s entered our program through rescue has had a crop load of Trich, but were completely asymptomatic on arrival.

A raptor that had eaten one of these birds that was “healthy” by all appearances would still have sickened from it and died with out immediate veterinary intervention.

Our livestock doesn't exist in a bubble.

What we do (or don’t do) with our domesticated animals has consequences.

And when your biosecurity is nonexistent, and you either half ass treatment of a pathogen or don’t bother to treat at all, outbreaks are inevitable, and devastating to outside populations.

Pigeon fanciers talk about Canker like it’s nothing. Pop one pill and it’s done.

But this parasite is devastating.

And the way it’s treated by fanciers practically guarantees a fast track to developing drug resistance.

Domestic Pigeons left “in the wild” or “returned” to it not only have no beneficial niche to fill and no way to keep themselves fed,

They act as a reservoir for increasingly resistant pathogens practically engineered by the half-assed veterinary care of the fliers who provide a constant stream of new blood as racers and other performance breeds are lost from races or tosses or separated from kits.

Because of this, as much as the moral issue of having abandoned them in the first place, feral pigeons should not be ignored.

It is possible to drastically reduce their numbers with out any inhumane measures.

Taubbenhouses, comfortable shelters where nest boxes, feed, and water are provided, and any eggs laid are swapped for fakes, work wonders for population control.

With out injections, trapping, or poison, the reproductive rates of feral populations where this strategy was employed decreased by 95%.

Imagine combining that with better veterinary care for pigeons who belong to fanciers...

Maybe we could avoid...

This.

(Graphic photos under the cut)

This pigeon died of Trich.

By the look of it, those plaques went straight to its lungs...

This wood pigeon's entire throat was blocked.

Here is a septic pigeon (three and a half weeks old or so), with lesions all the way down its digestive tract.

Another septic pigeon (adult), with lesions all over its liver and even laced into its muscle tissue.

This is what happens when a hawk eats a pigeon with resistant trich.

This owl probably wasn’t able to swallow around that lesion

This falcon chick (in particular danger due to falcons primarily preying on other birds) won’t be able to swallow soon.

This owl's choanal slit, glottis, and esophagus have been completely blocked off.

This peregrine (post-op) was lucky to have survived.

From the article ( http://www.shropshireperegrines.co.uk/news/news.html ):

“June 2014 - Peregrine chick treated for Trichomonas Gallinae

Two young peregrines, one male and one female, have been recovered in a distressed state from a scrape in north Shropshire by members of the Group and taken for treatment at the Cuan Wildlife Rescue Centre at Much Wenlock.

On examination both birds were diagnosed with "trichomonias gallinae", an infection affecting the birds' mouths, throat and eyes. According to the vet who examined the birds, the infection had most probably occurred by eating infected pigeon meat. Unfortunately the female chick did not survive.”

#pathology #veterinary pathology #tw: graphic content #raptors #pigeon #wildlife

75 notes · View notes

huigusu · 3 years

Text

#showyourprocess

From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES: When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours!

Thank you so much to @cloudylotus and @wendashanren for tagging me for this set ❤ (please check out their respective posts here and here as well 🥰) and to the members of mdzsnet who started this!

1. Planning

I try to alternate between gifsets based on quotes and gifsets based on a single scene for the cql edits I create! This is because the ones based on quotes require significantly more thinking for me to come up with scenes to fit, alongside getting all of them to adhere to one colour scheme and then inserting the typography, rather than just me focusing on a single scene 😅 This time it was time for me to pick a quote, which I usually do from my #words tag on my tumblr where I like to collect poetry I resonate with.

“Oh, let my chest split open, let my blood spill over, body be still! I’ve bled for you, and you won’t even show me your face.” - Yi Kwangsu (via skogenflicka)

For the quote used in this set, I had thought that it fit wangxian so I had already tagged it to find later 😄 I also searched it up to read a little more on the background of the story and author and was surprised to find that it was from a short story on gay, unrequited love, which made it somehow more appropriate as I wanted to fit lwj’s perspective during his mourning years.

To select the scenes, I split the quote up into four lines and wrote the summary of the the scenes that demonstrated them quite literally, as in the things lwj did for wwx out of love even when wwx was pushing him away, + ep number and timestamps for easier gif creation. I knew that I wanted to focus on text effects too so the 3rd gif was specially picked for the horizontal movement of lwj across the frame.

2. Creating

- oh, let my chest split open (wen brand at the cold springs)

- let my blood spill over (blood running down his hand as he holds onto wwx)

- body be still! (lwj holding the rods as punishment for visiting burial mounds)

- i’ve bled for you, and you won’t even show me your face. (wwx pushing lwj’s hand off his and turning away)

I use Handbrake to isolate the scenes I want and then Photoshop to import and pare down the number of frames. I favour larger gifs, especially so that there’s room for the typography, so these were the usual 540px ratio across for cropping. For the first gif in this set, I didn’t have the special episodes downloaded so I used a screen recorder to get the needed frames of lwj’s chest brand! I remember not being happy enough with the length/framing of the brand from the regular episodes. I didn’t cut out his nipple and so many tags I see talk about it 😂

Colouring

Okay so! I knew I wanted to try out a darker colouring as the ones I do are more bright, so I went to look for tutorials and I found this psd that had a good effect for what I wanted after I modified/removed many of the layers. I wanted to work with existing colours already within the chosen scenes rather than modifying or emphasising them to go with the muted, anguished mood of the quote. The colour scheme thus became dark, maroon red (wwx) from the blood and wwx’s tassel, as well as turquoise (lwj) from the water and lwj’s robe. I then added a channel mixer layer and selective colouring layers to make the turquoise of the waters that the psd had removed stand out more, and then another vibrance layer and an additional selective colour so that I could match the blues/reds across gifs. Thankfully, I could copy this colouring over to the other gifs with a few alterations of hue/saturation, curves and levels 😊 After colouring, I resize, denoise, and sharpen the gifs.

Typography

I really wanted to work with some text effects and get out of my comfort zone in this one. In line with the three parts of the first line of exclamation in the quote (and the parallel structure for the first two parts which I found hit so hard 😭), I wanted to highlight the alliteration I found in them - the words ‘split’, ‘spill’, and ‘still’. For the first two gifs, I decided on linear gradient overlays at 45 degrees + taupe drop shadows with the colour from the colour scheme other than the colour already in the gif. In the second gif, I used the pen tool to draw a line (in blue below!) that followed the curvature of their hands, then pasted the text in. I realised that I had to draw a separate line for the word ‘spill’, which after a lot of trial and error turned out to be much simpler after turning off the first pen layer visibility (the new line kept connecting to the first 😓)

As for the third gif, I initially thought of masking each frame to make the words appear as lwj moved from left to right, then I remembered that using the ‘overlay’ blend mode on the text hides it when it is on top of the colour black! 😄 In this case, lwj’s hair is black so I just had to position the words properly so that the words ‘body be’ would reveal themselves while giving time for the word ‘still’ to also have a nice effect after. (If you look closely you can see them a little in lwj’s hair 😅) The word ‘still’ took a lot longer to figure out, but in the end using ‘difference’ for the overall text layer and ‘pin light’ for the dark maroon colour overlay gave the clearest dark red effect as the camera panned.

Finally, in the last gif, I wanted to have the effect of the word ‘face’ change from a dark maroon gradient to turquoise with wwx’s hand moving lwj’s away to have it be a bit symbolic I guess 😅 of wwx’s leaving lwj? The ‘linear burn’ setting for the overall text layer (solid turquoise) and ‘difference’ for the gradient overlay (maroon) ended up working best to make the red disappear the moment wwx’s hand ran over the word, unlike other settings where the colour looked mixed/too messy.

3. Posting

I usually save the gifs and look at them on tumblr to see if I need to adjust any colours to match better or make them more vibrant (and ask yan what she thinks HAHA). These were fine, so I wrote the caption to summarise the source of the quote, added links to research and the op of the quote on tumblr, and wrote my tags. If it’s a post with translations of what the characters are saying/from the novel I typically take more time to edit the translations/do my own translation. I check if it is loading fine on mobile and edit the saved draft if necessary, then I post! 💕

Tagging but no pressure please!! 💗

@lanwuxiann for this amazing wangxian wedding night edit 🤧🤧🤧 that had me yelling into my pillow

@inessencedevided for this heartbreaking nie brothers set (which included manhua scenes!!)

@lan-xichens for this really lovely wwx + lotus pier edit, the colouring of which i think about from time to time

@mylastbraincql for this gorgeous jyl set with soup set with such pretty blending

@still-snowing for this beautiful piece of wangxian art about lwj holding wwx’s hands through the years that i teared up over multiple times

#showyourprocess #phew thank you for reading the whole way if you did!!#and thank you jasmin and ali for the tag #❤❤❤#tag game #tw blood #tw scars #gifmaking

17 notes · View notes

ligbi · 4 years

Text

Hecate or Hekate

Usually a titan goddess daughter of perses and asreria, though sometimes of zeus by asreria, or zeus and demeter, goddess of crossroads and magic, sometimes the dark moon Has a pack of dogs, controls ghosts, can impart wisdom and magic but hell hath no fury like a goddess who does not believe you are deserving Hecate suppers are held by worshipers of black female lamb, Honey, and dog, and the leftover are left at crossroads on a full moon She is often times seen as a triplicate goddess, both the new moon with selene the full moon and artemis of the cresent moon, and the sky goddess with artemis's earth and persephone's underworld Hekate is associated with the underworld and saw persephone's capture by Hades from a cave Pre hellenistic time she may have come from an asia minor country before becoming a respected titan during the hellenistic era, and worship of her persisted through the medival era when she was villainized by the church

Source 1: early greek myth timothy gantz Daughter of Peres the ravenger titan (noted for his wisdom) and Asreria a titan of the stars, though sometimes zeus is stated to be the father, she is goddess of the crossroads Hesiod says she helps men in victory and success If She Wishes it, is honored by zeus, general helper of men, but no early association with the moon Usually ahows up in any given telling of the rape of persephone to tell demeter of what she saw when persephone was taken away by hades Homeric hymn to demeter ends with hecate becoming attendant of persephone, and shes been seen on pottery escorting persephone back from the underworld She is also associated with iphigenia the daughter who was being sacrificed at the start of the war with troy that was saved by artemis, as iphi is sometimes called artemis of the road or artemis einodia, an enoida by the 5th century was a title of hekate Some sources seem to link hecate and artemis in a one and the same capacity, like how she has been said to be the child of leto who is traditionally the mother of artemis and apollo Euripide's Medeia calls her a patronness of drugs and poisons A 5th century piece portrays her as a tripple goddess, but with herself not in the lunar triplicate we usually associate with her. Theres a suggestion of the triple form having her lower body turned into black dogs, much like scyllas lower half was transformed to, and in some sources she is the mother of scylla, and sometimes is hecate is deemed the child of nyx the primordial night goddess, though she is called a daughter of demeter in orphoc tradition Tl;DR for all this, crossroads goddess heavily associated with persephone and artemis, not the moon, yes poison, helps people when she wants to, lineage as with all gods a questionable mess Going back to source 1 for a moment-oops- iphengenia was a sacrifice for a fast expedition to the war at troy/because her dad agamemnon pissed off artemis through bragging,, and artemis swapped the girl for a deer last second, and in some tellings is made immortal, and the author pausanias says she was turned into hekate The einodia term associated with hecakte is also used of demeter and persephone Hekate has long standing association with artemis but not as an aspect of Bonus the term hekatos means far darter is is sometimes applied to apollo

Source 2 Guide to the gods- marjorie leach Goddess of underworld and the night, daughter of nyx and tatarus or asteria and peres, mother of scylla Magic powers and sorcerery bestows prosperity and wisdom, this cites her as an early thracian moon goddess A goddess whose powers extended to all regions ( heaven earth sea underworld), protective of doors and gates, crossroads and travelers, can be malevolent scares men w/ghosts and demons, can bestow honor victory fortune wealth but witholds them from the undeserving in her eyes Magic includes divination and oracles Source 3 dictionary of comparative religions s.g.f. brandon Cthonian and pre hellenic, 3 faced, associated with the uncanny and ghosts, worshiped at crossroads which are traditionallh haunted by the dead, hecate suppers are monthly offerings made at the crossroads usually included dog flesh Her cult survived till the middle ages It was mentioned in source 1 a woman(hekabe) during the fall of troy was turned into a dog and is sometimes said to belong to hekate

Source 4 the new book of goddesses and heroines patricia monaghan Crossroads, sacred dogs, bearing a torch, night, offerings left at three way crossroads, some say she has 3 heads serpent horse and dog While hecate walked, followers gathered insidd for their hekate suppers over which they swapped magic knowledge and secrets of sorcerery, sacrifices of dogs honey and black female lambs. This implies you had a meal and then offered leftovers at the crossroads Calling her a snake goddess Another mention of thracian origins, argument that she is a form of demeter, argument she is a form of persephone Sometimes a titan but still respected by zeus which basically never happens so shes a big deal Mention of worship into classical times, both hekate suppers and public sacrifices celevrated by great ones (caberioi) of honey black lady sheep, dogs, and oh yikes black human slaves Said to be the crone of persephone demeter trio or the dark moon in the artemis and selene trinity, rules spirits of the dead, powers of regeneration,can hold back ghosts, greek women evoked hecate for protection when they left their houses by putting up a threefold image at their door Trying to find more qbout caberioi but so far google only gives me this exact source as source. Look further into later....

Source 5 the women's encyclopedia of myths and secrets barbara g walker Trinity, deruved from the egyptian midwife goddess heqit/heket/hekat, who evolved from the tribal matriarch of pre dyanastic egypt heq, a wise woman in charge of mothers words of power Heqit delived the sun god every mornong from his mother hathor, her totem is the frog, symbol of the fetus, still associated with her when christians 4k years later declared her queen of witches Trinity crossroads underworld, hekate trevia or hecate of the three ways Offerings left on full moons Invoked by those setting out on journies Called the most lovely one, which is a lunar title, this says her triplicate is hecate selene of the moon, artemis the hunter on earth, and persephone the destroyer in the underworld Hecate selene the far shooting moon, mother of dionysus (who while eventually having the mortal mother semele, is a child of zeus and persephone zagreus which is a whole thing i like to yell about ) which is a wild pull but if you say hekate/selene/artemis/persephone are the same person then I Guess Here shes mentioned as the crone to hebe the virgin and hera the mother Symboyl of the new moon figure in white robes, golden sandals, torches lit, a basket of crops she made grow Middle ages queen of the ghostwprld or queen of witches, diabolized by catholics who hate midwives And now for anoter wild pull: hekate was helping a woman in labor, the gods feared magical contagion and put her in the river acheron to wash away birth mana, the river took her underground where she married hades. ...what also a mention that hecabe the queen of troy transformed into hekate's dog, a black female one names maera mara or moera (the destroying fate) Source 6 the new century classical handbook catherine b avery Triple goddess with persephone and artemis, persepbone attendant, powers over ssa eartj sky, gave riches and good fortunes, lead the souls of the dead, associated with ghosts magic and witcjcraft Invisible to mortals but dogs can see her, passes through the night with spectral hounds, dogs sacred to her, crossroads goddess, triple bodied back to back, romans call her trivia, also associated with demeter rhea and persephone Rhea of course being mother of zeus hades posideon hestia hera demeter Cult of rhea associated with fertility rites, has her own mysteries like dionysus, helped her persephone topside after the hades thing, associated with the asian mother goddess cybele, roman magna mater and ops Trivia: roman epitget of hecate and diana when shes associated with hecks Guide to gods called trivia goddess of crossroads streets and highways can be malicious

Source 7 Whos who in greek and roman mythology david kravitz Goddess of underworld, daughter of asteria and perses or zeus and demeter, taught magic to medea her priestess, pictured with torch, epithet for luna, diana, and persephone, other eputhetos enodia the wayside goddess, trioditis goddess of meeting of three routes, also possible crantaeis whose the mother of scylla Trivia is mentioned here as epithet of diana

Source uhhh 8? Dictionary of ancient deities patricia turner Underworld night darkness queen of ghosts and shades, controller of hidden things of nature, presides over birth life death streets and gates, taught medea her pristess magic, only worshiped at night by torchlight, dogs sacred, has a pack of hounds, sacrified to her are black lambs and dogs, shown sometimes with 3 heads: dog horse and Lion Possible moon goddess, standard perses are asteria and zeus and demeter maybe heritage May be the indian Ekata Associated with artemis and persephone and selene The name Brimo used for hekate persephone demeter and rhea Hekate used as epithet of luna/selene and diana and persephone Also known as akitiophi artemis brimo crantaeis diana enodia proerpina selene trioditis Crantaeis loops back to hekate, more redirects for brimo as with aktiophi No entry in here for ekata Just says trivia is name for artemis No mention of ekata in previously sourced books and my only indian myth books are stories and mythology of all races: 6 indian iranian which has no index and isnt a handy alphabetized list .....might have meant native americans let me cross check those Also naught India india has three water god brothers one names ekata Googling qnd saying a goddess from asia minor carian so says a guy whose book from 87 i dont have

Source 9 classical mythology mark p.o. morford Hekate put the fury tisiphone in charge of guarding the grove of avernus Hekate sometimes resembles the furies in appearance and character Medea met jadon at a shrine to hekate Source 10 lost goddesses of early greece charlene spretnak Dark moon cthonic associations gjosts, hekate suppers, food offered as a form of purification, image used above the house to ward off evil, mother of witches, some sites in greece her torches carried around freshly sown fields to promote fertility Zeus and hera kid (???) She gives heras rouge to europa and hides in a house where she midwifes which makes her impure (hey this story again) Standard stuff but covens await hekate near drooping willow trees where she appears and imparts magic knowledge, nest of snakes in her hair, her form became human and animal, favored herbs black poppy, smilax, mandragora, aconite Without death there is no life gonna skim a few more to see if anything else not already mentioned but... Nope.

Source 11 myths of the female divine goddess david leeming From the dark moon she brings soma, unwelcome truth Was in a cave when she saw persephone kidnapped She can heal and teaches magic, more snakes in hair, a necklace of testicles...... once showed up as a boat to kill her love /son and restored him on a new moon

Source 12 a guide to the gods richard carlyon Goddess of moon magic riches wisdom victory flocks and navigation Defends children, associated with regeneration, honored in asia minor and boetia, shows up as crossroads tombs and scene of crime

#hecate #hekate #mythology monday #roman mythology #greek mythology

27 notes · View notes

sword-dad-fukuzawa · 4 years

Note

Oh! I think it'd be really cool if you did a sort of 'what's in an op analysis' if you'd like too. Also, Scarlet Sky is from the dark era episodes, while Dear Prince is from dead apple! And they're both already in english :) Hope this helps!

Namae Wo Yobu Yo

I am so sorry this took so long to finish. I ended up doing an analysis a while ago but I’m a chronic dumbass, which means I ended up accidentally deleting it all. The utter despair that came from losing my un-backed-up work caused the delay.

So! I’ll start with Namae Wo Yobu Yo, because that was the one you were originally interested in, right? I may have gotten that wrong. Crap. Anyway! I’m using the english translation from the wiki. Let’s break down this song. Buckle up, it’s a long one, y’all.

The first thing I noticed from the song is that it’s in first person, and it’s being sung to someone, not about someone. The actual imagery of the ED is pretty straightforward with a focus on establishing a dichotomy between Atsushi and Akutagawa. Most of it shows Atsushi and how Dazai’s there to support and guide him, while Akutagawa’s left to suffer alone. There’s a particular ouch of a scene where Atsushi’s drowning and Dazai’s there to pull him out, but Akutagawa just sinks deeper into the water as the ghost of Dazai’s hand fades.

Knowing that this ED caps off the episodes where we see the majority of Atsushi’s character development, I’m of the opinion that this song is being sung by him.

I was searching for the reason I'm able to remain as myself. If there's a version of me that exists within your heart, Then even amid the darkness on this long, hilly road, I feel I can become a new me, able to make my way through!

Initially, I thought this was about Atsushi singing to Dazai. The first verse establishes a conflict--the narrator is trying to stay true to himself, but he’s finding it difficult. He feels as though the person he’s singing to knows him better than he knows himself, and that as long as this person holds him in their heart, he can persevere through any difficulty.

So that each of us, walking our individual moments, can keep on smiling... So that we can keep moving forward, exploring the meaning of life together... I'll call out a name: your name, So that you can remain who you are.

Here’s what made me question this, though. It’s not the person being sung to who is calling out a name--it’s the narrator. He’s calling out the other person’s name, to make sure this person doesn’t lose themselves and keep living. I found the significance of naming this person especially beautiful.

A name, after all, is unique to a person. In a lot of fairy mythology in particular, names are important and hold power. To know someone’s true name is to know them utterly, and that gives the wielder a degree of control and even ownership. To name someone is to know them, and to hold them to who they are.

Whenever you're darkened by sadness and your tears overflow... Whenever your heart floods with loneliness and begins to waste away... I'll call out a name: your name, Just as you once called out mine.

It’s like Atsushi’s reassuring this person. When they’re in their darkest hour and they feel alone, when they’re losing themselves, Atsushi will name them. And by naming them, he holds them to their truest self. When they’re drowning, he will pull them back out of the water. Does Atsushi do this for Dazai?

Taking in a deep breath, I drink it down, then release it to the sky. Am I allowed to believe that everyone can find happiness? Even me?

This next part makes it clear that Atsushi’s the one singing. A lot of his personal conflict during the show is about learning he’s worthy of living and of happiness. He’s always struggling with his own perceived naiveté. “Even me?” he asks, with that childlike uncertainty.

Even if the future awaiting me is so bright that it's blinding, If I'm to face it alone, there's no real meaning in it. I'll shout out a name: my name. I'm still right here; can you hear me?

Atsushi also struggles a lot with loneliness. Even in the manga, he’s struggling with feeling alone and with doing things alone. What he wants, more than anything, is the warmth of companionship and camaraderie. That’s what he’s talking about when he says he doesn’t care how great his future is, not if he’s alone to see it. And then he names himself. He’s grown by this point in the song, to the point where he doesn’t need someone else to name him. He’s secure in who he is, and he knows himself.

"I guess no one would notice if I were gone," I whispered, as I looked up to the sky, alone. Then amid the wind, I heard, from somewhere far off: my name, a gift that allowed me to remain who I am.

So, this part is interesting. When Atsushi was at his lowest, feeling as if nobody cared about him at all, someone named him. Someone saw him for what he was. It kept him from falling apart entirely and losing himself. The question is, who named him? Was it Dazai?

I’m skipping the last two verses because they repeat, but the song ends with the lines “I’ll call out a name. Your name.” Who is Atsushi naming?

If I were to go off how this song caps off episodes 1 to 12, I’d definitely say this song is about Atsushi and Dazai. It’s Dazai who gives Atsushi a chance at something better, and it’s Dazai who is the first person to truly believe in him. The emphasis, with this context, is on how Dazai named him first--and how that was a gift.

But the beauty of this song is that it can apply to many of the other characters, and it’s relatable to people who are listening. If this were the ED for the later episodes, I’d say it’s Atsushi singing to Akutagawa. After all, the two of them come to know each other in a way nobody else seems to understand. And they are, in a more literal sense, always yelling out each other’s names. But they hold each other true to themselves, especially during the cannibalism arc. This places the emphasis on how Atsushi names the other person, rather than being named himself.

The argument could also be made that it’s a younger Dazai singing this song to Oda. Then the emphasis (at least for me) shifts that one part about wondering if he, too, deserves happiness like other people do. I love Namae Wo Yobu Yo because every time you recontextualize it to be about a different relationship, there’s all sorts of new, varied nuance that crops up.

Anyway, I’m so sorry this took so long, and I hope it was helpful!

#namae wo yobu yo #song analysis #bungou stray dogs #bsd #bungo stray dogs #luck life #music #manga #anime #dazai osamu #atsushi nakajima #akutagawa ryuunosuke

36 notes · View notes

gdiwes · 5 years

Link

Chapters: 6/7 Fandom: RWBY Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Qrow Branwen/Clover Ebi, Lie Ren/Nora Valkyrie, Penny Polendina/Ruby Rose, Blake Belladonna/Weiss Schnee/Yang Xiao Long, Robyn Hill/Winter Schnee, Marrow Amin/Jaune Arc Characters: Qrow Branwen, Clover Ebi, Elm Ederne, Vine Zeki, Other Character Tags to Be Added, Harriet Bree, Marrow Amin, Lie Ren, Nora Valkyrie, Penny Polendina, Ruby Rose (RWBY), Blake Belladonna, Weiss Schnee, Yang Xiao Long, Robyn Hill, Winter Schnee, Jaune Arc Additional Tags: Other Additional Tags to Be Added, fairgameweek2020, The Ace Ops are FRIENDS, Teasing, Flirting, Kissing, swapping weapons, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Romantic Soulmates, soulmate-identifying items, 5+1 Things, Confessions, Scars, Mild Body Worship, Scar Stories, dumb college kids, Domestic Fluff Summary:

(Add. Tags: Yes that is a reference to a Britney song, I love her and I would live my best life for her, anyway, Fair Game Week 2020 Baby!!!, yes this was an impromptu join, but I got an idea so I HAD to, I'll update the tags as the week goes on, and depending on how many prompts I finish, sorry I'm late to the party with starbucks !!!)

Day 1: Flirting: Qrow flirts first and Clover is f l u s t e r e d. Day 2: Date: Qrow gets Clover a new pin. Day 3: Weapons: The Boys try to use each others' weapons and fail miserably, kinda lol Day 4: Soulmates: I've managed to put feathers into a Soulmate AU. Day 5: Comfort: Clover hears some stories about Qrow's scars. Day 6: Atlas Ball: The second time Qrow's there to see it, he thinks he can beat Clover to ask him to go. Day 7: Free Day: Clover discovers Qrow can turn into a bird.

I was really busy getting home the last couple days so I’m late to the party but here’s my updated fic for Fair Game Week 2020!! Thank you for sticking with me everyone, and thank you if you contributed to the week!! Y’all are such talented artists and writers, I am SO FED my skin is SO CLEAR my crops are SO WATERED,..,.,,, This has been such a fun experience, and I hope you enjoy this if you read!!

#fairgameweek2020 #fair game #qrow branwen #clover ebi #rwby #gdiwes #gdiwes writings

35 notes · View notes

grrlinthefireplace · 5 years

Note

Hey so I’ve been seeing you post a lot about La Casa de Papel recently. What exactly is it? It looks kinda interesting.

Thank you so much for asking!

I am delighted beyond reason to have the opportunity to tell you - and by extension the entire world - why this show has cleared my skin, watered my crops, and legitimately healed my soul after this particularly soul-crushing season of Grimdark White Man Television almost broke me as a human being.

I will attempt to keep this as spoiler-free as I possibly can, because this is a show that should be experienced in the moment, but in a nutshell, La Casa de Papel is a heist show set in present-day Madrid which follows both a found family of thieves who rob the Royal Mint of Spain, and the law enforcement officials on the outside who are chasing them.

If that is enough for you, go right to your TV or computer, fire up the ol’ Netflix, and don’t waste any more time.

If, however, you need a little more, here are the top five things I flail about to every single person in my life to convince them they need to start watching this show like immediately and then come back and tell me all about it.

For visual flair, we’ll intersperse them with some gifs of ladies, because I know my audience.

5. character driving plot > plot driving character.

You know that infuriating thing lazy TV writers do where, in order to to hurry up and get to the big explosion or battle scene or dragon attack or whatever, which is the only bit they really care about, they handwave away the whole concept of motivation and make some character do something that any halfway-attentive viewer will immediately clock that they would never actually do?

There is none of that bullshit here.

In its simplest form, the plot of La Casa de Papel is as follows: a brilliant criminal mastermind devises a heist which cannot possibly go wrong, and then we proceed to watch all the ways in which it goes wrong.

This is a fantastic setup for an action story, made even more breathlessly exciting by strategic use of my favorite heist movie plot device (as perfected by Ocean’s Eleven): namely, “scene where it looks like our crime heroes have been outsmarted and are now threatened by a completely unforeseen disaster” immediately followed by “flashback to the team prepping for the heist where we learn that of course they prepared for this exact scenario.”

But from time to time, things do actually go wrong (as they must, or else there would be no story); and, when they do, it is never because you can tell a writer just wanted to write a scene where bullets go flying, and didn’t care how he got there. These characters are so clear, their behavior so consistent, that when gasp-worthy plot twists happen, they happen because of course that character, in this exact scenario, would do that exact thing.

I’m telling you, I came to this show for a ship (more on that in a minute) and I stayed for a swooning, heart-eyes writer crush on the impeccably-designed plot structure and characterization.

4. High stakes, low gore.

Tone-wise, on a sliding scale of Heist Film Intensity where a really fluffy episode of Leverage is a 1, Reservoir Dogs is a 10, and the Ocean’s franchise is somewhere in the 3-4 range, I would place La Casa at a 5 or a 6, which is perfect for me. I love action, suspense, drama and adventure, but I hate gratuitous violence (especially when it’s pointless and masturbatory and doesn’t contribute anything to the plot) and have a very low tolerance for blood and gore. So I kept waiting for the story to eventually take a hard left turn into Tarantino Land, until eventually it was all just one huge pile of dead bodies, and was genuinely surprised when it didn’t.

This is how I learned just how badly my brain has been fucked up by lazy showrunners who think shock deaths are the only way to raise stakes. During the first season of this show, before I had figured out that it was a Flawless Gem of Television Which So Far Has Not Once Disappointed Me, there were probably a dozen moments where I was absolutely convinced that some character was about to be gruesomely killed for shock value … and I was wrong every single time.

Reader, it was fucking wild.

Every single time I was convinced that person A was going to shoot person B in the head because blah blah maximum angst over here in this part of the story and then it will motivate person C to do this other thing, the show did the hard work of finding a smarter, more unexpected direction to take that character’s story. That means that when deaths do come along - and there are a couple - they feel genuinely earned, and they matter deeply to the story and to us.

3. I would die for these women.

This show loves women. Like it truly, authentically, uncompromisingly loves women in all our fucked-up messy glorious complexity. There are no “types” or cliches here; no one is forced to be only one thing. Fuck your one-dimensional Strong Female Characters, lazy writers.

For one thing, on many shows you might be lucky if you get maybe one mom who is given a personality and a story outside of motherhood. Often, on shows written by men, the fact of her motherhood diminishes her strength or her agency. On this show, nearly every one of the central female characters is both a mom and an action hero simultaneously. Seriously. By season 3 there are four different battle moms. They’re all different, they’re not all on the same side, they have different perspectives, and their role as mother impacts the story differently, but that’s the joy of having a whole lot of different kinds of women - no one has to be everything to everyone.

These women are complicated. They laugh, they cry, they crack dirty jokes, they get laid, they have babies, they fight, they make mistakes, they fall in love, they grow. Men pull sexist shit and they shut it the fuck down. Some of them have love stories, some of them don’t, but they are never defined by or triangulated around relationships with men. They get to have relationships with each other. All of them are excellent at their jobs.

Tokyo is the kind of hot mess antihero protagonist we’ve been watching middle-aged white men play for decades.

Allison is such a realistic teenage girl it’s genuinely painful to watch.

Monica has one of the best arcs I’ve ever seen on television, this is not a drill.

Alicia is terrifying. (A pregnant black ops interrogator! ON WHAT OTHER FUCKING SHOW!?!??)

Nairobi is unlike any other character you’ve seen on TV before; she’s got a little bit of Parker from Leverage, a little bit of Raven Reyes from The 100, but she’s entirely her own creature and you will fall in love with her instantly.

And Raquel. Oh, my love, my angel, my hero, Inspector Raquel Murillo. Love of my goddamn life. A fierce, kickass hostage negotiator swimming upstream against a tide of workplace misogyny who sometimes has to make the frustrating little male-appeasing compromises we all have to make to get through the workday. A beautiful, sexy, powerful heroine over 40 whose femininity isn’t diminished based on some bullshit notion that, for example, pairing your tough-bitch suit and gun holster with red toenails and a lacy blouse detracts from your strength. A loving mom and daughter who has to juggle raising a small child and caring for an aging parent with the stress of, you know, trying to stop the biggest robbery in the history of Spain. A domestic violence survivor (TW for those who need it; nothing is ever shown onscreen, but it’s discussed several times) who is given the space to discuss the things that have happened to her and how she has worked through them with such dignity, accuracy and respect that you can tell the writers did their homework.

This is a show where you can tell there are women in the writers’ room.

2. The Professor and Raquel. I don’t want to spoil a single thing for you here except to say that I myself was lured into this show by the promise of electric sexual chemistry between a criminal mastermind and the police inspector hunting him down, and my God I was not disappointed.

1. Love.

This show came into my life at a period where I was so weary of cynicism on television - so fucking furious at showrunners who dangle hope in front of us and then crush it, who only care about building anything if they can tear it down later, who treat love and fun and joy and hope and family and happiness like they’re intellectually lesser than grimdark nihilism with no soul - that I was honestly kind of broken by it. I was just so. fucking. tired. Tired of “the way we show this heroine is strong is to kill off her love interest.” Tired of “sorry but all this rape and murder is NECESSARY because of REALISM” (particularly rich when coming from shows featuring evil A.I.’s or dragons and ice zombies). Tired of getting invested in relationships - whether ships or friends or found families - only to realize that the show I was watching was always going to sacrifice character to force plot mechanics into place, and those relationships were never going to get the kind of care and focus I wanted them to get.

But that is not this show.

The single most revolutionary thing, to me, about La Casa de Papel - the thing that sets it apart from every other rollercoaster action thrill ride on television - is that every single thread of the plot is tied to love.

Every.

Single.

One.

Love of all different shapes and sizes - parents and children, friendships, doomed crushes (straight and queer), toxic exes, blossoming romances, siblings - and over it all, a deep, deep love for humanity.

The thing I said before, about how when things go wrong they go wrong in character-driven ways? It’s this. Love is why everything on this show happens. Love is what makes children want to live up to their parents and what makes parents fight to leave a better world for their children. Love is why deaths have stakes. Love is why we spend so much screentime lingering on small moments another show might ignore, like all the thieves at heist camp sitting down every night to have dinner together and argue about paella techniques. Love is what causes chaos in the middle of the heist; when there’s one person in the room you care about more than the others, you can get distracted and take your eye off the ball. Love is how your enemies can get to you, by leveraging or blackmailing the people who matter most, knowing that you’ll crack if they’re in danger. Love, gone wrong, causes toxic men to develop possessive and controlling behavior towards women. Love is how the Professor gets the idea for the heist in the first place. The plan is flawless on paper, but it doesn’t account for the human variable, and over and over again we see that relationships and connection and sex and family and love cause people to behave in unpredictable ways and throw the whole plan into chaos, which is what makes for a dynamic and compelling story.

How refreshing to see a show simply refuse to grant the oft-repeated premise that a show cannot have both high-octane thrills, and a big soft squishy heart, at the same time.

ANYWAY, I’VE TAKEN UP ENOUGH OF YOUR VALUABLE TV-WATCHING TIME, GO JUMP ON BOARD THIS TRAIN AND COME SCREAM ABOUT IDEALISTIC SPANISH ROBIN HOODS WITH ME, AND LET THE GOOD SHIP SERQUEL INTO YOUR LIFE, YOU WON’T BE SORRY

THANKS FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK

#lannister-slings-and-arrows #la casa de papel #money heist #from the inbox #i have a lot of feelings about this show #is this entire post just one long subtweet of 'the 100'#listen #maybe #i'm still pissed about kabby and will be for awhile #but legit this show was HEALING and CATHARTIC in some unexpected ways #yes virginia you CAN have functional loving stable relationships and high-stakes drama at the same time

273 notes · View notes

greyias · 4 years

Text

FIC: Smoke and Mirrors - Chapter 12

Title: Smoke and Mirrors Fandom: SWTOR Pairing: Theron Shan/f!Jedi Knight Rating: T Genre: Pre-Relationship, Slow Burn Synopsis: Something’s rotten on Carrick Station, and Theron won’t rest until he finds out what. But picking at the frayed threads of suspicion quickly unravels a conspiracy much larger than even the Republic’s top spy can handle on his own. (A mostly canon-compliant retelling of the Forged Alliances storyline, as seen through the eyes of Theron Shan.) Author’s Notes and Spoilers: See Chapter 1.

Chapter Index: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | Crossposted to AO3

Theron glared at the bright sign over the bar as another minute on the display’s minuscule chronometer ticked by without any sign of his asset. He checked the urge to let out an annoyed breath, and instead swirled around the contents of his glass to occupy his waiting time. The off brand whiskey from Soccoro was considerably cheaper than Whyren’s Reserve, but it still had the woody notes he enjoyed in the beverage.

The bartenders here on Carrick Station tended to water down drinks more than usual, although whether that was a request from Republic Command, or just a way to extend profits he didn’t know. However, it was still alcoholic, and right now that’s what mattered. Besides, a watered down drink suited him just fine at the moment. He wasn’t sure how long he’d be here, and he needed to keep up appearances on the off chance anyone was watching.

The likelihood of that was low considering he’d been careful to keep his suspicions of Darok to himself — unlike some people he could maintain a low profile. Not that Theron wouldn’t have relished the chance to openly glare at the bastard, but sometimes it was better to be subtle. Especially when it came to tailing and observing targets. He wasn’t sure what role Darok had played in the invasion of Tython, but he’d find that out soon enough.

Thoughts of the Jedi Temple in ruins inevitably led his mind astray, and he tried to flick the mental query about the status of the Grand Master to the back of his mind for what had to be the fifth time. He was pretty sure there would have been mention from his Knight Errant if she had seen any sign of Satele during the battle to retake the temple. If her reaction to the family resemblance was anything to judge by (not to mention the amount of times their names cropped up together in the dossier), they had to be at least familiar with each other. Or at least more so than the average Jedi was to the Grand Master. After all, her first reaction on seeing him was to latch onto the family resemblance.

Satele could take care of herself, Theron knew that. If she wasn’t on Tython at the time, then she was likely engaged in some important business elsewhere. It was inevitable that she would be briefed on what had happened at the temple and likely already be on her way back home. It didn’t make much sense to call in a professional sense, and he definitely wasn’t going to just ring her up to say hello.

He took another, very shallow sip of his whiskey and glanced at the chronometer again. Perhaps he’d been too subtle in his invitation to Highwind, and she hadn’t realized his comment about the drink was an excuse to talk to her away from Darok. She seemed fairly sharp, even for a Jedi. Hopefully she hadn’t decided to keep trying to press Darok on her painfully obvious suspicions. Theron frowned into his glass, wondering how he kept getting pulled into jobs with Jedi.

It certainly wasn’t the will of the Force. If the damn thing had ever given him any sort of favor he would have been on Korriban and Tython right alongside the little blonde with a lightsaber of his own, rather than stuck being the voice in her ear. His efforts may have been crucial to the overall success of the mission, but being cooped up in a room while someone else did the heavy lifting wasn’t his style.

While he preferred sneaking into the back door to kicking down the front, either of those options would at least have him in the middle of the action. It would have given him first-hand information on what had gone down at both locations, rather than him having to interpret the conversations Highwind’s earpiece had picked up.

Information was key. And honestly, it was of utmost importance to the ongoing war efforts to know the status and whereabouts of the members of the Jedi Council, especially the Grand Master. And damn it, if something had happened to her, someone was going to have to tell Jace. Not that the two were an item anymore, but still. That wasn’t the sort of thing you just heard in a report.

Not that Theron was volunteering for that thankless task.

And since he had no idea whether the Hero of Tython was going to grace him with her presence, he could at least kill some time and answer that stupid question nagging at him. Without another thought about it, he pulled out his holo and keyed in Satele’s private frequency. She had given it to him after the Duros mission, for whatever reason he still couldn’t figure out. He’d committed it to memory immediately and destroyed the physical copy, as a direct line to the head of the Jedi Order was information that needed to be carefully controlled.

Almost immediately the other end picked up, and the fuzzy blue image of the Grand Master sprang up from the small device. He felt some of the tension in his shoulders ease a little at seeing her face frowning in confusion, even if the quality of the call obscured the finer details of her expression. Judging from the flickering image, she was quite a distance away.

“Theron,” she said in greeting, her tone measured and careful, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting a call.”

Maybe he should have led with something else, but apparently the small amount of whiskey had removed at least one brain-to-mouth filter. “I’m guessing you weren’t at the temple.”

“No,” she said, “I’m acting as an emissary to the Drayvos League.”

“Have you heard?”

“Yes.” She closed her eyes briefly. Even over the call it was obviously she was trying to gather a measure of calm. “I felt Master Traless’s passing through the Force, and the rest… I felt them too.”

He probably should have passed along something along the lines of condolences, but those words stuck in his throat. He washed that away with another sip of whiskey, trying to control his expression as the woman on the other end of the holocall seemed to collect herself.

“We got it back,” he managed to get out tersely. “I’m sorry it wasn’t soon enough.”

“Thank you,” she said sincerely. “I’m sure you all did the best you could.”

Maybe it was just that small glimpse of vulnerability that she let slip through, but his ironclad desire to maintain professional distance slipped away, and suddenly he wasn’t just another SIS agent confirming the security of high ranking Republic personnel. For a moment, they were almost something resembling mother and son. Maybe not like a normal family, but still close enough that he wanted… he didn’t know. To offer reassurance? Let her know he was going to find the truth? To ask for her help? No. That was crazy. Not only had the Council not been informed of the Korriban op beforehand (that would be a fun call for Jace to have), but this wasn’t a secure line. There would be too much for him to explain. And honestly, would she even believe his crazed conspiracy theories?

No. Of course she wouldn’t.

And even if she did, there were too many potential ears listening in around them. Before talking about anything classified he’d have to determine who around him was actually drunk and who was listening. What she needed from him was the actual truth on what had happened today. What she deserved was the real reason that her home had been ransacked, and why her people had been killed.

“I just thought you should know,” he finally said.

It was almost too hard to tell over the weak connection of the call, but he thought he saw the normally composed expression soften just a faction. It was probably his imagination. “I’m glad you called.”

“Right,” he said awkwardly. “Sorry for interrupting.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “My mind is a little more at ease now.”

Her attention was pulled away as two officers walked into view of the call. He saw her eyes flick over her shoulder, possibly sensing their approach. Without saying anything to him she turned to address them. Something about the way the two held themselves, glancing at the private communication their commander was viewing struck Theron as odd, and he tried to suppress a frown.

Satele glanced back at him, already reaching for the disconnect button. “I’m sorry, Agent, but something has come up. Besides, it appears that you have company.”

He didn’t break from his position, but flicked his eyes over towards the bar to see one blonde Jedi Master approaching him, obvious curiosity on her face. He gave Satele a curt nod of acknowledgement, and she ended the call before anything else could be said.

“That was Grand Master Satele, wasn’t it?” Highwind asked as she approached.

He gave her a small measure of his usual annoyance for someone so casually broadcasting that sort of thing, which apparently was a little too subtle for the Jedi to catch as she just kept staring at the space where the Grand Master’s image had been a few moments before. Like spies, a lot of Jedi were fairly guarded when it came to their inner-thoughts. This one apparently was a bit of an exception, because Highwind was fairly obviously broadcasting concern.

“Yeah, that was her,” he said. “She wasn’t anywhere near Tython.”

“Theron, I’m sorry,” her voice dropped, the note of contrition contained within entirely baffling, “I should have let you know that I didn’t find any evidence of her while I was there.”

“You had other things on your mind,” he said, trying to impart a note of finality into his voice. “Like not dying on the other end of a lightsaber.”

“Still, she’s your—“

“We’re not that close,” he interrupted, and straightened up in his chair so he could catch her eye. “Your Order’s pretty particular about that point.”

“I didn’t mean to offend,” she said quietly. “If I have, I apologize.”

“Forget it,” he muttered, “it doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t have your particular talent as it turns out.”

She gazed at him curiously, cocking her heading to the side as if trying to slot in a new piece she had just found to a puzzle she had been working on. It made him feel itchy and uncomfortable, and he immediately looked into the depths of his glass of whiskey. He swirled the liquid around, watching as the sugars of the alcohol clung to the sides and slowly worked their way down the side of the glass.

“I’m going to guess she gave—“

“I’ve got a tab open at the bar,” he interrupted the query before she could even finish, “go order something.”

“I’m sorry, that was rude of me.”

“Get a drink,” he said insistently. “Before you start getting any looks standing there looking like a Jedi.”

“I am a Jedi,” she reminded him.

He motioned to the bar. “So go get a refreshment. I assume your lot is still allowed to do that aren’t they?”

“Yes,” she said tersely.

“Then help yourself. I’m not going anywhere.”

She frowned ever so slightly at the dismissal, before turning on her heel and approaching the bar. He watched her surreptitiously, pretending he was more interested in the glass in his hand. Whatever she was saying seemed to confuse the server for a few moments, before he apparently took in her attire completely. The dramatic eye roll was obvious even from this far away, and he had to go into the back before he returned with a tall mug of a steaming beverage, and handed it over

She walked back, shoulders back, and mug tightly gripped between both of her hands to keep any of the liquid from spilling. He expected to see the strings of some sort of tea bag over the side of the mug, but as she took the chair opposite to him, he could just make out the telltale aroma and dark brown color of caf.

Interesting choice.

“I have a drink,” she said with finality.

“That’s caffa,” he said blandly. “That’s not a drink. There’s no alcohol in it.”

“It’s liquid and you drink it,” she corrected primly, “therefore, it’s a drink.”

“Well, if you want to be literal, sure.”

“Besides, I try not to drink alcohol.”

He almost, almost asked what she meant by “try”, but stopped himself at the last moment. They were already getting sidetracked to his reason for coming here.

“I apologize if I was prying,” she said carefully. “I did not mean to speak out of turn on what might be a difficult subject.”

“It’s not difficult,” he said flatly. “It’s just a closed one. People in my line of work don’t really discuss that sort of thing.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, and took a sip from her mug as if to busy herself. It wasn’t usually the Jedi way to act so… casual around others. If that was the right word.

The normalcy of the whole act caught him a little off guard, and he found himself adding without really thinking, “Everything worked out for the best, even if it’s different than what I first thought. I’m good at what I do.”

“If you ask me, I think you turned out pretty well,” she said, glancing up from her mug of caf, a small smile playing across her face.

His brain frizted out for a moment as he tried to interpret that statement. From anyone else he would have assumed they were trying to flirt with him. Considering her background, he couldn’t completely dismiss the fact that she was likely oblivious to that sort of thing. He decided to chalk it up to that so he could tackle the subject at hand. “Well, if that’s so, hopefully you’ll keep listening. At least, as long as you have a drink in hand.”

“Well, you were quite insistent that I grab one.”

He probably should have apologized for his brusqueness earlier, but he just shrugged. “I like to keep up appearances.”

“For the bartender?” She took a casual sip from the mug, but the look she shot him over the rim was contemplative, not confused. “Or are you concerned about other eyes?”

“You catch on quick.”

“You are not the first SIS agent I’ve had a meeting with under false pretenses.”

“Is it really a false pretense if we already made the arrangements before there was a need for one?” he shot back. “Besides, I bought you that drink, as promised.”

“So you did, and I still have a way left to go in this mug.” She leaned back in the seat, cupping the beverage between both of her hands. “Was there more you wanted to speak about, other than just the merits of what constitutes a ‘drink’?”

Touché. Apparently she knew how to duel with something other than just lightsabers. His first instinct was to return fire with a sarcastic remark, but he caught himself. While not normally one to back down from a challenge, there was a bigger issue here. Something was rotten on Carrick Station, and he needed to get to the bottom of it.

He ran a finger along the rim of his glass, looking at the Jedi’s guarded expression. Any lingering doubts on her being part of Darok’s scheme had been pretty thoroughly put to rest by her practically trying to interrogate him on the spot. The amount of planning and forethought to somehow arrange that for Theron’s benefit was, quite frankly, paranoid. More paranoid than the spy’s current line of thinking. Also, Highwind’s record spoke for itself. Not to mention her performance on both of the missions. There was no telling what was going on, but if anyone could handle the unknown it was the woman in front of him. It would be stupid for him not to recruit her into this.

“This conversation is off the books,” he finally said. “Does that bother you?”

“I had a feeling it might be,” she returned. “Is this in regards to what I’m thinking?”

“It might be.” Theron sat his drink down and folded his hands together. “I don’t need the Force to do simple math. Things add up here. Something’s off.”

She nodded. “The timing of both attacks was too convenient.”

“That’s not all.” He frowned, doing quick calculations on how much of his hand he should play, and decided it would be beneficial to put most of his cards on the table. “Darok and these ops… there��s something being buried here.”

She pursed her lips. “Do you remember the Sith I spoke of? The one on the holo?”

“Oh, you mean the one our buddy Darok didn’t want you talking about?”

“You noticed that too?” She tapped the side of her mug, but he couldn’t tell if the comment was genuine or sarcastic.

“I’m surprised you did with the way you kept going on.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “I was trying to properly debrief after a mission. No one wanted to listen to me.”

“I was listening,” Theron said, catching her eye. “I’ve been listening to you all day.”

She fixed him with a look. “Why did you not say anything?”

“Because there’s this thing called subtlety,” he said, “you ever heard of it?”

Her nostrils flared as she snorted out a breath. “Of course I know what subtlety is. What am I supposed to do? Use some sort of secret spy signal to let you know I want to talk?”

He stared at her for several beats, hopefully letting the ridiculousness of that statement sink in. “Yeah, of course you are. It looks like this.”

He used his thumb to trace the shell of his ear in an exaggerated gesture, like some sort of cliché spy from a holodrama. She narrowed her eyes, before quickly mimicking the motion. “Like that?”

Stars. She was just so… so… so… Whatever. It didn’t matter what she was. “Yeah. That’s the secret SIS signal for needing to pass along sensitive intel while someone else is listening in.”

“Really?” She tilted her head at him.

Okay, he was going to have to work on broadcasting his sarcasm more clearly. Also, they didn’t have time for this. So he returned to the more important subject at hand. “What did the Sith say?”

“Not much.” Highwind stared into the depths of her mug. “He spoke of a package that had been secured. To a ‘Lord Goh’, I presume that was the Sith I fought in the library. I could not determine what the contents of said package were.”

“I guess they wouldn’t just let that slip,” Theron muttered annoyed, mostly to himself. “Might defeat the purpose of doing their raid.”

“I suppose so,” she allowed. “When the Sith realized I was not his compatriot, he said something odd.”

“Odd how?”

“That I was ‘running a little bit ahead of schedule’.”

“That’s… yes. That’s very odd,” Theron agreed. “Although maybe not so much if the timing wasn’t so much of a coincidence as we’re supposed to believe. Did he say anything else?”

She was quiet for a moment, still staring into the contents of her mug. “When I pressed him on the reason for the attack, he said it was for ‘the vindication of history’. I don’t know what he meant by that… but I really don’t like the sound of it.”

Theron nodded, trying to fit the new snatches of information into the odd picture that was starting to form in his head. There were still too many gaps in the larger picture. He’d have to file them away for now.

“What are we going to do?”

“We?” Theron quirked a brow. “So I take it that means that you don’t want to just hang up that shiny new medal of yours and head on home?”

Her head snapped up at the challenge, for a moment the perfect Jedi calm broken. The brightly colored lights of the cantina threw a strange wash on everything, but the defiant blue of her eyes still shone through clearly. It made for a very striking image. “A Jedi does not have need for bloodstained trinkets.“

He raised his brows. “I’ve seen some that do. Wasn’t sure if you were one of them.”

“I have enough medals,” she leaned forward, meeting his stare. “If you say something is being buried, I would like to know what that is.”

"It’s going to require some digging.”

“The truth usually does,” she said. “I’m out of shovels, but I’ve got a Seeker Droid on my ship that’s really good at digging up things.“

“That might be a bit overkill right now.” Not to mention way too literal. “I think we need to go for a more subtle approach.”

“If that’s what you think.” She leaned back against the cushion of the chair, eyeing him curiously. “What exactly is your line of thought?”

“Well, hypothetically speaking of course, I’d start by making a new friend,” he said casually, “someone I might be able to count on.”

“Friends are a good thing to have.”

“I’m thinking of a really good friend, one who’d be willing to face down the Emperor himself if it came to it,” he said, watching her carefully. “You know of anyone like that?”

At the mention of the Emperor, something flashed across her expression, so quick he almost missed it. Brows drawn together in a deep frown, and something darker in the eyes, but it was gone too fast to tell exactly what had been there.

“I might know of someone,” she said.

“Yes, well, then hypothetically after we exchanged friendship bracelets, I’d go off on my own.”

“That’s not very nice after making a friend.”

“My friend’s a busy lady. I wouldn’t want to bother her until I found out everything I could about Darok and the Sith Lord she talked to.”

“I thought you said you needed help.”

“Hypothetical help, but only after I checked and double-checked all my information and found all the connections.”

“This is a lot of hypotheticals,” she grumbled into her mug.

He couldn’t check the grin at her repressed annoyance. “I like my hypothetical proof.”

“Your new friend must be a very understanding and patient person.”

“I wouldn’t know, I just met her.”

“I do. She has the patience of a Jedi.”

“Fancy that,” he tossed back. “But I might give her a call—”

“Good, she was starting to get lonely drowning in this sea of hypothesis.”

“I’ll toss her a hypothetical lifeline.”

“My hypothetical hero.”

“And then after she stopped being hypothetically sarcastic, I’d see if she’d be ready to get to the bottom of all of this.”

“She’s ready now.” Highwind twisted the mug in her hands.

“That’s not being very patient,” he admonished lightly. Despite the gravity of the situation he had to hold back a laugh at the petulant look on her face. “And I’m good, Master Highwind, but I’m not good enough to be able to do all that without leaving this seat.”

“I thought you said we were friends,” she shot back.

“Hypoth—”

“Don’t even think about finishing that word,” she muttered dangerously.

“Fine, we’re ‘friends’.”

“Then drop the formalities, unless you want me to call you ‘Agent Shan’ from here on out.”

She made sure to say the last part a few decibels louder than the rest of the sentence. Luckily the cantina was pretty much deserted at this time of day, but he fixed her with a look all the same for attempting to attract attention.

“Now, Grey,” he lowered his voice in an attempt to get the conversation back under control, “if you’re annoyed you don’t need to shout.”

“I’m not annoyed,” she said, “but I don’t enjoy speaking in vague riddles either.”

“I thought you Jedi loved that.”

Highwind—no, Grey—shot him a look, and he was pretty sure that whatever curiosity she had held for him at the beginning of the conversation had been beaten out by irritation at this point. “It’s been a long, very unexpected day, Theron.”

“Okay, that’s probably fair.” The image of that unguarded moment he’d caught a glimpse of flashed in his mind. He could still see that glimmer on her cheeks, and the way she’d tried to dash them away before anyone else could see. The tiniest hints of something that could have been a thread of guilt wound through his chest and he busied himself with his glass of whiskey. “You did do all the heavy lifting.”

“I had help,” she corrected, and the curious quality of steel and compassion drew his gaze up to see her staring at him resolutely, “and I appreciate that. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

A tiny flare of warmth lit up in his gut, warring with that thread of guilt. He had no idea how to reconcile either of those conflicting feelings, which made it difficult to form a proper response. “I was just doing my job.”

“And it was a good one, judging by the fact that I’m here.” That really shouldn’t have made the little flare heat up into a small fire, but for some stupid reason it did. At least it burned away some of the guilt. “Even without the friendship bracelet, that goes both ways.”

“I don’t follow.”

“If this is off the books,” she leaned forward, voice dropping further, “then you’re going to need backup.”

“I work best alone.”

“That’s not how being ‘friends’ works.”

“I’ll call you once I know something,” he clarified, “but I can sneak around better without you waving your lightsaber for everyone to see.”

“I can always not pull it out.”

“The whole armor and cape getup is kind of a dead giveaway too.” He waved his hand at her attire vaguely. “Besides, I’m just going to do some low-key surveillance and scour the HoloNet. You’d get bored very quick.”

“I can do more than just wave around a lightsaber,” she pointed out.

“I’m sure you’re very talented,” he took a sip of his whiskey, “but not as much as me when it comes to my job.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re not overconfident. Nothing bad has ever come from that.”

“Is that sarcasm I detect, Master Jedi? Very unbecoming.”

She pursed her lips together, cheeks turning the slightest shade of red, but didn’t drop that intense gaze. “If you run into trouble, what happens?”

“I’m not,” he said finitely, setting his glass down on the table and rising to his feet. “But I promise to write, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s not what I said—“

“Look, it’s been fun chatting, but I’ve got a shuttle to catch.”

“Aren’t you going to finish your drink?” She pointed to the half-consumed glass of whiskey. A bead of sweat trickled down the side, pooling on the table below it. “Such a waste. The bartender will talk.”

Theron slid a glance to the bartender, who was busy wiping down the bar, then back at the Jedi staring at him placidly. He met her gaze evenly, and grabbed the glass and tossed back the entire contents in one smooth motion. To his credit, he didn’t choke even as the alcohol burned a trail all the way down his throat.

She shrugged at him lightly, and lifted her mug up as if in cheers. “Have a good flight, Theron.”

“See you around,” he tossed back, before slipping away.

If his ears weren’t deceiving him, he thought he might have heard a quiet huff of laughter as he walked away, the whiskey still burning in his throat, and the odd warmth still bubbling in his gut.

#swtor fanfiction #theron shan x jedi knight #Theron Shan #Female Jedi Knight/Hero of Tython #oc: greyias highwind #otp: adorkable #smoke and mirrors #SoR Fic O Doom #swtor #fanfic #greyfic

13 notes · View notes

monster-addict · 5 years

Text

Unexpected

Orc x OC Multipart Fic - Part 1

Coming to university was a different experience than I thought, overall it was great. I had been going to my local college for some time until I got enough scholarship money to attend wherever I wanted. My friend Aria, had managed to convince me to come to her.

"Yes! I knew you'd come, I already told you about my roommate, bitch." She mumbled the last part.

"Yes, I remember, so you're living in the co-ed dorms right?" I asked her.

"No, considering I'm not a freshman anymore, I'm finally able to rent out one of the houses they have on campus. I asked the two dudes that were my bunkies to move in with me. It's like 5 bedrooms in the house so we all can have our own room."

She informed me on a lot of stuff as she helped me take my things in my room. I guess because they were orcs, everything was bigger, which I was glad about. She told me about how the two males orcs in the other rooms are really nice, and sometimes she hangs out with them. The great thing about this university is that no classes take place on Saturday or Sunday. Looking at my class schedule, most of my classes are in the morning, I'm not complaining about that.

"Oh Sky come here, this is one of the dudes I was telling you about. Skylar this is Orlov, O this is Skylar." She introduced us.

We shook hands, and they got to talking about class.

"What are you majoring in Skylar?" Orlov asked me.

"Umm, Biochemistry." I said.

"Oh, that's what Nick is studying, you two may get along." He said.

"Where is Nick?" Aria asked.

"At study hall, although I don't get why he goes there when no one else studies with him, he just sits there." He said.

I let them talk and I headed back to my room and pulled out my laptop, checking to see if I had any surveys to complete. That's one of the ways I try to get a little extra money. It was already a little late in the day. Aria came to my room and told me that they ordered some pizza. I ate then went back to my room, not really socializing that night.

I went to sleep, but I heard Orlov playing the game all that night. I was used to hearing that type of noise, so I went to sleep fairly okay.

When I woke up the next morning, no one else was up yet. I bought some groceries yesterday while me and Aria was bringing my stuff to the university. So I found everything I need and started to make breakfast for everyone.

Considering the fact that Aria and I have been friends for a pretty long time, I know how much orcs eat. I turned the oven on and made the bacon and sausage. I already had the coffee pot on, I was glad It was one with two pots. I made coffee on one side and tea on the other. Once I started to hear movement coming down the stairs I started on the eggs.

"Oh man, breakfast is being made." I heard a gruff voice, it was Orlov.

"Yeah, morning. How do you like your eggs?" I asked him.

"However is fine, same as Nick. He should be down soon. Aria is still sleep." He yawned and sat at the island.

I continued to cook and I heard someone else come down, Aria this time.

"I'm surprised you're up." I looked over my shoulder.

"And miss your breakfast, I think NOT." She stood beside me.

"Where's Nick?" She asked.

"He's upstairs, I thought he was going to be down before you." Orlov said.

They continued talking and I made the plates, we took them to the living room when Nick finally came downstairs.

"Hey man, what took you so long? Your plate is in the microwave, come on hurry up." Orlov said.

He didn't really seem to be that focused on what he was saying but he came into the living room with his plate.

"Nick this is my friend I was telling you about, Skylar." Aria said.

"Nikolai, but everyone calls me Nick. You got here yesterday, yes?" He asked me.

"Yup." I said.

The TV was on, but you couldn't hear it over Nick and Orlov talking. That's when Aria turned to me, and started talking.

"So, because I knew you were coming back, I got us some studio time for about an hour and a half." She told me.

"That's great, but I feel a 'but' coming." I said.

"Yeah, it's at 8 tonight." She said.

"Oh, that's fine, my first class isn't until 9." I told her.

"Oh god, you have that early bird schedule too, you and Nick are TERRIBLE." She said.

"Hey, Nick!" Aria called out.

"What's up?" He said.

"You mind taking Skylar to class with you, I'm pretty sure you guys have the same schedule." Aria rolled her eyes playfully.

"You're a biochem major?" He asked me.

"Yup." I said.

"Let me look at your schedule later." He told me.

"Sure thing." Then me and Aria get back to talking about dance.

I'm not sure how long we were in the living room talking, but Nick was the first to leave, talking about how he had to go meet up with his girlfriend. I got everyone plates and Orlov helped me clean them up. I heard Orlov say something about playing the game some more.

"Hey, you mind if I join you?" I asked him.

"What, to play?" He asked.

"Yeah." He looked at me in disbelief.

"Okay." He said.

I walked to his room, and it wasn't as messy as I'd thought it would be, he had a little sitting area to sit down.

"I planned on playing Fortnite a bit, but I'll put on Black Ops for your sake." He said.

We played multiplayer for a bit, then he switched it over to Blackout.

"You're pretty good at this." He looked over at me.

"I used to play all the time, I'm a little rusty." I say.

"I typically play with Nick, but I think I may need another controller." He said.

"Or I could by my own TV and console, that way we can just play like that, without having to compromise too much screen space." I said.

"Yeah, Nick has his own, but it depends on what we're playing, we just play in the same room." He said.

"Yeah, I get that." I say.

We played a few more games until I left the room and made me something to eat. I just made a sandwich, and drank the last bit of my tea from this morning.

Aria came in with some shopping bags, and I already knew what it was.

"Bitch, no you didn't." I looked at her laughing.

"If I get any time with you in the studio, AND if we get to record, bitch we gonna look good. Plus I picked you up your regular class attire in the school spirit." She said.

I followed her up to her room and she dumped all the clothes out on her bed.

Most of it was strappy tops and bottoms, our typical stuff we wear in videos. She showed me the sweatshirts and joggers she got me with the school mascot on them. Purple and gold, with the tiger mascot. She gave me every variation of color and style of sweatshirts and sweaters that were in the school shop.

"You do too much, but thank you." I gave her a hug.

I took the stuff back to my room and put it in the dresser.

It was nearing the time for our studio time, so I took a very quick shower and but on some jean shorts, fishnets, a black strappy sports bra and a white cropped hoodie. I finished the look with my black heels that looked like combat boots. I had my hair in box braids, so I just put them into a high ponytail with a struggle. Last minute, I put on my shade of dark red liquid lipstick and left to go to Aria's room.

"Let's go bitch." I said.

"YES BITCH! Snatching all the wigs tonight." She said.

She had on some white short shorts, and a red halter crop top with matching heels. I had my bag packed with a frozen bottle of water and two different sized towels, as well as some baby wipes.

We headed out and we walked to the studio and we checked in and got to the studio. She had her camera with her, and she lived streamed us dancing. She often posted videos on her YouTube, which is her main source of income outside of her parents. We just went over all the old dances we knew, and decided that the next time we come to the studio we'll create something new.

When you only have an hour and a half for studio time, it goes by really quick. By the time we were finished, we were sweating, but not drenched in sweat.

"It feels good being back in the studio." I tell her as we walked back to the house.

"Yes, it always feels good, especially dancing with you." She said.

"What do you want to eat when we get in?" I asked her.

"If you're cooking, it doesn’t matter." She said.

We walked to the house, to hear two orcs upstairs yelling, playing the game.

"I'm going to ask them if they ate yet." I told her.

I went upstairs, and followed the curses and grunting.

"Hey guys, do burgers and fries sound good?" I asked them.

They both turned their heads quickly towards me, but only Orlov replied.

"Yeah, thanks." He said.

I laughed at them and went to my room, taking a shower and cleaning my face. I put on some leggings and a tank top.

I went to the kitchen and started cooking. It didn't take too long to cook, so I made everyone plate. I figured Orlov and Nick weren't going to come down, so I took them their plates.

"Oh man, you're an angel." Orlov said as he took a bite.

"Haha, no problem." I said as I closed the door.

I went to Aria's room to watch some YouTube before I crashed for the night.

//Masterlist//

#orc x human #exophilia #gxf #unexpected

12 notes · View notes

ac-liveblogs · 5 years

Note

slides in. Did somebody say Fate. A bit late, but now that fate go 1.5 is over, what is your thoughts? Both on the two last chapter and all 4 as a whole? And maybe the prologue of cosmos if one can be greedy.

Seraphix (i say it’s canon to EoR so it’s canon) = Shinjuku > Salem > Shimousa > Agartha

Epic of Remnant was an extremely mixed bag, I tell you what. Excluding Seraphix, I don’t really think it got back to Shinjuku’s level in terms of my enjoyment, but Salem put in a damn strong effort. This year I generally preferred the events, so... there’s that, I guess.

Shinjuku was just plain fun? THIS is what sold me on Salter and Jalter, who knew all I had to do was sit in on them sniping at each other for half a singularity. Moriarty speaks for himself, honestly... he’s been an absolute delight not just in Shinjuku but in every event he’s cropped up in since (as has Holmes). Yan Qing is just kinda there I guess, they didn’t really make great use of him.

Agartha. Oh boy. Agartha. As I understand it, NA did some damage control regarding this singularity’s tone, but it couldn’t do much regarding the content, huh. Parts of it were just plain uncomfortable to read (...pirate asexual reproduction...), but honestly nothing takes the cake more than Fergus Lily’s dumb speech to Scherazade I wanted to brain myself the entire time. Agartha was just an exercise in misery.

I play as a male Guda so I didn’t even know Agartha is incapable of recognising if you have a female master. Incredible.

Shimousa... I don’t dislike Musashi, but she’s definitely not my favourite dimension hopping Saber. I get the same feeling with Shimousa that I get with late stage Gintama - a lot of their talk about samurai and swords and the significance therein is lost on me as a Western reader, and it’s definitely appealing to a more Japanese crowd, so a lot of all that just came off as extremely preachy to me.

Musashi too OP, please nerf. Somehow she handily beat the minibosses from the backline of my party, where she’d been banished after the game forced me to put her in the frontlines. (That mechanic was cooler in theory.)

As a disgusting Shirou Amakusa... something, I wish we’d gotten more out of him. Muramasa was kind of cool I guess.

Meanwhile Salem did appeal to my aesthetic, Tituba’s hilariously unsuspicious character art aside. I’m not the hugest fan of Salem forcing you to bring “your” servants with you - it’s always uncomfortable when FGO pretends I keep some Servants longer than the 10 seconds it takes to feed them to someone else - and the plays felt like Salem was just trying to pad itself out. There’s not a huge amount of story in Salem, so I’m not surprised it timegated itself so heavily.

I think I preferred Salem’s tense atmosphere and build-up more than the actual reveal (I had to double check what happened to make sure I understood properly). I don’t dislike what was done, but I do think improvements could’ve been made.

Overall, I wasn’t as impressed with EoR as I was the last stretch of part 1. EoR suffered especially because Seraphix blew the whole thing out of the water and Shinjuku’s strong start made it hard for any of the other Singularities to compare. It definitely feels like filler. As I understand it, Musashi, Holmes and Muramasa are the only relevant characters to make it out. Moriarty is by far the most memorable.

i luv crime grandpa

As for the Prologue - ohoho. I had a lot of fun, despite the info-dumping nature of both it and Lostroom. Thank god Chaldea staff finally got portraits.

The long and short of it is that I am FAR more excited for the Lostbelts than I was for EoR. And I want to punch Goredolf in the nose. Tamamo... Gucci(?) is a fun villain. And... I mean, Kirei is Kirei.

They sure don’t give you long to mourn da Vinci, do they.

paging mr galahad sir, please come back and explain your actions, sir. i want to love you, please let me. please let me make the 3 shielder stalling team of my dreams.

I’m super curious about the Crypters! I’ve been spoilt about some things due to osmosis and the general explosion when Atlantis dropped.

i’m really excited for camelot even though i’m not going to be able to play it for two years. my phone is already crying at the graphical upgrades.

#replies #ac plays fgo #Anonymous

3 notes · View notes

zamancollective · 5 years

Photo

The Constructive Agony of Talking Politics at Shabbat (Or How to Survive a Debate with Your Relatives)

By Gabriella Kamran

Illustration by Sophie Levy

I wasn’t yet 20 years old and I had already forgotten what it felt like to join my relatives for Shabbat dinner and eat brisket without a side of political commentary. Was that a new phenomenon? Was I too busy spitting tomatoes into napkins as a child that I didn’t notice the moral axioms being thrown above my head? Regardless, charged conversation after charged conversation gradually emerged from background noise while I chewed to a dynamic that captured my interest and charted the course of my intellectual development.

It seems accurate to say that I entered the fray around the same time I started buying my own clothes. These were the early teenage years: I was testing the waters of feminism, experimenting with political Facebook posts, and learning that not everything I believe to be true is, in fact, the truth. Every young person has a moment of realization that adults can sometimes be profoundly wrong. Mine took place gradually over a series of weekly dinners, as my male relatives argued and I felt an arsenal of my own opinions weighing in my chest.

I will say with no qualifiers that it is difficult for a fourteen-year-old girl to wedge herself into a conversation with several adult men. First, there is the issue of a quiet voice, not yet amplified by the support of social affirmation. Then there is the matter of being taken seriously — that is, the unspoken surprise that I was not in the living room talking to my girl cousins about nail polish.

(The aunts, for their part, either ladled soup in the kitchen or listened at the table, inserting a comment when appropriate. For a long time, I interpreted their disinterest as ignorance or resignation to gender norms, but with maturity one gets better at recognizing weariness. I remember once my jaw dropped when a cousin’s grandmother expressed a political opinion out loud- something about Hillary’s foreign policy. I hated myself for being so shocked that she’d have something to say.)

I learned quickly that family debate is rocky terrain. The post-meal discussion usually unfolded as follows:

Man 1: This ObamaCare is going to put doctors out of business, I’m telling you.

Man 2: Just awful. The liberals are pushing us towards socialism. Aunt: We’re just giving more and more money to the lazy bums. Me: What about the majority of poor people who aren’t lazy and were born into poverty? I don’t think anyone genuinely wants to be on welfare.

Man 2: Oh, no. We send our kids to the conservative schools and they still get brainwashed by liberals.

Man 1: Question everything your teachers tell you, Gabs. They have an agenda. An agenda.

Alternatively, the “elders” card was pulled and the conversation stopped short:

Me: I don’t think you should call people _____

Relative: You can’t speak to me like that. How can you disrespect your family?

The more politically conscious I became, the more these dinners began to wear on my nerves. At school, I was learning so much I could almost feel my mind growing into itself. The classic teenage practice of finding oneself was in full force for me as I wrote school newspaper op-eds in my successive editor positions and defined myself in the lines of my rhetoric. Dinner with relatives sucked this pride out of my chest and pulled the plug on my budding confidence. I oscillated between righteous indignation that prompted me to sit firmly in place when the political debate started during our meal and outright fear that anyone would ask me at any point in the night about something of more import than my week’s activities. Family dinners became a matter of fight or flight.

I took refuge in journalism and books. They seemed to possess more certainty than my relatives’ armchair sociological analyses. I read Betty Friedan, Ta Nehisi Coates, Ari Shavit… and the fact that I considered these all to be radical texts is indicative of how intimidated I felt in political terms. My progressive ideals were no longer inclinations; I could use words like “neoliberal” and “reactionary” to match my relatives’ rhetorical skill. Vocabulary aside, however, a gulf persisted between me and some of the men in my family.

What was this gulf, exactly? Was it a generational gap? Surely an ideological divide existed between every new crop of cousins, fathers and daughters, uncles and nieces. Common wisdom dictates that naïve youth will always be more progressive and open-minded than their older counterparts. It seemed to me, though, that something more was at play here. These Shabbat dinners meant more than a blasé tidal shift in opinions, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

The time came for me to go to college, and I was surrounded for the first time by a collection of politically conscious people who had enough intellectual acuity to rigorously critique the elder generation’s values.

I met friends who told me their grandparents were “hella liberal” and still smoked weed on the weekends, and I beheld these friends in awe. This must have been the diversity they extolled in admissions brochures, the expansion of horizons — but which one of us was living in a bubble? Then there were the students who seemed to have swallowed their relatives’ platitudes like pills, rolling their eyes when they passed a student protest or snickering at T.A.’s requests to state our preferred gender pronouns. These students made me the most uneasy.

Mostly, though, college brought me a network of friends who shared my experience. By this time we had all developed standby strategies to deal with opinionated table talk: some blocked out the rhetoric and ate their khoresht in peace, and some, like me, often ventured back into the weekly scuffles like moths to a partisan flame.

But, of course, it was more than righteous indignation that pulled me back into the tides of argument. The supposed radical leftist hegemony on college campuses gave my relatives plenty of dinner table fodder on the nights when I made the ten-minute journey from my dorm to their dining rooms. They particularly liked to raise an issue with my chosen minor, Gender Studies, which they denounced as man-hating. As they prodded me about my professors in order to attack their liberal agendas, I felt the familiar nagging anxiety: Was the leftist haven I found in college making me tone-deaf, insular under the pretense of high-minded morality? I felt obligated to listen to every dismissal of Hillary Clinton, every racial slur, and every condemnation of Islam. This was my internal protest at their accusations of narrow-mindedness.

I still wondered what was really new in our political conversations. Topics had changed — Obama and McCain became Hillary and Trump, Al Qaeda became ISIS, gay became LGBTQIA+ — but the emotions I had as a young progressive facing several elder conservatives were constant. What were we all feeling during those semi-heated exchanges? We one-upped each other and attacked arguments at weak points, but what was the seed of all this debate? Perhaps it was a sense of familial betrayal.

We swear to keep family and business separate but there is no such promise when it comes to politics, although we know they are equally divisive. “The personal is political” is also true in reverse — to disparage someone’s worldview is an affront to their world. Political standpoints are currents that run deeper than the surface waters of opinion. Debate is healthy and insult is not, and the line between them is fine.

One August night before my freshman year of college, one family member reminded me once again to question everything my professors would tell me.

“These are a different kind of people. Really liberal. They don’t think like us.”

I wondered briefly what he meant by “us,” considering our often radically divergent opinions. He had been at the dinner table all these years — could it be that he never truly listened to me?

My cousin leaned toward me, interrupting my thoughts.

“Or you could come back from college a flaming liberal, and we’ll still love you.”

I was struck by the resonance of my cousin’s joke, and I still think about it often. By the very merit of calling one another family, we make an implicit promise to stand by one another and love unconditionally – that is, regardless of ideology. When we sit across the dining room table, embroidered white tablecloth stretching between us, and launch attacks intended not to teach, not to strengthen, but to change, there is a sense of combat that doesn’t belong in a family. These mealtime political debates are not a leisurely pastime but a battle driven by an attempt to win, and to win means to vanquish. Hovering over the platters of chicken and tadig is an intention to change one another, and the promise of loyalty feels contingent upon your next comeback.

Isn’t that what families do, though? We change each other. Any amateur psychologist will tell you that our personalities begin at home. Parents, and to an extent other relatives, are charged with the responsibility of edifying their children. It takes a village, and a large part of this is the admonitions and proverbs of the villagers. Perhaps my relatives feel this weight of social obligation propelling them forward as they critique my beliefs. They crave my confirmation that they are succeeding in their efforts. Maybe when I push back and hold my own, they feel some kind of failure.

There’s a Jewish parable in which a sage, faced with a crowd of scholars who disagree with his judgment, asks God to determine who is correct. God declines to comment. The wise men debate and eventually move forward with a decision. From heaven, God laughs with joy: “My sons have defeated me!”

The goal of true mentorship has never been indoctrination. Young people look to their beloved elders to create some kind of safe space to learn to walk, to stumble, to mess up. The goal is that eventually, the pupil becomes the teacher. A student who recites their teachers’ talking points is a student lost.

Through the ages, a 7 p.m. roundtable over plates of freshly-cooked dinner has been the family’s classroom. The curriculum is set by the routine inquiries of “What did you learn at school today?” and, “How was work?” Some families study in groups of three, and some are lucky enough to learn alongside dozens. I should hope that men in my family take enough interest in my growth to stretch my mind and challenge my thinking. So, too, should they hope I prove them wrong sometimes.

#nonfiction & opinion #gabriella kamran #sophie levy

54 notes · View notes

friendsof3villages · 7 years

Text

Play Diary Part 1 (Opening, Up to Spr. 14, Y1)

To sorta kinda revive this blog, start playing the game again from the start, and get in some much needed writing practice, I decided to finally begin a female file on the English version. I’ll be writing a play diary entries and also some entries of random helpful (I hope!) tidbits and mini columns from the Japanese Famitsu guide.

I decided to impose a few rules on myself for this time around:

Veteran mode! Sure, I’m using the Miracle trait, which gives me a very unfair advantage, but... Let’s drain that stamina and that money, mmmkay?

No preconceived ideas about whom to marry! None of that. No leaning toward one character over another sorry Yuzuki and Ludus.

Go easy on the gifts. I want my character to cultivate friendships based on daily conversation, festival participation, and the occasional gift.

Can you believe that this’ll be my...4th(?) time going through the game, and I’ve never made a pet a Furmiliar? And I have still never once played online?! I used to do online co-op frequently in the two previous games, but lately I’ve developed a weird aversion to doing any kind of online competition or co-op... I need to do BOTH those things this time around.

With all that said, here’s my protagonist:

(Man, I miss Miiverse...)

I gave her the name of and based her appearance on my mental depiction of what I wanted my MC to look like in my latest playthrough of Mystic Messenger. Lately I’ve had this weird thing about naming my characters after fruit, pastries, flowers, gemstones, or a combination of two of the previously listed things. I do this in Fire Emblem Heroes, too. (And now you know the only two mobile games I play, bahaha.)

Hence, we have Berry, who should have strawberry-colored hair, so...well, close enough.

I had to consult the calendar in my game guide to come up with a birthday that wouldn't conflict with a festival or another's birthday. I wanna be unique! (The best calendar is on pages 334 and 335, by the way.) I finally decided upon Winter 7. (And yes, playing the English version while relying on a Japanese guidebook could be interesting.)

I’ve noticed this before but I don’t think I’ve mentioned it... While we don’t see Marlena’s face in the flashback, she appears to look exactly the same now as she did back then! She’s aged very gracefully.

Anyway, you know the drill: the family’s moving, Berry wants instead to move out and start her own farm, Daryl doesn’t think she can do it, blah blah. And, clearly, Berry wins the argument, hehe.

Don’t worry, Dad; it’s not like I’ve never played this game before. I’m a VETERAN, y’know. Starting with the amount of money I have will be a huge help. Thanks for the awesome allowance! (14.6 million gold, aww yeah!)

So off Berry goes, she meets Uncle Frank, eats pizza with him...

Ooh, I love that nice long stamina bar...

The next day we’re introduced to Westown and its residents. Here’s a lovely screenshot from a previous playthrough...

Westown is lucky that it has a reliable water source; a lot of the western US (on which Westown is clearly based) isn't so lucky. There are a lot of dams and reservoirs to collect water to make sure that there will be enough for humans and livestock. (I could also go into a tangent about how the buffalo in this game is technically an Asian water buffalo and not the very different-looking American buffalo (bison) native to North America, but, hey. I won’t. Not this time anyway, haha. It’s a fictional world, so they’re allowed a lot of slack.)

Hello, Wayne! I’m genuinely impressed that he remembers Berry’s name just from his conversations about her with Frank. And, yeah, he gets a slight head start in the affection dept., as he’s the first bachelor we meet. But since Ford will come along in a couple of days, he doesn’t get much of an advantage.

Also, have I ever mentioned how much I love Lisette’s design? It reminds me of traditional Mexican dress. She’s just missing a rebozo (shawl), and one with a delicate flower pattern woven or embroidered into it would perfectly suit her.

Finally, the time came to name my farm. I was sleepy and giddy and ended up calling it...

Yup, it’s not just any farm. It’s THE farm. Heh heh.

Thanks for telling me that's a bed, uncle. I would have never figured out on my own that the wooden frame with a mattress, blanket (that looks stitched together from a number of pillowslips or something) and pillow is a bed. So, thanks.

Spring 3, Year 1

FINALLY, the opening and tutorial were over so I could at last play the game!

Here’s what I did on my very first day: planted the crops Uncle Frank gave me and bought some more seeds:

Only 5 bags of radish seeds, uncle? Oh well, I’ve got more than enough money to buy more.

I chopped down a whole tree:

That took forever.

And managed to max out Westown’s E status. On the first day. Niiiiiiiice.

I also expanded my bag (twice), bought and planted grass seeds, bought spicy fodder and chicken feed, plus treats and the tools I need for the animals,and then bought a chicken (Banana) and a cow (Kale). I now gather eggs from Banana and milk Kale every day. Make of that what you will.

Spring 4-14, Year 1

I’m not going to ship much, at least not yet. I’ve shipped 10 radishes as a requirement to raise Westown to D rank. Everything else has gone into storage. I’ve also met Berry’s second potential future husband: Ford.

I was able to purchase a fishing rod, so now I spend a lot of time fishing. All my crops, milk, eggs, fish, and stuff I’ve foraged are stowed safely away in storage for when/if I need them. I love hoarding.

So, my next entry will probably be my introduction to Lulukoko and the rest of Spring!

#Story of seasons #trio of towns #playthrough

42 notes · View notes