#Our Development Process

[icewindandboringhorror]

I know this is just a silly bad quality random screencap of a screencap that I found on facebook lol, BUT it's a succinct enough image to easily describe the concept in a quick/accessible way hopefully :

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(and of course, feel free to elaborate in tags, etc.! (especially elaborating about other senses as well.. can you "hear" in your mind just as well as you can "see"? taste? etc.) It's an interesting topic to me, as someone who's like a 4.5 at MOST lol. I'm curious what option will be the most common :0c )

[aro-culture-is]

Questioning aro culture is am I actually aro? Maybe I just have commitment issues? But i don't see the appeal of being in a romantic relationship so maybe I am? But the thought of being in any kind of intimate relationship makes me anxious so maybe I am just emotionally unavaliable and i should work on that? Why is it so difficult to understand myself?!

(Someone please help me)

I would avoid phrasing it as "making you [anxious, mad, etc]", due to having a therapist sister who regularly goes on rants about how important it is to own your own emotions, ie, "I feel anxious about this", not "[they, the emotions] make me feel...". some things I'd recommend asking yourself, privately, and without judgement:

"Am I afraid because I am used to feeling unsafe/insecure/unwanted in relationships, and safety is not familiar? If so, how might I practice feeling familiar in safety? How might I practice making my unsafe relationships less unsafe, or less frequently encountered? Who might be able to help keep me accountable to these plans? Can I start writing/journaling about this process to see my progress and avoid doubting myself when that happens?"

And note, when I say "without judgement", I mean like. It's okay if you feel like you should feel safe but don't. That's just an observation. It's okay if you feel a way, and it's okay if you feel bad for feeling that way, and you don't need to ruminate on it. You can write that down, and you can give yourself permission to move on to the next question or thought. It's okay.

You don't need to interrogate yourself. Often, especially if you don't have a lot of safe or healthy relationships (a common component in folks who are nervous of intimate relationships of all kinds) you are taught to be the first cruel voice, to shut down any thoughts less safe individuals might not appreciate, and learning to stop doing that is a part of the healing process. Your thoughts, emotions, and actions influence each other, but they are different. Thinking and feeling are not actions, and it's okay to recognize that maybe acting on them is not polite, but you don't have to do that! They don't control you. You simply are thinking or feeling that way. "I feel, I think" - not "it made me so angry I..."

Things will get better. Healing is not linear, and you will have both improvements and setbacks, and that is normal and okay. As you examine what safe relationships feel like, I think that will help settle what relationships you do like and want for yourself.

[thepersonalwords]

Luxury is the enemy of growth. This is the one thing that I learnt from my father, and I approve of it fully. Abundance is neither good nor healthy for the growth of a child’s mind.

Abhijit Naskar, Human Making is Our Mission: A Treatise on Parenting

[bestworstcase]

How likely is it do you think that there are/have been Grimm-based cults? I can't imagine there's Never been Grimm cults, and I'm particularly interested in the idea of there being Grimm cults or even just organizations who Actually Understand the Grimm and safely live alongside them. I think it's such a fascinating idea, I'm very tempted to come up with a mysterious faction that respects/admires the Grimm (like how people did/do respect forces of nature in religion) and (mostly) safely lives alongside them. Any thoughts?

two obvious paths. whether the second is viable depends on how well you trust my basic reading of the grimm as sapient beings who reflect back what they’re given—dark mirrors—but the first is textually sound without any extrapolation required.

#1: the grimm as gods of war

these are the salient facts:

the grimm follow groups of bandits around to scavenge in the wake of their raids

criminals in mistral sometimes use captive grimm to execute members of rival gangs

grimm are more strongly drawn by violent anger and hatred than by sadness, fear, or other negative emotions.

it’s possible (per ‘before the dawn’) for one side of a conflict to "ally" with the grimm in battle if the other side is, er, tastier

ok. imagine you have a region where most of the people live in small nomadic groups—perhaps a steppe or a desert, their subsistence base is herding—with smatterings of fortified towns and villages around the edges of the region where there’s arable land enough to support a larger sedentary population. the nomadic groups can’t produce their own weapons/armor (mines, smelters, and forges aren’t portable), so they’ll need to either raid or trade with the towns for that. and conflicts between these nomadic groups over territory and other resources are inevitable.

how do the grimm figure in this region?

well a) the grimm are going to be following the nomadic groups around, with more warlike groups attracting more grimm, and b) grimm will fight alongside people against a common enemy if their "allies" are calmer or otherwise less appealing.

this is like… a perfect storm for the nomadic groups to start venerating "their" grimm as war-gods, in tandem with fostering warrior-cultures that prize tranquility or joy and mercy in battle; there is no honor in hatred or rage or taking pleasure in killing (our grimm turn against those warriors who lose themselves to bloodlust), so a good warrior must be calm, decisive, and swift, and never prolong a fight unnecessarily. but it’s also beneficial to make one’s enemies fearful and angry, or provoke them into hatred.

all it takes is one or two warriors who kept a cool head in battle noticing that the grimm ignored them to go after another warrior who went berserk and then interpreting this as a moral judgment. historically, we know grimm were thought to be the vengeful or corrupted spirits of animals, or animals possessed by demons; both are understandings that encourage this sort of thinking. these are animal spirits that cannot rest because someone killed them without giving due respect, and now they seek to punish those who commit such wrongs… so we’d better take care to treat our adversaries in battle and the animals we hunt with honor and mercy.

and oh, we should pay our respects to the grimm, too. perhaps make some offerings. they eat the corpses of the slain after a battle, so… a) we mustn’t be wasteful when we hunt, it isn’t respectful, and b) we should consider the grimm in our funeral customs.

this is a very basic. BASIC human impulse. humans will try to propitiate the fucking sky because we’re so good at pattern recognition and also anthropomorphizing things that we’ll find patterns and read meaning into the most random coincidences. take that and add it to the fact that it legitimately is possible to form alliances with grimm… fgrhjsv

under these conditions grimm-worship probably tends to look something like:

warrior cultures that prize moderation, calmness, efficiency, and clever mockery or intimidation of the enemy in battle,

funeral customs that ritualize feeding the dead to grimm, and/or ritual sacrifice of captured enemies,

grimm viewed as battlefield psychopomps and/or patron spirits of warriors, whether as a class or as individuals or both, and

incorporation of grimm-like designs or motifs into armor and clothing of warriors, to intimidate enemies.

with wide variation in the details and elaborations. the reason for this common set of foundational practices is that religion is practical. it’s not arbitrary. it isn’t pretend. prayer and ritual are things people do because it works, or it’s believed to work, and the right methods are figured out through trial and error long before they coagulate into tradition. so with something like grimm, whose behavior really can be meaningfully influenced, similar patterns will emerge across different cultures because whether a given practice does or doesn’t work is a) more than random chance or coincidence, and b) extremely easy to identify because if it doesn’t work the grimm will attack you.

& #2, the grimm as nature gods

these are my presuppositions, based on extrapolation from the text:

the grimm have a physiological need for aura, which they can get by siphoning; they eat their prey in order to extract aura from the remains.

grimm attraction to emotions is akin to our attraction to the aroma and taste of food; strong emotions herald deep auras or excite aura so it’s more "nutritious" for the grimm, so they hunt by following emotion.

because aura/soul separates from the body at death, siphoning aura from a living person is much more efficient than killing and eating; grimm will prefer to be fed aura by someone alive over hunting if possible.

because aura can be channeled outward through tools, clothing, etc, it can also be channeled into a repository and stored for a while; this seems to be how the grimm lures in arrowfell work.

grimm are intelligent, emotional, social creatures who can learn to recognize certain groups of people as 'safe' or as friends/allies, without salem.

grimm reflect back the emotional energy they’re given; they’re not "attracted" to anger or pain per se, they just mirror it. bristle and draw your weapon at a grimm, and the grimm will charge at you. remain calm and retreat slowly, and the grimm will keep its distance too.

if all of these presuppositions are true, you can propitiate grimm by saturating an object with aura and leaving that out for the grimm on the regular. i imagine that organic/living things that naturally have aura would work best for this purpose; sacrificing an animal or a portion of your harvest is intuitive, and if fervent religious belief alone isn’t enough to infuse something with aura, then priests or religious officials whose auras have been unlocked and trained will do the trick.

if aura-saturated offerings aren’t possible, then you’d need someone with aura training to channel aura to the grimm through, like, a stick, or bare-handed if they were brave enough or confident enough. this is a more uncomfortable option (like physically) but we have a canonical example of a character doing it: she found it disconcerting, but not painful, and it’s implied that the grimm didn’t attack her at any point during. so a) it probably doesn’t do any more harm than having one’s defensive aura break, and b) stopping the flow of aura to the grimm by moving away won’t provoke the grimm to attack.

as unpleasant the prospect might seem, if it clearly worked to reduce or eliminate grimm attacks on the community, people would do this. people would absolutely do this. the big hurdle lies in discovering that this is possible—like you’d need someone to willingly approach a grimm, lay a hand on it, and channel aura into it without knowing what will happen, and the kind of person who would even think to TRY that is very rare—but once it was known? religious belief motivates people do all sorts of unpleasant, uncomfortable, or even outright painful and harmful things to themselves. fasting. self-flagellation. hermitage.

like… waves hands. if it’s a known thing in a community that grimm won’t attack anyone if a few people go into the wilderness every morning to stand there and pour aura into grimm who pass by until they’re tapped out for the day, lots of people will be fully willing and able to do that. far more than are willing and able to become huntsmen: it’s not dangerous or difficult, it’s just going to tire you out on your assigned days. and if you have say, a village of a hundred people of whom ten are able to do it, you can rotate so no individual has to do it more often than thrice a month. NBD.

and if nothing else except the emotional mirroring thing is true, then you can… more or less propitiate grimm by doing whatever, because in this case what makes propitiation effective is community belief that it works: if you and everyone else around you believes that wearing pendants carved in the likeness of grimm and pouring a libation of wine outside the village gates to entreat the grimm for safe passage through the wilds is effective in making the grimm leave you alone, then no one’s going to panic or raise the alarm upon seeing a grimm wandering around in the barley field, and the grimm won’t freak out either.

if you believe that a grimm is a being that can be appeased and you cross paths with one in the woods, you’re going to do what you believe will keep you safe; for a huntsman, that’s "draw a weapon and attack," but for you that might be "hold up your grimm pendant and recite a prayer to politely wish it well and ask for its blessing in return," which—if the grimm just reflect your emotional energy back at you—will probably make the grimm pause and look at you for a moment before continuing on, which confirms and reinforces your belief that this is the correct way to deal with grimm. This Is How Religion Works.

so all that to say, as long as i’m correct about at least one of these presuppositions—the one with the strongest textual evidence, no less—then propitiating the grimm will reduce their aggression dramatically if not stop it altogether. and if that’s the case then i’d imagine grimm-worship is quite common and also varied in more remote regions where human-grimm encounters are frequent.

the shape of that worship will evolve out of how people in a given community figured out that you can do this with grimm. if one person tries a certain thing and it works, and then more people try the same thing and it works for them to, then that is going to become known as the Thing That Works and it will be gradually refined and elaborated on from generation to generation. and on the other side of the mountains they might be doing the same process but with a completely different thing that also worked the first time.

so you might have a village making huge ritual productions of preparing a feast for the grimm with a portion of the harvest, orchestrated by a coterie of priests who fill the offerings with aura… and in the hinterlands a few hundred miles away you might have a group of nomadic herders who leave the bones of every sheep they eat for the grimm and also have elaborate coming-of-age rituals where you go into the wilderness to prove yourself to the grimm by baring your soul… and up north on the coast you might have a whaling town where sailors pray to something like the leviathan or the feilong as a sea-god because their ancestors happened to stumble into a symbiotic relationship with a giant grimm that preys on whales and realized these little guys in boats make better hunting partners than they do snacks. etc.

basically if you accept a presupposition that the grimm aren’t "soulless evil monsters whose sole purpose is to kill humans" and consider them as beings that have some rhyme or reason as to when they’re aggressive and when they’re not, and the rhyme or reason is something humans/faunus could plausibly figure out how to accommodate and/or influence, there are a lot of ways to build a grimm cult. ’cause religion is at its core humans trying to understand the world so we can keep ourselves safe, healthy, and comfortable; worshipping grimm is just a cultural framework for a threat management program.

think about it in those terms, and take however you think grimm work and ask "what could people Do to lower the risk of grimm attacking them?" and "what might people Do that doesn’t really have an effect but seems like it maybe does?" and then start to elaborate from there with "okay, what stories do people tell to explain why they do these things and how they learned to do these things? how do they conceive of the grimm and their relationship to grimm? how does this shape the social and moral values of this religion?" etc.

praxis comes first, belief second. and the praxis develops through trial and error with the basic goal of "how can we make the grimm leave us alone?" so things that clearly don’t work will be discarded. (with ‘clearly don’t work’ meaning "we did this and grimm immediately attacked us"; people will tend to take "we did this and grimm didn’t attack us for two months" to mean "it worked! we should do it every other month!")

[esteemed-excellency]

2 & 6 for character asks?? >:3

2. How long was the process before the character reached its final version? (or a version that would be clearly recognizable as the character?)

I started playing in 2013 and for years I thought about fl as an online equivalent of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, there was no player character, just me reading a story. Hiram became recognisable as a character only around 2018/19, after I asked myself what kind of person would make irl all the choices I jokingly made in game. In terms of personality, nothing changed much because I always played in the most chaotic way possible, not caring much about menaces, hoarding laudanum, and losing my character's soul immediately both with the old and new account.

In total I'd say it took around 6-7 years for Hiram to fully develop his storyline and destiny in game (the late game was implemented relatively recently), while I designed him over the course of one year in 2018. His backstory and character arc developed afterwards, when I created a group chat during the pandemic with @that-fella-snipsnop @thunder-threnodies @that-giorgione and @a-true-gentlemummy (the Paramount Polycule).

6. What was the thought process behind their appearance? Did you go mostly for the aesthetic or are there other reasons they look the way they do?

I designed Hiram while I was playing the middle game for a second time and found myself with a character who was deeply embroiled in the Wars of Illusion, and strongly aligned with Hell, so the aesthetic factor played a strong part in his appearance. I love designing outfits, and I had the perfect excuse to explore multiple decades of fashion. His design never changed much: my first thought process was to draw a guy who looked like a mix between a 1920s actor and Mandrake the Magician. I was watching a lot of operetta films at the time so I incorporated the mannerism of Anton Walbrook into the design, settling on him and Ronald Colman as faceclaim. I still really like the idea of him looking like a 20s actor playing a victorian character, it gives him the perfect vintage campy flair ✨️

[journey-to-balance]

My life's inner work, or shadow work, has continually consisted of doing the work of cleansing the window of my mind, that it may become a mirror reflecting inspiration from the most High.

I do this, not with strenuous effort, but through quiet contemplation, through gently reaching and affirming an inward recognition.

Today I walk in the pathway of inspiration. Said inspiration intuitively guides my creative processing of ideas. I honor my boundaries, personal space and privacy so as to not ever step out of the creative flow of energy I've devoted myself to. There is an inspiration within me which governs every act, every thought, with certainty, with conviction and in peace...

Reflections, Our Journey to Balance

[triglycercule]

in undertale you choose to care for the characters and if you do you can get the happy ending you want

but if you dont then you might just kill some out of inpatience (me fr) or greed for G or because you suck at fighting or really you might kill them ALL because you just want to see what would happen,,,,, you want to get that delicious 0/100 (idk how many monsters there are in the underground) full completion with all side quests unlocked and all possible dialogues read and every single little thing done no matter how cruel those actions could be,,,,

it's the lack of care for these characters due to just seeing them as nothing more than video game scripted characters and just something to have fun with that causes players of games to do cruel and immoral things

ok but triglycercule what does this have to do with the murder time trio?? idk maybe the fact that killer completely embodies that last sentence to me

[chloecorvid]

My D&D character Norphanus is having a looooot of feelings as of late. Some good, some bad, mostly confused and uncertain. And I needed a new portrait of him for my... 9th playlist based on him and this game he's in. So! Here that is!

[caroalanfc]

mexico's really going to the next world cup with two 35+ year olds and a nepo baby as its center forward options

[crescentfool]

🎆✨

[chestersbraincell]

ORLAM GREAT HEAVENS YOU’VE NEVER LOOKED BETTER

[not-so-superheroine]

Since it's not going in my article due to space constraints, i'll share a bit about Jane Manning James here. It won't be superfleshed out atm bc it got cut. I plan to do more later. As I am *Reorganized*, writing this for a Community of Christ publication, i researched Ld-S shared history to the point of Nauvoo. my article doesn't follow west (technically). the main resource was an LDS one (thank you v much for your freely available archive) asking about her time with the prophet of the Restoration.

Jane Manning James

A significant Black Latter Day Saint from the early church was Jane Manning James. A woman from Connecticut notably made the walk from Buffalo, New York to Nauvoo, Illinois on foot, with most of her family. This was only after being separated from the group of recently converted latter day saints in Buffalo, possibly due to their race. Jane was baptized in 1842 by missionaries in her home state of Connecticut. She recorded these things about her journey and arrival to Nauvoo and her faith when asked to recall her life living with Joseph Smith in 1905.

“When I went there [Nauvoo] I only had two things on me, no shoes nor stockings, wore them all out on the road… They [Joseph and Emma] was looking for us because I wrote them a letter. There was eight of us, my mother and two sisters and a brother and sister-in-law, and we had two children, one they had to carry all the way there, and we traveled a thousand miles.”

She was sure in her belief of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and Modern Prophecy. She says in her recollection, after seeing that Joseph Smith Jr was indeed the man in her vision in Connecticut, that “This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ and there will never be any other on earth. It has come to stay.” Sister James would later go west with the saints under the leadership of then Apostle Brigham Young.

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me tumblr posting again:

thank you for the example set Sister James on faith, dedication, and perseverance. She also had spiritual gifts, such as speaking in tongue and faith healing. She believed following the gospel, knowing it was a key to a better way of living life (for her.) it wasn't easy for her, and yet, i think the faith community i observe today (and mormonism in general) is better, just for her having lived it.

may she be at peace, and in a manner God, Sister Jane herself, and her family she led that meant so very much to her, see fit.

[thepersonalwords]

Each of us wages a private battle to thrive. Whenever a person fully immerses oneself in life’s aromatic flower garden of pleasures and encounters life’s warship of armor-plated rigors, they blend and bend to make reasonable accommodations for surviving. Scripted and unscripted encounters with superior militant forces bruise us mightily and eventually cut us to the core. Every person’s life contains a minefield of obstacles that function as potential barriers to achieving our ultimate manifestation. The expended labor of continuously hefting oneself over one contentious hurdle after another is what leads a conscientious person onto the path of needing to write in order to create emotional poultices to ameliorate painful wounds.

Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

[thecultofproductivity]

Aaaaahhh

Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh

[your-lovely-ghost]

TW for grief rambling, and mourning an abuser

Will it ever stop feeling weird? Grief, I mean. Grieving people that have done objectively monstrous things to you is incredibly isolating because it’s like nobody understands why you’re grieving, and most days you don’t either. God we just need to hear from someone else that’s been in this situation. Please tell me we’re not alone.

For losing someone so close to us, it feels like it should hurt more. And sometimes less.

I feel like I should regret more, but sometimes I just can’t. Or at least I can’t admit to myself or the others when I regret something.

This woman raised me for almost half of my life. We were strangers for the last five years.

I love(d? No… still love, I think.) her more than myself, more than my parents and siblings, I can’t begin to describe the deep seated loyalty I felt towards her for some reason.

She was the best and worst memories of my life.

Even being forced to relocate so much I always tried to get back to her, to where I thought my home was, and she’d try to keep me no matter how it tore everyone else apart. Until the day I gave up coming back, which had its own reasons.

We spent the last two months of her life together every day. I don’t even remember what I’m trying to say. But nothing feels real. I just want her back so fucking bad. It feels weird to grieve someone that did horrific evil things to you but still showed you the most love.

How am I supposed to go on after this?

[taeyungie]

😺