#all those quotes seemed to place him secondary to his death

[petrichara]

Used to really hate when people would tell me my grief was part of love. All those quotes felt like a smack in the face saying it’s meant to be, and how could something so senseless find poetry?

[dailydemonspotlight]

I'm so so so in love with the content you make on this blog, thank you so much for all the effort you put into researching each demon!

Is it possibile to ask for some insights on muu shuwuu?

Have a nice day!

Muu Shuwuu - Day 85

Race: Raptor

Arcana: Temperance

Alignment: Dark-Law

August 2nd, 2024

The obscurity of several demons throughout the SMT series isn't often a point of contention- most demons, barring a few (cough, cough, Arahabaki,) have rather open-and-shut cases, and their origins are easily able to be traced, as are their stories. However, sometimes, it's not that easy, and sometimes the source mythology itself is so obscure it's hard to get a grasp on. We've already seen this with poor ol' Porewit, but another case of this lies in the somewhat off-kilter religion of Tengrism, and, more specifically, a rather bizarre spirit from said religion. Today's Demon of the Day is that creature, one created out of a dead woman who never got to experience love, Muu Shuwuu.

Sources and stories relating to this demon are scant, even for this series- as an obscure monster from an already obscure religion, Mu Shuvuu (also referred to as Moh Shuvuu, Maγu Sibaγu, Moshobo, or Muu Shubuu in several different sources) is a tough nut to crack. Almost all sources about this bird are in different languages, whether it be Japanese, German, or Russian, and as such it'll be hard to get direct quotes for a lot of sources. Given the hellish mixture of a lack of primary/secondary sources, Google Translate having to try its damndest to translate the few articles I can track down, but I've managed to get a general idea of what it's going for thanks to the Internet Archive.

Mentioned within the text 'Demonology, Ritual Principles, and Worship Grimoires,' Muu Shuvuu makes an appearance concretely in English. Thank YHVH. In the text, the Tengri demonness appears listed as an example of an evil spirit from another culture. Her name literally meaning 'evil bird,' the spirit is noted as being dangerous to entire groups of people, though especially so to lonesome travelers or those with soft hearts. Appearing as a kind, lonely young girl, she'd always be hiding her mouth out of fear of revealing her beak...

According to the text, Mongolian principles state that a person has two or three types of souls within them, and Moh Shuvuu is made up of that third kind of soul- the type that can form into a spirit after death. A Muu Shuwuu specifically seems to form from a combination of factors, namely being a young girl who either died without ever experiencing love, died and had their father place a flint into her hand posthumously, or experienced a violent death. This would eventually lead to their spirit growing restless and rising from their corpse, forming into, what else, but a Muu Shuwuu itself. The bird would then go around seeking vengeance for its lack of love, proceeding to seduce men who would approach, or pretend to be a lost little girl in order to get the man to let his guard down. Then, after bringing the man to a safe location, she would proceed to kill him and suck his brain out of his head with her sharp beak. Again, a lot of this is hard to prove confidently, given that I'm mostly working off of wikipedia articles and spotty translations- most sources are exclusively either Japanese or use Cyrillic, which I can't translate due to not having a keyboard for either alphabet- but for the most part, I can glean that she sucks out the brain for sustenance.

I think, and this is based mostly off of speculation from the articles referenced above, that Muu Shuwuu actually isn't a mix of a bird and girl like in SMT- no, apparently she is able to shift between the two forms, the young girl's form being a disguise so she can then slaughter the man later on as a bird. This seems to make Muu Shuwuu less of a harpy and more of, well, a bird! That aside, though, I do have to admit that the design in SMT works very well- to an extent, this is what I wish Hua Po actually looked like, given the bird theming throughout her original story, but I might be asking for a bit much here. Still, if any of you can find any further sources on this demon, I'd happily take them, as I'm not quite satisfied with this simple of a rundown. Regardless, though, I have to thank SMT for making a demon from such an obscure concept, even if that would eventually down the line lead me to a strange, bottomless spiral of research.

Tengrism is fucking weird, man.

[manyothermusingsofmine]

Masquerade of Units || Chapter 3/5

Prev: Chapter 2 Start: Chapter 1 Fandom: Xmen

Warnings: None

Wordcount: 2506

Summary: Hey you know what solves the questline sooner? When two of the three party members start arguing about stuff until the third one is questioning his life choices -------------------------

The three of them stared at the guy at the door, with Gambit leaning back with an annoyed groan. Seemed like tonight was the night of running into people he didn’t necessarily want to run into in the first place. But at least this one shouldn’t be too difficult to deal with as he lightly elbow pushed Miranda forward by a smidge.

“You go distract him.”

“Wh- wait, hold up a minute, why me?!” she asked in a high, annoyed whisper, “you’re the one with the charm gift here, not me.” “I haven’t had any luck with my supposed charm all evening,” he replied back in an equal hiss of a whisper, “besides, not even my charm is going to work on an actual straight guy, Miranda!”

“Who’s married, by the way,” Forge dryly remarked in a soft tone as he was behind both of them listening to the argument unfold, “with two kids.”

“Two?” Gambit asked, as both of the other mutants turned to Forge while he casually dropped this bit of knowledge into their lap.

“Yup, second one on the way from what I’ve heard through the grapevine.”

“…. Huh.”

Forge tried to keep his face unmoving as Miranda almost dramatically turned to Gambit, green eyes spewing fire and oh, if only they actually could.

“You knew he was married and you still want me to go over there and flirt with him?!” the tone of her whisper sharp and almost venomous as her ire seeped through in every word she hissed through her teeth.

“I said nothing about flirting, don’t be putting words I never said in my mouth!” his tone was just as sharp if not more so than hers, not appreciating it in the slightest that she implied he wanted her to start messing about in someone’s marriage, “just distract him, there’s other ways to do that than sweettalking someone!” “Then why don’t you do it?!”

“Because luck has been abandoning me all evening!”

Forge just looked back and forth to whomever was speaking, a sigh coming from what seemed to be the deepest pit of his soul as these two were having an argument on who had to talk to the guy at the door, rolling his eyes and wishing he had brought popcorn along to watch the debate. What finally stopped the whispered bickering between the two was when the actual lights started flickering, all three looking up at the light fixtures as Gambit grumbled that that was a great secondary problem that decided to make itself known if it wasn’t a mere fluke of the gods getting equally annoyed at their squabbling. Miranda on the other hand zoned out for a moment, her mind concocting a plan with the sudden flickering of the light as she looked at the guy.

“… Then I hope he’s superstitious,” she muttered, taking off her gloves and immediately without a word handing them over to Gambit, who just stared at her in an attempt to figure out what the hell she meant by that. She took out her ruby earrings, wanting to hand them over to Gambit as well when her hand suddenly halted above his in a moment of hesitation as she rolled her eyes to him.

“I want those back. They cost me a pretty penny.”

The absolute death glare she got in response would have been funny had she not been serious, and had Remy not taken genuine offense at the implication that he would steal from a friend as his red eyes were now the ones ablaze with anger

“Skill issue.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up.”

“I don’t want your damn rubies; I can get my own for whatever purpose I need, thank you very much.”

“Oh, sure, because you gave that zircon you quote unquote found to Shadow out of the mere goodness of your heart, huh?”

“Miranda,” he growled, eyes flashing pink in a warning that she was seriously pushing his buttons right about now, to which Forge reacted by actually stepping in before these two decided to turn on each other like two rabid dogs fighting over the same bone

“Will you two knock it off?! Seriously, having to listen to you argue like a set of school children is making me want to be a part of this less and less by the minute, so get a move on; we have more important things to worry about than this childish argument between the two of you!” Miranda dropped the earrings on top of the gloves, vanishing from sight as soon as they hit the fabric with the only thing still showing being the sparkles of her dress in the light. She had no intent of being graceful about this anymore, walking over with an annoyed growl coming out of her that she could easily use for the plan she had been trying to set into motion. It was enough to startle the man with the dark curls and green spotted skin away from his leaning against the door enough that with a simple approach and a hard push with her hip she shoved him further away. She threw the door to maintenance open, easily spotting a light switch that she angrily and rapidly pushed on and off to make the lights down the hallway flicker. 

Deep brown eyes looked on in increasing concern and a faint sense of horror as all he saw was light reflecting off shining particles before an almost poltergeist scenario played out in front of him

“Uh, that’s-“

His sentence interrupted by the loud slam of the door being forcefully thrown shut on it’s own with no one nearby, the frog mutant instinctively leaped up and back from the noise, temporarily sticking to a window near the base of the stairs before sliding down and leaping up again as the door was throw back open with the same angry vibe coming off from the force

“… something I’m not dealing with on my own,” he concluded to himself, hopping off in big jumps down the hall back to the ballroom to find one of his friends. Miranda didn’t care if he brought the whole party, flicking back into view herself while leaning on the wall near the door with her arms crossed over her chest as Gambit and Forge approached.

“…. Subtle,” Gambit remarked, dropping her belongings into the hand she held out to him as soon as he got close enough, “see, no need for flirting with a married man. Thanks, by the way, for thinking that’s what I wanted you to do, like I’m some sort of homewreckin’ heartbreaker.”

“Now who’s putting words into someone’s mouth?”

“I seem to be learning from the best, here.”

“Stop,” Forge bit at the both of them as Miranda inhaled to start the argument back up again, deciding that if they still didn’t want to play nice with each other, he was going to take reign on this operation if they had any hope of actually finishing what they set out to do, “You, you stay by this door and let us know if anything happens. There’s a unit to your left, over there; if that starts working we should be in the clear. And you-”

He turned to Gambit, clearly and absolutely fed up with their arguing and stabbing at each other that he had decided the best course of action was to physically separate them for the time being

“Come with me,” it was a firm request he didn’t give an opt out option to, his gaze firmly on the other mutant, “I need your help with this AC.”

“N-“

“Do not argue with me,” and the almost parental tone of his voice finally seemed to shut both of them up despite Gambit having a need to always have the last word in a conversation, “come with me. Now.”

Gambit groaned, but obeyed the command regardless, with Miranda silently mocking him and the situation as they left, despite still fuming internally at the whole thing. She just listened as their footsteps went further away down the hall to what she hoped was whatever controlled the AC units, so when they fixed it the whole night would be fine and she didn’t have to deal with either of them for the rest of the damn evening. The boiling rage in her stomach seemed to cool and settle, and with it her heart sank a little. Her mind took over, overthinking the situation while guilt started swirling in her chest over the things she had said. Remy was right, she was implying things about him she had no right to put on him. She shut her eyes to try and ban the tension head ache that started to emerge, only to open them and look directly in brown eyes so dark they were near pitch black. She let out a mangled, soft yelp at the sudden presence of someone way too close in her personal space like that. The silver haired man tilted his head like a curious dog, looking her up and down and immediately laughing when her invisibility flicked on- there was little point in hiding from someone who knew where she was already, and he placed two arms on each side of her with a speed she had no hope of ever matching, trapping her in.

“No you don’t, hi, mind telling me why you’re scaring the living daylights out of my friend, hm?”

“When you’re done sulking, will you give me that miniature wrench over there?” Gambit huffed at the request, but grabbed the tool and handed it over to Forge.

“Dunno, by how this evening is going, someone’s brother is going to accuse Gambit of stealin’ that off him.”

“Remy, will you stop?”

“She started it by implying I wanted her to flirt with a married man and that I would steal from my friends, like I don’t have enough on my plate without her accusations. I gave her back the stupid earrings, what do you want?!”

“For you to breathe, and cool your temper for a minute. Fine, she started it, you’re right, is that what you want to hear? You did little to deescalate the situation back there, or anything to explain what you actually wanted from her.”

“Oh so the logic there is that because I don’t tell her what kind of distraction I need we’re just all going to assume I want her to jump Tolansky’s bones, or what?! Grand. Really making me feel appreciated right about now, when I’m trying to save this evening for her sake.”

“Are you? Because to me, it’s starting to sound like you’re doing what she did to you; putting words in our mouths. I certainly didn’t expect that to be your intent, but neither her, me or you possess telepathy. Unless both of you start talking about what the plan actually is, without taking stabs at each other over things the other has no control over, the two of you will never form an actual good, functioning team, now will you?” “She wouldn’t be here if I didn’t convince her to go, which means she would miss out on an evening with Nightcrawler; insulting me, accusing me of shit I didn’t do is her way of repaying that?”

“Oh, and what a night it’s been; Nightcrawler amongst many boiling alive in a mansion that forgot that machinery like this need maintenance that they haven’t bothered to hire the staff for apparently, and Gambit meddling in the business of his friends because he’d rather set those two up then deal with his own business, causing him to cold shoulder ignore the woman making heart eyes at him as soon as he appears on the scene. Am I missing anything, or is that an accurate enough summary?” The call out hit him hard and raw, as Gambit crossed his arms with a scowl and leaned back on the nearest flat surface. Yes, Forge was missing something, the part where Miranda implied he was going around wrecking the relationships of others for the hell of it or for quick gain. As if he wasn’t in the middle of trying to tie off the loose ends between the residue remaining of how he had felt about Rogue, while simultaneously trying to make sense of the absolute overpowering wave of emotions and feelings Shadow shook loose in him by merely looking at him.

… Which she couldn’t actually know about, and for what it was worth Miranda had kept her word about not telling anyone about seeing him and Shadow kiss. Sure, bringing up the zircon was a stupid stab; but giving someone a gift was something he could still play off and come back from in a way he couldn’t if she ran her mouth about that kiss instead. Tension left his shoulders as he could at the very least not blame her for the bind he found himself in; Miranda had nothing to do with the struggle he felt between two women he did genuinely care a lot for.

“Why did you bring me here, Forge? You don’t actually need Gambit to help you with any mechanical know how.”

“I brought you here to stop you and the lady from actually tearing each other’s throats out back there. You’re both bullheaded and enjoy pressing the buttons of the other too much to walk away when things get too real, so I figured if you two weren’t going to separate yourselves I would step in and make you; before someone said something they couldn’t take back or turned it physical; I saw that warning flare in your eyes, Gambit. You two genuinely fight like siblings, so I figured I would treat you as a pair to give both of you some time to mull it over, away from each other. Speaking of,” Forge leaned back, looking on one of his widgets to check the time, “that should have given us just about enough time.”

“For what, the AC to be fixed?”

“For Todd to get back up.”

“…. Wait, what?”

Forge rolled his head to Gambit, a neutral expression on his face as he sat down by the machinery he almost had running again, waiting for a minute to see if the situation dawned upon Gambit by himself.

“As far as Todd is concerned, he got attacked by a Victorian ghost haunting this place. You know as well as I do that he went to go grab a friend to come help him check it out. Fast,” and as soon as he emphasized that last word, Gambit turned his eyes to the ceiling in a groan as if his soul wanted to escape and in turn haunt the mansion they were in. “Merde. He’s bringing Maximoff.”

“Yup, and if her claim of you having the better talking skills holds any water, then she isn’t talking herself out of that one.”

“… I’m going back.” “Good choice, my friend.”

[sockknitterporg]

The main bulk of my suffering is directly related to the manufactured "opiate crisis" that has caused untold pain and suffering for so many millions of people for so many, many years. In this essay, I intend to place my experiences in their proper context, as one of a sharply growing series of victims of medical malpractice stemming from the fundamental shift in our society from seeing pain patients as people to be treated, to deriding them as addicts to be suspicious of.

Though it says volumes about our society that we see addicts as fundamentally 'bad' people who deserve homelessness and death instead of as human beings, often times human beings who are suffering greatly and turn to the only thing that makes life even mildly bearable. But that's neither here nor there. (For more information about addiction, see https://tinyurl.com/rat-park )

Our story begins in 1996, when Purdue Pharma (Stamford, CT, USA) released OxyContin, a sustained release oxycodone preparation that is also sold here in the UK. In the US, where such things are legal, it was aggressively marketed and promoted as less dangerous and less addictive than other opiate preparations. (Source & more information about OxyContin's marketing: https://tinyurl.com/oxymarket )

Anyone who thinks a $200 million a year marketing campaign would not spill over to the UK is more than merely obtuse, but likely willfully ignorant. The entire 'opiate epidemic' is an American import, and it started there: with an unscrupulous American company that would stop at nothing to make money.

Lulled into a false sense of security by Purdue's claims of minimal risk of addiction, doctors began prescribing OxyContin much more liberally and for much more than they originally would have. This increased availability set many people up for addiction and overdose deaths.

To most people, that is the bulk of what the 'opiate crisis' is. But there is a secondary crisis unfolding quietly behind closed doors. In the USA, there are "Don't Punish Pain" rallies that at least try to draw attention to the situation ( https://dontpunishpainrally.com ), but here in the UK we are entirely forgotten and buried under the British 'stiff upper lip' mentality. It is completely hushed up, no one talks about the fact that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. (For example: https://tinyurl.com/opiate-pendulum )

The government and/or the NHS have enforced involuntarily tapering of chronic pain patients' medication. Medication we need in order to not spend our lives screaming in agony. The pain management clinic has already warned me that it is, direct quote, "when, not if" I will find my own medication terminated, ready or not.

But there will be no 'ready'. Chronic pain does not get better with time. Chronic pain does not go into remission. If you know someone with chronic pain who appears to be 'getting better', I can promise you it is merely that the sufferer has learned to better conceal it. It's a saying in the chronic pain community, "We don't fake being ill. We fake being well."

We have learned that the average person only has about two weeks of compassion in them, after that you're treated as a freak for not getting better already, or outright accused of malingering. After all, with all of modern science, can't you just go to the doctor and get a pill and be done with it? Our concept of illness is either 'you go to the hospital, get treated, and come out okay' or 'you go to the hospital, waste away, and die'. Chronic pain patients, who never get better, but aren't actively dying, don't fit in to our society's 'concept' of illness.

People who offer to help us out for the social brownie points of helping the poor cripple soon discover that we're not going to die, we're going to continue to need help for the forseeable future. Rather than gracefully admitting that they don't have the ability to help us in perpetuity (which would be perfectly understandable!), most people choose to lash out at us, we must be abusing their kindness, they helped so we must surely be better by now. Compassion fatigue seems to hit every single human being that interacts with us, as if merely existing while disabled is wearing on their ability to remain civil. (Compassion fatigue: https://tinyurl.com/2-week-fatigue )

Doctors have even less compassion than that. In the backlash of the 'crisis', they have begun to treat anyone who complains of pain, unilaterally, as a drug seeker. And those of us already in treatment? Are addicts in need of rehab. (More examples: https://tinyurl.com/drs-no-compassion )

Despite study after study (Studies: https://tinyurl.com/no-taper ) showing that tapering chronic pain patients unequivocally causes severe harm, up to and including death, the pain management team said to my face that I am, direct quote, "addicted to heroin" and "no different from my four year old grandson, demanding a choccy biscuit because he doesn't know they'll rot his teeth. And I have to smack him and tell him NO! And I'll smack you, too, if it'll get you off those drugs!" (Somehow my complaint that a doctor had literally smacked his hands in front of my face to demonstrate that he was sincere in his threat to physically assault me.... mysteriously got lost.)

I have been denied treatment for other (non-opiate) methods of reducing my pain because, direct quote, "it doesn't matter as long as you're on those drugs, opiates actually make you more sensitive to pain in the long run, so there's no sense trying anything else if you won't get clean." They talk to me like taking my medication responsibly, as prescribed, is the same as shooting up black tar. All in the hopes of bullying or shaming me into "voluntarily" tapering.

Honestly just living under these conditions alone would be enough to snap my mental health in half, but you have to remember that I'm not only facing all of this systemic bullying and professional misconduct while also living with pain that has often been compared to late stage cancer and chemotherapy ( https://tinyurl.com/fibro-chemo ), as well as debilitating fatigue, and a shroud of fog hanging around my brain and clouding my memories and judgments (and at times, my ability to speak English). Everyone's first reaction is "did you report them? you should report them. why didn't you report them!" as if I'm too stupid to have thought of that myself. But I don't have the energy for the lengthy bureaucratic nightmare that is dealing with the NHS's administration, especially not when I could have my entire life destroyed by a doctor's bruised ego penning into my file "patient was uncooperative and combative, suspect drug abuse".

It's only a matter of time before I choose suicide over another sleepless night of laying in bed and praying for death. And when that time comes, I hope that my name is added to the long, bloodstained list of people who have killed themselves not out of any sort of depression, but because their entire existence is built on pain and suffering and enough becomes enough for the last time. Drop my body on the steps of the CDC, which is the main driving force behind the opiate witch hunt. Maybe death will at least bring me some measure of peace.

[sometimesrosy]

I guess last episode was the final straw for you? Was the whole past season just slowly deteriorating or was there one moment or scene or something that just ruined it? Sorry about all this, it really sucks that this show had such a chance to pull through and just didn't.

No actually. Final straw for me on a show is when I stop watching it. Sometimes those final straws have nothing to do with the show but with, say, my dish company dropping HBO (GOT) or my not being able to watch on a certain night. More often the final straw is an accumulation of issues in the narrative.

Like, when I figure out that there’s an “issue” with a show, I then keep watching it, to make sure I’m right and “find evidence” for that interpretation. I put that in scare quotes because if I’m not writing meta, the finding evidence is just seeing a scene and going, “yeah, no.” 

So I guess that did happen with Madi’s story. But since it’s the last episode, I’m going to keep watching because I want to see what they’re going to try to do to pull all those dropped narrative threads together.

And I also can’t analyze the car wreck unless I see where all those wreckages land and which ones blow up and which ones make it out of the mess.

Everything was going fine until Bellamy came back.

Or, well, everything was FIXABLE until they brought Bellamy back and never attempted to bring the Bellamy, Clarke or Bellarke narrative back. 

I just need to see what happens until it is no longer fixable for me. Even if they give Clarke some sort of happy ending through some cheap reversal (another reversal) I suppose it’s no longer fixable for me. They murdered Bellamy’s character with a brainwashing and gave up on him. Then they tortured Clarke’s character by sending her right back down that hell of love=death that she climbed out of in season 6. 

It looks like they’re going to make it worth it for Raven and Murphy and Miller and Jackson, but they’re going to make Clarke sacrifice EVERYONE she loves and then herself.

And this is NOT the bittersweet ending we were promised. This is an outright tragedy for the hero and the secondary hero, and THAT’S who we’re supposed to identify with. But somehow, NOTHING Clarke did made anything better, NOTHING she sacrificed was worth it. She NEVER achieved her goal of being the good guy. Bellamy NEVER achieved his goal of peace or living a good life or protecting those he loved. 

BUT, let me get to the end and see what they consider a “bittersweet” ending is.

I like this story, The 100. The abrupt about face from it being about Clarke, and her relationship with Bellamy, and how they save humanity in the apocalypse, to it being an ensemble show about those who used to be the secondary characters, and relegating the heroes down to just part of the ensemble, means that they stopped telling their narrative. The only one who’s had a consistent narrative is actually Murphy. Maybe Indra, although she has much more this season than usual. Raven’s story has been floundering the last couple of years. Octavia has faded as a character this season and gotten kind of blandified. Echo is just a Strong Female Character (and that is not a compliment.) Emori’s character was good though. 

Except for Raven (who lost her focus before this mess,) it seems the closer the characters were to Bellamy and/or Clarke, the less their narrative was consistent.

Even so, it was enjoyable to watch the ensemble stories. Each separate episode was good. But as a whole, they didn’t have the narrative backbone. 

This show was always told around the center of the duo protagonists, Clarke and Bellamy. Bellamy saved Clarke and Clarke saved humanity. The head and the heart. The leaders of The 100, doing it “together.” By removing the focus from Clarke and Bellamy, they lost the backbone of their story. Backbone. That’s JR’s word. And that’s what we saw. 

TBH my first worry that they were not just wrapping up the side stories and building backstory was Bellamy’s episode on Etherea. Everyone was happy to see him, but the story was boring. It was a straight action piece and had no connection to the long term narrative or anyone else in the show. It did not convincingly show his brainwashing, but showed a vision of his mom and then expected us to think that’s all that was needed. It was a cheap reversal, not character development. 

I still thought they could get things back, but they never did. And when they killed him, and had Clarke do it... for nothing... with no emotional weight to the scene and no resolution to Clarke and Bellamy’s relationship, the head and the heart, the backbone of the story except, “so much for ‘together’,” that was bad.

There were STILL possibilities to bring it back around, and I was waiting to see if they took them. Then Madi went to sacrifice herself, and yes that was in character, and Clarke lost her, and she ended up being tortured by Cadogan simply to see his daughter again and Clarke found her totally, permanently paralyzed.

I get it. We want Clarke flattened. We want everything to be taken from her and we want her to be responsible for ALL the death and ALL the trauma and ALL the destruction...

Why again? Why is she to blame for all this? When all along all these things were being forced upon her and she was trying to make the best of things andn choose the best of bad choices and keep everyone alive and she sacrificed herself again and again and to allow them all to survive? WHY? For her choices to be WRONG all this time and for her to lose everyone? Because she loved Madi too much? hmph. 

Okay, let me see how it all ends up to see the “message” they are trying to send, their moral of the story, but I honestly don’t see how they can pull back from this madi storyline.  the only way is another cheap reversal with a deus ex machina from some magic aliens or “and then she woke up” from some anomaly trip or fear simulation. Those are valid endings, but they are never really satisfying because it doesnt’ work the story through a deserved ending but places it on top of the story being told as a way to get out of a mess the storyteller got themselves into. 

Oh also. That ‘inside man’ should have been Bellamy, not dumbass Levitt, with the fake love story. I mean rushed. Listen I HATE the “i fell in love while torturing you/being tortured by you” story. That is messed up. There is no resonance for that relationship. 

Listen. I’m trying not to analyze too much because I need to know where they’re going with all this in order to analyze it, since they are no longer following the story they laid out for six seasons.

I was trusting they’d get back to the story until they brought Clarke and Bellamy back together and then they killed the heart of the story and the brain is now functioning without a working heart (coincidentally the exact state of Emori’s health right now,) and tore the backbone out of the narrative.

If there was more than one episode left I probably would be done, because I’m not into torture porn. And if there’s no transformation with the pain Clarke is going through then it’s just torture.

So now what? I don’t know. But they screwed up their story. I’ll get back to you when I process the finale.

[swampgallows]

my uncle works at blizzard and i know the end of shadowlands

here is my prediction, it’s sloppy as fuck but i wanna just draft my general idea before the shit actually comes out so i can be like “CALLED IT” if i’m right lol

okay so let’s talk DREADLORDS babey. they are not demons per se but a separate race of sentient beings called the nathrezim. apparently they were discovered by sargeras when he was traversing the cosmos. they were sitting around chilling with the old gods, which is how sargeras found out about the old gods and void lords in the first place. so the history of dreadlords and the old gods/void goes way back.

there are three things that dreadlords are very good at:

1. summoning chaotic shit 2. crafting chaotic shit 3. being chaotic neutral emissaries, mostly for the burning legion. mostly.

1. dreadlords are really powerful interdimensional beings from the twisting nether. however, with the afterlives: maldraxxus cinematic it possibly implies that both the denizens of the shadowlands and the nathrezim themselves have the power to move between life and death as well as laterally across realms like the elemental plane, twisting nether, etc.

2: the dreadlords have forged the sword apocalypse and are possibly the original smiths of the helm of domination and frostmourne. we know that these artifacts are not of azeroth. the nathrezim could have smithed both the helm and frostmourne with help from the jailor and his magic. side note is the WoW canon spelling his name Jailor or Jailer? ive seen both. guess it’s one of those imposter/impostor situations.

anyway, point number 3: we have witnessed dreadlords allying themselves with several different factions, including but not limited to the scourge (sub-faction of the legion), the burning legion, the light (lothraxion), and waaaay back when... the forsaken. by sprinkling themselves throughout the cosmos they can tip the scales on several fronts toward chaos/old gods/void (yes, even lothraxion, since the Light seems to have its own agenda per Xe’ra).

newer players may not know that sylvanas once had a dreadlord ally named Varimathras. one of his click-quotes he’d say “I’m always on the winning side.” he claimed to hold no more ties to the burning legion and that he also wanted to get revenge on arthas/the lich king, and since that was sylvanas’ ultimate goal, they teamed up. he used to chill right next to her in the royal quarter, until the battle for the undercity. this was a wotlk-era event not unlike the pre-bfa “war of thorns” that followed The Wrathgate. the horde, including thrall and varok saurfang, led horde troops into the undercity to oust the mutineers from the horde. the alliance was also present, with newly-returned king varian wrynn and lady jaina proudmoore also invading to take their revenge on putress and his loyalists. 

but before all that, sylvanas could have possibly been clued in by varimathras about the jailor’s intentions all the way back in wrath. especially if she was looking for a way to defeat the “death god” lich king, varimathras would have been more than happy to tell her about death’s boss—the jailor—and the suffering arthas would undergo in the maw. (remember, shadowlands itself is not new lore. it has existed since the dawn of warcraft itself; whenever you die in game you are in the shadowlands. the spirit healers in the graveyards are in the shadowlands.)

again, this is just my speculation, but varimathras easily could have told sylvanas about the origins of the helm and frostmourne, the source of arthas/the lich king’s powers. varimathras/putress betray her (though even this has conflicts with new lore, e.g. Chronicle [my bane] saying that Sylvanas had planned the Wrathgate all along). battle for undercity happens, and varimathras is banished. 

sylvanas maybe figures ‘dont worry imma bust that shit open when i go kill arthas’. maybe she even planned to hold dominion over the scourge and wear the helm herself, taking the place bolvar has currently. but the halls of reflection & ICC happen and... she doesnt get to kill arthas, her one reason for continuing her existence.

so we get Edge of Night, which potentially planted a lot of seeds (if blizz is that clever).

VALKYR possibly trick her (i have said this before), as they are agents of the scourge/the jailor, hopefully to get sylvanas on their side to incur more death and be a secondary wave of would-be scourge (since bolvar aint doin that job and he’s not dead so they cant really get to him BUT they can travel throughout the shadowlands). either that or maybe they were planning on her becoming the new lich king and when bolvar got the hat instead they got a lil pist about it.

sylvanas is foisted into the very non-consensual position of “choose death and suffer for eternity or come back to life and Lead Your People™”. there is some OLD ASS LORE that i cannot find and maybe it’s something i misread somewhere or whatever but i was always under the impression that the Light could not save the Scourge, so anyone turned Scourge could possibly end up in the Maw on principle of being inherently irredeemable (hence the name “Forsaken”, they cannot be saved by the Light). the lore might have changed or, like i said, i might have just picked this up from somewhere and it’s wrong entirely. but if that’s the case, more Scourge = more anima dumped into the Maw disposal, which strengthens the jailor. either that or breaking sylvanas’ spirit to redirect her vengeance on Capital D Death rather than arthas himself.

basically everything sylvanas does while “alive” in azeroth pales in comparison to the eternal suffering and torment that awaits her if she is to die. so she has literally nothing to lose and can only gain by at least keeping herself alive as long as possible, no matter what wild shit she gets up to, it cant be as bad as the maw. 

ultimately i think sylvanas becomes the new jailor to satisfy both her loyalists/fans and those who want her to pay for her crimes, she is redeemed by technically stopping the maw expansion by taking over a la bolvar keeping the scourge dormant, all the symbolism of her destroying the helm of domination becomes all the more poetic and poignant along with her ‘this world is a prison and i will set us all free’ bullshit, avoids her potential fate in the maw as a prisoner by becoming the jailor itself (”better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”). PLUS then she gets placed in a limbo much like illidan fighting sargeras for potentially eternity by being dead-but-not-really as the jailor so blizzard can cameo to her or make merch of her all they want or bring her back as deus ex machina if they feel like it.

i had way more details about this shit when me n the best friends talkd about it a while back but it’s  been seemingly an eternity since then but yeah the tldr

sylvanas becomes jailor (predictabo) because varimathras spilled the beans about the funny sword and hat his buddies made purely for the bants w the old gods/void (less predictabo).

boy are they gonna make that covid vaccine soon or what i need a fuckin job

[k7l4d4]

Bleach OC, the First

Hello all, today I decided to create an OC for the acclaimed Supernatural Anime and Manga series by Tite Kubo, Bleach. This is just for fun. Everybody Clap Your Hands!!

Virgil Cruz

Age: 17

Species: Bount

Alignment: Chaotic Good

Quote: “Justice waits for no one!! Now wait here for a sec, okay?”

Personality: Flighty and somewhat reckless, Virgil has almost no real self-control to speak of. If he wants to do something, he does it, no matter how reckless or stupid it may be. However, his sense of justice, honor, and nobility is unshakable; every attempt to compromise his morals has ended in a brutal reprisal against whatever poor sap crossed him. His idea of what justice is can be roughly summarized as the rebellion against cruelty; whenever he sees something or someone being forced into a situation that would harm them needlessly, or when the rules of others would punish someone for helping others and saving lives, his fury erupts without limit. Do not test him.

Synopsis: The first Bount born in centuries, and one capable of passing on the power of Bounts to the next generation, Virgil is a daredevil who lives to push boundaries, and has a long history of causing trouble in his pursuit of justice for those bound by cruelty. A wanderer to his core, Virgil has lived his life on the move. He has no knowledge of his parents, but genuinely wishes them a good life of kindness, whoever they are. Virgil joined the fight against supernatural threats when he realized how helpless mortals are against evil spirits and malevolent spiritual entities.

History: Virgil first encountered Ichigo during the opening act of his ventures into the supernatural world, and quickly declared himself Ichigo’s eternal rival in the path of justice, oblivious of Ichigo’s lack of care and attitude towards his presence. Virgil cares nothing for how his presence upsets the balance of power between the living and the dead, and has repeatedly come to blows against others whenever they attempt to enforce their beliefs upon him. Virgil has served as both ally and enemy to Ichigo and his friends, but Virgil will always put aside whatever craziness he is currently enmeshed in when the lives of the innocent are threatened by the “other side.”

Powers: All Bounts possess incredible Spiritual abilities, and Virgil is no different, though with something of a twist. Virgil unabashedly refers to himself as the next evolutionary step of Bount-kind, and he isn’t wrong. While Virgil can easily live to be over 200 years old, he will never lose his youthful build and strength, though unlike the previous generations of Bounts, he can die of old age, something he accepts and admits to being intrigued to experience when his time comes.

Virgil possesses the ability to absorb and integrate foreign Spiritual Energy perfectly, making fighting him a purely physical matter against other spirit-based foes, something he enjoys exploiting in the extreme.

Virgil’s greatest asset in combat is his Doll, Schützen, which takes his absorption powers into a truly terrifying direction, combat wise. While utilizing Schützen, Virgil can modulate his Spiritual Energy to take on the properties of any that he has absorbed prior, allowing him to create techniques and skills based on the enemies he has faced before; however, he cannot imitate Irregular Phenomena, such as Orihime’s powers.

What is easily his most deadly ability, and what often serves as the crux of his conflict with other Spiritual Beings, is his Parallel Spirit Layer, a technique that he can use at will, or that automatically engages when Schützen is active. Using this technique, Virgil can bridge the Spiritual and Material layers of the world, allowing anyone and everyone to see spirits and spiritual phenomena; the true strength of this technique, though, is that it makes it impossible for purely spiritual beings from affecting or interacting with purely material beings, bar those that possess spiritual powers. With it, the masquerade that separates Spirits from the living comes undone, and the sheer chaos that erupts is enough to cause all sorts of trouble.

Fighting Style: Virgil’s fighting style is focused on his ability to render any non-physical technique against him useless, primarily based on his long years of grappling and street fighting; his ability to absorb Spiritual Energy from enemy attacks makes it so anyone who can’t go hand to hand effectively are rendered useless. While his style may seem clumsy at first, Virgil has a wide range of skills and strategies to face all sorts of foes, even those that can go into close range, and has successfully duplicated legitimate Martial Arts that have been used against him prior. His keen eye for detail means no trick works twice unless the one using it finds a new way to exploit it.

Appearance: Virgil has a well-worn appearance, with many of his clothes have the borderline ragged look of someone who rarely changes their clothing or gets new ones. Despite the sorry state of his clothing, Virgil himself is scrupulously clean, as he never sets down in an area without first establishing a local water source or public area where he can bathe and cleanse himself. Virgil has rather sharp features that give him an intense air, undercut by his perpetual, dopey grin. His most distinguishing feature is his oddly prismatic hair, as it’s exact color never seems to stay consistent, and the oddness of it even baffles Virgil himself.

Schützen

Age: Not Applicable.

Species: Doll.

Alignment: True Neutral.

Quote: “The world is an uncaring place to many; the goal of my master to make it better is a noble one, and that is the only thing I care for myself.”

Personality: Blunt and taciturn, Schützen is invariably straight to the point and unfailingly logical at all times. Often playing the straight-man to his energetic master’s antics, he nonetheless is unwaveringly loyal to Virgil and has made it clear that he will sacrifice himself without pause if it would save Virgil’s life. As a result of Virgil’s unusual status among Bounts, Schützen possesses none of the murderousness that lurks within his kind when his master is weakened or in danger of death, instead acting as Virgil’s main defense when in true danger. Despite his blunt personality, Schützen has a strong flair for the dramatic, often enabling his master’s more childish impulses when in combat by providing Transformation Announcements and sound affects for their combined techniques and skills.

Synopsis: The unique Doll that is Schützen emerged when Virgil first faced another Spiritual Entity in combat, and has been his loyal aid and confidant ever since. Schützen possesses a strong sense of camaraderie, referring to those who fight alongside himself and his master as brothers and sisters, and will lose his incredible self-control even more fiercely than his master when those his master trusts are in danger, though this noticeably only applies to those who can actually fight and defend themselves, and only when they are confirmably on the same side.

History: Schützen first made his debut to Ichigo and his allies when the Menos Grande was released into Karakura by Uryu’s recklessness. His emergence allowed Ichigo and Uryu to dedicate themselves totally to fighting the fearsome foe without worry. Schützen since then has made more regular debuts in fights, and often serves as a hidden ace in combat against those who are unaware of his true capabilities.

Powers: Schützen’s primary ability is the power to integrate foreign Spiritual Energy into his being and utilize it as his own, allowing him to learn and grow in strength with every foe he and Virgil face, no matter how weak or strong they may be. His secondary, but no less potent, power is the ability to react to the abilities of his enemies in advance, a form of purely reactionary and subconscious precognition; while it only engages when he or Virgil are in risk of serious injury, it renders any surprise attack worthless against him.

His most closely guarded ability, however, is one that is truly terrifying to contemplate: true resurrection. While Orihime can do the same, if she has the energy and the will to do so, Schützen’s ability allows him to permanently sacrifice a measure of Spiritual Power from both himself and Virgil to resurrect someone as they were in before their demise, and can even resurrect portions of a being separately, such as reviving a Zanpakuto without it’s Soul Reaper, or a Doll without its Bount.

Fighting Style: Due to the nature of his body, Schützen has no fighting style of his own and merely supplements Virgil’s own.

Appearance: Schützen, in his sealed form, takes the appearance of a oddly large belt buckle marked with the Bount Crest upon it, which opens to reveal his deep purple, and jewel-like eye. In his True Form, Schützen takes on the appearance of a suit resembling the kind worn by Tokusatsu-style superheroes, giving him an oddly comical, yet still threatening, air. His appearance most strongly takes after that of the first Kamen Rider’s Rider Suit.

[thethistlegirlwrites]

OC Enneagram types!

@nade2308 I haven't been able to stop thinking about doing this since the Enneagram conversation came up in the Discord, so here it is! My seven main characters (sorry, Rowan, I'm not confident enough to type a tree just yet) and their Enneagram types, plus a short explanation and some quotes about their basic type and wing!

Robin - 4w3 As a basic type of a 4, Robin sees himself as fundamentally different from other people. He isn't sure how to fit into the world, since his dual fae-human nature leaves him feeling on the outside of all of it. He feels broken and incomplete, and keeps trying to create a place that he fits. The 4 tendency to imagine a world where they can belong led him to idealize the hunter world and want to join it like his father, despite his grandfather's warnings against it. The 3 side of his personality is also involved in the effort to fit in, to make himself into an acceptable version that people will like. “Fours feel that they are unlike other human beings, and consequently, that no one can understand them or love them adequately. They often see themselves as uniquely talented, possessing special, one-of-a-kind gifts, but also as uniquely disadvantaged or flawed. More than any other type, Fours are acutely aware of and focused on their personal differences and deficiencies...Healthy Fours are willing to reveal highly personal and potentially shameful things about themselves because they are determined to understand the truth of their experience—so that they can discover who they are and come to terms with their emotional history. This ability also enables Fours to endure suffering with a quiet strength. Their familiarity with their own darker nature makes it easier for them to process painful experiences that might overwhelm other types.” “Threes learn to perform in ways that will garner them praise and positive attention.” John - 6w5 John is deeply tied to his roots, following the family tradition of becoming a hunter with no question of whether or not that was what he wanted to do. To him, duty is the highest thing to seek after, and individual personal goals must always be secondary to what has to be done. the 5 side of his identity comes into play in his work; John feels a sense of pride in working from the shadows, knowing about vampires but hiding that secret from the larger world for its own protection. Like his great-grandfather, he's the sort of person who seeks out a person to be devoted to. Until his brother died, Gabe was the tethering force in John's life. After his death, John drifted away from his home, searching for a new connection, but struggling to find it. “Sixes are the most loyal to their friends and to their beliefs. They will “go down with the ship” and hang on to relationships of all kinds far longer than most other types.”Wanting to feel that there is something solid and clear-cut in their lives, they can become attached to explanations or positions that seem to explain their situation. Once they establish a trustworthy belief, they do not easily question it, nor do they want others to do so. The same is true for individuals in a Six’s life: once Sixes feel they can trust someone, they go to great lengths to maintain connections with the person who acts as a sounding board, a mentor, or a regulator for the Six’s emotional reactions and behavior.” “Investigating "unknown territory"—knowing something that others do not know, or creating something that no one has ever experienced—allows Fives to have a niche for themselves that no one else occupies.” Kira - 5w4 Knowing she would struggle to fit into normal society because of her deafness, Kira seeks to make herself important to others by making discoveries and creating new things. She often called on the 5 tendency to rely on their knowledge and curiosity in her classes, and made a name for herself as the smart girl, not just the Deaf girl. Her passion for strange and new fields of study allowed her to keep an open mind when she first learned of the existence of vampires, and also helped her delve deeply into the lore surrounding them when she became a vigilante hunter. As she's grown, Kira has become more in touch with the 4 side of herself as well, accepting her uniqueness and seeing that as a gift. “Behind Fives’ relentless pursuit of knowledge are deep insecurities about their ability to function successfully in the world.  Fives “take a step back” into their minds where they feel more capable. Their belief is that from the safety of their minds they will eventually figure out how to do things—and one day rejoin the world. Fives are not interested in exploring what is already familiar and well-established; rather, their attention is drawn to the unusual, the overlooked, the secret, the occult, the bizarre, the fantastic, the “unthinkable.” ” “Fours maintain their identity by seeing themselves as fundamentally different from others.” Cody - 2w3 Cody is at heart a giver. He grew up being the friend Robin needed, and that was such a formative part of his identity that when Robin left Rowan House to become a hunter, Cody felt adrift. As the youngest child of his family, he'd relied on his friendship with Robin as an outlet for his need to be useful and needed, since his siblings didn't seem to want the nurturing. Since then, he's channeled that into his work, where he enjoys helping people find the information or books or other help that they need at the library. While he's very selfless, Cody is also ambitious, deeply driven to create stories that he can share with the world. His drive to become a published, successful author is the main evidence of his 3 wing. "Being generous and going out of their way for others makes Twos feel that theirs is the richest, most meaningful way to live. The love and concern they feel—and the genuine good they do—warms their hearts and makes them feel worthwhile. Twos are most interested in what they feel to be the “really, really good” things in life—love, closeness, sharing, family, and friendship. Healthy Twos are the embodiment of “the good parent”: someone who sees [people] as they are, understands them with immense compassion, helps and encourages with infinite patience, and is always willing to lend a hand—while knowing precisely how and when to let go." "Threes are often successful and well liked because, of all the types, they most believe in themselves and in developing their talents and capacities. Threes want to make sure their lives are a success, however that is defined by their family, their culture, and their social sphere. No matter how success is defined, Threes will try to become somebody noteworthy in their family and their community." Maira - 9w8 Maira's basic 9 type has allowed her to navigate her world by finding the paths of lesser resistance. She's wise enough to know when to back down and seek another route to her goal, and this has gotten her far in her world. People respect her shrewd 'chess match' movements, but also like her as a person since she has managed to maintain a reputation of being even-handed, understanding, and willing to seek negotiated solutions. But making the mistake of thinking Maira is a pushover is a dangerous one. Her 8 side is strongest when she encounters an injustice or cruelty. Maira has her breaking point, and woe to the person who pushes her over it. "Peacemakers are the skilled mediators and counsellors in a group of friends or coworkers. They work hard behind the scenes in order to keep the group harmony steady and flowing. As children, they knew how to get along with each classmate, making them a great addition to any group project. They can easily see the many different sides to an issue and tend not to jump to conclusions quickly, if at all. Complacent and humble, Peacemakers are stable and gentle, willing to go the extra mile to avoid rocking the boat. Soft-spoken yet firm in their personal stances, they make an effort to neutralize tension and restore group harmony." "Eights have enormous willpower and vitality, and they feel most alive when they are exercising these capacities in the world. They use their abundant energy to effect changes in their environment—to “leave their mark" on it—but also to keep the environment, and especially other people, from hurting them and those they care about. At an early age, Eights understand that this requires strength, will, persistence, and endurance—qualities that they develop in themselves and which they look for in others." Emma - 5w6 Emma's 5 tendency to acquire esoteric knowledge is one of the reasons she's risen so rapidly in vampire society since her turning. She's learned a great deal about herself and her fellow vampires, and she uses that knowledge to her advantage. She's well known for being not only on the cutting edge of knowing what's happening in the city, but for being able to analyze that information and interpret what it will mean for the vampire community and the wider city population. Her 6 side is evident in her formation of a coven that accepts vampires who were not turned by its own members, giving outcasts or vampires who broke free from their sires like her a place of safety. "Fives think, “I am going to find something that I can do really well, and then I will be able to meet the challenges of life.” They therefore develop an intense focus on whatever they can master and feel secure about. Depending on their intelligence and the resources available to them, they focus intensely on mastering something that has captured their interest. Much of their time gets spent "collecting" and developing ideas and skills they believe will make them feel confident and prepared. They want to retain everything that they have learned and “carry it around in their heads.” " "Sixes rely on structures, allies, beliefs, and supports outside themselves for guidance to survive. If suitable structures do not exist, they will help create and maintain them." Arion - 7w8 Arion is perhaps the poster child of the dangerous side of the 7 type. A hedonistic pleasure seeker, he's driven by filling his life with whatever he enjoys. He has acquired a wide range of talents and interests. But his vampire bloodthirst is his most intense drive. Unlike some vampires who control and manage their impulses, Arion embraces them. He revels in the pleasure of drinking real blood, and sees nothing wrong with seeking it out. His 8 side makes him truly dangerous, because in addition to his craving for a life of comfort and ease, he has a powerful drive to do whatever it takes to attain that goal. While he is fully capable of luxuriating in his pleasures, he is also willing to temporarily put them aside in pursuit of one he believes will be even greater." "Sevens are enthusiastic about almost everything that catches their attention. They approach life with curiosity, optimism, and a sense of adventure, like “kids in a candy store” who look at the world in wide-eyed, rapt anticipation of all the good things they are about to experience. They are bold and vivacious, pursuing what they want in life with a cheerful determination. Sevens are compelled to stay on the go, moving from one experience to the next, searching for more stimulation." "Eights do not want to be controlled or to allow others to have power over them. Much of their behavior is involved with making sure that they retain and increase whatever power they have for as long as possible. They often refuse to “give in” to social convention, and they can defy fear, shame, and concern about the consequences of their actions. Although they are usually aware of what people think of them, they do not let the opinions of others sway them. They go about their business with a steely determination that can be awe inspiring, even intimidating to others."

Taglist: @nade2308 @cmvorra @bands-space-and-monsters-oh-my @catwingsathena @asloudasalone @anguishmacgyver @flowing-river24 @myhusbandsasemni @floh673 @teddythecat1234 @bkworm4life4 @viawrites-andacts @amarilloskies

If you want to be added to or removed from my taglist for Magic & Silver stuff, just let me know! (Type description references taken from https://www.enneagraminstitute.com and https://www.truity.com/enneagram/9-types-enneagram) 

[laufire]

In depth fandom ask: the last fandom you joined bc I can't remember it now

Well, I guess the last fandom I’ve properly joined --making a few edits, starting yet-another-WIP etc.-- is Black Sails, so. Plus I want to talk about it a little, spoiler-free, in case you decide to watch it ^-^ (I’ll leave that to the s3 post I need to finish...).

Top 5 favourite characters: Max is my number one, without a doubt, and of the rest of my faves Silver has an edge... but the remaining positions are a tough fight between Flint, Jack, Madi and Miranda, and I honestly can’t choose DD:

Other characters you like: Mr. Scott, Anne, Idelle, the Maroon Queen, Billy, Eme, Abigail... This show has a lot of great characters tbh.

Least favourite characters: I still loathe Peter Ashe with every fiber of my being. Alfred Hamilton is obviously The Worst(TM). And though it hasn’t grown into hate (yet), I don’t like Woodes Rogers one bit ¬¬

Otps: Flint/Miranda, and the combos in Flint/Madi/Silver and Anne/Jack/Max (in no particular order at the moment because I just HAVE TONS OF FEELS ABOUT THEM ALL).

Notps: I don’t have strong NOPE feelings towards anything, but I’m not into Eleanor/Max (which is a dynamic I actually really like BUT that I’m glad it doesn’t return to shippiness LOL); Eleanor/Rogers (I might be indifferent towards Eleanor most of the time but I haaaaaate Rogers for her. RUN GIRL), Flint/Vane (booooooooring).

Favourite friendships: Max & Silver (THE duo I swear), Jack & Max, Flint & Silver, Idelle & Max (I might not have said so before but I guess I like a little conflict LMFAO), Billy & Flint (NOT a friendship, but their relationship absolutely cracks me up I swear. “Who’s Billy?” XDDD).

Favourite family: Madi’s family, which is all I can say without getting spoilery. I just. *lies down on the floor overcome with emotions* xDD

Favourite episodes: the problem with binge-watching (okay, I’ve taken s3 more slowly but) is that they all kinda blur together LOL. Hmm. The season finales are all *chefs kiss* so far (sometimes in a very painful way... I’m looking at you s2. Though the ominous Flint/Silver moments in the s3 were A LOT too); any in which I get to see Max & Silver scheming together ofc. And the first handful of eps in s3 were particularly enjoyable to me because I was drowning in PURE ANGST and Flint & Silver feels xDD (I can’t NOT believe the fandom seems to call one of those “the shark date” asñldfjasdfñl).

Favourite season/book/movie: oof. I honestly can’t pick; s1 is probably the “least” because the others include better moments for some of my secondary faves, and because there’s a plot that’s really hard to watch... BUT it has things on it I adore to pieces too. s1-2 doesn’t have Madi (major drawback xD), and s3 is after one of my faves’ death... but frankly they’re all neck and neck so far.

Favourite quotes: “I am ruined over you” always comes to mind DD: “Liked is just as good as feared”; Max combo with Eleanor about sand (typing that down made me think of Anidala LMFAO. The scene itself is very different though! xD) in the s1 finale; “in another time, in another place, they would call me a queen”; “this ends when I grant them my forgiveness, not the other way around”, Mr. Scott’s “No. Only YOU.”... honestly, this show’s dialogue is just too good(TM), I could just quote it all back xD. And of course, I HAVE to mention “WHO’S BILLY”. It’s the law.

Best musical moment: the score is perfection all around, but given that I never skip the intro just to listen and watch it... yeah, the intro xD

Moment that made you fangirl/boy the hardest: well, I *might* have lost it the moment CAPTAIN FLINT COMES OUT TO LONG JOHN SILVER OVER A BONFIRE, IDK XDD

When it really disappointed you: the fact that I won’t get to see a fully fleshed out Mr. Scott-Silver dynamic is MAJORLY disappointing, let me tell you. That Flint’s actor didn’t somehow get his mother (aka Maggie Smith aka Professor McGonagall aka Lady Violet) on the show too ¬¬. LOL.

Saddest moment: character’s deaths of two of the characters listed on “top 5”/“others you like” xD.

Most well done character death: the hanging in 3x09 was well done and served its purpose.

Favourite guest star: for a value of “guest star”... I’m going with Idelle.

Favourite cast member: Jessica Parker Kennedy is the one that I know and love for other projects she’s done.

Character you wish was still alive: THE ONE WE TRAGICALLY LOST IN 2x09.

One thing you hope really happens: I’m cheating because I know there’s some of that in s4, but I want to watch more Flint/Madi interactions pls.

Most shocking twist: well, I wasn’t spoiled for Mr. Scott’s plot in s3 so I was (pleasantly) surprised by that xD

When did you start watching/reading?: a little over two weeks ago; I watched (devoured) s1-s2 and 3x01-3x04 in a few days because I wanted to meet Madi, and then I tragically had to slow down :(((

Best animal/creature: I will always love Treasure Islands’  parrot that Silver named after Flint LMFAO.

Favourite location: Nassau aka Max’s ~domain xD. And Miranda’s house.

Trope you wish they would stop using: noooooone. I love the tropes this show reuses LMFAO. Romantic Betrayals(TM), triumvirates, “good things happen in the dark/away from civilization”, the power of narratives, social climbing and revolt... bring them oooooon.

One thing this show/book/film does better than others: quite a few xD. But one that really stands out to me is the dialogue; both the ~deep and sorrowful type (there were so many quotes where I had to take a break to freak out properly lol), and the humorous ones.

Funniest moments: I know I’m repeating myself, but I recently rewatched the pilot to edit some scenes and I keep remember the WHO’S BILLY one xDD (which I maintain it was Flint trolling him. He could give Abigail a rundown of Billy’s whole life story AND he shamelessly checked him out that one time. Flint knows who Billy is, he’s just an asshole xD). Really, all the scenes between Billy and Flint in that episode are comedic gold lmfao. Billy’s “oh dear I fucked up” expression when he tells Flint the crew has started to think him weak and Flint looks half a second away from murdering him right there, his WTF face at Flint’s antics with the stolen page... Gold, seriously.

Couple you would like to see: I meannnnnn. I would’ve been very happy if the show had decided to go with Flint/Madi/Silver, for one. Bonus if Miranda could’ve been included. Or just explicit Flint/Silver in poly arrangements (THEY ARE IN LOVE, IT’S JUST ~COMPLICATED XD).

Actor/Actress you want to join the cast: MAGGIE SMITH DAMMIT.

Favourite outfit: literally everything Max wears in s3. Eleanor’s s1-s2 outfits were things I’d love to wear too. Flint’s ~dramatic coat. Miranda’s collection of supposedly-puritan-but-showing-the-goods dresses xDD (and ofc her London clothes), Jack’s clothes (he’s Nassau’s fashion icon lbr).

Favourite item: the books!! Especially when Flint gave Miranda “La Galatea” as a gift (given that sometimes he reminds me of my OC Latoya, you might understand the freakout I had when he gave the other member of my OTP a book titled like that xDD).

Do you own anything related to this show/book/film?: no, but I kinda want to. I did have a Treasure Planet computer game I tragically can’t find... it was about collecting money in increasingly difficult scenarios LOL. And I probably have more pirate-y/Treasure Island theme stuff. I had a long pirate phase xD

What house/team/group/friendship group/family/race etc would you be in?: Max’s because I like being on the winning team, thanks xD (though I do ~align more with Flint and Madi’s lbr...).

Most boring plotline: Eleanor and Vane’s ~romance is not at all badly written... but the fact that I find both of them boring kinda ruins the whole thing because I always wish that time went to someone else xD. Also, Blackbeard. Meh.

Most laughably bad moment: n/a.

Best flashback/flashfoward if any: the London flashback where Miranda goes to Flint’s house unannounced to take him to an art gallery, she finds him half-naked and he gets all awkward about it lmao. And then they hook up in the carriage :DDD

Most layered character: we get to explore Flint and Silver the most. Silver’s development in particular is something that never ceases to impress me ngl.

Most one dimensional character: except the one-note characters I wouldn’t really call anyone completely one-dimensional, tbh. Though I do think the fandom attributes more complexity to Thomas than it’s seen in canon? Like, I like what I see; I think he’s functional, he works well, and he adds wonderfully to Flint’s (and Miranda’s) story, but I don’t see him as a full character in his own right. Which is perfectly fine for the narrative so far, but I fear it might fall apart for me at the very end.

Scariest moment: I never know what to say in this... I mean, I guess Flint killing a man with his bare hands in the pilot Like That was scary xD. I understand why Silver freaked out LOL.

Grossest moment: any of Max’s interactions with Vane tbh. Stay away from her ¬¬

Best looking male: Flint has that ruggedly handsome thing going on for him, if you’re into that (and sometimes I do appreciate his ~aesthetics... very sad he shaved his head in s3 though. Like, I get you did it for the Angst, honey, and trust me, I Feel U, but still). I feel like I might be forgetting someone, but seriously, none of the dudes in this show so far do anything for me LOL. I can honestly say I love them for their personalities xDD

Best looking female: I have a weakness for Max, but Miranda, Madi, Anne, the Maroon Queen, Idelle, Eme... all of them are gorgeous in their own way. This show is good for sapphic women’s enjoyment in that sense xDD.

Who you’re crushing on (if any): I could crush on any of the women mentioned above tbh.

Favourite cast moment: I have literally only seen this post about an interview where Flint’s actor says he’s too old to party with The Youth of the cast and just wants to chill on the weekend... with bonus Max and Eleanor’s actress talking about how Vane’s once climbed the side of a building up AND back down. I’m with you, Toby Stephens, you don’t need those shenanigans xDD

Favourite transportation: the Walrus, for sentimental reasons LOL. I liked stolen Spanish warship too.

Most beautiful scene (scenery/shot wise): lots of good ones, though I think my fave might be the one of Miranda sitting by the window in London. Or the one of Charles Town burning down, I liked that :))) (I remember thinking “Flint better go full Daenerys on them”. And he did! It was nice xD).

Unanswered question/continuity issue/plot error that bugs you: n/a, so far.

Best promo: n/a.

At what point did you fall in love with this show/book: I liked it from the word go, but the moment that TRULY cemented it for me was in 1x03, with Max making a decision that I... frankly didn’t expect. It made things worse for her in the short-term, the storyline itself was difficult and disturbing to watch and I still have some mixed feelings about it. But what it said about her as a character and how her journey goes after that... I was in awe of her, and of the show.

[laughingpinecone]

Trick or Treat 2020 letter!

I am laughingpineapple on AO3  

Hello dear author! I hope you’ll have fun with our match. Feel free to draw from general or fandom-specific likes, past letters, and/or follow your heart.

All requests are art or fic - for art, the stuff I like is the kind that depicts the characters doing something. I’ll always be happier with a very simple drawing of two characters walking together or sharing a cup of coffee than with an ambitious composition that looks like an Avengers poster. I also enjoy seeing them wear different clothes, getting a feel of what their fashion sense is like beyond their canon outfit(s).

Likes: worldbuilding, slice of life (especially if the event the fic focuses on is made up but canon-specific), missing moments, 5+1 and similar formats, bonding and emotional support/intimacy, physical intimacy, lingering touches, loyalty, casefic, surrealism, magical realism, established relationships, future fic, hurt/comfort or just comfort from the ample canon hurt, throwing characters into non-canon environments, banter, functional relationships between dysfunctional individuals, unexplained mysteries, bittersweet moods, journal/epistolary fic, dreams and memories and identities, canon-adjacent tropey plots, outsider POV, UST, resolved UST, exploration of secondary bits of canon, leaning on the uniqueness of the canon setting/mood, found families, characters reuniting after a long and/or harrowing time, friends-to-lovers, road trips, maps, mutual pining, cuddling, wintry moods, the feeling of flannel and other fabrics, ridiculous concepts played straight, sensory details, sickfic, places being haunted, people being haunted, the mystery of the woods, small hopes in bleak worlds, electricity, places that don’t quite add up, mismatched memories, caves and deep places, distant city lights at night, emphasis on non-human traits of non-human characters (gen-wise, but also a hearty yes xeno for applicable ships), emphasis on inhuman traits of characters who were human once and have sort of shed it all behind

Cool with: any tense, any pov, any rating, plotty, not plotty, IF, nerdy canon references, unrequested characters popping up.

DNW: non-canonical rape, non-canonical children, focus on children, unrequested ships (background established canon couples are okay, mentions of parents are okay!), canon retellings, consent issues

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Hurdy

I love the game’s world and all the little stories and legends that fill it. Great atmosphere, great lore, so if you feel like getting a little worldbuildy and indulging in the scenery and its story, please do! A focus on the sense of camaraderie in a caravan would also be great (like people could do on Gamecube.....). Hurdy’s a bit of an odd duck for that theme, but maybe he hitched a ride at some point? With whom? Amidatty or De Nam maybe, among the nominated characters? I love the whole cast so anyone goes. Do they travel together enough for them to cotton onto the weirdness of the whole Gurdy situation? Got any run-in with Lady Mio? Or what’s his status after the miasma is lifted, can he go back to Tipa, can he/they begin to heal? What does healing even look like for him and Gurdy?

Ghost Trick: Cabanela

You know.. him. Dazzlingly OTT, untiring, rock-solid self-esteem, loyal to a fault, following a rhythm of his own, flawless intuition until it fails and it all burns down... him. I just want to see more of him doing stuff! The way he’s chill and open toward new people (like Sissel and Missile in ch15) makes him perfect to throw at most other characters and see how they react to the sparkles... I’d love some focus on how ridiculous his aesthetic is, half Saturday Night Fever half hardboiled detective half bubbly preteen (for a total of 150%) and yet he makes it work. Or how ruthless he can be, possibly for the sake of the people he cares for. The quote “The intimacy of big parties”. Him and Alma in the new timeline bonding over knowing (once Jowd has spilled the beans) but not remembering that terrible timeline. Some tropey scenario on the job. Snark-offs with Pigeon Man, by which I mean PM snarks and it bounces off him like water off a spotless white goose’s back. Dreaming Sissel but he’s strange... and wrong?

Ship-wise it’s only Cabanela/Jowd whenever it’s not infidelity, Cabanela/Alma in what-ifs and Cabanela/Alma/Jowd for me (and Lynne/Memry and Yomiel/fianSissel on the side). There are a bunch of shippy prompts in all my past letters - I would however reiterate here that Jowd. is. the worst tease. always.

Conversely, Cabanela/Lynne and Cabanela/Yomiel are NOTPs especially from Cabanela’s side. So while I appreciate the thick tension of a good Yomiel VS Cabanela confrontation like everyone and their cat, and also really appreciate a roughed-up Cabanela, and I do love Yomiel in his own right... I don’t want Cabanela being into it. Adrenaline junkie he may be but this hurts and his coat’s a mess and there’s no perfect winning scenario so he hates every second of it. (JOWD being into it is another matter altogether and he should probably mind his own business)

Kentucky Route Zero: Carrington, Cate

Act after act, intermission after intermission, I somehow didn’t see the arts rising to such a dominant theme in KRZ and it’s stuck with me since the ending finally hit. It’s great and moving. So! Who better than good ol’ antler man to linger in those feels! Carrington’s playwright adventures or Carrington&anyone you fancy, either way I’d listen to him ramble for a week and I would like to know more about his big dramatic plans. Or maybe him helping someone, more or less accidentally, by offering his unique takes? Overriding my “no canon retellings” DNW for a hot second, did he ever figure out what was going down in the Death of the Hired Man (or Nap of the Hired Man as the case may be) interlude?

For Cate, I’m mostly interested in two things: life on the river and mushrooms. Maybe both! The Echo river ecosystem is intensely fascinating to me as opposed to life on the surface and life on the Zero, and yet all these environments are permeable. So what’s a moment in her daily life that encapsulates the river? Someone they picked up on the Mammoth, a strange island that popped up at some point? Cate&Will bonding extremely welcome, I’m love Will. And then there’s the mushroom hunting. I don’t know much about mushrooms, but I do know that they’re cool. Cate seems to agree, so if you’ve got a story or pic in you about her and them mushrooms, I’d love to see it.

Pyre: Volfred Sandalwood

This is a Volfred solo, Volfred&literally anyone or Volfred/Tariq, /Oralech or /Tariq/Oralech request. If &Manley or &Brighton, I am not interested in more lenient takes on their characters than canon’s. fwiw I also enjoy Jodi/Celeste and Bertrude/Pamitha a lot!

I feel deeply for all of Pyre’s main themes - literacy, degrees of freedom, the fragile time that is the end of a historical cycle, nobodies rising up to the occasion, building a better society, and of course found family, “distance cannot separate our spirits” and all that jazz, and Volfred is squarely rooted at the center of all of them. Just please tell me things about my fave. His relationship to the Scribes (as a historian, a some kind of vision, via *ae or once he’s a star himself)? A ‘forced vacay’ Downside ending where he looks at the Union from afar and keeps living in this strange transformational place? Life in a cramped Blackwagon that was meant for like 5 people tops and is currently eight Nightwings, a herald and an orb? Since he picked him for the job to begin with, does he respect and cherish Hedwyn as he dang well should? What does it feel like to try and Read a herald? Was he ever in danger, in the Commonwealth or in the Downside? Does he puff up as prime minister because he’s nervous, and who can see past his hyper-professionalism and lend a hand? Please roast him big time about the votes he assigns to the various Nightwings in his planner? What’s his attitude toward the flame’s purification (what with being a tree but mostly like, as a general concept. He did nothing wrong!) (well he definitely said some things wrong and sometimes oftentimes the ego jumps out, but his intentions did nothing wrong)? When did his calculating approach fail him? Something with Pamitha along the lines of that edit that goes “Can we talk, one ten to another?"/"I am an eleven, my girl, but continue."? btw that ‘emphatically yes xeno’ from my general likes is only applicable here I guess so: emphatically yes xeno to both shippy interactions at all ratings and to gen explorations of what a Sap is like...

Shenmue: Qiu Hsu, Xianzi Bei

Cormorants... kung fu... cormorant kung fu. They turned out to be my faves in a very likeable cast and I’d love to see either or both of them slice-of-life-ing it up in Niaowu, or anywhere up or down the river. The rest of the cast is welcome to join! Did Ren end up at Liu He Hall for whatever reason, or did Shenhua chat up a cormorant, as she does? Id love to see a spookier mood too! Ghost story time in Liu Jiao shrine maybe?

The Silver Case: Catherine, Kodai Sumio, Kuroyanagi Shinko, Kusabi Tetsugorou, Macalister Edo, Morishima Tokio

I‘m all for the surrealism, big things being introduced and never picked up again, Rashomon’ing it up with six explanations for the same thing where no single one can be true, people dying and then popping up again like nbd...  maybe the thing I like the most is characters transcending their humanity and looming over the dystopian world like ominous avatars. Correctness’ first ending had me swooning, that kind of mood is unparalleled. I have played TSC, FSR and 25W so far and have vague memories of K7. I’m aware of the “everything’s connected” readings but that’s not my main interest in these games. Mainly I see Lospass as a real island but also a metaphysical  place of transformation first and foremost, where strange things happen that don’t make sense elsewhere, but I’m good with anything that works for your story! There are a few & prompts for these fine folks in my Press Start letter [here].

For Catherine, I’d love to see something along the lines of her YAMI appearance, on Lospass on her own or hanging out with another character of your choice (or Tokio again). Sumio leaves me at a loss for words... if you’ve played 25W, maybe an expansion of his [intense ethereal whooshing] moment? He’s a gust away from vanishing from existence altogether... &Sakura and/or &/Tetsu if you want. Or his time in prison or a return to Lospass or whatever’s going on with that one, really. For Shinko I’m itching for different team-ups! Throw her at anyone you like and see what happens! FSR-era Tetsu could be cool, or off-the-grid Tetsu, or Tetsu&anyone... as for Edo, I’d be curious to see his pov on anyone and anything! WAS the Flower Sun and Rain the friends we met along the way? And Tokio... oh Tokio. Something about older Tokio and his gaggle of tulpas (Slash and whatshisface from YUKI who looks suspiciously like YAMI Tokio himself?)? Any...thing...about any part of his life from Lifecut onwards? Any portentous encounters?

[sometimesrosy]

(1) Hello, Meta Anon (thank you, Jeanie205) here. Just dropping in to say I agree with your assessment of Wells. If there’s one The 100 character who best embodies the quote, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” it’s Wells. The last act of his life is to impart onto Clarke the importance of forgiveness and then he dies at a juncture when the show’s horrors were relatively, considerably tame. He didn’t even make it to the culling. Given all we’ve seen,

(2) the cinnamon roll perception has never tracked for me. Every character is broken by traumas, tragedies and impossible choices, every one. It’s presumptuous to think Wells would remain the one person unsullied by darkness had he lived. Presumptuous doesn’t even seem like the right word. More so, unrealistic. Maybe because he died early, he’s malleable enough to be whatever fandom wants him to be and romanticizes the thought of a character representing a steadfast beacon of light? In fairness,

(3) I’ve only seen this argument aggressively utilized by an antiClarke, claiming the show would have been “so much better” had Clarke died instead of Wells. By better, I’m assuming they meant having a lead character who isn’t morally bankrupt, or some such nonsense. I guess we’ll never know where the story would’ve taken him. I could just as easily see him akin to Monty - someone not immune to the narrative’s evils but never so impacted that he went off the rails, opting for a peaceful end.

+++

Interesting. Because Wells was a “good” character who was generally unformed by hardship, he can serve as a kind of cipher for the fans to give him whatever purpose they want him to have. He stands in for everything good, for the idealistic vision of what could have been. 

I never really jibe with the people who say a character ‘deserves’ better when they don’t get the storyline the fans want. I don’t think that’s what deserving means. And I don’t think that “deserving” is a function in many stories. 

In a more simplistic story... or maybe they are more traditional stories... we have the good heroes and the bad villains and those characters who do good things are rewarded and those who do bad things are punished.

This story does not really work that way, at least for the good people. They often fail in their goals and are not rewarded. If a character is “good” they “deserve” a happy ending or victory or reward. If a character is “bad” they “deserve” to suffer, lose and die. The witch is chased off the cliff, the brute is vanquished, the demon is exorcised. The hero and heroine get together. The knight wins the battle. The loyal best friend is rewarded. Not in The 100. The hero and heroine are separated. The knight is sentenced to hell and must reign there, and the loyal best friend is killed for something he didn’t do.

HOWEVER, there is a hope for this story, for while our heroes have not been rewarded yet, and we have lost MANY of the deeply good and moral characters, our dark side knight has come back to the light and the TRULY evil characters have indeed gotten their just reward, often in VERY fitting manners.

Tsing was irradiated to death after her torture experiments.

Cage was killed by his own drug, administered by one of his victims.

McCreary’s coercion and torture was turned around on him and he was curb stomped to death.

Josephine was erased from existence at the hand of the victim she thought was vanquished and her own true love soulmate who couldn’t bear her evil any longer.

Simone lost her daughter and friends and was kicked out of the ship by the person she murdered to get her way.

??? So it’s not QUITE that the characters don’t get what they deserve. Some do. And maybe by the end of the show, the heroes will get what they deserve, too, and it won’t be death? Maybe? We can hope.

Maybe it’s about learning to be a good person. And Clarke and Wells at the beginning of the show could be the good people because they’d never ever been faced with horror and oppression until Jake was floated. That’s why Clarke fell from grace and her place as golden girl. She had to confront the horrors of this world and these systems that were in place and figure out how to be a good person WITHIN this world.

WOULD Wells have done better at it than Clarke?

I tell you, I have never seen the argument that Wells should have lived and Clarke should have died. I HAVE seen the argument that he should have taken FINN’S place, but that’s probably because I avoid clarke-antis like the plague. Because they are a plague. I get not loving a character, but how do you actively campaign against the hero of the story. That’s who the story is about, and wishing it was a different story about someone else isn’t going to do a damn thing except make you bitter and disappointed, and spread your bile to other fans, ruining their enjoyment. (I understand that this is what some people feed on. Hate, anger and spreading their negativity.)

To say Clarke shouldn’t have been the hero, Wells should have, smacks of misogyny. How HARD do they have to fight against having a complex, conflicted, morally gray female hero who struggles incredibly with what it means to be good. How often do they watch a male hero (his name is Bellamy) have almost the same struggles and be fine with it? To say that Wells would be better as a hero than Clarke says what? Do they think Wells wouldn’t have struggled with being morally gray?

How would that be possible? That’s what this show is about. It wouldn’t have turned into a disney cartoon simply by virtue of a different hero. 

Wells was a sensible character with a firm sense of right and wrong and he did things based on logic, and the desire for peace. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a character like that. But, is he the hero that this story needed? 

I don’t think so. First of all, he doesn’t rock the boat. Don’t tell people about the oxygen failing. Don’t start fights. Don’t waste resources. He didn’t have a problem with the plans his father had. He didn’t have a problem with the inequities and oppression of the lower classes, or if he did, he didn’t do anything about it. He was about stability and building up. 

If he’d found himself in Mount Weather, would he have fought them? Knowing that they were in a culture that worked, that was successful and safe and even thriving. Would he have resisted upon finding out about the grounders? Would he even have looked beyond the polite society to DISCOVER the evil? 

I don’t think so. He was a sensible character. Good character. Brave character. Wasn’t particularly bold or passionate and his vision of the world was to make do with what they had and follow the rules, while Clarke dreamed of something bigger. 

When those rules fell apart on Wells, what would he have done? THAT’S what we can’t know. What would have been his part in this story? Fearful? Resentful? Peacemaker? Collaborator? Defender? Administrator? Supporter? Warrior? 

There’s a lot of options, but in this story? I don’t think he would have been “hero.” 

Well no. He definitely wouldn’t have been the hero, because CLARKE is the hero. The story is about HER. A story with Wells at the center would have been a very different story. 

I think this is one of the problem we get into when we don’t pay attention to point of view or who the hero is. Even though we have narrative arcs for all the important and secondary characters, the main story does NOT focus around them. And they are not shaping the main story. 

Clarke Griffin was designed by JR to tell THIS story. Everything relates back to her and/or Bellamy (secondary protagonist.) A story with Wells as the primary and Bellamy as the secondary wouldn’t have been the same, because Wells was not proactive character like Clarke, but a reactive one, so Bellamy would have taken over. A story with Clarke as the primary and Wells as the secondary could have been similar to this story but it would have left out the class story. It would have been two upper class people swooping in to save the world. It also would have lacked the yin/yang of opposites. If they had written Wells with Clarke’s story, made him the rebel who wanted to tell the people what was happening against his fathers will, well, that could have worked, but he would have been Clarke in a man’s body. In which case it would have been the same story. In which case either we’d see the same hate for him as we have for Clarke, or we’d see the same clarke-antis loving WELLS, because he’s a man and it’s okay for a male hero to be complex, conflicted, morally gray person who struggles with what it means to be good, and that, my friends, is misogyny.

[evanfleischer]

Truth, like love and sleep, resents Approaches that are too intense. —  W.H. Auden, “New Year Letter”

Walter Benjamin spoke of an “angel of history” in his unpublished-at-the-time essay, “On The Concept Of History,” writing that  — 

His [that is, the angel’s face] face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin’s definition of ‘the angel of history’ enables us to look a little bit more closely at the function of the symbol and the idea of ‘an angel of history’ in The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. It’s also in discussing both Walter Benjamin’s angel and The Rings of Saturn that we can discuss Wings of Desire and take note of how the three engage with the other.

There are literal connections and all but literal connections that can be drawn between the three texts: in the library scene in Wings of Desire, per the screenplay, one reader studies Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” which is referenced by Walter Benjamin in relation to “the angel of history” (and which prompts the above-quoted paragraph), which itself serves as a point of intellectual reference in The Rings of Saturn.

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystalizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history  —  blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled (orig.: aufheben) … The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.

The Rings Of Saturn is manifestly aware of an oppressed past and the notion of “blast[ing] a specific era out of the homogenous course of history.” The text is aware of how frequently it looks upon a “wreckage,” so aware that the voice of the text frequently slides upward into a register filled with hauntings — but not just Gothic-styled hauntings pegged to a specific object, i.e., a single ghost haunting a single house because of a single terrible act committed one generational leap back into the past.

Sebald pursues a different path: when the reader ascends to a certain level in the text when one might feel a more ‘direct’ encounter with a ‘ghost,’ i.e., that space between a pile of herring and the bodies of those murdered in the Holocaust as defined by the implicit metaphor, we also share an intellectual space with thinking over of what generational trauma means while also operating in the middle of an encounter with ‘place.’ (The narrator can be expected to only accomplish so much, being human, after all.) The book has names for the things that have produced that “wreckage” — imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and fascism; and the book traces their evolution well — but merely indicting a large ‘-ism’ isn’t where the mission of The Rings Of Saturn begins or ends. Sebald the narrator seeks out a saint in Nuremberg. An angel seeks to become human in Berlin. Each are on an analogous path and make use of similar tools. In a small essay called “Why Do You Make Films?” written in 1987, Wim Wenders remarked that “The camera is a weapon against the tragedy of things, against their disappearing.” Sebald himself was quoted in an interview flagged by the podcast Backlisted as saying that “The photograph is meant to get lost somewhere in an attic — a nomadic thing that has a small chance only to survive,” making their survival — and the act of ensuring their survival — all the more striking.  And, more often than not, both Sebald and the angel seek to commune with nominally empty spaces.

To explain what occupies this emptiness requires us to talk for a moment about what we mean when we use words like trauma, collective trauma, and generational trauma.

With all three, there’s a rough feeling that lingers with us where we can say that we know it when we see it, feel it, or hear about it. We know it when we keep friends safe in the middle of the night, telling them over the phone to breathe in and breathe out. We know it when we hear a blues song scratchily emanating from the side of an open and otherwise quiet car mechanic’s garage late at night. We know it when we read a book like The Body Keeps The Score and we know it when we watch a television show like Watchmen.

Now, there’s a DSM-5 definition we can break out — which talks about “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence” — but that doesn’t incorporate a thousand other things that are part of the landscape of trauma. There is also a certain level of complexity in tracing generational trauma from one generation to the next at the level of biology. As of 2018 — insofar as this writer can make out — no studies exist that follow the trauma a mother might have before she conceives a child, how that trauma changes the genetic make-up of an oocyte (a cell in the ovary that changes to form an ovum), and how that link between the trauma established before conception and the trauma felt by the child is established after the child has been born.

That difficulty doesn’t mean the investigation into generational trauma is illegitimate. In 1966, Vivian M. Rakoff, a Canadian psychologist, described the children of parents who survived the Holocaust as suffering more acute psychological symptoms than their parents. In the 1990’s, as Rachel Yahuda and Amy Lehrner note in World Psychiatry, as technology developed, time passed, and more investigations were made — 

… offspring of Holocaust survivors were more likely to show HPA axis alterations associated with PTSD, such as lower cortisol levels and enhanced GR responsiveness … Subsequent investigations documented that maternal and paternal PTSD were associated with different biological outcomes. A post‐hoc analysis of cortisol circadian rhythm data indicated that lower cortisol levels in adult Holocaust offspring were associated with maternal, but not paternal, PTSD.

The HPA axis refers to the connection between the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and adrenal glands. GR responsiveness refers to glucocorticoid receptors, which are found throughout the body and play a role in regulating the genes that control development, metabolism, and immune response.

Looking at these results suggests that it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to offer up the reductive assertion that lower cortisol levels and enhanced GR responsiveness means that someone is both hyper-sensitive and might not feel the stress that the body should otherwise feel if it were in a ‘flight or ‘fight,’ trauma-inducing situation. In other words: the children exhibit the symptoms of the traumatized.

There is much more detail at hand here — studies involving GR gene methylation that parallel but don’t explicitly show genetic transmission of trauma, mothers with PTSD who experienced September 11th rating their children as having higher anxiety in the morning than mothers without PTSD, animals exposed to “chronic stress in utero [that led to] increased male, but not female, HPA stress reactivity,” and ‘secondary traumatization’ — but we should zoom the camera lens out to flag the fact that trauma simply makes itself manifest in the day-to-day lives of individuals in a variety of ways. In Bassel Van Der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps The Score, the doctor describes patients who “felt emotionally distant from everybody, as though [their] heart were frozen and [the individual in question was] living behind a glass wall,” as well as other patients who were “suffering from memories,” and notes that “I [the author] could not be [the doctor of a traumatized group] unless they made me one of them.”

This characterization brings us back to the idea of the lead characters in The Rings Of Saturn and Wings Of Desire encountering nominally empty spaces. At Somerleyton Hall in The Rings Of Saturn, the narrator thinks of how “fine a place the house seemed to me now that it was imperceptibly nearing the brink of dissolution and silent oblivion,” a house where “there are … moments, as one passes through the rooms open to the public … when one is not quite sure whether one is in a country house in Suffolk or some kind of no-man’s-land, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean or in the heart of the dark continent.”

The house is only ‘nominally’ empty because of the action implied by the phrases of “the Arctic Ocean” and “in the heart of the dark continent.” Open up the door of the latter phrase and voices will come rushing through. The alexithymia of trauma located in more than one place — in both the house and the ‘dark continent’ — will find a voice — of exploitation, cruelty, and worse. (Later on, the narrator goes so far as to suggest that the colonial violence of the Belgians in the past makes it manifest in physical deformations in the near-present.)

Consider two scenes in Wings Of Desire. The first is the montage that shows us a glimpse of what happened to Berlin in the war: the camera passes by a destitute man, a domestic argument, and a child screaming for his mother in the street before we transition to the sounds of a bomb siren, see for ourselves the bombs flash bulb across the sky of the city, the shadow of planes and white-yellow search lights, and buildings on fire. Or, as the English writer Thomas Browne puts it in one section of The Rings Of Saturn —

The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so … one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn — an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.

The second scene is Peter Falk standing outside a small snack bar in the middle of a muddied expanse. He talks to Bruno Ganz, the angel, and — even though the angel says nothing — they share a moment.

I can’t see you, but I know you’re here. I feel it. You’ve been hanging around since I got here. I wish I could see your face. Just look into your eyes and tell you how good it is to be here. Just to touch something. See, that’s cold. That feels good. Or, here … To smoke. Have coffee. And, if you do it together, it’s fantastic. Or … to draw. You know, you take a pencil, and you make a dark line … then you make a light line. And, together, it’s a good line. Or when your hands are cold — you rub ’em together. You see, that’s good. That feels good. There’s so many good things. But you’re not here. I’m here. I wish you were here. I wish you could talk to me, because I’m a friend. Compañero.

It is agonizingly tempting to liken Falk’s voice here to Sebald’s voice in a one-to-one ratio, even in spite of the fairly central role ‘wreckage’ and melancholy play in The Rings Of Saturn, especially if one were to factor in the consistently sumptuous turns of Sebald’s language, i.e., how the scratchy sounds of a transistor radio playing on a beach are “as if the pebbles being dragged back by the waves were talking to each other”; how — instead of a child — one couple in The Hague has an “apricot-colored poodle”; and how — “every now and then” at the Schiphol airport — “the announcers’ voices, disembodied and intoning their messages like angels, would call someone’s name.” But just before that scene in the film, Falk is seen wandering through a muddied expanse of earth. “Walking and seeing,” he says in voice over. He turns and looks off in the distance to his right (and the lingering background of the shot.) “That must be the station — not the one where the trains stop, but the station where the station stops.”

“The station where the station stops” is a roundabout way of talking about “the zero hour,” the end of history, or the “inclusion of all exclusions,” which is how the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann once described the apocalypse. Falk goes from contemplating the “inclusion of all exclusions” — an enormous collective trauma collectively felt — to talking about simple things with a spirit he can’t see, a spirit who doesn’t feel like it’s part of humanity and wants to be a part of humanity. And Falk wants that spirit there.

Sebald’s narrator has a role in reaching out to the spirits. The angel has a role in reaching out to humanity. Each are working to build a narrative bridge over which those impacted by collective trauma and generational trauma can pass into the story of the present. The aforementioned individuals who felt “emotionally distant from everybody, as though [their] heart[s] were frozen and [they] were living behind a glass wall” might now have a better idea of the path they need to take to unfreeze the heart and come from behind said glass wall. (Or, as it was put in HBO’s Watchmen: “Wounds need air.”) Neither narrator in either text can accomplish the project of building this bridge without the other, as is evidenced by the fact that The Rings Of Saturn all but ends amongst a reconstructed Temple of Jerusalem — an appeal to the judgement of eternity — and Wings Of Desire ends with the angel becoming human and falling in love.

There are a few complications that linger along our path: on one level, Sebald’s narrator doesn’t really ‘do’ much of anything. He walks around, has some associative thoughts, and eventually ends up in the hospital. The same judgement could be passed on the angel: he drifts, becomes human, and — for his troubles — ends up with a colorful coat.

But that reading ignores the role of what it means to be a witness.

“A witness is needed in order for the particular narrative to rise from the inundation of universal sound,” Xavier Vila and Alice Kuzniar wrote of ‘the library scene’ in Wings of Desire in the 1992 Spring issue of Film Criticism, and witnesses abound in both Wings of Desire and The Rings of Saturn. Roger Casement is witnessed on television. The gaze of the painter is witnessed in The Anatomy Lesson. The pathway of a Nazi who becomes the head of the United Nations is witnessed from one era to the next. The descendants of the colonialists — as well as what they took — are witnessed. In looking at a bridge crossing the river Blyth, the narrator also performs an act of witness concerning the growth of capitalism and empire in China.

It is this repeated act of witness that lends a shape of characterization to the seemingly unobserved, un-filled-in narrator. In observing this, we observe a man who is quiet, decent, and thoughtful. We observe a man who knows what it means to genuinely ‘live in the moment.’ We observe his silence in the same fashion that the narrator and housekeeper observe the silence of Major George Wyndham Le-Strange after the latter was one of the ones who liberated Belsen.

By contrast, the angels in Wings Of Desire observe things in an earthward direction, i.e., someone reading in a library — or someone dying as the result of a motorcycle accident  and seeing their life flash before their eyes — 

Albert Camus. The morning light. The child’s eyes. The swim in the waterfall. The spots of the first drops of rain. The sun. The bread and wine. Hopping. Easter. The veins of leaves. The blowing grass. The color of stones. The pebbles on the stream’s bed. The white tablecloth outdoors. The dream of the house in the house. The dear one asleep in the next room. The peaceful Sundays. The horizon. The light from the room in the garden. The night flight. Riding a bicycle with no hands. The beautiful stranger. My father. My mother. My wife. My child.

In each case, we see a deepening of the role of the angel of history as described by Benjamin in his essay. It isn’t just that the angel witnesses the wreckage; it’s that the angel has emotions about the wreckage it wants to share with us. It isn’t just that the storm propels the angel into the future; it’s that the angel has an opinion as to how that wreckage should have conducted itself. The angel of history isn’t about the truth or falsity of history; it’s about who is acknowledged and what it means to share care and concern for those initially lost to history.

The other complication to the arc of this argument is that solely ascribing an interest in the traumatized ‘lessens’ the work of either text — that it strips them of the necessary ineffable mysteriousness that makes art ‘art.’

If that were to hold true — if we were to push our concern with trauma to the side — it still wouldn’t get rid of the fact that there is an emotion we can ascribe to the wreckage of history as described in The Rings Of Saturn. You can’t look at the very end of the book — wherein Sebald notes the death of his father-in-law — and not feel an emotion — that, over the course of history, when a ‘lady of the upper classes’ suffered a grief — which the reader could reasonably read as barely concealed code for ‘a very important woman’ — this is how history would respond (ergo, how we could respond), with …

… heavy robes of black silk taffeta or black crêpe de chine … black Mantua silk of which the Norwich silk weavers … had created … to rape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field …

 — but the text doesn’t just stop with the emotion. It begins to move and slides upward to note that these arrangements were done so that  — 

… the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost forever.  

In other words: amidst the wreckage of empire and silk, as you cross from a story about Queen Victoria to fictitious words falsely attributed to Thomas Browne, we realize that a bridge has been built for a dear one close to the narrator’s heart. In fact, all of this is done in the name of building a bridge: the angel bearing witness to the words of a dying motorcyclist in Wings of Desire; Peter Falk (as an ex-angel) bearing witness to an empty space on his way to get a cup of coffee; Sebald’s narrator bearing witness to an empty house or to fishermen on the beach who looked

… as if the last stragglers of some nomadic people had settled there, at the outermost limit of the earth, in expectation of the miracle longed for since time immemorial, the miracle which would justify all their erstwhile privations and wanderings.

The late David Foster Wallace once characterized true heroism as “minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer.” The actions undertaken in Wings Of Desire and The Rings Of Saturn highlight just how much weight the words ‘probity’ and ‘care’ carry over the course of a story, as well as what it takes for someone to actually earn that epithet of praise.

[orecarus]

Hugo is about materialism

‘The human body is a watch, a large watch, constructed with such skill and ingenuity...’~Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Materialism is the philosophy that consciousness is the direct product of material components interacting. At death, those material components disperse, with consciousness coming to an end.

With the rise of atheism, materialistic ideologies have risen to prominence. Advocates against this increase in popularity claim that this type of ideology leads to a degradation in character through apathy--namely that with no belief in an afterlife or a higher authority, what is to stop humanity from falling into a state of destructive appetite--eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.

In Hugo a 2011 children’s movie directed by Martin Scorsese based off the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznic we are introduced to the setting with the whistle of a train. Indeed, our main protagonist Hugo lives in a train station. The importance of this symbology being that it facilitates transportation between two points. The secondary sound before any image on the screen is that of a clock. This is perhaps an even greater symbol than that of our setting, for time is the vehicle by which we attain our goals. 

And if one believes that life must come to an ultimate end then time is god. This is highlighted as we are introduced to the film with a tracking shot that ends with our first look of Hugo as he peers over the denizens of the station through the view of a clock. 

We come to find that Hugo is forced to keep the clocks running lest he be discovered and sent to an orphanage. The orphanage being a recycler for children who have nowhere they belong. Hugo is trapped in transition, but it can not last. He must find his place. 

We are consistently reminded of this throughout the film in the form of the Station Inspector, having himself been raised in the orphanage. He is quite literally the image of man and machine in one as he uses a brace for his injured leg. Now it is his duty to recycle children the way he once was. His constant prowl through the station heightens the tension and reminds us that Hugo’s time is limited. However, this is not something that is necessarily evil in and of itself.

There is a scene in which Hugo, with Isabelle, is once again looking through a clock. This time over the entirety of the city of Paris, once again striking us with the seeming importance that time plays in the themes of Hugo. In this theme comes one of Hugo’s most prominent quotes: ‘I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.’

This is the key to Hugo’s thematic doctrine. We are all part of the machine called humanity. Life is about finding your purpose in that machine. It is not interested in exploring any theological theory of the origin of humanity or, for that fact, our ultimate resting place, but in the simple grounded logic that finding purpose not only is our function but also brings us joy--whether you believe in god or not is beside the point.

It can even be flipped on its head. One may argue that belief in an afterlife has a larger negative impact on society. As Julien Offray de La Mettrie wrote in his work, man a machine: ‘If atheism were generally accepted, all the forms of religion would then be destroyed and cut off at the roots. No more theological wars, no more soldiers of religion. Nature infected with a sacred poison, would regain its rights and its purity. Deaf to all other voices, tranquil mortals would follow only the spontaneous dictates of their own being the only commands which can never be despised with impunity and which alone can lead us to happiness through the pleasant paths of virtue.’

I may not agree completely with Julien that it is necessary for atheism to be generally accepted, but I do agree with the reasoning behind it--that all the fights over who is right and wrong about what comes after this life is a poison that causes us to lose sight of why we are here in the first place. For as long as we are conflicted we can not find happiness.

Happiness is believed to be achieved like a metal at the end of a race track, and something you can only obtain if you beat those you're racing against. That is of course idiotic. Happiness is as inherent within us as the ability to breathe.

This is illustrated in a more personal representation by the character of Georges Melies. He is a man that has achieved his dreams but because of extenuating circumstances beyond his control did not receive the notoriety he felt he was deserved and has largely been forgotten. He is now a miserable man who sees in Hugo the cruel passage of time. Time, he views as a thief that robbed him of the reward his labor deserved. 

Unhappiness does not necessarily come from a disparity of aspirations and current standing, but from actions to achieve aspirations. Georges has been blinded to the fact that it wasn't for notoriety or reward that he began creating art. Yet, that viewpoint changed, and so when he lost it his happiness also went with it.

This separation from the knowledge that it is only the achievement of our dream and not also the road that gets us there that brings us happiness is shown in the image of the automaton. From the Greek word automatos meaning acting of itself. In other words Georges is no longer acting of himself. He is not himself. He is a cog in the machine that has stopped turning.

As a side note I think it is interesting that the automaton’s function is to draw. There is an incorrect notion among artists that our work comes from some otherworldly source that somehow separates us from the average worker, but that can’t be further from the truth. Art like construction is done a day at a time through intense labor. The titular identity of the tortured artist comes from a lack of an understanding of this. 

So Georges must be reunited with himself in order to return to harmony. Is it any wonder that it is Hugo, the boy who keeps the clocks running, that does this?

[symphonic--chaos]

Empires of Brick and Blood Chapter 2 - Vēnor Rating: PG-13 This chapter is set to the song: Kill of the Night - Gin Wigmore

Also posted on AO3

Alexander Lightwood- Alec, as most called him to his preference, was what some could possibly call… Neurotic. If you asked him, it was an understatement, what with the amount of stress he’d accrued seeing the state of Brooklyn once the Largo’s had lost their last clawed grip on it. Chaos caused in city’s across the country due to Repo men that hadn’t been reigned in and let their power get to their heads, by greed within the Largo family that had only grown as the line went on. At the same time, he would correct you because, while falling into this seeming leadership position his parents placed on him had been unexpected and daunting, his stumble had turned into stride. Now, if he was truly labeled by those who knew him best, they would find authoritative fit Alexander Lightwood the best. The great grandson of the Largo heiress Amber Sweet, who started the line of destruction after passing the business to her one-night stands bastard child from the man known as Graverobber, had followed on in his family’s footsteps. Keeping the business going, though with what Alec found through articles and paperwork from the labs, the man was surprisingly trying to turn things around. Maybe even had a better head on his shoulders than the rest of them, which no doubt had to come from the side of whomever married into the Largo family. 

Though he married, they never bore a child into the line, as their only pregnancy ended with a miscarriage. With a wheeze and a groan at a ripe age of 97, the eldest and last remaining member of the tyrant family had croaked their last order to whomever became their predecessor:  Find him. He is your key. What they had failed to mention was who ‘him’ was, why he needed to be found and, Alec didn’t know, maybe a hint to where he was. It seemed his sister, Isabelle, was more interested in the nightlife around the city more than actually helping him go through mountains of neglected paperwork or to find him, and his mother was busy recruiting guards and tossing money at previously corrupted repo men to get them to join their forces. Robert… Was somewhere, as always, causing mayhem and anxiety in anyone near him. It had been his money that elbowed them into the large secondary headquarters of the Largo’s, currently in the heart of New York, whereas the original having been in California. The youngest of the Lightwoods, Max, was away at some elite boarding school, always out of the way of his parents and their work-induced, steamrolling habits. Once their parents had taken over the colossal task of taking on the Largo estate, his father’s words were simple as he headed out the door: ‘The bills are stacking high and unpaid organ repossession is, and now will always be, the key. I’ll be back once I’m done.’ ~ “Split up. Two men together at all times, you all know Bane fights back.” Alec gave a pointed look at a nearby guard sporting a black eye and busted lip to accentuate his words. Pointing to the alleys he wanted covered on a map of areas they’d swept and had yet to, they were all soon on their way to their respectively given locations. Handing the map to the driver that would wait in the car, Alec ran his hands along his belt, nodding to himself as he confirmed he had all of his gear, his boots crunching on a broken bottle on the sidewalk as he headed for his own alley. “No, I go alone. It’s personal at this point.” The two guards that went to follow Alec looked shocked by the command, hesitant, but they soon split to go down the adjacent alley, quietly conversing with each other that they weren’t sure what made him feel so invincible. Truth be told, nothing made him feel invincible. What fueled him to believe he could go alone after this little rat that continuously slipped between their fingers was nothing but pure rage and a will to win. It had been five months since he’d proclaimed his hunting party on the drug dealer, five months of trying to get anonymous tips on where he was, five months of dropping everything to rush to a location where guards swore up and down that they had him only to have some random junkie that looked nothing like him. Five. Fucking. Months of seeing that smug face, that little wave of polished fingers as he paused on a buildings fire escape ladder, fifty feet above Alec, mid-rush to get away from him. There had been times, of course, when he’d had him. Truly had him in his grip, an arm or his jacket between his fingers, knuckles white from his hold. Once time he’d even been in a fist fight with him, the one time Alec had learned just how much of a fighter Bane was, as though he’d been trained to fight this way. It made sense considering he was a street urchin, all that lived on these streets at the threat of being robbed or jumped, or even at risk of a repossession, they had all found ways that worked best for them to protect themselves. While most used weapons, Bane was certainly no exception here, though his weapons were certainly his fists and smart. Security was crucial, what with the amount of Zydrate and money he likely carried on himself to appease the 'children’ of the alleys, poisoning them, yet aiding the Lightwood’s in slowing them down fast enough to repossess what was theirs according to the books. That likely wasn’t part of his plans, but finders keepers as Robert said. A long sigh was released when he was finally alone, his steps pausing at the beginning of the alleyway, his neck rolling slowly from side to side as he tried to mentally prepare himself. He was sure that after so long, tonight would be just as rage inducing as every night had been, though parts of him hoped for another one of those fights since it would at least be more entertaining than staring at junkies and dirty alleyways full of empty Zydrate vials and trash. “Get a quote on a cleaner for these alleys and the sidewalks.” Alec sent the voice memo from his phone to Izzy as he walked, kicking a vial out of his way and making a face as a large rat ran by in the distance. All hopes of it being a cat were shot after the plague had gone through, one that strangely enough only affected cats with something akin to rabies, and could only be passed to humans the same way. While it made simple strays slowly turn vicious, striking out and even chasing down people that so much as looked at them wrong, it did something wholly different to the people that were attacked. Rabid was something vaguely simple of a term. It made them almost…superhuman. Some people gained strength that no one should have possessed, able to rip people limb to limb or tear doors off cars to get to those inside. There had been cases of people who gained a chameleon like affect, their skin could change to blend into their surroundings- something Alec had seen first hand when driving through a city during the height of it. Other people had, what they could only refer to as 'magic’. It was the closest thing possible, it was like the people could harness the air and the energy around them and use it to cause sheer chaos, inciting break-ins, deaths. All they had learned was that nothing good came from this plague, and it was treated as such. All cats found outdoors were killed. Everyone that owned a cat was immediately to register and bring it to a nearby clinic for it to be inspected for the disease, then given a shot that would prevent (or they hoped would) the disease from affecting them. If you were rich, you were lucky to keep your cat. Most of the lower class families weren’t as lucky, as most of their cats were outdoor permitted. It wasn’t unlikely to see them trotting alongside their owners in the alleys, or lounging in sunspots on the cars. The humans that carried the disease were easy to spot, their eyes, ironically, all became colored with a slit pupil just like the cats that had infected them. Many of them drooled or struck out when approached too closely. Many had been captured and attempts to give them an antidote failed, so, just like their feline counterparts, they were put down as well. To see a mass culling of people had been traumatizing to many of the kids their age, putting fear into them of being next on that list. It had been ten years since the incident and there hadn’t been any cases in the past seven, something Alec was grateful for as he’d grown rather fond of his and his sisters cats, twin Maine Coon’s that Robert had threatened to toss out to the vets to be euthanized far too many times. In reality, they just hated the man and hissed at him every time he passed due to the vile energy he put off, and the kids had learned to do whatever he ordered out of fear of his words. This had stuck even as they’d grown older, even at 26 and 24, to a point where they generally just avoided all eye contact with him and kept their eyes on the floor as they agreed to their duties. A shuffle to Alec’s left had his attention turning from the giant rat, grown from years of a lack of upper food chain predators, to the billow of a trench coat disappearing behind the connected alley. Heavy boots stopped abruptly as his ears strained to listen for a voice or any hint of someone running, but the girls and guys that frequently passed through or sold themselves in the alley were too loud and drowning out everything he actually wanted to hear. His steps were quick to turn down the short connector between the two, the rancid smell of the dumpster filling the small area sided by two tall buildings and nearly making him gag. A look to his left confirmed what he’d seen, the long overcoat swaying behind the figure that hummed and walked nonchalantly away from him, a half eaten apple in hand. “BANE!” With that shout, the other figure paused mid-step, the apple slipping in his fingers despite the attempt to catch it, the thud of the fruit on the ground minimal against the echo of Alec’s yell. “My apple!” Came the whine as the long-haired dealer looked down at it sadly, then turned to look at Alec. “You owe me an apple.” Alec was speechless. He… owed him an apple? A fucking apple? “I owe you shit, now get over here and come with me peacefully so you can finally go to trial and we can clean the streets of trash like you.” “First, Mr. Lightwood, that apple cost me thirteen credits, not that a rich asshole like you would get how much that is. Second, I’ll come with you,” His eyes traveled up and down Alec’s body as his wicked smile proved their words meant two completely different things, “but I do nothing peacefully. And finally, I’m not trash. If anything I like to consider myself like a fine, vintage shop.” Alec merely stared, knowing his eyes were wide in disbelief that Bane was seriously… flirting with him? While he was warning of an arrest? His lips parted as he began to form the words his mind was stewing together, but they soon shut as he inhaled deeply through his nose instead. Gods, that dumpster, bad decision. Alec stepped forward to get away from the mid-alley entrance before he vomited all over the ground in front of him and, with every step forward, Bane took one back with brief, forlorn looks given to his apple, as if giving it a silent goodbye. “I… You’re dead. I’m just going to kill you and no one’s going to know.” Alec’s threat seemed nonchalant, that disbelief still lingering in his tone. Much to Alec’s dismay, it brought a bright smile to Bane’s face as his cuff-gloved hand rose, his fingers adorned with rings and nails painted as black as his jacket. Those fingers curled in towards his palm one by one, then out, and back in, beckoning him tauntingly. “Come on, Mr. Lightwood. I love a challenge. You’re my favorite so far. Who else is blessed enough to have a hot guy so infatuated with them?” “You son of a–” Alec dashed towards Bane as a delighted laughter rang through out the alley, the dealers feet carrying him along the dirt and asphalt. It was a chase that would end fruitless after just five short minutes, lost into an alleyway with an open door and a hand reaching out and motioning for Bane to hurry and run in. Alec panted as he stopped suddenly at the now locked door, his fist slamming on the cool metal as if the three little piggies would let in the wolf. Backing up, he gathered his energy and rushed the door with a frustrated yell, throwing his shoulder into it and successfully getting it to open, slamming against the wall of the hall within. “Apartments, corner of East 63rd and 1st.” Alec’s watch beeped after he passed along his whereabouts to the guards patrolling the nearby alleys. The black cylinder at his waist was removed from its clip, the button extending the weapon into its full length, the tip sparking briefly with electricity. A cattle prod, only adjusted to be more human tolerant. His favorite weapon he owned outside of his bow, much better for close range attacks, though he was considering taking to the roof’s from now on and using the bow to hunt Bane down. This fight had ceased to be a potential win now that Bane was hidden away, since knowing his ways through months of studying, Bane was either on the roof, or in one of the hundreds of apartments and going out through a window. “Keep an eye out all around the building out there, he won’t be able to get far. Call in the backup, have them check every apartment. Feel free to bring a couple of the Repo guys, see if they match anyone they’re missing on their lists. Check with Raphael, first, though. He’ll let you know who he’ll spare of the group.” Alec paced the hallway for a moment or two, listening for any sign of Bane’s voice even though he knew the other would be remaining silent and waiting him out. That, more than anything else, frustrated Alec to no end. He sniffled and ran a hand through his hair as he tried to calm himself down, but another moment passed and soon his fist met the drywall of the hallway as a frustrated “FUCK!” rang through it. The door swung open as he pulled the knob and flung it aside, walking outside and shoving past the guards there. “I’ll be back at the office. Let me know if you find anything. Permission for no mercy.” Moments like these he knew he sounded like Robert, but time after time Izzy tried to assure him it was only because they were their own worst critics. That it was something ingrained in them by their father. But, if so, why was she always so carefree and sweet? Alec found himself like his father more than he liked, and he hoped that he didn’t pay for it some day.

[shivaom99]

The Beautiful & Enigmatic Mystic of India: Sri Anandamayi Ma :

The Early Life of Sri Ma

The Divine Life Society described Sri Anandamayi Ma as “the most perfect flower the Indian soil has ever produced.” Born in a small village in Bengal on April 30, 1896, her parents named her Nirmala Sundari Devi, which means ‘immaculate beauty’. She came to be recognized as a powerful expression of the Divine and throughout India was regarded with great affection and reverence by people of all faiths. In the 1920s, her devotees began to refer to her as Anandamayi Ma, meaning ‘Joy Permeated Mother’, a name that acknowledged the bliss and unattached love that was her natural and constant state. Over the course of her life she attracted many thousands of devotees; among them Mahatma Gandhi, and Kamala Nehru.

As a child, Sri Ma’s parents observed their daughter experiencing states of apparent ecstasy, especially on hearing devotional songs sung by her Brahman father. In her village she was known to be a cheerful child who never complained about the work assigned to her and was always willing to help others in any way she could. Nirmala attended the local village school for just two years.

In keeping with tradition, Nirmala’s marriage was arranged when she was just 13. She went to live in her brother-in-laws home where life was more disciplined and a good deal of domestic work was expected of her. Despite this, she remained good-humored and never complained. In fact, her uninterrupted state of serenity and often withdrawn meditative states gave her new family cause to wonder if she may be a bit simple minded. It was some time before those around her began to appreciate that her lack of self-concern and limitless compassion for others was an outward expression of her spiritual maturity and not a mental defect. A devout neighbor named Harakumar, in recognizing this divine quality, made a habit of visiting her morning and night to pay his respect. He began to address her as Ma, or mother.

Sri Anandamayi Ma - The Indian Saint

Celibacy and Spiritual Practice

When Nirmala was 18 she went to live with her husband in Ashtagram. Her husband, who she came later to call Bholanath, soon realized that their marriage was to be a celibate one. Whenever he began to feel amorous towards his wife, Sri Ma would grow faint and her beautiful face assumed a deathly pallor. Accounts from friends and neighbors indicate that Bholanath accepted this situation without bitterness and came to consider his role as one of guardian of a remarkable treasure rather than husband in the traditional sense.

In August, 1922, at midnight during a full moon, Nirmala, at age 26, began spiritual practice in full earnestness. Without guru, she initiated herself, following her own inner guru, or sadguru. Bholanath witnessed Nirmala become absorbed in a world of inner joy, assume yogic postures, repeat mantras and move rhythmically in a vibrant dance that seemed directed by an other-worldly power. Onlookers noted a distinct radiance that emanated from her body. It was suggested by Bholanath’s family that he remarry, but instead he asked for initiation. A friend of Bholanath’s demanded evidence that she was qualified to provide spiritual initiation at which point she touched Bholanath on the head. In his words, at the touch of her finger, he experienced a state of ineffable, divine bliss that lasted for several hours.

For nearly six years Nirmala continued her sadhana or spiritual practices, her Divine presence growing stronger all the while. In later years when questioned by scholars, seekers of the truth and those curious to know how she had attained so much knowledge of the spiritual practices of every faith, Nirmala indicated that all was revealed to her as part of herself. She said that she had not yet revealed one thousandth part of what was shown to her during those years of intense spiritual practice. After this period of sadhana, Nirmala remained completely silent for three years, marking the fulfillment of spiritual knowledge.

Sri Ma at Shahbagh Gardens

Sri Ma Attracts Devotees

In 1924, Nirmala moved with her husband to Dhaka where he worked as manager of the Shahbagh Gardens. It was soon observed that the young wife of the manager of the gardens was gifted with spiritual powers and had the countenance of one who has merged with the Divine. It was here that she first attracted life-long devotees. Soon crowds began to swell around her and a close disciple, Bhaiji, conferred the title Anandamayi Ma upon her. Bhaiji was responsible for the first ashram built in her name at Ramna in 1929. Twenty-four more ashrams were to follow.

Sri Ma, as she was affectionately called by her devotees, moved to Dehradun in 1932, accompanied by her husband. From this point until her death, aged 86, she traveled extensively throughout India, rarely staying in the same place longer than two weeks, despite the efforts of devotees to keep her there by constructing ashrams and making their heartfelt appeals. What is remarkable about Sri Ma is the adoration felt for her by people of every religious faith. She was as at home in a Hindu temple as a Muslim mosque or a Christian church. One Christian devotee is noted to have said upon meeting her, “Now we have a face to put on God”.

A visiting Irish journalist asked her, “Am I right to believe that you are God?” to which Sri Ma replied, “There is nothing save He alone; everyone and everything is a form of God. In your person also He has come here to give darshana (to merge consciousness with a holy person).” His curiosity peaked, the journalist asked, “Why are you in this world?” Sri Ma responded, “I am not anywhere. I am reposing in myself. What I was before, I am now, and shall be hereafter. I am also whatever you or anybody may think I am; why don’t you look at it this way – the yearnings of truth seekers have brought about this body. All of you have wanted it and so you have found it. That is all you need to know.” A devotee of many years named Richard Lannoy spoke of Sri Ma, “Yet there is a strangeness, a particularity, an indefinable quality which comes so near the limits of the definably human as to make an adjective like ‘human’ quite inadequate when applied to Her case, and Divine paltry. She was unique and remained throughout her life, the acme of effortless perfection.”

Paramahansa Yogananda Meets Sri Ma

In Autobiography of a Yogi, the Indian spiritual master, Paramahansa Yogananda recounts his meeting with Sri Ma in the chapter titled, ‘The Bengali “Joy Permeated Mother”’. When asked by Yogananda about her life she at first replied, “Father knows all about it; why repeat it?” When Yogananda gently asked again, she explained, “Father there is little to tell. My consciousness has never associated with this temporary body. Before I came on this earth, Father I was the same. As a little girl, I was the same. I grew into womanhood, but still I was the same. When the family in which I had been born made arrangements for this body to be married, I was the same. And when passion-drunk, my husband came to me and murmured endearing words, lightly touching my body, he received a violent electric shock, as if struck by lightening, for even then I was the same. ….And Father, in front of you now, I am the same. Ever afterward, though the dance of creation changes around me in the hall of eternity, I shall be the same.” Sri Ma’s Teaching

Sri Ma’s teachings were simple and took on a musicality as she spoke spontaneously of the spiritual quest and answered the questions of seekers thirsty for liberation. Her guidance manifested in an endless variety of forms and she subscribed to no particular path of spirituality, regarding all as valid. “How can one impose limitations on the infinite by declaring this is the only path – and why should there be so many different religions and sects? Because through every one of them He gives Himself to Himself, so that each person may advance according to his own inborn nature.”

Sri Ma advocated spiritual equality for women in a world where at the time women throughout all religions were regarded as lesser. Her teachings counseled on a life of doing good and refraining from doing bad. She provided instruction on meditation, made jokes, sang songs of devotion and read from sacred scriptures. The following quote is said to capture much of Sri Ma’s message, “Who is it that loves and who that suffers? He alone stages a play with Himself. Who exists, save him? The individual suffers because he perceives duality. It is duality that causes all sorrow and grief. Find the One everywhere and in everything and there will be an end to pain and suffering. The Supreme calling of every human being is to aspire to self-realization. All other obligations are secondary.” When her husband died in 1938 with Sri Ma at his side, devotees were struck by the totality of Sri Ma’s acceptance – there was a complete absence of grief and her great serenity remained unbroken. Seeing their shock, Sri Ma remarked, “Do you start to wail and cry if a person goes into another room in the house? This death is inevitably connected with this life. In the sphere of Immortality, where is the question of death and loss? Nobody is lost to me”.

Throughout her life Sri Ma met with many mahatmas, political dignitaries, and ascetics - all were touched by the compassion she radiated as well as her ability to effortlessly converse on any aspect of spirituality. In 1982 Sri Ma began to withdraw from her busy schedule of meeting with devotees and her health began to deteriorate. Devotees beseeched her to make herself well again but she replied, “This body has no illness. It is being recalled toward the Unmanifest. Whatever you see happening now is conducive toward that event. As the Atma, I shall ever abide with you.” She left her body at around 8 P.M on August 27, 1982 and her funeral procession was given the highest honor with all the Mahatmas coming together to assume charge of Sri Ma’s physical remains.

“I find one vast garden spread out all over the universe.

All plants, all human beings, all higher mind bodies

are about in this garden in various ways ,

each has his own uniqueness and beauty.

Their presence and variety give me great delight.

Every one of you adds with his special feature to the glory of the garden."

Sri Anandamayi Ma

Also read: Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj : The Great Sage of India

The Spiritual Journey Unfolds

Sri Anandamayi Ma

[phinnsyreads]

Site-12, Monday Morning. 4:00. January 11th, 2025. Containment area of SCP-5200

Researcher Boyd closed the hatch behind him, and turned to face the containment vault’s occupant. Boyd thought he looked like an old fashioned tramp, complete with bindle and permanent five o’clock shadow. But yesterday he’d looked like a wino, and the day before a washed-up boxer. This look wasn’t new.

Boyd sat down across from the entity, and pulled an empty manila envelope out of his jacket. “They told me that you wanted to talk.”

SCP-5200 pulled itself up to the table, and grinned a toothy smile. “Ahyup. You’ve all been gettin’ anxious about the dreamer, right?”

“Perhaps.” Boyd turned the envelope over in his hands. “What do you know about it?”

SCP-5200 let out a long sigh, and leaned back in his chair. “Boy, you eggheads sure get to the point quick. If I’m going to tell you that, I’ll need to let you know how the world got started out.”

Boyd frowned. SCP-5200 was known for spinning stories to distract from having to answer questions. Usually, it was best to play along until it could be coerced into giving a definite answer.

“Fine. But be quick about it, we don’t have all week.”

SCP-5200 chuckled. “You don’t know how right you are, chuck.”

He pulled a crumpled cigarette from his jacket, and placed it in his mouth. “Okay, okay… so the first thing that happened, was we had the two forces of the universe. Greeks had it on point, y’know? It was the music, and the dreams.”

Boyd nodded, drumming his fingers on his thigh beneath the table.

“So’s they banged, y’know, and they made the world. But, they didn’t fill in all the space, because you can’t fill in nothing forever. There’s a little bit left over from the days gone by.”

Boyd nodded, and pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket, pretending to take note of what SCP-5200 was saying.

“So that’s why this third rock from fun has all the craziness pulled to it like that shit’s on rails. It’s a storage depot for the unknowable. Would’ve worked like a breeze if you guys hadn’t busted up the lock.”

“It was more like a jar.”

“Whatever, chuck. That’s just how you made the smoker’s stupid dream witchery true. When those two kid’s get together, nothing’s gonna be able to stop them. Not even flipping things around one more time.”

“I don’t understand a word you’re saying.” Boyd put the notebook away, and stood up. “If you don’t have anything else to add to your story, I think we’re done.”

SCP-5200 held out a hand. “Wait, sit down a second. There is something I want to give you.”

Boyd stopped at the hatch. “What?”

SCP-5200 reached into its own jacket, and pulled out the manila envelope. “Here’s what a few people have said.”

The envelope is tossed, picked up, examined, and stuffed into a pocket.

Boyd exited the hatch, locking it behind him. Briskly, he set off towards the Records and Information wing, for debriefing and transcription of the interview.

First Document: Unusual Incidents Unit. (A case file.)

UIU File 1976-34, Case File Pluto’s Front Door

— Summary: Possible portal or slate that causes immediate death upon contact.

Description and Capabilities:

— Name: Object of Note, Black Portal — Irregularity Cross-reference: destructive, transport?, immobile, locale — Physical Description: A cave in North Dakota, which has an entrance in the form of a flat, non-reflective black wall. Wall is immobile, and does not respond to provocation. Causes immediate death on contact. — Capabilities: Does not move, or take any initiative. When touched, causes objects and persons to be pulled into it, and disappear. — Purpose: Possibly a trap, naturally occurring anomaly, or misunderstood aspect of nature. — Behavior: No behavior. Object not believed to be living.

Evidence:

— Exhibit A: The object. No evidence related to case 1976-34 has been located other than the object itself.

Bureau Record:

— Current Status: Currently noted, with light guards. Due to remoteness of location, chances of being discovered are slim. — History of UIU Action: Discovered in 1976, by a US geological survey. Turned over to the UIU shortly thereafter, and secured since then. Very little action has taken place since then, other than the tragic loss of Agent Brom to the object when he mistakenly came into contact with it while doing field work at the location.

Second Document: Dr. Wondertainment. (An email.)

DEAR MISTER RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR:

We regret to inform you that your toy proposal has been rejected, for failing to meet the following criteria:

— Deadly to adults, animals, children, and pre-children. This violates the Wondertainment Super-Safety guarantee. — Fun factor, after vigorous testing, has been rated at 0.0. — Does not have market viability for future additions or innovations, due to being 100% fatal to the consumer. — Unpackageable.

Thank you for your interest in DOCTOR WONDERTAINMENT and we hope to see you innovating again soon!

Third Document: The Factory. (An invoice.)

SHIPPING ORDER: 10,000. Bulk distribution. PAYMENT: PAID IN FULL, PRODUCT NOT DELIVERED. ACTION: Relationship with distributor discontinued.

Fourth Document: Prometheus Labs. (A grant request form.)

PROBLEM The Prometheus Labs physics lab has proven the existence of an object which could be used to dispose of any type of matter harmlessly, at little to no cost past the initial investment to find the object.

SOLUTION In order to locate it, the Prometheus labs team would need additional funding to dedicate most of their mathematicians to this purpose.

BUSINESS CASE Once located, Prometheus Labs will save massively on the disposal of high-risk materials that would otherwise need special handling procedures in order to nullify or put out of sight and mind.

USE OF FUNDING Currently, the only need for funding is the researcher salaries to give them the time to find a more precise location of this object they have only just proven to exist. Further costs can be estimated once the object is located.

KNOWN ISSUES It may not be possible to reach and return the object within the lifetime of any current employee of the Prometheus Labs corporation.

Fifth Document: The Chaos Insurgency. (A command brief.)

WARNING: DELTA COMMAND EYES ONLY!

DeCIRO Catalogue Number: SC-55/2024

Document Type: Step Compilation

Dates Received: 09-18-1955 through 09-18-2024

Operation Status: Open

Foreword: This object is to never come into the hands of the Insurgency. All steps to secure Site-12, the Foundation location of the object, are critical to maintain. These security procedures are to be kept secret from the SCP Foundation.

Hereafter we of Delta Command document the Steps of the Plan as transcribed by the Engineer of the Chaos Insurgency.

1. STEP [55/6]

Security parameters, such as entrenching in the surrounding countryside, have been enacted. Anomalous countermeasures have been placed in the uninhabited areas surrounding Site-12, which, due to its remote location, is not accessed or widely known by persons outside the Foundation and Insurgency. Further measures to be taken as the situation around Site-12 changes.

2. STEP [24/88]

The Foundation appears to be losing control of some of their frontier sites, due to the remoteness of their location and the containment difficulties suffered by that organization over the years. Efforts must be taken to preserve the security of Site-12, including by capturing the Site, intact, and handing it over to another group which has more stability, such as the Global Occult Coalition.

Sixth Document: Herman Fuller’s Circus of the Disquieting. (A quote.)

You want us to add what to the act? – W.G 

Seventh Document: Groups of Interest “HI” “GOTBG” “5”. (A report.)

MEMORANDUM TO SITE DIRECTOR STONE

We currently believe that the research object has been written about in the scripture for various religious groups dealing with paranormal activity.

They refer to it unanimously in terminology that describe it as “empty”, and at times like a portal to their underworlds or similar theological concepts. Descriptions generally refer to it as all black, and hostile.

The similarities to the research objects are obvious. As such, we should take precaution against any word of this entity being held, as it may incur an attack by these organizations.

Therefore, we recommend that the currently in-construction Site-12 be selected as the location for the entity, due to its remote location and high security.

Colonel Ritts American Secure Containment Initiative

Eighth Document: Are we cool yet? (An art caption.)

Title: Much Ado About Nothing

Materials Used: The piece itself is singular, having been created by the artist and using a method which has not been disclosed, for artistic reasons. It is unique, and the artist does not recommend attempting to replicate it.

Abstract: A black star composed of a non-reflective, anomalous material. When touched, pulls the user into an undisclosed location in deep space. The person is not recoverable, so viewers are recommended to bring secondary entities if they wish to view the contact-making portion of the piece. Should be displayed behind glass, on a white pedestal with a small porthole to allow for direct contact with the object.

Intent: The piece was created as a commentary on how really and totally alone we are in this universe. You can find yourself in any location out there in the cosmos, and you’re not going to catch a ride. You’ll be by yourself, until you die. That's what awaits us up there.

Note: I can’t really display this thing anymore. It’s cool, but nobody really seems to want to look at it. Gonna store it till we can find a use for it.

Ninth Document. (A handwritten notebook page.)

Shadow Child.

Aliases: Shadow Person, Chip, Corpo, Nobody. Note: doesn’t seem to be a nobody. More nothing.

Summary: A being repelled by light, and made of shadows. Very dangerous. Consumes everything in path.

Threat: High. Difficult to avoid all shadows.

Interest: Possible attempt to fish me out:

1. Follows, tracks, and finds me with alarming regularity. 2. No constant physical form. 3. Does not live. 4. Older than oldish dirt.

I can’t explain it. Perhaps it’s a case of the town not being big enough for two. This thing is (or these things are) to be avoided and help sought out to avoid it (or them).

Foundation or other collectors may be able to keep it at bay or remove it. Thing is very old; may have evolved past destructibility.

Location: Unknown. Following me, so it’s close to me.

[Two images are included. The first is an attached photograph of the shadow person described. The second is a sketch on the notebook page itself of a man wearing a Cold War era business suit seated on a park bench by a lake. He calmly looks on as a mushroom cloud rises from beyond the horizon. On the line beneath is written “related?” with an arrow pointing to the man.]

Site-12, Sunday Evening. 6:00. January 17th, 2025. Containment area of SCP-5200

“How did you get these documents?”

SCP-5200 leaned back, shaking his shackles. “You know, this isn’t what I hoped you would think of them.”

Boyd didn’t respond, choosing instead to tap his pencil against the clipboard and raise a single eyebrow. None of the usual dodging of inquiry and cat-and-mouse would be tolerated today.

“Man… I’m just trying to help you guys. You know that you’re coming up on the number. You’ve got the child, but you don’t understand it.”

“What’s there to understand?”

“It wants… to turn the clock back. To suck up everything with the taint of the original flaw, the big glitch, that acts as your job security.” SCP-5200 attempted to wipe his nose on his sleeve, but the chains didn’t allow enough mobility. His face twisted as he suppressed a sneeze.

Boyd narrowed his eyes, and made a note. “How do you know? Why are you helping us? You could easily be trying to undermine us.”

“I know because that’s the whole reason I exist. I was made specifically for this moment, right here. For you to find me, and for me to help you out when the time came.”

“Who sent you?”

“Every-frickin’-body that doesn’t want to die when this thing starts knuckling down, dummy. There’s a lot of vested interest in existing for a lot of people.”

SCP-5200 leaned forwards from backwards, and began to whisper. “And, off the record, you guys need the help.”

“What do they know about the object?”

SCP-5200 groaned, and attempted to rub its brow. “Have you not been listening at all? Look. It’s gonna change into something much, much closer to how it originally was. That’s the deal. That’s what you need to prepare for. When that starts, you’ll need to play all your cards right to keep it from going back to how it likes things: non-existent.”

Boyd’s brow creased slightly, as he took more notes. “So, if you’re here to help, do you know what to do if it’s starting?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, chuck. From my end, this is all she, he, and they wrote. Hope y’all don’t die.”

[Narrated by @ryanvoid]