#anyway this discourse is as old as dirt but

[focsle]

I've seen you answer a few asks about whaling history before, so hopefully I'm not offbase asking you questions out of the blue? But anyway, how did people bathe (or keep clean if not by bathing) during long sea voyages?

Not off base at all! Out of the blue whaling history questions are some of my fav asks to receive; I find them thrilling. I can’t help but write an essay every time.

It was particularly hard to keep clean on a whaler, and whalemen were often disparaged by those in other maritime professions. In 1839, naval Lieutenant Charles Wilkes said of the crew of the whaleship America, 

“I have seldom seen at sea a more uncombed and dirty set of mariners than his crew.“

J.E. Haviland of the Baltic, 1856, complained of besmirching his journal pages with the grime that he was unable to scrub off his hands after tarring the rigging, self consciously saying:

“My hands + clothes would look beautiful for a ladies Parlor. I see they even collor the paper but I cannot get the tar out. The Old Man says he intends to have me tar down the rigging a few days before we get in New Bedford so that I shall not forget too soon that I have been a sailor.”

General ships’ work  such as tarring could be messy, but a whaler’s work was even messier. When trying out blubber it was futile to attempt maintaining any semblance of cleanliness during the process. William Abbe of the Atkins Adams, 1859, said that during boiling, a watch would turn in to their bunks a few hours rest, merely ‘after wiping off your bare body with oakum to take off the thickest of the oil”.

But the gore and oil wasn’t forever. After the particular job was done the ship would be meticulously cleaned, and the whalers would tend to themselves too. As Herman Melville wrote,

“The crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland. Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics; propose to mat the deck; think of having hanging to the top; object not to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and bring us napkins!”

Haviland expressed gratitude in getting a chance to get clean after all the work of boiling blubber was done:

“I feel much better to day I have given myself a good wash + a clean shave + got in all clean clothes. You would not have known your own son if you could have seen him yesterday. I was nearly black with smoke + dirt. (with shame) I say it was the accumulation of 2 months dirt + 4 months beard. Everything looks as clean + bright as it did before we took the whale”

Being able to bathe was such a highlight that Abbe titled one of his journal pages “Washing myself!!” With TWO exclamation points!

“I write with pride in my fastidious journal that this morning I washed my face + hands with castile soap + fresh water — when shall I do the like again? When shall I write the pleasant and comfortable fact that I have shaved? The future and fair weather only can tell.”

The ship’s slop chest—its general store—had toiletries for sale, often at a very high premium. Whaling account books show men buying pounds of oil soap for their own personal stores. The fresh water was often rainwater collected for this purpose, rather than the casks set aside for drinking.

“This has been a rather squally day,” wrote Mary Lawrence, whaling wife who accompanied her husband on his ship Addison in the 1850s. “Considerable rain has fallen, and everybody on deck is using an abundant supply of rainwater for washing purposes.” She also added, though this is speaking of laundry rather than bathing, “Having stopped up the scuppers, the use the whole deck for one grand washtub.”

They’d use the sea, too. John Martin of the Lucy Ann, wrote of bathing via rain and sea whilst near the equator on January 24th, 1842.

“Towards noon the rain came down in torrents. The weather being sultry the watch on deck shipped off their shirts to it. John the boat steerer went entirely naked with the exception of a handkerchief tied around his privates. In the afternoon it cleared away, when I asked permission from the Captain for the crew to take a bathe over the side. He said we might do it if we rigged a studding sail over the side, which was soon done & all hands that could swim were to be seen jumping from different parts of the ship. Some went out to the end of the flying jib boom & jumped off there. Even the dog was thrown overboard & got his share of washing. I like bathing at sea but for one thing, and that is sharks. I always have a fear that one might be hovering about and give one a nip before he was aware of it.”

It was challenging for whalers to keep clean by nature of the job, but man when they were able to they really seemed to revel in it. For many of them it was more than just a bath; it was a symbolic return to a home they were long away from, or to the man they perceived themselves to be back on shore, or of a society that they felt cut off from in their line of work.

If you’re interested I also wrote a thing about doing laundry on whaleships too, yonder!

[sammydem0n64]

[Rolling around in the dirt] Guys can we agree that a lot of "age gap discourse" is ultimately subjective because YES when its pedophilia and/or grooming its obviously gross and yes admittedly its p weird to see someone who's in their very early 20s date people twice or even thrice their age bc of brain development and life experience but ultimately . at some point this shit doesn't matter and a lot of it comes down to if it makes you personally uncomfortable WHICH IS TOTALLY FINE BY ALL MEANS but you shouldn't treat others like shit bc they got a 35 year old dating someone nearing 50 because you don't like it

Anyways i love milk duds

[bugbuoyx]

About Me

You've got the basic rundown from my sidebar but what else could there be? So much more obviously lol. This is really long so read at your own risk. I’m only posting this to pin it :P Edit: This is the most recent version of the tumblr pride flags post! There is a list of flags I have done in the replies

Anyways I'm a queer transmasculine guy who's gender is best describe as la croix boy, sparkling guy, or guy-adjacent. I present masculinely in public as well as obviously queer. I’m also mlm/nblm meaning I’m gay and I like dudes.

I am not subtle about being queer at all in any shape or form, nor do I censor or tag it or any other slurs. Being queer is an essential part of my identity, one you can not remove without erasing a part of me. The intersection between my gender and sexuality is complex and I don’t really care for microlabels for myself.

Besides that I have hobbies! Too many of them! I crochet just about anything I’ve done 10in amogus’s, shawls (I love making shawls even though they’re not my style), and useful things like pot holders and wash cloths! I’m also getting into cross stitch. I draw as well as keep bugs. I forget to tag things alot but I usually tag “bugs” “spider” “arachnid” etc. I’m awkward so I don’t post much myself but I reblog stuff about transmascs, the queer community, bugs, and whatever I find funny. This is my old blog from like 2014-2018 that I’m reusing out of laziness so if you’re trying to dig up dirt on me please check post dates lmfao. I am much different now than I was when I was 14-18.

Some of my views: - I (and bigots) don’t give a fuck about slur discourse in respect to the queer community. I’m not gonna censor them, especially if it’s in regards to a persons identity. For example I’m not gonna say “The D*ke March” or the “D-slur March” because I respect them and their right to reclaim and identify themselves. If you ask me to tag tranny, faggot, dyke, etc. you’re better off blocking me/those words and moving on. If you ask me to tag queer, you’re the one catching a block.

- Trans people can not oppress each other on the basis of being trans, but they can hurt eachother personally. A transmasc can perpetuate transmisogyny but trans guys do not oppress trans women/vice versa. - Anti-transmasculinity exists. Actually I’ll go a step further, misandry does exist and mainly manifests against oppressed groups though it is also spread by radfem groups. - Radfems catch a block, I don’t care if you are “trans friendly”, radical feminism is inherently transphobic. Men and Masculinity are not inherently evil, disgusting, or violent and can exist in non-toxic ways. Alongside that, femininity can be toxic and weaponized, such as radical feminism and false rape accusations.

- I don’t want to get into shipping discourse but I lean more pro-ship. I believe censorship demonstrably and inevitably leads to the silencing of minority communities. Tumblr is ironically a good example of this seeing as the porn ban also lead to trans women being labelled “nsfw” for simply existing.

[werewolf-transgenderism]

chanting to myself "do not do white gloves discourse on the post your just saw do not do white gloves discourse on the post you just saw do not do white gloves discourse on the post you just saw"

anyway. it is NOT proper technique to handle old books and manuscripts with the white gloves you see in tv/film!!

-loss of the manual dexterity you have with bare hands

-cotton gloves can lift pigments from pages (BAD!!)

-cotton gloves also can leave fibers/dirt/sweat that's trapped in the fabric behind (also bad!)

clean, dry hands are the best way to interact with old texts (unless it's photographic material or has a lot of metal, which oils on your skin can damage, or if it's one of those books made with arsenic green pigment or other toxic materials, in which case you probably don't want to touch that with your bare hands)

[formulatrash]

top 5 seasons in any motorsport?

nothing makes me madder than when I craft a good reply and tumblr eats it!!!! don’t make me redraft you chaos vortex of a half-baked gif workshop, how dare you force me to “improve” my “””writing””” I will deliberately make it much worse.

anyway, this was a good question! whoops under a cut to save your dashes

5. Season 4, Formula E

ok this... it might not actually have been that great a season. and you’ll never know now because the races aren’t on YouTube!!! but like, indulge me here: it was my season and I managed to not think about Sam Bird or his title chances so much, so hard, over so many races that it was him and JEV in contention at the end of it all. my horrible faves!* and it was the end of Gen1 which surely meant something. and there was so much comedy drama! Daniel’s win getting cancelled, then him taking Audi’s first win for a second time and them being pure mad about it because they’d wanted to bin him off for Rene Rast only Lucas had thrown a shitfit and then there he was completely justifying his place on the team!! (I don’t think the direct Audi team thought this but there were corporate machinations) and the absolutely dogshit Andretti car which, my word, you had to feel sorry for Antonio dragging around week after week but which had some truly comedy failures. and Alex Lynn!!!!! all season!!! that wouldn’t happen again until season ruddy seven ffs. shame the car sucked. anyway, good year, good year. we all assume hurling ourselves into the unknown from a relatively secure and financially lucrative corporate position will be rewarded by seeing our faves and perhaps the driver we most horrifically project onto rewarded and it worked!!!! 

4. 2020 Formula 1 season

no I know this is a weird choice but I... really liked the 2020 season. it was so weird, obviously and quiet but that somehow. felt right. like there was something changing somewhere, like there was time to think. I don’t really like the glitzy grift side of F1, can’t have an annual Celebrity Interview Discourse Month if you’ve got no celebs can ya and also this was the most reasonable-length season for ages. maybe I simply think of it fondly because FE dropped the ball so chronically in 2020 and also that there was that big, long dark period of nothing so having something at all felt like a lifeline but. Lewis quietly winning the title in Turkey might be my favourite win of his. a little comfort championship after a terrible year.

3. 1997 Formula 1 season

I know what you are about to say!!! unless it’s ‘fuck off grandma’ in which case, yeah, fair. but yes I know I should like the 1996 season more but - and this is the only time in which I will allow this - 1997 was the banter timeline. Jacques Villeneuve won but honestly, that’s totally immaterial to whatever the hell was going on with everyone this year. hardly anyone could finish a race 

also I was, like, 11. so. also this was the year when Hungary just decided to commit violence when Damon dragged that piece of shit Arrows to the second row in qualifying and then!!! the lead!!!! and it shat itself in the final laps like the miserable little hangover of an F1 it was. I have been well set up for disappointment ever since. 

2. 2017 World Endurance Championship 

flipped around a bit on this but actually yeah. yeah!!!! this was the last year of there being two competitive hybrid LMP1 teams (Porsche and Toyota) and without Audi making everyone look like total idiots it was suddenly a genuinely big old battle. and at the same time, LMP2 got really competitive, which it always had been but maybe it was just it was getting more air time at last. and there was actually a proper LMGT pro field with more than one make! ah, heady times. also Le Mans that year was this made dustball of swirling heat and every LMP1 retired in the space of 15 minutes at like 3am while I’d lain down in a bit of warm dirt by the side of the Dunlop curves and then the one Porsche did qualifying laps for the entire rest of the race to get back to the front. Jota nearly won it outright! ok, WEC is allowed to be banter. that is basically what it’s for. 

1. 2000 World Rally Championship 

listen, someone needs to let me write the simmeringly homoerotic screenplay (Rush-style) about Colin McCrae and Carlos Sainz Snr. these fucks couldn’t stand each other at all! and even worse, the idea anyone else might be their closest rival or team mate. intolerable. 2000 was when they met back up at Ford after a few years of pretending they could ever despise other people as much as each other and it was also a real classic of a fight. Sainz and McCrae ended up scrapping for third while Gronholm and Burns ran away with it and perhaps it was that, the title out of the window, that made this one of their most tender and terrible years. the Ford sucked and they both knew they were better than it, united in disgust for the car and each other. weep.

*’horrible’ and ‘fave’ here being used as a) hyperbolic way of expressing I love them and admire them, b) obviously all of them are my faves. well, apart from that one. faves is an evolving concept that encompasses all my terrible (see point a) sons (see point b)

[rosemarygeorgiaflutur]

Review: Chris Marker's "Level Five" (1996)

Combining documentary, narrative fiction, critical essay, and poetry, Level Five (1996) is one of Chris Marker’s many ingenious anomalies. The film follows Laura, a newly widowed computer programmer, as she completes her late husband’s unfinished video game, a task she herself has chosen to take on. Like mourning, it is an enterprise, though a more concrete one. Laura’s grief is an influence but not a detainer: it affects but does not stop her thinking. She adds new truths next to old ones. Time, she declares, is an invisible insect that chronically stings whoever lives. But those stings are not just the pain or nuisance that commonly defines them; they’re also reminders of her humanity. Time is life’s permanent tenor, steadfast and impartial, and there is no stopping it. Not like she is trying to fight it: resignation and curiosity are her framework, and she engages each ache under no illusions. Different interpretations get sowed in the same dirt where others have already been buried. The dead repose beside—and inside—the living. The connotations of this are Laura’s main consideration; or, more precisely, they are Marker’s, who knows the past is veined through each person like a network, too bound up to be undone or circumvented.

A probe of time’s influence on memory and affect, both personally and culturally, is signature Chris Marker, the fulcrum of all his films. So, too, is his inimitable form of expression: enigmatic, fragmentary, and tongue-in-cheek. For Marker, there are no answers, only what patterns can be made from connecting loose ends. In Level Five, he assembles a bricolage of his favoured subjects—Japanese culture, the burgeoning of technology, a world after War—as the foundation from which to explore the never ending question of Time. Typical of Marker too is inventing characters to make his inquiries for him, knowing that fiction can push back on the borders that close in on storytelling when one has to remain faithful to the facts. Not like a common veracity would likely interest Marker anyway, as history is largely an art that strives for perfect truth in the face of great bias. No; Marker’s “gentle mission,” like that of Roland Barthes (as Wayne Kostenbaum writes in the introduction to A Lover’s Discourse) is “to rescue nuance.” For Marker, it has always been about the overlooked, the details that evade the wide angled view: that which pricks, like Barthes’ punctum, or the things that, as underscored in Sans Soleil (1983), quicken Shōnagan’s heart. With fiction, characters that act as proxy for Marker can hone in on elaborate states of feeling—or the nuanced—without eclipsing what is objectively factual. (In his more documentarian films like Grin Without A Cat, nuance is the overlooked subjects he interviews. He often aimed, as he states in a mid-aughts interview, “[t]o try to give the power of speech to the people who don’t have it,” to those who had “no tools to be heard,” and to those neglected by a sole, autocratic narrative.) Marker, like Barthes, wants “an armistice with perception’s systemic injuries” (Koestenbaum): to be free to adapt and dilate that perception. It’s about discovering other worlds while remaining in this one. “Okay, it’s fiction,” Veronique says at the end of fellow New Waver Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), “but it brings me closer to reality.”

In Level Five Marker invents Laura, played by French actress Catherine Belkhodja. We meet her via the diaristic videos she records while working on the game, all of them a one-sided communion with her dead husband whose name we never learn. Despite the intimacy this implies, we are not alienated as viewers. The videos are mostly philosophical and poetic musings, an out-loud processing, that help her reckon with the labyrinthine game he's left her, the one she alone strives to complete. This strategy-based game, which is also never named, concerns the small Japanese island of Okinawa during the Second World War, and its goal is to offer its players alternative outcomes to the tragic events that unfolded. The real Okinawa was, at the point of Marker’s filming, still embalmed by the brutal trauma of WWII: over the Spring of 1945 the so-called Battle of Okinawa ensued, killing nearly half of Okinawa’s civilian population, with many of the deaths a result of suicide and ritual killings induced by Japanese propaganda. Japan may have moved on by the time of the film’s creation in 1997, bolstered by the country’s obsession with rapidly modernising itself, but to Okinawa’s survivors it remained a lacuna, unaddressed. (“[But] that’s how history advances,” Marker tells us in Sans Soleil, “plugging its memory as one plugs one’s ears.”) There are ways in which this can be rectified, but Marker is more interested in how this institutes a hauntology: the past may be omitted while creating a new future, but it is never absent. As the film moves from footage on Okinawa to Laura in the workroom and back, we see the differences in how this manifests: while Japan will not acknowledge the elephant that haunts its room, Laura holds each fact’s gaze—her husband is dead, her memory of him is fading—even in her desire to turn away. One painfully represses; the other painfully integrates. Only one of these pains has integrity.

Eventually Laura stops working on the game. It’s unclear what stage her grief is at when she does, but there are many indications of the experience having granted her perspectives that will aid her in coming to terms. “I can recognise myself in that little island because my most unique, my most intimate suffering is also the most banal,” she observes at one point. At another, she admits she’s afraid that something “as potent as a song” will no longer be her and her husband’s anymore, but instead “everyone’s to share.” She vocalises her fears to displace them, to see past the pain of another of the insect’s many stings. As time builds without stopping, memory gets subsumed into the large fabric of history, losing not only its potency but its sanctity. It all goes; she is simply being reminded. By the end, Laura has had enough reminders; she’d “come to a limit; beyond it, the game was not hers anymore, nor was history.” She engaged with her wound, asked the questions, felt whatever arose. The limit is an invitation for her own deliverance. Taking the hint, she disappears.

Review of Chris Marker's film "Level Five" (1996), 2022

[sssn-neptune-vasilias]

RWBY RWDE/Discourse Bingo

What's up, I know I've been basically dead for months besides RTX but I'm back to cause general chaos in the FNDM again. My first act? RWDE Bingo.

I had the idea for this last night after looking through Reddit (I know) and seeing that a lot of the FNDM still for some reason think that RWDE is a hivemind intelligence that all think the same exact things and agree with each other on everything. So I made this bingo board for everyone to have fun with! These are some of the RWDE topics and discourse I can remember from my long, long, tenure in the FNDM, and I have more, but this is round 1. If you think of any discourse or RWDE topics outside of this one, shoot me an ask or post it in the tags so I can do some more!

See which ones you agree with and talk about it if you want! Show your friends. Show your followers. Get out there and be the RWDEst bastards you can be! If- somehow- everyone in RWDE all pick the exact some discourse and don't pick the exact same ones, then I'll take back everything I ever said about RWDE not being a hivemind and give my capacity for free thinking up to the collective.

Gonna explain what each topic is under the read more considering a lot of these are old as dirt and some are a little confusing and probably could've been worded better had I not had limited space on the board. Some of them I don't agree with, but I'm still gonna do my best to explain them as unbiasedly as I can because I'm not a poopoo baby.

"Blake's slap was abusive." This one was about her slapping Sun during v4. People really didn't like that, especially considering that one of the scenes from the same episode was Jacques using physical violence against Weiss in an abusive manner. There are other conversation topics of Blake being abusive as well, but let's keep this one about the slap specifically, alright?

"Taiyang's arm joke." Remember that? Yeah a LOT of people thought Taiyang was horrible, no good, very bad father because he'd basically just made fun of Yang's brand new disability and trauma.

"Adam's change in characterization." Some people believe that Adam's characterization changed somewhere during season 3. That he went from being a ruthless freedom fighter to a genocidal maniac and jilted incel mad that his girlfriend left him.

"Qrow's Innkeeper story." People thought that story about the Innkeeper's skirt was super sexist and inappropriate for an uncle to tell his nieces.

"Jaune in a dress was a transphobic joke." This one's kinda self-explanatory. People thought that everyone laughing at Jaune wearing a dress was transphobic.

"Racism subplot is poorly handled." Again, kinda self-explanatory. Anything from Adam using his faction of TWF to join Cinder and Salem to Ghira being a bad leader to the story suddenly becoming about classism instead of racism to Robyn not being a fox Faunus, etc.

"Fair Game was queerbaiting/fridging gays." Some people thought Fair Game was the beginning of a budding romance and were sent back into The 100 CW hell when Clover got a sword through his torso.

"Snowbird is bad because Qrow is old." If you weren't around for season 3 you missed all the Snowbird shippers going feral about two attractive and of age characters finally sharing some screentime. You also missed some people being really weirded out by said Snowbird shippers because Qrow's in his mid to late 40's and Winter's in her late 20's.

"Jaune harassing Weiss s1&2." Did you think that Jaune flirting with Weiss back then was triggering? There was a ton of discourse about it and how Miles was basically using his character insert to harass one of the main characters and twist the framing of his harassment in a positive light.

"Sun is a stalker." Remember when Blake saw that robed dude following her and it was Sun? Who'd been following her for a few months? Yeah people were super squicked out about that and called him a stalker.

"Salem was right..." Basically the Gods were garbage entities anyway and deserved to get shit on. Salem was right to try, even if it got humanity 1.0 nuked.

"Rhodes deserved it." Y'all are probably like "who the hell is Rhodes?" That guy that trained Cinder! Yeah, remember that flashback scene? People think that Rhodes deserved to get skewered because he didn't actually do anything to try to save Cinder. He knew she was a slave working at the hotel and did nothing to save her and instead just told her to wait until she was 17 to join a Huntsman Academy.

"Jaune's screentime." Kinda self-explanatory. People thought Jaune took up too much screentime in the early volumes, to the point he rivaled most of team RWBY and had more lines than some of them combined. His plots also derailed the show because the bullying arc and the prom arc really had nothing to do with Salem or Ozpin or the relics or maidens, and that time could've been better spent doing more worldbuilding.

"Being forced to pick a side..." This one's almost entirely exclusive to the Tumblrsphere, but is this something you've felt pressured to do by any part of the FNDM? Have you been told you were biphobic for shipping Bumbleby/lesbophobic for shipping Black Sun? If not, count yourself lucky because you've avoided a LOT of bullshit.

"Waiting too long for LGBT rep." Do you feel that RT kept us waiting way too long for any meaningful representation? Especially considering what was promised to the FNDM early on in interviews with the CRWBY?

"Ren was an aroace bait&switch." People felt that Ren was aroace during the early volumes- especially after that "Please do nothing to the cook" apron scene- and were very frustrated when Ren did start showing romantic feelings for Nora.

"Amber's death was June's fault." Remember when Ozpin told Jaune to guard the door? And then he got distracted because his girlfriend got put in a box next to a comatose woman in another box? And then that comatose woman got an arrow through the chest because his back was turned? Do you think that was his fault?

"Rosegarden is bad because of Ozpin." Some people feel that Rosegarden is squicky because Ozpin's consciousness is in there and he's like seventy-million years old and Ruby's barely 17.

"Eddy's Freezerburn Tweet..." This one was over on Twitter. Eddy QRT'd a Tweet about "couples that would absolutely get a divorce" with "Freezerburn" and people were very angry about that and thought he was super unprofessional. Here's the link.

"Ironwood's s8 characterization..." Did you think that Ironwood's descent into a mustache twirling villain came out of nowhere? Did you think that it made no real sense to villainize Ironwood in the first place when Salem and Monstra and an army of Grimm were already outside Mantle and Cinder and her team were already inside Atlas? Did you think that that tidbit about his Semblance Mettle potentially clouding his judgement just to never be shown it was really badly handled? This one's kinda broad on purpose.

"RWBY/JNPR's stubbornness..." Some people think that Atlas being destroyed could've been prevented had our main characters just went along with Ironwood's plan.

"Weiss pointing Myrtenaster at Whitley." Did you think that Weiss doing that was totally out of line? That a soldier pointing a weapon at a civilian is totally unjustified? That siblings shouldn't ever threaten one another with violence at all?

"Blake running away was cowardly." Blake got a sword through her stomach, then was told by Adam that he'd destroy everything she ever loved. Then he dismembered Yang. Then, instead of even warning RW_Y about the threat, she just... left? Ran away? Even if you think her fear was justified, do you think it was cowardly to run without so much as a goodbye?

"Qrow is Ruby's father." Maybe you've seen this HC before, maybe you haven't. But people think that Qrow might be Ruby's real father. If you missed the discourse that his HC first brought about during v3 then I truly envy you, but if you remember the essay length dissertations people were writing about how mean and wrong and abusive that HC is, then suffer together with me.

"Bumbleby is abusive." You know all those weird parallels they keep emphasizing between Blake and Raven (how quick they are to abandon their friends, etc.), and Yang and Adam (how quick they are to lash out in anger, etc.)? You know how they're like, consistently highlighted in the show but not really addressed? But the ship is still portrayed as a positive one? Do you think Bumbleby's actually abusive?

[wehatejulietsimms]

From Juliets mother claiming he found himself as a Native American. He himself had a post about being a changed white man to Native American man but it was deleted as to not stir drama. This is not to cause discourse, this is just a list of problematic lies the Simms go through to make themselves relatable to the public and gain sympathy from the blind.

Another thing, Juliet claimed she was dirt poor finding herself in a big city. Lmaooo, so not true. Even in her mother’s words, they’ve had generational money. “18 room red stone mansion.”

How’d you think they still pay off Juliets photographers, connections in the industry *coughs a certain app runners name that puts Juliet on playlists*, THE VOICE, makeup artists, clothing, etc. We all know BVB took HUGE hits the past five years coming to money, so it’s not Andy or her depop, or even never take it off. Go to anyone of Juliets work associates pages and they’ll say they’ve known her for over ten years and ass kissing her saying she’s been this AMAZING Miley Cyrus archetype with SO much influence. Lmao she couldn’t even get 10k likes until two years ago, you cannot make that up. Back to the money, this is her parents chilling in what we presume to be their living room.

These are two white brothers, not natives or mestizos in any way. Not judging their skin color but the facial features don’t add up, even with claiming their father to be native. That man looks like a sunburned tanned white Irish German man. I find it oddly strange and twisted that they’re going to lengths TO LIE ABOUT THEIR ETHNICITY to govern control of Juliets “legacy.” They’ll deny and go to lengths like USING an old photo of a white man who’s tan and claim not NATIVE ANCESTRY but to be NATIVE within four generations of pure blonde and light eyed European ancestry. Imagine what auditing and gaslighting they’ve done to make Andy “feel crazy,” when in reality they’re attacking him to keep his daughters reputation clear, because the true Scientologist motive is destroy, build, and create. Destroy people who get in the way (Lilith and the destroy archetype), build an empire (Lilith and her demon fans) of lies, and create false harmony (Lilith having connections to the industry to make Andy look like the insane bad guy).

Bro Andy, we can see it in your eyes around her and feel the anxiety through pictures and videos, anyone with a brain can put two and two together because you’re a good guy even though they’ve made you put yourself down. You don’t want abuse apologists to support or believe in you anyway. That’s the wrong people to influence, let them hate your light. That’s their problem! Remember why you started WSTW, the people who are finding themselves against abusers listen to your music too! We remember your lullabies to all the lonely ones who are rebuilding themselves after the revolution. Nobody can take anything away from you, they’ve tried and you’ve proven them once again they’re wrong! I hope this brings you motivation to live once again. Don’t try to be an influence or force it, be who you are and it will come naturally. Have confidence in yourself, you’re doing a great job contrary to what you might believe.

Stop 👏 being 👏 rough 👏 on 👏 yourself 👏 from 👏 taking years of abuse 👏 and healing & creating your true happiness 👏 you 👏 deserve 👏 every 👏 inch of freedom and healthy peace 👏

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏they’re all liars. let them believe they’re such huge guru transcendental influences but they’re sore losers 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

Oh, “what about his mother?”

Most likely White - Spanish.

Andy coincidentally covering up his Scientology tattoo after visiting Jeff a few weeks before? Lmao

Juliet having and exposing hate pages over THREE THOUSAND DAYS AGO??? And that’s only the recent posts!

There’s only 365 days in a year, she’s been trouble since day one. We all know Andy. When you are free of these people, new better career opportunities will come for you so free your doubts.

Finally, this is one of the last photos of Juliets transitions before Lilith, her alter ego. Someone needs to get checked up for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, narcissism, extreme sociopathic tendencies, and multiple personality disorder. This isn’t making fun of mental illness, this is real concern from her behavior the last ten years. No wonder why Scientology says no mental health professionals… The lies people in cults live up to are insane and delusional. One of the last things I wanted to add is that by 25, your body is done growing. You don’t magically wake up with three inch cheekbones from weight loss. In fact, you lose cheekbones after going from 140-100 pounds, which Lilith is. Coming from someone who’s weight fluctuates, cheekbones only become bigger with real muscle toning, weight gain and stubborn fat gone. Juliet is around 5’7, her ideal healthy weight should be 20+ pounds more. She’s lied saying skinny is natural body from dance (which she never did professionally in a long time 20+ years lol) but we know from 2012, she looked healthy at 130. Juliet has had facial feminization and fat burner injections for her jaw to take shape before her big tumor cheekbones. Same with her sister but her sister doesn’t have as big cheeks.

[rahleeyah]

Oh boy I need to avoid EO discourse cause it just causes headaches. I just start to overthink things and I hate that. I miss the days when I would just watch the show and read fanfics. Honestly, this whole discourse is why I had stop going deep in fandoms and just did my own thing. Anyway, how's life? Seen any good movies, read any good books?

Listen. I am too damn old for disk horse. Twitter wants to rehash fights we all had fifteen years ago, somebody wants to tag their Hot Takes and start shit? I do not hear it. I do not see it. If it crosses my path I block it like a kid kicking a can out of the road. Do not devote your energy to it, not even to bemoan it; to spend your life obsessing about cleanliness is to spend your life obsessing over dirt.

If you miss doing something, do it. You can just read fic and enjoy the show. You don't have to see anything you don't want to. Curate your fandom experience; plant flowers, and grow.

I cannot remember the last time I watched a movie. Wait I think that's a lie @andallthatmishigas and I watched the Prom and that was a very enjoyable little experience. How long ago was that tho?

The last book I read was... probably trash vampires thanks Ariel lmao I was on a Stephen King kick and then I was on a fic kick and then I got busy. Ariel is that right. Was trash vampires the last thing I read?? I have such a shit memory babes I need you to tell me lmao

[arschbiene]

I probably should just mind my own business and not involve myself in this schoolyard scrap but some thoughts about the hetalia fandom + ships +tw in/cest as someone who has been here 10 years that I just have to get off my chest so I can move on from it bc embarrassingly it’s on my mind lol:

Imma preface this saying I don’t ship the ships in question and I am someone who really enjoys parent-child, Guardian-Ward and Teacher-Student relationships in their pure form as cute adult-child dynamics. I am a weak bitch for parental love and Found Family dynamics, it is my bread and butter as someone who did not have a great upbringing. In/cest is not my jam, I am in general, not really a ship-focused artist at all etc etc

But......I will say that I don’t consider any ships in hetalia to be in/cest and the reason why is I have....a really hard fucking time getting past the fact that these are just literal personifications of COLD...PULSELESS, BLOODLESS, did not crawl out of a vagina dirt and stone land-masses lol. They...don’t have DNA ties 😭 Not all of them have stable or well established family ties or parental figures.

It’s like I have two thoughts about it: I do understand people who say that nations with a Parent-Child relationships being shipped together can be kinda incesty....Like O.K, that’s valid, I kinda share that squick with some ships, even ones I previously dabbled in ( Like Germancest, for instance, I shipped it to appease my Abusive Friend...But I always liked them more as Brothers and that stance only Intensified as I matured). But...On the other hand, I find people who see that relationship and go, well, I don’t view it that way and I’m canon divergent/Don’t give a shit if they have family ties bc they’re made of earth and stone/whatever reason valid too. 

I think I’m very firmly in the boat of Don’t Make Your Preferences Other People’s Problem. Mind your Business. Tumblr has plenty of resources to allow you to curate your experience. Savior tags of ships that trigger/squick you, and leave people to enjoy themselves in the confines of their personal blogs. Because it’s all bullshit. Family ties in this fandom is bullshit. It is up to User Preference.

Especially and Particularly and extremely Uniquely in the Hetalia Fandom. This fandom beats the “DISCARD CANON, HAVE FUN, DO WHAT YOU WANT” bible all day and night, but somehow once people start trying to enjoy ships in their own way with their own interpretation, ya’ll are pulling out canon receipts to attack people just trying to enjoy what brings them comfort in hellish times, and I don’t find that shit cool at all. It’s toxic. It’s straight up harassment. And it’s hurting the fandom too. When one artist buckles bc of hate, it has a ripple effect on all other creators. It makes me as an artist want to pack my bags and distance myself from this fandom for the 9403059340593th time.

But Idk that’s just my two cents on it. I’m not really interested in an argument about it so I’m closing my askbox. I probably should’ve just kept my mouth shut but It was brought to my attention that some people think PruAus is an in/cest ship and I just feel a wave of exhaustion and I’m bored enough to want to throw in my two cents lmao Prussia literally became a kingdom based on the idea that it was detached from the habsburgs. what is happening lol also “cousins” is such a weird word to use to describe relationships with nations without parental ties man, like, brother’s already low key kinda messy but “cousins” is just..a reach, yknow? Bc you can’t just be cousins with also having aunts and uncles??...it’s just a messy discourse. Like I respect people who have this opinion but for me personally Idk. FOR NatIONS. it’s just like if they’re cousins, then EVERYONE is cousins and it’s ALL in/cest. I’m too old for this idk. ANYWAY, Have a good night.

[slashermary]

4, 8, 12 & 14 for the 'discourse ask game' lmao 👀

ooooh anon let’s GO

4. i loooooooove human!cas😫 i remember being an impressionable teen in the original fandom and being like ‘powers...cool’ but all the meta and fic writers who i thought ACTUALLY understood cas were all fantasizing about human!cas and I have it a shot and got hooked!! no one loves humanity more than cas he deserves to experience it!! he deserves to grow old and find favorite foods and favorite sweater textures and feel the dirt in his hands and warmth in his chest! i just think it’d be lovely :’)

8. fan fiction...much like the show...is something that is so offensive and SO precious to me<3 i quit the show in s9 and i remember specifically going back to watch it and just crying! but also like...robbie thompson i love you you ARE my friend but you are like a parent who wants SO badly to engage with his weird kids and does NOT get the nuance but he’s trying! and it’s sweet💕 plus i had i’ll just wait here then pirated on my phone and i DID shame listen to it all the time and think about cas🥺

12. ANON THIS IS WELL TIMED i just watched the apocalypse world cas episode today and woooooooo-eeeee was THAT a lot....like there IS a point where i think it’s a funky little choice and the actor man got gay bullied on set for us so he deserves his weird little indulgences but also...there needs to be a line king...his chrisoph waltz/the villain from raiders drag was maybe where it crossed over but also like...idk high camp king😔

14. no! bc ew! also i reject the idea of soulmates anyways bc it spits in the face of free will and choice and any time those pervs were tossed a bone in canon i like to ignore it! also i mean rlly if we’re talking post canon heaven HAS been restructured so it’s not like little isolationist chambers anymore it’s whatever you want it to be and WITH whoever you want it to be with! idk man the whole heaven thing annoys be tho tbh like i wish they had eradicated the afterlife and gone full Big Empty with it like there’s life and that’s it! and also maybe rip off his dark materials and just return every soul to the earth and the sky and creation in one big cycle of existence :’)

[beetlemancy]

Anon again: Thank you!! I appreciate you taking the time to answer me because I am kind of active in the community but very very new. I did know your opinions but being new I just wanted to know whether those recent posts held any weight. I want to be socially responsible with my media consumption and I was worried there was something I was missing, given I have seen specific call outs for certain cast members (Travis, Laura, Sam, and Liam) recently. Thanks again!!

Anon pt2: you don’t have to post this but for context the call out posts were as follows: Travis actively supports the military, Laura voiced a black character?, Sam did brown face??, and Liam is fake woke/virtual signaling (or something along those lines). Obviously I can find out information about this for myself but I have seen more anti-CR stuff lately which prompted my ask.

As with everything, I suggest you do your own reading on those topics, and any topic that comes up in regards to the media you watch. Below is simply my opinion. Note: this gets long.

Travis does support the military - but not as an institution. He has family in the military. He supports the soldiers. He works with Operation Supply Drop and I’d encourage you to look into OSD specifically. Whether you agree with the idea that we should even have a military or not, you cannot deny that our veterans and soldiers are given the short end of the stick. We cannot just abandon them because helping them might be viewed as giving money to the military. I have so many military vets in my disability groups. The VA is awful because it has no funding (I know good people who work at the VA too, but they just cannot help everyone like they’d want to). Programs like OSD are genuinely helpful to a lot of hurting folk and the people who shit on Travis and CR for promoting and helping them out have clearly never actually sat down and talked to a vet or a soldier before. 

Laura and many many other voice actors have voiced people of color in various shows. Yes, this is a legit problem. However, obviously as with most things, the problem is nuanced. The fault mainly lies with the VO industry as a whole, in that actors actually have very little control over what they do. There was a whole strike about this very topic (though the strike covered other issues in the industry as well). In the case of Laura, for instance, she was never told what her character would look like until after the fact. And that is super common in the industry. One of the things they tried to get in the strike was more transparency so that actors could make the decisions themselves whether to voice characters or not - not just based on race or culture but also based on type of work (stressful screaming vs chill dialogue) and whether the content of the game itself was something they wanted their name attached to. 

Sam’s blackface scandal is extremely old news. That’s not to say it isn’t important to note, and in fact Sam made a point to note it again back in 2018. I know people who can’t watch CR because of it, even after his apology, and that’s fine because its not my place to judge others for how they react to that kind of thing. However I know a lot of people who read his apology and the circumstances surrounding it and decided to forgive. To some people, the fact that he was asked to do so by will.i.am changes the situation. To others, it doesn’t. To some the fact that he apologized and has clearly worked to improve his behavior matters, to others it doesn’t. You have to decide that for yourself. You can read Sam’s letter HERE. 

Now. Regarding Liam. * sigh * I think, and again this is my opinion, that you cannot proclaim someone you do not know as ‘fake woke.’ I think there are parts of this fandom that have it out for Liam because of a whole bunch of gross reasons, many of which I’ve spoken about before. He is sensitive and a man - that makes people uncomfy. He plays a lot of women characters and tends to embody them in both personality and body language - that makes people uncomfy. He fully embraces the bi energy (this is not to say whether he himself is or not) - that makes a lot of people uncomfy (and angry). He loves theatre and loves to explore the human condition, warts and all - that makes people super uncomfy. Now. There are people who thinks he’s homophobic. Do you know why? Its because his bi character ended up with a woman instead of a man. That is biphobia, no matter how they twist it. Bi people being “allowed” to be bi and not ‘pick the right side’ in the LG (not BT, lets be real) community IS revolutionary because its so very hated. 

Another reason they say he’s homophobic is because of the jokes he is often involved in - some gay men in the fandom believe that joking about sex is him ‘making fun’ of gay relationships. As a bi enby, I disagree, and I read many of the jokes he himself makes as the kind of humor I use among my own friends. I think there is a definite disconnect between bi vs LG humor and I’m not entirely sure who would be considered in the ‘right’ on that. However, when LG people in the fandom claim that he cannot talk about gay relationships because he is cishet? They cannot know that. That is an assumption they are making. When LG fans say that he alone is responsible for this issue and not -literally every single member of CR- ? I have to question whether its really the issue and not just that they still hate Liam for deigning to make a bi character bi instead of gay.

Another thing re: Liam. Aside from Marisha, he is the one I see the most hate about. People on Twitter and Tumblr both have legit uttered death threats about him if he doesn’t do exactly what they want his characters to do in the game. Usually this is about shipping. I have seen people claim that they WISH he was ‘like vic mignogna’ so they’d have a reason to hate him more. I’ve seen a certain group of people and one in particular say they have ‘dirt’ on him but refuse to say what the dirt is - and yet continually bring up that it exists, but that they just cannot say. Why would you incessantly bring up information you possess just to say that you cannot divulge such information? 

Legit issues about CR that is attached to Liam is the whitewashing issue. Some say that only Liam is responsible here because he controls all the art. I would say that we actually don’t know that for sure. He is ‘Art Dad’ and clearly has some pull. I do think that CR should address this issue, but I’m not sure they can legally do what the fandom wants them to do, which is “call-out” artists by name and denounce them. Now, this too is more nuanced than the fandom makes out because its often way more about colorism vs whitewashing. Many people do not draw Beau as white, but they do draw her as much lighter skin tones than her original art. Colorism is a real problem, but white allies tend to go about talking about it wrong or making smaller things a bigger deal when POC would really rather talk about something more important to them. It was these same white allies that tore Mica Burton apart on Twitter because she liked and enjoyed a drawing of Reani, her own character, that was a few shades lighter than the drawing she herself had brought in, even after she had said that she appreciated the variety of skin tones due to seeing herself in each of them. On the topic of whitewashing/colorism in the fandom, I personally tend to wait to hear from POC over the masses of white allies.

The CR fandom is very big for a niche thing like DnD. As such, there are many many corners of the fandom that can get really jaded, really dark, and really up their own ass in regards to the discourse. There are legitimate issues in the fandom and with CR as a whole. Nothing is perfect, nothing ever will be perfect, and people should absolutely do what they can to do better and to ask their media to do better. That being said, there are also people who think that if you don’t do something exactly like they want, then you’re Problematic by default. There are also members of this fandom who have an active vendetta against certain cast members and will use any opportunity to co-opt legit issues in order to shore up their false arguments. These people are only using the real issues and it becomes clear pretty quickly that they don’t actually give a shit about the people they say they are trying to speak up for. 

There is also some fandom drama that has occurred ONLY in fandom and has absolutely nothing to do with CR other than the fact that the people involved happen to be CR fans. Certain people in the fandom think that CR should arbitrate this issue and involve themselves, call out the individuals responsible, etc. This is, I believe, a GROSS misconception of what CR’s role is and asking way too much of a source of entertainment. The fact that CR has not involved themselves in this issue has led certain members of this fandom to claim that CR is homophobic. I would caution that most callouts of CR as homophobic are directly linked to this first issue, and also a callback to the Vaxleth drama from campaign one, and is incontrovertibly tied to bi and enby-phobia and a seriously sick misunderstanding of the responsibilities a show has versus the responsibility individuals have as viewers of said show. 

That’s it for now. I could go way more in depth on this problems, but I’m tired of typing. Suffice it to say, its easy to make a list of things Problematic with CR, but once you actually delve into each topic hopefully you’ll realize how complicated and filled with nuance and Different Opinions going on back from the first episode of Campaign One... Listing problems without actually addressing them head-on isn’t a good way to deal with the problems that are true anyway, let alone tell them from the false ones. 

[delightfulstarlightparadise]

Stardew Valley imagine Reader/ ?????

Possibly Sebastian... but who knows.

-So, I have been playing Stardew Valley for hundreds of hours in just few weeks and finally had de courage to write my own imagine. (Nice, I get off the game to write about it).

-I will avoid pronouns as much as I can, but when necessary I will use they/them. I hope everyone feels included.

-English is not my main language, but I am doing my best.

- I will, sometimes, bring some fanarts I made too.

Let’s go <3

The slow pace of the bus makes you feel dizzy. You look outside and see the most lively and green landscape you had ever seen, and along with it you feel the memories of old times coming to your mind.

Those days in the farm seem so far away now, playing with animals along your cousins, running around the crops, swimming in the rivers and lakes, fishing... and in the late evening sitting by a fire with your grandpa to hear stories about the valley.

Stardew. Stardew Valley, a place cherished in your memories.

You never imagined you would be going back to that valley to live in the farm from your childhood, taking with you just a small luggage. You are tired, sad and broke. Your wrists still hurt, a gift from hours typing in a computer of Joja corporation.

You don’t know how everything went so wrong. As a kid you always wanted to be a veterinarian or maybe a biologist, but you ended up in that corporative job, making thousands of reports that seemed the same one and attending meetings to talk about nothing. If you told yourself, that bright kid full of hope and wonder, that you would grow up to become such a bitter adult, you wouldn’t have believed it then.

At least you had the courage to leave.

You hold tight in your hands the letter from your grandfather, attached to it as a last light of hope that moving to Paradise farm can help you start new.  

The bus stops and the driver asks you if you need help with your baggage, but you decline. You didn’t bring much.

You stand beside the bus sign and feel the soft breeze from the valley, listening to the birds chirp. Those memories seem more alive inside you.

“Hey! You arrived!”

A friendly call takes you out of your thoughts as a ginger woman comes towards you with the nicest of smiles.

“I was worried that the bus would be delayed but you are just in time!” she says, taking your baggage from off your hands before you can say anything. “I am Robin, the town’s capenter, you must be the new farmer! Lewis asked me to pick you up!”

“Hi...” you stutter, shaking her hand.” I am y/n.”

“You caused quite a commotion here at Pelican. It is not everyday we receive a new villager, a new farmer, then!” she says, taking your luggage to a small red pick up truck parked beside the bus stop.

“Actually... I am not a farmer. I am just going to live in the farm.” you say a little unease about how friendly she is. You are used to the apathic city people.

“Well, I guess living at Paradise makes you a farmer now.” She says a giggles.  

As you take a dirt road, she continues to speak to you cheerfully.

“I just came by truck because I thought you would be bringing much more stuff. Your farm is actually very close.”

“I... I don’t own much.” you reply. “WHAT THE …!?”

When she parks by the gates your wonderful memories and hopes connected to Paradise farm seem to shatter. The landscape is taken by weeds and all the structures you remember seem to have aged twice the time you had been away. Trees had outgrown the charming paths or rock in which you and your cousins used to race each other, the little ponds where you used to fish were surrounded by twigs and bushes of weeds. The sight of the land was a mix of leaves, twigs and boulders.

“Not much of a Paradise anymore, hun? But I guess with a little effort you can bring it back to it’s bright.” Robin says as she notices the disappointment in your face.

“I guess...” you say, dispirited.

She takes you to the old cottage and the view is not much better. The wood seems a little rotten and cracked, you are afraid of what you might meet inside.

“Y/n! I haven’t seen you since you were this little!” an elder man comes out of the cabin and waves at you.

You think you remember him. Probably one of your grandfather’s friends. He had many, unlike you.

“Oh, I guess you were too little to remember me. I am Lewis, Pelican Town’s Mayor. You know, your granpa and I used to be friends since we were very young and this farm was full of coops, animals, fruit trees...”

Robins ahams to him to call his attention to your discomfort about the current situation of the farm.  

“Oh... I mean... Sure you will do a good work of taking care of your grandfather’s property. Anyway, I am here to welcome you and say that whatever you need, you can call me and that If you have anything to sell to the city or export, you jut need to put it into that box, I will gladly take it and return to you with the money.” he says, in a very mayorish manner.

“Thanks.” you reply.

You are not very good with people. Maybe that is why you ended up behind a computer job.

“It is almost lunchtime!” Robin exclaims, she is so spirited. “So why don’t you put your bag in the cottage and come have lunch with my family? After that one of my children can show you around town. My son Sebby is almost your age, I am pretty sure you two will get along.”

“I... I don’t want to bother.” you reply scratching the back of your neck, uncomfortable.

“It was not an invite, it was a demand!” Robin says, and you can see the seriousness printed on her eyes.

You leave your bag beside the old bed in the cottage and follow her to the truck. After a small ride, you find yourself in front of a big house in the mountains.

“I think I have been here before.” You say, as you look at the lake slowly flowing near you.

“Probably when I was still building the house. I remember you and your grandfather’s other kids swimming around the lake. I think Sebby used to play with you sometimes. I guess if you remember each other.” she says.

“I surely don’t remember that.” you say, pointing at a giant boulder pile beside the lake’s source.

“Oh, that. That is the result of a landslide provoked by Joja Mart.”

“JOJA MART?!” you screech.

The simple mention of the company’s name makes you sick to your stomach.

“Yeah, they say they are working to get it removed, but they wouldn’t have to if they had not caused it in first place. I bet they were exploding the mines in search of gold, like the leeches they are.”

“Probably.” you agree to Robin’s inflated discourse.

When you get in the house, you hear the sound of a small explosion, followed but smoke and a funny smell.

“Oh Yoba! Dad, are you ok?! I guess I overcharged the batteries again!” you hear a girl’s voice and then a fire extinguisher being activated.

“There can’t be a fucking minute of peace in this house.” a guy comes from downstairs complaining. He is wearing a hoddie and has headphones hanging on his neck.

“Sebastian, language!” Robin says.

He turns to you and for a moment seems completely astonished to see you there, but quickly turns back to the apathic face he had on before.

“Hi honey! Maru and I were just doing a little experiment, but it got a bit out of hand... Oh, hello!” a man comes out of the room where the smoke is coming from.

“Y/n, this is my son Sebastian and that over there is my husband Demetrius.” Robin introduces you as you wave shyly.

A girl comes out of that same room. She is cleaning her glasses worried, but as she glances at you, her face shines with a bright smile such as Robin’s. She runs towards you and starts shaking your hand with both of hers, excitedly.

“Hello! I am Maru, and you must be the new farmer!”

“I... han... not a farmer actually. I will just live in the farm.” you reply uneasy.

“Oh, but I guess living in the farm will make you a farmer, then.” Demetrius says and giggles.

“I am going back to the basement.” Sebastian mumbles taking the direction of the stairs.

But Robin stops him by grabbing the back of his hoddie.

“Sebastian, it is lunchtime, so why don’t you go to the kitchen and put on the table for our guest, hmn?” she says in a way only a mother could.

He grunts and heads to the kitchen.

Maru leads you there by the shoulders while asking you:

“So you are from Zuzu city, right? How is life there?”

You can see Sebastian turning to you with the corner of his eyes when he hears it, he seems a little interested.

“Busy.” you answer.

She keeps staring at you with a smile as if she is waiting for the development of your answer, and does it until you feel uncomfortable enough to either attend her expectations or flee.

“Well... it is crowded. People are unfriendly, time seems to go by very fast...” you say, cracking your fingers anxiously. “There are more malls, I guess.”

“Interesting!” she replies with that same smile.

“So, you will be now taking care of Paradise farm, hm?” Demetrius says while sitting down next to his daughter. “I guess you will be having a lot of work taking care of all those weeds.”

“I actually don’t intend to work as a farmer.” you reply.

“Oh really? What kind of work do you do, y/n?” he asks gently.

“I am a reviewer. I mean, I was. I used to take care of paperwork, write reports on data and... you know, spend the day in front of a computer. I think I will find me a job to do this, but from here.” you answer.

“Sebby here is a computer geek, too! You two will get along well.” Robin says while serving you more food than you think you can eat.

“I am a programmer, mom.” he mumbles, facepalming.

“You should not be afraid of trying your hand at farming though.” Demetrius says. “Darling! This food is DE-LI-CI-OUS! As I was saying, this land has very productive soil and the town is an exporter, I am sure you can make some profit by selling whatever you produce. Also there is much foraging around you can pick and sell, there aren’t much people who take their time on doing that. The Salmonberry season will be here soon.”

“Thanks honey!” Robin replies with a giggle. “I am pretty sure y/n has it settled for the computer job.”

“Actually, I am pretty broke.” you think while taking a bite of Robin’s food. It is really good.

REALLY GOOD. You can’t remember the last time you had a homemade meal and the thought of it brings tears to your eyes.

“Oh, dear! Is it too spicy?” Robin asks, serving you a cup of juice.

You shake your head negatively trying to wipe the tears, ashamed. Sebastian and Maru stare at you, concerned, they even exchange a glance of worry and then, look back at you.

“No,no I... I have... a gland problem, I tear up sometimes... when... I am... eating?” you stutter, sobbing a little.

“I think I have heard about that. “ Demetrius says. “Maybe you should pay a visit to doctor Harvey in the town. He is a very good doctor.”

You nod as you continuously take bites of that wonderful food. It is so good to finally have a meal that isn’t pizza or a cold burger.

…

While having lunch you discover that Demetrius is a scientist. You take great pleasure in listening to him talking about how diverse is the Stardew biome. He also talks about minerals, the land’s properties and many other scientific things while Maru stares at him like she is the proudest daughter in the world. You feel like you would look at him the same if he was your father.  

Sebastian rolls his eyes more times than you can count and when he is finally done with the whole “family and guest lunch” thing, he stands up and says:

“I am going out for a smoke.”

“Actually Sebby, could you please take y/n to get to know the town?” Robin says while she collects the dishes.

“Mom, I think you better ask Maru, she is better suited for these kind of things.” He whispers at her, but you overhear.

“Oh well, so maybe you wanna stay and take her turn in washing the dishes?”

You swear you can hear him cursing while he passes beside you and makes a sign with his hand for you to follow him. You feel unease, but Robin points at him and shakes her hands indicating for you to go.

Sebastian takes you outside, to the garage and hands you a helmet.

“What?” you say.

“What?” he replies while putting on a helmet himself. “We’re taking the bike”

“Bike?” you ask.

Sebastian uncovers an old-fashioned bike and gets ready to sit on it, but you stop him by giving him back the helmet.

“No, no, no.” you say, gulping your breath. “I can’t, sorry.”

“What? Aren’t you from the city?” he says.

“I can’t ride a bike.” you say, shaking your head frenetically.

“You just sit down and hold on, I am the one doing the riding.”

“Look, you don’t really have to do this. I will just go home and you can tell Robin I had to... do something else.”

“You don’t know my mom.” he says while taking off the helmet. “Ok, wait here, I will grab the truck keys.”

Sebastian doesn’t take long to come back with the keys and the both of you get inside the truck. He lowers his window and immediately puts a cigarette in his lips.  

“Do you mind?” he asks you.

“Actually, can I have one?”  you reply feeling awkward.

“You smoke?” he says while rising towards you the pack with a cigarette extended.  

“Only when stressed.” you say while letting him light it up for you.

“Yeah. Me too.” he says starting the engines.

Next part here:

(I liked the sketch so much better, so here it is)

[sapphiresonstrings]

Women in Fantasy

There’s Discourse floating around, something about women, longswords, and medieval Poland. I’m not a masochist so I’m not going to get involved. I do want to comment, though.

There’s an exchange I read so often that it’s getting dull. It goes like this, with colourful fake names for the interlocutors:

Realismo: This fantasy book is allegedly set in a world based on medieval Europe, but it also includes women fighting with longswords. Women did not usually sword fight in medieval Europe, and if they did they would not use longswords. This is unrealistic!

Fantastico: You claim to care about realism, but this book contains dragons. You can believe in a world where dragons exist, but women fighting is too much for you to handle? Or did I just blow your mind? *mic drop*

As is usually the case with gotchas, this doesn’t really address the main thrust of the argument. I think the first point deserves a better counterargument. In fact I think there are better cases to be made here on both sides, so I’m just going to make all of them.

Realismo: You are misunderstanding what I mean when I say “realism.” I am willing to accept the premises of the world, such as dragons existing or women fighting with swords. However, if you introduce your world to me as being “like medieval Europe, but with dragons,” and then you throw this business about women swordfighting at me, it makes me suspect you don’t actually know very much about medieval Europe.

Fantastico: Okay, it’s like medieval Europe, except with dragons and also women can swordfight. Are you happy now?

Realismo: Not so fast! You say that it’s “like medieval Europe,” and yet clearly the status of women is totally different from medieval Europe. If there are female characters in this book, don’t you think it matters to our perception of those characters what the status of women actually is?

Fantastico: I think you should just infer it from context. There’s no need to go around expositing about meaningless background details. Sometimes it’s like medieval Europe, like if the heroine has a plot point where she rebels against her patriarchal father who wants to force her into an arranged marriage, and sometimes it’s not, like when women are swordfighting. What’s so hard about that?

Realismo: I will grant that the author isn’t necessarily obliged to explain every detail about how the story world diverges from the real world. However, I do maintain that it’s important for the author to know how the story world diverges. Furthermore, I believe that women swordfighting is a red flag which, combined with others, may indicate an author who actually hasn’t thought about the issue as hard as they should have. What seems to you to be pointless historical nitpicking actually reveals something important that you’re overlooking. I will illustrate with a parable:

(Realismo alternately pretends to be Authorio and Criticio)

Authorio: Criticio, I have written a new fantasy novel.

Criticio: How interesting. Please summarize it for me.

Authorio: It’s set in a medieval Europe inspired fantasy world.

Criticio: How original. Please continue.

Authorio: The eighteen year old heroine has just moved to the capital city of the kingdom she lives in. She’s dirt poor, and she rents a tiny apartment with the money she makes as a waitress at a fancy restaurant.

Criticio: Are you aware that most people in the medieval period did not live alone because of the considerable overhead in labour involved in maintaining a living space as well as the relative lack of wealth compared to the modern day, that moving out at eighteen is not only a modern concept but an Anglocentric one too, and that restaurants were invented after (and arguably as a consequence of) the French Revolution?

Authorio: I don’t know anything about history and also I wasn’t listening.

Criticio: Charming, please continue.

Authorio: The heroine sees all the poverty in the world and she gets madder and madder. Eventually one of her friends starves to death because of the evil king’s taxes. She gets so mad she teaches herself Calculus by studying at the public library and invents a giant robot. She uses the giant robot to force the king to give all his gold away to the poor. That fixes poverty forever and everyone lives happily ever after.

Criticio: That wouldn’t work. Ancient societies lived in poverty because of the brutal Malthusian nature of their food supply. Given a fixed food supply and an expanding population, the population inevitably expanded beyond the ability of the land to support it, provoking famines and epidemics that reduced-

Authorio: Oh my God I can’t even express how much I don’t care.

Critico: Fine, then I only have one more thing to say: Your story is clearly set in a fantasy world inspired by the United States in the modern day, not medieval Europe.

Authorio: No, I said it was-

Criticio: And you’re simply wrong. You can’t be inspired by medieval Europe because you don’t know anything about it. You know the world you live in and that’s the world this book is inspired by, full stop.

Authorio: But there are sword fights, and a king!

Criticio: I stand corrected: Your book is set in the Star Wars universe.

Authorio: Fuck you.

Criticio: (Thinking) while I’m here, the first public library opened in 1833. I suppose it could theoretically have come at any time after the printing press, and the printing press was invented (in Europe anyway) in 1440 and we can call the medieval period the 5th-15th centuries, so it just about scrapes in. Calculus was invented in the 17th century, but there’s no reason it couldn’t have been earlier. I’m not even going to touch the giant robot.

(The parable ends)

Fantastico: I resent everything about what you just said. Unfortunately my rebuttal will have to wait because this post is getting very long.

Part 2

EDIT: I’ve found another source indicating that the Romans had public libraries, so the 1883 date is probably just search engine confusion. That being said, the overall assumption that you can just go to a public library and learn anything you want is modern as fuck.

[torendheavenandearth]

1.7

“At the end of thy road, one must remember the golden rule: all things in moderation, and find the balance in all things. There, in minute perfection, you will find God, and you will find him wanting.” -- From the Discourse of the Tambay Swordsman and the Alcoholic Witch.

▼

Makabintang nears the crossroads. “Hey kid,” says Makabintang, peering behind him. He sees Angela is out, sleeping sideways against the kalesa seat. That’s bound to cause some neck pain.

Makabintang moves the kalesa to the right edge of the road and stops the horses, which have been running for almost two hours. There’s a small clearing here, a little embrace from the trees. Here the soft patter of the stream punctures the silence. The sound of the wind slipping through the bamboo causes a song of sadness to ring out from the forest.

Makabintang climbs up and flicks Angela’s face. Angela snorts as she’s pulled back into the waking world. “Ah punyeta. What--?”

“We’re taking a short stop here. You can rest up here. Get down and stretch.” Makabintang then grabs a glass canteen from behind her and walks off to the stream.

Angela watches Makabintang disappear into the greenery. She tries to move, but is greeted by an orchestra of pain. Her neck is sore, her feet sear with red hot spiky agony, her hands feel raw, and her knees have been scraped. Wincing, she gingerly makes her way down from the kalesa and winces as she hits the ground. Her feet are raw: she’s not wearing clogs or any kind of shoes. She makes her way over to the center of the small clearing where there’s a small campfire used by those before. The charcoal has been doused, but it hasn’t been cleared or replaced. They’re going to have to clean off the charcoal and get some new firewood.

A couple of men riding along on horses happen by the clearing. Angela notices that they’re taking the right path at the crossroads. One of the men, wearing a large salakot and barong tagalog, stares longingly at Angela, and Angela looks away, trying her best to act as if she can’t see them. She briefly wonders if she should just go back to her own kalesa and hide. 

The two men stop their horses. One of them--the one wearing a navy blue uniform, has an arquebus hanging from behind his back, and a sabre hanging from his waist--gestures with his head, and the salakot-wearing man nods and slides down from his saddle.

The approaching man is wearing a large cloak that wraps around him, but underneath that he’s wearing large balooning pants, leather shoes, and a fancy striped barong tagalog. His hair looks groomed, and so is his moustache.

Angela squints at them. She sits at one of the logs-turned-benches. 

“Hello, binibini,” says the man, as he nears her. He takes off his salakot. “What is a precious young girl like you doing out here, in the middle of the path?”

Angela breathes out, slightly irritated. She didn’t think she’d get these kinds of people in another world still. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to talk with strangers?” 

“Then let’s change the situation then,” says the man, smiling. “My name is Don Jose Iago de Lacandola. And you are?”

Angela cringes. “I’m 17. Go away.”

“Age is but a number,” says Don Jose Iago de Lacandola. Angela cringes. He examines Angela thoroughly. “It is better if you are not to stay here, in the middle of nowhere. You seem like you have gone through a rough patch. I can take you to my hacienda, which is just over Mount San Roque. I can care for you like a king would care for his princess.”

Angela blinks. She thinks that this can be a good chance to get some good life out of this miserable predicament she’s found herself in. “Are you some kind of… noble?”

Don Jose nods. “I am a principales, part of the principalia of the Kingdom of Perlesensya. Perhaps that will make my offer more enticing. I will care for you all your life.”

Angela squints at Don Jose again. “Why?”

Don Jose manages a small smile. A shy smile. He looks up at the sky and says, “Well, it is not everyday that a Don such as myself would be graced by God the fortune of seeing an exceedingly beautiful maiden sitting out here in the forests. I must protect all beautiful ladies that I come across but…” he looks down on Angela again. “...never have I seen a woman so beautiful as you.”

“But…” Angela reaches up to her horns. 

“Oh, do not worry about that. We can surely hire a surgeon and a healer to surgically remove it from you. We’ve done it before.”

“You’ve… surgically removed horns from people? Why?”

“No horns are allowed in the Hacienda proper, you see,” says Don Jose. “And it’s commonly seen as unnoble within Biringan, the City of Cities. It's just for politeness and so that you can fit in better. Admittedly, that is the only blemish I see in your perfection.”

Angela cringes again. The prospect of having the horns surgically removed is something she’s keenly interested in, but a mote of doubt lingers within her heart.

“There’s a catch to this, isn’t there?”

Don Jose shrugs. “Of course, it would be in my best interest to wed you. Perhaps we can live together in my hacienda, and you can be the loving wife that welcomes me back from military expeditions and other such things! You will have a grand life.”

Angela pouts and thinks. Her forehead creases. She doesn’t quite know what to answer. Not yet, anyway. 

“Come on, girl. Do you not want to be treated like a principales?”

“I do,” Angela says, looking up. “But… I don’t think I can.”

“Oh, lovely maiden, moon of my life, why?”

Angela shrugs. “There’s… something I have to do first. There are people that are counting on me, I think. I’m not sure. But I don’t think I can do whatever I have to do if I went with you. Sorry.” And also going off gallivanting with a creepy older man is out of the question, fuckin’ creep.

Don Jose stops and stares at Angela for a bit. Eventually he sighs and shrugs. He produces a piece of rectangular paper from his pocket and gives it to her. “This is a paper signed by me. If you ever come to the hacienda--Hacienda Lacandola it is called--then show this to the gatekeeper. They shall let you in, and perhaps we can talk at length and help you come to a conclusion.”

Angela snorts. “Sure.” She takes the card. 

“God bless you,” says Don Jose, before walking back to the horse and then shrugging. His shoulders have fallen. The principales gets on his horse and the two of them begin making their way up the mountain. The man that looks like a soldier looks over his shoulder and stares at her as they disappear into a curve.

“Weirdos,” says Angela. She thinks of throwing the paper away, but then decides against it. Perhaps it can help in the future. She looks around her and finds that the baro’t saya she’s wearing has no pockets in them. Exasperated, Angela sighs. Of course they don’t. 

She gets up and walks over to the kalesa and slips the piece of paper into the sheath of the bolo that Makabintang gave her. She stares at her own reflection through the slightly dulled blade of the bolo. There’s still some dirt on her face, from when she fell. Her eyes are red. Is she losing sleep? Her glasses are miraculously still intact. When will they get broken? What will she do if they do? She’s practically blind without them. How will she be able to survive?

The bolo could be a good start, she thinks. Maybe get some training in them and be like a samurai or one of those old Filipino action movies or old Filipino komiks by Francisco Coching. She can manage it, she thinks. She’s always had before.

“I’ll get Makabintang to train me,” she mutters. What is seemingly apparent to Angela is that in this universe, fighting is to be expected at one point or another. At least, for a person like her. So it only makes sense for her to get up and grab some kind of combat training. If not, she’s going to get turned to bloody mush on the ground, and she doesn’t have any plans of dying just yet.

I still need to go home.

She brings the bolo over to the log she sat on and pondered. She wonders how life is, back at home, back in horrible Metro Manila, with the shitty transportation system and the even shittier government. That distant wish for home hit her like a truck. Sure, it was hell, but at least that place didn’t have, like, huge demons and angels and explosions and supernatural kung fu or whatever. If this is heaven, then she’d rather be cozy back home in hell.

She sighs. She wonders how Kristina is doing. One of her best friends. She was supposed to go and have a study date with her the next day, eating and drinking at their favorite cafe along Aurora Avenue. A hidden gem. But no. She was abducted by human-trafficking angels instead. Angela wonders if she will ever get back home. She decides that if she ever does go back home, she will.

In fact, she decides that she’ll do all of this, survive and get strong and hop around with Ang Nilapastangan and Makabintang, just to find a way to get back home. Her mother is waiting. Her little brother is waiting. They are all waiting for her to get back home.

“Oyoy, what was that commotion a while back?” Makabintang’s voice floats out of the trees. Angela looks up and sees him walking out, with three canteens full of water, which he carries with a makeshift flat plane of wood that he found out within the forest. He goes over to the horses and gives them something to drink.

“Some principales,” Angela replies. “Can I ask you a favor, Makabintang?”

“A principales? Did he say his name?”

“Don Jose something something Lacandola.”

Makabintang pauses. He turns to stare at Angela and his eyes go wide. “Lacandola? Are you absolutely sure?”

“Oh what, is he like, super important or something? Is that it?”

“Yes! Yes he is! Lacandola is one of the royal houses of the Kaharian!”

“What?”

“There’s not a lot of them, really. Only nine left: Sulayman, Lacandola, Ache, Colambu, Tupas, Paiburong, Sikatuna, Cabungsuan, and Namwaran.” Strangely enough, Angela recognizes some of those names. Names that she’s seen her friends have, or mentioned in old historical texts. Another weird note that imprints itself onto her mind.

“And this is important to me… how?” asks Angela.

“You shoulda taken the offer and took me with you!” Says Makabintang. “We’ll be rich and living large!”

“I doubt they’d allow a duwende to live in with them, though,” says Angela. “Don Jose already said that he’d have my horns surgically removed.”

“Yeesh,” says Makabintang, and then waves his hand dismissively “But whatever, you’re probably right. Come on, let’s get back on the road.”

Angela opens her mouth to ask something more, but a low guttural bellow resonates from somewhere else, freezing her words in her throat. She and Makabintang stare at each other, eyes completely wide, bodies frozen.

And then the kimera leaps out from within the shadows between the trees.

There’s a moment of absolute fear blossoming from the well at the bottom of Angela’s soul. She leaps to her feet, brings out her bolo, and faces down the kimera even as it leaps through the air and pins her to the ground.

“Makabintang! Help!” She screams, and the fear in her voice is like the shattering of glass. Makabintang rises and brandishes his own bolo. He sinks into the earth and then erupts from a mound to the left of the kimera, sending him cannonballing straight into the kimera’s side, bolo first. The bolo sinks, the kimera screams. 

It flails about, sending Makabintang flying from it. This time, it doesn’t underestimate Makabintang. It leaps toward him as he slams against a tree, grabs him mid-bounce, and then slams him against the tree once again. 

And then with a single, savage movement, rips Makabintang’s head from his body with its kimera dog mouth.

“Makabintang!”

▼

Ang Nilapastangan is faster than horses.

Upon her bellowing strides of smoke and flame--a neat little trick she’d picked up when traveling with a tigbalan--she crosses the length traveled by the kalesa in half the time. Despite the dewy morning, the road is not damp enough to let wheel tracks be embedded upon it, but that’s okay. Ang Nilapastangan told Makabintang where to go. She knows where they’re headed. 

She just hopes she’s not too late. She just hopes she catches up before they go past the crossroads. But Makabintang knows that. Makabintang is a wise duwende, and he’d know to stop by at the crossroads to wait for her.

That is, assuming nothing worse follows after them. The kimera… she can’t brush the thought of the kimera from her mind. It wasn’t there when she looked around. Last time she remembered, halimaw don’t just disappear when they die. It’s popular to use the materials harvested from hunting them for equipment and items.

So where did it go?

Ang Nilapastangan bellows-pumping stride eventually reaches its peak, and she reaches the crossroads at almost a quarter of the time a horse-drawn carriage like the kalesa would. When she gets there, however, the kimera’s maw rips Makabintang’s head from his body.

Ang Nilapastangan’s fury is silent, and the world has told her that she must be silent. She blurs forward. Now right beside the kimera, and thrusts her hand--which is in a knife-hand position--straight through the kimera’s chest. She then inserts her other hand through that same hole, and then rips the kimera in two, vertically.

Chunks of meat and blood scatter across the clearing. Angela scrambles away from the blood and meat, bolo still in hand. Her eyes are wide, her breathing rapid. She feels like she’s going to puke, but she can’t look away from the fantastic gore caused by Ang Nilapastangan.

Ang Nilapastangan hurls both parts of the kimera into two different parts of the forest. Throwing it so strongly that it sends waves of air rushing out. She throws it seemingly so that the two parts of the kimera are as far from each other as possible.

She looks down upon the headless corpse of Makabintang, ripped and savaged. The blood of beings like Makabintang don’t seem to be red like human blood. Their blood is one that is yellow-ish, like the sap of trees, nearing gold. 

Ang Nilapastangan scowls. Angela stares at Ang Nilapastangan.

▼

Ang Nilapastangan digs up a grave for what’s left of Makabintang’s body with her bare hands. She is silent, and when Angela looks over at her, her face is blank. Not in that blank kind of way when someone’s loved one dies and you don’t know how to react. Her face is exactly like her face the first time she saw her. As if the death of Makabintang, the only person that she seems to speak with, doesn’t faze her.

Ang Nilapastangan makes an effort to make the grave like a mound, like that of his house. And then, at the top of the mound, she places a single sampaguita flower that she finds nearby.

With that done, she gets on both knees and then bows. Her hands are clasped together, as if in prayer. Angela wonders if she should follow in what she’s doing. Even just to pay some kind of respect to the weird duwende that helped her. But, she feels too awkward, and decides not to.

Eventually, Ang Nilapastangan finishes the procession. She doesn’t do any kind of sign of the cross or anything. She simply lifts her head and then rises to her feet. She turns around and says: “I’m filthy.”

Angela blinks. “Um. Yeah. You’re covered in guts and blood.”

“We can’t afford to bathe yet,” she says, with an almost… complaining tone? Angela can’t help but tilt her head in slight confusion. 

Angela also notices that as she’s talking, her burning crimson feet and hands are slowly subsiding. Her black and red eyes are dissipating. She closes her eyes and she breathes out. When she opens her eyes again, her eyes are normal. They’re no longer black and red, but a beautiful white and ash gray.. She, more or less, has the visage of a human. 

Save, of course, for the horns.

“Come on. Barangay San Justo is a bit more travel.” She walks over to the kalesa and unlatches the horses from the wagon. She then reaches into the wagon and brings out a pair of saddles. Fraying at the edges, but working more or less. “Ah, the horse carer remembered my request. Good.”

Angela walks up to Ang Nilapastangan. “We’re not going to ride the kalesa?”

Ang Nilapastangan shakes her head. “We’re going to ride the horse instead. Do you know how to ride one?”

▼

Angela and Ang Nilapastangan ride down the path. They’ve gone down the westward road. “The east road leads up to a mountain trail that leads to Barangay Sampotsi. There you will find Hacienda Lacandola,” Ang Nilapastangan said. Angela told Ang Nilapastangan about the encounter she’s had with Don Jose, but Ang Nilapastangan doesn’t reply or respond to it.

Now, upon the trail, there is a slight awkwardness. The only time Ang Nilapastangan has talked to her is to teach her the ropes of riding a horse. She’s ridden one before when she went to Tagaytay and Baguio, but riding one on her own without the guide of some kind of caretaker is a new experience. Surprisingly, she got the hang of it rather quickly, and soon the two of them are on a canter. Ang Nilapastangan took the horse with the black coat, while Angela chose to ride upon one with a chestnut brown coat.

The path is mostly quiet, save for the soft sound of the wind wafting across the trees. The rustlign of branches, the whistle of small zephyrs. The temperature is not too bad. Humid, of course, but the sun is not shining directly at them so the heat is bareable. Angela realizes how much she prefers the temperate, humid climate of the more tropical countries than the more extreme degrees of other countries. She’s glad that they have that climate here, and much cooler than in Metro Manila too, since this place is presumably not choked by pollution and microwaved by climate change.

Their canter is brisk, but not to slow. Its a perfect pace for Angela to ponder upon the things she sees as she travels across the path. The broken twigs on the ground, the kabalyero trees that seem to be more popular here, sending the red petals of their flowers cascading down to the soil. The random snake coiling about a trunk, or flying lizard leaping from one treetop to another. A squirrel scurrying down a tree. Numerous birds flying above.

A soft wind sends fallen dead leaves flurrying into a small tornado, instilling into them once again, a semblance of life.

However it's not the kind of abounding, almost choking, multitude of animals Angela thought she would encounter. It’s strangely serene. The animals here seem to be alone: Angela can’t help but wonder why she only sees one squirrel, and one flying lizard, and one flock of birds. At this point, she’s expecting to be assaulted by an onslaught of mosquitoes and flies, but none come. Maybe one, and it isn’t even a mosquito.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Angela blinks. She looks up at Ang Nilapastangan. The path ahead is long. There’s a patch of the road further down that is shadowed by a canopy of tree branches. “Yeah.”

“It used to be even better,” says Ang Nilapastangan. 

Angela waits for Ang Nilapastangan to explain further, but she never does. 

After a bit of cantering, Angela speaks, “I’m sorry about Makabintang.”

“Don’t be,” she replies. “You had nothing to do with it. And Makabintang would’ve been honored to go out that way.”

“Wasn’t he your friend?”

“He was. He was the only friend I had and the only one that didn’t freak out when I said that I was the winner of the Hagdanan and that I came to that village to hide away from Biringan. He was a good friend. But he was going to die, I think, one way or another. It always happens.” The wistful tone is almost cliche to Angela.

“You were hiding?”

Ang Nilapastangan nods. “It’s the only way for them not to kill me, or use me.”

“Use you?”

Angela doesn’t get a response to that either. 

With a sigh, Angela continues with, “If only I knew how to fight.”

“Don’t worry about  the ‘ifs’,” says Ang Nilapastangan. “It’s done now. Move on. That’s what’s important. That’s how you break chains.”

Another silence. Angela decides not to engage anymore with Ang Nilapastangan. Maybe she’s still grieving, and just doesn’t want to show it to Angela so that she doesn’t break her tough-girl demeanor? Either way, Angela loses the will to converse. She looks around her again, and nothign much happens. Not a lot of animals come out. For a world that is the center of the multiverse, she thinks that it should have a lot more colorful animals. Not just a single squirrel and a snake. And some birds.

They ride for a few more hours, passing through numerous canopied sections of the road: the parts where the branches of the trees embrace overhead, as if to provide shelter and shade. The sun doesn’t shine down directly at you within the canopy, and the wind is chilly. As they canter along, her mind begins trailing, looking for more distractions. She wishes she can have her phone right now, numb her mind against her Twitter feed or chat with some friends. But then she remembers that those friends are universes away.

Eventually, to pick up the pace, Ang Nilapastangan tells Angela to gallop and follow her. Angela nods, prodding the horse forward and then balancing herself on her knees. Ang Nilapastangan taught her this just a few moments ago. She remembers what she’s taught: use her knees to steady herself, don’t pull on the reins, lean forward. And she does. 

The horse goes forward, and it runs quick and true. It seems as though it’s doing its best to accommodate for Angela’s inexperience. Even though her gallop isn’t as fast as Ang Nilapastangan’s, it's enough that Ang Nilapastangan is always in view.

▼

After a few more hours of riding--which was painful for Angela, having to look around all the time--Angela finds that the road they’re sat upon crests up to the top of a hill. When they reach it, Ang Nilapastangan stops the horse, and so does Angela.

There, from the hilltop, they see Barangay San Justo. A quaint little town with the same wooden houses mixed with stone houses, and with a church in the middle. It is surrounded, of course, by dense trees, some of them breaching the gaps of the town and growing between houses and roads. There is a small wall on both the north and south sides of the barangay, made of earth and wood.

The hilltop road bends down into the southern exit. 

The barangay, strangely enough for the middle of the day, is quiet.

“We will look for the albularyo here,” says Ang Nilapastangan. “And then afterwards, I will help you.”

Angela blinks, looking up at Ang Nilapastangan. “Help me?”

“Get stronger and win the Hagdanan. It’s the only way, if you wish to be free.”

Next Arc.

Return to the Table of Contents.

[pdabinch]

Emergency - SIGNAL BOOST! I NEED TO MOVE IN 2 WEEKS OR I WILL 90% BE HOMELESS

Hello. I don’t want to say my name on here because of privacy reasons but i used to frequent this website (outside of this discourse blog I have abandoned for like a year now)

This is gonna be kinda a long post BC I want to explain everything but if you want a TL;DR just scroll down. I hate the fact that I have to do something like this but. It is what it is.

I am an artist who works on commissions for a living. Because of my disabilities (I’m autistic and have memory gaps and others) I have a very hard time committing to a more conventional, “normal” job because of my social ineptitude, so until I can get into art school this is all I have.

But this recent year has been really taxing on me and my workflow has been greatly disrupted, because of personal reasons. Because of this I have moved into the property of my mom’s husband because it’s dirt cheap and obviously close to her. He hasn’t kept up with maintenance at this house and because of this the pipes burst or something, idk anything about plumbing but sewage has leaked into the house, even going into the carpet. Because of this the carpet need to be replaced (the whole area because you can’t just replace one area of carpet).

But that’s not why I need help. He’s trying to scam me into paying for the carpet and using my pets as leverage, claiming that they might ruin the new carpet once it’s in (they haven’t even so much as scratched the current one). He’s saying I have to either pay $2000 in 2 weeks, or I will be kicked out unless I get rid of my pets (which he knows won’t happen, I’ve literally had him since I was in intermediate school). My mom is not helping me, shes instead trying to get me to pay $1k while she pays for the other half and lies to him saying I paid for it lol. I don’t blame her because he’s really bossy as a husband and she doesn’t want to upset him but. There’s no way I’m paying $2k for this place that’s actually garbage, it was supposed to be very temporary anyway and I’ve only been here 1 month and a half. I was only informed of this today.

I don’t want to give up my pets because they are very important to me and calm me down. I have a cockatiel whom I’ve had for almost 10 years and I would rather die than give him up.

I can’t move in with family because my only family is my mom (and she lives with my landlord) and the only other family I have is across the globe in the Philippines.

I absolutely NEED to be able to move out in 2 weeks. I’m going to be doing emergency commissions and you can PM me about that or email me at pandxcommissions@gmail.com to talk about it. But on top of that I would really appreciate even small donations because it’s such a small timeframe. Even $1 donations are appreciated a lot.

I draw mostly furries but might be comfortable drawing humans. Here’s an example of something I drew recently of my oc. You can also see examples at my FA (username is Pandx) but the uploads on there are kind of old as I haven’t really been on in a long time.

If you can donate, my paypal link is this one:

https://www.paypal.me/pandx or you can send it to apocalypanda@gmail.com as friends or family.

I will also probably set up a ko-fi account.

If you can’t donate, please just reblog this so someone who can will see it. And if you like cute fluffy animals, please consider buying an emergency commission from me. I also do PWYW (pay what you want)

TLDR; I have to move in 2 weeks or cough up $2000 because of something that isn’t my fault or problem, and I’d much rather do the former

I can do art but donations are greatly appreciated, I’d kiss you all if I could. All links are above