#i cannot experience anything without SOME kind of narrative forming around/within/through it

[sae-mian]

𝕍𝕚𝕖𝕣𝕒𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕝 | 𝔻𝕒𝕪 𝟙𝟝

“Alternate Universe”

BUN(?) FACT OF THE DAY: Nira'sae alone has more alternate universes and timelines than they've had years alive. (and here are some examples, labelled below the cut)

[writingwithcolor]

Hello! I've been wanting to create a fictional world where the British didn't ruin the world (I'm really sick of the trend of 'what if the oppressors 'succeeded' 'narrative) and while I know the world would still be super complicated, i kinda just want to explore all the cool shit we could have had. I've been reading a bunch of your posts and other history stuff and I feel like I'm not really getting it (since there's SO much to think about). I was wondering if you had any tips/resources on how I could approach this subject.

Alternative History Where British Didn’t “Ruin The World”

Please go to the ask rules and check out the existing resources before starting.

WWC is not here to direct you to resources--our focus is on specific questions regarding scenarios that arise within your writing experience which cannot be answered through your own research. In particular, please take a look at our "What Does Our "Motivations" PSA Mean?” post. While the concept is something we can tackle, we are human like you, and need some more detail to accurately assess a scenario.

I’ll walk you through how to set this up so we can answer it accurately.

1- Give us more background on your starting point.

The British were not the only colonizers that had a lasting impact on the world, nor were they the only European colonizers to have had a lasting impact. Yes, the world would be complicated regardless because of human nature and the expansion of the species over time, but removing the British doesn’t erase the colonial impact of the Spanish, the French, the Portuguese, and far more outside of Europe, including the Ottoman empire, the Japanese, and the Mughals. Not to mention that there are centuries of conflicts that occurred locally across the world. Focusing on a region or even one particular country as well as a time period will reduce the work necessary in establishing changes.

Also, to what degree would British influence be removed from a global scale? I would suggest picking a starting point in history that you think is the critical point of change, alter the British influence, and go from there. 

2- Create a narrative or other form of vessel for your setting.

Getting started when you have a narrative to fit it to is way easier than starting from nothing. There are countless possibilities for how the world could have changed without British influence, but if you have an idea of the technologies, societies, and conflicts that would exist to make your narrative basis, you’ll be better off by a significant margin. This means picking a route and sticking to it. Coming up with all sorts of changes to the world will not mean anything if you don't have a way of explaining them well and keeping them on track. It’s much harder to explore this kind of scenario without knowing what you need to plan around.

3- Start worldbuilding from the ground up.

What kind of world do you want to get out of this? If you’re really trying to do this, I would start with elements of societies that are necessary for worldbuilding, and move forward from there. This is what will give you more depth as well as what will bring up the scenarios I referenced earlier.

Consider the effects of:

Trade and commerce, both local and global

The world powers/major empires that would continue with colonialism in the absence of British colonialism

Local and global relationships pre-British intervention

Power structures and systems of government that would have been maintained without British colonial intervention

The cultural elements that would significantly affect the world in the absence of British colonialism

The differences in technology development as based on global and national priorities

Religious differences and the proliferation of specific belief systems

Creating a world in this scenario cannot solely be about what cool things could have happened, but also what damage could have occurred.

4- Consider your audience and the purpose of this work.

Who are you writing this for, why are you writing this, and how are you getting the point across to them? You need something concrete to work off of if you are intending to create something of this scale, and knowing your audience and purpose will help. Our goal at WWC is to help with crafting stories that speak to wider audiences than what most literature reaches--how wide do you think you can reach?

5- Find a voice for this world.

Whether it’s a general layout of the changes you want to make or a character who lives in the changed world, bringing this setting to an audience requires some kind of voice. This is also where questions may pop up regarding a character’s background. I would be wary of taking a character from an oppressed minority and making them into an oppressor in this situation, especially if they were specifically oppressed due to British influence.

There’s more that I could go into, but again: WWC is not here to be your personal researchers. Please follow our ask guidelines and give us the information we need to give you an accurate assessment.

~ Abhaya

Seconding what Abhaya has said, and adding a few points of my own:

1- You’re going to have to address the concept of “racism” and what discrimination would’ve existed 

In pre-colonial times, the primary form of bigotry towards outsiders was xenophobia. This is a hatred of “the other.” There was discrimination based off mismatched cultural practices, classism, different religions, colorism (which is separate from racism and is instead an often classist-based ranking for darker skinned vs lighter skinned) and other factors that WWC is not equipped to discuss. 

Race in Europe was invented primarily to enslave African and American Indigenous peoples. If they were somehow different from Europeans, then they were okay to treat this way.

As a result, back in the day skin tone would have been less of a deal. The oppressive structures were based off factors that will look wildly different and unusual/unintuitive for those who grew up on racism exclusively. Communities weren’t necessarily divided by skin tone (or, if they were divided by skin tone, it wasn’t always in groups from different continents) but instead class, religion, culture, and profession. 

You’re really going to have to de-centre “race” as the primary structure of oppression you know and instead learn about societies where groups of people who look similar to their neighbours are opposed because of something other than race. Class would have been huge, and religion would have been even more salient (see: how many European countries banned Jewish and/or Muslim people from existing in their borders). 

There’s also plain old “we both want this territory, we are from different groups, let’s fight over it.” This is not necessarily a colonial relationship, so long as the goal is simply to temporarily gain access to a certain tract of land and the resources therein, without brutally getting rid of every person who existed in the rival group. 

Learning a whole new system (or multiple systems) of oppression and how it would have been at the time is going to be necessary to create an accurate what-if. Because people just… create in and out groups. That’s the history of people. It happens around the globe. You’re not going to create a magical discrimination-free society if you remove European colonialism, because people have been fighting wars about religion and sources of food/clothing/trade goods for as long as there have been multiple groups in the same region.

As Abhaya said, colonialism isn’t unique to Europe, and it also isn’t unique to the 1700s. It has happened for millennia, across the globe, with different belief structures guiding it. It comes from cultures with attitudes of superiority, and those attitudes can come from a whole host of factors.

It’s not automatically a natural state of being, but it is something that has happened fairly regularly in history. You need to think beyond certain time periods and certain countries and instead take everything from a very long, very macro lens.

2- For European colonialism, you’re going to need to address Christianity, especially the Catholic/Protestant divide

Y’know why England tried to take over the world?

Because the French and Spanish were already taking it over, and the English Crown wanted to prove that God preferred Protestants over Catholics. 

The initial motives for colonialism were, likely, to circumvent Muslim control over the Silk Road. So the Catholics and Protestants wanted to get direct trade links to the other side of the Silk Road and cut out the Muslim Ottoman empire, which had also been a refuge to Spain’s Jewish population. Christian Europe wanted to gain the wealth they felt entitled to, because God preferred Christians, did he not? 

At first, colonialism was about simply gaining the most wealth to show god loved them the most. And then it rather literally became a proxy war of who could convert the most people to what religion.

This religious proxy war didn’t necessarily exist in Asia, but in Europe it absolutely did. If you want to what-if this, then addressing Christianity and its entitlement to everything is necessary.

3- You’re going to need to address the concept of assimilation vs multiculturalism and how those attitudes have fluctuated with time

Not every empire on the planet was unilaterally terrible for its whole existence.

What made England, Spain, France, and Portugal so devastating is the fact they did not allow anyone to live a slightly different life from them, both inside their borders and in the lands they colonized. It’s why the Spanish under Isabella cast out their Jewish and Muslim populations, after trying for decades. It’s why France and England were constantly at war (and also casting out their Jewish populations). They had determined others were living life wrong therefore they needed to go away, and if they cast out all of these groups, then the church could grab their resources and richen themselves.

In France, you could be punished by death and seizure of your property if you harboured a Jewish person as they began resettling the country in the 1610s. In England, they didn’t start resettling until 1655.

Notice: Europe had been colonizing on the European continent plenty before they expanded their borders. They simply spilled over into the Americas and Africa, put themselves on unequal footing with the Indigenous populations (weapons and illnesses), and that’s when they became the global supervillains we know today.

But the Spanish didn’t just wake up one day and decide that the Indigenous population of North America was uniquely bad and needed to go away. They had decided centuries prior that everyone not Catholic was terrible and bad and they were better off as a purely Catholic nation (they were not). Before they went after Indigenous peoples, they had removed the Muslim and Jewish populations from Spain.

Those are going to be the attitudes you need to address in this alternate reality of yours. Why did England, Spain, France, and Portugal feel it was their right to dictate everyone’s way of life? Same with the Ottomans, and the Japanese. What cultural factors made them think that they had the right?

Meanwhile, on the total opposite side of the spectrum, some empires preserved multiculturalism, or, at least, selectively preserved it. Some pretty unilaterally went “diversity is good”, so you have people like Cyrus the Great building the Second Temple, or Akbar who tried to found a whole religion to merge Muslim, Hindu, and Jain beliefs to show he held them all equally. Then you have the Ottomans who, for a period in the 1600s, both harboured the Jewish populations cast out of Spain and brutalized a whole bunch of groups that they didn’t like and wanted to grab the land/resources/property of.

It all depends on the ruler and the time period, which leads me to… 

4- You’re going to need to look at time periods fairly closely 

Empires’ attitudes towards their populations were extremely ruler-specific. In the days of divine right to rule and the ruler’s words being law, the beliefs of the rulers were very influential towards the rest of the population.

Even the French, in the early days of Canada, had decent relations with the Indigenous population at the start. It was fairly open trade, shared land stewardship, and basically the French considered the Native population more valuable alive than dead. The devastation came later. Not much later, but still later.

If you don’t want to address basically Europe’s whole history with Christianity and how they existed as a Christian place (wording chosen deliberately, because they tried very, very hard to be homogeneously Christian—they failed, but the fact they tried counts for something), then look and see how individual rulers were kinder to their populations and try to replicate that. 

5- How recognizable do you want this place to look?

The thing about “the oppressor won” narratives is: they have recognizable worlds.

The oppressor did succeed for an extended period of time. As a result, oppressors-won narratives mean a perpetuation of the world as it was; it might be perpetuated to the point of satire, but it was still a grounded possibility.

Doing a narrative where you remove one of the single most influential periods of history?

You are basically writing secondary world fantasy without magic at that point.

You’ve got North America, a bustling hub of river systems and cities and food-forests that are tailor-made to sustain as much life as possible, as sustainably as possible.

Europe, perhaps still with their monarchies in-tact because America didn’t revolt because America didn’t exist, and the various courts didn’t have bloated treasuries that relied on colonialism to enrich themselves (why was the French monarchy in financial trouble? Well they’d kinda just lost most of their colonial territories in the Seven Years War) 

Did China take up as much territory as it does today? Did its unification efforts fail?

The borders as we know them wouldn’t exist, because so many places would’ve never had a unified colonial territory to build a state from.

How many nomadic and semi nomadic groups exist, because colonialism didn’t happen to force settle them? 

How much conflict is there over resources? Did centralization happen anyway just to have things like public health programs? Do groups have agreed-upon shared territory that nomads are just allowed to pass through, or is there still conflict over that?

Has any colonial empire tried to rise up, and if yes, how much have they succeeded? How long did they last? What were their goals?

These are a bunch of questions you’re going to have to ask yourself as you try to nail down what this place looks like.

6- This is not going to be a paradise

It will be a better world, yes. We wouldn’t be facing this drastic level of climate change without the overproduction and over-extraction of resources that capital-colonialism produces. We would likely have some variations of some types of technology, just with a lot less metal because of how resource-heavy mining is. 

But people are people and even in societies where they actively try to teach humility and have cultural markers in place to prevent anyone from hurting each other, they still have murders. They still have stillbirths, and children who die young. They still have wars, and plagues, and oppression.

If you’re going into this bright eyed and bushy tailed, thinking that you’ll have overridden millennia of humanity being humanity because you got rid of colonialism—think again.

Humanity is beautiful, yes, and there is such fundamental care in communities. Humans like taking care of other people.

But humans also like drawing up lines between us and them, and then not caring for “them.” Or caring for “them” so long as they show they’re other. Or a whole bunch of things.

To think that you can solve all the world’s problems simply by getting rid of colonialism is a fool’s errand. It will improve one hell of a lot, but it won’t improve everything. There’ll still be war, and borders fought over, and impossible to reconcile differences of opinion.

I think a story like this is worthwhile. Don’t get me wrong. Writing AUs without colonialism is, at the very least, a tool we can use to imagine how a better world would look like. 

But don’t expect everything to be a utopia.

~Mod Lesya

Published Nov 2021

[unwelcome-ozian]

is there really such a thing as false memories? is it really possible that these painful terrifying memories i have are just made up? because people i talk to about deny them? that they dont "add up" with the rest of my life history? I swear i have memories of some kind of cult abuse/religious abuse, something to that effect, with rituals involved. but other alters and people outside the system say this is impossible to have happened. is it really possible to have false traumatic memories? i dont know if this makes sense, i just dont know if anything that i swear i remember happened was all just a dream or make believe.

A false memory is a recollection that seems real in your mind but is fabricated in part or in whole. False memories aren’t malicious or even intentionally hurtful. They’re shifts or reconstructions of memory that don’t align with the true events. Basically a False memory refers to cases in which people remember events differently from the way they happened..

I don’t know who you’re around and sharing your memories with. If it’s family members, friends, or a group of people in what is supposed to be a supportive environment.

I encourage you to work towards finding a supportive, safe environment where you can work through your memories and trauma.

Oz

Here’s some information about memory.

There are four types of memory: (Explicit) Semantic, (Explicit) Episodic, (implicit) Emotional, and (Implicit) Procedural.

When something traumatic happens information like words, sounds and images can’t be formed to create a Semantic memory. The sequence of events becomes fragmented and affects the episodic memory, the emotional memory is affected by the person becoming triggered after the trauma and experiencing painful emotions without context, and Procedural memory stores the pattern of reactions to the traumatic event.

There are several factors that influence whether a traumatic experience is remembered or dissociated. The nature and frequency of the traumatic events and the age of the victim seem to be the most important. Single-event traumas (assault, rape, witnessing a murder, etc.) are more likely to be remembered, but repetitive traumas (repeated domestic violence or incest, political torture, prolonged front-line combat, etc.) often result in memory disturbance. The extremely stressful experiences caused by natural or accidental disasters (earthquakes, plane crashes, violent weather, etc.) are more likely to be remembered than traumatic events deliberately caused by humans (i.e. incest, torture, war crimes). People who are adults when they experience traumatic events are less likely to dissociate conscious memories of the events than children who experience trauma. Research shows that the younger the child is at a time of the trauma, the less likely the event will be remembered.

When something traumatic happens our brains become focused on survival not remembering. Stored within our bodies are all the impulses of what we wanted to do at the time of the trauma and physically were not able to do. The part of our brain that stores information regarding these incomplete actions, the part that deals with survival, has no sense of time - there is only NOW. At the moment of the traumatic event, in an unconscious effort to never repeat that experience, our survival brain takes a snapshot photo. Because in that moment it’s too overwhelming to comprehend, our brain breaks it down into hundreds of files.

There is a saying, “The body cannot lie.” If you spontaneously have a flashback and feel terrified the feeling can be trusted.

*Explicit memory, also called declarative or narrative memory, is the ability to consciously recall facts or events. This is the form of memory used, for example, when a person recounts the events of his or her day at work or school. Implicit memory, also called procedural or sensorimotor memory, refers to behavioural knowledge of an experience without conscious recall. A person who demonstrates proficiency at reading but who cannot remember how he or she learned the skill is an example of implicit memories in the absence of explicit memories.

[asexual-society]

i feel kind of afraid to say this publicly, but your post about fighting sex negativity in the ace community has given me some hope. it bothers me a huge amount when i see ace positivity posts that imply that asexual people have a unique understanding of consent, even claiming that the only reason people "hate aces" is "because they teach in a way nobody else does that no means no means no" (quote from a post that was disturbingly popular). it feels like the exact same thing rape culture has said about "sluts" forever - that they do not care about consent in the same way someone who isn't "into sex" does. i remember being in the kink community 10 years ago and seeing people who were better about consent then - really understanding how it applies to everything and everyone, and that everyone decent has a stake in it - than "ace positivity" posts are now. sexual people care exactly as deeply about consent as ace people, because violations of their sexual boundaries are exactly as bad. any coercive sex that happens to an ace person would be equally as bad done to someone else. i wish i could point this out without being considered a traitor, because it comes up so, so often, always branded as harmless positivity. thanks for giving a platform to discussing this kind of issue

I definitely agree, and I think that there is a bit of echo chambering right now—kink communities, ace communities, feminists have all been deeply involved in advocating for nuance in consent, with past "No Means No" campaigns being only the most visible of a larger movement. In the ace community, I think many younger people tend to be unfamiliar with this, since a lot of the mainstream (feminist) fervor has died down, which is how we've reached the narrative of "no one cares about consent like asexuals do!" when that just.. isn't true.

(Though of course, this isn't a blanket truth, and awareness is corollary to time and place—I solidly remember the mid-2010s No Means No campaigns, and the complementary feminist arguments of Nothing But "Yes" Means "Yes".)

At the same time, as someone who has read up on kink (firsthand accounts and activism in addition to secondhand) and consent, I think it is notable that aces' approaches to consent tend to be different—not better, not worse, but different.

Let me start by describing my impression of consent in kink. I'm sure it varies (and I'd love to hear more of your personal input on this!), but the framework for consent that the kink community I've always seen has been, still, focused on implied positive consent—"your presence is an assumed yes, until proven otherwise through the use of a safe word." This isn't a monolith—and I know that there's been some critique of this from within the community—but that's the general impression I've gotten, and the one most others are probably familiar with. In such a framework, the emphasis is still on the verbal "No," assuming a non-verbal "Yes" up until.

By contrast, ace activism tends to emphasize implied negative consent—"your presence is NOT an assumed yes, and cannot be overwritten by anything less than enthusiastic consent." This is borrowing from feminism quite a bit—and to your point, obviously not all feminists are asexual!—but rather divergent from the model present in kink communities. The idea of non-verbal positive consent is questioned, and a higher focus is placed on identifying different forms of No.

In particular, mirroring feminist social analysis, an ace interpretation of consent might give focus to the social climate around consent, by looking at how an individual's ability to give negative consent (or even positive consent!) may be impacted by their cultural and interpersonal environment. That doesn't mean that only aces do this work, but in my experience, I see it discussed much more prominently within ace circles, without discount.

I want to elaborate on that a little further: aces are not the only one doing this work, but, visible conversations tack on language around positive consent and individual choice, which can feel alienating. It's true that many (presumed-)allosexual people care about consent, do good activism around consent, and reach the same conclusions as aces. However, dominant (allo) narratives of consent often fail to present the social aspects of consent which are at the heart of ace activism, and that's what ace positivity posts are writing in reaction to. When sex-positive feminism says, "Here's how to reach a safe and mutual 'Yes'!", that overlooks aces for whom 'Yes' is never the answer. When kink advocacy says "Just say 'No' if you feel uncomfortable," it can alienate aces who are trying to distinguish being comfortable with from desire.

(And, for the record, it's not just aces who are affected by this. I think we should expand our advocacy, to not assume that allosexuals are always comfortable, are always desiring. A severe limit of a lot of positivity is that it's identity-based—as if only aces need this advocacy, need the right to say No, need the right to not have a presumed Yes. But, that's another post.)

I don't think that this makes aces "more enlightened" or that feminist, kink, and other forms of advocacy aren't important, with their own goals and values. Ace activists shouldn't take a chauvinist stance when we talk about consent.

But, I won't discredit the work being done in ace communities, either. We should be mindful of our peers in other communities (and listen to those who are in both/multiple!), but keep moving, too.

-- mod banshee

[old-daemon-farts]

Daemonism Survey

I wanted to see if I could summarize my experience. I know I have long winded thoughts on many of these subjects. Figured others may enjoy reading my answers. Survey found at the bottom.

What is a dæmon to you? The subconscious speaking through inner monologues.

What makes a dæmon, a dæmon? A daemon provides a positive change in their person while also intrinsically being a part of who they are and their identity. You cannot have one without the other. I feel this being needs to be tied to the subconscious (or soul) and will use our inner monologue to communicate.

I am of the belief many different beings can play the role of a daemon. Tulpa, alters, other headmates, and spirits can match these qualifications. "Daemon" has always felt more like a job title or other very personal labels like pronouns or familial titles like "daughter" or "father". I think daemons can stem from too many things and how they connect within the mind to say for sure what is and is not a daemon.

What does dæmonism mean to you? Daemonism is cultivating our inner-self to be a companion who supports us, and in doing so we are learning how to support ourselves.

What is the purpose of dæmonism? To provide a healthy mindset. Can be focused on mental health or cognitive thinking. A healthy mindset for one may be self-improvement; for another it may be companionship and self-compassion; or perhaps they just need someone to help recall information. What daemonism is varies from person to person but to me the base line is you get into daemonism seeking something you feel is going to improve something about your life.

What is/are your dæmon(s) like? What is your dæmon's personality like? What are their likes and dislikes? This is the space for anything you want to share about how your dæmon behaves, thinks and feels! Thats a lot to put. So I will place what may make them different from other daemons. They are very self-focused on me. No matter their personality its always focused around what is best for me. What needs to be done for me. Their world revolves around me and they do not question nor hate it.

How did you meet your dæmon(s)? Inspired by His Dark Materials. Finished the 3rd book, tried to see my daemon, he laughed and the rest is history. I thought we were the only human/daemon pair at the time.

What is/are your dæmon(s)? Dæmons can be many things; a gateway to the subconscious, a personification of your conscience, the other half of your internal dialogue, a spiritual entity, or many other things besides. What is the nature of your dæmon? They are me. They are how I connect to my inner self/subconscious. At the moment they are a gateway rather than the full personification of my subconscious. Please see the answer for "how they are connected to me" for more examples.

What is/are your dæmon's gender(s), and how do they relate to and differ from your own? Mostly female. I use to think my daemons gender was my opposite, then I though I was the outcome of their genders, then I thought their gender supported my own. Now I think it just is another outcome of what my brain needed to be happy and healthy, and while my daemons genders never change future daemons may be influenced by the same factors.

How autonomous is/are your dæmon(s)? How independent and free-thinking is your dæmon; how much do they rely on you in order to exist and function? Autonomy is an illusion. Myself and my daemons will always be influenced by my subconscious and factors surrounding us. Their identities rely on my focus but who they are at the core and how they function is thoughtless. I can personify my heart and it can grow independent but as soon as I stop talking to my heart it doesn't stop beating. It just returns to what it was prior and continues its constant task of keeping the body going without needing any thought on the matter.

How is/are your dæmon(s) connected to you? Subconscious, inner monologues, and even intrusive thoughts. Anima/animus. ID/Ego/Super Ego/ Shadow, split-brain ... Basically if there is a term for connecting with any inner part of yourself or piece of our mind my daemons encompass or build upon that.

How do your dæmon(s) differ from you? They are very goal oriented and driven involving my life and health.

What are the similarities between you and your dæmon(s)? They reflect key parts of myself (good, bad, and desired). We all like and dislike similar things, look for similar things in life and friendship, share taste in fashion, food, and entertainment. Only time things vary are when my daemons reflect an extreme. Like Tess who loves physical activity. I'm not a fan of exercise or sports but I wish I was and so does my body and mind. So her favorite activities are not mine by choice but I know on a subconscious level I need to enjoy these more. There is always a connection so there will always be similarities.

How have your dæmon(s) changed since you first met them? They have changed as much as myself, as they grow the very same as I do effected by my surroundings and experiences. Cayde started just as childlike as myself and grew into an adult. My more recent daemons started based around emotions or specific traits and then grew to be far more complex. This is the nature of living, remaining static is nearly impossible.

Can your dæmon(s) front? Fronting: taking primary control of the physical body. I believe with practice they can but since they have very strong opinions about fronting will refrain from doing so. We have co-fronted to allow my daemon to speak louder and to use "mind-over-matter" to stop pain. But during co-fronting there is no physical control. It is only causing a shift in where my daemon lies on my consciousness.

What are your dæmon form(s)? They have many. Both animal and human.

What do your dæmon form(s) mean to you? Some represent who I am on a subconscious level, a deeply analyzed level, and a more surface level.

How did you find your dæmon form(s)? Some through created systems, others through daemon's choice, and one picked completely out of my or my daemon's control.

What do your dæmon form(s) say about your personality, if anything? One describes my behavior and how I interact with others. The other portrays how I am seen and my narrative in life.

How does your dæmon feel about their form(s)? They love all of them and the more meaning behind a form the prouder they are taking it.

What does it mean for a dæmon's form to be settled? Represents who I (or they) are for a set moment in time. Finding and being content with who we are and our identity.

What kind of forms has your dæmon taken in the past? A variety, mostly animals.

How did your dæmon(s) get their name(s)? Chosen together or they picked one they liked.

What do your dæmon(s) names mean to you? Not much. One of my daemons shares my name which is pretty cool but there is little meaning behind everyone's name.

Has your dæmon's name ever changed? If so, feel free to elaborate! Yes! My first daemon has gone through 3 name changed. First one didn't fit right, second lasted years but he got tired of seeing other people with it, so now he's on his third.

How did you first learn about dæmonism? I learned about daemons through His Dark Materials and daemonism through The Daemon Page.

What motivated you to try dæmonism? Loved the companionship daemons gave in the books

Has your experience of dæmonism changed since you first discovered it? If so, how? I take it far more seriously now as a tool for mental health and self-awareness. I just wanted a unique friend that was a talking animal in the beginning.  

How do your dæmon(s) affect and influence your everyday life? Hm, its so hard to say after living over half my life with one. But I'd say they influence my day just by helping me process everything?

How has dæmonism helped you? My daemons have taught me self-love, self-worth, pride, and acceptance.

What does the dæmian community mean to you? They are my home. Sometimes you leave home, and sometimes family upsets you, but you still feel drawn back no matter where you wander. The community is a family I have chosen and I will always feel a part of.

The survey this came from can be found here “ Daemon Survey “. If you are interested in sharing your thoughts please consider completing it, I know the creator would greatly appreciate it.

[im-the-punk-who]

Hi! I’m new to the fandom and I’m simply curious (not trying to start a feud or anything), why don’t you like Steinberg?

Hello dear anon! And welcome to the fandom! 

Oof. That’s a question. xD 

I’m going to try and stay as uh. neutral as possible. Because I’ve already written the post I know I failed but, the intent in answering this is also not to start a feud or hurt anyone’s feelings. 

Okay, so I got fairly negative in this chilis tonight, so I want to start by saying that even in light of the opinions I’m about to express, Black Sails is one of, if not my number one, favorite TV shows of all time. Certainly in recent memory - I’ve been hyperfixating on this show for 18 months with no sign of stopping, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for everyone who worked on the show - even Steinberg. (The one exclusion is Michael Bay, he can go twist.)

AND I think Stienberg is an incredibly talented writer. Black Sails is one of my favorite shows because it does such a wonderful job of weaving stories, creating characters, and melding things in a way that is both unexpected and makes sense narratively. I have changed as a person because of the show, and they will have to pry James McGraw and Thomas Hamilton from my cold dead knives-attached-to-them hands. None of what I’m going to say is meant to detract from that.

I will also say that a lot of these issues are not particular to Steinberg and are in fact a systemic problem with American TV + Film. And I’m not leaving Robert Levine out of my criticism, it’s just that Steinberg had the biggest hand in the pot(he wrote a full half the episodes) and a lot of what I’ve heard as far as talking about the show comes from Steinberg. So, he gets the brunt. But it isn’t that I think Steinberg was the only problematic element of the show. 

Also, these are all my opinions and are colored by how I interact with my fandoms. I am not only a fandom veteran, but I work and pretty much live in the entertainment industry. I work in indie film and theatre and am surrounded by artists and creators of all walks of life, like, constantly. I know what is possible, and when I see something that can be improved, I want to note it because it is important to me to always be striving forward. Like Miranda says about Thomas, this isn’t out of malice, or out of hate. It’s because I genuinely love this show, and I love entertainment as a whole, and I think in order to get to a better, more inclusive industry we have to have hard conversations and look critically at the media we consume, and it is frustrating to me to time and again see the same faces in the room. 

But if that isn’t your cuppa, that’s fine! Fandom isn’t meant to be stressful and if all you want to do is watch a show about gay pirates that is your tomato and I applaud you. Have at it you funky motherfucker.

OH! One more. At some point I’m going to talk about Silverflint. When I do, it is NOT meant as a ‘you shouldn’t/cant ship this’ or ‘this pairing is bad’ or any negative attack on the people who ship that pairing. My criticisms in this post are exclusively about what it means for Steinberg as a writer and Black Sails’ representation of gay and mlm men. While it’s not my cuppa, this is a sail your own ship blog. 

OKAY! SO! 

My main criticisms of Steinberg & Co boil down to:

The homozygosity of the writers and directors shows a complete lack of desire to include marginalized people in the writing of a show that is about them. Which leads to:

The centering of white men while choosing a historical setting and time period that was in fact dominated by people of color and specifically a black woman, 

The gratuitous inclusion of violence against women, particularly sexual violence, and again, that the female characters are often sidelined for the central male characters. 

SO.

Black Sails is a show centered around queer, female, and black leads, and yet there were only two non white-male directors (one bi-racial man and one white woman) and only 7 female writers - one of whom was Latina. The entire rest of the major creative staff was white men. I’m not going to comment on sexualities but none of the writers or directors are out as queer according to a quick google search. 

Let me reiterate the important bit there. 

In Black Sails, where the last two seasons specifically feature around a real, actually-happened-in-history event that shaped black history in the Caribbean, there was not a single black writer on the entire show. 

This is the main difference between inclusion for inclusion’s sake, and actually centering marginalized voices. Black Sails has a ton of gay, POC, and female rep in front of the camera but practically zero representation behind it, which leads to storylines and implications that Steinberg and his writers, as white men, simply would never realize.

It’s like why Silver and Miranda never realized the true reasons James was waging war on England. They just did not have the life experiences to realize they were missing a piece of the puzzle, and so they filled in their own without even realizing they’d done so. 

Because no one in the room of Black Sails was a part of these marginalized identities, nuances get lost or mistranslated, motivations get muddled through a white man’s gaze(or a straight person’s) and implications that someone within those communities might think is obvious won’t even come up.

And again, because there were no writers or directors of color in the last two seasons (the biracial man directed episodes 2x02 and 2x04 - WHICH MAKES SENSE IMO) the entirety of the historical lore that the show bases itself on in its latter half is filtered through a white man’s lens. And so there is no discussion of how changing something changes the meaning, how leaving someone out or changing their role to be more minor might affect people for whom that is their heritage. How the entire story they’re telling might change with one simple exclusion or addition.

So, how does this relate directly to Steinberg, you ask? Well, simply, because it was his show. 

Steinberg(and Levine) were involved in every major decision about the show, from its conception, to the script, to choosing the writers and directors. They chose how they wanted the show to look, to think, what stories to tell and how they wanted to tell them. Their decisions(and the biases that formed those decisions) are woven into the show.

And look. I don’t for a second believe any of this was willful or malicious. I don’t think that John Steinberg and Robert Levine sat down one day and said ‘you know what would make the gays really angry? If we locked the only two canonically gay men up in a prison camp.’

But the decisions that were made in the show were based in ignorance in a way that shows more than just simple negligence or laziness(especially given the attention to detail in everything else). The things they leave out or change in the Maroon War plotline for instance are not small details easily missed. They are big, giant waving flags. They are things that are irreplaceable to still have the same events and stories and tell them respectfully. 

It shows an insane amount of privilege to, for instance, write a show airing during a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was at the forefront of the American conscience, include black characters and black storylines, and yet not include a single black voice on their creative team. 

In a show that centers a gay man’s love and his journey in attempting to process the horrible things done to him and his lover because of it, we are given just forty minutes of the entire show dedicated to their relationship - and just fifteen of those minutes actually feature the lover! 

(Relatedly, the entirety of the gay romantic rep is two kisses, and a forehead touch. That’s the entirety of your gay intimacy representation. And yet there are in the first two seasons alone - because that’s all I’ve clocked so far - something like twenty seven minutes of scenes involving a naked or half naked woman. Five minutes of that is explicitly wlw sex.

Again, I just want to reiterate this because it’s important in recognizing bias. 

There is fully twice as much female nudity in the first two seasons, as the entirety of the time the two gay characters have together on screen. )

Steinberg is a perfect example of how a lack of understanding why the diversity you are representing is important, matters. I dislike Steinberg because he, just like every other straight white cis man I have known, profited off of marginalized voices without including them or creating with them in mind.

Art does not exist in a vacuum. You cannot create something - especially something as back breakingly, intensely a labor of love as Black Sails - without putting several pieces of yourself into it. But those pieces color your narrative. They will expose things about you that you don’t even realize. And it’s in these places we are weakest, and why a diverse group of writers with a diverse group of experiences can help a piece be stronger. But for whatever reason, John Steinberg thought that he could make art with only people who looked and thought and experienced like him. 

The lack of representation behind the camera in Black Sails was evident in front of it and yet Steinberg is out here getting to pretend like he created the most inclusive groundbreaking show that ever existed. It is important to me, personally, to acknowledge that. And that it kind of makes my skin crawl in the way all media made by straight white (cis)men makes my skin crawl. I wish I didn’t have to feel that way about my favorite tv show just because it was created by a man of privilege, but here we are.

SO. I hope that helped? Feel free to take what you want and leave what you don’t! 

Below the cut is a more in depth look at things that I think show what I’m talking about, but that up there ^^ is the gist. <3 |D

SURPRISE!

The Maroons and the Maroon War

So the first thing I want to point out is that the Maroon War was a real thing that happened. It lasted ten years, and resulted in the most substantial victory the Maroons ever achieved against the British. Not only that, there was in fact a KICKIN’ badass female leader of the maroons named Queen Nanny, who is to this day honored as a national hero in Jamaica. While they weren’t able to drive the British out, the outcome of this war led to a mostly self-governing Maroon population in Jamaica from the mid 1700s on. This was a long term fight that had a very tangible and real outcome, even if it didn’t end in the destruction of colonialism. 

And what is this war turned into in Black Sails? A white ‘madman’s revenge’  that is doomed to failure after six months.

That, my dear pirates, is a problem for me. (And those familiar with my brand of spiceyness know that I do not ascribe to the ‘Flint is a Madman’ trope, but that IS what Steinberg ascribes to, what he seems to have written the show thinking.) 

There was no narrative reason to include the Maroon War in the narrative of Black Sails. The Maroon War didn’t happen until a decade after the Golden Age of Piracy, and aside from Silver’s wife being a black woman there is no mention of Silver ever having contact with them. To me, this feels like the choice of a showrunner who found a cool historical event and saw a chance to up the stakes of their white male heroes while getting in some sweet sweet POC rep. 

Except that they then took the major events of the Maroon War and gave them to their white characters, Flint and Silver. 

Here’s the thing. If you’re going to take a piece of culturally important history and use it for your show, you NEED to have sensitivity writers. You need to have people who are at least familiar with those events and who care about them to do them justice. Have an expert come in and read your script or go over your ideas. Or just like. Hire a black writer. Hire ONE black writer. As a treat.

The important Maroon figures, Nanny, Cudjoe, and Quao, all get sidelined or ‘sexified’ and then used as plot points for the white characters. Nanny gets split into two women - the older mother queen and Madi, the young naive warbent visionary. Quao(Mr. Scott is the closest, or Kofi possibly) gets killed off because the writers realized they didn’t exactly have a place for him in their writing. Cudjoe(Julius) gets a few scenes and one good speech but his entire role in the war gets given to Silver. And THEN. That sexy Queen Madi figure gets used as emotional bait for Silver and then has to learn he has betrayed her and destroyed the hope and freedom she had wanted to bring to her people. 

Gross, pirates. Gross.

Anne Bonny/Max/Mary Read - a heads up, this section includes a semi in-depth discussion of both Max and Anne’s sexual assaults. If that bothers you, the paragraphs talking about that begin with a ***

COOL NOW LET’S TALK ABOUT LESBIANS. Words my 20 year old self would never have imagined coming out of my mouth. 

Specifically, I want to talk about Max, and Anne, and their backstories both involving extreme sexual trauma at the hands of men. And then Mary Read and the once again sexification of female characters.

(Actually while I’m here another criticism I have of Steinberg is that his writing does not seem to recognize how queer people existed in the past - again, likely because he didn’t have any gay historians to be like ‘actually buddy that doesn’t make sense also why is Anne not dressing as a man? If you want to fuck with anything and insert modern day terminology and ideas into this show, make her non binary and REALLY piss off the hetties.’)

(This same ficitonal gay dramaturg who is definitely not me has also questioned John Steinberg repeatedly about where Mary Read is, unsatisfied with the answer ‘well we wanted her to be hot so we made her a sex worker and then had Anne have to rescue her but then we realized it would be weird not to include her actual character so we gave her a five second cameo at the very end of the series and also made her like 13.’)

Anyway! So my main point in bringing up Anne and Max is the sexual trauma they are exposed to in the show, particularly being that they are the two primary wlw in the show, who Steinberg has said he views as being completely gay, and what THAT whole unexamined idea looks like. 

***Max. My dear Max. There was literally no reason to have her be repeatedly r*ped(and for the love of god there was even less reason to make it that gratuitous and graphic). Max being assaulted like that did not add anything to the gravity of Eleanor’s betrayal. The traumatic event was being tossed aside by Eleanor, and that could have been just as emotionally damaging without the sexual assault. And the only reason for her to be continually assaulted was to bring her and Anne together. 

***The reason imo that Max’s r*pe plot was added was because it was the only thing these white straight men could come up with that felt emotionally damaging enough to them. The act of betrayal itself wasn’t enough, the act of being thrown away, of having a lover put your life in danger because of her own ambitions wasn’t enough, they needed her to be r*ped to really drive home the point. 

***Anne, on the other hand, is never shown being sexually abused, but we are given an explicit account of her own traumatic history and how Jack saved her from this vile beast who was passing her around to his friends.

But here’s the thing pirates - that never happened. According to every account we have of Anne Bonny, she chose her husband, and married him against her father’s wishes. They were probably relatively happy until her husband started being a pirate spy and Anne started cheating on him with Jack. 

And yes, when they were found out. Her husband had her beat. That’s not fucking cool, and if they really wanted to go the damsel in distress route they still could have had Jack ‘save’ her from that. But at no point was she sexually abused by her husband(at least not in any accounts I’ve read.) 

You know who did likely sexually abuse her or at least manipulate her and Mary for his own benefit? If you guessed our Rat man Jack Rackham, you would be correct, because when he found out about Mary and Anne’s (supposed, but probably real) relationship, it’s implied he extorted both of them into fucking him to keep their secret from the crew. 

The addition of sexual abuse to Anne’s past isn’t done to be true to her character and was in fact explicitly untrue. Now of course I don’t know the reasons why they chose to do this, but I can guess. Just as with Max, the most traumatic thing a male writer can think of for a female character is for them to be sexually abused.

And the most disturbing part of this to me? The parallels it has to the real world of why straight men think lesbians exist. These characters who would be called man haters in present day are given these incredibly traumatic man-centered histories. It brings up something very uncomfortable in me about particularly wlw sexuality being viewed as a reaction to trauma at the hands of men. It’s just gross, I dont like it, and honestly there is no fucking excuse for it besides a room full of white straight men writing this bullshit. A room that Steinberg chose, because they fit his ideas.

In Fact heck, the women of Black Sails in general

***I honestly struggle to think of a single female character who I think was treated fairly in Black Sails. Miranda and Eleanor are killed for taking sides and not understanding their partners, Madi is betrayed in the worst way possible, Max is given a pseudo empowering ending but has that fucking terrible start. Idelle ends off fairly well, but tied to a man she may or may not have any actual feelings for, in what is essentially a political marriage. And Anne has her entire identity tied to a man who will be dead in two years as she is robbed of any agency whatsoever without him. (Oh, and the whole r*pe thing. And also her support for Max’s r*pe or death until she started having fee-fees. Who wrote this stuff. >_>)

Even though the characterization of each and every one of these women is PHENOMENAL - and again I will repeat that I absolutely LOVE these characters as they exist in a vacuum. I think they are well rounded, real, feeling people given motivations and drives and FEELINGS and they SHOW THEIR ANGER and i LOVE THEM. 

But the show punishes them for it. Miranda is essentially fridged to move Flint’s storyline along, and to make room for Silver. Eleanor is killed for the emotional damage it will cause Rogers. Madi is placed at the center of a conflict she explicitly says she is willing to die for and then not only is her entire cause taken from her, but when she tells Silver to fuck off he - in possibly the most predictable white man move ever - says ‘no i will stay until you change your mind. I will never leave you. I don’t care about your choice in this matter, I will wait forever for you. I’m your biggest fan. I’ll follow you until you love me. papa, - paparazzi.’ 

And I touched on this before, but I want to talk in more detail about what is possibly my hottest take to date, the sexification of Mary Read and Queen Nanny, as they are presented in the show. 

Max is to Anne what Mary Read is, historically. She is the lover that Jack Rackham discovers with Anne, and then he joins them in their bed. They form a triumvirate that upholds Jack at the expense of the women. But for some reason, Steinberg didn’t want to just include Mary Read as an actual character. For some reason he needed to make Anne’s love interest a sex worker who was in need of saving (and who, coincidentally, we never see working the brothel after she becomes lovers with Anne, because she is now a madam. :) Gross.)

And Madi. My dear sweet fucking Madi who didn’t fucking deserve any of this bullshit send tweet. 

So, historically, Queen Nanny was the Queen, spiritual advisor, and the military tactician of the Windward Maroons. She would have filled both Madi and the Queen’s character roles(and Flint’s, but who’s counting. A BLACK GAY LEAD? Inconceivable. I digress.) But, I guess, because they were wishy-washing with Silver’s sexuality or felt they needed to give him a female love interest because of Treasure Island, or because they were leaning a bit too hard into the gay shit and needed to backpedal, they took Queen Nanny and split her into a character who is for all intents and purposes powerless in the war and Madi, who is young and naive and does not have any real world experience outside of the Maroon camp.

Because that’s sexy, or something. They could have had the Maroon Queen be a fucking badass lady who works and fights alongside Flint and Silver and one ups them and teaches them shit and has her own ideas about where the British can stick it, but instead they made her into the perfect caricature of a female monarch, letting the big strong men handle the dirty work or something. Because white male power fantasies. 

Just let women be powerful and not nubile and let them have character arcs over fucking thirty and let them be CENTERED in their own. fucking. narratives. 

God damnit Steinberg.

James Flint, mlm extraordinaire

Oh, my love. My most amazing child. The light of my life. My purest cinnamon roll. 

~~And now we’ve come to the dreaded Silverflint criticism part of our programming. Please please know and remember this isn’t a criticism of people who ship Silverflint. As I said up top, Your Tomato Is Not My Tomato and that’s cool. Please don’t take this next part as an attack on Silverflint as a fandom ship.~~

My criticism of Steinberg as it relates to Flint is related to:

What a romantic/sexual relationship with Silver being the basis of the tension and plot means for Flint in particular as a gay or mostly mlm man. 

Refusing to confirm Thomas and James being alive at the end and honestly the whole finale in general but like I’ll try and focus.

The major problem I have with Silver and Flint being coded as in love with each other is the implications there in terms of gay men’s relationships to other men. 

From every corner, men are inundated with the idea that any close relationship between them must be gay. That intimacy cannot exist unless there are sexual feelings involved. That a relationship cannot be close, deep and soul shattering and life altering, unless one guy secretly(or not so secretly) wants to bone the other dude. That two men cannot value each other as partners or friends or truly know each other unless they are gay.

Seeing both of the meaningful relationships Flint forms with other men be sexually coded feels a bit the same way as Anne and Max’s sexual assault plotlines does vis-a-vis being wlw. (Even with Gates, Flint never spoke about Thomas or his plans - Silver is absolutely the closest person to Flint besides Thomas and Miranda.) And this is just as true for Silver. Having both Flint and Madi - the two people he trusts - both be people he’s in love with also just feels. I don’t know. 

It feels like a confusion between male intimacy and male love that is so so familiar to me as a gay man I could choke on it. Where they wanted these men to have a deep and really lasting connection, but could only figure out how to do it if they were in love. Friendship wouldn’t have been enough - only romantic and sexual love is enough for the gay man(or men, at all).

Just because it isn’t queerbaiting doesn’t mean it’s good rep, and I would have liked to see truly deep male friendships that did not center on sexual attraction - particularly for Flint as a confirmed mlm(and Silver too, if you’re counting him. The same arguments for why I dislike Flint being paired with Silver are also true in the reverse.) 

Even if both Flint and Silver were confirmed mlm I still would have LOVED to see a platonic relationship between them. In fact I would have loved that EVEN MORE. Men! Who fuck men! Not needing to fuck each other to be important to one another! Who made this. Very delicious. 

But because there weren’t any queer writers on the show, writers who understand this kind of struggle that gay and mlm men face, they thought ‘oh, let’s also have them be in love with each other. More gay rep is better gay rep, right?’ False. THOUGHTFUL gay rep is better gay rep.

Okay and here’s my last thing. The fact that Steinberg refuses to say whether or not the explicitly mlm men are alive at the end of the show - that the words he specifically uses are ‘up for interpretation’ is. Fuck, it’s gross, okay? It’s fucking gross. 

I have been around enough men, enough people in power, enough people with leverage who also know how to play the field, to know that when someone wants a group’s support but does not agree with them, their go to phrasing is that it is ‘up for debate’ or ‘up for interpretation.’

Say the gays are alive. Steinberg refusing to acknowledge the reality of the ending of his show to maintain his own sense of artistic integrity is what, honestly, really sets me off about him and I don’t care if this is a nuanced take.

Like yes, death of the author. I honestly don’t care if he thinks they’re dead or alive. What I care about is that he thinks he can get away with being clever and leaning hard into a story is true/untrue’ - doesn’t realize what the implications of that are, and didn’t when he was writing, and didn’t have anyone else in the room who would think about it either. 

ANYWAY. So this is....my long drawn out explanation for why I do not like Steinberg. Uhhhhh tune in next week for more of my totally unpopular opinions!

[inspired-by-the-music]

y’all know I can’t control myself when shinee loving anon encourages me to do literary analysis! here are nearly 2,000 words of me analyzing my own writing like a weirdo :p because this is not the first time I have done literary alaysis of my own work, and it certainly won’t be the last (I’m already working on a thesis statement that could connect themes from the SHINee universe to at least 2/3 main plots of For You), I’ve decided to make a little banner for these essays lol. 

First, some disclaimers: For You is an ongoing work. It might be an ongoing work for the rest of forever because Lei provides a perfect character through which I can explore S.M. In case you haven’t gathered from scrolling through my blog for a few seconds — I am a huge S.M. fan. With that being said, the main plot of 4 O’Clock is completed. This informal essay will discuss similarities between 4 O’Clock and works in the SHINee Universe.

I think I should begin by expressing my deep attachment to Taemin that is reflected in my writing. He is the first SHINee member that I wrote about; that drabble resulted in my friendship with SHINee Loving Anon and inspired my confidence to write about all five SHINee members. “Beautiful Parts” should be read as what it is: my reunion with my favorite group. Writing that story was therapeutic; it ranks with “Between Souls - Jonghyun,” “Lights - Taeyeon,” and “Orenda - Onew.” All of these works were written with my emotional needs in mind. They are deeply personal, and that’s why I love them. I created them with the intent of bringing myself comfort, and I shared them with the hope of extending that comfort to others. 

“Beautiful Parts” also represents the shift toward Taemin becoming one of my ultimate idols and creative inspirations. When I could not yet write about Jonghyun, I could write about Taemin; when I could not yet listen to Jonghyun or SHINee without hurting, I could listen to Taemin. The image that I created of Taemin comforting someone — an unnamed reader — in “Beautiful Parts” remains with me. I can’t unsee it. It is obviously not a moment that I have lived through, but it feels real to me.

That image is integral to the relationship between Taemin and Lei. Comfort —  the fact that Taemin sat beside her when she cried — is a key component of Lei’s love for him. 

One could and should find similarities between the unnamed character of “Beautiful Parts” and Lei. Granted, “Beautiful Parts” is a part of the SHINee Universe. The character is Minho’s sister; although much of her character is intentionally vague, she is a separate character from Lei. She could and should, however, be read as a precursor to Lei. Both characters seek the company of the moon when they are troubled and cannot sleep. They share a desire — a compulsion, even — to reach for the moon and stars that they know they can never reach. 

“What’s so comforting about the moon and the single star in the sky? How can they be so far, lightyears away, yet feel so close? Why did they convince you to lean against the railing, reaching for them like a child with no understanding of the distance? You couldn’t say, even though you wondered almost every night.” “Beautiful Parts”

“The stars were on full display, and the moon was a sterling crescent so bright that I thought, were my wrists not bound, I could have reached out and grabbed it out of the sky and put it in my pocket.

That was a silly thought I dreamt about often: holding the moon, carrying it around with me in the daylight as if I could protect it better than the sky. I don't know who planted that dream in my mind or why, but I was always grateful for it" (4 O'Clock, Chapter 2). 

If you read 4 O'Clock, you cannot mistake the significance of the moon; Lei will not let you. In third-person or second-person narratives— like "Beautiful Parts"— I think that it would cheapen the story to overtly impress upon the reader the significance of a symbol. Put simply: if the second- or third-person narrator has to explain, "this is significant because," then the writer has failed in their application or execution of a symbol. However, as Lei is a first-person narrator relating her story to her mother, she is permitted to express plainly, "this is important— this is important, and this is why." She does exactly that by referring to the moon, in later chapters, as "our moon," meaning that she has claimed this symbol as hers and Taemin's. 

This claim of ownership becomes especially significant as Lei struggles to confine her love for Taemin to times when it is safe to express— at night in their hotel room or, in post-tour chapters, in her room. This distinction is also expressed in "Beautiful parts" compared to its counterpart "Morning Confessions." I used "Morning Confession" as a guide in writing the morning scenes of 4 O'Clock Chapter 9, Chapter 12, Chapter 14, and part 6 of the Epilogue. In all of these scenes referenced, there is a clear shift between the night— when a character receives comfort— and the morning— when that comfort is reciprocated, usually through some form of affection. 

The exception is the scene from Chapter 9. This part of the story occurs before the New Year's kiss that dispels much of Lei's discomfort about being in a relationship. Within this scene, Lei is torn between the desire to share her first kiss with Taemin and the desire to escape his embrace and start her day. Notice, then, that Lei is imposing this binary of day and night. (Granted, Lei believes that this binary is imposed upon her by external forces. I am inclined to agree that she is limited in self-expression by the pressures of standing in the public eye. Using my author knowledge of her life, I would also argue that her fears and reservations are rooted in real-life experiences; those are always the hardest fears to shake.)

Another interesting observation is that this scene from Chapter 9 is sandwiched between Lei's comforting Taemin post-Jaemin-induced-tantrum and the tense bathroom scene where Lei object to the terms "mine" and "yours" when referring to another person. 

"That's something I've always struggled to accept: the idea of calling somebody— a whole individual— mine. I know some people are infatuated with the idea of ownership, but that kind of dynamic has always made my skin crawl." 

"It's just, those words— mine and yours—" I cringed, and Taemin dropped my hands. "I don't know. I think it's fine to call you my soulmate or my boyfriend, if that's what you are, but the thought of calling you— all of you— mine just seems wrong'" (4 O'Clock, Chapter 9). 

Note: Lei does not yet accept that Taemin is her soulmate. These quotes are indicative of Lei's character as they express her deepest fears. Consider that 4 O'Clock— while it is about Lei's love for Taemin, and it is about Donghae's unrequited (totally requited) love for Manager Kim— is ultimately about Lei's liberation from fear. Certainly, Taemin places a role in that liberation; Lei states far too many times to reference that he was an inspiration to her before she knew him as anything more than an idol. However, one would be remiss in failing to recognize the relationship through which Lei discovers herself: her relationship with her mother. 

(If you need proof of this claim, and I seriously doubt you do, here is a quote from Chapter 10: 

"I had been considering what it meant to be the fulfillment of her dreams, and it meant that I couldn’t be afraid. It meant I didn’t have to be. There was liberation in the fact that I could be confident in the truth that no matter what anybody in that hotel room, in the country, in the whole world even (!) said or thought or did, I now knew who I was. I knew who Mom was. I knew that no matter what— come what may— we would love each other forever. 

All along, I had the forever love I couldn’t admit to wanting. . .") 

The whole "'mine' and 'yours' makes me cringe" scene occurs right before Lei admits to her mother that she knows who she is: the idol who never debuted. Throughout most of the story, Lei refers to her mother as "Mom," capital-M, as if "Mom" is her birth name. There are scattered incidents where Lei writes "my mom," but she usually does so to distinguish her relationship with Mom and the one Lucas claims by using the name. 

"Were I not used to that— Lucas referring to my mother as if she were also his, calling her hot— I might have cringed" (4 O'Clock, Chapter 1). 

This use of the phrase "my mother" should be viewed in contrast to Lei's use of the phrase "my mom" in chapter 9. 

"No. No, I knew my mom. I knew her long before I saw her as the idol who never debuted. She had eyes that found possibilities where others saw none. There was no way that she hadn't considered how the last 21 years of her life had been affected by my existence" (4 O’Clock, Chapter 9). 

By using the word "my," Lei does not take ownership of the relationship— or of her mother as a whole individual— in a way that should make anybody's skin crawl. Rather, she uses that word to distinguish her Mom from the idol who never debuted. "My" is a protective word— a word through which Lei can shield her mother from judgment. Distinction of identities matters deeply to Lei because she feels that she is inadequate in her roles as an idol and as a human being. 

She writes when reflecting on Kai's request to be called Jongin that she has always been hyper-sensitive to the difference between calling an artist by their stage name and their birth name. Considering whether she should have used a stage name herself, Lei wonders: 

"Would that have made it easier to distinguish me (the person) from me (the idol)?" (4 O’Clock, Chapter 2). 

It is crucial to understand these distinctions of identities and their significance to Lei if you are to feel the weight of a post-New Year's- Kiss moment:

"That time, when Taemin whispered, “My Lei,” against my skin, I didn’t cringe at the thought that I— all of me, every thought locked away in my mind, every fear hidden in the darkest corners of my heart— belonged to him. 

Maybe that’s not the best way to phrase it. Maybe I mean to say that I didn’t cringe at the thought that all of me, even the parts that I considered fruitless or dangerous or flawed, belonged with Taemin. I don’t know" (4 O’Clock, Chapter 14)."

There's our Lei, still caught up in things like proper wording! Also significant is Lei's limited use of the phrase "my Taemin." She thinks it for the first time shortly before the scene quoted above; she doesn't say it aloud until the next day. We could take this, I suppose, as another example of the binary of day and night that culminates in Lei's decision to "live in the light," expressed in the closing chapters. 

[terramythos]

TerraMythos' 2020 Reading Challenge - Book 22 of 26

Title: House of Leaves (2000) 

Author: Mark Z. Danielewski

Genre/Tags: Horror, Fiction, Metafiction, Weird, First-Person, Third-Person, Unreliable Narrator 

Rating: 6/10

Date Began: 7/28/2020

Date Finished: 8/09/2020

House of Leaves follows two narrative threads. One is the story of Johnny Truant, a burnout in his mid-twenties who finds a giant manuscript written by a deceased, blind hermit named Zampanò. The second is said manuscript -- The Navidson Record -- a pseudo-academic analysis of a found-footage horror film that doesn’t seem to exist. In it, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson moves into a suburban home in Virginia with his partner Karen and their two children. Navidson soon makes the uncomfortable discovery that his new house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Over time he discovers more oddities -- a closet that wasn’t there before, and eventually a door that leads into an impossibly vast, dark series of rooms and hallways. 

While Johnny grows more obsessed with the work, his life begins to take a turn for the worse, as told in the footnotes of The Navidson Record. At the same time, the mysteries of the impossible, sinister house on Ash Tree Lane continue to deepen. 

To get a better idea try this: focus on these words, and whatever you do don’t let your eyes wander past the perimeter of this page. Now imagine just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can’t see it, something is quietly closing in on you, so quiet in fact you can only hear it as silence. Find those pockets without sound. That’s where it is. Right at this moment. But don’t look. Keep your eyes here. Now take a deep breath. Go ahead and take an even deeper one. Only this time as you start to exhale try to imagine how fast it will happen, how hard it’s gonna hit you, how many times it will stab your jugular with its teeth or are they nails? don’t worry, that particular detail doesn’t matter, because before you have time to even process that you should be moving, you should be running, you should at the very least be flinging up your arms--you sure as hell should be getting rid of this book-- you won’t have time to even scream. 

Don’t look. 

I didn’t. 

Of course I looked. 

Some story spoilers under the cut. 

Whoo boy do I feel torn on this one. House of Leaves contains some really intriguing ideas, and when it’s done right, it’s some of the best stuff out there. Unfortunately, there are also several questionable choices and narrative decisions that, for me, tarnish the overall experience. It’s certainly an interesting read, even if the whole is ultimately less than the sum of its parts. 

First of all, I can see why people don’t like this book, or give up on it early (for me this was attempt number three). Despite an interesting concept and framing device, the first third or so of the book is pretty boring. Johnny is just not an interesting character. He does a lot of drugs and has a lot of (pretty unpleasant) sex and... that’s pretty much it, at least at the beginning. There’s occasional horror sections that are more interesting, where Johnny’s convinced he’s being hunted by something, but they’re few and far between. Meanwhile, the story in The Navidson Record seems content to focus on the relationship issues between two affluent suburbanites rather than the much more interesting, physically impossible house they live in. The early “exploration” sections are a little bit better, but overall I feel the opening act neglects the interesting premise. 

However, unlike many, I love the gimmick. The academic presentation of the Navidson story is replete with extensive (fake) footnotes,and there’s tons of self-indulgent rambling in both stories. I personally find it hilarious; it’s an intentionally dense parody of modern academic writing. Readers will note early that the typographical format is nonstandard, with the multiple concurrent stories denoted by different typefaces, certain words in color, footnotes within footnotes, etc. House of Leaves eventually goes off the chain with this concept, gracing us with pages that look like (minor spoilers) this or this. This leads into the best part of this book, namely... 

Its visual presentation! House of Leaves excels in conveying story and feeling through formatting decisions. The first picture I linked is one of many like it in a chapter about labyrinths. And reading it feels like navigating a labyrinth! It features a key “story”, but also daunting, multi-page lists of irrelevant names, buildings, architectural terms, etc. There are footnotes that don’t exist, then footnote citations that don’t seem to exist until one finds them later in the chapter. All this while physically turning the book or even grabbing a mirror to read certain passages. In short, it feels like navigating the twists, turns, and dead ends of a labyrinth. And that’s just one example -- other chapters utilize placement of the text to show where a character is in relation to others, what kind of things are happening around them, and so on. One chapter near the end features a square of text that gets progressively smaller as one turns the pages, which mirrors the claustrophobic feel of the narrative events. This is the coolest shit to me; I adore when a work utilizes its format to convey certain story elements. I usually see this in poetry and video games, but this is the first time I’ve seen it done so well in long-form fiction. City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer, both of which I reviewed earlier this year, do something similar, and are clearly inspired by House of Leaves in more ways than one. 

And yes, the story does get a little better, though it never wows me. The central horror story is not overtly scary, but eeriness suffices, and I have a soft spot for architectural horror. Even Johnny and the Navidsons become more interesting characters over time. For example, I find Karen pretty annoying and generic for most of the book, but her development in later chapters makes her much more interesting. While I question the practical need for Johnny’s frame story, it does become more engaging as he descends into paranoia and madness.

So why the relatively low rating? Well... as I alluded to earlier, there’s some questionable stuff in House of Leaves that leaves (...hah?) a bad taste in my mouth. The first is a heavy focus on sexual violence against women. I did some extensive thinking on this throughout my read, but I just cannot find a valid reason for it. The subject feels thrown in for pure shock value, and especially from a male author, it seems tacky and voyeuristic. If it came up once or twice I’d probably be able to stomach this more easily, but it’s persistent throughout the story, and doesn’t contribute anything to the plot or horror (not that that would really make it better). I’m not saying books can’t have that content, but it’s just not explored in any meaningful way, and it feels cheap and shitty to throw it in something that traumatizing just to shock the audience. It’s like a bad jump scare but worse on every level. There’s even a part near the end written in code, which I took the time to decode, only to discover it’s yet another example of this. Like, really, dude? 

Second, this book’s portrayal of mental illness is not great. (major spoilers for Johnny’s arc.) One of the main things about Johnny’s story is he’s an unreliable narrator. From the outset, Johnny has occasional passages that can either be interpreted as genuine horror, or delusional breaks from reality. Reality vs unreality is a core theme throughout both stories. Is The Navidson Record real despite all evidence to the contrary? Is it real as in “is the film an actual thing” or “the events of the film are an actual thing”? and so on and so forth. Johnny’s sections mirror this; he’ll describe certain events, then later state they didn’t happen, contradict himself, or even describe a traumatic event through a made-up story. Eventually, the reader figures out parts of Johnny’s actual backstory, namely that when he was a small child, his mother was institutionalized for violent schizophrenia. Perhaps you can see where this is going... 

Schizophrenia-as-horror is ridiculously overdone. But it also demonizes mental illness, and schizophrenia in particular, in a way that is actively harmful. Don’t misunderstand me, horror can be a great way to explore mental illness, but when it’s done wrong? Woof. Unfortunately House of Leaves doesn’t do it justice. While it avoids some cliches, it equates the horror elements of Johnny’s story to the emergence of his latent schizophrenia. This isn’t outwardly stated, and there are multiple interpretations of most of the story, but in lieu of solid and provable horror, it’s the most reasonable and consistent explanation. There’s also an emphasis on violent outbursts related to schizophrenia, which just isn’t an accurate portrayal of the condition. 

To Danielewski’s credit, it’s not entirely black and white. We do see how Johnny’s descent into paranoia negatively affects his life and interpersonal relationships. There’s a bonus section where we see all the letters Johnny’s mother wrote him while in the mental hospital, and we can see her love and compassion for him in parallel to the mental illness. But the experimental typographical style returns here to depict just how “scary” schizophrenia is, and that comes off as tacky to me. I think this is probably an example of a piece of media not aging well (after all, this book just turned 20), and there’s been a definite move away from this kind of thing in horror, but that doesn’t change the impression it leaves. For a book as supposedly original/groundbreaking as this, defaulting to standard bad horror tropes is disappointing. And using “it was schizophrenia all along” to explain the horror elements in Johnny’s story feels like a cop-out. I wish there was more mystery here, or alternate interpretations that actually make sense. 

Overall The Navidson Record part of the story feels more satisfying. I actually like that there isn’t a direct explanation for everything that happens. It feels like a more genuine horror story, regardless of whether you interpret it as a work of fiction within the story or not. There’s evidence for both. Part of me wishes the book had ended when this story ends (it doesn’t), or that the framing device with Johnny was absent, or something along those lines. Oh well-- this is the story we got, for better or worse. 

I don’t regret reading House of Leaves, and it’s certainly impressive for a debut novel. If you’re looking for a horror-flavored work of metafiction, it’s a valid place to start. I think the experimental style is a genuine treat to read, and perhaps the negative aspects won’t hit you as hard as they did to me. But I can definitely see why this book is controversial. 

[fantasyresident]

My Review For Pokemon Sword and Shield (Spoiler-Free)

The road to Sword and Shield could be considered interesting to say the least. Shit hit the fan with everyone’s accusations, complaints, and grievances before the game even came out. Death threats, fake leaks, ridiculous critics, you name it. As a dedicated Pokemon fan, I saw huge potential with Sword and Shield, and I have officially completed Shield just a couple days ago. Reviews from official critics like IGN and Gamespot mainly praise the game giving it scores of 9.3 and 9 respectively. But then others off to the side of these major critics are saying the game “isn’t worth the $60″. I can say after playing the game myself to its completion (plus some) that the game is definitely in my view worth the money. I will break down my opinions of these entries by categories of Mechanics (how well the game works, how much gameplay there is, and how valuable the gameplay aspects are) Story (how good and effective the plot of the game is) Characters (how good the characters within the plot are) Dialogue (how good the writing of the game is) and Visuals (how good the game looks from a visual perspective). Here I go.

Mechanics: (9.1/10)

Sword and Shield is jam-packed with excellent features and gameplay elements to endlessly enjoy. The new Pokemon Camp feature is the best, most interactive way of playing and building your friendship with your Pokemon. The curry cooking is very simple, but it is more interactive then just giving a floating PokePuff or Bean to a Pokemon and having them chew it slowly right in front of you only to give it yet another one until they cannot eat anymore. You can throw a ball to have your Pokemon play fetch with you, speak to your Pokemon, and have them play with the little wand toy. While you cannot pet your Pokemon like in the past, the new features feels so fresh and even just watching your favorite Pokemon interact on their own is a worthy replacement for old systems like Amie and Refresh. Aside from Camping, the Gym Challenge was by far one of the best features. Gyms actually for the first time ever felt like full-fledged Gyms. Each Gym has their own special challenge in the beginning, and each one helped diversify the experience rather than tossing you into a room with randomly arranged trainers and the Gym Leader standing at the end waiting for you to get through the maze. I particularly loved Allister’s Gym Challenge, but every one of the challenges was a fun light-hearted experience. Many nuisances from the game that lingered in the past main titles have been removed, like no longer having to farm heart scales just to experiment with different move sets, having a Pokeball throwing shortcut, having a name rater posted in every Pokemon center, and many other quality of life improvements. The only problem I find with the mechanics of the game is the pop-ins. NPCs (ones that move from place to place), wild Pokemon, and berry trees all have their pop-in moments in the game. As you approach them, they come into view normally from a mid-range distance, and fade away again if you get too far away. This isn’t a huge deal when it comes to the experience as a whole, but it did slightly rob from the otherwise fresh Wild Area experience considering the pop-ins are the worst there. Lagging while online in the Wild Area is also a slight problem, but not too persistent of a problem.

Story: (8.5/10)

The story of Shield very much reminded me of the Pokemon anime in a sense (Swords being no different other than Pokemon variations). The narrative mainly focuses on the lovable and colorful cast of characters rather than a constantly changing dynamic plot. The plot is pretty big (not a Dynamax pun I swear), but it’s mainly told through your trainer character’s perspective, so the secrets of the unfolding plot occur through the perspectives of the adult figures, which you eventually see around the end. It’s not a complex story, but I found it to be very solid, kind of like a Pokemon movie. The characters carry the story along smoothly, and it’s a nice “save the world” Pokemon plot. There’s not a bunch of lore for the region, but what lore is explained is very suitable for the Galar region and I found it to be pretty interesting. I feel like the ending wraps up a little quicker than in usual Pokemon games, but the post-game story helps to finalize things even if it contains two very weird parodical characters. I think the point of the game’s plot is timely (for a reason I cannot elaborate upon for non-spoiler purposes, but to anyone who finishes it, you may know what I mean). I feel like it really connects with a real-world issue that the world is facing currently. Additionally, the story’s presentation was handled very well in most parts, I really liked the mid-battle cutscenes and the scripted battles that remind me of classic RPGs. While I don’t think the plot of Sword and Shield beats the darker dynamic plot of Sun and Moon, it’s good and solid all the same. 

Characters: (10/10)

As I briefly mentioned in the story segment of this review, the characters are some of the biggest stars of this game. Each Gym leader stands out and have their own little backstory. These backstories aren’t told through cutscenes, but you can read their biographies on the back of their League cards which I thought was a good way of telling us more information about the Gym Leaders than we got with them in the past titles. Gym Leaders are normally just treated like pretty designs and then thrown away by the post game. Sword and Shield however puts each of them in the spotlight more and they all get some time to shine. The designs for the characters themselves I find to be particularly amazing. Personally, Piers, the long awaited Dark-type Gym Leader was my favorite, but every single one of them had something interesting in store. Aside from Gym Leaders, memorable characters like Marnie, Bede, Sonia and Leon really help liven and enrich the experience. I felt really invested in these characters, and when I feel that invested in the characters of a video game, I consider them a smashing success.

***ADDITIONAL NOTE***

I neglected to mention the most important characters to any Pokemon game: the Pokemon themselves! The designs of the Galar Pokemon and Galar forms are breathtaking. I love the vast majority of them and there’s very few that I think little of. The designs are themed and look very creative, I really loved the art direction for this generation’s Pokedex.

Dialogue: (9/10)

With the new Galar region, inspired off of the UK, the dialogue is bound to change. A lot of British slang is slipped in which was enjoyable even if I wasn’t familiar with some of it. Each character seemed to have their own way of speaking and I liked this individuality in dialogue. Nothing any of the main characters say seems off-putting, so I’d say the dialogue is in a very good place for a Pokemon game. It is a game that’s marketed for younger audiences, but it does a good job of not making you feel like a baby (something that prior titles also done a good job with), so the dialogue is consistently good for any audience. Some lines could be improved perhaps or less generic, but nothing stands out to me as an issue with dialogue, so I’d say the writing is pretty on-spot.

Visuals: (9.4/10)

This is perhaps one of the most controversial parts of these games, with many complaining about reused models, trees looking badly textured, and the game looking like just an “upscaled 3DS game”. While I do agree that the Wild Area trees are terrible-looking upon close inspection, I by no means view this game as just an “upscaled 3DS game”. The visuals of Sword and Shield are by far the greatest the series has to offer, with town areas and dungeons looking absolutely superb. Some critics think that the graphics need a dynamic change, but I couldn’t disagree more. Graphics are a subjective thing until you’re delaing with something like the textures of the game (like the trees.) If fans don’t like the Pokemon style, they shouldn’t be playing the games anymore. Sword and Shield mastered the style the franchise should have with the very interesting, beautifully rendered areas like the Glimwood Tangle and Ballonlea. I found these areas and others to be breathtaking upon first seeing them and I just really adored the look of these games. As for the character models, (the people and the Pokemon) they look just fine. They’re not the biggest upgrade, but they fit in well with the rest of the game’s style, so no problems in that department. If you are to find graphical flaws that aren’t only subjective, they can be found in the Wild Area. The trees and some ground textures (near water in particular) are a bit blurred and wonky. But then you gaze upon the surroundings as a whole and it looks quite nice. The lighting looks incredible in many areas, and I just found myself in awe of just about anything I was looking at. As for the animations, there are some new incredible animations (like Cinderace’s Pyro Ball) and many well-polished animations. There are however some of the same-old animations that didn’t work and still don’t work like double kick and tail whip. Overall, the visuals are extremely nice and just what I’d expect from a next-gen Pokemon game.

My Verdict:

Pokemon Sword and Shield was an exciting new adventure that brought me back to the old days of playing Pokemon, only without all the nuisance problems that once plagued the fun of the experience. This game reminded me of what it was like to wholeheartedly enjoy a new adventure with new lovable partners. The graphics and mechanics are beyond refreshing, even if some areas could be better polished. The narrative isn’t as wide as Gen 7′s, but it’s as solid as I’d expect a Pokemon story to get while not straying too far from the roots of what makes them good to begin with. At the end of the day, experiencing Galar was without a doubt worth the $60 price tag, and the memories gained from the experience is even more priceless.

Final Score: 9.2/10 👍

[maxg-longform]

Outer Wilds

A new frontier for the interactive experience

Moments in gaming which are truly ground-breaking are rare, and they are only getting rarer. A dual axiom of diminishing technological returns achieved by the jumps between console generations and the rampant predatory monetisation of the games as a service modal have had many despairing and looking to games that denounce photorealism and market trends for inspiration , in much the same way those in the art world despaired at the first cameras. As they could no longer make art more detailed technically, meaning and artistry moved from technique to statement. Why is it not photorealistic? The question posed today is the same. You could make a game that is an accurate reflection of life – or a biased reflection of a certain kind of life (Military-industrial complex funded shooters I’m looking at you) – so why have you chosen to instead create something with a particular art style? What is the combination of your narrative and design choices trying to say? 

In the case of Far Cry 5, when particular attention is paid to the fact that the cultists are under the influence of drugs for the game’s entirety in addition to Obsidian’s claims that their new game concerning corporate exploitation of space colonies is written apolitically with empathetic and ‘good’ characters on both sides, the aim is all too often to actively stop you from drawing any meaningful conclusion at all, or at the very least to give the impression that there is nothing to draw.

What is the aim of this spiel then? In reality, you don’t need context to enjoy Outer Wilds, but only within the nexus of the modern games industry can you see why I’ve grown to love it so much. It also lets me talk about the game in more abstract terms without spoiling it – as it is very hard not to spoil it in talking about it, as knowledge is the only progression system within the game. The game itself, mechanically, is very stripped back. You have a spaceship to explore the solar system with, a spacesuit with thrusters for exploring each of the planets you can land on, and a translation device, which allows you to understand the language of an ancient alien race which inhabited the solar system many years prior. The story orients you as the first of your race to explore the stars with this new translation device. Explorers has previously visited each planet in the solar system, but contact with them has been lost, and they cannot translate the language there. Your objective, insofar as you are given one, is to find them and learn about the ancient aliens. In an age where open-world games have quest markers and some, such as Skyrim, have a spell which paints a trail on the ground in the direction of the next objective, the handhold-free nature of Outer Wilds is charming and arresting.

Whenever you discover anything important, it is stored in your ship’s log at the back of your small spaceship. In a way, it reminded me of Morrowind, one of Skyrim’s forebears, with the journal giving hints as to where you ought to look, but no real help beyond collating what you already know so that you can easily reference it in future. You are free to explore any of the planets at any point, and follow any lines of inquiry you see fit. In a lesser game, this would lead to a disjointed narrative experienced so out of order that it would give Tarantino a headache. However, this leads me into talking about the level design. I could not laud any higher the way in which the planets are designed. Every planet has a dynamic twist to it you need to learn in order to be able to understand how to access information on it and each planet has areas that require you to piece together learnings from around the solar system in order to access. In every sense, the game rewards exploration and understanding as a means of progress, rather than giving you new tools and telling you how to use them. This is evident in each of the planet designs – which I will briefly explain in the order I visited them (there is no ‘proper’ order).

 Giant’s Deep 

 A swirling, green water planet with four islands, which are continually tossed around by an endless stream of cyclones which make the planet hard to navigate. The pole is protected by a ferociously large cyclone and a strong current prevents underwater exploration of a porous, but fiercely electromagnetic core. The sheer size and oppressive atmosphere is compounded by the strong gravity making it almost impossible to jump, incentivising careful exploration.

 Brittle Hollow

A hollow planet built around a black hole and beset by fiery meteors from its volcanic moon. With an inhospitable surface, much of the challenge comes from discovering how others adapted to these conditions previously, and how to use the gravity of the black hole to navigate a planet that slowly falls apart and disintegrates as the game goes on due to the constant meteor bombardment.

 The Wanderer

A frozen comet with an elliptical orbit that takes it within a lethal range of the sun, and covered in mysterious ‘ghost matter.’

 The Hourglass Twins

Two planets orbiting each other as they orbit the sun. One starts as a bare rock with many caves to explore; the other as a perfectly round desert planet, with absolutely zero to explore. Then, a large column of sand starts flowing through space from the desert planet ‘Ash Twin’ to the bare one, ‘Ember Twin.’ This means areas of each planet are only accessible at certain times, and you need to beware of the sand level when exploring caves.

 Dark Bramble

A planet consisting purely of thorny branches wrapped around a core that pulses with white light. Enter the hole, and caverns that bend the laws of space and time fill massive areas within. A Tardis of horrors, this planet scared me like no jump scares could. A truly eerie vibe – a memorable and haunting level unlike anything I’d ever played before.

 While every one of these planets is in its own way unique and memorable, as are the moments when you discover how to access parts of them you couldn’t before – the best example of the game’s genius comes in the form of a location known as the Quantum moon. Before you go to this location, there are three pieces of key knowledge you need. Without them, you shouldn’t even be able to land on it. Nevertheless, I accidentally managed to land on it early in the game. However, because I hadn’t yet solved how to get into the tower of Quantum knowledge on Brittle Hollow, I didn’t understand how to access where I wanted to go. The moon has a secretive ‘Sixth Location’ you wish to explore, but every time I tried to leave the control room, the way was blocked by rocks until the moon moved back to one of the five locations in our solar system. It wasn’t until a few hours later, when I was following a different lead on another planet that I figured out how to avoid the rocks, and also where I needed to go once I had made it out.

The game is filled with eureka moments, and the lack of handholding makes you feel like you have genuinely accomplished something when you solve a puzzle. For example, I discovered a much quicker shortcut to a key area called the Black Hole Forge. The game doesn’t penalise you for this; much of the beauty of the game comes in the journey. Translating the alien scriptures in each area contains hints as to the overarching story – which I won’t in any way spoil, except that it is moving, inspiring and heart-breaking in equal measure – but also contains deeply personal stories about the people who made these structures, these homes, these technologies. The tension among the clan as they tried debated their plans to achieve what they came to our solar system for. The romance and feeling amongst those who worked on their projects. The jubilation of breakthroughs and the let-downs of defeat. The struggle for life and the joys of overcoming the hostile worlds of the system. The heart-wrenching story of the Quantum moon. All pieced together in bitesize chunks, out of sequence, displaced. Abstractions anthropomorphised because we don’t know enough about them to truly contextualise them. You never even find out what these aliens looked like. But you discover their hopes, their aims, their dreams and their death – as you, the traveller from an antique land, stare at the vast and trunkless legs of stone.

Rather purposefully, I have been abstract in my descriptions and generalised the experience. In a game where knowledge is the means of progression, and real detail would be a spoiler, and its best to come into this game blind. So, I’ve chosen to focus on the feeling the game instils in you. It has a charming art direction, understated yet distinctive music that complements every area perfectly and a real warmth and passion that oozes from every pixel. In a world where every new innovation is immediately copied and run into the ground by every game in the same genre – the camp clearing from Far Cry 3 is now a chore in every vaguely open world game- or climbing the conveniently placed towers to gain map vision a la Assassin’s Creed – or that very same game series doing its very best Witcher 3 impression in Origins and Odyssey – there is an incorruptible heart to Outer Wilds. There will be games inspired by it, no doubt, but there won’t be other games that weaponise knowledge in quite the same way, or use it to explore the same themes. It’s a game about futility, about facing death but choosing to explore and challenge yourself and improve and, most importantly, to enjoy the little things and cherish the detail, to find pieces of light in that endless, futile dark.  

Games like this have always been few and far between, and are becoming even rarer now. That’s why it’s essential we cherish games like Outer Wilds. There is no formula for creating a masterpiece but when a game really connects with you, you know it, you feel it. My list of favourite games I’d consider a masterpiece is quite incongruent – SSX 3, Tony Hawk’s Underground, Assassins Creed 2, Halo 4 to pick out a few of the rather different ones –  but Outer Wilds has topped all of them, and I only spent around 12 hours with it. It strips gaming back to its essentials, while bringing new ideas to the table and presenting them in charming and arresting ways. You will never have another 12 hours like it. Its heart, soul and message are inimitable, and I sincerely urge you to open up to it and give it a try.

10/10

Played on Xbox - the game is available through Xbox Game Pass

@CoreLineage on twitter

[flamingkorybante]

Present: A Ritual for Queer Shame

This is a ritual for queer shame. I invite you to read through this with me and try it, even if you don’t think of yourself as someone that does magic. Try it with me as a thought experiment.

Let’s start by considering the possibility that ritual can change you. I don’t mean this to say that it can be a substitute for doing work on yourself, or for having a varied and flexible mental health toolbox, but rather that we are frequently prevented from doing work that we need to do by the fear that it will be intolerably painful, and that working collectively in practices that give us structure to hold that pain makes it easier to face, thereby making that work more accessible. This type of ritual (which can also be called katharsis) doesn’t clean out your basement for you, but it can break open the rusted-over lock on the door to the stairs, which will give you access to get down there and clean it out yourself. We can call this ritual “magic,” but we don’t have to. I’m less invested in the vocabulary than I am in the syntax, and all the roads up a mountain lead to the top.

So if the language of “magic” works well for you, we can use that. If you’d prefer to consider this an exercise in psychological and somatic processing using tools drawn from the work of Eugene Gendlin, Starhawk, Halko Weiss, and Bessel Van Der Kolk, that’s also fine. The important thing is that you try this with a sense of curiosity and openness to the possibility that it’s not meaningless.

Let’s start by letting go of the moments we have made it through to get here. Each you that you have been in each moment up until this one, every younger and smaller self lingers in your body. Their pains are your pain, but let’s start by letting there be a little bit of distance between you and them. Every time you breathe in, feel the space between the you that you are now and all of those past selves. It’s not a violent severing, it’s not a space of uncaring, it’s just enough distance that you can really see them and hear what they’re saying instead of being overwhelmed by the volume. Every time you breathe out, let those past selves feel your breath like a warm breeze in the spring, let them take in the information that they aren’t alone, that they are witnessed, that they are held. Stay with this breath for a little while, let it open some space up inside you and clear off any debris that’s accumulated in or on you.

Now let’s turn our attention to the present moment. This is the part where you really let yourself remember that you are an animal, that the substance of you is breath and blood, that the mechanisms by which you take in information about the world are ancient. Feel the boundaries of your body, your skin where it touches the air, your nerves thirsting for information. Feel gravity pulling you down to the earth and the earth below you bearing you up. Feel your breath fill you up and your body push it out, the eternal rhythm of your heart, the way the energy flows smoothly into and around the boundaries of what you understand to be yourself. This is a kind of being alive and being real that cannot be taken away from you.

This kind of base aliveness is also a way of being connected. The way your heart moves the blood through your system, the way your breath fills you, the way your nerve endings sparkle against the air — these are things you share with your ancestors, with your living families, and with your descendants. The family that is the lineage of queerness and gender nonconformity stretches outward from you in all directions, in all dimensions. Everywhere you look, wherever you stretch out your hand, they are there reaching back for you. Keep feeling the workings of your body as one of an infinite number of nodes in a web of connection and care as expansive as eternity.

Let’s also call in whatever other powers you feel have your back. This could be the lineage of the ancestors of your blood, your helping spirits, your god or gods, your own powers — whatever face you see when you picture the knowledge that you are not alone, that you are protected. Whoever they are, whatever form they take, let’s take a moment to feel their presence, to feel into the connections between you and them, and to breathe into the knowledge that when you stumble, they’ll be there. Let’s invoke those spirits, and call their protection and guidance into the space that we’re creating together. Hail and welcome.

Stay with these ideas until you can feel power singing along these connections to ground you and plant your roots firmly in the moment that your body exists in right now. Take your time with it. This is process-oriented, not goal-oriented. Getting through it faster isn’t better.

When you’re ready to move to the next step, let’s start to build a memory of pleasure. It doesn’t need to be a narrative memory, but rather more like a collage of sensations and emotions. What was the last joy you felt? What’s a sensation in your body you can remember that reminded you that being alive is pretty cool? What moments have affirmed the immanence of your body and the capacity of your spirit for wildness? What has given you a respite from anxiety, hyper-rationalization, dissociation, fear — even if just for a second? Hold those moments gently, as if you’re guiding soap bubbles together to make one larger bubble. Let them resonate in you as if you were a bell. Feel the harmonics of them in different parts of your body, let them sink into your bones. Let the different parts of it catch the light. This immanence is always available to you. This is yours. This is for you. You get to keep it.

Is there anything in you that’s standing as an obstacle between you and this feeling? Something that’s telling you that it’s not for you, that you’re not allowed, that it’s too much, that you don’t deserve it? Step back from this obstacle. Look at it. Feel the boundaries of it. Where does it live in your body? What surrounds it? What’s the sensation of it? Are there words associated with it? What does it say?

Let’s name this obstacle “shame.” This obstacle was given to us by institutions of control and has been being given to us our whole lives. It made its home inside us to protect us from being punished by those institutions. This shame is doing everything it can to protect the vulnerable places in us from harm, and for this work, we are grateful.

Let’s take a moment and open up a little room for what this shame is protecting us from. Being present is terrifying. It’s dangerous. It puts you at risk of deeply connecting with others, of seeing them and being seen in the fullness of yourself, of being rejected — or even worse, of not being rejected. Shame protects us from having to ask the question: am I really worthy of love exactly as I am now?

But let’s imagine, just for a moment, what it might be like if we could release this protection. If we could accept the fear, step into and through it, and choose freely to be present. Let’s imagine that moment just one heartbeat into our shared future.

Let’s imagine one heartbeat ahead into a moment where we can release this shame. A moment where there is no block or barrier between us and truly, fully, unabashedly feeling, being present in, digesting, integrating — our pleasure, our power, our connections. Let’s look into this moment where our shame is allowed to dissipate like a little twist of pollen in the breeze, and where in its place, our helping spirits, our ancestors and descendants, our families, stepped up to fill the space, to hold and protect us, to keep institutions of control at bay and open us up a space of liberation.

Let’s imagine this moment before us, where each joy we encounter, each beautiful sensation, each moment of bodily immanence, can surround us and fill us without any barrier, can stay with us, can live in our bodies and be available to us whenever we want to return to them. Do you have that moment fully realized in your mind? Can you feel it trembling on the cusp of this one? Can you feel what your body will feel like in that moment? Your senses in that moment? Your heart in that moment?

In just a moment, we’re going to take a step forward together. It can be a physical step or not — do it however makes sense for you, with your body, with how you’re engaging with this. And as we step forward together we’ll step into that moment, let it come into being through us, let it bloom inside us and be real. This is yours. This is for you. You get to keep it.

As we step forward together, let the shame inside you soften and melt and gently fall away. You don’t need it to protect you anymore. Let it flow out of you. You can shake or dance or cry or sing or howl it away, whatever you need to do to scrape the last little shreds of it out of your spirit. All your spirits, ancestors, everyone we’ve called into support and guide you, they can help you.

As you pass through the membrane from that world into this one, give a moment of gentleness to what you are leaving behind. You can speak to it as you let it go — name it, thank it, say goodbye to it or hello to what you are becoming. Take all the time you need to feel the transition, to let it move through you and wash over you.

When you are ready to be done, let’s say goodbye to the elements, entities, spirits you called in, thank them for their protection and guidance. Gratitude and love for the ancestors who walk with us, who laid the path we tread, whose light shines our way. Gratitude and loves to the descendants of our lines, those whose ancestors we are, those bright faces that keep us hoping and fighting and surviving so that they may bloom without ever feeling the shame we have been taught. Gratitude and love to the spirits, the elements, everything that held us together in this moment.

And know that when we go out of this shared moment, back out into the rest of the world, we go out with this moment of abundance and liberation alive within us. The energy we have raised goes with you. The step forward you have taken goes with you. The presence you have cultivated tonight can never be taken away. It’s yours. It’s for you. You get to keep it.

[tmitransitioning]

What causes gender dysphoria to develop? I was well-past puberty by the time I had any, and it wasn't like performative genderfluidity where I was like "oh, so there's a word for it, it's A Thing!" ps. How long does it take for a question to get answered and posted? I sent one about a week ago on clitoral hardness that isn't up yet, and in the past it's been shorter for any questions i've asked. I wanna check how long I should expect to wait or if maybe it just didn't send properly.

Second question first—timeframe varies a lot; a bunch of us got hit with real-life issues lately (academia, work, and a monster flu strain) so a backlog accumulated again and we’re working through it. If you’re the person asking about going on/off T and “erections”, I’m drafting an answer for that one; if not, maybe send again because I don’t see another ask along those lines in either the week-back inbox or the queue. Sometimes Tumblr eats things; if you send a question checking up on a previous question in such a way that it can be identified, I’ll look for you (general you) and see if we got it—we strongly prefer that to just resending the question. c:

As to your first question—if anyone can answer that conclusively, they’d make  a lot of money off of it. We don’t know; nobody knows. The ways people explain their dysphoria vary because experiences vary. The best guess that we have right now is that it’s a combination of neurological, social, and emotional factors that relate to how we internalize, understand, and form our identities in the face of social gender.

The shortest answer that we can generally accept is that dysphoria comes from the dissonance between how we conceptualize ourselves and how we exist in the world in relation to gender. This cause "holds” room for a lot of different experiences; some people have had identifiable dysphoria from really young ages, for example, where they “knew” internally that they weren’t their birth assignment. Other people, like you and I, didn’t have anything identifiable as dysphoria until past puberty. For me, a lot of that happened because I was a “tomboy” as a child in an unusual social environment (secular homeschooling) that had little imposed gendering, but puberty meant that suddenly I was being very aggressively gendered based on secondary sex characteristics that I couldn’t control.

I’m guessing what you mean by ‘performative genderfluidity’ is the kind of... reactive thing that a lot of people do when they first realize they’re trans where they feel like they have to embody it very outwardly in the name of Oh This Is A Thing!, because that’s a pretty common experience that a lot of people go through before we feel comfortable moving presentation around in various directions. But the framing of your question to me says that you had dysphoria before then (please correct me if I’m wrong), where it evolved as a thing before you ever had a word for it. That absolutely happens. What you attribute it to is up to you and is as scientifically valid as anyone else’s concept.

I don’t know if this narrative would strike any chords with you, but maybe it will, so here it is. I don’t feel like I would still “be” trans if I had been raised entirely in a society without any strong forced gendering. My identity as a nonbinary person would still exist, but I would feel less pressure to outwardly embody it or contravene something expected of me. Part of that would probably be a different set of feelings about my body and my physical dysphoria; I might be more okay keeping my boobs, for example, or being less hairy. If I had never been hit on, or harassed, or preyed on, or degraded, or assumed to be nineteen at age ten based on my secondary sex characteristics, I would probably feel a lot less dysphoria about them.

That is not because such a series of experiences has led me to believe that they’re lesser; by contrast, I still think of them as neutral objects in existence. But on me, as a person, they are irrevocably associated with accumulated traumatic experiences of being gendered as something I am not, and that didn’t manifest until after puberty for me because they didn’t really exist until that point. I got boobs really early and really fast; I was my adult height by age ten and had like a D-cup. The years that followed that were a steady, crushing weight of not being allowed to exist as an androgynous weirdo who liked horses and YA fantasy—suddenly straight people were assuming that I was fair game for their dynamics, and people were forming ideas about the social roles and behaviours I was expected to hold based on something about my external appearance I couldn’t control.

I think that in a nongendered utopia I’d still have things I want to change about my body—I’ve always disliked having a voice in “female” ranges, for example, though I have no clue why that persisted. And frankly, I would probably want my boobs changed anyways, because of back pain—but if I hadn’t spent over a decade being forcibly categorized based on them, I would probably go with a reduction instead of removal.

I don’t want to imply that all dysphoria is due to socialization because that is very easily twistable by TERFs. I think there’s a strong neurological component to how people develop internal gender identities outside of the debunked “male/female brain” model, and I don’t think that we understand what that neurological component is yet; I would put money on it being a primary driver of dysphoria. But I also think that the medical narrative of trans people who always know about their gender and experience marked dysphoria from childhood is, while a real thing that happens, only accurate for some of us and in no way true to the diversity of experiences within the trans umbrella. I talk about social gendering in this context because I think that, for a lot of us who only experienced what we could call dysphoria after puberty, our dysphoria is in part a result of accumulated traumas from being forcibly gendered into something that does not match our internal experience. It comes from the mismatch between how we are, how we’re treated, and how we want to exist. The forms that it takes, then, vary depending on where the individual person lays the “fault”, and what sort of experiences have been associated with our physical appearances over time. Being misgendered and told that we cannot know our own reality is traumatic. For a lot of us, that only becomes identifiable during or after puberty, when we have the cognitive capacity and life experiences necessary to understand this in ourselves.

- Mod Wolf

[rewolfaekilerom]

this week in reading.

//NOTE: This was originally posted on Wordpress on 04.11.2021//

I read a few things this week, and I thought I’d group them all together in this post because they’ve collectively helped me come to a realization about my reading preferences.

Let me preface this by saying that I’ve never really given much thought to the genres of books I like to read. Or, rather, I never really knew how to put into words what I like about the books I like. I can say “oh, I like mystery” or “I really enjoy some fantasy stuff,” but there wasn’t a unifying element or genre. Or so I thought.

I feel a bit like I’m confessing something, but after re-reading the first 8 books of Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (Sookie Stackhouse, True Blood, whatever) and then reading Daphne Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn for the first time, along with Lucy Foley’s The Guest List and the first few pages of Alix Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches, I’m ready to say that my preferred genre is gothic.

My all-time favorite novelist is Barbara Michaels. I’ve been reading her books since I was probably too young to be reading them–maybe 9 or 10? I remember reading one of her books in the backseat of the car during a family trip to Vermont, which must have been around that time. Her novels are often categorized as “romance novels,” but I think it’s actually Romance (with a capital R, as in the early 18C literary movement, not a Harlequin romance). Other sources will say they’re gothic or supernatural suspenses. I agree with that, and maybe one day I’ll write about why I love those books so much. For now, though, it’s enough to say that I love them.

So, Du Maurier is a new favorite of mine. Rebecca was one of the first books I read for fun after finishing the PhD, and it was the first book that I felt free to read without also dissecting. I loved it so much, so I’ve had her other books on my “to read” list for a while.

The thing I love the most about Rebecca–and, I guess, about all gothic novels, really–is the atmosphere. That’s something Barbara Michaels gets right, too, but the focus right now is Rebecca. This is a book that’s saturated with atmosphere. The way Du Maurier describes spaces and the bodies that move through those spaces is sensuous, rich, and complex. As you read Rebecca, you feel like you can smell the rooms the narrator meanders through–it’s like Maxim’s aftershave and Rebecca’s perfume linger and lift off the page as you read. Your body feels clammy and compressed as you read the narrator’s thoughts as she navigates the literal and figurative maze of life at Manderley.

And then, bonus, you get a really good mystery.

I’m a sucker for a mystery. So, yeah, I like gothic novels, but I especially love gothic mysteries. It took me a PhD and 30 years of life to realize this fact, but that’s fine. No judgment here.

Back to Rebecca: it’s a rich story–rich in every sense of the word. Honestly, I don’t even know if “rich” is saying enough. It’s SATURATED with atmosphere. As I read that book, I feel like I am in Monte Carlo and Manderley. I know the scenery, and the faces populating that scenery, better than I’ve known some apartments I’ve lived in or some people I spent hours with. It’s a visceral reading experience, and I love every second of it. You can reread Rebecca. That means a lot.

Another thing about this book? We are all the narrator. I don’t care who you are or how badass you are. The narrator’s insecurities and struggles and worries and anxieties are something you’ve felt at some point in your life. It’s relatable in a way that is almost disorienting and repugnant. You identify with the narrator, but you also come to hate her and her insecurities and her naiveté. I think that says more about the reader than it does about anything else, but what do I know? In any case, that’s a story where jealousy and insecurity–things that are intrinsically tied to power–are the veils around which hides a deeper narrative about how our identities form and how one’s ability to consolidate one’s own identity is itself an act of power that can be denied.

I’m constantly puzzled if I think Maxim and the narrator’s story is a romance. The Netflix adaptation says it is, and sometimes I think it is. Well, maybe not in the “in love” sense of the word “romance” but in the “loving” sense of the word. I guess it doesn’t matter, but it’s something I think about while reading. “Romance” and “love” can be a lot of different things, and that’s a book where lust looks like love, but kindness and companionship also looks like love.

All this is to say that I love Rebecca and I had high hopes for Jamaica Inn, which in a lot of ways lived up to but also didn’t live up to those expectations. It’s good, don’t get me wrong. I read it in two days and mostly enjoyed it. But what Jamaica Inn doesn’t have–and what most other gothic novels get right, for me–is a terror, an insidiousness, a series of threats to the heroine that are subtle and suggestive. This book doesn’t play with your head like you might expect a gothic novel to do; it lays its cards on the table and then slaps you in the face with danger.

Rebecca is a compelling read because you don’t really know what’s wrong at Manderley for most of the book; you just know something is wrong and you want to figure out what it is, so you keep reading. With Jamaica Inn, you know what’s wrong–you know that Mary’s uncle is a brute and violent and menacing. It doesn’t matter that he’s a smuggler or a murderer or a wrecker (spoiler: he’s all of those things) because he proves early on that he’s a monster. And by the time you get something compelling–for instance, the fact that the uncle isn’t acting alone, or rather that he’s not in charge of the smuggling operation–you’re 70% through the book.

So, yes, to correct myself: there is an unknown threat, and that’s the vicar. He’s the “true” bad guy, but honestly, they’re all bad guys in some way or another. The danger he presents is real because he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing–as his illustration not-so-subtly points out–but again, it slaps you in the face. And by the novel’s early twentieth-century, ableist approach to characterization, his physical difference–the very fact that he is albino–serves to mark his difference. We know there’s something different about him because he looks different. It’s a tale as old as time. It’s not a good tale, and it’s not a tale that we’d want to see written now, but it’s important to acknowledge that the trope of physical difference/disability standing in for some questionable moral quality (or even innate evilness) was and is common in literature across the globe. So any adept reader will know from the moment that the narrator makes the vicar’s albinism apparent that there’s something up with him. Reading the scenes with the vicar made me long for a story that would do something different. I’d hoped his albinism was a red herring–that it was simply a facet of his character that indicated nothing about his moral standing or views of the world. But alas, my hopes were dashed and Du Maurier rubbed my nose in my own optimism. Maybe I’m taking it a bit personally.

Shifting gears slightly but not too much, the romance plot is endearing, but you can see where it’s going from the second Jem steps onto the page–he’s the good brother who’s pure at heart, and we know this because he’s so much younger than Mary’s uncle, was often the victim of his elder brothers’ bullying, spent more time with his mother, and is engaged in less morally questionable illegal activity. He can be forgiven while the uncle cannot; he’s worthy of love while the uncle is not; he will come out alright while the uncle will not. We get a few pages where we question his nobleness, but that skepticism is quickly dashed from our minds as someone else steps in to be another bad guy. I like that, but it also left me feeling grounded throughout the reading experience. I had two feet on the ground and knew exactly where I was going while reading Jamaica Inn. I don’t feel that way while reading Rebecca or many other gothic novels, and I like that.

And again, the pacing is frustrating. I’m not talking about the pages and pages of describing moors or landscape. I studied 19C lit; I’m comfortable with that. I might even say I enjoy it. In fact, there’s a lot about this novel that feels like something like, say, Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life. It’s a good book, but the interesting parts sometimes get buried in storylines that aren’t as compelling. What I’m talking about is the fact that 70% of the novel is the same threat and then the interesting threat–the stuff that might get a reader invested and destabilized–takes up the last 20-30%. The climax of the novel felt hurried, and the denouement was like downhill skiing rather than a winding, twisty ride through a not-so-lazy river. (That metaphor got away from me.) This book needed a heavy-handed editor.

Which ties in with my experience reading Foley’s The Guest List. Apparently this and The Hunting Party are essentially the same story with different locales. Or maybe a better way of putting this is that both of these books show Foley adopting the same premise with more or less successful results. The Guest List got better ratings than The Hunting Party on Goodreads, so I followed my novel-reading-and-reviewing overlords. In any case, though, it suffers from the same issue with organization, if we’re going to put it in first-year-composition terms. But where Jamaica Inn manages to keep you invested in its characters for 100% of the novel even though the stuff that is psychologically compelling (even if it wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for) takes up maybe 30-40% of the book, The Guest List truly does contain its climax and denouement within the last 5% of the book. If the climax and denouement of Jamaica Inn felt like downhill skiing, those parts of The Guest List felt like riding a rocket straight into Earth–there was no suspense, no delayed gratification. The book spent the majority of its pages vaguely creating and then completing its unlikeable characters’ backstories before then murdering its most unlikeable character and identifying the potential suspects for the murder all in the span of, like, 10 pages.

Murder. Chapter for suspect 1. Chapter for suspect 2. Chapter for suspect 3. Chapter for suspect 4 . . . Back to murder and . . . REVEAL.

The thing about this is that it’s taking something that Agatha Christie did right and making it obnoxious and tedious. Christie and countless others have played with the same type of story structure: revealing that someone has not died but not saying who, presenting a cast of characters who all have something to hide, showing the murder but obscuring the murderer, revealing that all of the characters were connected in some former life and thus have a reason to kill, refusing to reveal the murderer until the last possible second. Together, these can be incredibly successful at building suspense and keeping the reader on their toes. But The Guest List takes those techniques for building suspense–especially jumping in time and between narrators in order to give all sides of a situation while still masterfully leaving the reader in the dark, so to speak (which is also arguably a facet of gothic lit), in order to keep the reader invested–and turns it into something that manages to make you less invested.

I’m not going to rehash the plot, so check it out on Goodreads. My novel-reading-and-reviewing overlords have done it better than I ever could. But the thing I want to emphasize is that despite (1) knowing that a murder has happened and (2) recognizing early on that nearly every character is sketchy and hiding something, I never really cared all that much to find out who was murdered or why. It just . . . didn’t concern me. I was more invested in making sure all of the female characters escape with minimal harm done to them by a gaggle of, frankly, lecherous men.

To put it bluntly, I’m tired of mystery novels that attempt to create suspense by putting their female characters in danger of sexually aggressive men. It’s lazy, and so is using self-harm to prove that a character is going through something.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s an interesting premise and the description of the scenery is gorgeous. Foley gets those things so right. I could dwell in the detailed and atmospheric descriptions of this secluded island for days. In fact, I wish there was more of that–maybe with less of the lecherous-man-lechery and self-harm. Swap those things and we’d be on our way to something that’d make me want to read again.

In case you haven’t noticed, I judge a book by how willing I am to read it again. I LOVE rereading books, so it’s a compliment when I want to do so.

So, where does this bring us in my week of reading? Jamaica Inn was good but not as good as Rebecca. The Guest List is a story about characters who are so utterly unlikeable you end up wanting the boat to abandon them on that island.

And then there’s Harris’s series. I’ve read most of them before–probably as a teenager? I thought I’d read all of them, but Wikipedia tells me there’s 13 books rather than 8. It looks like I stopped reading when I started college, which makes sense in some way. Say what you will about this series (I enjoy it), but from a technical standpoint–that is, from the standpoint of pacing and organization and world-building–this series does a lot of things right. I’ll write on it in the future, maybe, but I’ll just say that I think this is a surprising example of a series that takes gothic and supernatural tropes and wields them to their fullest potential. I like that.

So, I guess that means I have like 5 books to read now. That’s a pretty awesome surprise, if you ask me.

xoxo, you know.

[rewolfaekilerom23]

this week in reading

//NOTE: This was originally posted on Wordpress on 04.11.2021//

I read a few things this week, and I thought I’d group them all together in this post because they’ve collectively helped me come to a realization about my reading preferences.

Let me preface this by saying that I’ve never really given much thought to the genres of books I like to read. Or, rather, I never really knew how to put into words what I like about the books I like. I can say “oh, I like mystery” or “I really enjoy some fantasy stuff,” but there wasn’t a unifying element or genre. Or so I thought.

I feel a bit like I’m confessing something, but after re-reading the first 8 books of Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (Sookie Stackhouse, True Blood, whatever) and then reading Daphne Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn for the first time, along with Lucy Foley’s The Guest List and the first few pages of Alix Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches, I’m ready to say that my preferred genre is gothic.

My all-time favorite novelist is Barbara Michaels. I’ve been reading her books since I was probably too young to be reading them–maybe 9 or 10? I remember reading one of her books in the backseat of the car during a family trip to Vermont, which must have been around that time. Her novels are often categorized as “romance novels,” but I think it’s actually Romance (with a capital R, as in the early 18C literary movement, not a Harlequin romance). Other sources will say they’re gothic or supernatural suspenses. I agree with that, and maybe one day I’ll write about why I love those books so much. For now, though, it’s enough to say that I love them.

So, Du Maurier is a new favorite of mine. Rebecca was one of the first books I read for fun after finishing the PhD, and it was the first book that I felt free to read without also dissecting. I loved it so much, so I’ve had her other books on my “to read” list for a while.

The thing I love the most about Rebecca–and, I guess, about all gothic novels, really–is the atmosphere. That’s something Barbara Michaels gets right, too, but the focus right now is Rebecca. This is a book that’s saturated with atmosphere. The way Du Maurier describes spaces and the bodies that move through those spaces is sensuous, rich, and complex. As you read Rebecca, you feel like you can smell the rooms the narrator meanders through–it’s like Maxim’s aftershave and Rebecca’s perfume linger and lift off the page as you read. Your body feels clammy and compressed as you read the narrator’s thoughts as she navigates the literal and figurative maze of life at Manderley.

And then, bonus, you get a really good mystery.

I’m a sucker for a mystery. So, yeah, I like gothic novels, but I especially love gothic mysteries. It took me a PhD and 30 years of life to realize this fact, but that’s fine. No judgment here.

Back to Rebecca: it’s a rich story–rich in every sense of the word. Honestly, I don’t even know if “rich” is saying enough. It’s SATURATED with atmosphere. As I read that book, I feel like I am in Monte Carlo and Manderley. I know the scenery, and the faces populating that scenery, better than I’ve known some apartments I’ve lived in or some people I spent hours with. It’s a visceral reading experience, and I love every second of it. You can reread Rebecca. That means a lot.

Another thing about this book? We are all the narrator. I don’t care who you are or how badass you are. The narrator’s insecurities and struggles and worries and anxieties are something you’ve felt at some point in your life. It’s relatable in a way that is almost disorienting and repugnant. You identify with the narrator, but you also come to hate her and her insecurities and her naiveté. I think that says more about the reader than it does about anything else, but what do I know? In any case, that’s a story where jealousy and insecurity–things that are intrinsically tied to power–are the veils around which hides a deeper narrative about how our identities form and how one’s ability to consolidate one’s own identity is itself an act of power that can be denied.

I’m constantly puzzled if I think Maxim and the narrator’s story is a romance. The Netflix adaptation says it is, and sometimes I think it is. Well, maybe not in the “in love” sense of the word “romance” but in the “loving” sense of the word. I guess it doesn’t matter, but it’s something I think about while reading. “Romance” and “love” can be a lot of different things, and that’s a book where lust looks like love, but kindness and companionship also looks like love.

All this is to say that I love Rebecca and I had high hopes for Jamaica Inn, which in a lot of ways lived up to but also didn’t live up to those expectations. It’s good, don’t get me wrong. I read it in two days and mostly enjoyed it. But what Jamaica Inn doesn’t have–and what most other gothic novels get right, for me–is a terror, an insidiousness, a series of threats to the heroine that are subtle and suggestive. This book doesn’t play with your head like you might expect a gothic novel to do; it lays its cards on the table and then slaps you in the face with danger.

Rebecca is a compelling read because you don’t really know what’s wrong at Manderley for most of the book; you just know something is wrong and you want to figure out what it is, so you keep reading. With Jamaica Inn, you know what’s wrong–you know that Mary’s uncle is a brute and violent and menacing. It doesn’t matter that he’s a smuggler or a murderer or a wrecker (spoiler: he’s all of those things) because he proves early on that he’s a monster. And by the time you get something compelling–for instance, the fact that the uncle isn’t acting alone, or rather that he’s not in charge of the smuggling operation–you’re 70% through the book.

So, yes, to correct myself: there is an unknown threat, and that’s the vicar. He’s the “true” bad guy, but honestly, they’re all bad guys in some way or another. The danger he presents is real because he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing–as his illustration not-so-subtly points out–but again, it slaps you in the face. And by the novel’s early twentieth-century, ableist approach to characterization, his physical difference–the very fact that he is albino–serves to mark his difference. We know there’s something different about him because he looks different. It’s a tale as old as time. It’s not a good tale, and it’s not a tale that we’d want to see written now, but it’s important to acknowledge that the trope of physical difference/disability standing in for some questionable moral quality (or even innate evilness) was and is common in literature across the globe. So any adept reader will know from the moment that the narrator makes the vicar’s albinism apparent that there’s something up with him. Reading the scenes with the vicar made me long for a story that would do something different. I’d hoped his albinism was a red herring–that it was simply a facet of his character that indicated nothing about his moral standing or views of the world. But alas, my hopes were dashed and Du Maurier rubbed my nose in my own optimism. Maybe I’m taking it a bit personally.

Shifting gears slightly but not too much, the romance plot is endearing, but you can see where it’s going from the second Jem steps onto the page–he’s the good brother who’s pure at heart, and we know this because he’s so much younger than Mary’s uncle, was often the victim of his elder brothers’ bullying, spent more time with his mother, and is engaged in less morally questionable illegal activity. He can be forgiven while the uncle cannot; he’s worthy of love while the uncle is not; he will come out alright while the uncle will not. We get a few pages where we question his nobleness, but that skepticism is quickly dashed from our minds as someone else steps in to be another bad guy. I like that, but it also left me feeling grounded throughout the reading experience. I had two feet on the ground and knew exactly where I was going while reading Jamaica Inn. I don’t feel that way while reading Rebecca or many other gothic novels, and I like that.

And again, the pacing is frustrating. I’m not talking about the pages and pages of describing moors or landscape. I studied 19C lit; I’m comfortable with that. I might even say I enjoy it. In fact, there’s a lot about this novel that feels like something like, say, Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life. It’s a good book, but the interesting parts sometimes get buried in storylines that aren’t as compelling. What I’m talking about is the fact that 70% of the novel is the same threat and then the interesting threat–the stuff that might get a reader invested and destabilized–takes up the last 20-30%. The climax of the novel felt hurried, and the denouement was like downhill skiing rather than a winding, twisty ride through a not-so-lazy river. (That metaphor got away from me.) This book needed a heavy-handed editor.

Which ties in with my experience reading Foley’s The Guest List. Apparently this and The Hunting Party are essentially the same story with different locales. Or maybe a better way of putting this is that both of these books show Foley adopting the same premise with more or less successful results. The Guest List got better ratings than The Hunting Party on Goodreads, so I followed my novel-reading-and-reviewing overlords. In any case, though, it suffers from the same issue with organization, if we’re going to put it in first-year-composition terms. But where Jamaica Inn manages to keep you invested in its characters for 100% of the novel even though the stuff that is psychologically compelling (even if it wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for) takes up maybe 30-40% of the book, The Guest List truly does contain its climax and denouement within the last 5% of the book. If the climax and denouement of Jamaica Inn felt like downhill skiing, those parts of The Guest List felt like riding a rocket straight into Earth–there was no suspense, no delayed gratification. The book spent the majority of its pages vaguely creating and then completing its unlikeable characters’ backstories before then murdering its most unlikeable character and identifying the potential suspects for the murder all in the span of, like, 10 pages.

Murder. Chapter for suspect 1. Chapter for suspect 2. Chapter for suspect 3. Chapter for suspect 4 . . . Back to murder and . . . REVEAL.

The thing about this is that it’s taking something that Agatha Christie did right and making it obnoxious and tedious. Christie and countless others have played with the same type of story structure: revealing that someone has not died but not saying who, presenting a cast of characters who all have something to hide, showing the murder but obscuring the murderer, revealing that all of the characters were connected in some former life and thus have a reason to kill, refusing to reveal the murderer until the last possible second. Together, these can be incredibly successful at building suspense and keeping the reader on their toes. But The Guest List takes those techniques for building suspense–especially jumping in time and between narrators in order to give all sides of a situation while still masterfully leaving the reader in the dark, so to speak (which is also arguably a facet of gothic lit), in order to keep the reader invested–and turns it into something that manages to make you less invested.

I’m not going to rehash the plot, so check it out on Goodreads. My novel-reading-and-reviewing overlords have done it better than I ever could. But the thing I want to emphasize is that despite (1) knowing that a murder has happened and (2) recognizing early on that nearly every character is sketchy and hiding something, I never really cared all that much to find out who was murdered or why. It just . . . didn’t concern me. I was more invested in making sure all of the female characters escape with minimal harm done to them by a gaggle of, frankly, lecherous men.

To put it bluntly, I’m tired of mystery novels that attempt to create suspense by putting their female characters in danger of sexually aggressive men. It’s lazy, and so is using self-harm to prove that a character is going through something.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s an interesting premise and the description of the scenery is gorgeous. Foley gets those things so right. I could dwell in the detailed and atmospheric descriptions of this secluded island for days. In fact, I wish there was more of that–maybe with less of the lecherous-man-lechery and self-harm. Swap those things and we’d be on our way to something that’d make me want to read again.

In case you haven’t noticed, I judge a book by how willing I am to read it again. I LOVE rereading books, so it’s a compliment when I want to do so.

So, where does this bring us in my week of reading? Jamaica Inn was good but not as good as Rebecca. The Guest List is a story about characters who are so utterly unlikeable you end up wanting the boat to abandon them on that island.

And then there’s Harris’s series. I’ve read most of them before–probably as a teenager? I thought I’d read all of them, but Wikipedia tells me there’s 13 books rather than 8. It looks like I stopped reading when I started college, which makes sense in some way. Say what you will about this series (I enjoy it), but from a technical standpoint–that is, from the standpoint of pacing and organization and world-building–this series does a lot of things right. I’ll write on it in the future, maybe, but I’ll just say that I think this is a surprising example of a series that takes gothic and supernatural tropes and wields them to their fullest potential. I like that.

So, I guess that means I have like 5 books to read now. That’s a pretty awesome surprise, if you ask me.

xoxo, you know.

[theinquisitivej]

‘Hereditary’ – A Movie Review

There are countless factors that can affect how a film sits with you, but I often find myself narrowing down my overall impressions into two significant categories; the film’s narrative success and its technical execution. Does the story have an impact on me, and does it use the form of cinema to tell that story in an interesting way? Every film incites different questions that vary wildly from movie to movie, but more often than not, these two all-important questions are what my thoughts boil down to whenever I finish a viewing. The best films weave technical expertise and innovative use of form with their narrative to reinforce the story’s impact on the viewer. But then there are the films which excel in one area, but don’t quite measure up in the other category. That doesn’t stop such films from being praiseworthy, but it can lead to a nagging sense of missed opportunity. If a meaningful narrative with a tight script is saddled with by-the-numbers cinematography, or if stellar editing and camera work is being used to tell a narrative that just isn’t connecting with me, I’ll always feel some level of disappointment that the film in question couldn’t have come together as much as I believe it could have.

         Hereditary is one of the most noteworthy films of the year in terms of technical filmmaking, but its story falls short of the impressive creative skills that are on display in every other part of the film.

         The film’s plot has a strong start. After a striking first shot which immediately sets an unnerving tone for this horror, we get introduced to our family of characters, pick up on what has recently happened, and, through some intensely focused visual storytelling, are given ominous signs of what might be going on under the surface. If you’re interested and already set on seeing this film, then I’d say that’s more than you need to know, and you should go in to see what kind of movie it is for yourself. However, if you have seen it or don’t mind hearing more if you’re still unsure and need convincing, then please read on.

         The opening text tells us that an old woman, a grandmother, has recently passed away, and that her family will be attending her funeral soon. The text is formatted to look like the excerpt from a newspaper, and this is surprisingly effective at immersing you in the film’s world before it even begins, as well as subtly establishing an unspoken impression that the film itself is reporting on the events of the story, and you are the passive reader, taking in what’s happening but powerless to influence the events that are playing out. It’s as if all of this has already happened, and all you can do is observe what went down. A terrific opening.

         The opening act establishes the four family members that act as the main characters of the film, including the mother (Toni Collette), father (Gabriel Byrne), a teenage son (Alex Wolff), and a young daughter (Milly Shapiro). We can tell that the mother had an unpleasant past with the grandmother, and that the grandmother interacted in a strange, overly controlling way with the mother’s children when they were born. As much as some members of the family are partly relieved that this difficult relative is no longer around, the hole that the grandmother left behind preys on each of their minds, to the point where we start to wonder if what’s haunting them is really only psychological in nature.

         If it seemed like I was suggesting that Hereditary’s story is subpar at the start of this review, I’d like to stress that that isn’t the case. The first half has some compelling family drama that goes to painful places. Despite the extreme emotions on display throughout the film, the relationship between these characters and the reasoning for why they all feel the way they do about certain issues is consistently believable and grounded. Much of this can be credited to each of the four main actors giving standout performances. Collette has a lot of tough scenes on her shoulders and she meets each of them head on by pushing her emotional reactions to her limit without going laughably overboard. Byrne may get overlooked due to the impressive nature of the rest of the cast, but he plays a father that is way out of his depth in a sympathetic and measured way. Shapiro takes the archetypal unsettling young girl role that is so common to horror and injects more vulnerability into her than I was expecting. Finally, Wolff did very impressively as the teenage son. A great deal of the film’s drama and horrific tension rests on him being able to sell the film’s key moments through his reactions, and he nails all of them. While some have criticised how he responds to certain moments like he’s suddenly become a six-year-old child, it never bothered me. If anything, it just made the horror of the situation sink in even more, as it suggests that this person is so terrified that he’s reverting to a more vulnerable version of himself. All in all, the film’s first half has some great family drama to accompany the effective scares. The idea of a difficult grandmother leaving an impact on a mother that makes her feel cursed as she struggles with her own family and fears that she might be passing the curse on to them is a golden premise for any horror story, and the performances make the drama of this premise work.

         Then, after sowing the seeds that make you reasonably confident you know what direction this horror movie is heading in, it takes a sharp, shockingly unexpected turn. Suddenly, you’re not sure what the film is about, or where on earth it’ll head after this development. Granted, the family drama is still the driving force of the movie, and many of the same themes about struggling with how to process grief and live with your family during an impossibly difficult time are still there. But as far as where you think the plot will take you next, the film sweeps the rug out from under you, leaving you completely stranded. And that’s a terrific move for a horror movie. Certainty and familiarity are the enemy of fear, and by making you second guess yourself like this, the film leaves you alone in a dark, uncharted forest. I was more on edge after the significant turning point, making every scary moment get to me that much more than if we were treading along the predictable path.

         But as we approached the final act, the effect had unfortunately dissipated as the ultimate shape of the plot revealed itself. After a certain moment, the nature of what’s going on suddenly clicks in your head, and the all-important fear factor of the unknown loses its edge. After that, I was waiting to see if the film had any big last-minute surprise about how this was all going to resolve, but sadly, it runs its course in a way that’s still somewhat interesting and unnerving to watch, but certainly less compelling than the rest of the film. By the conclusion, I was left wondering what the film’s take-away was meant to be. It presents all these questions about grief, the trauma that a difficult family member can leave behind, and how old scars can push a family to breaking point, but then ends without really saying anything about these issues. It leaves the questions it raises to the audience, and while asking viewers to develop their own answer to what the film presents them with isn’t necessarily a bad approach, in this case it felt like the film created an interesting series of problems and then left before offering any unifying thesis statement on any of it. Horror should of course leave some questions unanswered, but like any decent story, I should be able to take more of a thematic point away than simply “yeah, that’s something, eh?” It’s not a disastrous ending, but Hereditary’s narrative doesn’t end as well as it starts.

         Having said that, I still cannot recommend this film enough as a technical achievement within the medium. Every part of the filmmaking process comes together to make Hereditary a superbly crafted cinematic horror experience. The cinematography never stops impressing, taking influences from The Shining with how it presents rooms, houses, and objects of focus. They’re often shot at a distance, with you being able to take them in all at once, much like the miniatures you see the mother working on. But then the camera will start to slowly creep closer towards key figures or objects, creating this uneasy tension as you take in more of the detail of what you’re looking at, and end up getting more intimate with the object of focus than you might be comfortable with. The editing makes excellent, creative scene transitions and connects the shots within a scene together in memorable and insightful ways. The film knows when holding on for an unbearably long time works for the atmosphere, and when to make a quick, unexpected cut to punctuate what’s just happened, or throw you off balance for what’s about to happen. The soundtrack provides some exquisite pieces of horror music, avoiding the cliché and overused sudden sharp violin stings in favour of steady, perpetually creeping atmospheric music which constantly fills you with dread. The sound design is on point, making seeing this in the cinema with surround sound essential. Isolated noises will pop out sharply and startle you with alarming effectiveness. This is Ari Aster’s feature directorial debut, and it’s a hell of an impressive one. Based on this, I’ll be very interested to see what he does next.

         Hereditary’s plot may not finish as strongly as I suspect it could have, but enough of the narrative still works for me to make me glad I saw it. When you add to that a whole host of impressive examples of cinematic form, you have a film that might not land well with everyone, but is absolutely one of the year’s highlights.

8/10.

Its narrative falls short of all-time greatness, but its presentation can’t be faulted. A terrifying and memorable time.

[danofcrowsnest-blog]

The Wonders of Our Sinful Nature

I have a question for you. How many times in your life have you been called a sinner with any real sense of seriousness? Whatever your answer is, from one to ten thousand and one, I can assure you that it hasn’t been anywhere near enough. Quite naturally, the modern mind will reel from such a proclamation, as it believes by right that it has been born upon the high ground, acting as if it has always held the superior position of power and vision. This subtle arrogance is a tremendous disaster for the soul, for the human experience, and for the cosmos as a whole.

Of course, I am not talking about sin as you might have heard it set within some religious or philosophical architecture. While the nature of that framework is certainly another matter altogether, I can assure you that the word sin as we have popularly defined it was as absurd thousands of years ago as it is to you now.

In other words what I am about to say to you now isn’t new. This is isn’t some hip and trendy insight from a weak soul caught up in the spin and tumbling of in the gravity of his epoch. No, from the very first time the word sin was used, it was never intended to signify that we are dirty and ugly and weak, or that we have somehow committed a crime against the divine by being at all. I know this because the word sin originally wasn’t a word that had anything to do with religion. It was an archery term.

To sin is a technical term that means to “miss the mark”. It was a way of referring to the missed shot, and a way of bringing into the light the process by which the wayward arrow that has not found the target. It doesn’t take much to see how this term could be misappropriated in service of the dogmatic and ideologically possessed mind. The distance between the word sin having originally meant the missing of a target, to the world sin now coming to imply the committing of a crime, is really quite small. As such, it doesn’t take much imagination (and even less personal experience) to see our tendency to leap quickly and with a great enthusiasm over such a chasm.

The real question is, what is the nature of this gap? Why do we, even when the originating reality of the term sin has been revealed to us, do we choose to go about actively ignoring the inherent and informing nuance around that reality and instead choose to enforce the error? The reason is actually quite simple: our spiritual teachers aren’t master archers, and regardless, we the masses, don’t have any interest in difficulty of something like archery. So, we line up, sit down, or hunch over a screen to be educated in the realities behind of the missing of a target by someone who has never knocked an arrow for themselves. You see, we have been repeatedly held hostage by those of us who are not, or will ever be, masters. And we willingly submit because we would rather submit to them, then to the process of anything resembling a path to a mastery for ourselves. This willing submission to our weaknesses takes off the pressure, granting us the bland alleviation that descends only to the dull and stagnant not-yet-a-soul. However, as stagnant as we may get, our hearts fight back, and rebel. We all know something is deeply wrong, but the pain of this awareness is too much, and so we are forced to leaping over the edge of one side of the gorge, to reaching desperately for the other. Once we have made that jump, and once our fingers have clung, then sin becomes something else entirely: a symbolic object of blame, very much having the nature of the (poisoned) arrow. This way, the suffering that we feel has both an easy diagnosis and cure: them. They. Him. Her. It. You hurt because “they” are sinners, full of grease and decay. Then, when you have yourself been caught unable or unwilling, then you can write yourself off in very much the same way. You say, “This is expected, for I am corrupted by nature. I haven’t the choice here. I am as I am”. Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that when you have been offended or hurt by someone else, you must hold them to account, and take them to task for their error. You demand “they” be different.

We are this way because we haven’t been taught very well. Our systems of education within our religions, cultures, and sciences have been utterly blinded by the very software it has sought to inform. To put it another way, the theology of sin will always be corrupted because our own ontological experience must itself always arrive through sin. That is to say, our being, from our first day on this planet to our last, is something that must be negotiated out of a surrounding reality we don’t understand very well. All of us must learn because all of us are born ignorant. We are born with every kind of desire and urge and need, most of which we act blindly in service of, and we don’t see very clearly that these drives cannot find satiety or fulfillment without a profound form of submission. We want to eat, but we need to farm, hunt, or buy (sell our time). We want to have sex, so we need to compromise ourselves to find and maintain a suitable mate. We want to be happy, so we go to the movie theatre (money), take a hike (time and effort), or lose ourselves in the company of loved ones (compromise). Each of these things requires a process, which is itself not unlike the shooting of an arrow, and like the shooting of an arrow, they will miss. A lot. If you practice of archery, your arrows will miss thousands of times before you can begin to group them around your mark at will. It will then take many thousands more until you can split your arrows by instinct.

You see, by using a term from something simple, universal and incredibly difficult, you can speak directly to the soul whose main function is to grow and learn. Only the soul who has learned to submit themselves to the sinning process will ever find a mastery of that sin. It can never happen for someone who has exiled the reality of sin to something that is philosophical or theological. To do this is to commit a very dangerous sort of sin because it is the missing of the mark by the refusal to raise up your bow in the first place. In most religious circles, this has been paraded about as something virtuous, but there is no virtue in casting down the bow into the dirt and snapping the arrow over your knee.

The entirety of the religious traditions (including that of science), and thus the resulting cultures, have been corrupted by this one terrible mistake. A misreading of that one word and the resulting ideas that follow it as they occur throughout the ancient literature will blind the reader not only to the narrative itself, and the teachings within, but what is far more tragic, you will miss the very reason for it being there at all: you. That is, the realization of a human soul that has come here, now, despite the apparent impossibility of that reality.

Archery, and any complex participatory endeavor for that matter, is the exploration of the reality of being held to account against the substrate in which it must exist. Here you are: you want the bullseye, but you will always find yourself unable. Even as a child, you come to understand that reality doesn’t serve you. Your wanting isn’t enough, not now, not ever, but it will direct you. If you are wise, that wisdom will have you pointing your arrows at the archery range, and therefore ultimately at yourself. If you are arrogant, that arrogance will have you pointing your finger instead, at this, at that, at whatever takes you away from the real. In other words, you have no choice but to take aim at something. Therefore, you cannot miss a target intentionally, you can only choose another target.

So what now?

Find your mark, and then, with all of your courage, pick up and knock the arrow. With the entire strength of your heart, draw the fletching to the skin of your face. Aim with love, attention, and care. Breathe out, and while holding gently to that stillness, simply let go. Be completely aware. Make intimate the flight and strike of the arrow with the state of your inner being. Watch how they are one. Make adjustments. Repeat. This time, do it better. Repeat. This time, even better. Repeat.

This time, be better. Repeat.

You are a sinner, so sin beautifully.