#idk much about religions

[theeflowerofcarnage]

fantasy sim brainrot atm

[skrunksthatwunk]

actually i'm still thinking about the moral orel finale.

he has a cross on his wall. do you know how much i think about that bc it's a lot.

a lot of stories ((auto)biographical or fictional) centering escape from abusive/fundamentalist christianity result in the lead characters leaving behind christianity entirely. and that makes complete sense! people often grow disillusioned with the associated systems and beliefs, and when it was something used to hurt them or something so inseparable from their abuse that they can't engage with it without hurting, it makes total sense that they would disengage entirely. and sometimes they just figure out that they don't really believe in god/a christian god/etc. a healthy deconstruction process can sometimes look like becoming an atheist or converting to another religion. it's all case by case. (note: i'm sure this happens with other religions as well, i'm just most familiar with christian versions of this phenomenon).

but in orel's case, his faith was one of the few things that actually brought him comfort and joy. he loved god, y'know? genuinely. and he felt loved by god and supported by him when he had no one else. and the abuses he faced were in how the people in his life twisted religion to control others, to run away from themselves, to shield them from others, etc. and often, orel's conflicts with how they acted out christianity come as a direct result of his purer understanding of god/jesus/whatever ("aren't we supposed to be like this/do that?" met with an adult's excuse for their own behavior or the fastest way they could think of to get orel to leave them alone (i.e. orel saying i thought we weren't supposed to lie? and clay saying uhhh it doesn't count if you're lying to yourself)). the little guy played catch with god instead of his dad, like.. his faith was real, and his love was real. and i think it's a good choice to have orel maintain something that was so important to him and such a grounding, comforting force in the midst of. All That Stuff Moralton Was Up To/Put Him Through. being all about jesus was not the problem, in orel's case.

and i know i'm mostly assuming that orel ended up in a healthier, less rigid version of christianity, but i feel like that's something that was hinted at a lot through the series, that that's the direction he'd go. when he meditates during the prayer bee and accepts stephanie's different way to communicate, incorporating elements of buddhism into his faith; when he has his I AM A CHURCH breakdown (removing himself from the institution and realizing he can be like,, the center of his own faith? taking a more individualistic approach? but Truly Going Through It at the same time), his acceptance (...sometimes) of those who are different from him and condemned by the adults of moralton (stephanie (lesbian icon stephanie my beloved), christina (who's like. just a slightly different form of fundie protestant from him), dr chosenberg (the jewish doctor from otherton in holy visage)). his track record on this isn't perfect, but it gets better as orel starts maturing and picking up on what an absolute shitfest moralton is. it's all ways of questioning the things he's been taught, and it makes sense that it would lead to a bigger questioning as he puts those pieces together more. anyway i think part of his growth is weeding out all the lost commandments of his upbringing and focusing on what faith means to him, and what he thinks it should mean. how he wants to see the world and how he wants to treat people and what he thinks is okay and right, and looking to religion for guidance in that, not as like. a way to justify hurting those he's afraid or resentful of, as his role models did.

he's coming to his own conclusions rather than obediently, unquestioningly taking in what others say. but he's still listening to pick out the parts that make sense to him. (edit/note: and it's his compassion and his faith that are the primary motivations for this questioning and revisal process, both of individual cases and, eventually, the final boss that is christianity.) it makes perfect sense as the conclusion to his character arc and it fits the overall approach of the show far better. it's good is what i'm saying.

and i think it's important to show that kind of ending, because that's a pretty common and equally valid result of deconstruction. and i think it cements the show's treatment of christianity as something that's often (and maybe even easily) exploited, but not something inherently bad. something that can be very positive, even. guys he even has a dog he's not afraid of loving anymore. he's not afraid of loving anyone more than jesus and i don't think it's because he loves this dog less than bartholomew (though he was probably far more desperate for healthy affection and companionship when he was younger). i think it's because he figures god would want him to love that dog. he's choosing to believe that god would want him to love and to be happy and to be kind. he's not afraid of loving in the wrong way do you know how cool that is he's taking back control he's taking back something he loves from his abusers im so normal

[adhd-merlin]

Christian iconography? in my Merlin??

[abyssalaquarist00]

idk if I'll make this a fic instead or keep sketching out comic pages for practice

[lunar-jewels]

Apotheosis

[skyblueartt]

Thinkin about how I’ve seen a lot of super interesting interpretations of Henry being religious or at least believing in God (makes sense— he was raised in Utah after all, lmao). I really dig this, maybe it’s because I was raised in a regions environment and hashtag religious trauma!!! But also- do we think if he did believe in God, he stopped doing so after Charlie’s death, the children that went missing at HIS restaurant, aaaaaaaaand finally figuring out that his best friend that he once trusted and cared for uh. Was responsible for ruining his life and taking so many others??

Basically in my head he went from 🙏 to

[glownery]

wishing everyone who celebrates a happy easter and an even happier transgender day of visibility 🐣🪩🫶🪽

[icewindandboringhorror]

little lord cottonball gazing down from his ominous perch

[asterdeer]

tear the pitch apart

not really please be nice-ish but i'm submitting a pitch to a literary festival pitch war and i need to be the most specialest goodest writer so the pitch war runners will say nice things about me in front of 50 people and maybe decide to agent me. haha what

A farm boy follows a thief on an interplanetary petty crime spree in search of a mythical deep-space monster. The Monster At the Bottom Of the Universe is a sweeping space opera about the myths we tell to keep ourselves alive — and what happens when those myths come true.

it has to be 280 characters or less (i'm presuming including spaces a la twitter) and this feels so shallow and uninteresting to me but i don't have ROOM for more and i'm trying to follow their pitch construction formula. would you read this book, is the second line too cheesy, is it too vague (I CAN'T HELP IT), should i temporarily change the 41-character book name so i have a little bit more room to pitch the damn book rather than its title, do i need to start from scratch

[dawnssummers]

— i never liked that ending either. more love streaming out the wrong way, and i don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way.

buffy the vampire slayer, 5.07 fool for love + 5.18 intervention + 5.22 the gift / richard siken, litany in which certain things are crossed out

[triglycercule]

I need to ask the mtt expert, do you think any of the murder trio would be religious?

ooooof this is a hard question to answer because personally i dont practice any religions specifically so i cant exactly offer the best answer to this DXXXX but i'll TRY. take everything i say with the fattest grain of salt. imagine the grain of salt is a salt lamp because i genuinely dont know that much about religion and belief

so i guess the first thing to consider is sans undertale since he's the one that all the mtt originate from. i dont think sans canonically is religious like at all. so if i wanted to take the easy route i COULD just says sans doesn't worship anything so its unlikely that any of the mtt would. but i wont because i have honor. i doubt that any of our surfaceworld religions wouldve made it into the underground since theyve been seperated from humanity for a long ass time. and i think undertale has its own belief based on the delta rune anyways so im gonna stick to that since it seems more plausible than just saying that dust is a hardcore buddist or something

for horror my answer like hell no. he mightve prayed for the angel described in the delta rune to save horrortale or something but i think those are just like desperate times call for shitty tries for ANYTHING to work. he literally describes horrortale as "living in a place like this is like living through an eternal hell" and i think that being in a place like horrortale would kill anyone's hope for some sort of angel to save them. plus i think he's too aware of the issues going on in horrortale to try and put his faith into something that doesn't exist AND also he wouldn't use religion as a moral guide. considering that he literally said in the horrortale flash game that he's "given up on figuring out what's right and what's wrong" (my king with an absolutely terrible moral compass LET'S GOOOOOO) (i love the horrortale flash game. i even have the quote saved because its such a good and important line for horror)

as for dust i think there's more of a possibility of him being religious (undertale delta rune based religion not any of the real world ones). the delta rune says that an angel who has seen the surface will descend from above and bring us freedom OR a harbinger of destruction as the angel of death, waiting to free monsterkind from this mortal realm. mostly gerson's words i stole this from the wiki because i cant be bothered to play undertale more than once. when translating dust's canon fics SPECIFICALLY the one called "a true hero appears" the topic of dust "liberating" the monsters of the underground and "granting their wish" to be free (even though he himself doesn't believe in the underground ever being free especially while hes in the middle of his "mad time") comes up. i dont think dust views himself as an angel at ALL like described in the prophecy but he could view himself as a "savior" type of person. it could be a really coincidental coincidence or it could be dust deciding to take up the role of the angel except a really really shitty one out of a desperate try for something to help like i mentioned with horror earlier. if we're going this route then him taking up the role of the angel could provide a sense of comfort that religion does and also shape his moral compass (i keep bringing these 2 things up because idrk why people worship. so i researched why so i can better support my arguments!!) with all the salvation liberation bullshit. personally i dont think that dust would exactly believe in himself as THE delta rune angel but more of just some sort of rouge savior but the possibility of going in a more delta rune religious way IS there

killer is in a completely different situation than dust and horror here (i'm not like the rest of yall ahh. get back in the original fishbowl you goldfish fuck) because he's AWARE of what arguably could be considered god in an utmv context. and obviously that's US the creators (players in his eyes. smh dont you know i havent played undertale in forever. i needa go back and do a true pacifist run. i did neutral because im shit at dodging attacks. but call me a CREATOR you second dimensional FUCK. you are a lower concept than me call me by a name i DESERVE) because for some reason and i completely forgot why he's aware of the creators. i think this could go in maybe two different ways where since killer is very much so aware that there are millions of gods(/creators. every one of us that creates something for utmv is a god in their multiverse LMAOOO) out there that he could completely just avoid religion itself since the usual reasons of comfort and moral alignment are completely debunked and pointless once you know that the gods that you could believe in just view you as code or characters to play around with. no comfort or morals to align with there. OR it could go in another direction where since killer is aware of the creators that he actually does end up worshiping SOME sort of us-based religion??? (what would that be called. do you think that theres a religion for all the self aware utmv characters who believe in creators. creatism. creationism. idk but would ink be the leader of that??? prophet type ass guy for creatism. this would be a cool concept someone else steal this from me and make a cooler story with it.) anyways i got side tracked. doesn't killer already believe that he has to do things that the creators want or something??? which COULD provide the moral compass part of religion. its definitely not a good moral compass but whatever killer believes his god wants of him he'll do. and also it might provide some sort of nihilistic depressive comfort knowing that everything is out of his hands and predetermined by a higher being. he already has that whole "lowly servant who'll do whats ordered of him" type shit going on. not unlikely that that could apply to the creators (or chara possibly. that relationship would be interesting if killer viewed them as a god and worshipped them as such. HM.)

anyways those are my thoughts on if i think the murder time trio would be religious. this was actually way longer than i expected but maybe thats just because i ramble a lot and have a lot of side thoughts. PERSONALLY i dont think any of them would worship a god just because i dont practice any religion and it makes it easier for me to characterize them without the religious barrier there. but also i do think there are possiblities of the trio all believing in a god (with horror maybe hopelessly believing the in the delta rune, dust becoming a delta rune esque figure, and killer's entire schtick with knowing about creators) but everyone has their own fanon interpretations on these characters!!! so if you wanna make them believe in religion or something then go then ahead and do that. maybe those possible points i brought up where they could worship a god will inspire someone or something idk. triglycercule OUT (off to reread horrortale for the 20th time today)

[jewishboricua]

i think that it's perfectly fine to celebrate a religious holiday while not following a specific religion yourself, but it becomes a problem when you start claiming that the holiday isn't religious anymore to force other people who dislike or don't celebrate said holiday to like or celebrate it because of YOUR personal opinion

[rainofthetwilight]

just saw someone call muslim women opressed and op, who made fluttershy a literal hijabi, agree with them 💕

[millenari]

To you, what’s the key belief or beliefs in cats? I just really like your takes

Hmmm, key belief(s) as in, the beliefs that are woven through the media itself and are communicated to the (human) audience, or key beliefs as in, the beliefs the characters themselves hold, like the Cat Religion(TM)?

in terms of the media: I have a lot of thoughts about Cats and how it dwells so much on the concept of cycles. The Jellicle Ball happens once a year, in a cycle. The cat chosen for the Choice is reborn into a new life, a new cycle. The main song, Memory, is about dwelling on the happiness you once had and using it to motivate you through current hard times, another cycle. There's a particular back-and-forth through the whole play of the old versus the young, not just for Griz and her memories, but also in the cast. Jenny's song -about how she's hardworking and motherly and worthy of respect- is followed by Tugger the rebel being Young Dumb and Sexy. Jerrie and Teazer's playful acrobatic song is followed by the respectful duet that honors Deuteronomy as the oldest cat in the tribe. Back and forth, another cycle. The cats who reach out to Griz out of compassion are all young, and the ones that pull them away are all old. Throughout the play there's this almost tension between the young and the old, and it ends with Memory, where a young cat (the youngest maybe) and an old cat come together to teach the whole tribe a lesson about compassion and forgiveness.

A lot of Cats fans don't like Moments of Happiness much, but it's one of my favorite Cats songs. The lyrics are kind of dense, and they're not taken from any of TSE's cutesy cat poems, they're from one of his more serious pieces, The Dry Salvages, which discusses the cyclic nature of humanity and life and death.

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing, The silent withering of autumn flowers Dropping their petals and remaining motionless; Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage, The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable Prayer at the calamitous annunciation? There is no end, but addition

(He must've been fun at parties, but to be fair I think anyone who lived through world war I and II was probably also like this).

Deuteronomy's lyrics from the Dry Salvages are taken from the middle-ish, and that section has a lot to do with age and experience and how they change how a person looks at things.

It seems, as one becomes older, That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence— Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.

Which is obviously super relevant to Deuteronomy, Resident Old As Shit Man™. I could go on about this poem & MoH for forever (But I Wont), but I think it has a lot to do with these themes in Cats of aging and dying and living again, and passing on your experiences to the younger people along the way. tldr:

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No wait actually I have more to say about Cats and The Dry Salvages. The whole poem is basically TSE going on and on about how life is cyclic and there's no real forward progress and humanity is fighting a losing war against nature and ourselves, and death is inevitable, etc etc. But it actually ends on a positive note

[For most of us] Who are only undefeated Because we have gone on trying; We, content at the last If our temporal reversion nourish (Not too far from the yew-tree) The life of significant soil.

Essentially this last bit is kind of saying 'the only reason humanity hasn't been 'defeated' by now is because we keep trying and living despite all the cyclic hardship and inevitability we face'. And the only way we can truly content ourselves is by 'nourishing' 'the life of significant soil'.

Of course there's interpretation there but that last bit makes me think of children. Maybe our lives don't mean anything and maybe humanity is caught in a cycle of violence and death but even with how temporary our lives truly are, we can still tend to something that'll outlast us, we can still tend to our communities and our children.

And that really ties into Cats and how Cats doesn't even really have much of a plot- because the plot isn't the point. The point, any dedicated Cats fan will tell you, is watching the silly little cat people interact and live with each other. The point is the relationships between these characters and how they're acted out on the stage/screen. There's no single overarching metaphor at hand here, or some 1:1 message that everything you see in Cats is working towards. It's just a bunch of characters living their lives, on an important holiday for them.

It's kind of the same thing for humanity in general. What is the point of life? Most of us are just... people. We have no grand purpose or Destiny™ we're working towards, we're just going to live our lives, unremarkable and mundane. But that doesn't mean that our lives have no point. Because, even if we haven't really consciously thought about it before, most of us do know deep down that the goal/purpose of our lives is to tend to and contribute to the communities we live in. It's what humans (and cats) do.

& idk I feel like that's really beautiful and meaningful for Cats in its own way? Sometimes all life has gotta be is sucking and fucking and taking care of each other along the way. Sometimes all life has to be is having a good time with those you love. Sometimes all life has to be is sitting down to watch a silly cat musical with catchy songs and fun dances.

And given that Cats made billions of dollars and broke all sorts of records, I feel like that's an idea that resonated with a lot of people, at least on some level.

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And now all of that said. Look at this. Look at fucking this. 'Munkustraps snickerdoodles'. Why do I always find the weirdest shit when searching for Cats images on google.

[theygender]

I've got too many games I want to play and not enough free time 😭 I still need to finish my BG3 playthrough but since Endless Ocean: Luminous came out I've been playing a lot of that instead. Also just got back into Wizard101 last night. Started playing House Flipper again last weekend. Still need to finish BOTW so I can start a TOTK playthrough and finish Pokemon Shield so I can start on Pokemon Violet. I've been fighting off the urge to start up a new Skyrim playthrough for weeks. My brother just told me that Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is getting ported to the Switch. And now I'm suddenly feeling inspired to replay DAI... And throughout all of this I'm also playing the hell out of DragonVale on my phone. Someone just pay me to play video games all day please