Just to clarify my thoughts (since I've had a number of people ask me about it) re: Job and cursing God. There's a big difference between cursing God as used in Scripture and how we generally would think of cursing at God today.
Cursing someone, in the Bible, has a lot of depth to it. It's not just saying "screw you " in anger, it's got a sense of forsakenness to it. It's the opposite of a blessing, a removal of blessing. If the blessing is presence, your face shining on the person you're blessing, then a curse is absence. In some translations, Job's wife tells him to "renounce God and die," which I honestly think makes a lot more sense to modern ears.
Job says a lot of unpleasant things to and about God in his anger and grief. So do the Psalmists. A number of the Prophets. So can we. God can take it if we come to him with honest expressions of our emotion, including those not-so-nice ones directed at him. I don't think there's anything wrong with getting mad at God and saying, "How dare you, you bastard" when you suffer unjustly. You can say much worse, I think, without sinning, though I don't feel particularly inclined to give examples. But as long as it's an honest expression of your heart, I think you're doing exactly what prayer is for. You're presenting him your heart with an open hand. He can use that. Opposite of love is not hate but indifference, etc.
Job doesn't renounce God. Neither should we. But I think when you're truly suffering, you're gonna have those feelings toward God either way. He'd rather you address them with him directly than try to avoid them. Cursing at God in the modern sense is actually a great way to keep the relationship strong and not end up cursing/renouncing him in the Biblical sense.
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A little love letter to Din Djarin writers... 🤍
I love that some of you write him as soft and gentle while others focus on the darker, harsher parts of his personality. I love that he can be both a quiet, kind man caring for his child or an intimidating, terrifying bounty hunter who is a lean, mean killing machine... depending on what the fic warrants.
I love how you write him with other characters from The Mandalorian or even with those who would never cross paths with him in canon, from Star Wars or elsewhere. I love how you write him interacting with yourselves and us, and some of you even create your own original characters to exist a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away alongside him.
I love that some of you ship him with that one other special person, while others recognise how desirable he is and ship alllllll the ships. Not forgetting those of you which are here for none of those ships and/or even headcanon him as ace. I love that any of those options allow you to explore your own identities and sexualities through him.
I love that you can write the most tooth-rotting fluff or filthiest smut, and all of those things in between. Whether it's for general audiences or explicit and strictly 18+ ... all of your fics have an audience and someone out there who appreciates your writing.
I love how differently you can interpret him, but there are also so many common themes and tropes running through your writing. I love that there is room for all of your Dins here.
I love that he means so much to you and that all of us here hold him in our hearts a little bit. I love that we can all watch the same episodes and come to entirely different conclusions about him. I love how much we love him.
Getting to be a part of this wonderful community and interact with so many people who love the space tin can man as much as I do has truly been one of the best things that happened to me recently. I'm so glad I made this little blog... It reminded me just how good fandom can be. I am blown away by the number of talented people here!
So, I just wanted to take a moment to express some gratitude towards all of you! Thank you for writing your Dins and please don't ever stop. Finally.... last, but not least:
I love Din Djarin!!!
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jesus christ impaled on a wednesday i hate hate HATE it when christianity is brought into mathematics. people pushing their agenda by saying shit like "this beautiful mathematical thing proves the existence of GOD" or "GOD made math and we're just discovering it". that is SO fucking rancid for so many reasons and half the time the people that say those kinds of things hold math in a purely qualitative sence in their mind, thinking that because they got a mandelbrot zoom in their reccomended they eat breathe and shit math out their asshole on the spiritual level
no matter how hard our education systems bastardize the subject, compressing their concepts into a pristine meaninglessness to cull the young person's imagination across the land, nor how well their nouns verbs and adjectives describe what we see in the universe, mathematics at it's heart is a form of SELF EXPRESSION. nothing, NOTHING I SAY in this world we live in would be as FUCKING PSYCHOTIC as to suggest us to dwell over how a bunch of IMAGINARY IDEAS relate to one another along patterns and symmetries, other than OURSELVES. we started doing math because it offers a kind of fulfillment unlike any other artform. the difference between mathematics and other arts is that our culture doesn't see it as one.
mathematics is not about facts, or even worse, about "rules", but rather about the IDEAS that went into drawing such conclusions. similarly, the only thing more beautiful than math's polyhedra, infinitely intricate fractal shapes, and other pictures such as the ones abraham and jacob here put in their thumbnails, are the MADE UP IDEAS that constitute them, ideas that we have thought up for no good reason other than we find doing so lovely. wonderful. fulfilling and completing.
if some BRICK LICKER named EZEKIEL went out to an art fair and proclaimed with their righteous ass vocal cords, "all these paintings, all these works of art, all of these were drawn by GOD and HERE'S WHY", they'd rightfully be told to go off and HUFF DICK, but when it's mathematics it passes with nodding heads because our culture doesn't see math as any kind of self-expression, instead as a bunch of statements and sedentary pictures to worship, bend over, and take cock for to achieve some higher level of virtuosity.
"but how can the Mandelbrot set have infinite complexity as you zoom into it, that has to be god right there!!!" perhaps if you ever pondered the distinguishing complex numbers, how recursive processes ballet with its algebraic structure, the geometry unfolding into chaos along an infinitesimal boundary, all things that DON'T ACTUALLY FUCKING EXIST IN OUR WORLD BUT WILL STILL BE THOUGHT OF FOR OUR SAKES, LEST WE LET THE IDEA GO COLD AS WE SHIVER IN THE ABSENCE OF THE WARMTH OF ITS SIMPLE CHARM, then you wouldn't resort to implementing an omnipotent figure in order to fulfill your inclination to have the wonder be explained by anything besides the creativity of humans.
oh, but questioning the words of the bible? now that's sacrilege.
HOLY SHIT.
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yknow, no, i'm not done thinking/posting/being deeply angry about the whole "bbuuuhhh Astarion is gay and was made playersexual as a game mechanic bbbuuuhhhhhhh" garbage some people still spout.
like this type of sentiment is always annoying and wrong, but it's specifically this character for whom it's especially annoying to me, just because on top of all the regular host of issues, it also deeply contradicts what I believe is the central theme of his whole goddamn story.
(excuse the rant please.)
Like, my skin already crawls at that term, "playersexual". I hate it, and find its use either vaguely ignorant at best, or blatantly pan/biphobic at worst. but even just besides that....
This character is a man whose narrative intentionally shows his presentation of himself, and of his masculinity, as being contradictory with convention. This character is one whose entire arc is about discovering who he is beyond the boxes he was assigned: a spawn, a monster, a seducer, a tool, a predator, a plaything, a victim, a sexual object... these are all identities that were forced onto him. And if he's given space to discover them, turns out, none of them are things that he actually wants to be. if you give him space, and affection (romantic or otherwise), and acceptance, and help him attain closure and catharsis, he expresses desire to be... an adventurer, a lover, a friend, a protector, so many things, but all of them in his own way. That's the point of his story, control vs. autonomy.
How.... myopic does one have to be to see that story, to play that story, to play an active, participatory role in that subversion, that search for the self beneath the masks, and declare that actually, they made him this other box for him to fit into, so... it's fine, i guess, to ignore what he says?????? it's fine if they pick and choose among his expressed traits which ones to use and which to disregard, because they decided (based on frankly homophobic and rather misogynistic stereotypes) that he cannot be different from their perception, despite him literally saying otherwise????????
Astarion's entire figure is a succession of trope-subversions. I could write essays about all the ways in which, in the romanced spawn game, the narrative sets up tropes (primarily in act 1), only to then purposefully knock them down and contradict them as the game progresses.
Like..... He was to take revenge by taking power for himself (like he thought he wanted, like Cazador did to Vellioth): ended up taking his revenge and rejecting the power that could have come with it, and despite that having a price, being content and grateful for it (and realizing that the alternative would have had an even greater price he would have paid unknowingly). He starts out using sex and sexuality as a weapon, and a tool of manipulation, like he did for many decades: ends up expressing discomfort with being seen as a sex object, resuming his sex life by saying "I love you" before his partner would have, and proposing sex with them as a beautiful metaphor for his own rebirth.
His whole story starts out with him thinking he requires protection from the player and that the only way to get that is through using his body and looks as a bargaining chip: later he discovers in himself a desire to be the protector himself, which he talks about more than once, and expresses varying degrees of discomfort at the thoughts of both using his body to gain something, and needing a protector.
There's the "this is what I'm good for" type of attitude towards sex morphing into "I am so much more than a thing to be used". There's the whole thing about how important his looks were to both him and his "usefulness" back then, despite him not being able to even fucking see them, (which also kind of includes that silly lovely gremlin-face he sometimes makes), but those are just the ones off the top of my head.
The story, and the romance plot, is about... it's about him regaining ownership of himself, it's about autonomy, his whole recurring "what do you want" line is about respecting his choices and letting him find his way to them, it's about letting him show you who he is, believing him, and loving the man behind the facade.
how absolutely fucking short-sighted does one have to be to then take that incredibly reductive stereotype of "femme-leaning man with theatrical mannerisms who cares about his looks; must be exclusively homosexual and any attraction he shows to women is just a mechanic/fanservice/flattery" (which, that's so fucking insulting to gay men, and bi/pan men, an any man who might express masculinity in a less than conventional way, and to the women who may love them [eta: and of course nonbinary people, and the people to whom masculinity means something wholly different]), and assign it to this character on their own accord, despite him literally telling the player otherwise? despite him verbally expressing attraction to multiple women, and contradicting that stereotypical interpretation wholly and out of pocket??????
like, hello??????? did we play the same game????????? did we play the same fucking game??????????
like don't think for one second that it isn't the pan/biphobia that annoys me more, it absolutely is, but this character is such a particularly egregious example, it's almost fucking poetic.
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Daisuke's Notes on Venom's Concept and Design:
Like Millia, he was raised in the Assassin's Guild from an early age. He adores Zato.
He was set up to be a long-reach character and flier. I wondered what kind of character I should make. Originally, he had a cello.
He actually had a fan for a weapon before Anji did. He also had a large cross, which I thought was the best concept, however, we were told that it was OK to have it as a part of his design, but not to hit anyone with it.
When I was struggling, I went out to play games as a distraction. One time, as we were playing billiards, we talked about how interesting it would be to have a fighter who fights with a pool cue. But I thought the character would be too boring with just the cue alone, so I made it so that his hair also covered his face and added a mark on it with a bit of paint.
Since the head had such a strong personality, I wanted to keep the body simple. However, I wanted to change the overall shape of the body to make it similar to Zato's, so that's why the legs are like that.
As for the pants design, if I wanted to keep it simple, I would have made each leg the same color, but that would've made his figure appear more naked. To find a way around this, I made one leg light and the other dark to add more of a mysterious flair.
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reading up on some spoilers for the acolyte finale & i guess i'm really just not gonna finish this show. osha goes dark like i did NOT want her to, at least not this way. forgive me if i expected her to have more of a backbone ffs like... why? really what are her motivations? 'she wants to be free!' there are plenty of ways she can be free that don't involve her turning to the dark side within 5 fucking seconds, under a dude that killed her friends??? 'she's upset that sol killed her mother!' sure. & her immediate response (someone that was supposedly a moral person. someone that was going to arrest her own sister for being a murderer) is to kill him & join the dark side... like, there's no believable progression to her fall for me. it feels like she falls bc the plot demands it so, more than anything else. & to make it all worse everyone is eating it up bc 'omg oshamir held hands y'all!!' god, i'm so tired.
like part of me feels the criticism that the show suffers from not having time to properly tell its story, but on the other hand i feel like nothing relevant ended up happening even with the time they were given.
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