#it would have required coming up with a whole new race and mythology just to have a recurring villain

[giffingthingsss]

It's interesting for me to think of what Seska's background could have been. It's interesting that this cunning spy should be so drawn to Chakotay. A twisted person kind of desperately clawing after something. Of course the desire doesn't express itself in any way approaching healthy.

And it's interesting that she winds up in a society where she has to play submissive, although no doubt she would have ended up murdering Cullah and ruling the Kazon through her son.

[berattelse]

[...] The qualities we hail as heroic in Western culture -- courage and fortitude, selflessness and nobility, steadiness of mind and will -- are not unique to men. Arguably, they're not even characteristic. But in the male-dominated myth, folklore, and literature that defines our culture, they've been annexed as "masculine" traits. We're still struggling to create or consume stories about valorous women, unless they also display the "feminine" virtues: passive sex appeal and fragility that requires rescue. In a hero, these are flaws. Thus, any heroine who tries to embody both contains the seeds of her own undoing. The female hero can hoist up the shackles of femininity and take them with her on adventures, but that's not the same as breaking free. [...] In college, I was a particular fan of Edmund Spenser's "martial maid" Britomart, who gets to wear armor and carry a spear and go on quests and even rescue maidens -- but eventually, even Britomart gallops back to her role as a princess, a wife, and the mother of a race of noble Britons. Her whole mission, in general, has been to find the man she glimpsed in a magic mirror and fell in love with. The rescuing damsels part was just a side quest. [...] And if the heroine truly slips the constraints that her femininity is supposed to place on her, the very heroic virtues she embodies often mutate into monstrosity. In the Old English epic poem Beowulf, the eponymous male hero is described as an aglæca, a word for which we do not know the exact meaning but which is usually translated as something like "hero" or "warrior". Beowulf's antagonist, the monster Grendel, also gets described as an aglæca, which in his case is usually glossed as "demon" or "monster" or something similar. What the two have in common is the sense of being awe-inspiring or formidible, so that's probably more or less what aglæca means. But the word has a feminine form, aglæcwif, and the ancient text contains an aglæcwif too: Grendel's mother. There is no abiguity to this word, not in the way it's come down to us; aglæcwif is translated as "monster-woman," "troll-lady," "wretch," or "hag." In other contexts, "wif" (which is also attached to other descriptors of Grendel's mother) specifically denotes a human woman, and yet -- like it's not indignity enough that she's always called "Grendel's mother," as if the bards were Grendel's schoolmates who didn't realize mothers had names -- the aglæcwif is assumed to be subhuman and bestial. She's just as much an aglæca as Beowulf, and just as much a wif as the other human women to which that refers, but the combination inspires not awe but horror. The monstrousness of Grendel's mother, the factor that makes her a hag or a troll or a wretch, comes from her stepping outside the slim strictures of womanhood into the realm of aglæca, of formidability and awe. In another world, she would have been a hero.

Zimmerman, Jess. Introduction to Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology. Beacon Press, 2021.

[dreamsmp-au-ideas]

Oops, I made a plot…

Anyways. Epithet Erased

I love the idea that the Egg was created by someone with the Epithet of Consume. Now an interesting idea I had is that the owner of Consume originally had possession of the Arsene Amulet after Copycat died. The owner of Consume created the Egg and then started using the Amulet to feed Epithets to the Egg. In return, the Egg was able to use these Epithets and temporarily bestow their powers onto those who followed it, hence the whole bloodline wanting to protect it kinda thing. When the original owner of Consume started to reach the end of their lifespan they fed themselves to the Egg in hopes that it would eventually be fed something like Immortal or Rebirth and it could bring back its former master. This is why it’s an Egg, eventually it’s going to hatch into the original owner of Consume if it’s fed the right Epithet

The reason those following the Egg want the amulet is because they want to get back to work again. Everyone else is varying degrees of aware in terms of the Egg group’s plan. The Egg Group also has a process that new members of the Egg Cult go through where they offer up their Epithet to the Egg by being “Consumed” by it and held inside the Egg for a couple days. At which point the Egg leeches out their Epithet as an extra way to force its followers to be loyal. Sure you can still use your powers, and a ton of other Epithets as well, as long as you’re linked up with the Egg. But the moment you become disloyal and break off your Epithet is gone. It belongs to the Egg, you were only renting it.

Of course this takes a lot of time so it hasn’t happened to anyone in the DSMP by the time the actual plot starts except for Skeppy who’s the bartering chip that the Egg uses to make Bad be loyal to it. Bad doesn’t belong to the bloodline that’s been taking care of the Egg, he’s just a victim of circumstance. Techno is part of the family, but he’s a member of an offshoot branch that distanced itself from the Egg. He’s Billiam’s great (however many greats) nephew, but that isn’t a strong enough link, he’s the actual great (however many greats) grandson of the Sheriff which is why the Egg has less of a hold over him than it would a typical member of the bloodline.

Mundies are actually the best people for the job when it comes to fighting the Egg since its mind control powers only work on those who have an Epithet or offered up their Epithet to the Egg. Those who lost their Epithet specifically to the amulet against their wills are also immune. The Egg has the same powers seen in canon because one of the first Epithets it ever ate was Control.

There is a trade off to the Egg taking powers however, since the Epithets can’t “mature” while inside the Egg. Meaning they stay at the same proficiency level their former owner possessed making it advantageous for the Egg to allow Epithets to “mature”. The Egg might even offer an Epithet to a Mundie to let them mature it before harvesting it at a later date. It’s worth noting also there is a difference between getting trapped on top of the Egg and getting trapped inside the Egg like Skeppy, only the latter will get your Epithet snatched while Tubbo and Ranboo who are victims of the former just get their heads scrambled.

Team Pro Omelet eventually learns of the Egg’s abilities and plans and at that point it’s a race against the clock to ensure they 1. Don’t get the Amulet and 2. Aren’t able to shove anyone powerful inside the egg (cough cough Tubbo/Ranboo cough cough). While we could have Tubbo angst with his powers getting yoinked, I don’t think it would mean as much as the angst that would come from him just being normally controlled by the Egg and having his Epithet taken against his will would partially break him out of its control. He might not actually care as much about his Epithet, but him hurting Tommy by accident while being controlled? That would break him, mentally and emotionally.

While I was thinking about the plot, I mentioned with my last post I think that Tommy’s Epithet should have been taken or lost. We’ve had a connection made between Tommy loosing his power to Ranboo causing him to forget which I really like, but what if, and hear me out, he loses it to the Amulet? The last caretaker yoinks it with the intention of giving it to the get, probably at some point a good ways before the plot starts. However, because the former caretaker loses the Amulet before depositing it, Tommy’s Epithet stays pretty much trapped inside the Amulet. Partially because I really like the idea of Antihero Dream having to 180 why he wants to Amulet when Tommy eventually admits what happened. It adds a nice dynamic of character wants.

Originally I purposed Hero as Tommy’s Epithet which is good, but I think I can outdo myself. Meaning I have two other options.

Earlier I mentioned the Egg really really wanting someone with Immortal/Rebirth. Well, it’s a running gag that I keep making Tommy a phoenix in every AU I touch because he never damn well dies. So you could give one of those two words, or heck, even the word Phoenix itself to Tommy and it’d not only be a really good Epithet but it’d be an Epithet currently inside the Amulet, giving even more of a dire air to the story as a whole. If the Egg Squad is able to get that Epithet inside of the Egg, you bet it’s gonna hatch and the results will not be pretty. It also plays well with the fact that Tommy just never seems to die. Even when he doesn’t have his Epithet it’s such an engrained character detail that people comment on it whenever he joins an SMP.

I think it could be an interesting dynamic and it gives Tommy an array of interesting powers from wings to fire to being able to bring himself back to life. Additionally, we can give Immortal or Rebirth to Foolish since he’s a sentient Totem of Undying in canon and it would work well.

Alternatively, and this is admittedly the idea I personally favor, we pull a parallel between Tommy and Tubbo by giving him a seemingly stupid Epithet that’s deceptively strong. And trust me, I spent a lot of time thinking about what this Epithet might be and how it could be misinterpreted. The idea I ultimately settled on was Archetype. Now, this idea is near and dear to my heart because it fits Tommy as much as everything I’ve posted prior and arguably even more so than Hero. Tommy throughout the entire canon DSMP has had role after role forced on him. Being called the Hero or the Villain when really he just wants to be Tommy. I like the poetic irony of his Epithet literally being Archetype when everyone around him seems so desperate to assign him one. Plus, it’s one of those things that requires not just creativity but a certain level of classical or psychological background information to use properly, leading most people to being unable to use it (Egg included if it actually managed to get the Amulet.) So people just kind of brush it off and it lends itself well to the whole do you wanna be a hero thing since Hero is an Archetype.

For this power we’d basically be able to pull some really strong parallels between Tommy and Tubbo. Both have Epithets that are strongest when they temporarily become a different Epithet. Maybe Tommy can not only use Archetype, but he can temporarily transform it into literally any societally recognized Archetype and use that as if it was his Epithet. So he could still technically use the same powers one could come up with for Hero, it would just be while he’s using an Archetype Swap ability. Not only that but he’d be able to change other people’s personalities or Archetypes. He could even imbue others with traits of a new Archetype (i.e. giving a Mundie the powers associated with a Hero Archetype, aka literal actual honest to god plot armor) to act as support, but you wouldn’t think to do that typically. You’d just assume that Archetype is a one trick kind of pony at best. But maybe if we wanna go Tommy and Tubbo childhood friends route as kids they specifically spent hours practicing alone when they figured out their Epithets. Specifically coming up with overpower combo moves, thinking up powers that interacted well with one another to make themselves an actually terrifying menace to society.

Tommy and Tubbo childhood friends also is near and dear to my heart because everyone remembers the scene where Tommy told Tubbo that he’d been the hero and Tommy was the one who was the side kick. Having Tommy’s Epithet be Archetype and the majority of his childhood used to find ways to support Tubbo’s Epithet using his own adds another layer to this. Tommy literally made Tubbo the hero, gave him the powers and assigned him the Archetype. It’s just that they’re the only ones who know that. Plus plus we get a really good queen and knight dynamic between the two when they’re going all out which I just die for.

Also if SBI is canon, it makes sense why Tommy would have learned the word Archetype as a child, he’s related to Techno, what else would you expect? Part of Tommy being stupidly good at his power is probably from Techno reading him mythology as a child and linking up characters to their Archetypes, giving Tommy even more stupidly overpowered ideas for how to use his Epithet. Unfortunately it got yoinked at some point, either because someone saw how powerful it was or maybe Tommy just got unlucky. I think out of the ideas I’ve listed Archetype is my favorite if we go the yoinked route. It also works well with Techno and Dream since, again, Tommy could play a support role to make these already terrifying Mundies even more terrifying. Plus it would be like Tommy to keep having an Epithet secret because Techno is a Mundie and then later accidentally getting it stolen or we can go double angst and have Tommy both forget he has an Epithet and get it stolen.

Obviously Archetype being the Epithet and the plot would still work with Tommy just forgetting what his Epithet was, but also I really personally just like the aching pain of Tommy being forced to describe what it’s like having your Epithet stolen. How much the gap doesn’t hurt physically but emotionally and mentally almost daily, a phantom pain that never goes away. Sweet angst my beloved.

----------------------------

Tubbo🤝Tommy

Having stupidly overpowered Epithets

Anyways. Holy shit. This is brilliant. The plot is brilliant and oh god. This could open up so much now. The Arsene Amulet is still relevant in a way.

Oh man, the Egg just consuming Epithets as well? Man. That’s great.

[eloquentgifs]

DWJ Reading Project. Part I

As I said here, my 2021 resolution is gonna be READING EVERY DIANA WYNNE JONES BOOK I CAN FIND, and due to my love of making lists and taking notes, I’ve decided keeping track of this reading project here in this post, which I’ll keep updated as I make progress. It’s mostly for my own pleasure, but maybe it helps someone who wants to give it a try to this amazing writer and doesn’t know where to start.

Part II (1977 – 1981 & The Chrestomanci Series)

Part III (1984 - 1992 & Land of Ingary Series)

- Changeover (1970) I couldn’t find it, which it’s a pity because not only it’s her first novel, but it’s one of the few she wrote for adult readers. For what I’ve seen, it’s a political comedy about colonialism in Africa.

- Witch’s Business (also called Wilkin’s Tooth, 1973) It tells the story of two siblings who start a revenge/dirty work business to make some cash and ended up caught in a crazy plot of debts, witchcraft, old grudges, painting modelling and treasure hunting. I love how even this early in her career you can already find some of her creative trademarks, altought it’s not as polished as her future novels. Still, the characters and the dynamics between them are pretty good, the way everything unfolds is flawless, and it is a fun read in general.

- The Ogre Downstairs (1974) Three kids are dealing with the fact that her mother married a guy who’s rather grumpy and terryfing (the titular ogre), and that now the household includes him and his two sons. The story begins with the Ogre buying a chemistry set to each group of siblings, and they turn out to be magical, so a lot of crazy shit happens and they start to get along with each other as they have to colaborate to clean a mess after another before the ogre finds out. I must confess I didn’t enjoy that much the first half because everyone was being an asshole, but it improves as the characters own their shit and decide to be better. Magic here it’s merely an excuse, Diana just wanted us to learn empathy and how to build a good coexistence.

- Eight Days of Luke (1975) David is depressed because he’ll have to stay with his abussive relatives during the summer, but then he mets this weird kid with powers called Luke and they become bff’s. Unfortunately, Luke is also in bad terms with his own relatives and David will have to help him to hide from them. I’d say you’ll enjoy more this book if you have some basic knowledge on Norse Mythology, but tbh I think reading it without any clue about the subject might be interesting in its own way, because you’ll discover the stuff as David does. Great read anyway.

- Dogsbody (1975) This one it’s like two different premises mixed up together. First, we have this society formed by sentient stars and planets, in which Sirius was a very important figure until he’s judged and punished for murder, and we follow him while he tries to get free (and maybe prove his innocence?). On the other hand, I think Diana just wanted to write a dog POV. In any case, both ideas where combined perfectly, and the result it’s crazy good. Some trigger warnings tho: there are several depictions of animal abuse, and once again tons of emotional cruelty towards chidren (the main human character is an Irish girl being harrased and bullied by her own family because of her nationality and for having a father on the IRA)

- The Dalemark Quartet: · Cart and Cwidder (1975) It kind of reminded me of the first half of The Name of the Wind, probably because the main character is also a red haired kid who travels with his family all around the world performing with his lute (I figured a cwidder is some kind of lute?), and there’s also tragedy, politics, old foreshadowing songs and legends... But mostly because I JUST COULDN’T STOP READING, and I can’t wait to read the rest of the series.

· Drowned Ammet (1977) I thought the two previous books were rather darker than I’m used to see in Diana’s work, but this is a whole new level. It follows the evolution of Mitt from a sweet farm kid to a teen terrorist, so prepare for a main character full of hate, resentment and, eventually, self-loathing and a beginning of redemption. We also get to see his dynamic with two high born children, and it is super interesting how the prejudice and ignorance keep getting in their way so they can’t become 100% friends (as a contrast with those stories of rich and poor being bff’s without a single sign of how very different their POV of the world is, just by their different upbringings). I love friendships and found families as much as anyone else, but it is refreshing to see some realistic struggles and people caring for others even if they don’t get along perfectly

· The Spellcoats (1979) This one was very surprising, and I think it might require a re-read some time. The first odd thing about it is that it’s settled centuries before the previous books, in prehistoric Dalemark. Then the actual wtf comes from the structure itself: it’s a first person story, weaved into two wool coats (seriously, this concept is genius and so is the ending). The weaver is a girl who has to runaway from her village with his brothers and sister because they look like the people who’s invading their land, so their fellow villagers want them dead. There’s not a lot of action, but tons of little details and magic and family dynamics brilliantly written and I LOVE IT.

· The Crown of Dalemark (1993) This last book of the series brings back almost all of the characters of the previous ones, plus a time traveller from modern Dalemark, and concludes both the political/social aspect of the story and the more fantasy, mythical one. I love time travel stories so this really was my treat, because not only serves a plot purpose, it’s also used to let us know what happened with the characters of past Dalemark (although through the lense of historians, which is not as much as I would like to)

- Power of three (1976) At this point it’s clear Diana just loved to play with POVs and make us question every side of a story. I’d say this was the main theme of this book. It is present in the main character arch, who has to reconcile how he sees himself (as some average pointless dude) with how he’s perceived by others (everyone fucking loves him and consider him super wise and awesome). And it’s also the main conflict of the plot: the three races/species who live in The Moor HATE each other and constantly kill each other as animals but.... Well, it remind me to this episode of Star Trek. I love it when a story is used to show us how actually ridiculous some prejudices and bigotries are. I love it when they do it in ST, and certainly love it when Diana does it. Just let kids read and watch these things all of the time, please.

[rose-oracles]

Myths About the Zodiac Signs

Aries:  The myth most associated with Aries is the Greek story of Phrixus and Helle, children of King Athamas. Their stepmother, Ino, hated them and tried to have them killed by hatching a devious plan. Right before their murder, a magical Ram flew in to save them, sent by their natural mother Nephele. The Ram took off with the children on his back, bringing them to safety.  Afterward, Zeus placed a Ram’s image in the heavens to immortalize his courage. The Ram then shed his golden fleece, which continued to be a source of inspiration and legend. From the sky, Aries the Ram now symbolizes leadership and bravery, along with the protective powers of his fabled golden fleece.

Taurus:  The Greek myth of Taurus comes from the story of Cerus, a large and powerful Bull, owned by no one. The spring goddess Persephone found him one day, trampling a field of flowers without realizing it. Although the Bull could not speak, he understood Persephone, and she calmed him by her very presence. Persephone taught the Bull patience and how to manage his strength. Every year thereafter, she and Cerus would reunite in early spring. Riding on top of him, they would set the flowers in bloom. When Persephone descends into Hades in the fall, Taurus returns to the night sky as a constellation. There, he reminds us of quiet steadiness, loyalty, and earthly splendor.  

Gemini:  According to Greek myth, the Gemini Twins represent the brothers Castor and Pollux. Young and adventurous, they shared their life together with curiosity and zeal. Castor was mortal, Pollux immortal, and eventually Castor died, leaving Pollux distraught. Pollux wen to his father, Zeus, and begged him to help. Zeus allowed Pollux to share his immortality with Castor, transforming them into the constellation Gemini so they could live together forever. From the sky, the Twins remind us of human complexity, as they embody mortality and divinity, separation and unity. 

Cancer:  According to Greek myth, Cancer was a giant Crab named Crios, who guarded the sea nymphs of Poseidon’s kingdom. He was enormous and immortal and took his role of protector very seriously. One day, a few sea nymphs escaped, and Crios sent a giant squid named Vamari to retrieve them. The squid devoured them instead, and when he returned, Crios fought him to the death. Afterward, the Crab was crippled and in terrible pain. To repay him for his heroism, Poseidon relived Crios of his pain by placing him in the sky as the constellation as Cancer. From the sky, Cancer reminds us of the dear Crab’s protectiveness, care, and vulnerable strength.

Leo:  According to Greek mythology, Leo was a mythical monster known as the Nemean Lion. Heracles was required to kill this Lion as one of his twelve labors – thought to be an impossible feat. Since the Lion was impervious to weapons, cunning Heracles eventually succeeded by strangling the Lion with his bare hands. Realizing the protective powers of the Lion’s hide, Heracles skinned the Lion, making a cloak and helmet out of his fur and head. Then the spirit of the Lion was placed in the sky as the constellation Leo, reminding us of the Lion’s mythic power and magical strength.

Virgo:  Astraea is perhaps the most interesting Greek goddess associated with Virgo. She was the last of the celestial beings to leave Earth at the start of the Bronze Age, after witnessing the degeneration of mankind. Goddess of innocence and purity, Astraea was a virgin and caretaker of humanity. When she left Earth, she was placed in the heavens as the Virgo constellation. Many believe that the adjacent Libra constellation represents Astraea’s scales of justice. Shining from the sky, Virgo reminds us of virtue, as she waits to return to Earth in angelic form, as the ambassador of a new golden age.

Libra:  The main Libra myth revolves around the Greek goddess Astraea, represented by the constellation Virgo. Astraea was the goddess of innocence and purity who lived on Earth as a celestial being. She eventually fled, escaping the onslaught of human depravity, which appeared at the dawn of the Bronzed Age. Astraea represented justice, just like her mother Themis, the goddess of divine justice. When Zeus placed Astraea in the sky, she was holding the scales of justice, represented by the constellation Libra. The Libra Scales remind us of harmony, delicacy, and fairness. They help Astraea to hold her place in the sky, until the day she returns to Earth as the ruler of a new golden age.  

Scorpio: The Greek myth most associated with Scorpio involves the god Orion and the goddess Artemis. One day Orion bragged that he was the greatest hunter who existed and would kill every creature on earth to prove it. Artemis, goddess of hunting, did not retaliate or defend her status as the greatest hunter, because she was enamored by Orion. This irritated Apollo, Artemis’s twin, and he began to work with Gaia, the great earth goddess, to create a Scorpion that would kill Orion. Eventually, the pair battled, and the Scorpion won. Zeus then placed this creature in the sky in recognition of her good deed. The Scorpion was placed on the opposite end of the sky as Orion, to prevent them from fighting. It is said that Orion appears in the winter to hunt, fleeing in the summer when Scorpio appears. As a constellation, the fierceness and bravery of the Scorpion are immortalized, reminding us of her power – along with the fate of Orion’s hubris and brutality.

Sagittarius: The Greek myth of Sagittarius is connected to the archer Chiron, who was a gentle and compassionate centaur. While many centaurs lacked intelligence and acted out in violence, Chiron was known for his wisdom and ability to teach. One day, while trying to wipe out other centaurs who were causing problems, Heracles shot Chiron by accident. Finding Chiron suffering and helpless from his venomous arrows, Heracles experienced deep regret and sadness. Chiron was immortal and could not die – although he wanted to, since he was in so much pain. Prometheus stepped in after observing Chiron’s struggles, and help elevate him to the heavens, where he would live as the constellation Sagittarius. There, he reminds us of his wisdom, teaching, and gentle might.    

Capricorn: The Greek myth connected with Capricorn is the story of the sea-goat Pricus. He was the father of a whole race of sea-goats who had the heads and bodies of goats and the tails of fish. They lived in the sea, close to shore, and were known as honorable and intelligent creatures. Created by Chronos, god of time, Pricus shared Chronos’s ability to manipulate time. As the story goes, Pricus children began exploring and swimming to shore. On land, they slowly lost their tails, intelligence, and ability to speak and live in the sea. Pricus was distraught. His children were disappearing from the water, rapidly becoming regular goats. To fix this, he revered time and warned the sea-goats of their fate in attempts to save them. No matter how many times he did this, Pricus’s children continued to leave the sea to explore. Finally, he gave up, allowing them to live out their karma. Immortal and in pain, he begged Chronos to help him die. Instead, Chronos placed him in the sky, where he could watch his children from above, even as they played on the highest peaks. There, Capricorn reminds us of paternal love, the inevitability of karma, and the importance of letting go.

Aquarius: The Greek myth associated with Aquarius is the story of Ganymede, a young prince who was said to be the most beautiful man of Troy. One day, tending to his father’s sheep, Ganymede was spotted by Zeus, who found him to be overwhelmingly desirable. Zeus decided he wanted to take Ganymede as his servant and young lover -a common practice in Greece. Once on Mount Olympus, Ganymede became Zeus’s cupbearer, brining Zeus drinks upon command. Essentially, Ganymede was Zeus’s slave, and Zeus cemented this role by paying Ganymede’s father with land and a herd of fine horses. One day Ganymede rebelled, pouring out all of Zeus’s wine, ambrosia, and water of the gods onto Earth, which caused a massive flood. After reflection, Zeus realized he had been unkind to Ganymede and decided to make him immortal rather than punish him. Zeus then placed him in the stars as the constellation Aquarius. There, the Water Bearer reminds us of rebellion and independence -and the chaos sometimes necessary when fighting for freedom and equality.  

Pisces: According to Greek myth, Pisces is connected to Aphrodite (goddess of beauty) and her son Eros (god of love). One day, the monster Typhoon began to appear on Mount Olympus, sent by Gaia to attack the gods. None of the gods had the power to destroy Typhoon, so they transformed themselves into animals to flee from him. On a certain day, when Typhoon appeared, Pan warned the others and then transformed himself into a sea-goat, diving into the Euphrates River. Aphrodite and Eros were bathing on the banks of the river and missed Pan’s warning. When Typhoon suddenly appeared in the water, they turned themselves into Fish and swam away. Afterward, two Fish were placed in the sky as the Pisces constellation, commemorating the day when love and beauty were saved. Venus is the roman name for Aphrodite, and astrologers consider Pisces to be Venus exalted – or exalted love – and to represent the spiritual dimensions of the Venusian realms of love and art.

 - Where I got this information: The Stars Within You. A Modern Guide To Astrology. By Juliana McCarthy. 

{Rose-Oracles}

[aion-rsa]

Why Chronicles of Narnia’s Santa Claus Celebrates Christmas with Weapons of War

https://ift.tt/3n3CscT

Anyone who adapts the works of C.S. Lewis for the screen will find they have a few odd things to contend with. We have never seen a screen version of Prince Caspian, for example, in which young children Susan and Lucy go around cavorting with Bacchus, the god of wine, and his wild Bacchants, for the very good reason that it comes across as seriously strange and more than a little disturbing.

But the oddest moment in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lewis’ first written The Chronicles of Narnia novel and the most often adapted, cannot be so easily lifted out. In that fantasy epic, the first major sign that the White Witch’s eternal winter is fading is the appearance of Father Christmas (aka Santa Claus), who has been kept out of Narnia ever since the Witch arrived.

Father Christmas gives three of the four child protagonists magical gifts that are both far more impressive and far more dangerous than most children expect to find waiting for them on Christmas morning, and these gifts play important roles in the story, not only in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but in its sequel Prince Caspian as well.

How Father Christmas Signals Springtime

Lewis’ friend J.R.R. Tolkien famously disliked the Narnia Chronicles, as he told David Kolb in a letter. Lewis’ biographer George Sayer and Tolkien’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter both suggest that one of the reasons for this was the mixing of mythologies in the Chronicles. Carpenter particularly singles out the combination of Father Christmas—a mythologized Christian saint—with Greco-Roman fauns and nymphs, and talking animals, as one of Tolkien’s main issues with the stories. Too many different things all jumbled up together.

Other scholars have doubted whether this in particular was the cause of Tolkien’s dislike, but it’s easy to see why it seems a likely factor. Tolkien was a firm believer in the importance of believable, consistent secondary world creation, and the appearance of a Christian saint in a world dominated by characters from Greco-Roman and Norse pagan mythologies seems rather strange. Tolkien is far from the only reader to find the big bearded man’s sudden appearance odd—and his disappearance, never to be heard from again, for poor Edmund never even gets a single present from him despite living in Narnia and reigning as King for 15 years.

Lewis, however, was determined to keep Father Christmas in the story and not everyone finds his presence a problem. When Lucy Pevensie is first told that the White Witch has made it “always winter, but never Christmas,” she responds the same way any child would, crying “how awful!” The primary target audience of the Narnia stories is children, and the story is told in a way that’s meant to appeal to children.

Lewis clearly realized that a child’s response to an eternal winter would quite likely be “goody, it must be Christmas every day!” and that the lack of Christmas needs to be specified to show how awful the Witch’s winter is. Andrew Adamson’s film version from 2005 shows the same understanding. When young Lucy lays eyes on Father Christmas, she yells “Presents!” That’s what Christmas and Santa Claus means to young children, after all.

How have Narnians, living in a world where Jesus’ role is fulfilled by a talking lion, come to have an understanding of the Christian festival of Christmas? P.H. Brazier points out that, as Lewis later established in The Magician’s Nephew, (British) humans have been living in and ruling Narnia since it was created. So in story, it is not actually that strange that Narnia’s British-descended kings and queens introduced Christmas and the name of Father Christmas for the red-coated man who brings presents at that time of year into Narnia, even without bringing the story of Jesus along with it.

Additionally, the British name “Father Christmas,” like the French title of “Pere Noël,” (and unlike Americans’ use of “Santa Claus”), avoids any clear connection with the Christian “Saint Nicholas.” It also opens up the possibility of this being a mythological figure connected to the more secular side of Christmas.

Let’s face it, if we’re going to start getting really picky about these things, then what exactly are we going to do with the “holiday” lands in The Nightmare Before Christmas and other fantasy versions of Santa that are far removed from their Christian original story?

And Father Christmas has an important role to play in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. His appearance is the very first sign that the Witch’s hold is weakening and the long winter is ending. Although the British Father Christmas has more or less become the American Santa Claus these days, his origins aren’t just in the story of Saint Nicholas. He is also a character in medieval Mummers’ Plays, which celebrated the annual death of vegetation, crops, and so on in autumn and winter, and their resurrection and re-birth in spring.

Father Christmas was a personification of Christmas, and so represents when the darkest time of year also brings light and joy before the turning of the seasons towards brighter days. The usefulness of this symbolic figure for the story of Narnia and how its endless winter becomes spring, alongside the death and resurrection of the Christ-figure Aslan, thus becomes inescapable.

Father Christmas/Santa Claus is also, of course, a Christian figure, and Disney and Walden Media’s marketing for their 2005 adaptation leaned heavily on its Christian themes, especially in certain parts of America. The previous year’s The Passion of the Christ had broken box office records and was for some time the biggest earning R-rated movie ever made (until Deadpool de-throned it in 2016). The Christian market was suddenly on movie studios’ radar, and an adaptation of Lewis’ famously Christian-themed books seemed perfect to cash in on this new discovery. It’s no wonder, then that there was no strong desire to edit out this most obviously Christian element of the story.

Why Christmas Means War in Narnia

There’s another important aspect of Father Christmas’ appearance in the story though, and one brought out especially effectively in Adamson’s film. That aspect is the wartime setting of the story, and the surprisingly violent nature of the gifts Father Christmas gives the three children he meets. (The third Pevensie sibling, Edmund, isn’t with the others when they meet him, because he has temporarily defected to join the White Witch—a choice he comes to regret pretty quickly!)

All three children are given weapons along with some advice about how to use them. Oldest sibling Peter is given a sword and shield and told that they are “tools, not toys”—Peter will soon be required to use these weapons in war and to become High King of Narnia afterward. The need for him to grow up almost immediately is clear. Susan is given a magical horn that will summon help, and a bow and arrow, which in Lewis’ original book, she is told to use “only at great need.”

Lucy, the youngest, is given magical healing cordial, and a small dagger, also to be used “to defend yourself at great need.” In the book, both Susan and Lucy are firmly told that they are not to fight “in the battle.” The girls are therefore put into traditional wartime roles for women as helpers and healers, and Peter is left to lead the fighting.

The violence of the story reflects the background violence of its setting. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was written in the late 1940s, a few years after after the end of World War II, and is set during that cataclysmic war. The year isn’t specified, but the children are evacuated from London, which suggests 1940 during the Blitz bombing of London and the Battle of Britain as a likely setting.

This date was later confirmed by Lewis himself when he put together a timeline of Narnian history some time after finishing the whole series. This is one reason why Edmund is so excited at the prospect of eating Turkish Delight—he is living in a country in which sugar is rationed and sweets are a rare treat. Which doesn’t excuse him for betraying his brother and sisters “for sweeties,” as the White Witch puts it in the film, but it does provide some context for how important Turkish Delight seems to be to him!

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Adamson’s film emphasizes the wartime setting of the story far more than earlier adaptations, opening on an air raid over London and showing the children racing to escape the falling bombs. The children talk about the war and about their father being away fighting in it, and directly compare their Narnian experiences to their earthly ones far more often than in other versions or in the original novel, where their evacuation is largely an excuse to get them staying in Professor Kirk’s house, and is based on Lewis’ own memories of having evacuees stay with him.

A wartime Father Christmas giving weapons of war to wartime children also requires a serious-looking figure, someone who makes the children feel “solemn,” as Lewis describes it in the book. The appearance of Father Christmas/Santa Claus in modern pop culture became fixed when Coca-Cola started using him in their advertising campaigns, dressing him in their company colors of red and white. Before that, he was just as likely to wear brown, or green, like Charles Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Present (who is very similar to him).

Actor James Cosmo’s Father Christmas (who is not named on screen, to avoid confusing British audiences expecting “Father Christmas” and American audiences expecting “Santa Claus”) is not the Coke-drinking Santa. His robes are red, but they are a dark, maroon-red, fitting in better with the earthy tones of a snow-covered Narnia. Cosmo’s performance is carefully balanced to match. He laughs and is reasonably jolly, but he is also serious, bringing enough gravitas to the role to go with the very serious presents he’s giving.

Father Christmas’ gifts and advice are put to use at the climax of the story when Peter is required to lead an army into war without even Aslan’s presence to help him, Aslan having been inconveniently sacrificed at the altar of the Stone Table the night before. Of course the death of the Hero’s Mentor is a common trope in stories following Joseph Campbell’s template of the Hero’s Journey, allowing the Hero to prove their own worth independently before the end of the story. But expecting an untrained child to lead an army is a fairly extreme example.

Perhaps this was also part of Lewis’ ability to tap into young children’s games and fantasies, since plenty of children have played with toy swords in mock battles, but putting it on screen does have the potential to look rather strange.

In Adamson’s film, this problem is solved by changing the ages of the two older children. Whereas the four children in the BBC’s earlier adaptation all appeared to be very close in age to each other, Adamson’s Pevensies split neatly into two groups—a considerably older Peter and Susan (William Moseley was 18 by the time the film came out) and a much younger Edmund and Lucy. At the very beginning of the film, Peter glances uncomfortably at a solider barely older than himself, and during World War II many young men of Moseley’s age would have been fighting already (or serving in the Home Guard).

So Peter and Susan become characters who might more reasonably be expected to start taking on adult roles. The younger Edmund is initially kept further back from the battle with Mr. Beaver and the archers, while the older Peter actually leads the charge.

The sheer sexism of Father Christmas’ original advice in the book also presented a potential problem for a movie released in 2005, a time when women were still not allowed to fight on the front lines in the U.S. or UK armies (this changed in 2016 in both cases), but were serving in many other roles in armed forces around the world. When Lucy says that she is brave enough to fight in the battle too, she is told that “battles are ugly when women fight.” The implication seems to be that they are not ugly otherwise, which is very strange—and what is it that is so unnatural and ugly about women fighting, anyway?

Adamson’s film cleverly sidesteps this issue with a tweak to the dialogue. As we’ve seen, Peter and Susan are both far older in this version than they are implied to be in the books. Edmund is absent from the Father Christmas scene, so we see the much older teenagers given weapons to use, but he gives the much smaller child just a dagger for self-defence. When Lucy objects and says she thinks she could be brave enough to fight, Father Christmas says nothing about women, but just tells her that “battles are ugly affairs”—implying that it is her young age that he’s thinking of, not her gender.

When the much older Susan asks him “what happened to ‘battles are ugly affairs?’” on receiving her bow and arrow, he just laughs a little—in this version, there is no instruction for Susan to avoid the battle, and a brief moment is added in the eventual climax when she saves Edmund with a well-timed arrow before Lucy fulfils her job as a wartime nurse by healing him.

As Father Christmas drives away in the film, Lucy smugly tells her older sister, “I told you he was real.” It’s very funny and also fits rather nicely into some of the film’s overall themes, as Susan is always the sceptic, the Doubting Thomas; in Prince Caspian, she steadfastly refuses to believe Lucy has seen Aslan to the point it nearly gets them killed.

This is another aspect from the books played up in Adamson’s films, as Susan constantly doubts whether they can achieve anything in Narnia. When Peter first tries to use his new Christmas present, ‘sensible’ Susan screams at him, “just because some man in a red coat gives you a sword it doesn’t make you a hero!” as he tries to hold off a wolf attack on a frozen river, cheerfully ignoring the fact they still have a missing brother to find.

But just as young men and women had to become “heroes” in World War II, all four Pevensies eventually find their inner hero over the course of the story—in three cases, helped by the immensely practical, if violent, Christmas presents they’ve been given.

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[wtfzodiacsigns]

Myths About the Zodiac Signs

Aries:  The myth most associated with Aries is the Greek story of Phrixus and Helle, children of King Athamas. Their stepmother, Ino, hated them and tried to have them killed by hatching a devious plan. Right before their murder, a magical Ram flew in to save them, sent by their natural mother Nephele. The Ram took off with the children on his back, bringing them to safety.  Afterward, Zeus placed a Ram’s image in the heavens to immortalize his courage. The Ram then shed his golden fleece, which continued to be a source of inspiration and legend. From the sky, Aries the Ram now symbolizes leadership and bravery, along with the protective powers of his fabled golden fleece.

Taurus:  The Greek myth of Taurus comes from the story of Cerus, a large and powerful Bull, owned by no one. The spring goddess Persephone found him one day, trampling a field of flowers without realizing it. Although the Bull could not speak, he understood Persephone, and she calmed him by her very presence. Persephone taught the Bull patience and how to manage his strength. Every year thereafter, she and Cerus would reunite in early spring. Riding on top of him, they would set the flowers in bloom. When Persephone descends into Hades in the fall, Taurus returns to the night sky as a constellation. There, he reminds us of quiet steadiness, loyalty, and earthly splendor.  

Gemini:  According to Greek myth, the Gemini Twins represent the brothers Castor and Pollux. Young and adventurous, they shared their life together with curiosity and zeal. Castor was mortal, Pollux immortal, and eventually Castor died, leaving Pollux distraught. Pollux wen to his father, Zeus, and begged him to help. Zeus allowed Pollux to share his immortality with Castor, transforming them into the constellation Gemini so they could live together forever. From the sky, the Twins remind us of human complexity, as they embody mortality and divinity, separation and unity.

Cancer: According to Greek myth, Cancer was a giant Crab named Crios, who guarded the sea nymphs of Poseidon’s kingdom. He was enormous and immortal and took his role of protector very seriously. One day, a few sea nymphs escaped, and Crios sent a giant squid named Vamari to retrieve them. The squid devoured them instead, and when he returned, Crios fought him to the death. Afterward, the Crab was crippled and in terrible pain. To repay him for his heroism, Poseidon relived Crios of his pain by placing him in the sky as the constellation as Cancer. From the sky, Cancer reminds us of the dear Crab’s protectiveness, care, and vulnerable strength.

Leo:  According to Greek mythology, Leo was a mythical monster known as the Nemean Lion. Heracles was required to kill this Lion as one of his twelve labors – thought to be an impossible feat. Since the Lion was impervious to weapons, cunning Heracles eventually succeeded by strangling the Lion with his bare hands. Realizing the protective powers of the Lion’s hide, Heracles skinned the Lion, making a cloak and helmet out of his fur and head. Then the spirit of the Lion was placed in the sky as the constellation Leo, reminding us of the Lion’s mythic power and magical strength.

Virgo:  Astraea is perhaps the most interesting Greek goddess associated with Virgo. She was the last of the celestial beings to leave Earth at the start of the Bronze Age, after witnessing the degeneration of mankind. Goddess of innocence and purity, Astraea was a virgin and caretaker of humanity. When she left Earth, she was placed in the heavens as the Virgo constellation. Many believe that the adjacent Libra constellation represents Astraea’s scales of justice. Shining from the sky, Virgo reminds us of virtue, as she waits to return to Earth in angelic form, as the ambassador of a new golden age.

Libra:  The main Libra myth revolves around the Greek goddess Astraea, represented by the constellation Virgo. Astraea was the goddess of innocence and purity who lived on Earth as a celestial being. She eventually fled, escaping the onslaught of human depravity, which appeared at the dawn of the Bronzed Age. Astraea represented justice, just like her mother Themis, the goddess of divine justice. When Zeus placed Astraea in the sky, she was holding the scales of justice, represented by the constellation Libra. The Libra Scales remind us of harmony, delicacy, and fairness. They help Astraea to hold her place in the sky, until the day she returns to Earth as the ruler of a new golden age.  

Scorpio: The Greek myth most associated with Scorpio involves the god Orion and the goddess Artemis. One day Orion bragged that he was the greatest hunter who existed and would kill every creature on earth to prove it. Artemis, goddess of hunting, did not retaliate or defend her status as the greatest hunter, because she was enamored by Orion. This irritated Apollo, Artemis’s twin, and he began to work with Gaia, the great earth goddess, to create a Scorpion that would kill Orion. Eventually, the pair battled, and the Scorpion won. Zeus then placed this creature in the sky in recognition of her good deed. The Scorpion was placed on the opposite end of the sky as Orion, to prevent them from fighting. It is said that Orion appears in the winter to hunt, fleeing in the summer when Scorpio appears. As a constellation, the fierceness and bravery of the Scorpion are immortalized, reminding us of her power – along with the fate of Orion’s hubris and brutality.

Sagittarius: The Greek myth of Sagittarius is connected to the archer Chiron, who was a gentle and compassionate centaur. While many centaurs lacked intelligence and acted out in violence, Chiron was known for his wisdom and ability to teach. One day, while trying to wipe out other centaurs who were causing problems, Heracles shot Chiron by accident. Finding Chiron suffering and helpless from his venomous arrows, Heracles experienced deep regret and sadness. Chiron was immortal and could not die – although he wanted to, since he was in so much pain. Prometheus stepped in after observing Chiron’s struggles, and help elevate him to the heavens, where he would live as the constellation Sagittarius. There, he reminds us of his wisdom, teaching, and gentle might.    

Capricorn: The Greek myth connected with Capricorn is the story of the sea-goat Pricus. He was the father of a whole race of sea-goats who had the heads and bodies of goats and the tails of fish. They lived in the sea, close to shore, and were known as honorable and intelligent creatures. Created by Chronos, god of time, Pricus shared Chronos’s ability to manipulate time. As the story goes, Pricus children began exploring and swimming to shore. On land, they slowly lost their tails, intelligence, and ability to speak and live in the sea. Pricus was distraught. His children were disappearing from the water, rapidly becoming regular goats. To fix this, he revered time and warned the sea-goats of their fate in attempts to save them. No matter how many times he did this, Pricus’s children continued to leave the sea to explore. Finally, he gave up, allowing them to live out their karma. Immortal and in pain, he begged Chronos to help him die. Instead, Chronos placed him in the sky, where he could watch his children from above, even as they played on the highest peaks. There, Capricorn reminds us of paternal love, the inevitability of karma, and the importance of letting go.

Aquarius: The Greek myth associated with Aquarius is the story of Ganymede, a young prince who was said to be the most beautiful man of Troy. One day, tending to his father’s sheep, Ganymede was spotted by Zeus, who found him to be overwhelmingly desirable. Zeus decided he wanted to take Ganymede as his servant and young lover -a common practice in Greece. Once on Mount Olympus, Ganymede became Zeus’s cupbearer, brining Zeus drinks upon command. Essentially, Ganymede was Zeus’s slave, and Zeus cemented this role by paying Ganymede’s father with land and a herd of fine horses. One day Ganymede rebelled, pouring out all of Zeus’s wine, ambrosia, and water of the gods onto Earth, which caused a massive flood. After reflection, Zeus realized he had been unkind to Ganymede and decided to make him immortal rather than punish him. Zeus then placed him in the stars as the constellation Aquarius. There, the Water Bearer reminds us of rebellion and independence -and the chaos sometimes necessary when fighting for freedom and equality.  

Pisces: According to Greek myth, Pisces is connected to Aphrodite (goddess of beauty) and her son Eros (god of love). One day, the monster Typhoon began to appear on Mount Olympus, sent by Gaia to attack the gods. None of the gods had the power to destroy Typhoon, so they transformed themselves into animals to flee from him. On a certain day, when Typhoon appeared, Pan warned the others and then transformed himself into a sea-goat, diving into the Euphrates River. Aphrodite and Eros were bathing on the banks of the river and missed Pan’s warning. When Typhoon suddenly appeared in the water, they turned themselves into Fish and swam away. Afterward, two Fish were placed in the sky as the Pisces constellation, commemorating the day when love and beauty were saved. Venus is the roman name for Aphrodite, and astrologers consider Pisces to be Venus exalted – or exalted love – and to represent the spiritual dimensions of the Venusian realms of love and art.

- Where I got this information: The Stars Within You. A Modern Guide To Astrology. By Juliana McCarthy.

Source: rose-oracles

[matildainmotion]

Rejection, Failures and Fxck Ups – A New, or Very Old, Approach to Loss and Losing

          “It’s okay to make mistakes – that’s how you learn;” “It’s the taking part that counts -the playing, not the winning;” “If you can learn to lose that will be a huge achievement.” I hear myself saying these and similar truisms when my daughter comes last in a race with her impossibly long-legged brother, or breaks a cup, or spills her drink, or when my son’s carefully planned prank goes awry, or the drawing he is trying to do does not come out right. In such moments of acute vulnerability my daughter howls – a cry of deep and terrible anguish, that can go on for a great many minutes after the original loss. I noticed even when she was a baby that falling, for her, was failing, an injury not so much to her body as her soul- as if the ground had deliberately struck her, undermining her upright dignity. My son, on the other hand, does not howl, but rather bares his teeth, makes fists, swings punches at me or anyone else who might have witnessed and therefore in some way contributed to his sense of failure. In both instances, when they weep and wail, gnash teeth - because on a child-scale their circumstances seem serious and awful - I have comforted them and then come out with some version of the above statements. They are trite but I have believed that the basic message – ‘it’s fine to fail’ – was a sound one. At least, that’s what I thought until last week.

           Last Friday I experienced two forms of failure which, on an adult-scale, were really very minor. One was the culmination of a writing competition, run by a literary agency – the prize: mentorship and representation. I had not entered it to win – I had entered it in order to have a focus, a deadline, to practice submitting my fiction, rather than hiding with it in a secret corner. The winners were due to be announced on Friday. Despite being clear my primary motivation for entering was not winning, despite being certain I would not be selected, come Friday morning I was nervous. I was checking Twitter for the announcement and felt a strange mix of repulsion and respect for those on there who were frank enough to tweet, with nail-biting gifs, about their angst, their aspirations, their hope. Hope - Dickinson’s feathered thing but, despite the feathers, the only item not to fly out from Pandora’s box- a quiet, little creature with wondrous and terrible tenacity. On Friday I wanted to get the damn thing out of the box. I wanted it to fly away. I tried hard to shake it loose - it wouldn’t budge. I was feeling hopeful.

           Meanwhile, down the hill, at our allotment, there were some other little things in a box, that did not yet have feathers, only fluff: chicks. I hadn’t been hopeful about the eggs. We had collected them from a faraway farm – in theory they were fertilised but the woman who sold them to us did so for half price because, she said, “It’s late in the season and I can’t be sure. I’ll give you a variety to give you a better chance.” And then, on top of that, our broody hen (the Star Wars-inspired ‘Princess Layer’), at first rejected the pale blue ones that did not look like hers, and only later started sitting on them, so I thought they had probably got too cold and nothing was going to hatch. But Thursday morning, four weeks after she first went broody, sitting day in day out in the dark of the nest box, I lifted up the Princess and lo and behold there was a broken shell, and a tiny, wet, cheeping chick. Friday morning, after checking Twitter, I pedalled down the hill to the hens. Chick number one had fluffed up to full yellow cuteness and been joined by chick number two. Little wings, dark eyes, pale pink claws. I thought that was it, and began to take the other eggs, the pale blue ones, away. But as I lifted an egg, I saw a black spy hole in its shell, and behind the hole – motion - someone inside. I felt small, in awe, as if whoever was within knew things I didn’t, couldn’t. Breath held, heart fast, I put the eggs back. Here was hope in action. An actual hatching - the Easter pinup – the most famous of images for spring, for life returning.

           By Friday evening I had not won the competition and the chick was dead. It had hatched after hours of work – who knew hatching could be so like a human labour in its length and intensity? Yet it had managed, had come out whole -a bold bundle of breath, blood, beak, incontrovertible evidence that whichever came first – chicken or egg – the result was the same: life. But then it had been weaker than the others, who had had a head start, and the broody hen was growing restless – when I came back to check on them before bed, I found it lying, limp, still warm, thin eyelids down, little claws unclenched, half buried in the straw. If I had come earlier, if I had separated it, if I had cleared out the straw…maybe it would have lived.

        I have been very lucky – I have never had a miscarriage or a still birth. This was only a little chick. Nonetheless I felt broken. I tried out the truisms that I have used on my children a thousand times - they did not cut it. Worse than that – they seemed offensive. I wanted to howl like my daughter, and rage like my son. They knew something I didn’t. Just like that chick did. So I gave up trying to teach my children how to lose with grace and decided to consider instead what I might learn from them.

           My son goes from one obsession to the next, as many children do, but he does so with particular, on-the-spectrum intensity. Feb to April was My Little Pony. April to June was Beast Quest. He is now onto the Greek myths. To be fair there is some consistency through this- believe it or not both My Little Pony and Beast Quest draw heavily on Greek mythology for inspiration. This is the first time his obsessions have overlapped with mine - in my writing I am also working on a Greek myth. What strikes me as I study the stories through my son’s eyes is that they are full of characters, divine and mortal, who fail, fall and fxck up royally, who lose face, lose their lovers and their loved ones, and that when they do, they are terrible losers. The heroes and heroines in these myths don’t hold back on their howling and their raging. They cry for weeks, years even. They cry so hard they change shape or change the world around them. They swear vengeance for their losses, plan awful punishments, wage long and horrible wars. No one tells Hector, Achilles, Paris: “Never mind mate – it’s the taking part that counts.” Now I am not proposing to use the ancient Greek myths as a new model for mothering, but there is something relieving about their heroes unashamed and often moving melodramas, about their sense of seriousness and ceremony. Inspired by these myths, my son held a burial for the chick, by the raspberry bushes on the allotment. He knelt and said a prayer to Zeus, and then to Hades and Persephone, asking them to welcome the little creature when it arrived with them, to let it fly free. This was after he had railed at me for an hour – crying, shouting, trying to punch me, beating the wall, accusing me of murder – full on, proper grief, worthy of those ancient Greeks. It struck me I could have done the same with my writing disappointment: printed out the webpage announcing the happy winners, then wept upon it bitterly. Built a ceremonial fire, burnt the paper, whilst sending off my prayers for the Herculean stamina and strength required to keep writing. What I’m trying to say is that I’m aware I have been guilty of that crime our culture commits daily- tidying disappointment and loss away too quickly, making it constructive, sidestepping the difficulty, heading straight for claiming: “I’ve learnt my lesson. I’m fine. I’m over it.”  

           In the modern mythic classic, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, written by Michael Rosen, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, a book more befitting my daughter’s than my son’s age bracket, each time the children encounter a new obstacle in the landscape – long grass, mud, a river, a snowstorm- they chant:

We can't go over it. We can't go under it. Oh no! We've got to go through it!

This is the insight that my children, a small chick and some Greek gods have reminded me of in the last week: you’ve got to go through it. Not over it, not under it, not round it, but through it. I did know this before – I know how excruciating it is when someone tries to teach you a lesson, give advice, instead of being present with the pain of where you are. But I had not recognised the extent to which I have been doing this with my children, because their losses seem so slight, so trivial when I hold them up against the stark losses in the world. I see now that I’ve been getting everything the wrong way round: I’ve been comparing the children’s worries to the world’s, instead of the world’s worries to theirs, instead of recognising that they hold some wisdom that I and the world need now. Ours is the age in which it is clear that we have made some cataclysmic mistakes, that we keep making them, that we are a generation of losers and those that come after us will inherit a whole lot of loss. There is no way round it. We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. A global pandemic. Racial injustice. Climate change. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it! This means weeping for weeks. Howling for months. Raging for years. But doing so consciously and creatively. When my children do this, I think they are rehearsing themselves, rehearsing me. This is not about being hopeless. I believe that going through it, with full feeling and ceremony, is the most hopeful thing we can do – the thing that will earn us feathers. Maybe we can weep enough to change ourselves, a metamorphosis as marvellous as that of a Greek god.

           To go through it, there are some things we are going to need. Two of these things are the stuff of the gods: care and creation, or, to use other words, mothering and making. In all myths, in all traditions, this is what the gods do- they make stuff and they look after stuff. The two go together: we look after things because we made them, and we make things because we care. Arguably ‘Mothers Who Make’ is a terrible tautology, and caring and creating may even be the same – they both involve a kind of holding. When the chick died, I had to hold my son while he tried to hit me. Later I had to hold a ritual with him. At a time when all the theatres are closed, it seems to me, we need theatre more than ever. Be it online or outdoors, we need to build symbolic fires, stages to hold our grief, our rage, our fear, our hope. We need to perform these things- it is what will get us through. Secret creations and collaborations got people through the concentration camps. The late and legendary civil rights activist John Lewis said: “If it hadn’t been for music, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings.” Art is not a luxury, a nice diversion – it is the way through, not round.

           So, what will I do next time my daughter falls over, or my son messes up his drawing? I hope I will pause and consider this: maybe there is a point to crying over spilt milk. Maybe next time it spills we will weep the same weight in tears as the milk that is pooling, white, across the kitchen table. Maybe we will lie in it, mop it up with our clothes, then run outside and do a dance to the milk gods, to celebrate the milk and say sorry for its loss, and then we will run to the river, dive in, wash our clothes and ourselves, while we sing a song of cleansing, and then we will walk back, dripping new. I am playing with this so as to bring it home to myself, so that when the next rejection, mistake, failure, loss befalls me or the children, I have the courage not to mop it up too fast. Instead of my teaching them to lose with acceptance, I hope that we may discover together how to lose with passion and imagination.

           So, here are my questions for you for the month of August (coming to you at the end of July): Tell me about your rejections, your failures, your losses- your own? your children’s? What do you do when loss comes? Do you weep? or rage? or both? Can you do so more, as if you were inside a Greek myth, do so consciously? And what ritual, ceremony or creative act can you perform to get you through it? What can you do to earn your feathers?

[haphapner]

The Madonna of Allentown

It happened again at Big Len's place in Allentown, Pennsylvania.  A steady flow of true humanity came through there every day.  Big Len's specialized in cold beer to go and weekly room rentals, an odd mix but it had been around for years.

I had just returned from buying a carton of cheap cigarettes.

It was my daughter’s sixteenth birthday.  I hadn’t been pregnant for fifteen years, eleven months and nineteen days.  On that morning, I experienced a miraculous conception.  What would come from my womb some months later would not, indeed could not, be, from a man.

Long ago, I recognized that one should take these things as they come.  The years and more than five-hundred-fifty pregnancies have tempered my weariness and bone crushing sadness with wisdom.  Inexplicably I felt driven to invest in this child so that it would be more successful than all the others combined.

One minute, I was walking up the backstairs to my bug-infested room, a communal toilet and shower down the hall.  The next, a fresh new soul spontaneously generated in my ancient womb.  The cigarettes slipped from my grasp and bounced down the dingy stairs, bounding higher as they picked up speed.  The carton cracked against the door and burst open spewing cellophane wrapped pleasure across the sun-lit landing.

“Shit!”

I can’t explain it; I just knew it had happened again.  It’s like Zen, if you’ve experienced sartori, you get it; otherwise, you’re shit-out-of-luck.

I sat down three quarters of the way up the steep stairs.  “Shit, shit, shit … I’m too tired for this.”  I slammed my elbow against the wall; dingy, faded wallpaper fluttered. “How does this always catch me off-guard?”  I took a long drag on a generic cigarette, my last.  “So many myths about gods becoming men and walking among us, the gods of mythology were too chicken-shit to become women.”  I ripped at a piece of wallpaper exposing years of corrupted paint.  “Woman’s work my ass,” a sarcastic laugh slipped out. “Men should try motherhood.”

My story starts in the mists of time, before I conceived the collective unconscious of humankind. Known by a thousand names – Eve, Ishtar, Isis, Mother Earth – I am the Oracle of Delphi who doled out visions, generation upon generation, ad infinitum.  The Greeks referred to me as Gaia, the one who sprang from Chaos and became the mother of all things.

Myth cloaks the truth trapping humanity in ancient prisons of ignorance.  A son once said, “The Truth shall set you free.”[1]  I have born more grief than the mind can conceive.  In vain, I have staggered through humanity searching, always searching for true companionship, a true equal.

Jung wrote, “Whenever the earth mother appears it means that things are going to happen in reality; this is an absolute law.”[2]  His words were confused.  I do not appear.  I never disappear.  I keep moving, looking into eyes that cannot see, listening for words that convey meaning. Carl understood one thing.  For those who come to know me, reality takes hold.  Through the mind-numbing millennia, I have witnessed pockets of hope, people whose peaceful coexistence drew me toward the mainstream.  Such communities were but flickering flames blown out by human progress.

Every sixteen years I become pregnant and carry the baby to term – which is usually some time during the twenty-fourth lunar month.  I neither consult nor require a patriarch to participate in these sacred events. These children of fiat are my offering, my sacrifice to humanity, gifts meant to foster evolution so that humanity might come to a full realization of their divine nature.

Through the centuries, I have mothered some famous and infamous people.  Ishmael and Isaac, those naughty boys who denied the goddess, were mine.  Siddhartha and Jesus were my sons as were Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Mohamed. You see, I am doomed to have sons, boys and men who must throw off the fear and oppression of women or die.  Warriors, orators, gurus, and shaman alike I have birthed, but very few wise men.

Sid was a rebellious boy in the beginning.  Jesus died too soon.  I fled the Christian lands after seeing so much harm done in his name.  Humans constantly teeter on the brink of madness.  After the first jihad, Mohamed tried to honor me in his book, “Christ, the son of Mary, was no more than a messenger; many were the messengers that passed away before him.  His mother was a woman of truth.  But they had both to eat their food.”[3]  Can you imagine?  My own son did not understand the divine reality of the one who bore him into this world.  With a broken heart, I slowly made my way north and west.

Sadly, most of my sons turned out to be self-centered egomaniacs.  Tragedy seemed my only companion.  Witnessing their utter lack of respect for women and the goddess, I began to desert my boys by their sixteenth birthday.  Hitler broke my heart long before he broke the world.  I fled to the west.

I arrived in the new world just after the turn of the century.  My next child, Sunnyland Slim, soulfully interpreted my heart through his fingers and songs.  But the moral decay and utter inhumanity of the last several centuries had brought me low. I took a long vacation, which brought me to Big Len’s with my only daughter.

Human potential for greatness is exceeded only by its arrogant individualism.

Around each child’s thirty-third birthday, when the calendars of the sun and the moon align, is a powerful opportunity in their lives.  At those times, the collective unconsciousness draws toward the surface of conscious thought throughout the earth’s inhabitants.  At that time, every generation faces the great question – will they accept their maker as she is.  Only during that powerful alignment of the lunar and solar phases, is vision able to break the bonds of human limitation and broach the domain of collective reality.  That unified vision is the key to human evolution.

I loved the renaissance when men nearly grasped the divine nature of humanity.  Rubens honored me, and all women, with his exquisite art. Things had always been dicey with the boys, but they really went downhill fast during the industrial revolution. My son Karl wrote about a community of equals, but he was no Jesus.  He thought economics could alter the human condition.  He could not see that lasting social change will only come through an evolved race.

For thousands of years, since the men of this species overthrew the goddess, violence toward women and children has run rampant.  The prehistoric patriarchal revolt disfigured the male capacity for love, trust, and connection.  In the process, my heart fractured and so began my perpetual search for wholeness.

The myth of the ages is that human men become mature. Their adult lives are lived as an extension of their boyhood.  They do not mature they merely age.  Their deeply buried true self rarely surfaces.  Panic ensues in the hearts of men when they glimpse their feminine side. The fear of homosexuality is but a disguise.  Their terror lies in something sinister and primal that they cannot face.

They fear me in them.  In the gap between Eden’s fall and recorded history, they knew me as the goddess of all things dark and uncanny.  Men’s hearts filled with fear, knowing I could strike them down with arrows of conscience even from afar.  In rebellion against the true nature of all things, they have subjugated women since the dawn of human history.  Once they seized control, they denied their essence and proclaimed their superiority.

To survive I had to go on the lam.  Of course, modern humans have no recollection or understanding of these things.  Primeval instinct leads men to oppress and deny their nature and needs.  They do not comprehend that their claims of physical superiority and manifest destiny are born of fear.

Men need not fear.  I am the self-existent One.  Ex nihilo I made all things.  I am woman and man, the beginning and the end, the lover of all things.  I draw many into oneness creating a race of divine equals, who knowing their origins choose to embrace their divine nature.  I alone procreate – the divine begetting the divine.

A sign flashed above my head, Sacred Heart Hospital.  I floated along into an elevator.  Everything smelled clean and white.  Doors parted, closed, and opened again.  People rushed past my horizontal floating frame.

“She’s in trouble.  Get her into surgery.”

Who could they be talking about?  How long had I been here?

I hear my daughter’s voice, “What is it?  What is wrong?”

“She’s hemorrhaging.  We need to take the baby now.”

“Looks like a lot of scar tissue, possibly an acute ectopic. Get the on-call surgeon.

“Blood pressure’s dropping, pulse is dropping.”

“She’s going into shock; we’re losing her.  Come on people!”

~

The doctor explained that they had done a “clean house” hysterectomy.  I would never have another child.

My firstborn daughter, now eighteen stepped forward and looked into my eyes.  She held her new little sister with pride and hope.  “Mama, she’s the one; the last one.”

[1] Holy Bible, New International Version, John 8:38

[2] Douglas, Claire, Editor.  Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930 – 1934 C.G. Jung. Princeton University Press.  1997. Page 790.

[3] Koran 5:75

[osmw1]

Dimension Wave  Chapter 27 — Going on the Offensive

The arrival of Tsugumi… and the rest of the reinforcements turned the whole situation around.

Our lack of numbers was instantly no longer a problem. Mages and archers were very popular with their wide-area skills. They probably don’t get the chance to use them every day.

‘Different enemies are showin’ up!’

Things were getting interesting. I’m sure not everybody agrees, but I get the most excited in fighting games when my opponents and I are neck and neck. Stomping or being stomped by the other side isn’t fun at all. That’s why right now, things were interesting. The difficulty is just right. It’s now evenly matched.

“… now where’d they go?”

As our reinforcements arrive, the more chaotic the battlefield became. The noise of metal clashing against each other, the whistling on arrows in flight, and magic explosions create a sea of sound. We advanced and attacked to the sound of shouting voices and death rattles. I expected to lose my party members in this chaos. What are they up to now? Well, obviously, fighting.

‘This is A6! We’re nearing the towers from the center!’

The people here on the right flank burst out cheering. We met up at a crossroads at B5 and now we’re racing towards the ominous black tower. The path was littered with the remains of Dimensional Skeletons, Dimensional Beasts, and Dimensional Beetles.

I cast my gaze upwards at the tower. We must be like ants crowding around this tower of sugar. If my hypothesis is correct, then we’ll win by destroying this tower. We’re at the verge of victory, even though we were at the brink of destruction when the enemies swarmed us. Maybe I should get ready to set sail again tomorrow. Shouko and the rest of them must be gradually farming more Energy right now.

“That was… quicker than I had imagined.”

As the tower fell, ominous orbs of purplish black exploded from the center. There were players who succumbed to explosion and died. I couldn’t see well through the cloud of dust, but there was some kind of boss monster that appeared.

‘This is A6! The tower exploded and a monster sho—argh!”

His final moments were broadcasted throughout the map. Things were heating up again.

‘Its arm… there’s a rift opening up from its arm.’

The dust settled to reveal a monster covered in black hair, swinging his great arms tipped with razor-sharp claws. Many of the men on our side were torn apart by the monster. It definitely looked stronger than the Lizardman Dark Knight from before. Well, it’d be rude to even compare the two.

… even the ones in the heaviest armor fell to the monster. I didn’t want to imagine how much damage it’d do to me. I’d be lucky if a single hit were to deal damage in the thousands, or at least that’s what I assumed. Surely, it wouldn’t be here for long. A crackling of electricity sounded as it pried open the dimensional rift.

‘Let us attack it at range! Fall back, men!’

It wasn’t long until the arrows and spells started flying at the monster. We had no choice but to do that, even if it meant dealing little damage to it. Oh, most of the vanguard were withdrawing to let the rearguard attack, but there were a few who stayed at the front.

“… well, that’s no surprise.”

Among the ones who stayed were Shouko and Tsugumi. Since most of Shouko’s attacks are AoE, her damage output wasn’t that great. However, her folding fan was one of the lightest weapon classes in the game which—combined with her light armor—made her very effective at dodging attacks. She made great use of her skills to attack and dance around the enemy.

On the other hand, Tsugumi’s scythe had a lot of range as well. I’ve heard that it was great for mobbing mooks, though I’m not too familiar with them. The downsides are that it’s weaker for single-target attacks and its weight. But the biggest downside is that scythe skills consume an extreme amount of MP. They say scythes don’t get good gas mileage.

“Guess I have to go over and help too, eh?”

Shouko’s striking kimono will probably draw in Yamikage and Sheryl as well. They’ll definitely give me crap if I were to shirk away now. Alright, let’s go! No, wait, hold on. I’ve gotta have a plan if I’m going to go up close to the boss. I’m not happy about it, but I’m not nearly as skilled as players like Shouko or Tsugumi. If I ran in there without any tactics, I’d just be getting in their way, let alone helping out. What can I do?

Name/ Kizuna†Exceed Race/ Spirit Energy/ 67,720 Mana/ 8,100 Serin/ 46,780

Skills/ Energy Production X, Mana Production VII, Fishing Mastery IV, Gutting Mastery IV, Cleaver III, Speed Gutting III, Naval Combat IV, Transmutation I

Unlocked Skills/ Energy Production XI, Mana Production VIII, Fishing Mastery V, Hate & Lure I, Helmsmanship I, Night Vision I, City Travelling I

Hate & Lure I A basic support skill with a fishing rod. An attack with a lure and hook to draw hate from fish or monsters. Consumes 50 Energy per use. Costs 100 Mana to acquire. Unlock requirement: Defeat 1 or more enemies with fishing rods. Upgrade requirement: Defeat 10 or more enemies with fishing rods.

The hell kind of skill is this? And when the hell did I kill anything with a fishing rod? I’ve been constantly fishing during the week on the boat, but I don’t remember this happening at all. Hate means that I’ll draw the enemies’ attacks towards me. My light armor can’t be good for it. But if it works on fish as well, that would mean I’d get more bites. I’ve gotta try it next time. I don’t exactly know how I’m going to use it, but I’ll take it this skill just in case. But no! I should be focusing on its arm right now! I’m way too obsessed with fishing… I’ve gotta keep myself in check.

“Sorry! I couldn’t stop it!”

I closed my status screen to see Tsugumi shouting and the dimensional rift opening up in the monster’s arm. His fierce glowing deep crimson eyes matched its gigantic, pitch-black body, standing about five players tall. The most noticeable feature of it was the three heads on its body. It reminded me of a certain dog in mythology.

“Whoa!”

One of its three heads spat a breath of flame at us. I barely dodged its attack since it wasn’t specifically targeting me, but half of the archers were wiped out by that one attack. That’s probably phase two of the monster with its different attack pattern. It happens all the time in games. Shouko and Tsugumi dodged Cerberus’ swipes and bites and were still attacking it. … I moved up close to its legs, but what am I supposed to do? I don’t think I’ve ever fought anything like this in a game…

‘… bad news, everyone. It seems since the boss appeared, players who die can no longer return.’

I looked behind me. The entrance at the edge of the map had a black visual effect coming from it. I guess that means that dead players can’t get back into the fight. Well, Spirits had that problem to begin with anyway but no respawning sucks for other races. You’d want to be decked out in full armor for this fight. Shouko, Tsugumi, and others were still attacking Cerberus from melee distance. Those who couldn’t do so were surrounding it firing their bows and spells.

“Step aside! Our ranged attack is ready to fire!” “Wild Dance, the First: Chain Strike! I can dodge fine, so please just commence!” “Yup, yup!”

How does anyone dodge the spells and arrows falling down like rain? Are we the noobs for not being able to do the same? I remember how in Western FPSes, Tsugumi was able to get headshots with her sniper rifle without even so much visual confirmation of the enemy. Maybe it’s the same concept how she can master spatial awareness in this game too. I hate to say it, but I’m not nearly as crazy good as she is. While some other players ran out of the attack zone, Shouko and Tsugumi kept attacking Cerberus. Someone probably has to draw Cerberus’ aggro at all times. And somehow, the ones who stayed really did dodge left and right, evading the arrows, and kept tanking the boss. Seeing how good she is, maybe Shouko is a bit like a fish out of water to be sailing with us.

Another five minutes past and Cerberus swiped with its talons again. I was able to escape it by the skin of my teeth, but Tsugumi couldn’t.

“Ah… I’m all out of MP.”

As she muttered out, Cerberus swung its arm down…

… but no way I’d let it hurt my sister.

“I had wondered before, but… do I like my little sister too much or what?”

After evading its attack, I ran back right into it. I put up my Cetus Longsword to protect us and was sent flying backwards. I would love to have saved my sister from the wicked claws of Cerberus, but unfortunately, I lacked the ability to tank for her.

contents: /prologue/ /ch001/ /ch002/ /ch003/ /ch004/ /ch005/ /ch006/ /ch007/ /ch008/ /ch009/ /ch010/ /ch011/ /ch012/ /ch013/ /ch014/ /ch015/ /ch016/ /ch017/ /ch018/ /ch019/ /ch020/ /ch021/ /ch022/ /ch023/ /ch024/ /ch025/ /ch026/ /ch027/ /next/

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[mitigatedchaos]

how can your brand of nationalism solve the nagorno karabakh situation

(This ask was received on other media and moved here due to the predicted length of the response.)

I don’t have well-formed intuitions on the relative predilections of Armenians and Azerbaijanis/Azeris, so I’ll answer more generally.

There are multiple possible routes in the general situation of regional separatism that are compatible with my view of Nationalism.  The best choice depends on the conditions within the territories involved.

The following are major considerations:

Culture

Each cultural act takes up space (in memory) and time (out of a limited lifespan).  (Often, the supporting structures required take up physical space and resources as well.)  Therefore, it has an associated cost.  Often there are economies of scale both in the social and the physical manifestation of culture, where the dominance of a single culture creates time and resource savings and reduces the uncertainty of social interactions.

Culture will thus tend to homogenize whenever there are not barriers which prevent this.

These barriers include:

visible markings such as race

religion

cultural mechanisms which act to prevent cultural intermixing (such as prohibition of inter-cultural marriage, or racism)

time and space (including geography)

language

Culture is pretty much always encoded in laws on some level, due to difficulties with making two laws operate in the same space, from enforcement to physical buildings.  Successful cultural replication would also bias in favor of cultures that use state power to preserve themselves.

In order to maintain its perception of legitimacy among the population, a state must therefore have a sufficient level of cultural unity.

This does not necessarily mean racial homogeneity.  American Liberal Capitalism can socially atomize cultural identities and strip away conflicting elements, but is itself a culture which is dominant in the area in which it rules.

Bringing about cultural unity will generally require some sort of cost - it may be an economic cost, or a dispreference cost, or even a price that can only be paid in blood.

Geopolitics

How much pressure is the region under from the outside?  

The greater the pressure from outside (e.g. risk of invasion, blockade, etc), the more important a larger polity that can field a more powerful military is, and thus the greater cost one should be willing to pay to obtain that larger polity with sufficient cultural unity to successfully field that military.

How fragmented is the region economically?  What level of division can it sustain?

Every law incurs a cost to learn, remember, and enforce it.  Where there are many laws, this “artificially” increases the price of economic activity generally, potentially making an area poorer.

There is a trade-off - smaller divisions can have laws more closely suited to their cultural preferences, assuming that their population preferences are not evenly distributed.

Additionally, the control of strategic resources makes for greater de facto military and economic sovereignty, as the ability of outside states to punish the state is relatively diminished.

Just what resources do we have available to work with?

Some options are a lot more expensive than others.

What to Do About It?

Full Intermixing, New National Formation

Not always practical.  Can come at a terrible cost.  However, through the deliberate sabotage of barriers to cultural homogenization, over multiple generations a new synthesis culture may emerge.  May require some serious mythological synthesis, other times may just migration, depending on just how durable those barriers are.

Civic National Formation

Relative weakening of the identity elements that constituted the reason for ethnic separatism in favor of a new national mythology placing a civic national state and its ruling ideology as identity above existing ethnicities.

Autonomous Region

This allows the preservation of access to strategic resources and unification of various commercial while local cultural laws are allowed to differ, decreasing the desire for separatism.

(This apparently was rejected in the conflict the Anon mentioned.)

Unified Regional Federalism

Unify the whole area under a single federal government with weak powers, such that control of strategic resources and the ability to wield a military backed by a larger GDP.  Risky, if sufficient cultural homogenization does not occur.  May be the framework under which ethnic separatism broke out into violence in the first place.

Regional Treaty

Sort of like Regional Federalism “Lite,” a trade of control over territory might involve a complex treaty where certain tasks, such as region-scale infrastructure for access to sea ports for economic reasons, is handled by a new international organization without full surrender of local sovereignty.

Just Pay People to Move

Don’t force people to leave, don’t fine them, don’t jail them, just give them a large sum of money if they leave.  If the sum is large enough, the area will gradually depopulate without killing/jailing/etc anyone until majority control shifts.  May not be effective depending on the level of attachment to the region.  Offsets some costs of the migration on the receiving regions (as the money will pay for new housing/etc), which should reduce resistance from them.

There are obviously other approaches.  I’m a bit tired right now and don’t feel like enumerating them all.  Also, some of them are far more unethical and I don’t support them.

Other Considerations

One needs to be careful when it comes to the incentives regarding ethnic control of land.

If control is awarded purely on ethnic dominance, this incentivizes causing various kinds of harm, including forced migration and just plain killing everyone already there and replacing them with your ethnicity.

On the other hand, if control be obtained just by minority ownership having been held previously, this encourages wiping out all potential future claimants before they can make a claim.

There aren’t really a lot of good answers, since the trade-offs all tend to be pretty costly to different actors in any given scenario.  (Generally, I favor separatism over war and regional autonomy over separatism.)

[ppdoddy]

Wynton Marsalis

With the crescendo of public outcry and proliferation of opinions and justifiable expressions of outrage by so many experts, officials and popular celebrities, I fear there’s little room or need for yet another person voicing a commonly held opinion. I also believe that the everyday tragedies that are commonplace and routine to our everyday way of living, should be addressed when they happen, not when so much pressure has built up in the system that it must be let out. It’s also much more difficult to draw a crowd every day for the sanctioned and accepted forms of corruption and disrespect of Black Americans that are shouted from countless recordings and videos and even more powerfully whispered in the form of discriminatory laws, practices and procedures that result in unfair housing and employment practices, and more tragically, lengthy unjust prison sentences.

Much of this “cacophony of crazy” is executed officiously and with a warm and innocuous smile. Therefore, Americans of all hues pass quickly from anger to acceptance, and as months turn to years, our daily silence and inaction is willfully misread as endorsement and back we go to go the illusion that “we’re past this”, because the daily grind is more important than what we find if we just open our eyes and keep them open.

This particular tragedy, however common it’s become across these last decades, is perfectly symbolic of this specific time and place. And this global pandemic has given it a clear and more pungent stage. This murder is so distinctive because of the large size and gentle nature of the man who was murdered, because of the smug, patient and determined demeanor of his killer and of the other peace officers protecting the crime in full public view, and because our nation is always attempting to escape its original sin with the loud shouting of other serious, though less egregious, transgressions. This fully recorded public execution yet again demands our full attention and interest, IF we have the slightest remnant of belief in the morality, reason and intelligence required to realize, maintain and protect a libertarian democracy.

In each of the four decades of my adult life, I have addressed our myriad American social and character problems with an involved piece that always defends a belief in the progression towards freedom that my parents taught us was perhaps possible for all. Experientially, artistically, and spiritually, I’ve had a lifetime relationship - akin to obsession - with confronting this national calamity and conundrum.

As these decades have passed and our nation has retreated from the promises of the Civil Rights Movement that my generation grew up believing would substantially improve economic and social opportunities for those who had been denied by our ‘traditions’, I have spoken, written, played and composed about the toll that American racial injustice has taken on all of us—our possibilities, our presence and our promise. Those words, notes and more seem to have been wasted on gigs, recordings, in classrooms, in prisons, in parks, on tv shows, in print, on radio and from almost any podium from the deep hood to palatial penthouse in cities, towns and suburbs in every state and region of our country day and night and sometimes deep into the night for over 40 relentless years.

Just yesterday, I was walking with my 11-year-old daughter and she asked me, “Did you see the video of the man in Minneapolis?” “Yes” I said. I always talk to her about history and slavery and all kinds of stuff that she is not interested in - and probably overdo it for that reason. She asked, “Why did the man just kneel on him and kill him like that in front of everybody?“ Instead of answering I asked her a question back, ”If I went out of my way to squash something that was harmless to me, and stomped on it repeatedly and deliberately to make sure I had killed every drop of life in it, and then looked defiantly at you, as if triumphant. Why would I do that?” She said, “You hate bugs.” I laughed and said, “Let’s say it’s not necessarily a bug, just whatever I go out of my way to utterly destroy. Why would I?” She said, “Because you can.” “Yes,” and I further asked, “Why else?”

“Because you want to”, and then I said “Yes, but can you think of another more basic reason?” She thought for a while and just couldn’t come up with it. I kept it going saying and aggravating her,” It’s one of the most important ones.” After a few minutes she rolled her eyes and said, “Just tell me.” I debated with myself about telling her this last reason since it’s almost always left out of the national discussions when these types of repeated crimes by our peace officers are committed, but I figured, it’s never too early to consider the obvious. So, I said, “Because he enjoyed it. For him, and for many others, that type of thing is fun. Like them good ole boys in Georgia chasing that brother through the neighborhood to defend themselves.” It’s no more complex than that. She said,” hmmmmm....” unconvinced. And I said, “this type of fun is much older even than America itself.” I considered how different her understanding is of these things, if only just because of time, place and experience.

During my childhood, raw racism and pure absolute ignorance was just a fact, but so was enlightened protest and determined resistance. It was the times, the 60’s going into the 70’s. With our Afros and the consciousness music of James Brown, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, younger brothers were determined not to put up with any bullshit at all, unlike our ancestors, who we felt had willfully endured and accepted disrespect. And it was so easy to believe they were acquiescent in their own degradation because we didn’t know anything about the deep deep sorrow and pains of their lives, because they bore it all in silence and disquieting shame. Now, those old folks are long gone, and each passing day reveals the naïveté of our underestimation of the power and stubbornness of our opponent. Now, our ancestors loom much larger albeit as shadowy premonitions in the background of a blinding mirror that is exposing us all, black and white.

Racist mythology, social inequality, and economic exploitation used propaganda and physical lines of demarcation to create and enforce a state of mind. It was called segregation. Because my parents grew to adulthood in it and I was raised in it, I unknowingly believed in it, and even referred to myself as a minority. The late Albert Murray, my mentor and intellectual grandfather in Harlem, New York, dissuaded me from the segregated mindset with a penetrating question, “How are you going to accept being a minority in your own country? Is an Italian a minority in Italy?”

Well, let’s see. That’s a question our country has to ask itself. If we are plural so be it. But we aren’t. We are segregated in so many more ways than race and if we are to be integrated, a nasty question remains: whose genes will recede and whose will be dominant? Who is them and who is us? Mr. Murray once told me, “Racial conflict in America has always been black and white versus white.” We see that in the current riots that have sprung up around the country. There are all kinds of folks out there and always have been. Any cursory viewing of protests in the 60’s reveals Americans of all hues.

But when all is said and done, and all the videos and photos become just a part of a protester’s personal narrative kit to be pulled out for kids and grandkids as a testament of their youth. When the enormous collective wealth of America passes from one generation to the next, who of our white brothers and sisters now so chagrined will be out in the streets then? Playing loud defiant music in your bedroom means one thing at 15, but it’s very different when it’s your house. Who will be out there making sure that their darker-hued brother and sister in the struggle has enough opportunity to feed their family, and a good enough education to join the national debate to articulate an informed position in their fight for their rights and responsibilities and the financial security to enjoy older age with the comforts of health, home, and happiness? If the 80’s Reagan revolution is any indication, don’t hold your breath for the “post racial America” that we were supposed to have achieved without having corrected or even acknowledged any of the real problems.

The whole construct of blackness and whiteness as identity is fake anyway. It is a labyrinth of bullshit designed to keep you lost and running around and around in search of a solution that can only be found outside of the game itself. Our form of Democracy affords us the opportunity to mine a collective intelligence, a collective creativity, and a collective human heritage. But the game keeps us focused on beating people we should be helping. And the more helpless the target, the more vicious the beating. Like I was trying to explain to my daughter, something just feels good about abusing another person when you feel bad about yourself.

We can’t be feeling that good about our nation right now. Separated by wealth disparity, segregated in thought and action, poorly led on the left and on the right, confused in values of institutions and symbols of excellence, lacking in all integrity from the highest to the lowest levels of government, undisciplined in exercising the responsibilities of citizenship, disengaged and overfed on meaningless trivia and games, at each other’s throats all the time for every issue. We seem to be at a dead end.

It’s funny to think this whole experiment in democracy could end with a populace that is so polarized and self-absorbed that it can’t imagine atoning for the slavery and subjugation of other human beings and sharing enormous wealth (financial and other) with each other. But it wouldn’t be that surprising, because no matter how many times we find ourselves with the opportunity to right tremendous wrongs, we just keep coming up with the same wrong answer. It’s like having the solution to a math problem, not knowing the underlying mechanics to actually solve it, and lacking the patience and humility to ask for help-to learn. It’s the damndest thing to just keep doing the same wrong thing over and over again, and more forcefully wrong each time......or maybe, that wrong answer we keep coming up with—maybe it’s just who we actually are.

Life is not a book or a movie. It is itself much too complicated and simple to be understood from any one person’s perspective. Its truths come to their own conclusions that live as facts though lies may stand as temporary history. But George Floyd lying in the cold cold ground at this moment is a fact, as was the fact of Eric Garner and all of the other Americans who didn’t deserve to be killed by their peace officers. The murders of both men are eerily similar. And they, taken together though almost six years apart, are not even a referendum on the offending officers, but a view into how we can’t get past the illegality and illegitimacy of our courts and our politics that snatched back the North’s victory from the South in the Civil War. This successful legal and political wrangling to recast slavery as peonage and to maintain an underclass is still going on. Its victories, in effect, spit on the graves of 700,000 Americans lost on both sides in that conflict. And we refight our Civil War every day. It was interesting hearing Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Mayor of Atlanta and Killer Mike both reference the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement and this moment in one breath. They put this present moment in its proper context – a continuation of the struggle for human rights and civil liberties against the legacy of slavery and unapologetic racism.

These were Abraham Lincoln’s thoughts on slavery:

“I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republic an example of its just influence in the world, enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites, causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”

Notice the list of corruptions that Lincoln laid out 160 years ago - there is no better definition of our current position. He must have come up out of the grave to tell us yet again. Sad as it is to say, contemporary Americans just may not be up to the challenge of democracy. A lot of countries in the world seem to be openly retreating from it. But that open retreat will be different here, for our credo of equality, freedom and the dignity of persons requires us to construct elaborate ways of eliminating stubborn problems that we seem to not have the will, wherewithal, and humanity to solve.

And it’s the slow, slow choke out of everything black: that fake construct of blackness that was invented in America for the express purpose of elevating an equally fake whiteness; that blackness that has been parodied and mocked and shamed, been raped and robbed and lynched, cheated and fooled and straight up hustled into slapping itself under the banner of entertainment, still seeking the attention and resources of its masters by hating and disrespecting and killing itself; that omnipresent blackness to be named and renamed again and yet again for the purposes of denying its very name and birthright, that blackness that shows up in everything from a bowl of grits and a Southern twang to a whining rock guitar and a piece of fried chicken, to The Constitution itself. Yeah, choking all the blackness out is going to be hard. Because it shows up as state’s rights versus federal authority, as the root of the electoral college and as gerrymandered districts and the modern repression of some people’s right to vote. That inescapable blackness is always a primary subject in the discussions that elect Presidents where it shows up as immigrants, criminals, and disavowed preachers. It’s clearly seen every day and night in our richest cities staggering down the streets in a tattered stupor with a sign saying, “do you see me?” and bearing the dates 1835, 1789, 1855 and all of those slavery years. And all those ghosts remind you that we rolled back Reconstruction, we denied the Afro-American heroism of WWI with the segregation of WWII, that we denied our citizens access to equal funding and equal housing and equal education and equal health care and equal opportunities and that we rolled back the gains of the Civil Rights movement under on the very watch of many of us that are alive to read this post. And that at each broken promise, said with a smile, “fare thee well brother, fare the well”.

That slow choking of all the blackness out of the American DNA will prove to be impossible because we are written into the original Constitution – albeit it as 3/5ths of a person. Black folks’ struggle, more than any other, has advanced the integrity of that document down through these bloody centuries. The challenge that faces our country now is what it has always been: Can we reckon with the idea that the opposite of injustice is not justice, it is corrective assistance. The question that continues to plague us across centuries, decades, years, months, days, hours, minutes and even seconds: Do we have the will and the intention to get that 3/5ths up above 5/5ths and create a productive society the likes of which has never been seen?

One thing I know for sure, that’s not ever going to happen with your foot on a black neck, and I’m not talking about the most current, obviously guilty police officer. This is about all of us rejecting the injustices of our collective past with consistent and relentless individual action that goes far beyond giving money.

This has been my response to injustice in our country and in the world across the last forty years:

Black Codes (1984); Blood on the Fields (1997); All Rise (1999); From the Plantation to The Penitentiary (2006); and The Ever Fonky Low Down (2019)

– Wynton

[bluejay73-yt-va]

Sleepy Hollow (How to fix this Hellish Mess)

Warning y’all right now that this is gonna be a really long post.

So, the last few weeks, my mom and I have been catching up on Sleepy Hollow all the way from the beginning of Season One. (We had only seen the first two seasons and decided to start from the beginning to refresh our memories) Sleepy Hollow, since I first saw it, has been a favorite show of mine. All the incorporation of different religions and mythologies from around the globe really did a great job of making it feel like the world truly was crashing down all in this small town. I enjoyed the history jokes, the witty banter between Ichabod and Abigail. I loved all the characters really, and felt sad when they were sad, happy when they were happy, etc.

As we all know, the reason Season 4 flopped so bad was because of (spoiler alert by the way, in case that wasn’t clear), Abigail Mill’s death at the end of Season 3. I could go into more detail about how TV Shows and Movies always kill off the non-white and non-straight characters, but honestly, I don’t believe I could contribute anything that hasn’t already been said better by someone else. Now the show has honestly had some sketchy writers on issues of race and minorities, but it has also had some very good writing on those issues as well. One scene that will always stick with me is when Abigail meets Ben Franklin, and he refers to her as the “Embodiment of the American Dream” and as the grandson of a WWII survivor and immigrant, the American Dream is something I think about a lot, and yes, Abigail Mills was a prime example of it.

I will admit the reboot that was Season 4 was hard to get used to, but it did a good job of expanding the world. But something else that stuck out to me, at least based on my interpretations, was that I noticed a lot of Abbie Mills resurrection flags being thrown up, and honestly, I feel the need to go into detail about these:

Pandora’s Box was not broken into pieces, but rather exploded in a ball of light. For all we know it got sent back to the Catacombs. Despite Pandora telling us that Abbie was not in the box, we also know Pandora lied all the time.

The mantle of Witness does not require death in order to be passed on. We see this at the end of Season 4 when Molly loses the mantle to Lora.

Resurrection happens all the damn time, like seriously, if they can find a way to bring Henry Fucking Parish back for what, the fifth damn time, reviving Mills is definitely within the realm of possibility.

More than one horseman of death can exist at once, we saw this with Ichabod and Henry’s connection to War. Why is this important? Well, Abraham’s head is still in the box (presumably) since it was sucked in before being destroyed. So, with the possible return of the box, we could see Abraham again, and his battle to for possession of the Avatar of Death with the new one, or heck, he could even join up with Ichabod and Abbie.

So, if I were to write a theoretical season 5, it would go something like this: Shortly after the defeat of the Kraken shown at the end of Season 4, strange things start happening. A strange change in the flow of magical energies through the lay lines is causing more creatures to appear, including ones previously thought to be defeated. In the process, Lora goes missing, and, like a phoenix, Abigail Mills returns, causing everyone in the FBI to collectively go “What the fuck?”, and after being sealed to Pandora’s box for a while, has awakened more of her witch powers. The two witnesses reunite to face their fourth tribulation, along with help from friends old and new alike.

Honestly, if an amateur like myself can come up with a satisfying way to continue the series, then I don’t see why a team of professionals can’t. But for now, to humor the idea that the series would go on with myself and a team of other amateur writers at the helm, here are some things that I believe the series could use.

More prominent roles for POC Characters, aside from what happened to  Irving and Abbie, it always upset me that many of the non-white characters weren’t deemed important enough for the title sequence, not even some of the main antagonists.

LGBT Characters (and given this show’s track record I should add “that don’t die” to the end)

Religious Characters who aren’t Christian. I get that this whole thing revolves around Revelation, but considering how much the show draws from other religions and mythologies, why haven’t we seen things like an Islamic US Soldier who gets sucked into the fight of good against evil when a monster interrupts his daily prayers, or a bad-ass rabbi that goes around killing Nazi Zombies, or maybe a young Baha’i who, while doing research about different mythologies and religions, stumbles across the existence of Agency 355.

Speaking of Nazi Zombies, how about incorporating other times when the war between good and evil was brought to the forefront of the American War Effort, and how those people dealt with not having the witnesses around.

A recovery arc for Irving, because like damn, he and his family deserve to be happy.

Good witches, that actually accurately portray modern Wicca and Witches, (who, I feel the need to add again DON’T DIE)

Honestly someone get Lin Manuel-Miranda on this show so Ichabod can actually come to appreciate the musical because Ichabod and Lin would get along so well, like seriously you could do a whole episode about the actual ghost of Alexander Hamilton giving a message to Crane and Abbie through Lin Manuel-Miranda

Honestly, this show had, and has so much potential that is being held back by racist and backwards-thinking writers, and it deserves to be good again. But I guess there’s nothing I can really do about it, I’m just another angry fan among many.

(To end on a not totally sad, but slightly unrelated note: I absolutely loved the casting choice of have the fucking Kentucky Colonel Sanders play the Devil Himself.)

[lapidas]

Ambrosia is the food of the gods in Greek mythology. It was said to bestow immortality upon anyone who consumed it.

Items and ingredients

Ambrosia recipe book (§12,000)

Deathfish

Life fruit

Skills

Cooking (level 10)

Fishing (level 5 with angelfish bait/level 10 without)

Gardening (level 7/not required when bought the Al Fresco market, buy from there)

Tom raced to her mother, ready to tell her what he had found out. She looked at him in confusion, but there was something in his eyes that made her comprehend that whatever he said, was true. Tom had received an ancient book from the Lapida’s Library that belonged to the family for generations.It was written in a way none of them could read even a word, and Tom explained that to a Sim to be able to read it, had to be only in Cooking level 10, but the remaining ingredients had to be acquired by their own. And soon it became their life mission, to bring back to life Aaron Reynolds.

The whole family got word and was willing to make a sacrifice to make this come true. They knew that for one Sim it could be extremely hard to achieve, but working together they could get all the ingredients sooner than expected.

Tom went every day fishing for hours, reading books in an attempt to gain a level 10 in Fishing an get the Deathfish in the Lapida’s cemetery lake.

Alison walked the whole city by foot, in the search of the misterious seed that could get the Life Fruit, and after several weeks of looking under rocks and bushes, she finally fund it near a hidden rock formation in the hills. She then proceeded to plant it and take care of it in her own home hidden it from her father’s watch.

Fernanda’s isolation only made her time useful, without being able to left the cabin she was able to put all of her energy cooking and decipher the mysterious book she had.

The three of them worked on their skills for almost half a year, when they finally managed to get all of the ingredients pieced together.

That night it was Fernanda’s birthday, and Alison begged her father to see her mother for a couple of hours, to what his father accepted to kept her out of the his mansion alone with some women he met in the press for what he said Business Manners. 

Fernanda took the ingredients and cooked all night to prepare the dish. Tom had sneaked Aaron’s urn into the cabin from his father’s office and place it in the middle of the living room. Then they proceeded to wait, and from the Lapida’s Ancient Mansion, Tom’s ghost family made Aaron’s spirit return for a night.

Aaron’s soul was faint, and the sunrise was about to start. They needed to act quickly. They made him eat the Ambrosia and waited.

The Ambrosia worked. They watched as the soul of Aaron’s returned with the sun, and his body became flesh once again. (Idk why they appeared in sleeping clothing tho, Sims 3 was really something).

Still, Aaron’s body and mind was confused and he still floated for a while. Everyone could not believe their eyes. 

They gave an hour to Aaron to explain and process everything but they need to act. Aaron told, he couldn’t remember everything, but he was sure Tom had forced him drink poisoned wine or Fernanda would had to it, and that the driver was hidden in a box buried in the beach Fernanda and him met. 

It was time.

They had a plan. Tom would have to distract the police outside the cabin and make them chase him away in car from the cabin, giving time to the rest to escape. Tom did so, but one of the cops had to call Police Captain Tom and waited long enough to see the rest sneak into the woods. Tom Father exploded at the news of Aaron Reynolds being alive. He sent all the cops he had to stop them.

Tom´s driving ability made him lost his chasers and after had made a call to her girlfriend Margareth Williams, she had already went to the beach and picked the driver they were looking for. Then they both met, and Tom realized when se arrived in her car, that she had already picked his son Dean and all of their stuff for escaping away.

His phone rang and when he picked up he knew there was something wrong. Her mother told him their houses were already full of cops so they had to take baby Will, the money in bank the three of them gathered and were left but with no choice but to ran away once for all and leave it all behind in Alison´s car. And they wanted Tom to do the same, leave with them. But Tom decided he still got matters in hand.

Him and his family would move as far away as they could, but he could not leave his father’s corruption to continue. He thanked all of them, and said their goodbyes on the phone. It was a hard and heart breaking decision, but it needed to be done.

Tom drove for some days, stopping only for gas stations, sleeping in several motels and eating fast food until they finally found a new place to start a new life. In the city of San Myshuno.

They rented a small apartment, something they could barely afford and started a new life in the city.

Tom joined the police forces and months later, made open a case against his father corruption, that with the whole evidence he had, was able to gain and soon Tom’s father was found guilty in the states.

But Tom felt a sudden guilt, something that made him remember the story his family had spoke. The life of a different kid with a gift, and how he wasn’t born as the despicable person he had become, but in fact, the people of Sunset Valley had made him into.

He took his phone, and typed a small text for his father.

The police is on it’s way, I’m letting you know so you could run away as we all did. I know now the reason why you became full of anger, and I just wanted you to know, I’m sorry for everything Sunset Valley made you into. I hope you could find the peace you always wanted and that you could make amends with yourself and your family. It’s time to be the person you were as a child supposed to become, the one without rage and fear and instead living as happily as any kid would dream to. This is my goodbye. I forgive you, dad.

  —Your son, Tom Lapida. 

[aeroknot]

here have 1,740 words out of 17,600 words of narusaku headcanon

.............i’m goin’ in deep y’all sry not sry (ok i AM kinda sry to those on mobile who have to scroll past this....... i wish mobile didn’t suck like that so you can avoid watching me be a huge dweeb instead of pro’lly what you decided to follow me for hnnnnggh)

these are 2 separate moments I came up with that I eventually tied together after some editing (/fantasizing about my own ideas) passes:

at a gathering with their friends, they both got insufferably cocky about a game involving pairs against pairs, and the stakes kept rising, eventually hinging on some pretty risky bets. when they lost, they were mortified in having to eat the brightly colored crow their friends (conspirators, the useless lot of them!) came up with. they had to temporarily dye their hair the other’s hair color, and couldn’t wash it out for a whole week (or use a genjutsu?). so sakura had to work around the hospital with blonde hair, and pink-haired naruto was at the mercy of his sharp-tongued genin students. people wonder if sakura meant to and if she wants to look more like her shishou, which is cool and all, but most everyone says they like her pink hair better, which is a relief. The most annoying part is the humiliation she feels since she had to do it as the result of her own hubris. he complains about the relentless teasing savagery of his genin students while they’re walking along the canal on their last evening of this punishment, but admits to sakura he doesn’t mind the hair so much and shares he’s often wondered what it’d be like to have his mother’s hair, and pink is similarly distinctive and beautiful and in the same color family. It’s the first comparison of one of her features to his mother’s he speaks aloud, and his heart starts racing because he momentarily forgets she doesn’t know about his mother’s words to find a girl like her. Completely unaware of his thoughts and sudden nervousness, she serenely replies, “I’m sorry she’s not here to experience how sweet her son can be to her… I wonder if she would have liked me? I think I’d have liked her” she actually doesn’t take his silence personally, sort of because she doesn’t think what she said requires a response, but mostly because she’s distracted. they get around some trees at the edge of the pathway right at that moment, allowing a beautiful view of the brilliantly warm-toned sunset. she makes a noise of appreciation and with a childlike wonder he hasn’t seen on her in a little while, she cheerily says, “this sunset has all our colors, Naruto!” “Yeah” he says, a little breathless. “All our colors.” He watches her until she notices (trrrooopey as fuuuuuuck, i know, shut up) and smiles real big at him but humorously admonishes, “Don’t look at me, weirdo! You see me all the time, but you don’t see the same sunset twice” then she faces it again. So he puts his hands in his pockets to stop their quivering as the scene soaks in and suddenly it’s just really hard to see her green eyes with his blonde hair. he turns to take in the sunset too, and he thinks, “she would have loved you, Sakura… we can bet on it” (originally all i’d written here was the first paragraph, and then I think my subconscious LEAPT OUT AT ME the next time I read it to provide this sunset scene -- they’re my rainbow sherbet fighting dreamers ninja family!!!)

~ & ~

In my headcanon world, Naruto and Sakura have five kids, two of which are adopted and three conceived. * I want to note here that I almost never go the “lots and lots of babies” route w/ my otp’s. 3 out of my top 5 do not go on to have kids in my interpretations of them. But for Naruto and Sakura it makes sense, and this is especially based in my conviction he would want to adopt and he would want a big family to experience the exact opposite of his childhood. So, yeah, 5 makes a lot of sense to me. I tend to think they are resistant to the idea of kids for a while bc of the threats to their lives, but they eventually decide they both really want to have kids after fostering two boys and it’s so hard to eventually let them go on to their adoptive parents. Sooo.. their youngest are twins; they’re named Konohana and Sakuya. And my reasoning for this, as well as for all the other names, is pretty in depth. Here: I first heard about Konohana from @yellowflasher‘s great fanfics. She has a Konohana and Kae (not twins), and I asked her once if she named Konohana after the myth, and she said she actually hadn’t seen or heard it before. It obviously stuck with me tho!! Uzumaki Konohana = from the Konohanasakuya-hime mythology. I just discovered with this name theme of using myths I coulda inadvertently referenced Kushina and Minato as well!! -- Kushina’s name could have been derived from Kushinadahime, a goddess of rice/life, and Susanoo is her husband, the god of STORMS aka Namikaze Minato. (Maybe other peeps in the fandom already knew this but I’m late to the party. Oh well! I was shocked when I learned this yesterday.) And it honors Konohagakure, and honors Sakura: ‘flower’ is part of the name. Konohana was conceived (twin to Sakuya)

Uzumaki Sakuya = from the Konohanasakuya-hime mythology. And see above for the comments about the possible Kushina/Minato connection. And it honors Sakura: it’s literally 2/3rds her name; one different ending syllable. & naruto calls her Momo-chan, and I explain why below.

After deciding all this, I came up with this moment: Naruto and Sakura love the names from the princess myth but also love they are referring to Konoha and Sakura. tho, because Sakuya can sometimes sound too similar to Sakura, confusingly so-- and as Naruto’s the only one who has to say both names in the household (y’know, because it’s either “Sakuya” or “mom” said by everyone else, the kids don’t call her Sakura) -- he often calls her “Momo-chan.” as a kid she’s not sure why but just rolls with it and then one day in her later childhood it dawns on her: orange + pink = peach (note: momo means the fruit and momo-iro means the color but I think naruto would just keep it short and simple as momo-- he’d probably argue an orange plus a cherry equals a peach anyway, somehow……... hahhh! I actually looked it up and peaches are in the same genus as cherries and apricots, and apricots are orange :P not that naruto would know this but sakura would be like me and probs research it lol). Sakura expresses concern that Konohana will feel jealous or excluded if he doesn’t give her a nickname too, and he forlornly / guiltily (at having not even thought of that) approaches Konohana with this. She’s rather young to be considering this so thoughtfully -- maybe 4 or 5 -- but her answer never changes as she grows up (though the vocabulary / phrasing she uses might mature…. But I say might, haha); “don’t change me; I love my name!! it is like our home so it means I will become hokage like daddy!! and it is like flowers like mommy’s flower so it means people are happy and have a party when i show up!!” (she’s talking about hanami) naruto immediately bursts into tears bc holy shit he just loves this kid so!! much!!! ( ᵒ̴̶̷̥́ _ᵒ̴̶̷̣̥̀ ) sakura’s doing better at keeping it together, tho not by much, lmao

Some months into the nickname of Momo-chan settling in, there’s a morning where it’s brought into question again. while sakura and naruto are folding laundry, the twins rush in from the backyard to show them something they’re excited about in their grubby cupped hands. “Look! loo~oook! polli-wolly-wogs!!” (tadpoles-- i have great affection for this term for them bc mei in the english dub of totoro calls them that, and totoro is a defining touchstone of my young childhood) naruto intones, “eeehhhh? How cool, konohana-chan!! Momo-chan! Maybe uncle Gamakichi knows ‘em, huh?” and they laugh and stick their tongues out at him, “he’s not our uncle! He’s a toad!” yet they’re making ribbiting sounds as they run off to return the tadpoles. Sakuya trips and just narrowly regains her footing at the last moment to prevent toppling herself and the tadpoles across the floor. “careful, momo-chan!” Naruto offers in a loud voice, but calmly-- he holds back his concern, as he’s learned that a lot of the time kids decide whether they should cry based on their parents’ reactions, namely whether they freak out a lot, and he’s done a lot of freaking out, and is trying something new now, pfft. He watches her right herself, check on the tadpoles in her hands, nod once firmly and give a determined “mm!” in acknowledgement of his caution, and they scamper off. 

So then Sakura asks, with some humor in her voice even tho she’s going for annoyed: “naruto, why’d we even name her sakuya if you’re just gonna keep calling her momo-chan?” “aahh, sakura-chan. She’s just little momo to her daddy. Out in the real world she’ll be called the name inspired by her mind-blowing mom.” the tinge of pink on her cheeks does not get past him and the side of his mouth starts to twitch into a smirk. He roguishly continues with, “I thought about making you the one I address with a nickname instead, but all the ones I could come up with aren’t appropriate in front of the kids” she tries to look aghast but she’s fighting her mutinous mouth starting to veer into a big smile, and to distract his gaze away from this very visible and losing battle across her face, she twists a towel and snaps it at him. They play fight until they fall onto the bed, halfway into the now half-undone laundry. They rest a little bit, soaking in the calm moment, his upper body on top of her lower body-- resting his head on her stomach and holding her around her waist. Her eyes are closed and she’s absent-mindedly running her fingers through his hair. Then he softly voices, “little peach... she’s our colors, Sakura.” and she does vividly remember the sunset he’s recalling. She answers with his words from years ago: “Yeah. our colors.”

(god i’m really driving home this rainbow sherbet ninja family theme aren’t i???? Don’t care!!!! I love it!!! They are my faves they deserve everything I have to offer!!!!)

THE END.

(....except not bc..... there’s...... uh..... 15860 words left...... yeah those figures..... weren’t hyperbolic, i am actually that much of a dork)

[aion-rsa]

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Trailer Showcases a Kid-Friendly Alternative to Revelation

https://ift.tt/3mhvJyD

Despite it being 2021 and not, say, 1984, there’s A LOT of Masters of the Universe in the pop culture panorama at the moment. Not only are toy aisles of major stores carrying its quasi-vintage-styled items—peddled to a new generation—brandishing the classic blue logo bursting through red rocks, but the streaming arena of Netflix is doubling down on the franchise, having first unveiled animated series Masters of the Universe: Revelation in July. Now, the second part of this double-header (which would have been a triple-header had recent live-action movie plans not fizzled), CG animated series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, has heralded its imminent arrival with a trailer.

With just a quick glance at the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe trailer, it becomes quite clear that the series is not only a different take on the franchise, but a ground-up reinvention of the classic story—albeit one that, at the same time, has curated some elements from across its past iterations. While this particular take borrows the exact title of the fabulous-secrets-showing, disco-theme-thumping 1983-1985 animated series from studio Filmation, it also brandishes a technological sci-fi aesthetic that seems reminiscent of the 2002-2004 animated revival of Masters of the Universe from Mike Young Productions. The result is an intriguing hybrid series from the animators of House of Cool (Trollhunters) and CGCG (Star Wars: The Clone Wars/Rebels/The Bad Batch) that resets the mythology in a manner that aims to be accessible to impressionable younger fans; ones who might become molded on the concept that Skeletor has a bony yellow left hand!

With that said, check out the trailer for Netflix’s He-Man and the Masters of the Universe just below!

Standing separate from Kevin Smith’s Revelation, this particular take comes from creator Robert David, who also happens to serve as an executive producer on that series. Yet, David happens to know a bit about reinventing classic franchises for contemporary kid audiences, having headed the 2008-2009 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, and also worked on an animated iteration for another Mattel Toys property in 2016’s Max Steel: Team Turbo. Indeed, the new series may be based on a nostalgic brand, but—in a stark contrast from Revelation’s rapid, arguably-excessive references to classic concepts—its sanguine tone, loud voice work and wide-eyed looks typical of modern CG-spun serials clearly delineates a separate branch of the franchise; one that makes no pretense of continuing and/or emulating any vintage iterations. This approach potentially relieves the series of the segmented fan-fueled backlash that Revelation has endured after its now-famous protagonist twist.

Read more

TV

Masters of the Universe: Revelation Haters Need to “Grow Up,” Says Kevin Smith

By Alec Bojalad

TV

Masters of the Universe: Revelation – How Much He-Man Knowledge Is Required?

By Shamus Kelley

The notion of a bifurcated franchise is demonstrably apparent in the Masters of the Universe franchise’s bread and butter business: toys. While Revelation has just started to release premium-priced, highly-articulated 7” scale action figures aimed at the nostalgic adult collectors it covets, new series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe seems to have taken that age-old strategy further in the very design of the show’s primary characters such as He-Man and Skeletor, each of whom share an artfully disproportionate, torso heavy, skipped-leg-day look that resembles, well, actual toys. And sure enough, complementing the unveiling of the trailer, Mattel has revealed the first look at the new show’s attached toy line, which consists of figures scaled at 5.5” (the franchise’s classic scale,) that conveniently look as if they jumped straight from the screen.

Mattel

Of course, that is not to say that He-Man and the Masters of the Universe is missing the franchise’s primary pillars, since the upstart Prince Adam’s struggle, as He-Man, to protect the secrets of the mystical Castle Grayskull from the evil clutches of Skeletor remains the central premise amidst the updated bells and whistles. The characters, in a very toy-line tie-in manner, even call themselves “Masters,” notably with the quote, “To know oneself is to truly become a Master of the Universe,” and Skeletor referring to his evil warriors as “Dark Masters.” Additionally, the trailer further reveals that the series will even come to the table with a vintage-minded take on a classic concept that Revelation has yet to touch—at least in its initial five episodes—that being the origin of Skeletor. Indeed, in a crucial bit of exposition, we see a sinister goateed villain call out Adam for not recognizing his “Uncle Keldor,” one who we also saw superimposed with Skeletor, implying a transformation of some kind.

Netflix

While the 1983 animated series rarely delved deep into backstories, and didn’t really provide one for its fists-shaking, insult-dishing rendition of Skeletor, a 1987 mini-comic included with the Mattel action figures, titled “The Search for Keldor,” first dared such an attempt. The story centered on the mystery surrounding the missing brother of King Randor (Adam/He-Man’s father), and ends with the ambiguously implied suggestion that Keldor was actually Skeletor the whole time—thereby making him He-Man’s uncle. This idea would be expanded upon in the 2002 series, in which a flashback prologue shows that Keldor is Randor’s half-brother of the blue-skinned Gar race. When a failed rebellion to take the throne left Keldor gravely injured after acid splashed on his face, he made a dubious deal to save his life and gain more power by merging with a demon, thusly becoming Skeletor. However, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe seems to be taking a different approach by not making Keldor a Gar, potentially changing the context of the Skeletor change, and altering the timeline of the origin story to be contemporaneous with Adam’s.  

The voice cast for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe consists of Yuri Lowenthal as He-Man/Adam, David Kaye as Cringer/Battle Cat, Grey Griffin as Evelyn, Antony Del Rio as Duncan/Man-at-Arms, Kimberly Brooks as Teela/Sorceress, Trevor Devall as R’Qazz/Beast Man, Judy Alice Lee as Krass/Ram Ma’am, Ben Diskin as Skeletor, Roger Craig Smith as Kronis/Trap-Jaw/General Dolos, Fred Tatasciore as King Randor/Baddrah. Creator Robert David is joined by story editor Bryan Q. Miller (Motherland: Fort Salem, Shadowhunters), heading a long line of writers.

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He-Man and the Masters of the Universe hits Netflix on Thursday, September 16.

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