#king motion

[hekxate]

diamant goes out with the soccer team

[castles-crumbllng]

Jonah Hauer-King as Prince Eric THE LITTLE MERMAID (2023) | Dir. Rob Marshall

[piny1234]

⁉️🟪🌳

[notemaker]

Hijack movie au: In which Jack was there all along. Trust me it happened. If we believe it hard enough then it’s canon, that’s how it is, we don’t make the rules. The man in the moon does, and he says gay rights. He might have asshole behaviors but being homophobic is not one of them

[brother-emperors]

WHAT DOOM FOR YOU?

back again with my Please Read The Thebaid Agenda! I adapted the ending of Book VII into a comic because oh boy. thoughts thoughts thoughts.

There is a horror in having yourself altered to such a degree where you are unrecognizable in your own self, to know that it is happening, to know that you should be dead and yet you are not. You have already seen the moment of your death!!!! (Stat. Theb. 3.537 – 47) There's a horror in knowing, and in it being treated as an act of love when it's really more like a violation. Amphiaraus is spared Creon's decree, but by falling into the underworld, it makes things worse on a cosmic scale.

Statius' Thebaid Book VII, trans. Jane Wilson Joyce

Statius and Virgil: The Thebaid and the Reinterpretation of the Aeneid, Randall T. Ganiban

Statius' Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil War, Charles McNelis

The Perils of Prophecy: Statius' Amphiaraus and His Literary Antecedents, E. Fantham

society6 | ko-fi | twitter (pillowfort, cohost) | deviantart

[thecreaturecodex]

Monster Art History: The Wendigo

You may be wondering why the wendigo, which has become very popular in pop culture over the last 10 years or so, is usually depicted in Western sources with a deer head. This appears nowhere in Native American traditions, despite the creature having lots of folkloric variations. The association of the wendigo with deer is 100% Western, 100% modern, and has a long, weird history.

Just in case you need a primer, the windigo or witiko is a supernatural being from the Algonquin speaking nations of the eastern American continent. It appears as an emaciated figure, sometimes giant, sometimes covered in ice, sometimes both. In many stories, they have a literal heart of ice. Windigos are manifestations of cannibalism and winter, and hunt, kill and eat people. Someone who resorts to cannibalism to survive, or otherwise abandons their community for personal gain, will become one of them. A few stories tell of someone being “cured” and turned back into a human, but usually the only cure is to kill the monster. In the last several decades, native writers have  associated windigos with capitalism and deforestation as an extension of their selfishness. If you would like to know more about the properly Native windigo in context, I recommend Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History by Shawn Smallman.

The creature first came into horror fiction with Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo”. Note the spelling, which would become the standard in horror, and generally in non-academic Western sources. In that story, it is not associated with cannibalism, but instead is a more generic “evil spirit of nature”. This wendigo stalks white people in the wilderness and turns a Native character into a new wendigo by seizing them and flying with them into the sky. This definitely better fits fears about non white people, fears about nature, and how the one is closer to the other than “civilized” people. Its description in the story is vague (the most we get is that it has burned its feet away by running into the sky). But when the story appeared in Weird Tales in the 1930s, Virgil Finlay illustrated it like this, the first antlered wendigo I know of.

This story was ripped off by August Derleth, a prominent Weird author in the 1940s and the main popularizer of HP Lovecraft. In his Cthulhu Mythos stories, he introduces Ithaqua the Wind Walker, which is an alien version of Blackwood’s monster. This fits into Derleth’s vision of the gods and monsters of HP Lovecraft falling into the four classical elements, with Ithaqua being invented to represent Air. Ithaqua is usually depicted as an icy, emaciated giant, so ironically is one of the more accurate wendigos to Indigeonous beliefs in pop culture.

Image from a recent French edition of Call of Cthulhu RPG, by Loic Muzy

In Pet Sematary, Stephen King uses a wendigo as the reason for why the titular cemetery is cursed. This is an update of the classic racist trope of the “Indian Burial Ground”, except this time what gets buried there comes back animalistic and evil. The racist implications of that are pretty apparent. This wendigo is seen briefly and has ram’s horns. It does not appear in the first film adaptation, but does in the more recent one... with deer horns instead, because those are trendy right now.

A good scholarly look at the real windigo versus the 20th century horror wendigo is “The Appropriation of the Windigo Spirit in Horror Literature” by Kallie Hunchman.

In the 1980s, a movie called Frostbiter: Wrath of the Wendigo was produced, but it wasn’t released until 1995 by Troma. From what I’ve read, it’s a pretty transparent ripoff of Evil Dead 2, with the characters being picked off in a haunted cabin with a zombie in the basement. The “twist” is that the origin of the horrors is a wendigo released by breaking a Christian demonology-style sacred circle. This wendigo is realized in stop motion animation, and has the most deer-like body yet.

A number of other independent horror movies in the 90s and 2000s used wendigos as a plot element. These follow the Blackwood/King approach of having the wendigo being something evil, ancient and Native American, reflecting white anxieties about living on stolen land more than Native anxieties about cannibalism and greed. Wendigo (2001) has the creature sicced on a white family when they hit a deer with their car. The Last Winter (2006) posits that global warming and fossil fuel extraction have unleashed the ghosts of dead animals, which are wendigo apparently, to revenge themselves on mankind. Which approaches the idea that greed is wendigo sickness, but I don’t think intentionally as a reference to modern Native literature. The “wendigo” in this movie are spectral moose and caribou.

The mainstream breakthrough of the deer-headed wendigo was in, appropriately enough for this blog, Pathfinder RPG. In “Spires of Xin-Shalast”, the last volume of Rise of the Runelords published in 2008, a wendigo is a major encounter. I suspect that either the author (Greg A. Vaughn), or one of the editorial staff had seen Frostbiter, as the setup involves a cabin haunted by dwarven cannibal ghosts who all killed and ate each other due to a wendigo’s influence. This wendigo is a hybrid of the Blackwood and Cree versions in terms of its MO: it is a cannibal ice spirit that wants to make more cannibals, and does so by abducting people and running off into the sky with them. Its design is the standard for what most Western artists depict wendigos as these days: an emaciated humanoid with the head and antlers of a deer (and the burned off feet of Algernon Blackwood, which are less common):

Image by Tyler Walpole, © Paizo Publishing

This wendigo definitely made a splash at the time; it was the first time I remember seeing a deer-headed wendigo, and art of that design started to become common. It pushed away previous wendigo depictions, which were typically werewolves (as French Canadian trappers had blended the concept with their own loup-garou, and Werewolf the Apocalypse had a whole faction of racist Native American “wendigos”) or shaggy and ape like (based more on the look of the Marvel Comics villain). 

What turned wendigos from “folklore/horror monster” to “fandom blorbo” was Hannibal, which first aired in 2013. In that series, the first murder is a woman’s body impaled on a stag’s head, after which protagonist Will Graham has visions of a black stag, and a man with the antlers of a stag, representing murder, evil, and of course the cannibalistic murderer Hannibal Lecter.

Since Hannibal was super popular with the shipping fandom set, wendigo themed characters became popular in its wake, creating a wholly new way to culturally appropriate the wendigo. This was magnified by Over the Garden Wall, which came out in 2014, and its villain The Beast. The Beast is never called a wendigo, but is an antlered giant associated with winter, and so is commonly head-canoned as a wendigo and associated with them in fandom circles.

Which gets us to the modern day, where teenagers have misunderstood wendigo OCs, any character with antlers can be called a wendigo on the internet, and actual First Nations people with an actual cultural connection to the legend wish that people would just knock it off.

[mascheratoh]

And so the crows laughed

song is dove (doll version) - antihoney

all photos sourced from wikimedia (too many to link rn) text + some edited images from

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-7701

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/and-so-the-crows-laughed… https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6624

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2264

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-7246

all of which are great reads so check them out!

[ice-feast]

This episode has revealed that, yup, Jace is part of the Conspiracy of the season - but I don't think he's the mastermind behind it all. What would Jace gain from all this? His entire character is being chill. Why would he suddenly want responsibility? He intentionally teaches the subject with the least information to teach!

I don't think he's the mastermind.

I think it's Arianwen Abernant.

Ragh didn't just see Jace talking to Kalina. Arianwen was there too.

Everyone, including the Intrepid Heroes, is taking it for granted that Arianwen is still being chased around the Forest of the Nightmare King by a van with hands. But does the Forest of the Nightmare King still even exist? The forest of Sylvaire does, but Cassandra is no longer the Nightmare King. Her forest has become that soft twilit woods Kristen has visited a few times (and now contains a manticore). Even if Arianwen was meant to remain trapped in there (chased by a van with hands), Arianwen's punishment was hardly Cassandra's first priority. Getting new followers and not dying again was very much Cassandra's preoccupation. Arianwen could have escaped.

It's been a while since I watched Sophomore Year, but weren't the Abernants sent to Solace partially to separate Arianwen from her research into the Nameless Goddess? She could have learnt then that the Nameless Goddess had a forgotten wife. Anything the Bad Kids discovered could also have been discovered by Arianwen, an adult woman who didn't have the distractions of school and being a teenager taking her from her research.

What's more, wasn't Arianwen's motivation for helping the Nightmare King having him use his power for vengeance on Falinel? Falinel stripped the Abernants of their position and imprisoned Aelwyn. Arianwen cannot conceive of any of her actions being wrong. ("I was very warm and loving," she tells Adaine, the child she neglected and abandoned, without any trace of doubt. She also killed that guy to get into the Nightmare Forest, so we know she'll kill to achieve her goals, but tbh I find that less revealing than her reaction to Adaine's recounting of the abuse she's suffered.)

And now it's worse! She has no position of power, she has no magic, both her daughters turned on her, and one of those daughters punched Arianwen's husband to death. Isn't that unfair? Isn't that an injustice? Doesn't that make you angry?

If you fail to use one forgotten god in your revenge plot, you can always try again...

[brysonmcbee]

Working on a tutorial for this style in 3d, and I threw together this little Fantasy Visual Novel concept.

alt text:

Image 1: “Pleased as you are to find The Crown Of The Fallen King... It seems it will need some fashioning to equip.”

Image 2: “It appears the Fallen King has deemed your fashioning... unfashionable.”

[memoryaqua]

Rankin Bass's "The Daydreamer" (1966)

The blurry caps are mine; the sharper ones are from Google.

[cloudtinn]

Wendell & Wild (2022), dir. Henry Selick, produced by Jordan Peele.

[ultrabrite-dl]

The Monkey King Netflix movie (2023) in a few memes because I did enjoyed it

Bonus: My 1rst GIF featuring Stick after his 10 guitar lessons

[kagooleo]

only have time for some quick doodles but I’ve been doodling some of the king ohger fellers while i'm at work!

[scrivnomancer]

Goodnight out there, whatever you are.

[thezanyarthropleura]

Was just messing around and this turned out too good not to share

[that-vampire-loser]

Andrew popping Dramamine before any bus ride