#rebecome

[batwynn]

Don’t speak of the other side till you’re there.

[rebecoming]

editing to add the artist- @redmalt, dm if you want the post removed!

[imliterallysnakejaguar]

THE NEXT CHAP OF MY FIC IS OUT FINALLY YAYAYAYAY !!!

i actually cannot wait to get to the other characters' perspectives of this,, like,,,

jay realising that he could have prevented something if he'd actually listened to zane when he was freaking out about his nightmare,,, kai's whole losing his fire (and probably feeling guilty about feeling bad for himself after he found out what was happening to zane, and how he could have ALSO prevented something if only he was stronger) AND LLOYD OH MY LORD !!, imagine how terrifying it would have been seeing the brother that was the gentlest soul he'd known, someone who smiled or laughed so rarely it was considered a treasure END UP LAUGHING MANIACALLY AT HIM AS HE TRIED TO KILL HIM ???

ough i'm so business casual about them

ALSO ICE EMPEROR ART I FORGOT TO POST HERE (MINOR BLOOD WARNING)

[zeroiii]

need someone to turn me into an 11 year old permanently so i can be my authentic wolfkid self again

[quietwingsinthesky]

not to be like i am but

lucifercore.

[littlebigplanet]

deancas queerest moments compliation 300 hours

[familyabolisher]

Do you think any of the frameworks you've developed for analyzing love in TLT could be applied to Pyrrha's relationship to cam/pal? Since Nona doesn't understand it well, it's hard for me to get a handle on how those characters relate to each other, but I was wondering where it might stand on what the series considers "perfect love," what the significance of its presence/ambiguity is, etc.

I’m really locked on to this idea of illegibility, actually, and the kind of work that gets done in Nona to problematise efforts to easily name, define, & categorise a relationship or set of relationships. I’m thinking of what Muir said here:

It’s a very strange household. And they are a found family, but I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that in the last movement of the book Nona questions what that even means—their motives, what they all truly wanted out of each other, their pretenses: are they a family, or are they all just a psychosexual mess of roleplaying and bad meals? (The answer is yes.)

and like, her suggestion that ‘family’ can plausibly be collapsed into a ‘psychosexual mess of roleplaying’ and that the drive of Nona is less about asking whether Cam/Pal/Pyrrha/Nona ‘are’ a family as much as it’s about asking what it actually means to identify them as such; and particularly to identify them as such in a text which does very significant work elsewhere to identify ‘the family’ as a site of violence, a mechanism by which particular forms of violence can be enacted. I’m honing in on that ‘last movement of the book’ comment to say that, like—so, the two narratives in Nona (the ‘main’ narrative ie. Nona et al. on Lemuria, and the John narrative) are spliced together, right, so it makes sense to try and read them as though they’re in dialogue with one another, and the obvious entrypoint for doing so is the fact that they’re both working as an account of the ‘creation’ of Alecto; first through John literally creating her and then through Nona remembering his having done so and thus rebecoming what she had forgotten she was. What does it mean to ‘create’ Alecto?—what are the conditions that Alecto’s creation ushers in, what are the conditions that her creation does away with? The ‘last movement’ of the book is to ‘create’ Alecto for the second time—so, what does Alecto represent, and what about her ‘creation’ leads the text to ask what it means to describe something as a ‘family’ in the first place?

The reason I’m drawn to this reading of Cam/Pal/Pyrrha as like, ultimately illegible, incoherent in that we as audience cannot coherently put words to it and make sense of it in the language readily available to us, is because I think the text understands these processes of ordering, taxonomising, delineating, and categorising as tactics of fascism. This is a tension also at play in Lolita; Humbert ‘orders’ and constructs his narrative via the available tools of literary discourse and similarly constructs his ‘Lolita’ as a labyrinth of cultural references and taxonomies; but Dolores is a ‘Haze,’ Annabel Leigh is a ‘tangle of thorns,’ there exists a being who is able to remain indistinct and impenetrable in a narrative which enacts violence on her by trying to make taxonomical sense of her. Coherence and legibility are mechanisms of visibility; under fascism, to be easily made sense of can be dangerous. The first two books were all about coherence, legibility, interpellation, and the consequences of Living In A Society; what it means to ‘be’ or ‘become’ a cavalier, what the necromancer-cavalier relationship ‘means,’ what Lyctorhood ‘means,’ how these relations of hierarchised sexuality and the interpersonal relationships articulated within the normative language given to them exist to shore up conditions of imperialism. This question of ‘ordering’ goes right down to eg. enumeration (First, Second, Third, etc.) and pretty tightly contained and atomised cultural associations, and the fact that that enumeration can be traced back to Alecto—

D’you know why you’re really the First? Because in a very real way, you and the others are A.L.’s children … There would be none of you, if not for her.

—which cribs this passage, from Lolita:

‘[…] for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other—from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated—to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert—or was it green rot?—bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad. In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as father to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure.

—very evenly ties together ideas of reproduction as imperial sustention figured in the language of sexual assault. The point is: as far as the empire is concerned, processes of ordering and taxonomising are equivocal to the mechanical maintenance of conditions of fascism.

Conversely, Nona is a text about when John’s precise demarcation of the world starts to fail and people have to make sense of themselves between the cracks; from Pyrrha as both failed cavalier and failed Lyctor to Cam and Palamedes and then Paul as if not ‘failed’ then at least a new ordering of necromancer/cavalier-ism to the Tower Princes as John’s kind of scrambling effort to rearticulate hegemony post-losing all but one of his Lyctors. Regarding how we are to read Cam/Pal/Pyrrha, I think it’s pretty clear that the text understands the obligations, normative assumptions and expectations, and material consequences of normative kinship relations identified as ‘family’ as part and parcel with the social ordering of a fascistic imperial hegemony; Kiriona, Alecto, and Harrow make up the three key points of contact for this reading, though it’s pretty diffuse across the whole work. We see kinship relations as structuring imperialist hierarchies and we understand the currency of those hierarchies to be death/abuse/sexual violence/totalised control, articulated most profoundly through Kiriona; we also see the destruction of social formations as part and parcel with conquest—

Palamedes said mildly, “You know we’re conversant with the concept of family in the Nine Houses, right?” Pash seemed genuinely surprised. “Why the hell would it matter to you? [...] You don’t give a fuck about families when you’re carving them up—”

—this of course being in keeping with the general conditions of mixed cultures, mixed languages, variances on kinship structures, refugees seemingly thrown together on Lemuria. The bolstering of the social articulations of the conquerors and denaturing of the social articulations of the conquered is rendered as a tactic of conquest; ‘family’ here is figured as a cudgel of imperialism.

Diegetically, as I said, Cam + Pal + Pyrrha + Nona’s social arrangement is not ‘normative,’ neither in the fact that others on Lemuria can make easy sense of it (and thus attempt to do so by referring to peripheralised and marginalised social relations ie. sex work) nor in the fact that they can coherently make sense of themselves via the imperial taxonomy (is Pyrrha a Lyctor greatest thread in the history of forums). Nor is it normative on our end; relative to the nuclear family structure, it’s the ‘wrong’ number of parents, the ‘wrong’ configurations of gender, the ‘wrong’ configurations of blood relation (Nona is a ‘child’ but not an ‘heir’ to anything and not a blood relation of either; Cam and Palamedes as ‘parents’ are blood-related), even the ‘wrong’ overall kinship relations—I put ‘child’ and ‘parents’ in quotations there precisely because I don’t think they’re conditions uncritically reified by the narrative as much as they’re discursive gestures made for the sake of being problematised. Is Nona their ‘child’ in a text where to be the ‘child’ of someone means to be what Kiriona is to John? Is this a ‘family’ when ‘family’ is the mechanic of imperial refortification? Again, like—what does it mean to call them a family at all?

‘Family’ is a label we deploy to give legibility to relations that we are otherwise struggling to make sense of. Setting aside Paul for the moment because I don’t quite know what to do with them and probably won’t have a Take that I can confidently commit to until after Alecto—I think the kind of difficulty that the text has in articulating exactly what Cam + Pal + Pyrrha ‘had’ between them that we see in that final scene is intentional, and I think it’s best understood left that way rather than wrangled into a taxonomy that the rest of the text is v determined to critically unpack. So to answer your question, I think the ambiguity is key—one overarching theme of the series is how people can love each other and articulate that love when the language available for them to do so carries obligations of disparate power, hierarchy, serves a particular purpose that we come to understand as ethically unconscionable; whether that love has to be made sense of within hierarchy, or contravene it, or try and stake a place outside of it. Cam + Palamedes + Pyrrha become the next stage of development in the unravelling of such a discourse; to try and make coherent sense of them could all too easily mean falling back on the language that the text works to identify as socially constructed and thus as limited, and thus imposing those limitations.

[sol-rambles]

I need to sleep, that man makes me so genuinely furious from, literal, minute. one. of seeing that horrible horrible nasty man.

ugh, taking FUCKING JOY in Kristen's crying, trying to convert her BACK to Helio, the god she left, to allow Cassandra to have no followers, to allow Cassandra to rebecome the Nightmare King. UGHHH he's just so AAAAAAAAAAA.

Also, fucking expelling her, ougghhh I just need to see what bullshit reasoning was behind this. Ohhhhhhh, how I hate him. He is apart of the changing of Sol, if that's what Bakur was talking about.

[sweatertheman]

Even though Harry is completely unjustified in hating Dora as much as he does, I can understand emotionally why he can't help but see her as "the bitch that fucked him."

If I recall correctly, Harry only became a cop because of the influence she had on him. And it was becoming a cop that fucked him. He became a heavy-duty case solving machine, incapable of turning off, incapable of talking normally to people. He started drinking heavily, started coming apart at the seams. Being a cop turned him into a bad person (or worse, if he was already shitty) and made him lose his mind.

Thing is, there was no way Dora could have known that Harry would become the unstable man he became. She was just an average middle class woman, she didn't know how bad working as a detective could be, didn't know that Harry was someone suceptible to coming undone, likely didn't have the political education to understand that All Cops Are Bastards, and that Harry becoming one would make him into a bastard. Even if she did tell him he should become a cop, she can't be blamed for what he turned into. She had every right to leave when things crumbled.

But Harry, in the low point of his life, can't see that. He needs to blame Dora for making her love him, for encouraging him to become the man he became, and leaving him when he hit rock bottom. Because in his mind, its either that, or it's HIS fault, and everything bad that happened is because of him and the pain he did to others. A battle that goes on endlessly between Harry breaking down apologizing to everyone for being such a piece of shit and telling everyone to go fuck themselves for wronging him. A battle that continues because Harry, as a mentally unstable cop, can't concieve of the idea that both he and Dora are just flawed human beings who made mistakes, and that if he has to blame anyone, it should be the system.

It wasn't Dora's fault that Harry became a cop, it was the system's fault for glorifying the police. Both Harry and Dora here had good motives, wanted to make a difference and help people. But the police are just the lackeys of capital. They don't protect or serve anyone but the interests of the government and of each other. Police are given power over the people and encouraged to abuse it so long as they and their bosses get what they want. And Harry persisted, maybe because he still thought he was doing good work, maybe because he didn't want to let Dora down, or maybe because he just loved having power. And at the end of the day, the experience warped him into a broken man. And when Dora left him, all he had was his detective work, and some fading memories. It pushed him to drink himself to the point he forgot everything. And what thoughts can pop into his mind as soon as he wakes up?

"Officer? Am I millitary personnel?"

"Who would let me be an officer of the law?"

"I don't wanna be a cop anymore."

"Please come take me home. I don't want to be here anymore."

Free from (most of) the baggage, Harry can't fathom the idea that HE of all people is a cop. He wants to leave. He has to ask questions even if he doesn't want to. Harrier Du Bois is at war with the cop inside him. The thing that happens during the game is the process by which Harry rebecomes the thing which was killing him.

It was the Moralintern that fucked Harry. He could have been a real person. A revolutionary, a feminist, a father. But because of the Moralintern and general pro-police propaganda, he became a detective, lost everything, and slowly rotted into the unhinged bastard we know and... love..?????

[kingofthewilderwest]

I think it's, like, gone out of fashion to upload selfies (I sure haven't in an eon and a half). But today feels good and forgive me, I wanna celebrate. Bruh this is the first time I've worn The Concert Black in nine years.

Can't believe I let the core parts of my being lie dormant so long. I'm rebecoming myself. Cancer's gone, hair's been growing like a weed, I'm looking and feeling like myself again; I've got a classical music concert tonight - I'm again participating in the activities that are me. It's time to tackle what I want, reignite old goals and daydreams I'd lost, and make everything I care about count.

[electricdisco]

Writing this down before I forget it:

Just imagine if we could take Ketheric with us after the battle in moonrise towers. Just. Try to imagine, ok?

This old man has been completely corrupted by desperation and loneliness that he gave his body, soul and mind to the two most evil gods of faerun, got completely twisted by them even mentally and committed a few of the most atrocious things faerun has ever seen. He doomed a land, families and their children, all to have back what he had lost. But then he realises it was not worth it.

Isobel is not with him. Melodia would never love the man he is now, and he knows it.

If you tell him on top of the towers before the battle that melodia wouldn’t want this he surrenders. I repeat: this man SURRENDERS. I hate the fact that then he goes on with the “it’s too late” path, but honestly my bard has the same vibes of mob from mob psycho 100, so old man get the fuck up, you’re part of this fucked family now.

He surrenders, gives everything up, and he lives a mortal life wanting to put an end to the chosens with you. Him and Minthara become friends, she cherishes his company as an amazing general, he appreciates her stubbornness and her strength of mind. He manages to make her change her mind about taking the absolute’s power saying “taking the place as the absolute would only drain you: not only you would have no one to rule, but soulless beings that would never comprehend your mind, but you too would become one of them one day, it’s inevitable, no matter how much power you’d have. But most importantly… you’d be alone. Alone with no menzoberazzan waiting for you, no home, and no general like me to sustain you, no one that would fight at your side and drink with you in the evening until you’re completely drunk. We are even stronger than these monsters, imagine ruling as us. Being just us. No power, but the power of our word, no loneliness anymore, but the joy pf having a place, your place, Minthara. You’re strong enough to do it without my help, or anyone’s actually, why would you want to cancel the wonderful being you are?”.

He rebecomes a father to Isobel, and you see him gaining the trust of Aylin even.

Even Ayilin sees a man that is changing, now more than ever.

At the end him, Aylin and Isobel go back to moonrise, to become again worshippers of selune, but no rulers, he will just sit out of his new little house, on a wooden chair, maybe smoking, reading, until one day he will pass away in peace.

[droumack]

okay on the catboy jo train,,,, maybe 4 some reason he wasn’t able to be as open w his more cat-like traits in montreal (i can’t think of a real reason bc mtl is a cat crazy city but ntl,,, maybe specific teammates??? traditional team?? idk,,, the heartbreak of not being what ur childhood team wants you to be and trying to change urself for it only to lose urself in the process tho….oof) anyways so he’s all shy about it, and really hides his more catlike behaviors when he gets to Denver, which makes Nate very ???? bc that’s NOT what jo was like in juniors,,, and so Nate works on coaxing him out of his shell, making jo feel more comfortable being himself in front of others,,, and somewhere in there Nate just,,, rebecomes Jo’s Person (much how cats will have a favored human…) and jo lowkey moves in, but Will Not Mention This To Nate, bc he’s freaked that Nate will get freaked and stop doing everything he’s been doing,,,, meanwhile Nate’s on like r/humansofcatboys every night getting advice and he knows exactly what this means and it fits exactly into his plan (inevitably wooing jo after ensuring that he is comfortable and happy)…….also perhaps,,,,,, heat thrown in there,,,,,,,,,,,, a CATalyst some might say

you guys are doing an absolutely stellar job fueling my catboy brainrot because this is SO cute

like jo starts leaving things over at nate and being so smug because nate isn't noticing :) (nate, on the other hand, is cataloguing everything jo is leaving behind and demanding answers from his new friends on the internet)

if nathan mackinnon wants one thing it's to see jo Comfortable and Safe

[rebecoming]

[imliterallysnakejaguar]

art for the next chapter of my fic bc for some reason posting on tumblr gives me motivation to write

not so daily reminder than titanium becomes brittle and can crack if continuously exposed to extremely low temperatures hahahah. guess who was continuously exposed to extremely low temperatures and is also conveniently made out of titanium? not me :)

[gunpowderdtim]

Every so often i think about Aurora over the thousands and millions of years she lives with the mechs slowly healing. Nerves regrowing, organs reforming around the metal she is now. Slowly rebecoming the flesh monstrosity she is. I think about healing slowly and eventually being able to detach her from the cyberian life support and she can live without them pumping her heart for her. God body horror but make it Aurora and wholesome and healing from the people that hurt you

[notchainedtotrauma]

i hated to see your skinned knees. the thick growing over. the magic work of blood. your skin rebecoming itself while you picked at it. i saw you perfect. in a first layer of skin. and you bit your nails, chewed the skin on your fingers, hazarded splinters like you didn't care. like you took it for granted. you would stay in the sun and brown into brown like you strove for purple. you would keep neither hat nor glove on in heat or snow. you trusted your skin too much for my comfort. i saw you break yourself again and again. jumping from swingsets. dancing your hands out of the window. rollerblades ? why ?

from Dub: Finding Ceremony by Alexis Pauline Dumbs