#she’s a child who’s species have literally been hunted and tortured to extinction

[francforever]

I am and will forever be a Vee apologist/defender

[forksofwisdom]

What do you think witches and mermaids would have been like in the Twiverse? Do you think SM should have included other species?

Despite being a very pragmatic person, I am obsessed with mythologies of any kind, and I loved this idea so much that I took the time to do some research! And BOY did it get out of hands!

Note that I’m not a professional and most of my knowledge comes from scouring the internet, which is fraught with misinformation and I barely scratch the surface for the sake of brevity. I do mention things from my own culture - Icelandic folklore to be exact - but I encourage you to tag onto this post if you have something to add or want to make a correction! :D

I think SM kept a very narrow scope because she never intended Twilight to be anything more than a teenage romance between Bella and Edward. I for one am happy that she didn’t branch out beyond vampires, wolf-shifters, and the Children of the Moon because she was already on thin ice with her appropriation of the Quileute Tribe’s creation story. 

I also think that including more too many species and characters would have overwhelmed SM. Her side characters have spotty backstories, and I have a feeling that she wrote most of their history as an afterthought. Why else would SM have only mentioned Esme’s past in the Official Guide and not included the crucial information that Esme met Carlisle while she was STILL human in the story? 

If I’m honest, I would have loved to see different ending for New Moon and have SM do more character development in Eclipse. Bella’s quick recovery from her crippling depression was unrealistic in my opinion and her desperation to spend the rest of eternity with the Cullens seemed so shallow considering the fact she knew next to nothing about them and their past.

That being said, I still have some headcanons now that you got me thinking about this. I’m fascinated with the idea that some myths and legends around the world were born from encounters with real supernatural beings. 

Shapeshifters

Based on SM’s idea about the Quileute spirit warriors, there should be more types of shifters in the Twiverse since the Quileutes weren’t the only ones who founded their belief on having descended from wolves. 

Therianthropy is the mythological ability of human beings changing into animals via shapeshifting. This concept has been around for centuries, dating back so far that there are cave paintings that depict the transformation of men into animals. (x)

One of the most popular types of shapeshifting seems to be changing into wolves, and subsequently, there are a LOT of werewolf myths or The Children of the Moon as SM refers to them. (I’ve already written an entire post dedicated to them so I won’t talk about them here.) 

I won’t go much farther into Origin Stories than I have above since it’ll take over the entire post. There are so fricking many different tales, especially about randy gods - seriously, it’s wild - that it’s difficult to decide what would lead to becoming a Shifter and what would be considered fables in the Twiverse.

For the sake of clarity, I have made a short list below which includes a few types of shapeshifters from different cultures that people may be familiar with:

· In Chinese Mythology, it is believed that all things are capable of acquiring human forms through shapeshifting. There are the Huli Jing, which is a nine-tailed fox spirit, from which the Japanese derived their Kitsune (any fellow Naruto fan here???) and the Korean Kumiho.

· Selkies are a favorite of mine (Please watch Song of the Sea - I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried during that movie) since they sometimes feature in Icelandic myths. Selkies are primarily thought to be women who live in the sea as seals but shed their coats and turn into humans on land. They aren’t able to shapeshift without their coats. Most of the tales aren’t happy and are about men who steal the selkie’s coats and hide them to coerce the woman into marriage.

· Nāga from Indian religions are thought to sometimes shapeshift from snakes, most often King Cobras, into humans.

Witchcraft

Witchcraft is tied to many religions, but as an atheist, I only have a layman’s knowledge of the practices that are still in use today. I’m highly skeptical when it comes to spiritual healing in real life, and I’m not at all a fan of the cult cultures that frequently surround religion.

Here’s a brief history lesson: 

Witches were the women who served the goddesses in the earliest centuries of human civilization and were revered throughout their communities. In the ancient civilizations of the Middle East, priestesses trained in the sacred arts and partook in the holiest of rituals. They were seen as benevolent, and wise women who helped deliver babies, and saw to people’s health.

What’s interesting about them is that they are so clearly understood to be positive figures in their society. No king could be without their counsel, no army could recover from a defeat without their ritual activity, no baby could be born without their presence. (x)

The fear of witches stems from the deep-seated misogyny born from male-centric and monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Judaism. The panic spread to Europe and spiked to a level of hysteria with the outbreaks of plagues. (x) Witch-hunts, especially in Central Europe, resulted in the trial, torture, and execution of tens of thousands of victims. About three-quarters of whom were women. (x)

Witch-hunts still claim thousands of lives every year, especially in developing countries that have an inadequate education system. (x) I recommend watching this documentary if you’re interested in learning about a Tanzanian witch-hunt that happened in 2017.

Keeping this gruesom history in mind, I think there would be hidden communities of witches and warlocks in the Twiverse. I’m not here to dictate what sort of magic they would use - I’ll leave the world building up to the writers!

Here are just a couple of examples of witchcraft:

· Shamanism is a practice that involves a practitioner reaching altered states of consciousness to perceive and interact with a spirit world and channel these transcendental energies into this world. (x)(x)

· Druidism is a spiritual or religious movement that generally promotes harmony, connection, and reverence for the natural world. (x) You can learn more about modern Druidry here: (x)

· Wicca is contemporary witchcraft and is one of the fastest-growing religions in the Western world today. (x) Wicca spirituality is earth-based enlightenment. Note that not all Witches are Wiccans. (x) I’m not a practitioner myself, but I quite like the idea of being more in tune with yourself and nature. You can take a test here if you’re curious to see whether Wicca would work for you.

In Iceland, we had what we called Völva (seiðkonur or seiðkarl, depending on the gender) who were seers. Most of their practices were based on herbalism and the use of runes. 

For those of you who are curious about Norse Mythology which hasn’t been altered by the likes of Marvel and Hollywood, I recommend reading Völuspá, which literally translates to Prophecy of Völva. It’s the fundamental source for the study of Norse Mythology because it tells the story of the creation of the world to Ragnarök (end of the world). You’ll also have the chance to learn some freaky shit about Loki - like that time he gave birth to a eight-legged horse - and see that he wasn’t really that much of a dick compared to the other gods *cough* Óðinn *cough* - also Þór once gatecrashed a wedding by dressing up as the bride. 

Mermaids

· Mermaids are sometimes associated with perilous events such as floods, storms, shipwrecks, and drownings. In other folk traditions, they can be benevolent or beneficent, bestowing boons or falling in love with humans.

The Little Mermaid (the H.C Andersen version) happened in the Twiverse and that is a fact!

· Sirens! (You thought I could go through an entire post without mentioning Greek Mythology??? Think again!) They were beautiful but dangerous creatures that lured the sailors with their beautiful voices to their doom, causing the ships to crash on the reefs near their island.(x) This connection to the sea is why many confuse them with mermaids when instead they were believed to be a combination of women and birds.(x)

I can totally see them chilling on Greek islands singing their songs and luring horny sailors to their demise.

Miscellaneous

· Huldufólk (hidden people) played a crucial part in Icelandic folklore. They were the spirits of the land and shouldn’t be confused with fairies. Huldufólk wore normal Icelandic clothing and used the power of words to cast spells on people - either blessing or a curse, depending on how they judge the person’s behavior. They lived inside the stones. To prevent any naughty behavior, it’s said that Huldufólk would kidnap infants and replace them with wizened old elves that pretended to be normal children. They would behave like wild brats, kicking and screaming, and nothing but a good beating could bring back the human child.

These oral tales were used to prevent many children from wandering away from human habitations and instilled fear and respect for the harsh powers of nature. (x)(x)

Contrary to popular belief, Icelanders don’t actually believe in the existence of elves, or anything tbh, we just like to mess with foreigners. So if you’re a tourist then “YES, I am a believer in elves. HoW DarE yOU qUeSTioN my FAith! You dare sit on our precious boulders? Tainting the sacred houses of our elves by touching them with your filthy behind!”

· Tröllskessur (mountain trolls) are usually female, hence skessur. Trolls turn into stone if the sunlight hits them and their tales were used to explain the natural phenomena in Icelandic nature, f.ex. a stone caught between two pillars or the outlines of a face on the side of mountains. (x)

Tröllskessur are extinct in my headcanon but I just think it’s nifty if these stories were true in the Twiverse. 

· DRAGONS! 

Don’t fight me on this!! I have no idea how they would be kept hidden in the Twiverse but they’re out there!

· Spirits (as in the soul) and Yōkai

I’ve watched Spirited Away too many times to leave them out of the Twiverse. They’re probably out there chilling somewhere in a Supernatural Spa Resort…

This was a fun question to answer, anon! Thank you for sticking with me to the end of this post! The sleep deprivation got to me in the end… ಥ∀ಥ

[patioskate2-blog]

The Generation of Now. 2/25/18

I was driving home to see my little-angel-human-miracle of a niece today, and I was ruminating about life in the car on my way home. I thought about why I became vegetarian, I thought about the state of the world, I thought about this next generation to come, and I thought about the the root of my cynicism-steeped worldview. 

And while what I am about to say may shock you, I have often come to the following conclusion, and it’s not eloquent, but I wanted to rip off the brand-aid and put it into words:

 I think human beings are the worst thing to happen to this planet.

I am not excluding myself from this statement; it’s only to say that I am aware I am part of the problem, and if I single-handedly knew of a way to fix it, I would.

Here’s where I am coming from.

Years ago (think 16-1700s?), as a burgeoning race, humans weren’t consciously at the top of the food chain- I mean we were but I don’t think we were so arrogant about it. I think illnesses like the flu still ravaged populations, mothers often died in childbirth, the sophistication of commerce was rudimentary at best, and access to items beyond the basic familial necessity was still fairly out of reach for most people. And with that came humbleness. An appreciation for nature, for life, and for the hardships we actively faced as human beings. And from this? An embodiment of ‘humanity’: a need to contribute to our families and society, to coexist not only with each other, but with the planet, and to cultivate the ‘gift’ of the fruits and vegetables and animals it bore. Mother Nature dictated our well-being. We directly felt the impact of a bad harvest, of livestock-ruinous disease, of incurable hereditary diseases that killed 2 out of 4 children in a family. I certainly wouldn’t describe it as a ‘comfortable’ time, and I wouldn’t want to go back for sure, but the human-to human and human-earth relationship was still somewhat raw, modest, and unadulterated. 

Well, thanks to science and the power of the remarkable human mind, we’ve solved many of these issues. We don’t worry about chicken pox or the common cold. We don’t fear how we’ll get food on the table (for the most part), we look to C-sections and pre-natal screenings to cure illness and stop genetic abnormality in its tracks. For most of us, we’ve never needed to till soil, build our own house, or make a satchel to carry our possessions for a trip into town. And that’s a good thing.

But as I drove this vehicle of which I hardly know the mechanical composition, which has just always readily ‘existed’ for me, and the convenience of which I’ve always taken for granted- literally at the turn of a key, I thought about this phenomenon.. “What happened?” We seem to have solved all of the problems. All of us have some sort of shelter home- hell, we have laptops to read this right now; we have clothing literally stockpiled in closets for our civilized livelihood that usually involves a job with a morning coffee, a (debatable for some, I’m sure) comfortable place to go for 8-10 hours to work, and a paycheck; we have incorporated things like education, 401Ks, Uber eats and Netflix into our lifestyle, and more intangibly: the idea of career choice, time for self-discovery, and for many a welcome phase of self-destructive partying, as new luxuries of growing up. Marriage and kids are even sort of fading as a necessity anymore. 

For many years now, our population has been exploding, food and drink are superfluously available (I could go get a hamburger at one of 15 places in a five-minute-walk radius from my couch right now), and our lifestyles are now rooted in a word that might eventually cause our downfall: entitlement. 

What do I mean?

We live in a society where we devastate land for food over-production, of which 133 billion pounds / $161 billion gets wasted- it literally goes directly from store to trash, every year.  We live in a society where we now treat cows, pigs, and chickens like common produce, ‘growing’ them to be slaughtered in relatively violent ways, but having four types of hamburgers available ubiquitously at our fingertips is more important (We don’t even question it because it’s just always been the way we’ve lived.) We throw bags of trash outside our homes to get whisked away to a place we never see, almost as if it doesn’t exist, because we’ve become accustomed to the luxury, and pollution that has built up in the ocean over the past 30 years can now be seen from space, but also now has accessed the deepest recesses of our once-pristine (and respected) waters. We argue over a woman’s body and who should have final say on whether she has a baby or not, and then when we force her to have the child, we turn our backs and say, ‘you should have planned for this.’ We pride ourselves on immediate gratification, same-day delivery, free returns, ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, and being the first: the first to acquire, the first to buy, the first to consume.

We live in a world where human life is so devalued and confused by what is happening in society, children act out by shooting up schools. Death by disease is now being replaced by the drug overdose and suicide, and the complexities of just trying to understand this world, progressively spinning faster and faster, make it hard to keep up.

We’ve gotten so over-confident. We’ve completely lost the meaning of what it is to be human within humanity. We base our lives on collecting, comfort, immediacy and ease. But the problem is: it’s without regard to our connective ecosystem. We’ve risen so far above ‘land and sea’ and the plants and animals that have made our world so sublimely fruitful, we’ve entirely lost touch. 

We now feel entitled to having a dozen places to walk to get food on our lunch break, no matter how much food demand that places on the system, because our right to thriving business is more important. We feel entitled to having Canada Goose/down jackets, without a second thought to the thousands and thousands of geese that are quietly tortured in production for our warmth. We drive our gas-guzzling cars and smoke our cigarettes, tossing the butts on the street, and eat three times as much as our bodies really need.. Why? Because we feel entitled to it. We ‘earned’ it.  We now go through life doing activities like shopping and going out for lavish dinner-and-drinks because that make us feel good, further away from the coarse reality of what it means to be human, and because we feel entitled to it. And we do it without regard to where the merchandise came from, how the food got there, or where it will go after we’re done with it. We are a generation of now. We are a society trained by business to look away from real life: it’s ugly, it’s scary, it reminds us of that mortality we’ve fought for thousands of years to escape. We are wired to not ask questions, to not think critically about the things we use, their origins, and we are spoiled by clever advertisements and marking campaigns to just keep operating in a silo. 

 And it’s starting to take a toll.

We are killing ourselves with food covered with pesticides. We continue to add cars to the road despite clouds of smog clouding the skyline of many of our major cities. We are eating farmed fish with diseases and literally plastic on the inside. We hunt animals for sport and mount their heads as trophies on our walls for decoration because we see them as our possessions. We make dolphins dance for our entertainment. We bulldoze rainforests to build houses and make paper.  We’ve taken control of everything in this world and subjugated it for our hedonistic pleasure. 

This was never the way it was supposed to be. And now shit is hitting the fan.

Mother Nature is fighting back. Temperatures are rising at an exponential rate. Hurricanes are picking up in a way never experienced before. Animal and insect species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate. Glaciers are melting. Wildfires. Droughts. 

And in our blind ignorance we have the audacity to say, “these are natural weather patterns.” It’s laughable. This has never happened in history. 

Instead of reaching back inside of us and remembering where we came from, all we can do in this moment in history is continue to lift environmental restrictions for our own selfish financial comfort and for ‘job creation.’  We have rendered ourselves completely helpless to our own species due to a insatiable desire to consume, to blindly live life in the most entitled, I-deserve-this lifestyle with regard to the resources that support that lifestyle.  We are so numb, we’ve forgotten what real activism is. It’s whatever we can do behind the comfort of a computer, ‘liking’ or ‘sharing’, and going back to Internet shopping. 

–

I think about my year-and-a-half year old niece, Louise. When I pulled up in the car today and waved, I watched as her eyes lit up from the street and she smiled- such pure joy, and when I got out of the car, she said, “uppee”, or her way of saying, “Up, please,” (because she is such a sugary-sweet darling, “please” is one of the words in her 9-word lexicon). And when I lifted her up, she hugged me and didn’t let go, resting her gentle head on my chest in a way that I felt, just like she did, the momentary release of all that is bad in this world, the ephemeral but powerful connection of human spirit that signals that everything would be okay. There is nothing more soul-shaking.

And we are powerful. Humans, as we have seen, are capable of anything. Look how far we’ve come- it’s mind-blowing.

But I can’t promise her everything will be okay. Not in this world. Not with a country that believes in guns and nationalism over humanitarianism. Not in a world where women are still treated as 75% of a citizen next to a man. Not in world we treat like it was ‘created’ by a god for our personal dumping grounds. Of mass-slaughter houses and human trafficking. 

I cannot promise this kind, beautiful human being that her life won’t be mired in fear or environmental issues when she gets older. I can’t hold her forever to protect her from bad people who lie, cheat, and steal for their own gain, from a planet where our rate of over-production will eventually start to run us dry.  We’ve lost touch with who we are in our most elemental form: as animals- yes animals, as part of an ecosystem- and how audacious to think of ourselves as anything else. And to lose ourselves in a world we’ve crafted to gratify our personal whims and pleasures and the worst of all: entitlement.

But we haven’t lost yet. We still have a shot.   And I’m here. I’ll roll my sleeves up. I’ll pick up trash wherever I can be of use. I’ll tile a roof with solar panels; I’ll help do math to maintain a sustainable population relative to food growth. I will help protect animals. Just tell me what I can do- Louise’s, and all our lives, depend on it. 

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Source: http://justinthecity.com/post/171297244845/the-generation-of-now-22518