#superscript

[snarp]

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[ipbbanking]

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[inbabylontheywept]

Memories of Grandpa Dale

I was playing in the barn, but I was also hiding from my grandpa. I was aware that this hurt his feelings, but I didn’t know what else to do. Every year I’d ever visited him before, he’d seemed kind of mad at me, but I’d hoped still that year was the year that we’d finally be friends. I even made a list of things to do together. 

Unfortunately, the list did not fix things¹ so I'd been forced to acknowledge that if he couldn't be happy with me there, and he couldn't be happy with me gone, then perhaps he simply could not be happy. At least, not until someone invented The Secret Third Thing.

(But I was only nine. So. That someone would probably not be me.) 

Fortunately, being happy is a task that I've never needed to delegate - I’m actually quite good at it. I’d been sad in the barn for maybe an hour or so, but eventually that got boring, so I invented a new game where I would chase big clouds of shiny blue flies off the sun-warmed horse-poop and try to shoo them towards a corner of the barn that I knew had a large spiderweb in it. 

I was perfectly aware that this is not ideal for the flies, but I had just read Charlotte’s Web, so my empathy function was very biased towards spiders, who I perceived as patient and compassionate and slightly maternal women. Who just happened to have eight legs.  

(I, like most nine year old boys, would have personally been willing to fight a war for every patient, compassionate, slightly maternal woman I had ever met. If you, personally, have ever hugged a little boy who was trying very hard not to cry in front of his friends after skinning his knee, know that there is a child in this world that would kill in your name.)

(Now live with that knowledge.) 

I played my game with the flies for a long time. Long enough to get into a rhythm of running and laughing and then panting outside on my back while wallowing in the long green grass.

It was during one of those walks outside to lay in the grass that I noticed my mom. She was sitting on a hay bale, looking baffled. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but I was too young and confident to even feel odd. She asked me what I was doing, and I just kind of gestured to the ceiling, and said, You know, just. Feeding spiders.²

She nodded. I was feeding spiders. Of course. 

We sat there a few moments. It was an amicable silence, but I was still faintly relieved when she broke it.  

Your grandpa’s been looking for you, she said. He got some grapes earlier. Wanted to take you to feed the ducks.

I've always really liked feeding ducks³. Visiting them had actually been the next thing on my list. 

I was baffled by the effort. 

He’s mad at me, I pointed out. My mom, to her credit, looked genuinely confused. 

He’s not, she said. 

But he was mad when we picked blackberries, I pointed out. And when we went on that walk down to the prairie. And he snapped at me this morning when I asked if I could have some of his dried mangos. 

The mangos had been my last straw. The weirdest part was that he didn’t even say no, he just (angrily) said of course you can, as if it was an insult to his hospitality that I was asking when just the year before he’d yelled at me because I ate a tin of dried apples. Apparently, I was just supposed to know that those apples were exclusively reserved for The Apocalypse. 

(To be fair, my grandpa has always been very worried about the apocalypse, but mostly in the context of not having enough dried apples for it. There was a period of my life where I thought that The Apocalypse referred to some kind of prophesied biblical event where there would be No More Apples. This thought has stuck with me for a very long time⁴.)

Well. Yeah. My mom said. He’s mad. But he’s not mad at you. He’s just… Mad. 

I mulled this over. 

What about the mangos? I asked, and she shrugged at that. 

Alright, so that time he was mad at you, but that’s being mad one time in three days. Cut the man some slack, you’ve been asking him for permission before eating anything. 

I just don’t want to eat the wrong thing, I said. I’ve always been very defensive of my rule-following. Both because rules are important, and also because that #10 can of dried apples ripped through me like a shotgun full of razor blades⁵. That “snack” had 400% the recommended daily fiber for an adult man. And I was very definitely not a grown man when I ate it.  

It was a very painful experience is what I am trying to say. 

I know, my mom said. 

I don’t even like apples, I added. Still defensive. 

I know, my mom said again. She’s very good at saying it. It always feels like she’s agreeing with me, and not just trying to rush me onto The Point. Sometimes, people need to make detours from The Point in order to explain things. Like, hypothetically, why they once ate a very large number of dehydrated apples. My mom is wise, and she has always known this. . 

I just really wanted to eat something sweet, I continued. They don’t keep anything sweet in the whole house. The day before I ate those apples, I licked all the salt off a saltine just so I could eat the cracker plain. And then the cracker tasted just like a cookie. To me. That’s how crazy I was going. 

My mom nodded her head sympathetically. 

My first month of college, she said conspiratorially, I ate about a box of poptarts a day. 

There was another longish pause as both of us considered what led us to this point. 

My parents are crazy, my mom said at long last. It’s a very peaceful statement to her. I'm sure it was stressful when she first realized it, but she's had a long time to make her peace, and she's made it well.  

Will you go with me? I asked. To feed the ducks?  

He’s not mad at you, she said again. Reemphasizing her point. He’s just mad. It’s just how he is. 

But she went with me anyway.

I watched Grandpa Dale closely the whole way to the pond to see if my mom was right. She was. She almost always is.  He was angry while he drove, and he was angry while he parked and he was even angry while he strode purposefully towards the park. When we got there, he took several grapes, and he angrily put them in his hand, and angrily extended the hand towards the ducks, and he looked at me, and for maybe a tenth of a second he looked okay. Not exactly happy, but a little less mad. Then a duck bit the webbing between his pointer finger and his thumb.

He immediately, without hesitation, without even a second thought, hit the duck with a haymaker⁶. For a human, the punch would have been devastating, but the duck had the benefit of having essentially no inertia, so it just kind of moved sideways and looked perplexed. 

You son of a bitch, my grandpa said. This is a funny thing for anyone to say to a duck, but it was especially funny to hear coming from a former Mormon Bishop. 

Quack,⁷ said the duck. 

My mom started laughing. I'd felt a sort of holy terror at the anger my grandpa was exuding in that moment, but the moment she laughed I realized how absurd it was. I was watching a grown man beef with a duck. I was watching a grown man beef with the world. 

I started laughing too. In a better world, maybe my grandpa would've joined. Maybe he would've taken a good hard look in the mirror and questioned why exactly he was so angry. But he didn't. Instead he swore at the duck some more, and he threw his remaining handful of grapes at it overhand, like a baseball, and then the duck ate the grapes out of the water, and my mom actually laughed so hard she started dry heaving a little, and my grandpa had to go sit in the car for a few minutes by himself to regain his composure. 

¹ He managed to pick blackberries angrily

² Unfortunately, I do this kind of response quite a bit.

³ I got my first kiss from my wife because I managed to capture a duck. They're like, a motif for my life. Very lucky to have that.

⁴ I reference it again in this very weird short story.

⁵ I eat a lot of strange things.

⁶ My wife is concerned people will not know what a haymaker is. It is simply the most redneck kind of punch.

⁷ ...What did you expect it to say?

[the-littlest-goblin]

As I’ve alluded to, I think a lot of the failures of c3 can be traced to the fundamental gap that, in a plot where so much revolved around “”the gods”” CR never answers the question:

What the fuck is a god?

Others have made excellent points in how we talk about epic fantasy and the difficulties in fully receiving a world where gods definitively exist. What's interesting to me is that, if you really want to get deep into the philosophical weeds (and I always do), then what does it actually mean when we say "gods exist" in Critical Role?

Disclaimer: this isn't exactly as comprehensive as I would like but what I hoped to articulate in one meta post is more like 2-5 thesis proposals in a trench coat, and I still want the catharsis of yeeting my thoughts into the void so I can finally take a nap. I tried to limit the academia of it all but there's still plenty of jargon, and also a bibliography because I like to show my work.  

Short version: Godhood/divinity is a semantic lacuna in the CR's worldbuilding. That's not a bad thing, in fact it's kind of necessary. The problem arises when the plot makes gods and godhood a central problem without resolving or even acknowledging the barriers to understanding those concepts, thus leading to hours of dialogue, plot beats, and a supposedly climactic resolution which all amount to nonsense if you look too closely.

As anyone who’s so much as dipped a toe into philosophy will tell you, you gotta define your usage of terms or the discussion is DOA. On all levels of CR text, words like "god"/"the gods"/"divine"/"deity"/etc. are used interchangeably in so many contexts, and the meaning of those terms is only accessible via contextual implication, and the deducible meanings in so many of those contexts directly contradict each other. C3 especially reveals a dissonance between how the mytho-cultural text approaches divinity compared to the contours drawn by the mechanico-ontological text.1

The former in Exandria refers to "the gods" in terms of the Pantheon, a definite collection of individual entities. These otherworldly beings of Tengar, a realm of pure possibility. But "god" is also a rank within D&D's cosmic taxonomy—a rank to which, in Exandria, other entities can rise via the Rites of Ascension. The Matron is a god same as the others; Tharizdun is part of the pantheon but separate, not of Tengar. Maybe a "god," maybe not?

In the mytho-cultural role "the gods" play in Exandria, their being-qua-being is positioned as necessarily plurally defined and unknowable, but nevertheless possessed of immense "cosmic power" befitting their role in the Creation myth and ongoing worship. It makes perfect sense that the in-world mythology is (intentionally) plural and contradictory. However, as others have pointed out,* Exandria's socio-political and cultural worldbuilding vis a vis religion are (less intentionally, I would imagine) rather underbaked, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of what the gods (and religion) mean for the cultural part of mytho-cultural. 

Now let’s get into the latter. Because CR isn't just a narrative—it's a ludonarrative, and the game mechanics have huge ontological implications.1 

In the mechanico-ontological sphere, the gods are positioned as sort of exceptions to the rule, by which I mean, like, we don't get stat blocks for deities. Which again, on its own, makes perfect sense! D&D focalizes the PCs, and so on the purely mechanical level, gods/the divine are subordinate, acting only through proxies. This is necessary for the game-narrative D&D supports. Giving god-level power explicit stats would be a catch-22:

first, it would severely demystify "cosmic power"—to define is to limit, after all. Not doing so can imply an ontology where gods are not confined by mechanics—their powers go beyond, their powers are not only unwritten but unwriteable.

secondly, if the rulebooks were to even attempt codifying mechanical abilities on par with the semantic associations of “god-level” power, then it would be very difficult to maintain either the PCs focal role as agents of the narrative or a fairly balanced game, much less both. We saw this play out in Downfall—the point of the mechanics in the final battle outlined the huge disparity between mortals and gods.

Speaking of Downfall—as well as their mechanic and mythic existences, the gods also exist on the narrative level as characters. As such, we must necessarily consider questions of agency and consciousness in qualifying their existence, but fuck if that isn’t a messy question on the one layer, let alone putting it in the contexts of these shifting, intersecting layers.2 Keeping it brief though, the gods’ narrative agency is subject to similar issues as their mechanical powers.**

Being an exception to the rules of mechanico-ontological existence only holds together so long as divinity remains separate from everything governed by mechanics when mobilized in a narrative. I'm not trying to nitpick—Matt's "NPCs are not governed by the same rules as PCs" MO isn't automatically world-logic breaking, and there's a degree of pedantry on that front that is simply unsportsmanlike. But the problem in c3 specifically is that the plot focalizes the gods and divinity as a construct in such a way that invites—demands even—closer inspection. And the coherence between the structural layers of the narrative breaks down quite quickly under this scrutiny.

It's not like c3 brought this theme out of nowhere. Disproving that there is any essential divide between gods and mortals defines the zeitgeist of the Age of Arcanum. The Matron’s ascension proves that, however the difference is defined, the state of being one or the other is traversable. Exu: Calamity brought this up plenty: Laerryn contends that the distinction is access to the Celestial plane, and seeks to dissolve the difference by achieving large-scale interplanar travel for all of Avalir; Zerxus embodies that so called "divine magic" is not strictly tied to a worshipful relationship with a deity.

In c2, god-or-not is a huge element of Jester's arc with the Traveler. Her build shows that, despite the very different class abilities/powers of warlocks and clerics, there is no mechanico-ontological constraining the distinction between a warlock patron and a god. These are roles defined through a relational existence, not in keeping with any essential taxonomy of substances.1 The Traveller’s position in the cosmic taxonomy as an Archfey has less bearing on the type of magic he can grant than the belief and conviction on the side of the grantee. Similarly, there’s the Luxon in all its mystery—a god but not a pantheon deity? Divine but not a god? The semantics seem less and less significant. 

Now’s probably a good time to remember that CR is a story, and stories are representative constructions wherein any logic other than narrative logic is secondary. D&D as a story engine allows fictional representation to evoke a unique facsimile of materialism because the diegetic laws of physics are established in such detail via mechanics. But still, in a fictional world, metaphysics kind of are physics, and also kind of are semiotics, and both answer to the symbolic. It's fun (for me) to dig into the worldbuilding using philosophy as a framework, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if the philosophy finds gaps so long as the rest of the narrative elements cohere around those gaps.

In c3, they do not. 

Next to c3, c1 gets the closest to leaning too hard against the logical house-of-cards making up cosmic ontology in Exandria due to the importance of the Divine Gate in defeating proto-god Vecna. The Divine Gate is, imo, the material nexus point where all the semantic and ontological contradictions coalesce: it was created so as to specifically block gods from traversing out of the Celestial plane, but is permeable to mortals. Presumably there is some quality or essential substance that decides who can move through it and who can’t—but what is that? What is the substance of divinity, not in the ontological sense but in the materialism of arcana? It’s not something exclusive to denizens of Tengar, because the Matron is also trapped; perhaps “divine” is a misnomer, and it only traps the specific entities designated at the time of its creation, regardless of any shared essential quality? Except no, because Vecna was able to be trapped behind it as well. 

On the flip side, the great thing about the Divine Gate is that it encompasses and narratively justifies that catch-22 of divine mechanics by adding the element of time. The gods used to be un-writably powerful Pre-Divergence, hence their cosmic standing, but the Divine Gate limits their powers of acting in the present, allowing for their mechanical impotence. The Divergence and the Divine Gate incorporate the gods’ disparate ontological states into the history of Exandria, a physical and temporal division that allows for these contradictions to coexist in separate corners of the narrative.*** 

This coheres throughout campaigns 1 and 2—even when c1 started approaching concepts of “divinity” more closely, the plot maintains a separation between mortal stakes and divine stakes. Vecna was Vox Machina’s problem because he posed a threat to mortals; he posed a threat to mortals because he was seeking to achieve god-level power on the mortal plane. We don’t need to know what the “power” exactly means to know it would be a huge imbalance. The threat is nullified by trapping Vecna behind the Divine Gate. We still don’t know what he is vis a vis godhood, but we do know his powers of acting and affecting on the Material Plane are curtailed and as such he’s not mortal’s problem anymore. Compare this to the Bell’s Hells attitudes towards their joint BBEGs of Ludinus and Predathos. Ludinus is the threat on the Material Plane; for much of the campaign, BH cap off cyclical debates on the gods by agreeing that stopping Ludinus is their actionable concern. In the end, however, Ludinus’ rhetoric succeeds in focalizing cosmic concerns: the narrative concludes with the resolution to the questions of ‘what to do about the gods and Predathos,’ reifying Ludinus’ view that the cosmic structure was a problem to be solved (despite the complete lack of supporting evidence to that point). Meanwhile the resolution to the—previously central—question of ‘what to do about Ludinus’ is ‘leave him to his cottage-core Thanos epilogue,’ as though he is not nor has he ever been a primary source of conflict.

I think Predathos is where the irreconcilability of material substance and ontological substance really start to chip away at the foundations of narrative coherence. The “God-eater” must be subject to the same questions re: “so what do you mean by god?” The takeaway is that the Predathos lore is frankly a hot mess of ludonarrative dissonance—perfect illustration for the other side of that catch-22 I was talking about!

 In theory, Matt could have introduced Predathos into Exandrian cosmology without it becoming a narrative problem, had it remained at a sufficient distance from the immediate plot to sit comfortably obscured in the same miasma of metaphysical unknowns as the Luxon or Tharizdun. It’s Ludinus and all the discussion surrounding these cosmic entities that shines a glaring spotlight on the contradictions by way of placing the gods into an ethical framework and using that judgement as a basis for praxis. Moral philosophy is not my area, but as far as it intersects with ontology: it is, to put it mildly, very fucking hard to put a subject under ethical judgement when said subject has no defined being as such that it’s very subjecthood is in question. 

What I’m trying to say is that you hold a guy in a very different ethical standing than the sun. The Dawnfather is both and can be reduced to neither. He is a character in a narrative with agency and personality and relationships at the same time he is a mechanical construction that has no independent existence and extremely limited powers of acting, and all the while he is semantically presumed all-powerful.

*I can’t find the post now to link it but I’m 99% sure it was by @utilitycaster

**For an illustration of (non-game) narratives where a pantheon of gods explicitly exist, are in possession of a certain cosmic power, and are direct narrative agents, see: Homer. I ran out of steam before getting to the full comparison I wanted to make, maybe I’ll get to that in another post, but trust me when I say it has massive implications—like, ‘requires a totally different method of engagement with the work, one which heavily departs from, and at times directly contradicts, literary and pedagogical tradition since at least the early modern period’-level implications.

***In terms of Pre-Divergence depictions, frankly I need to finish rewatching both Calamity and Downfall (possibly multiple times) to properly incorporate Brennan’s contributions to the text into this consideration. Drive-by assessment though, as it pertains to the main campaigns: we see glimpses of what the gods powers of acting can be without the Divine Gate, both with Asmodeus at the end of Calamity and the final battle in Downfall, to use as a comparison. These are useful for when c3 brings up the possibility for an alternate state of affairs while providing no examples for what those alternatives would entail. 

1. Bryant, Levi R. “Substantial Powers, Active Affects: The Intentionality of Objects.” Deleuze Studies 6, no. 4 (2012): 529–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45332014.

2. The structuralism I’m employing follows a number of works and theorists, namely Roland Barthes for lit theory and Richard Schechner for performance theory; the most relevant direct citation is Daniel McKay’s book The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art (2001), which references both of the above and many others.

[trifargo]

proposing some kind of alternate 2/2, where the thieves decided to check on joker just to make sure he's not tempted by maruki's deal, barged in to the cafe, and found out that akechi's life on limbo. more in cut

so if you ask me, i actually enjoyed their rivalry relationship a lot! but i also think it's placed in an awkward situation: the thieves don't hate him, especially because he wasn't fully at fault, but also i'm sure some of them will hold grudge or mixed feelings about him (and i think this bleeds into the writers too*). or in case of royal trio (which interactions i also enjoyed, but have a catch:), it's kinda funny how sumire doesn't actually know what happened to akechi in depth.

it makes sense for their relationship to be more "secluded/secretive" from the team, but also this is why i find it to be rocky if their relationship continue further, be it platonic or romantic, whatever you prefer. i can't imagine how will futaba feel if she found out, for example – given how much she seems to not care much about akechi**. and the game (understandably, for pacing reasons) keeps on avoiding to explore the nuance of akechi-joker's relationship effects deeper in the game.

the concept is not only for joker to be even more torn seeing his friends arguing & akechi's fate, but also to see the polarization among the thieves, akechi being conflicted between disgusted and teammate care (boiler room but worse?), and maruki regretting seeing that he's not making things any better or easier for everyone, especially joker (hoo may be interesting to see how the thieves feel about maruki too after this).

well, i still wish for a P5RST game that reunites them all, one of them because i want this to be explored..... oh well. i know his arc has a closure already, but... yeah. i'm honestly more of a platonic akeshuake guy because of this (i've also always been a platonic guy in general, though), but i also don't like the crowd who thinks the PT hates him and thinks they only see them as a killer. and i think resolving the awkward situation between the PT and akechi could make more players open up about the dynamics between them that can be explored, instead of being stuck thinking the extremes.

* a prominent example of this was ryuji. ryuji brought up akechi a lot as one of the reasons upon confronting shido (he even banged the boiler room door), but then said "uh it was for joker" when akechi thanked them for taking shido down in 3rd semester mementos. while i think this is possibly because ryuji has a bigger affinity for joker because well, he's the team leader, close friend, and akechi is still at wrong, i thought it was a bit... backlashy tone wise? i was under the assumption that he did it both for akechi and especially joker, but the mementos dialog made it sound like he only did it for joker. just felt kinda rough in showing the nuance on how he feels.

** like the talk when they all found out the effects of maruki's reality wearing off. when the topic was about realizing akechi "dies" once again, she ignored it and brought up about her mother instead. though, i think this is still more of the consistent examples in writing how each thieves feel about akechi. she has always been bringing up about her mother more often in shido arc, while still can understand where akechi came from.

[vampirejuno]

Remember that discworld dream I had the other day? Well, lads.... I wrote it. At the encouragement of @catstrophysics, @lilenariinpink and @theygotlost, I present to you...

Something Fishy

His Grace, His Excellency, Sir Samuel Vimes the Duke of Ankh, Blackboard Monitor, sighed emphatically and tried to shoulder his way through the throng. Sator Square was packed with people. Never before in his life, he reflected, had he ever seen such a crowd turn up at six in the bloody morning to watch what was, essentially, a man tossing a dead fish onto the ground. Is this what passes for entertainment these days? he thought bitterly. We used to be a great city when it came to entertainment. After some further consideration of past greatness, he stopped, shook his head, and silently offered praise to whatever god was responsible for making sure it stayed in the past.

It had been a little over a month since the Fish Craze, and already Vimes wished he could permanently ban the import of all seafood into the city. Nobody remembered what had started it, but the fad had spread faster than wildfire, with no fashion-brigade to stop the madness. Everyone had taken it up. Even perfectly reasonable people, the kind that sneered at their grannies for fretting over a broken mirror, would, in all sincerity, say things like, “Thank goodness for another Right Day, I could use the luck”, or, more frequently, “No wonder it all went tits up, it was a Left Day”.

Vimes failed to see the appeal. The whole process consisted of taking a fish (preferably a sardine, though most made do with herring or, in desperate times, even anchovies), tossing it in the air, and checking which side up it landed. At first, everyone did it individually. This had led to much disagreement and, eventually, an event that would go down in history as “Most Organic Weapons Riot”. The watchmen who’d been on duty that night were given two days off to try and wash the smell out of their uniforms.

The following day, the Patrician had announced the instatement of an Official Fish Thrower, which soon turned into “the Offishal Tosser”, or simply “the Tosser”, and whose entire job it was to go into Sator Square every morning, toss a sardine for the city, and announce to the enraptured masses what sort of day they were going to have. It was rumored that the Tosser was a retired magician who had specialized in sleight of hand, and that he ensured the fish always landed precisely according to the Patrician’s specifications. Knowing Vetinari, Vimes thought, the man probably has a spreadsheet planned out for a month in advance.

His musings were interrupted by a current of movement in the crowd, which parted hastily to reveal a figure with a tray.

“Right Fish! Get your Right Fish! Guaranteed Day goes Right! Turn your day ‘round with just one toss!”

Vimes sighed. Only one man would try to sell you fish at the Offishal Tossing.

“Morning, Throat,” he said distantly. There was a commotion at the front of the crowd as people tried to dislodge someone from the Tosser’s podium. It looked like an Omnian preacher had taken advantage of the audience to spread the good word to the unenlightened masses, whether they liked it or not.

“A good morning to you, Commander! Can I interest you in some nice sardines? Three for tuppence, and that’s cutting my own throat!”

Vimes risked a glance at the tray as Ankh-Morpork’s least successful merchant approached him in a hopeful sidle. It was laden with row upon row of little strangely misshapen fish. Picking one up and turning it over in his fingers, Vimes saw the reason for this. Someone had taken some pains to cut them in two lengthwise, discarded all the left halves, and rejoined the things by gluing two right halves together with some mysterious sticky substance. He put it back down and inconspicuously wiped his hand on his trousers. Like many of Dibbler’s products, it was precisely what you paid for.

“Sardine? Seems more like smelt to me.”

“Yes, very fragrant, indeed,” said the merchant without missing a beat. “Perhaps some fish’n’chips, then, Commander? Only ten pence for our brave lads in the Watch!”

I don’t think I’m that brave, Vimes thought. Aloud, he said, “Is that where the left halves go, then?”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir. Ah, hello, miss, you look like you could do with a nice nourishing breakfast! Some delicious fish’n’chips to start the day off right, how about it?”

The crowd was so packed now – hah, like sardines in a can – that Vimes gave up all hopes of pushing through it. Most of these people had turned up early to get a good spot and were now whiling the minutes away until the much-awaited Tossing. There was a conversation taking place just behind him, where an argument of Morporkians was standing around, doing what it did best. The current object of ire appeared to be a young man’s drawling voice, which was questioning Tradition.

“-don’t see why we couldn’t put a new spin on it. This is…too restrictive, like.”

“How’s that, then?”

“It’s just awfully specific, is all I’m saying.”

“What are you babbling about, Harold?” responded a higher, slightly irritated voice that instantly filed itself away as “unhappy wife” in Vimes’s copper brain.

“I mean, why’s it got to be a sardine? Why not a, uh,” the young man cast around for seafood-related ideas, “a crab, or something?”

“Come now, that’d never work,” a stout little man next to him laughed good-naturedly. He was smoking a pipe and had the look of someone who used words like “indubitably” and “perfunctory” despite only having a very approximate idea of what they meant. “Crabs are not remotely suitable for the task.”

“Oh, is that right?”

“Well-known fact,” nodded the crustacean connoisseur. “Divination is congenitally tied to the noble art of fishing, you know. It’s called forecasting, after all.”

There were more nods and approving laughs. The man puffed on his pipe with a chuckle, clearly satisfied with the pun. Vimes managed not to punch him.

“Y’know, that sounds about right. Never ‘eard of someone telling the future with a crab,” an old woman nodded wisely. “You never know where you are with crabs. Now, fish, that’s reliable.”

The group pondered this.

“Look at it this way. We’ve had, what, twenty-three Left Days so far – not counting Floppy Friday* – and every single time, somethin’ bad happened.”

The others murmured their agreement. There were several thoughtful comments recounting various misfortunes that the participants had suffered on past Left Days. Vimes pinched the bridge of his nose.

“This is Ankh-Morpork, something bad is always happening.”

“Right, that’s what I’m saying,” nodded the young man, who hadn’t been saying that. “Besides, plenty of perfectly good fortune tellers in the city. A man tossing a sardine on the cobbles is not a valid method of divination, in my humble opinion.”

“Harold, you are embarrassing me.”

“Oh, come off it, Mathilda, you got by just fine without any of this business for thirty years of your life. Now it’s all Sardines this, Herring that, Why don’t we get an ornamental trout lake-”

At that moment, the Offishal Tosser stepped onto his little podium, and the couple was shushed into outraged silence. 

* * *

“Come on, before ol’ Stoneface gets here. You know he doesn’t approve of this sort of thing.”

The Pseudopolis Yard watch house was buzzing with excitement uncharacteristic for six in the morning on a Wednesday. Most of the night shift had signed off and the day guard were trickling one by one into the main room. An ever-growing group was clustered in a vague circle, in the center of which Corporal Nobbs could just be made out (if that was your idea of a good time). The men all had the vague air of middle school students asking their teacher about his dog in order to delay math class by another five minutes.

“Might that have anything to do with the fact that, last time, it took three hours and a bucket of armour polish to get the smell out of the floorboards?” Angua smiled. It was a very friendly smile.

“Right, sarge, but… We-ell, you’re…”

“Yes?” The smile widened.

Constable Fernsby shifted uncomfortably. There were a few sniggers. It was true that werewolves had considerably sharper senses than humans and would therefore be able to smell a fish long after it had departed the material plane, but, the sniggers seemed to indicate from a safe distance, you didn’t go around pointing this out to them. Fortunately for the boy, he was saved from any further smiles by a very timely interruption in the form of the Captain.

“Good morning! Everyone had a nice rest, I hope? Ready for another day of work?”

Carrot strutted in, wearing his usual genuine smile and gleaming armor. There was a not-so-subtle change in the atmosphere; a sudden nonchalantness enveloped the room. All around him, the squad commenced their very best impression of the Walls And Ceiling Inspection Division. One or two of the simpler lads even clasped their hands behind their backs and started to whistle**. Carrot sighed.

“Alright, what did you do?... And don’t look at me like that, I can see something smells fishy here.”

This was greeted with one or two coughs and a sudden interest in last night’s heaps of paperwork. Only Lance-Constable Whippet, who had joined three days ago and was, therefore, not yet acquainted with the minutiae of his commanding officers’ tempers, and sergeant Detritus, who could be a little slow on the uptake, met the captain’s inquisitive gaze. Finally, he looked to Angua for help. She shrugged meaningfully.

“Well… er,” said Sergeant Colon, who felt obliged to make some sort of contribution on behalf of his insubordinates, “we was just…engaging in some…cultural activities, captain. To boost morale for the day, like. Er.”

Carrot sniffed at the air – never a very good idea in a watch house, where, at any given point in time, half the men had just returned from patrolling and the other half were emerging from the locker room – and understanding began to dawn.

“Ah, I see. And I expect, Sergeant, that such…team-building activities are best carried out without the involvement or presence of, say, senior officers?”

“Could be, sir. I’m sure you’d know best, sir.” Colon’s big round face was a picture of cherubic innocence.

“Well, in that case, I believe Sergeant Angua and I have a case to attend to. Corporal Thighbiter up at Dolly Sisters needed some help with that Money Trap Lane break-in...”

“Actually, he just sent word the other day – it turned out Mister Mason had got drunk and lost his key again and crashed through the oomph-” Constable Ping bent over slightly from several democratic elbows in the ribs. With a true officer’s tact, Carrot feigned temporary deafness. He held the door for Angua, who detached herself from the wall with one last pleasant smile that could’ve cut steel, and the two stepped out briskly into the safety of fresh air***.

After they had gone, the squad waited a few moments and then turned back to the center of the room, where someone had dragged a mysteriously stained stool from the canteen when the kitchen lady wasn’t looking. Corporal Nobbs was shuffled towards it with extreme care.

The little man**** dusted himself off and scrambled onto the rickety stool. As the other watchmen leaned in closer, he reached into the unspeakable depths of his inner pockets and, with a certain air of ceremony, produced…

“A sardine!”

“Cor, is that real?”

“Dat a very small fish.”

“Where did you get it, corp?”

Nobby basked in the approving murmurs of his colleagues. It had, indeed, been a challenge to find – sardines were very rare these days, outside of the occasional coveted freak shower – but he was nothing if not resourceful.

“We-ell, it weren’t easy, that’s true,” he rolled a dog-end from one corner of the mouth to the other, savoring the moment. He rarely commanded so much attention without attracting a variety of insults and the occasional ballistic eel. “Pays to know the right people, o’course. I have connections, me. Contacts. Ties, even.”

“Aye, but that floral one you nicked last week really don’t suit you very well.”

“Oh, that’s rich coming from you, Stronginthearm. All your accessories are made of chainmail! Everyone knows jewel tones are for winter, anyway.”

Colon raised a placating hand. “All right, all right, lads, no need to get all up in arms just ‘cos some folks are a little…stylistically challenged.”

“Thanks, sarge.”

“I meant you, Nobby.”

The corporal threw up his arms. “I go to all this trouble,” he wailed, “I talk to people, I find a contraband seafood shipment from Klatch, I explain matters to the fishmonger – on my day off, too, might I add – I procure a real, genuine, only-slightly-nibbled actual sardine, and this is the thanks I get?”

The watchmen watched, transfixed, as he flourished the fabled fish in their faces. It had, indeed, already been chewed on; the tail was sticking out rigidly and the whole thing smelled as if it was a few weeks beyond consumption, but it was a sardine nonetheless. Most of the lads, coming from humble (and sometimes humbling) backgrounds, felt slightly awed at the idea of Tossing a fish that these days was available only to the very richest observers of the fad. It was, they felt, unbecoming to wave it around like a paper flag at a parade. The damn things tended to be slippery. Probably would be bad luck, they figured, if it was flung down by accident; who knew what sort of fortune that would foretell?

“Where’s the appreciation, I ask you?” Nobby continued in woeful tones. “Every time I’ve Tossed a fish for you lot, it’s landed Right! Now, how many of you can say that, eh?”

The watchmen exchanged doubtful glances.

“Er… Well, you never let anyone else do it, corp,” Ping reasoned. “You just nicks the fish and eats it afterwards.”

“Oh, now, that does it! I won’t stand here and be slandered at!”

“Woah there, Nobby, watch that sardine-”

“If you’re gonna be like that, then I’m not doing it. And good luck finding someone who’ll do it as well as me!”

“Careful with that-”

“And I’m taking the sardine.”

“-not the tail-”

 “You can beg, but I won’t change my mind, and that’s that!” Nobby flung out his hand in a grandiose gesture. Unfortunately, it was the wrong hand.

Time slowed to a crawl. Every head in the room swiveled as one, following the trajectory of the airborne fish. It sailed head first towards the front door, which was creaking, doorknob turning, and slowly, slowly opening…

* * *

The Offishal Tosser tossed the fish, which landed damply. There was a satisfying splat. The crowd held its breath as the first few rows near the podium craned to see.

“Today is the fourth of April in the year of the Significant Woodlouse, and it is a… Left Wednesday!” the man proclaimed.

A disappointed groan spread through the crowd. Slowly, people started dispersing with occasional complaints, casting sour looks at the offending fish. Here and there, members of the Gamblers’ Guild were exchanging coins.

Vimes shook his head again as the grumbling current carried him through the square, into the Plaza of Broken Moons, and out to the Patrician’s palace. At last he disengaged himself from the throng and elbowed his way towards the Brass Bridge. It wasn’t far to the watch house from here, but he still picked up the pace. Despite not having official working hours, Vimes liked to get there early in the morning, just as the day shift was coming in, to get a headstart on ignoring his paperwork.

As he walked, his copper mind took over and he mentally leafed through the agenda of the day. Let’s see, what was there… He had that audience with Vetinari at eleven, probably concerning last night’s diplomatic dinner – not that it was Vimes’s fault that he saw the unlicensed thief and that the Klatchian ambassador happened to be standing there, and anyway who drinks red wine while wearing a white robe… Then the interview with the Times at noon… Then briefing the lads on the unsolved contraband seafood case… Then he’d have to do something about the river division, they can’t just keep sinking the damn boat, this is getting ridiculous…

A distant glint caught Vimes’ eye as he stepped off the bridge. Carrot’s shiny breastplate could be seen from a mile away on a clear day, and the captain was, indeed, proceeding along the river with Angua in tow. 

What the hell are they doing out? They’re not on patrol today…

Briefly, he considered catching up to them, but then dismissed the idea. They were only a couple streets away from the watch house, and Carrot seemed relaxed enough, stopping to chat with every other passer-by in his usual manner. No emergency, then. On the other hand, they had a batch of new recruits at the main office, the gods alone knew what those yahoos would be getting up to without a senior officer present. And under Colon’s command…

A few minutes later, Vimes was rounding the corner of Lower Broadway and trotting up the steps of Pseudopolis Yard. There seemed to be quite a commotion going on inside; he’d heard the shouting from half a block away. With his hand on the doorknob, mentally preparing his best Not Yelling Voice, he pushed the door open…

…and very briefly saw something shiny flying full speed at his head. Before he could react, the thing clanked off his helmet, bounced on a nearby desk and, finally, lodged itself between the floorboards with a sproinnnng.

Silence fell like a gavel. A dozen horrified watchmen gaped at their Commander, the life quickly draining out of their eyes*****. Sergeant Colon’s face, pale as the moon and just as round, tried unsuccessfully to hide behind his high collar.

Wordlessly, Vimes approached the thing stuck between the floorboards. He crouched down. He examined it. He gave it a tentative flick. It made a noise not unlike a ruler twanging off the side of a table, or a very thin sheet of metal being shaken vigorously. After a moment’s contemplation, he felt moved to speak.

“Well, lads, I don’t think Left and Right suffices anymore. Seems we ought to add a third Day to the list.”

Ahhh. Relief rose off the squad like morning mist. Their laughter had the strained quality that came with trying very hard to pretend that whatever was happening was entirely intentional. At this point, they’d have laughed at anything, as long as it meant Ol’ Stoneface was Not Yelling At Them. Whatever they may think to themselves, the one motivation that all coppers in all the worlds have in common is to Not Get Yelled At.

“Bottom Day, sir?” someone suggested. There was another bout of slightly forceful sniggers.

“Er… Perhaps not.” Vimes gave the fish a few fruitless tugs and gave up. “Alright, someone get this damn thing out of there and, uh…”

“Throw it away, sir?”

“No, good gods, you could hurt someone… Look, just get rid of the…fish and we’ll say no more about it. Fred, a word upstairs?”

With the watch house returning slowly to its normal daily bustle, Vimes went up to his office and sat down wearily at his desk, which was hidden underneath an impressive pile of paper. He’d signed a few dozen forms and…dealt with half a fireplace’s worth of complaint letters last night, but the stacks looked suspiciously bigger this morning. They entirely refused to melt away under his glare.

“Alright, what is this bloody nonsense? I thought I’d made it clear I don’t want any Tossing in the watch house,” he said to Colon, once the man had huffed and puffed his way up the stairs.

“Well, Mister Vimes, I just thought I’d indulge the lads this once. Raise their spirits with some good ol’ cultural team building. For tradition’s sake and all.”

“Tradition? It’s not been two months, Fred!”

“We-ell, they’ve taken to it, sir. Besides, you can’t deny we’ve had crimes happen on every single Left Day since the Offishal Tossings started.”

“Good grief, you could say that about every bloody day since the founding of the city! I thought you weren’t a superstitious man, Fred.”

“No, sir, but the fish don’t lie,” said Colon fervently.

“Ugh. Next thing you know, the bloody Times will be printing it alongside the bloody date in their bloody papers.”

There was a guilty silence.

Vimes stared at the sergeant’s carefully blank face. A single droplet of sweat was slowly making its way down the man’s forehead. The beady little eyes flickered momentarily to a relatively unoccupied corner of the desk.

With a sinking dread, Vimes followed his gaze and beheld a newspaper lying there on top of the forlorn paperwork, all neatly rolled and still crisp from the press. Belatedly, he noticed the smell of fresh ink. At the top of the front page, a small print line proclaimed today’s date to be April 4th, Left Wednesday.

Five minutes later, sergeant Colon walked down the stairs and into a perfectly silent room full of watchmen. His face had the distant look of someone who had just seen a ghost, and was fairly sure everybody else had, too, but would be damned if he’d mention it first.

With nothing else to do, he cleared his throat. This seemed to break the spell; all at once, the room regained its normal level of noise as the coppers went back to their coppery activities. Only Nobby sidled closer and offered up a slightly bent cigar.

“What’s up with ol’ Stoneface today, sarge?”

“Dunno what’s gotten into him.” Colon took the cigar gratefully and lit it, trying not to think too hard about where it came from. “It’s this job, I expect. All this responsibility is wearing on his nerves.”

“Ah, right.”

“I mean, what’s so wrong with a little tradition once in a while, eh?”

“Beats me, sarge.”

“Doesn’t hurt no one, having some mores and values ‘round the place.”

“You never said a truer thing.”

“Ah, anyway, Mister Vimes is just overworked. Not his fault he’s got a bit of a cultural blind spot when he’s cranky,” Colon concluded magnanimously. “Maybe he could do with a coffee and a nice meal. I know I could… Say, Nobby, what’ve we got for breakfast in the cantine today?”

“Fish’n’chips, I think. Er… You alright there, sarge? …Sarge?”

* An unfortunate misunderstanding at the fishmonger’s that had led to the Offishal Tosser being handed a very live fish, foreboding a day of extreme mood swings for the populace.

** This is the social cue equivalent of climbing onto the roof at three in the morning and setting off a barrage of fireworks while waving an enormous fluorescent red flag. Not even a 6’6’’ dwarf could remain oblivious.

*** Only comparatively. This was Ankh-Morpork, after all.

**** Allegedly.

***** Except for Corporal Shoe, for whom it was a little late******.

****** heh.

[futchmoding]

The older brother is an extinct form of tgirl that existed in the Pre-Regime Era before the policy of mandatory feminization[1] was instituted for all world citizens.

[fearandhatred]

C by fearandhatred (6k words, 1/1 chapters)

Crowley's time with Jesus dredges up an old wooden box of memories 3000 years past—a flood, a reckoning, and lives lost. And in the box are two other things, one of which is a braided lock of her own hair, straw-like from dried-up rainwater, and hacked off violently and unevenly at the edges.

*don cheadle voice* boom, you looking for this?

it is finally here... the mesopotamia–golgotha fic! this is intended as a sequel to my golgotha fic, via dolorosa. also if you see the very tiny stitches of colour on his clothes and on the C in this drawing... they're surprise tools that will help us later :)

please go check out the wonderful art my beloved @knifeforkspooncup made for me!! i have probably racked up five hours of screen time just looking at it if we're being honest here. thank you loml <3

also this idea came my way because of this post and the lovely (life ruining) additions by @idliketobeatree and @eybefioro. this fic is for u two <3 (i also eventually realised that my original post was factually incorrect but hey it birthed this fic so! happy accidents!)

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 19: Fred Barnard

Surprise! And Merry Christmas!

I'm not even gonna bother to talk formally here. I have had. These. On hand. For. A year!!! Just! Waiting! For the right time to post them! And what better time than Christmas, a holiday I personally celebrate and a holiday defined by gift-giving? Thus, my Christmas present to you, dear reader:

Crisp, beautiful, & hand-scanned by me¹, here, for possibly the first time in Internet history², is a complete³ and high-definition⁴ set of Fred Barnard's iconic twenty-five illustrations⁵ originally made for the 1874 Household Edition⁶ of A Tale of Two Cities.

" She curtsied to him (young ladies made curtsies in those days) . . . . He made her another bow "

No other words are necessary here. Happy Holidays, and Enjoy!

( Unlike the others, which are embedded in the text, the above is a full-page illustration, rotated. )

And there they are. Have a wonderful last week of the year, everyone! See you New Year's Eve!

¹ painstakingly over a period of several days because some individual illustrations took several hours of trial and error to scan them with the degree of detail and accuracy they deserved😌 ² by my thorough (if not desperate at a certain point) research anyway🤪 ³ there is of course... one more illustration, completely separate from these, that Fred Barnard made from A Tale of Two Cities... but that will be for a different post altogether one day😉 ⁴ I know Tumblr can crunch image quality, so if you want the super high-definition versions of these, feel free to DM me😁 ⁵ if you're curious about any of these, this link is worth a click because it gives a description and context to all of the illustrations! all of them!!🤩 ⁶ technically, the edition that I own is a combination of A Tale of Two Cities and Sketches by Boz and is undated - and Barnard created his illustrations for Sketches by Boz in 1876, so this can't be from the original 1874 print - but as far as has ever been indicated in my research, it is of some variation of the Household Edition😎

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

[musubiki]

Okay this is dumb but how do you say m34th? I keep reading it as "meeth" and I have a suspicion that that isn't correct

NOT DUMB!!!!! actually a surprising amount of people have this question,,..maybe i shouldve picked different numbers..,,. but anyway in my head i say it as "em-thirty-fourth"

(my thought was that you refer to it like you would any military regiment like the 442nd, but the m- is in front to denote it as the only magic-specialized regiment in the central kingdom's capitol guard!!)

[bsideheart]

Hi, we don't really know each other, but you're the origin of ryanjim³ so I wanted to let you know that I may or may not be creating a silly Jim From Improv rp blog and thought you might want in on it!! I'm asking Gia and Orpheus too so maybe the four of us can make a whole polycule lmaooo. No worries if not tho I understand ahsjkdkd 😅

THAT SOUNDS SO FUN WTF!!!! I'M SO DOWN :3 which ones have been claimed already? i saw orpheus had ryan romeo but i'm totally awesome with being any of the jims !!! also i'm totally inexperienced w tumblr roleplaying but i would love to learn and participate in this :33

[neothebean]

Highly cursed answer on the weekly question at work

[duplicitywrites]

I’ve got you! Horrible only 😈

Potlord

Pottermort

Varry

potlord: $266.00/ounce 1

pottermort: $capitalism 2

varry: absolutely priceless

[iwtv1976]

Passport office emailing me if I want my name as MC SURNAME or MCSURNAME. My last passport was MC SURNAME but apparently my one before that was MCSURNAME. My sister’s is MC SURNAME and my mum’s is MCSURNAME. My mum says it’s all one word on my birth cert but I don’t know if that’s all caps because obviously I normally type it as McSurname…

[sun-snatcher]

Trying to code in AO3 is like gnawing my foot off a bear trap how are y’all doing whole discord-designs in here I can barely get my script to work let alone try to mimic the ANIMUS into my page 😭

[ekwallace]

How the fuck do you reach the postdoc stage in humanities without learning that citations at the end of a sentence go before the period?