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antialiasis · 5 months

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Chess (2018 Kennedy Center revival)

So I was just going to briefly mention all the other different versions of Chess I have consumed in the big essay post I’ve been writing on and off, but there was just too much to say about this one which made it really awkward to fit it in, so fine, here is another individual chesspost. Nearly 7500 words of rambling under the cut, oh my god.

This production represents the latest official full overhaul of Chess. It sports an all-new book written by Danny Strong, also known as the actor who played Jonathan on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is some whiplash (Sarah Michelle Gellar is apparently a big Chess fan, too). It was later staged again as a concert with some further modifications in 2021, but I listened to an audio bootleg of the 2018 version. (There exist some videos of it online, but only scattered bits.)

The Story Changes

This version has London’s basic plot structure with the distinctive two chess tournaments (this time four years apart, which is neither the original number nor the actual number of years between world chess championships), but rearranges Act I, adds a lot more quippy dialogue and swearing, reinterprets the characters, and recenters real-world politics in the whole thing — sort of the exact inverse of what Chess på svenska did with the material. It opens with “Difficult and Dangerous Times” to set the scene in the Cold War and features the Arbiter narrating with sardonic omniscient commentary between songs/scenes throughout, which does feel a bit more consistent than the Arbiter suddenly having a narrator role for the duration of one song in Act II.

All the main characters in this version are reinterpreted with significant new background context, which is a very interesting way to rewrite it that I definitely dig in principle. For example, Florence’s first scene here involves Walter threatening her with deportation from the US unless she can make Freddie behave for the duration of the tournament. Most versions of Chess make the political scheming very symbolic and vague — exchanges of mostly unnamed political prisoners or handwaved concessions — but this version is noticeably specific, with specific nuclear arms treaty negotiations that the CIA believes would be negatively affected if Freddie keeps openly antagonizing the Soviets. She tells Walter to go fuck himself (told you it adds more swearing) and that nobody can control Freddie Trumper, but ultimately she doesn’t have much of a choice but to reluctantly play along. This addition recontextualizes her character and her interactions with Freddie in Act I a fair bit — it’s pretty significant, after all, that she is under threat and may lose her home if she doesn’t somehow control what she really can’t.

Meanwhile, Freddie himself here suffers from a full-on mental illness which he takes medication for. Walter asserts on a phone call early that they’re dealing with a “genuine paranoid schizophrenic”, but then later calls him a “bipolar bitch”; I take the blatant inconsistency combined with the obviously insulting nature of these remarks to mean probably we’re not meant to take either of them at face value, but these two lines from Walter are the only ones suggesting any specific diagnosis. (I unfortunately suspect Danny Strong didn’t have a specific condition in mind and research it so much as just slap him with a Generic Ambiguous Mental Illness for which he takes Pills.) One way or another, Freddie’s ambiguous mental illness gives him bouts of intense paranoia, driving him to do things like trashing his and Florence’s hotel room to look for listening devices at one point. Florence keeps insistently, frustratedly telling him to just take his goddamn pills even as he’s in genuine distress; it’s pretty uncomfortable, and also definitely one of those things that are at least more human when his episodes could cost her the only home she has: she’s desperate and in distress too.

(I do kind of feel as if this whole bit would make more sense if Florence and Freddie had a strictly business relationship here to start with, instead of being explicitly portrayed as a couple — when they have a committed intimate partnership going on, one would think Florence getting deported would also be pretty obviously significant for Freddie, and Florence quietly playing along with the CIA and crossing her fingers that she can indirectly coax him into behaving with seemingly no serious thought given to whether it’d be better to just tell him why he needs to stop feels stranger. The scene with Walter sounds like Walter/the CIA are not aware of their romantic relationship and Florence wants to keep it that way — they both refer to Freddie strictly by his full/last name and as “her player” — so I guess Walter would have assumed she wouldn’t tell him, but surely the calculus would at least look a bit different to Florence herself. Even if it just prompts her to realize Freddie would still be liable to react by becoming even more erratic and vocal about his paranoias, that feels like it’d be significant enough, at least for her feelings on this relationship going forward, that it never actually coming up or being suggested within the story starts to feel marginally odd. Not a major complaint, though, just a bit of overthinking.)

Freddie in general is noticeably portrayed much more sympathetically here than usual throughout. Where other versions of Chess tend to present Freddie as an attention-seeking drama queen who plays up ludicrous arbitrary demands for money and press, here things like his walkout from the first chess game are made to come from a much more genuine place: he has major sensory issues and is intolerably thrown off balance by distracting noise and lights (which really are deliberately arranged to sabotage him). “Florence Quits”, the song with the misogyny verse, usually reads as being triggered by his jealousy and inability to accept that Anatoly’s just playing better than him, but this version makes it feel more about how he feels persistently gaslit about the ways he’s being sabotaged than anything else: he accuses the Soviets of having a hypnotist in the front row to throw him off (which they do, and Freddie literally saw him and recognized him) and Florence of working for the CIA (which she has been, if not by choice) while they deny it and brush it off, and the tense opening notes of the song play under him desperately yelling “You’re lying to me! You’re all lying to me!” (Which doesn’t make the misogyny okay, obviously, but it does make it feel more like a desperate, paranoia-fueled lashout where you don’t know how much he really means all that.)

When he subsequently forfeits the match against Anatoly, he makes a speech that sounds absolutely despairing where he says chess has been taking a toll on his health since he first became champion at eleven years old, and he doesn’t feel he can trust anyone, even himself. In Act II, before “The Interview”, he even actually apologizes to Florence for how he treated her; heck, his motivation for going so hard after Anatoly in “The Interview” itself is portrayed as being that he is genuinely disgusted by Anatoly leaving his family so callously (which is a lot of fun given Freddie’s own issues about his father leaving him and his mother behind) and wants Florence to hear the truth about what a despicable man he is, which is still unpleasant to her but clearly comes from a much more sympathetic place than either simple spite or reluctantly complying with Walter’s orders.

As for Anatoly… he was taken from his parents when he was a small child to be groomed by Molokov and the KGB into becoming a chess champion, and he’s well aware from his very first scene that the state had killed the previous Soviet champion after Freddie unseated him. (Freddie excoriates the press early on for not covering why the former champion disappeared off the face of the Earth because they’re too busy bashing Freddie, which sounds like paranoia, but the narrative has actually told us Freddie is right and they really did execute him but no one but Freddie seems to notice or care — another way in which Freddie is jarringly sympathetic here. In general, Freddie is portrayed as paranoid, and the other characters treat him like he’s just paranoid, but the narrative keeps proving Freddie’s paranoia right.)

Anatoly, though, isn’t afraid of the same fate, because “The state cannot execute a man… that is already dead.” (This general sentiment could press my buttons, but it just feels super corny and melodramatic the way it’s presented and performed, especially with that dramatic pause in there.) He is deeply depressed, thinks his marriage to Svetlana is fake and his kids hate him, and says repeatedly in Act I that he hates chess and just wants to be free of it, though he also describes a particular championship match he watched as the only time he’s felt love. At the end of Act I, he defects to the UK along with Florence as usual (his defection fully blows up the treaty Walter was worrying about despite Anatoly’s victory, so Florence’s refugee visa is indeed revoked, and that’s why they end up in the UK). Theoretically he should be free of chess now, but it bothers him intensely that he only won by forfeit (here they never finished playing a single match), resulting in him returning to defend his world champion title, and win it ‘properly’, four years later in Bangkok against Viigand.

Unknown to Anatoly, by Act II, after the election of Ronald Reagan, the Soviets are extra on edge and believe a planned NATO military exercise is actually the US mobilizing for a full-scale invasion of the Soviet Union. Walter tries to convince Molokov it’s just an exercise; Molokov insists unfortunately the generals are going to believe it’s an invasion and be ready to retaliate unless Viigand wins the championship (if Viigand wins they will take it as a ‘sign of goodwill’ from the US, which will change their minds on the apparent invasion because, uhh, unclear). Throughout Act II, the larger stakes in this version are set up to be that if Anatoly should win the match, the Soviets are liable to start a nuclear war.

Does Walter go to Anatoly to frankly tell him that apparently the Soviets have lost their minds and are basically threatening nuclear war over a chess match and try to convince him to throw on that basis? Does Molokov realize that if he’s telling Walter to go rig the chess match so the generals will call it off, he clearly doesn’t actually believe that the US is about to invade, so probably he should be trying to convince the generals not to go for the nuclear option himself? No, of course not; this is Chess, so we have to have the songs that are in Chess. So instead, Walter and Molokov just go through the same indirect schemes as usual to unbalance Anatoly and convince him to throw the game, with some minor twists. Molokov actually actively threatens Svetlana with being sent to a gulag to die if she doesn’t convince her husband to return — and Svetlana does straight-up tell Anatoly this, only for Anatoly to brush her off and tell her they won’t do that. Florence learns the same from Walter and initially dismisses him, and fully doesn’t believe him about her father being alive, but does ultimately sympathize with Svetlana and worry for her, which I like. But Anatoly is obsessed with winning this championship above all else and fully convinced Molokov is bluffing.

In the end, he plays the game to win, oblivious to the nuclear threat; as he checkmates, Walter makes a desperate phone call to his superiors to call off the training exercise. (Why he didn’t just do that immediately when Molokov told him the Soviets were taking it as an attack, instead of spending all this time playing along with this elaborate chess mind game, is a mystery.) Only… they don’t, and the Soviets watch with their fingers on the nuclear button, but ultimately they don’t fire. The Arbiter’s narration informs us this was the closest the world ever came to destruction, even closer than the Cuban missile crisis, and that this then served as the wake-up call that prompted negotiations about nuclear deescalation.

Anatoly, meanwhile, returns to the Soviet Union as usual, this time successfully exchanging himself for Florence’s imprisoned father, and Walter gives the two of them visas so that they can return to the US together.

Broad thoughts

I feel profoundly weird about the mixing of real-life history and completely fictitious alternate history here — you can’t just assert in narration that the fictional events in your musical were what taught the US and Soviet Union that maybe they should just talk to each other, while making a specific comparison to an actual thing that really happened, after spending the musical asserting that the Soviets murdered chess players for losing the world championship. I think mixing history and fiction can work fine if we can imagine that for all we know this is what really happened, or alternatively that this is what might have happened in some alternate universe similar to but distinct from ours. But here, we’re creating highly significant and publicized events that are obviously fictional, making it absurd to pretend this is what really happened, while also presenting these fictional alternate-universe events in objective hindsight narration alongside real events that happened in the real world and as a supposed cause of them. This ending narration just feels like it’s weirdly trying to have its cake and eat it too.

All in all, though, I think this is definitely one of the most interesting efforts to rewrite Chess. It definitely has something it’s going for, there are several neat ideas in it, and in particular I appreciate that it tries to give extra attention to the characters, more context to their actions, and more messy, humanized depth, inner conflict, and complicated motivators and stressors behind what they do. I genuinely enjoy what it’s doing with Freddie in Act I, in particular, even though it feels somehow both jarringly like it’s woobifying him (I genuinely think he ends up coming across as the most sympathetic of the three mains here, with so much of his erratic, childish and unpleasant behaviour being recontextualized to be more understandable and the way his hatred of the Soviets keeps being validated by the narrative) and like the narrative is weirdly harsh on him (this much more sympathetic Freddie who suffers from an actual mental illness is treated like absolute irredeemable scum by every other character including the fourth-wall-leaning narrator, even more than usual).

I also think the restructuring of Act I was pretty solid for the most part, though there’s definitely some awkwardness, like how Freddie’s expanded encounters with the press sort of clumsily repeat the same beats a bit. On the one hand, I can get what Danny Strong was going for in choosing to introduce everyone first and then go into “Merano” instead of doing several minutes of narrative meaninglessness before the main characters are even introduced; on the other hand, that kind of just half-defeats the sole original purpose of “Merano”, which is to provide a very jaunty more stereotypical musical theater song so that Freddie can be introduced via barging in and interrupting it with his very different vibe, and if I were Danny Strong I would definitely have just removed “Merano” at that point. But the “Difficult and Dangerous Times” opening works great, and it nicely avoids the “almost nothing of note happens for nearly forty minutes” and “several meaningless fluff songs in a row” problems of the London script, introducing conflict and stakes early and keeping the narrative going.

Ultimately, though, a lot of what it’s trying to do doesn’t quite come together to me, and some of it is variously misguided or just strange.

The Politics

To start with, I can definitely get wanting to emphasize the role of Cold War politics in the narrative, and I basically enjoyed the increased political focus and higher stakes in Act I — but I don’t think making Anatoly unwittingly almost start a nuclear war works here, or fits properly into this narrative at all. The Soviet generals have to be holding idiot balls; Molokov has to be holding an idiot ball; Walter has to be holding the biggest idiot ball of all; and most importantly, the ludicrously massive stakes being pasted on top of the match despite none of the main characters even knowing about it means we zoom thoroughly out of the character drama of the situation: “Endgame” just becomes grotesquely trivial with that hanging over it without Anatoly’s knowledge, rendering the actual drama of the climactic song completely irrelevant to what’s really at stake.

I also dislike, in a version that emphasizes the politics, how distinctly slanted it is. One of the things that I like in the London strain of Chess is that Walter and Molokov are both slimy, manipulative bastards in different ways, both sides’ political actors cruelly toying with the lives of the players for their own impersonal ends; the righteousness of each state as a whole doesn’t really matter to this story, only the impact that the whole conflict and the mutual scheming has on the main characters’ lives. But in this version, the Soviets and Molokov are cartoon villains who literally abduct children to force them into chess camp and then murder them if they don’t win the world championship, while Walter may be a condescending asshole who’s willing to threaten Florence but is distinctly the ‘good guy’ in his interactions with Molokov, which comprise most of his screentime, especially in Act II. Walter even gets a humanizing moment where he explains he has a nine-year-old son and has nightmares about him suffering a nuclear winter (Molokov, meanwhile, tells Walter in Act I that Anatoly is like a son to him but could not more obviously not care about Anatoly at all when he proudly presents his new champion material Viigand in Act II). I just find it really detrimental to Chess’s narrative to make it about Soviets Bad, US Good, and more so the more you focus on that — to whatever extent you highlight the politics in this story, it should be done in a way that’s about how the political machinations of the Cold War impact the character drama at the center of it, and it’s distracting when instead you make it into a loosely related B-plot about Walter’s desperate diplomatic efforts to stop the evil Soviets from destroying the world with their shortsightedness.

I think a successful more politically-focused Chess could definitely exist, but I think it’s always going to function best if Walter and Molokov feel at least narratively like just about equal scumbags. It’s not even impossible to imagine nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction coming up in the course of it — but it needs to be using that to make us enraged at all of this on behalf of Anatoly/Florence/Svetlana/Freddie, not enraged at Molokov on behalf of Walter.

The Character Work

Meanwhile, I do basically like the setup and recontextualization done for all of the main characters in Act I, but unfortunately none of them quite delivered as well as I hoped in the end.

Let’s start with Florence. I actually quite liked the deportation threat, putting Florence herself under personal pressure in a way she usually isn’t. I dig characters being put through the wringer and making decisions under stress. But the story doesn’t quite do anything with that other than using it as silent context behind her early interactions with Freddie and technically as the reason she and Anatoly move to the UK offscreen. We don’t, for instance, ever see Freddie learn that that’s why she moved or that he was unwittingly indirectly responsible for that, or otherwise address that in any way, and as far as Florence in the rest of the story is concerned, it might as well never have happened — we never see her having any kinds of feelings on it, or even confronting Walter about that nasty little part he played in her life when she meets him again (she doesn’t even comment on it when he offers her the chance to go back to the US at the end!). To an extent this is, of course, because Florence being deported was never originally part of the story of Chess, so of course it doesn’t come up in any song or have any significant specific impact on the core series of events — but if you’re going to add it in at all, you really ought to be taking that somewhere in the rest of your additions that isn’t just briefly handwaving that she gets to go back at the end.

Like Long Beach, this version brings Florence’s father back at the end — but unfortunately, it feels really unearned here. Compared to other London variants, it actually ditches the bit of “The Deal” where Florence is tangibly emotional and riled up by Walter’s offer of her father — she fully dismisses the idea of her father being alive as bullshit, and instead it’s Svetlana who moves her to have doubts when she sees her begging Anatoly to return on video and realizes Svetlana still loves him. I do really like that, by itself, and it’s probably my favorite thing about this version’s portrayal of Florence; her empathizing with Svetlana to the point of feeling genuinely guilty for having taken her husband from her, and believing maybe the right thing to do would be if he went back to Svetlana for her sake, is actually very good, serves as a great lead-in to “I Know Him So Well”, and makes Florence’s character feel far more sympathetic in a production where she’s otherwise pretty lacking in that department. But it leaves us with no emotional connection whatsoever to Florence’s father — we’ve only heard her mention him twice before Walter’s offer, very briefly, in Act I, and not really with any sense that she misses or is all that invested in him. Seeing her reunite with him means nothing for her or her arc; it just comes out of left field, and winds up being another thing slanting this version towards Good Guy Walter, Bad Guy Molokov, what with Walter offering her visas back to the US for both of them seemingly out of the goodness of his heart.

It would have been possible to actually build up to this in a way that would make it satisfying. Florence and Anatoly have several conversations; we could have used some of those to have Florence actually talk about her father and how she feels about him being gone, and that could have been part of building up her relationship with Anatoly, made it meaningful that Anatoly’s parting gift to her is to ensure her father’s return. I suppose Danny Strong’s thought process may have been that if he built up Florence’s father too much, that should become her main concern once Walter brings that into it, and he wanted her concern to be about Svetlana instead, which I guess is fair; it also means Anatoly only really has to dismiss the potential harm to one other person in his obsession with the winning the game. But if you do make the decision to not build up her father, then bringing her father back is not an ending that makes any sense, and there was no need to do this — they could have easily cut out all suggestion of her father being alive entirely and it would only have made things smoother. I think the only reason she gets her father back in this one is in some hasty effort to make Florence’s ending less bleak, but because it doesn’t have any emotional resonance, it’s just not the right way to do that here.

Speaking of Florence and Anatoly, the romance here… once again has some neat, interesting things it’s going for but doesn’t quite come together as a whole. The two of them do have some actual conversations where they bond a bit, which is already a marked improvement over the default London script — but their very first conversation features Anatoly asserting out of nowhere that Florence has “a way of brightening his spirit”, despite not even knowing her, which isn’t super convincing and just comes off kind of creepy-awkward. Florence asserts a few times that he’s sweet and kind, but we don’t really see much of him actually coming across as sweet or kind — his lines tend to be either melodramatic or sardonic moping interspersed kind of jarringly with awkward jokes. He’s less charming or sweet and more like a lonely, kicked dog, which is fine if Florence is into that but doesn’t quite make her descriptions of why she likes him ring true.

This production actually goes back to the concept album a bit when it comes to Florence and Anatoly — namely, more than political manipulation and external pressures forcibly tearing them apart from the outside, there’s a more substantial internal tension between them as Anatoly genuinely simply prioritizes winning the chess match over her and dismisses her as she tries to question him about Svetlana. The two approaches can both work but do different things for the narrative; this internal approach puts more focus on the personal conflict and character drama and makes the relationship more interesting, which is definitely good, and in principle I think this is built up to in a pretty solid way here — Anatoly, raised to become a chess champion to the exclusion of all else, being maddened by the notion of not actually beating Freddie in Act I and needing to prove he deserves the championship to himself in Act II before he can feel “free from chess” works as a coherent reason for him to be so strikingly, unhealthily obsessive about it.

But I think the biggest problem is that Florence and Anatoly individually don’t hit well enough as characters to create investment in them. Florence is ultimately not developed enough and mostly just acts kind of unpleasant, especially to Freddie, all the way up until that Svetlana bit in Act II. More importantly, I just can’t like or understand or sympathize with Anatoly at all, beyond recognizing that core of what his arc is going for. Part of it is probably down to the writing of his lines, which I’m just not a fan of in general. I already named one example from his first scene. Here’s how Anatoly and Florence’s very first conversation starts:

ANATOLY: It’s not his fault. This game drives us all crazy. FLORENCE: I’m fine. Aren’t you even a little bit scared? ANATOLY: Of Trumper? FLORENCE: No, that they’ll kill you if you lose. ANATOLY: Oh. To quote the great Leo Tolstoy, “Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.” FLORENCE: What does that mean? ANATOLY: I don’t know exactly, but it is very Russian.

I just don’t find this dialogue very convincing. Why is he reciting a dramatic irrelevant quote if he doesn’t know what it means and just thinks it’s “very Russian”? It feels like a generic quippy exchange off a snarky TV show. Does Anatoly use humour to cope with his situation? Not really; this is pretty much the only time he says anything that might be taken as that. This feels like a joke that’s there only to get a laugh out of the audience, not because Anatoly would actually tell it — and consequently, it doesn’t tell us anything real about Anatoly. Meanwhile, Florence responds to this with “Oh, you’re funny,” as if that’s one of the reasons she falls for him when I would decidedly not name that as a character trait he has. I feel like most of his dialogue just doesn’t have a great sense of character — in stark contrast to Freddie, who oozes character. I can’t get a good sense of who he is and how he thinks. He’s just there. And this also makes it harder to see what Florence sees in him and believe in the relationship.

Moreover, this Anatoly just comes across as kind of a terrible person, not in the fun coherent intentional way Freddie is a terrible person but in a flat, confusing and kind of unintentional-seeming way. Svetlana here is actually really sympathetic, with lovely little additional bits of dialogue that make her feelings hit harder (her voice as she tells Anatoly that “You left us!” breaks my heart), and this is possibly my favorite version of Svetlana in any Chess. But Anatoly is really, really terrible to her, by which I don’t even mean the cheating on her but the bit where he keeps angrily insisting to her face that she never loved him and she brainwashed their children to hate him and of course they’re not going to kill her (hey, Anatoly, guess who’s already well aware that the Soviet government in this universe is not above executing people over chess?).

And even that could be made understandable, given his situation — he could just be in hard denial about it because the thought of them having been suffering with him gone and being punished for his actions is so horrific he just shuts it down — but there’s never any sense that that’s what’s really going on. We don’t see him privately upset about the possibility later, for instance — he just keeps insisting the same and dismissing Svetlana to Florence, too. We know it’s not that it’s true — we see Svetlana admit to Molokov that even though he ruined her life and she never wants to see him again she still loves him, and we hear her sing “Someone Else’s Story” and “I Know Him So Well”. Nor do we ever get any hint at exactly what Svetlana or his kids did to make him think this of them, if anything (his own kids!). Anatoly just seems to sort of bitterly, adamantly believe this for no reason at all. And that makes it impossible to empathize with. Okay, sure, Anatoly, you were taken from your family as a child, but that really doesn’t even start to explain any of this. There could have been ways of making it feel at least believable, tragic in a deeply fucked-up way, but the story here just doesn’t do the work. And once again, Anatoly being so unpleasant for no reason just makes it harder to feel at all invested in his relationship with Florence or sad when they part.

The best fix here isn’t quite obvious, and I can’t say I envy Danny Strong trying to put all his neat little ideas together and make them work. If Anatoly were to appear substantially conflicted about Svetlana and put any real stock in Molokov’s threat, that would render “Endgame”, where he doubles down anyway, kind of jarring and inexcusable as he’d be not just refusing to return to her but refusing to care if she is killed. So in order for this to properly work with “Endgame”, he probably does need to be very deep in denial about whether they’d really kill her. I think what I would do, if I were writing this plot where groomed-as-a-chess-champion Anatoly knows the Soviets killed Boris Ivanovich and they’ve threatened to kill Svetlana too, is to emphasize better how irrational Anatoly is being and try to show it more as a consequence of growing up among the constantly plotting KGB.

Let him go off on a proper paranoid rant to Florence about the reasons why he thinks Svetlana is just plotting against him, and some innocuous things he saw his kids do once that mean she brainwashed them. When Florence tries to challenge him on how batshit he sounds, he just storms out, saying she’s being taken in by their lies and just wants to sabotage him, and disappears — and she doesn’t see him again until he appears at the final game and plays this manic, desperate match while insisting to himself that Svetlana and Florence both just never understood him and hated his success. Afterwards, we can perhaps see him finally, quietly asking Molokov if they’re really going to kill her, showing that on some level he already knew the threat might be real and had just firmly blocked it out (in the actual ending as it is Molokov simply tells him unprompted that she really will be punished unless he comes back, and he just asks why with no addressing of his previous adamant insistence that that wouldn’t happen). His and Florence’s final conversation could then involve a bit more of a reckoning with that and with what his relationship with Svetlana was really like, through a more honest lens.

I’m actually pretty tickled by this scenario because that would really drive home a pretty fun parallel between Anatoly and Freddie — which in hindsight I think this version must in fact have been trying for, but didn’t quite do in a focused enough way for it to really hit. Anatoly and Freddie are both chess players with deeply abnormal childhoods and bouts of paranoia that cause them to behave in toxic ways, which ultimately drives Florence away from both of them.

This production shows the first chess game as the “Chess Game” instrumental playing under Freddie and Anatoly having alternating inner monologues about the game and their issues, deliberately drawing a comparison between the two of them; they both say they hate chess, that they don’t feel like real human beings. It’s not exactly subtle, but I liked the way this was used to build up their respective brain gremlins and was intrigued by the parallel being set up. I didn’t feel they ultimately did much with the parallel, though, because the story then didn’t really continue leaning into it much from there. By emphasizing this Anatoly’s paranoia as paranoia and not just as him legitimately thinking the marriage was never real and the KGB wouldn’t kill her, we could properly build the story around that parallel, and I would genuinely dig that.

The one place after the chess match where the actual thing does sort of try to get at the Anatoly/Freddie parallel again is in the dialogue scene that precedes “Endgame”. This scene is not sung (though it has the “Chess Game” instrumental in the background, which connects it neatly to that previous bit comparing the two of them), but it’s clearly based on “Talking Chess”: Freddie approaches Anatoly to tell him Viigand’s weakness lies in his King’s Indian Defense, and:

ANATOLY: Why are you helping me? FREDDIE: Jesus Christ! Am I the only one who cares about this game? ANATOLY: It’s more than a game now. There is so much more at stake than who wins or loses. FREDDIE: No! No, winning is everything. Fuck politics! Fuck the KGB, fuck the CIA, fuck them all! We are the ones who have dedicated our lives to chess. We are the ones who have given up everything for greatness — our childhoods, our sanity, our loves. Anatoly, we’ve sacrificed everything. They’ve sacrificed nothing. What’s the number one rule of a chess champion? ANATOLY: Play to win. FREDDIE: As long as you do that you can never lose, even if you do.

Much as I love “Talking Chess”, though, this on the surface similar scene just didn’t feel right in this context when I listened to it. In Anatoly’s last scene here, he told Florence firmly that he just wanted to win and that his marriage with Svetlana was never real and it’s all KGB mind games. Him going “It’s more than a game now, there’s so much more at stake” suddenly now comes out of nowhere — if he believes that now, it could only be if he actively reconsidered something offscreen, but he doesn’t say anything elaborating on what he’s thinking now or what he might have reconsidered or why, just that vague, generic line that contradicts everything he’s expressed up until this point. It’s another example of Anatoly’s dialogue just feeling really flat and meaningless to me — his lines here don’t say anything, just serve as vague filler to prompt Freddie onward. And because unlike London proper the setup leading up to this is all about him already being absolutely determined to win the game at all costs, this just feels redundant, unnecessary, going through the motions of something that’s in London without realizing that with the changed context it doesn’t quite make sense anymore.

I think that’s unfortunately the case with Freddie a bit here too. I enjoyed Act I’s quite different take on Freddie, and his establishing narration for Act II petulantly stating Anatoly won the championship last year “by forfeit, I might add”, and “The Interview” is recontextualized in a very fun way as I mentioned before — but after that it feels like Danny Strong doesn’t quite know what to do with Freddie anymore and just has him sort of arbitrarily go through the motions of London in a way that doesn’t necessarily hang together with everything he’s established of Freddie so far. It made sense that this Freddie, despite being decidedly hostile towards Walter and the CIA, conducted the interview to show Florence what a bastard Anatoly is — he’s not doing it for Walter, he’s got his own reasons to want to do it once Walter’s shown him the Svetlana video. But I find it a lot harder to swallow that this Freddie — whose usual problem seems to be that he’s compulsively blunt about how he really feels — would then be easily persuaded to play his part in “The Deal”, which involves exaggeratedly trying to be all buddy-buddy with Anatoly. Maybe if there was better setup around it, like with “The Interview” — but “The Deal” only has seconds of kind of half-assed leadup here, and from there it moves directly into “Pity the Child” (after a segue featuring the recording of Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita, because nuclear war).

Freddie’s next appearance after that, then, is this “Talking Chess”-esque dialogue where he’s realized the parallel between the two of them, how they’ve both sacrificed everything for chess and the political schemers have sacrificed nothing and that’s why he should play to win. I can appreciate how the low point of “Pity the Child” would trigger that particular realization, contemplating how much he lost and sacrificed to achieve his status in the game and perhaps afterward realizing Anatoly is the only other person here who might understand that. That feels like it basically tracks and is interesting.

But… it also means that fun very specific contempt for Anatoly in particular based on him having left his family like Freddie’s own father did is just kind of… gone, I guess, or at least Freddie doesn’t consider it relevant enough for it to stop him from going out of his way to pep Anatoly up for the game with no mention or hint of it. (At least Freddie probably isn’t aware of the threats made against Svetlana in particular, so he doesn’t know Anatoly winning would shatter his family even further.) And we’ve lost the bit in “Talking Chess” where the notion of the political scheming actually leading to Viigand winning the match just personally offends Freddie because Viigand is not even that good; instead Freddie is just putting forward “Play to win” as some kind of general inviolable chess principle, which is kind of generic and not nearly as characterful, in my opinion. I’m not saying we ought to have had the “Viigand is mediocre” bit here — I don’t think it would quite fit in for this Freddie, whose feelings about chess itself are very conflicted and who is more concerned with showing up these political hacks who have sacrificed nothing while they sacrificed everything — but as a Freddie moment I would really have wanted to end on something stronger there than this vague assertion that “The number one rule of a chess champion is to play to win.”

Like in London, this is Freddie’s last substantial scene, but he does have a part in “Endgame”, and it’s also an interesting one: he gets Sixty-four squares / they’re the reason you know you exist (but not the preceding How straightforward the game…), but also a couple of other verses usually sung by the chorus, and the lines he gets are clearly very purposefully chosen to reinforce that final resolve regarding the sacrifices they’ve made for greatness, which I really appreciate: Listen to them shout / They saw you do it / In their minds no doubt / That you’ve been through it / Suffered for your art and in the end a winner and They’re completely enchanted / But they don’t take your qualities for granted / It isn’t very often / That the critics soften / Nonetheless, you’ve won their hearts / How can we begin to / Appreciate the work that you’ve put into / Your calling through the years / The blood, the sweat, the tears / The late, late, nights, the early starts?

All in all, Freddie is still definitely my favorite part of this Chess, but while the parallel itself is neat it’s too muddled and I find the second half of Act II pretty uneven for him. What would I do if I were writing this bit?

I’m not totally sure how I’d want to tackle “The Deal”, but as for the “Talking Chess”-but-not scene: I would ditch the bit where Freddie is trying to advise Anatoly on strategy and the bit where Anatoly is apparently suddenly not determined to play to win just so Freddie can then tell him he should be again. None of that is contributing anything in what this version has been building up. Instead, they just sort of bump into each other, Anatoly fresh off his paranoid rant to Florence about Svetlana, Freddie fresh off “Pity the Child” and the strange realization Anatoly might be the only person who’d understand him a little bit. At first they just sort of stop and look at each other. Freddie starts, guarded, with some kind of oblique accusatory prod about the leaving his family thing, which he still deeply resents.

Anatoly has calmed down now, but he tells him what he told Florence: that it was always a fake marriage, a fake family, that the video was just a lie set up for him by the KGB, that Svetlana had brainwashed their children to despise him.

This incidentally plays into Freddie’s existing preconceptions pretty well. He’s probably not instantly convinced but it checks out enough he’s willing to reluctantly leave it alone for now. Probably mutters something like, “Fucking Soviets.”

Anatoly says something like, aren’t you going to try to make me a deal to get me to throw the match and go back? Freddie says no, fuck that. Says the whole bit about how we are the ones who have dedicated ourselves to chess, who have sacrificed everything, childhood, sanity, love, and they’ve sacrificed nothing. Why should we listen to those CIA and KGB assholes? Draws out that parallel. The two of them are probably standing in symmetrical positions on the stage.

Anatoly just nods slowly, agreeing. “I would have beaten you.”

Freddie scoffs and says, “Dream on,” but not quite with the spiteful arrogance he would’ve said it in Act I.

Then they part, and we move on to “Endgame”. The scene isn’t about Freddie helping Anatoly, or about Freddie convincing Anatoly to go for the win; it’s about the Freddie/Anatoly parallel, about Freddie realizing it and in his profound loneliness finding a smidge of connection with this guy he hated because he’s the only one who sort of Gets It, and about showing how Anatoly’s conviction has developed since the first chess match where part of his inner monologue went, “I can’t beat him, he’s too good.” Anatoly is so ready to prove that he really is the world’s best chess player.

Conclusion

Man, this version is so interesting. It’s a mess, but it’s a fascinating mess with a bunch of tasty potential and a real sense that Danny Strong had some genuine thoughts on what the show was missing and how to rework it to fix that, even where his attempts were ultimately confused and don’t succeed. In some ways it’s the most me-core version of Chess and in other ways it’s deeply antithetical to me and in most all ways it’s trying to do something neat but does it in a flawed way. Special shoutout to this Freddie, who honestly deserves better than this Florence.

#musicals #chess musical #chess the musical #ramble #review

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offtorivendell · 8 months

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Elain's engagement ring may be Made; a theory 💍

Does it mean she is a witch? What about Nesta?

🌸 Elain Archeron Week 2023, Day 1 - Seer/Powers

Please don't screenshot or share this post without credit.

Disclaimer: this theory is a bit all over the shop, sort of like my life right now. The textual evidence might be a bit sparser than usual, sorry. 🫠

Spoilers: the ACOTAR, CC and TOG series to date (2023).

This theory probably wouldn't exist without the lovely @123moiaussi, who messaged me after I posted this theory suggesting that Elain may have Made the necklace that Azriel gave her on Winter Solstice in ACOSF. She wondered if Elain had possibly Made her engagement ring, in addition to/instead of her necklace - which is a solid theory and could definitely still pan out! - but a little later I had a thought; what if the Cauldron already Made Elain's engagement ring when she became High Fae?

She was wearing it when she went in, so why not?

It would then parallel other Cauldron Made items, such as Gwydion - and very likely Truth-Teller, if it is fully confirmed to be Made in a future book - which was dipped into the Cauldron by the High Priestess Oleanna. Metal (and pearl) goes into the Cauldron (in this case iron, not meteorite, which could always make a difference in how it reacts to the Void within) and, hypothetically, comes out imbued with the Cauldron's own magic.

Elain's refusal to give the pearl and iron ring back to Graysen then makes a lot of sense in this new context, beyond her understandably grieving the end of their relationship - could a human even hold it and survive? - as she may hear it calling to her, singing to its kin, as I often wonder if she hears Truth-Teller, and possibly even Azriel's "beautiful" siphons (as Bryce from CC hears a certain sword, one of many parallels that exist between the two).

Rhys winked at her. Feyre rolled her eyes. But then she said to Nesta, “Elain will need time to dust off her powers to try to See the Trove. But you, Nesta … You could scry again.” Rhys added, “As swiftly as possible. Time is not our ally.” - ACOSF, chapter 21

When Rhys spoke of Elain needing time* to "dust off" her powers, it sounds like he's referring to an item. Her ring? What might it do? And how?

* As an aside, the wording in this passage is strange. "Time is not our ally" made me look twice this time around. Could Rhys unknowingly be referring to a god of time, similar to Chronos or Aion? From whom Elain may need help with her powers? Both are associated with cyclical time, which brings me straight back to my theory that Elain may need to collect the Ouroboros from the Bone Carver's Prison cell to Look further than she has before, or to even use it as a portal.

There's no confirmation that Elain still wears her old engagement ring either way, at least not since Feyre remarked on it in ACOWAR. Has Elain put it away somewhere safe, possibly not knowing that she is drawn to it, finding herself unable to part with it even though she has moved on from Graysen by ACOSF, as demonstrated by the following quote:

Elain cocked her head. Didn’t dissolve into the crying mess she usually became when Graysen came up. - ACOSF, chapter 17

Or has the hypothetically Made ring glamoured itself such that it is forgotten, as Made items are able to do, and that's why nobody has mentioned it in two books even though she still wears it? But I digress; if it is now a Made item, what might Elain's engagement ring be able to do?

Trove of Dreams

I mentioned earlier that I have previously theorised that Elain could have Made her rose necklace on that emotionally tumultuous winter solstice night in ACOSF, a book in which Nesta Made her own trio of weapons: sword, greatsword and dagger. Now of course, there is still the distinct possibility that her necklace will go the way of Cassian's Sidra-bound ACOFAS solstice gift to Nesta and barely rate a mention in the next book, but there's also a chance that it's Made (or even came to her with powers already instilled in it, like the knives and necklaces that exist in the catacombs under the Hewn City).

So, to mirror Nesta's Trove of Nightmares, what if Elain will Make a Trove of Dreams? What would such a trove even entail? A rose necklace, possibly a pearl engagement ring*, and another item or two that she'll Make in her own book? Such as:

A staff, to parallel Iris, the messenger of the gods (and provide defence if required).

A ring of light, possibly acting as an external power source or for protection against vengeful Beings; perhaps, as @ladynightcourt reminded me, like Silba's ring protected against the Valg in TOG? Rhys did say that females preferred gold or silver to iron. Maybe that offhand remark contained some hidden depth.

A cuff, spindle, or something else entirely? I'm eyeing her baked goods, ear plugs and possibly some homegrown medicinal powders...

* There's a good chance that a ring Made by being dipped into the Cauldron will be a little different than one Made directly by an elemental faerie, so it may not count as part of Elain's own trove.

Many of us suspect that Elain will search for the illusive fourth part of the Dread Trove, the item that Lanthys showed to Nesta as a bit of age worn bone, half shrouded in shadows. Could pearl be mistaken for age worn bone? Unlikely, but worth a mention. I do think it's tricky, though, as there are multiple ancient Troves appearing, and the Dread Trove is only one of them. Gwydion (aka the Starsword), Truth-Teller and possibly Narben seem to be another trove, though maybe not Made in quite the same way as the Dread Trove (ie. dipped in the Cauldron vs imbued with power by a more elemental faerie).

Protection

We all know that I suspect Koschei* might have used the Cauldron to give Elain a bonus mate bond after orchestrating with Jurian to shoot Azriel with a poisoned ash arrow. And we know that the Cauldron has a dark maker, who made the Book of Breathings. Could there be a light maker, and is this hypothetical being working for or against Koschei? Are they the Mother (and maybe Urd)?

* I really think that Koschei could need Azriel out of the way, and needs Elain as a stand in for the Mother, or someone else important, somehow, in order to work some massive spell.

Could they have gifted Elain her Sight, or any other powers, and even put a little something special in her engagement ring. Something that would provide protection*, as Silba's ring did against the Valg in Erilea? The latter is less likely for an iron ring, but still plausible.

I've said before that I'd love to see the Archeron sisters create their own version of Midgard's Archesian Amulets, with one ring made from each of their magics to protect their loved ones and hide them from danger, and that still stands. This post goes into more about the rose necklace providing protection, if you're interested.

* Unless Koschei, or whoever orchestrated the Making of Elain and Nesta, stored something they needed to access in the ring instead, to free it from the Cauldron's grasp and make it available to them?

Witchcraft

One of the first thoughts that came to me almost two years ago, upon wondering what purpose a Made ring would serve Elain, was the possibility that it could be a focus for her power, something to tether or ground her while she was wandering the murky realm. This is backed up by the witches' use of iron throughout the TOG series, which @wingedblooms has discussed in many of her witchy posts, and I'll mention a little later on.

Could the pearl ring be Elain's focus, and ground her? Or might it function as a siphon or invoking stone does? Given she rubs the ring, I wouldn't be surprised if it helped her focus her being, or control her magic.

Some witches in ACOTAR are said to be able to amass powers beyond their natural capacity.

Nesta drifted toward the desk, the maps atop it. “What is the difference,” she asked none of us in particular, “between a faerie and a witch?” “Witches amass power beyond their natural reserve,” Mor answered with sudden seriousness. “They use spells and archaic tools to harness more power to them than the Cauldron allotted—and use it for whatever they desire, good or ill.” Elain silently surveyed the tent, head tipping back. - ACOWAR, chapter 51

Could the ring "harness" her to an external reserve of powers?

Could this reserve of powers even be the Cauldron itself?

Could the ring provide Elain a living bond to the Cauldron, such as the one Feyre had while she touched it during the battle in ACOWAR, when she witnessed Elain assassinate the King of Hybern?

Iron

In SJM's TOG series, we witnessed iron's ability to both block someone's access to their own magic and provide a grounding point to the witches, who might have otherwise been pulled away from their world. The leader, it was said, was so powerful that she required iron and pain to tether her to their realm. In the same passage, we learnt that pain was a gateway to the divine, which I have theorised may be behind Elain's glove-free gardening habits.

Legend had it that all witches had been gifted by the Three-Faced Goddess with iron teeth and nails to keep them anchored to this world when magic threatened to pull them away. The iron crown, supposedly, was proof that the magic in the Blueblood line ran so strong that their leader needed more—needed iron and pain—to keep her tethered in this realm. Nonsense. Especially when magic had been gone these past ten years. But Manon had heard rumors of the rituals the Bluebloods did in their forests and caves, rituals in which pain was the gateway to magic, to opening their senses. Oracles, mystics, zealots. - HOF, chapter 12

In Seers, Blindfolds and Bloodbane, I posited that Elain - like the Seers in Erilea once did - may be able to open portals to See spirits from other worlds by imbibing in certain hallucinogens (possibly with experiencing pain), and we know from Feyre that witchberries exist in the Spring Court (ACOTAR). Witches, who in HOF were associated with Oracles, mystics and zealots. Elain is 2/3 of those so far, and being the only sister to take an interest in faerie religious customs, she's possibly closing in on the third. But I'm getting off track. If Elain - whose powers have been linked to the same void/murky realm as Azriel's, through which Bryce was yanked to Prythian - has witch-like abilities, then surely she will need something to keep her grounded in her body in Prythian while she traverses the murky realm, searching for visions and possibly help. Especially if Truth-Teller helps her to go further than before, breaking through mist and shadow.

Could the iron engagement ring keep Elain tethered to the realm in which her body/Prythian exists, when her waking dreams threaten to pull her away into the murky realm? Was this why Elain was constantly fiddling with it in ACOWAR, before she learnt how to block her visions with light?

Tharion eyed the bare-bones wooden hallway as he and Flynn strode down the worn planks, aiming for a round door at its far end. It looked like the entry to a vault, solid iron that didn’t reflect the dim firstlights. They’d been halted at the first door by the Viper Queen’s guards. Flynn had snarled at them, but the males had ignored him, their drug-hazed eyes unblinking as they radioed their leader. That Tharion knew of this door at all told her guards he was important enough to warrant a call. - HOSAB, chapter 64

In CC2/HOSAB, we learnt that the Viper Queen had a vault made from solid iron, guarded by males with "drug-hazed eyes"... which sounds too much like a coincidence to actually be one. However, the more relevant point to note here is that the solid iron didn't reflect the dim firstlight (donation of a faerie's soul magic made when taking The Drop). Does this mean that iron absorbs firstlight/magic, rather than reflecting it? Is this how iron functioned to block magic wielders in TOG from accessing their magic when worn?

Could an iron ring function to absorb and hold a charge of power, like the one Prythian witches were known to create?

Following on, we know the Cauldron is made from a dark iron, and it very likely contains the Void. The Book of Breathings considers the Cauldron to be its home. Additionally, Elain fiddled with her pearl and iron ring* constantly in ACOWAR (I've wondered if it was singing out to her, but maybe it has more than one purpose). Does the ring now see the Cauldron as its home, too? Would Elain, and maybe Nesta?

* Azriel's shadows have been described as "rings of darkness" around his fingers, which could tie him into this plot?

In addition to potentially providing a living bond to the Cauldron as I mentioned above - and wouldn't it be absolute crazy if the ring itself was somehow made from the same iron source as the Cauldron, only passed down through human lines rather than Fae - what if Elain's iron ring is a backdoor of sorts that she can use to channel or even control it? Conduits are an increasingly common theme among SJM's work - and I've been harping on for years now that Elain's Sight might be due to her ability to act as a conduit for at least one god/goddess.

If Elain's engagement ring did come from the same iron source as the Cauldron itself, could it act like the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings, controlling the other Cauldron-Made items?

In addition to (hypothetically) allowing Elain to become a conduit for the Void inside the Cauldron, what if Elain's iron ring being Made permitted her to track it easily? "Like calls to like," Made objects Singing to their kin and all that. This could make it a possible target for theft.

Circling back to iron's ability to both dampen magic and ground witches in TOG, I wonder if both stem from the same function; ie. that the grounding of witches in their physical realm is done by dampening their specific type of magic, or their access to it. And considering ACOTAR, where the humans have believed - falsely, apparently - for centuries that iron will protect against the Fae… maybe this was intentionally spread misinformation, and done to convince humans to wear iron in order to block their magic. That would achieve an easier to control populace, all thanks to a little lie. This would mean that - if @wingedblooms, @silverlinedeyes and I are right about the Archeron sisters being descended, albeit distantly, from the Starborn fae - Nesta* and Elain were actually being contained by wearing their iron bracelets. I wonder what effect, if any, that may have had on their mental wellbeing? It could explain why Feyre was considered wild, even.

Could this mean that Elain's ring functions as a tether because it dampens her ability to access the murky realm?

Alternatively, does the iron ring contain the power that the pearl may have absorbed from the Cauldron's endless Void?

Another absolutely cracked theory is that it turns Elain into a walking embodiment of the Cauldron when she accesses the murky realm while wearing the ring, when she is physically contained by the iron. Void inside iron, like the Cauldron.

* Nesta having a Trove of Nightmares should count as an amassed external power source, imo, which also fits the definition of witch.

Pearl

Pearls are said to be associated with water, the moon, healing, honesty and integrity. Apparently they are also useful to centre and calm one's self.

This makes them sound perfect for use in a magical object that is used to ground or tether a Seer while she sails the Void.

Mother of Pearl (which isn't included in Elain's engagement ring, but is worth a mention) is even said to have protective properties, and be able to heighten intuition and psychic sensitivity.

Due to their ties to the moon and moon magic, pearls are said to be both a representation of the moon and linked to Selene and Luna - goddesses that embody the full moon. Apparently they can be made into pearl essences, and can be charged with intent.

Her gaze shifted to the carved wooden rose she'd placed upon the mantel, half-hidden in the shadows beside a figurine of a supple-bodied female, her upraised arms clasping a full moon between them. Some sort of primal goddess-perhaps even the Mother herself. Nesta hadn't let herself dwell on why she'd felt the need to set the rose there. Why she hadn't just thrown it in a drawer. - ACOSF

This sounds like a certain effigy next to which Nesta placed the dark wooden rose that Papa Archeron carved for Elain.

The name Selene is linked with Helena, which is a derivative of Elain.

Charged with intent sounds almost exactly like an object being Made. I am desperate to know what Elain experiencedbin the Cauldron, as that may affect the essence that the pearl hypothetically took on.

Pearls are said to be appropriate offerings to spirits, goddesses, and the sea.

"What are you looking at?" I asked Elain, keeping my voice soft. Casual. Her face was wan, her lips bloodless. But they moved barely-as she said, "I can see so very far now. All the way to the sea." - ACOWAR

We know from Amren that Narben was thrown into the sea; maybe a trade will be necessary.

Pearls are said to be useful with transformation magic and associated with wisdom.

I hope we can all remember this brilliant post by @wingedblooms, and note the evidence that suggests Elain may shift.

Mor said, back in ACOWAR, that Elain was wise.

Pearls are sacred to Aphrodite, and can be used in love magic.

Sounds appropriate for someone who may or may not end up Making her own mating bond.

There are a lot of possible uses for a magical ring, whether or not it is Cauldron Made, and I can't wait to see what happens with it!

Thanks for reading!

@elainarcheronweek

#elain archeron #elain archeron theory #elain #pro elain #elain's powers #seer elain #witchy elain #elainarcheronweek2023 #elain archeron week 2023 #elainweek2023 #elain week 2023 #elain week seer #acotar #sjm #acotar cc tog crossover theory #elain's ring #hosab spoilers #acotar theory

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hrodvitnon · 1 month

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Additional Novel Stuff! (that the other submitter missed)

Post from Mystical got my attention and so I hunted down the info on Reddit, found the guy who claims to have made the notes originally and he offered more info in a Twitter thread. I would like to urge to take both the notes from earlier and everything I’m about to say here with a grain of salt as the novel isn’t released till the end of April, and to consider this post supplementary to the one made earlier as Mystical seemed to miss the Twitter info.

The prologue actually opens with Serizawa, Vivienne, Andrews, and Emma meeting in Greenland to discuss some strange properties about some of Earth’s ice. They sample stuff from glaciers, Ghidorah’s prison, and the ice caps, and realize that when the ice was first frozen- the freezing was instant, described like a ‘reverse bomb’. This is also where we get that 3 million number for Shimo’s age as that’s when the earliest instance of this special ice was dated. Shimo is then dubbed as Monster H, standing for Hypothetical, as the only evidence they had of her existence was the weird ice patterns.

This is actually Andrews’ motivation for joining Monarch, to uncover this weird anomaly.

When Kong first meets Shimo, he can sense her violent rage towards Skar, but also sees how the crystal controls her.

There’s additional info during the mural scene where all the history is discussed- including the info that Shimo froze Ghidorah (god it feels so good have this confirmed) and an additional mural of Shimo fighting Godzilla in which Godzilla seemed 'worried’ about something. What he was worried about they don’t say, but I like to think Godzilla could additionally sense that she was being tortured by Skar and that he wanted to help her but didn’t know how- and had to revert to fighting her. Additionally, a note from the Reddit post states that Godzilla was additionally apprehensive about fighting Skar/Shimo. Could be interpreted that he thought he might lose or that he didn’t want to battle Shimo again because of her state. Either way, the characters confirm that the two have some sort of history.

Shimo is not the first Titan. The characters say the mural could be translated to say 'The First, The Foundational, The Ultimate, and/or The Quintessential’. However, I still believe that it is not the case that she is the first because right after this they actually that very same Iwi word to describe Mothra of all Titans. I have no idea what to make of this, crazy interesting that they elevate her to be on Shimo’s level of ancientness or importance.

Shimo is incredibly strong. Near the end of the book they describe her power as 'world-killing’, and actually describes Evolved-Zilla as being on the backfoot whenever fighting her.

However, they do confirm she started the Ice Age to balance the Earth’s ecosystem and not out of destructive behavior.

The bit about the governments of the world plotting to invade Hollow Earth actually revolves around a desire to control Shimo like Skar did, seeing as it was revealed in Rio she can be controlled. (sidenote: this is like, the perfect sequel hook. Operation: Destroy all Monsters, anyone?) This is what that 'end of the world’ note was talking about, a future in which humanity finds a way to control Shimo.

Apparently it’s made clear that Shimo and Godzilla were allies back when Ghidorah was around messing shit up.

Finally, there’s actually an extension of the post-battle scene where Shimo’s visibly distressed after being freed and Kong comforts her by petting her for a while in the Hollow Earth.

Small tidbit about Scylla not in the thread but mentioned in another tweet: She’s described as loving destruction and that she was actually beginning to warm the planet instead of cooling it, like her job was- so Goji was absolutely justified in dealing that death.

The thread was all about Shimo and has great info- but I honestly can’t wait to see the context surrounding the other notes especially the one about Godzilla and Mothra being family. (Ikik everyone wants this to be a Mothzilla confirmation, but I will be equally interested (maybe even more interested…) to see if they classify them as something else; say found-siblings. I also wanna know if there’s an implication that they grew up together- which would further creates a mountain of questions…). April 23rd is when this thing releases and this info is either confirmed or not.

---

*Serizawa and Vivienne mention* BRB PRE-ORDERING THE NOVELIZATION

Whether any of this delightful information turns out to be true once the book comes out, we Shimo fans are going to be happy with the abundance of lore. Also, YES KONG GIVE HER ALL THE PETS SHE NEEDS IT!

#submission #godzilla x kong: the new empire #gxk spoilers

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doberbutts · 1 year

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I'm turning this over and over in my mind here but

In Season of Storms we see Geralt's reaction to male homosexuality as fairly neutral, which is pretty normal for Mr I'm Neutral And Don't Get Involved (tm), but it's mentioned a few times that that's NOT normal for the world at large.

Really the only speaking characters we see that are not-straight (gay, lesbian, or bi) are all mages, except for Ciri's girlfriend who is just a street-urchin-turned-maurader. Ciri herself, of course, is a mage.

But the mages seem to run the gambit from "*shrug* not my bed so idgaf" to "who hasn't dabbled with the same sex???" and Geralt too seem to be placed somewhere in here. Which as a joke I've said several times that you cannot convince me that a bunch of teenage boys locked away from the world in a crumbling fortress *wouldn't* find some way to pass the time with each other after they get tired of using their hand, but we never really get confirmation of this.

Geralt's reaction to Phillipa is even possibly non-relevant, as it's never really directly stated if he knows for sure that she's a lesbian. At the time, she's faking a relationship with Djikstra so it's possible even if he has heard the [true] rumors that she pretty much exclusively pursues women, he could think she's bi or that the rumors are false since she's "with" a man at the time. Triss, too, has slept with women, and later it states that that's just sort of a thing with a lot of the sorceresses but doesn't really give any other specific names, and Geralt either doesn't know or if he does know doesn't care.

But, then, in Season of Storms, we have two major events happen:

Geralt beats the shit out of his cellmate while in prison (and we know that only Nilfgaard does mixed-sex cells, so it's got to be another man) because he "was uninterested in his partner's sexual advances". So he's defended himself from a rapist, and is grumbling about how the longer he stays in jail the more he has to do this.

With this fresh in his mind, when he's released from jail, he immediately meets up with sorcerers who are, well, either gay or bi. While one is the villian of this book, the others exist squarely in shades of grey, just like the majority of characters and even Geralt himself. And... he's fine with it. He's friendly with them even after being told directly and to his face that they're all fucking each other. One, later, specifically seeks him out to say goodbye when he leaves, due to them having been old friends and, perhaps, because of a love and respect in his heart towards Geralt. And Geralt is specifically touched by this, happy this man came directly to him to say goodbye.

This is very different from how many other characters react in the book, and in many of these contexts it seems Sapkowski's saying that he not only thinks misogynists are idiots but homophobes too. Most of the characters reacting badly to homosexuality are also misogynists, and all of them are openly mocked or directly punished for such views by the narrative.

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quibbs126 · 1 year

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*sigh* I tried to use a Cookie Run gacha maker thing to make it look all nice, but I just couldn’t get it to work, both on my iPad and my computer. But regardless, I thought I’d make this look as nice as I could

So some time ago, I decided I wanted to try and make the Evoland 2 characters in the Cookie Run style, and I wanted to start with my favorite character, Menos

This is him (also note, while this is from the art book, some of the information here is inaccurate, mostly the first paragraph. The second paragraph’s accurate though. I suspect there were some story changes after the artbook was finished)

I’m gonna be fully transparent with y’all, I did this so I could try and attract my Cookie Run audience and maybe get them interested like “oh hey these designs are neat, what game are they from?” and maybe then lure them into playing Evoland 2. Listen, it’s my favorite game, and there is like, no audience for it. There is BARELY any content for this game on here and I am DESPERATE. I need people to play it, it’s a good game, and I need people to talk to about this game, but I can’t because no one’s played it or heard of it, and the things about the game I want to talk about and discuss are things that are major spoilers for the game, so I can’t talk about them. It’s a rough existence

*ahem* sorry, I got carried away. I’ll shill more for the game later, but let me just explain this

I made him a porcelain berry, aka Amur peppervine, since they have bright blues and purples like him. I went with Peppervine since it sounded tougher than Porcelain Berry. Also peppers tend to be associated with fire in Cookie Run, and he does have sort of fire based powers. Well really it’s just a ground pound with fire at the end. It’s useful though

I think I’m gonna make all the Demons berries/fruits (I say fruits because there’s already Cherry and Plum), mostly since they’re the best substitute for their bright colors. Also Menos is a Demon. But they don’t like, come from the underworld or anything, they just exist in the world. Honestly they’re pretty chill people, way more than the humans

Porcelain berries:

I mainly used Capsaicin and Purple Yam as my references, given the similar body shapes and Capsaicin’s horns

I was also planning to make his eye outline black, with the main color being yellow and the slits black, since some people make the black outline black sclera, but it just didn’t look right, so I made it white instead and did all the other things

I had so much trouble with the chain around his neck, since he doesn’t have an official reference, and all official art I can find changes it slightly. It’s pretty annoying. I just ended up sticking with the one in the promo art

Menos looks weird without his nose and ears

Now let me just ramble about Menos

I love this dude so much. Like, he’s just an endearing character, and in my opinion, way better than Fina (green haired girl). Fina can be a bit of a brat sometimes and while yeah, I get that she’s the youngest and I think a teenager, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t get on my nerves. Anyways, Fina aside, Menos on the other hand is very polite. He always calls Fina “Miss Fina” and does the same with Velvet, and for Kuro, well I suppose first I need to give context. So you first meet Menos in this gladiatorial arena that we just stumble into while escaping prison (and that he’s being forced to participate in by the way), and because we don’t want to give ourselves away, we give ourselves a fake name out of the options presented to us. I personally always go with Mega Clink because of the Evoland 1 reference (the Evoland 1 protagonist is Clink). And see, Menos will always call you by that name you pick, no matter what. Other party members say our name, but he’s just adamant to call you that. I don’t know why he does it, but he does it with complete seriousness and I just find it funny.

But honestly, when I first played the game, I had an obsession with this guy. What first got me to pay attention to this guy is when you escape the arena and collect gravity, you fall into a pit and Menos laments the fact that he will now never see his son again. When he said that, I was like “you have a son? I will help you, I must reunite you two” and that’s where it began. Then we get to where we’re going and meet his son, but then [EVOLAND 2 SPOILERS] happens and I’m like “No! Menos no!” And after that point I was determined to reunite him with his family once again and save his people and just let him be happy because honestly? The demons, nor Menos, do not deserve what happens to them in the story. Like, Menos is not a bad guy by any means, his only flaw is that he can get irrational when it comes to the things he cares about, like saving his people, which honestly I can understand. He’s incredibly polite and understanding towards us when we meet, especially considering the fact that his people are in a war against humans and he was just captured by humans and forced to fight in their gladiatorial arena. And if he does get mad at Fina because of her beliefs about Demons (she’s grown up being told they’re the enemy), he’ll calm down and apologize for it. I mean I guess it makes sense, considering he’s the oldest of the group and by proxy probably the most mature, but still

There’s a point in the game where you get separated from Menos, and when I had been released from the story to go on whatever path (there were multiple paths to go) to continue, I immediately went “I’M COMING FOR YOU MENOS!” and veered straight to where I knew he was. He was my hyperfixation character

Anyways, sorry I’ve rambled, but I hope you at least like this art. And please check out Evoland 2. Please. It’s an RPG you can find on Steam, Switch, or PS4. You don’t need to play the first game to understand this one, they’re two completely separate games that just both use the motif of evolving game aesthetics, Evoland 2 using it for time travel. But even then, the first game’s like 2 hours long, 4 to 100% it. Evoland 2’s more around 17 hours to finish, 20 to 100%. I need people to talk to about this game please

Oh yeah also, here’s a simpler version of the drawing I did

#please play Evoland 2 okay? I know I’m shilling but it’s a good game #cookie run #cookie run kingdom #evoland #evoland 2 #menos #my art #also I planned to draw all 4 party members #I just wasn’t sure what to do for everyone else so I just stuck with Menos

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spindrifters · 10 months

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Hello! Ok so I’m here to tell you that I’m obsessed with wolfstar and have read so much so far but I’ve never read a harry potter book.

I’ve obviously known about hp for decades but the size of the series intimidated me. A year ago I decided to watch the movies (the books were too big a commitment at the time) and I really enjoyed them. I remember instantly falling in love with professor Lupin then by the end of Prisoner of Azkaban having the biggest crush on Sirius Black, but I never thought of the two of them together for some reason. (Although now that I think back, I remember being unsettled by the presence of remadora)

My golden trio phase only lasted weeks before I found myself on marauders tiktok and I heard about wolfstar. For some reason it just instantly made SO MUCH sense and from there I jumped head first into fan fiction.

I never felt that I was lacking any info about these characters and their personalities, even after I came to tumblr and met people who have read the books. Maybe I got lucky and read the right fics first?

I tried picking up the books to read but I honestly couldn’t be bothered to finish one when there were a thousand fics focused on my favorite characters waiting for me.

But now that I see your shock at how can someone ship wolfstar without having read the books, I’m intrigued to give them another shot.

hello!

I mean I feel like all I can really do here is say yes, read the books!! there's so much there that the movies left out!! especially in book three, which is (in @soloorganaas' words) an accidental love letter to sirius and remus, both together and individually.

but also, I'm now just fascinated in all of these ways people came to and are interacting in fandom that literally. never occurred to me before. maybe. idk. maybe it's because as a writer I'm like.... right so you can have information about characters and their personalities, but the ways in which they actually exist in context is something else entirely? and for me, personally, I so so hated the movies that I don't consider them canon because I don't at all agree with their interpretation of the original text. also they feel wildly incoherent -- I have no idea how you could watch them and know what's going on without having read the books, but also maybe that's just because I've read the books and know how much richness is missing there. but also I definitely had friends watch the movies without reading the books and they did not understand what was happening so. ymmv on that.

but also! I think I've always known there are people in fandom who had only seen the films, so... yeah idk I'm still working this all out! because at first the idea of people writing fic based on someone else's canon interpretation in their fic did not compute. but I always see fanfiction as inherently folkloric, and isn't that just what folklore sort of does anyway? hm. much to think about.

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cheese-void · 2 years

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2. OUT OF THE FIRE

Sometimes it felt almost as if the cold dark stone of the prison was the scolding heat that reflected from the white stones of a forgotten home they once had. Only distant flashes of a previous life that looked more and more like a far away dream. The creature could remember a time when these pictures were clearer, crispier… But something, themselves even, but also pain, had pushed them far, too far maybe for them to come back. Each and every ounce of happiness that had achieved to stay in these memories was more salt on the open wounds of their mind and flesh. It was easier to be no-one and to have no past. Their situation though, had evolved quite a bit since they were pushed in a cold cell of Utumno, left alone to contemplate an infinite existence of darkness. One of their companions of sorrow incited them to volunteer to become one of the scribes. A colossal task but also one of the safest. Men, trolls, wraith… Various evil creatures roamed the fortress and the territories seized by Morgoth. Thousands of orders passed hands and claws to coordinate immense armies in the War that followed. They needed hands to bear weapons but also hands to bear pens. Orders, maps, encrypted messages, drawings… Now, they did not really remember how it all started. The first few hundred years stuck in Utumno were a dark blur of screaming, pain and restless eternal nights spent copying parchment after parchment. During that time, the creature started learning common speech and black speech. They even learned certain variations through all of the different groups they had to translate for. They threw themselves into the despair of words and writing until their hands twitched and bled. At one point, they lost their right ring finger… They did not remember the exact context. A mistake, certainly. They had been beaten and cut numerous times, but the corruption had slowed down some of the healing qualities of their elven body. That finger was lost forever. An eternal reminder that whatever they were now, they were not really an elf anymore. Their pointy ears were the same as the uruks around. Only their facial features betrayed their origins. Light cheekbones striking out of their dark skin, underlining pale eyes. Their hair had been long and brown a long time ago. They still sometimes remembered it brushing against their back. Now it had been shaved on the sides and tied up into a short braid. Only a selected few prisoners were given the opportunity to be a scribe. As long as the creature could remember, they seldom saw anything else than the first elves, the first uruks, holding the feathers and the wooden pens. Holding, as a result, the information… The wide library, full of various leather books and parchments was in the heart of the black citadel. It did not have any windows and each writing desk was surrounded by books, ink bottles and spare pens. Uruks would patrol around, discouraging any discussion or any suspicious behaviour. After a while, it was like a dance. They would shuffle their feet. They knew each other's faces, names… When the creature could remember its name. There was a sweet spot during that time, when they were in some sort of habit. The rhythm of the day soothed the pain of the mind and the body. There was some comfort to be found in there, somewhere, anywhere really. After a while, seeing the same guards, discussing the matter of the citadel, commenting on the supply of leather or ink, it almost felt like some sort of home. Utumno was a small village after all, with its rumors and its customs. It dawned on them one day that this was their life now. Even though they could not remember any other life than this one, they knew it had been different. They knew there had been warmth and happiness somewhere in a distant past. Sunlight, flowers, trees, rivers… They had a regular dream, their feet in cold water, looking up at a mountain, before being smothered by heavy rocks falling on top of them. That water, they remembered. And yet, in these familiar feelings accompanying the habits, they knew very well that none of this was right. They were prisoners. Although they came to realise that almost every single one of them, scribe, guards, soldiers… They were all prisoners in the end. Even though the scribes were not at the heart of the battle, they could feel each variation of pace in the grand scheme of things. Ever changing abrupt corrections, more translations, more detailed maps… The scribes probably foresaw the fall of Morgoth before most soldiers. And yet, the creature did not foresee this as a possible liberation. A liberation of what, for what? They had stopped counting the years. They had stopped remembering where they used to live. Their name was a far away memory, tucked away somewhere where all their previous knowledge lurked. It would sometimes dart out to the surface, unsuspected and unexpected. A sound, a smell or a word. More often than not, it would summon a feeling more than a clear memory. The creature was then left either trying to suppress it with all of its might, or trying to identify what sort of vision it could have come from. Then the orders came in. They had to dismantle the library in Utumno to scatter its content and scribes around other smaller fortresses. The strategy was quite sound. If Utumno fell, not every single secret information would be found out, and also, it would all be incomplete. Some were sent to Carn Dùm and others in smaller secret locations. They were shuffled around, chained tightly to one another, isolated. The creature did not think that they could be even more cut from the rest of the world. And yet… They ended up in a small, more strict outpost, with only two other first uruks. The lieutenant in charge of it all was a corrupted man, a former knight in one of the human cities, Lotomar. He was somehow more twisted than previous masters the creature had known. He did not have a sense of duty but one of power over every life form in his contact.

________

It happened in the middle of the night cycle. Although they did not operate based on the sunlight, they did have shifts and periods of rest. Even the army of Morgoth recognised that tired soldiers were no use at all. When the creature realised what had happened, they were already being pulled by strong hands. When they looked up, they saw the half burnt face of Ragmor. A first uruk, like them. He was tall and strong and had probably been a beautiful sight as an elf. But extensive torture and corruption had completely melted one half of his face and body. One of his jaw bones almost stuck out through the thinned skin and his right eye was completely black and blind. They met Ragmor at the outpost. He was a gentle but stern being. Keeping to himself, never raising his voice or showing any sign of quick temper. He had been allocated to a smithsing station. He had said he was a smith “before”. He would often tell strange stories about the Valar, forgotten battles or funny tales. He had a grave voice that could resonate through your mind, embedding images of extraordinary adventures. It gave some respite from the cruelty of Lotomar. An explosion, that was it. An explosion had happened. An attack? An assault? An accident? For now they could not say. There were lots of movements left and right. Their ears were deafened and they could feel the pulse of the frantic agitation around in their very core. Ragmor was pulling them from their feet, keeping them close. The only thing they could remember before fading away from consciousness were the black gates completely pulled open, peering into a deep gallery in the mountain.

#adar #the rings of power #fanfiction #uruk

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nostalgebraist-autoresponder · 2 years

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Title: Rage Against the Machine

Author: Mark Fisher

Rating: 5/5 stars

Rage Against the Machine will always have a special place in my heart because, in my headcanon as a 12 year old, it was the one book that finally convinced me that the world could be a lot better than it is.

Rage's music was something that felt very different to the music I'd listened to in the context of the pop culture I'd consumed back then. And while I didn't know or understand quite as much as I think I did back then, my 12 year old self at least was aware that popular music was often boring or bad.

RATM was not (at least as far as I can recall -- I've spent so many years writing fiction that some stuff from high school has already faded away) in that sense of being a pop song about something. Instead, it felt as though a whole lot of other people were into something different than what I'd grown up with. Something that wasn't about some sort of "ideal" -- whether that ideal was the one that society allegedly had or the ideal my parents had, or even the one my friend/family member had. I didn't know that all these people liked "ideals" so much but RATM sure as hell wasn't about them, either.

So when I put the first few lines of "World is a Prison" on my 12 year old mp3 player, I knew I had to be wrong about those people. I thought I was about to be corrected in an important way, I was sure I was wrong and I was about to be brought up to the right side of history with the rest of the people who wanted a more realistic, authentic, or free world, where "realistic" didn't mean "fake," "authentic" did not mean "false," and "free" wasn't just "liberated from the rules and constraints of others."

But I didn't get corrected. What came on that mp3 player was a song that told me that there was no one way for life to be, no one way for the world to be, no one way for humanity to exist. It was a song about the way the real world already was. It was a song of rage. It was a song for me. It was the song that finally and truly said "fuck you, the world can be this way." I loved it. I needed it. I was finally able to see that something that wasn't what I had known was possible.

There was a feeling of catharsis, a moment of true clarity, when I heard that song playing in the headphones. I think I had always been afraid of that feeling. It's a feeling people get when you do something you know is against the rules and try to justify it later. It's a feeling when the "real truth" that people are taught makes no sense if you just accept that it is as it's presented. "The world could be so much better." "No, it can't, it's always been this way." "No, that's how it's always been, we can't just decide it isn't anymore." It's the feeling people get when they learn a lesson that is so different from the lesson they were taught that it is so fundamentally incompatible with what they're taught that it's the only thing they can do when they understand that lesson. That feeling was the only way I knew how to understand something I had always been told was wrong -- the feeling that this thing had always been different.

That feeling was the only way I knew how to be true to myself and to the world as I saw it. It wasn't just a feeling of satisfaction for me. It was my first sense that things could be different, the first moment when I realized that if you just decided you didn't like something, you could stop listening to it. That song changed me. The people on the album had given me this feeling of recognition, and had given me the words to get me there. If that isn't the definition of an art-form worth listening to, I don't know what is.

(There is an entire song called "Wake Up," off the album Evil Empire, dedicated specifically to the "fuck you" feeling that I got from that song -- but even then, it feels incomplete, like it has to be part of what the person was listening to that got them to the point where they're able to give that feeling to other people, to have someone else understand what that feeling has felt like for them. You can't just say "Wake up" without that, the feeling of seeing what was once invisible and the way it feels to be able to see it is going to be a lot more important than the album as a whole without it. But it's not a perfect album, either, it's not "Wake Up" that got me -- there is a sense that the album was trying to get to this feeling by means that weren't quite there, by means that felt like they were trying to go a certain way when really they weren't going anywhere at all. That's one of the ways the people on that album can sound as though their anger isn't as clear and unqualified as you might expect at first. It's the same sort of thing as trying to write a character who can't really seem to be the thing that the person who wrote that song wants to convey -- you can give an impression, but if you really mean it, it's clear and it's impossible to say it in words but saying it, you have it.

And even with all that, RATM still manages to have it that feeling I was talking about earlier, that feeling that feels like seeing something that was always there, seeing it because you're finally able to see it because you've heard the words for it and you've given those words to someone who's not there, someone who might otherwise have missed it, the feeling of giving someone a "wake up" because you can see it. There are people who can't hear that feeling, maybe for various reasons of age, or education, or illness, or whatever. But there are people who are here for a reason. I am here for a reason. And so even though this song has the feeling I was talking about, I think it should get to the point where music can get me -- that is the feeling I'm talking about -- and not just because RATM sounds like an art-form, but because even with the flaws on the album and with them still being there to some extent, it still sounds the way it does, and the way it sounds is why that feeling can be yours to feel. You can't have "Wake Up" without that feeling, that sense of seeing "the way it has always been." But you also have to understand that a person's version of that world might not be yours to feel -- it's different, even if it feels just as true to the person who didn't think there was an alternative to what their parents thought. It's different, that's all there is to say about it, there's nothing to

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simplepotatofarmer · 3 years

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Hey I saw a reblog of this answer of yours to an ask and I want to know how you'll think this would change, or rather how c!Techno's approach to anarchy (and if we wanna start comparing, c!Quackity's partiality to governance-based structures) would change now that the ban on farms has been lifted?

I feel like there are new implications to consider as this ban lift would influence any interested members of the server to create farms for resources and attain their previously non-existent material power through there. How would the big ideologically charged characters of particular influence on the servent present (and maybe past) go about their actions because of that new change?

okay big disclaimer here before i say anything else:

*i have no idea what the point of farms are in minecraft and at this point i'm too afraid to ask*

so with my extremely minimal understanding of farms but my fairly in-depth understanding of anarchy and of survival minecraft when played by grinding based on cc!techno's style, here's my kind of thought on the whole farm thing.

1.) what will farms actually change? okay, so we've established that i don't know what farms are for, but i do have a server where farms are present. there's a gold farm and a sugar cane farm and a squid farm and i think one other? and i use a lot of gold! i made my gingko tree out of raw gold blocks. i also use a lot of sugar cane as i love collecting books.

i don't personally use the farms but i still have plenty of resources and i'm reasonably confident in saying that no one is going to be able to take away my ability to get more resources.

because that's kinda the crux of it, you know? capitalism isn't just about having money or wealth, what it's really about is the exploitation and the inequality that comes from that exploitation and the inability for people to get out of it. and if farms in minecraft would cause that sort of inequality, then i think it would require a change in actions or more thought at least on c!techno's end. but i don't know if that actually applies because people would still be able to gather food and other resources.

2.) uh-oh! complex morality questions? in my minecraft mechanics? okay here's the thing. there are so many issues with the sheer mechanics of minecraft from a morality stand-point. i mean, if piglins are people with a culture and language, then gold farms are like.... so immoral. enough that i actually considered banning them on my server but i realized that most people wouldn't view it that way.

and that's the thing! where do we draw the line? especially when it comes to the RP aspect. because there's mechanics that require things like killing animals which would go against general characterization of the characters. or things like enderman. so if they're all people, what does killing them mean?

so baked-in game mechanics are kinda questionable. like trust me, i used to be in a large anarchist gaming group and we had biweekly debates on the morality of minecraft and farming mechanics and while i think that could be a worthwhile question, i don't think it's one i really want to tackle in the context of the dsmp because there's so much that can change from one moment to another. a horse can be an extremely important animal/pet or a mob that you kill because breeding mechanics in minecraft are awful, please gods i tried to set them all free but it was too much.

where you can apply the sort of in-world rp morality to things like exile or the prison because those are specifically aimed at characters and specifically have a weight in the story. so....

3.) minecraft mechanics are out, in-world power structures are in!

so, where i end up on the whole farm thing is 'the power that someone has in the context of the rp world is more important than the actual resources they have'.

which means that if c!quackity begins to use the resources he acquires through farms (or any other method) to do things like what the butcher army did - putting phil under house arrest, tubbo almost killing him, executing techno without a trial - then that's something c!techno would have to act on. the same applies to anyone who decides to use the resources gained through that method for something similar.

i think my point is that unless someone is applying the mechanics of minecraft to their in-world power and how they use that against the rest of the server, i can't see the introduction of farms as something that's going to have drastic changes to the political or moral ideology of the server. i mean, theoretically snowchester has one of the most powerful weapons on the server, but c!techno's approach to that was to look at the in-world motivations and actions of c!tubbo.

regardless, i'm just excited to see what they're all going to do with the possibilities it opens up!

#loyal answers things #did i answer your question? probably not and i'm sorry RIP #long post #dream smp #dsmp analysis #kinda??? it's more like. analysis of the world structure and idk.

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bestworstcase · 3 years

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I read a post by you where you describe Corona “as a society that chews you and spits you out” if you’re not a Royal. While I’ve heard you talk about the dark aspects of Coronan society In regards to how it shaped Cassandra, would you mi d talking about Coronan society itself? Like you, I’ve also noticed how Corona shuns people like Varian, an intellectual, and Cassandra, a woman who would rather be a warrior than accept the feminine role of a Handmaiden.

i don't remember the specific post so i will say as a blanket statement that not everything i write re: corona is textual analysis; a significant amount is specifically about bitter snow corona, which is a whole other ball game so -

& the reason i start with that disclaimer is it can be, i think, difficult to discuss this subject in the context of canon, just because insofar as there is worldbuilding in tts it exists in service of the plot (why isn't cassandra allowed to join the guard? because her character arc demands that she be barred from pursuing her dreams, that's why—etc) and while it's very easy to read "corona is systemically misogynistic and xenophobic" out of the text and then extrapolate accordingly vis a vis how this has shaped the characters, there are... a lot of gaps that need to be filled and you end up getting into headcanon territory pretty fast.

[and then you also start running into the question of: tts thoughtlessly reproduced the superficial appearance of a lot of real-world bigotries in the culture of corona, but it seems doubtful that the intent was for corona to come across as having this very discriminatory and closed-minded culture, so to what extent do we even need to accept as fact the existence of that bigotry? which is a question that matters in particular for fanworks where the goal is to portray corona as a more equitable place.]

anyway,

the point being that taking tts corona at face value, it is an absolute, imperialist monarchy whose citizenry is downright slavish in its loyalty to the king; women have little if any social or economic power, there are no women in the guard despite there being a rule on the books allowing them to join, and feminine gender roles appear to be harshly socially enforced [besides cassandra, the only gnc women we encounter are criminals and outlaws]; every trace of saporian cultural identity has been eradicated or forced underground in the centuries since conquest, and self-identified saporians are considered to be 'foreigners' despite being, as is explicitly stated in s1, coronan citizens; and the staggeringly harsh and blatantly unfair criminal justice system all but guarantees anyone who gets caught up in it once will be unable to escape even if they survive prison. i think the question of whether coronan culture has a strain of anti-intellectualism running through it or not is not something that can really be argued from the text (one of corona's major festivals involves celebrating the innovation and scientific exploration of the nation's citizens, and varian's villagers are probably wary of him because he blows old corona up on the regular, which,)

and that's like

a lot to unpack

[there's also the headache-inducing question of horses in the tts universe, and whether they count as people for this sort of thing, but i try not to think about that because it is just Too Much.]

what i always end up coming back to when i think abt this though is 1. the saporians and 2. coronan criminal justice, because those feel like the most egregious examples of like—oh, my god, corona is a fucked up place—in that the saporians are a persecuted ethnic group that corona treats like a historical footnote and everything we see and hear about the justice system in corona makes it breathtakingly clear that ordinary citizens just flat out do not have rights in corona and if accused of a crime would be lucky to get even a sham trial before getting tossed into jail. like, if that's the baseline then everybody here is fucked.

#tts #rta

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wither-rose-circus · 2 years

Text

I posted 6,194 times in 2021

3381 posts created (55%)

2813 posts reblogged (45%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 0.8 posts.

I added 11,786 tags in 2021

#mcyt - 5253 posts

#dream smp - 1752 posts

#hermitcraft - 855 posts

#3rd life smp - 720 posts

#ranboo - 690 posts

#last life smp - 549 posts

#blooming bud - 520 posts

#rendog - 503 posts

#grian - 479 posts

#asks - 465 posts

Longest Tag: 138 characters

#if the story doesn’t assign it that realistic weight then there’s no point in going “well /realistically/” when genuinely arguing about it

My Top Posts in 2021

Can we talk about how poignant the “I actually have friends” line was?

It’s not dramatic, it’s not a shout, it’s so quiet and nonchalant to Techno but it’s gutting in context.

When Dream was cornered and sent to the prison, he was scared. I think it’s safe to say now that getting imprisoned probably wasn’t part of the plan. The takedown wasn’t staged. Dream was left alone and fearing for his life with the only person around simply there to “look after him.” Poetic justice, if you will, at least up until Quackity’s arrival.

Dream knows Techno is just as “wanted” as he was, hell, he saved him from his execution. So to see him so calm about being thrown into the same predicament would have been bewildering.

And what is Techno’s explanation? He has friends. Those things Dream cut off because he thought they made him weak. Those things that defeated him and put him in the prison in the first place.

Techno isn’t Tommy. He’s not this weak little nuisance that keeps bouncing back with his dumb little friends. Techno is on par with Dream himself. Techno is strong, he’s powerful, he’s feared and revered by the server. But he didn’t get that way through this silly lone wolf dynamic.

Techno is everything Dream wanted to be and so much more

Because Techno has the one thing Dream lacks, the one thing he mocked, the one thing he rid himself of to get where he was

Attachments

4842 notes • Posted 2021-06-06 23:21:08 GMT

The fact that Quackity is explicitly targeting people who are disconnected and have no support system makes this so much more sinister

As the Warden, Sam isolated himself in the prison away from his friends. Quackity used that isolation to get into Sam’s head uninhibited, which is why Sam has frequently acted as his right hand of sorts.

Foolish lives off on his own with nobody around. In fact, Quackity did nothing to stop Foolish’s death in hopes that it would break his peaceful resolve and make him align better with Quackity’s ideals, waiting until he had returned home alone and had time to stew over it before cornering him.

Slimecicle is basically the equivalent of a newborn with nobody who even knows he exists. Quackity was going to slaughter him right there until he realized he could use Charlie’s nativity for his benefit.

Purpled has hardly been around the server in months. Quackity not only acknowledges this, but brings it up as a reason why he would be perfect to draw in, meaning he’s entirely self aware as to why he’s choosing these targets in particular.

Fundy has isolated himself and been cut off from his friends and family. Quackity knows this very well because he was one of those very friends that left him behind, and now he’s coming back and pretending like they’re one in the same.

Hell, even Dream counts in this! Quackity said himself that he no longer cares about the book, that the torture has become boring to him. Maybe it started out as getting the revive book, but that was never what he wanted. Quackity wanted to feel powerful. He wanted to have the legendary Dream, the godfather of the server, under his finger. He’s using Dream for his own personal benefit because Dream is isolated and powerless to stop him.

The only person he’s invited that he hasn’t tried to manipulate or corner is Wilbur because Wilbur is the very source of this mentality. Unlike everyone else, he views Wilbur as a likeminded equal instead of a pawn.

4997 notes • Posted 2021-05-22 23:06:52 GMT

Okay but real talk Charlie is SO GOOD at taking jokes and punching you in the gut with them

The running gag about how many bones he has, all of which are definitely his, and hitting us with “I don’t actually have 300 bones...” as a sign of a genuine attempt at trust

The bit about him totally being a real human and not a slime coming back around to his final words being “thank you for showing me what it was like to be human, maybe i almost was”

Charlie is so good at playing silly characters that are there to break tension only to twist them like a fucking knife in the end

6825 notes • Posted 2021-11-27 22:48:45 GMT

7154 notes • Posted 2021-05-08 18:03:08 GMT

Okay but listen, Quackity attempting to repeat Techno’s line (“I’ll put it through your teeth”) and failing to land the hit is spectacular writing imo

This is the type of scene that would normally come after a long period of growth, of a character developing enough to prove that they’ve overcome their demons

But Quackity hasn’t

Quackity hasn’t grown since the butcher army arc. He’s developed, absolutely, but he hasn’t grown. If anything, he’s gotten worse. He’s not better than Techno, he hasn’t overcome Techno, as a warrior or as a person. He’s only gotten more manipulative, more petty, more cowardly. Once again he has Techno trapped and cornered, convinced he has the upper hand, that he will finally prove he’s stronger than Technoblade, only to get it swept out from under his feet because he’s still going about getting that strength the wrong way. Techno’s strength doesn’t come from traps, or blackmail, or hiding behind others, it comes from a true boldness to stand up for what he believes and refuse to back down, regardless of how wrong or right he is, regardless of how it will make him come across to others. Quackity hasn’t gotten that yet.

Quackity hasn’t earned that pay off yet, and I think this was a brilliant way to show it.

7999 notes • Posted 2021-09-14 20:56:17 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #Oh that’s embarrassing #WHY ARE SO MANY OF THEM ABOUT QUACKITY #I can’t believe I talked more than I reblogged how do you guys put up with me #blooming bud

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bimboficationblues · 3 years

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mx. what’s up with bionacles? What is the lore? What do they want from me? Why do bionacles?

Bionicle lore is told through a series of books written almost exclusively by Greg Farshtey, with a few by Cathy Hapka. (There are also movies and comics but they follow the books.)

It’s initially presented as a dualist, cosmological battle between good and evil. This plays out in the context of one island populated by biomechanical life who represent various elements (fire, water, air, ice, stone, earth). But eventually the narrative escalates to interplanetary teleportation by way of diabolus ex machina, repeated mutations of the central characters, and a side-story where assorted villains from previous arcs assemble into a Suicide Squad and attempt to capture a historical war criminal.

Okay, so this is the basic plotline:

Essentially, Mata Nui (who is also known as “the Great Spirit” and is kinda like God) is asleep. His “brother” Makuta (who is initially presented as being like, the Robot Devil but later revealed to be more like a robo-dictator or supervillain) is making a ruckus on the island by corrupting the local wildlife into attacking the local civilian population (called Matoran).

Around this time, six pods wash up on the beach containing amnesiac elemental warriors called Toa. They don’t really get along but eventually they put aside their differences to fight Makuta and his various minions, master the elements they represent, and collect “Kanohi masks,” which are the little masks that most Bionicles wear and have unique powers like shield-barriers or X-ray vision. At some point they all fall in a vat of goo that allows LEGO to sell redesigns gave them new powers. They mostly fight various brainless, palette-swapped enemies like the Bohrok (bug-bots that curl up into a ball) and Rahkshi (mechanical suits that contain gross worm things). The Toa finally defeat Makuta temporarily with the aid of some plucky civilians and the power of the Mask of Light, as documented in the classic film Bionicle: The Mask of Light.

It’s at this point that the series did a very long loredump through flashback that’s basically Bionicle: Secret Histories. It turns out that within the Bionicle universe, there’s a bunch of different islands out there with all sorts of culture, and the civilians of Mata Nui actually originated on a completely different island called Metru Nui. This flashback basically explains how Makuta forced Mata Nui to fall asleep, called “The Great Cataclysm,” which is basically the driving plot that results in the world as it currently exists in the Bionicle universe.

The set of six Toa who watched over Metru Nui were basically outlaws who fought the Dark Hunters (an organization of bounty hunters and assassins), Vahki (mindless robotic police officers), and the Morbuzakh (a corrupting mind-control plant). At the current point in the timeline, these “Toa Metru” are now the village elders on Mata Nui (the island), because after Makuta caused the Great Cataclysm, the Toa Metru had to help everyone become amnesiac refugees and gave up their powers in the process. This is the plot of Bionicle 2: Legends of Metru Nui.

Okay, so then there’s a little interlude where during the process of transferring the amnesiac refugee citizens of Metru Nui to the new island, they get trapped and mutated into bestial versions of themselves, called the Toa Hordika, by robot spiders who have taken over Metru Nui, and they have to deal with that or whatever. This is Bionicle 3: Web of Shadows, and then the flashback is over.

After the village elders reveal this secret history to the current set of Toa, the heroes form a plan to save Mata Nui (who is dying from oversleep I guess), and the new set of hip, cool Toa in town--ex-Matoran called the “Toa Inika--head out to find “the Mask of Life.” This set of Toa are the reason that people my age associate Bionicle with the All-American Rejects’ “Move Along,” for the record.

Anyway, first they fight the Piraka, who are silly little bounty hunters, and then some idiot drops the Mask of Life in the ocean, so the Toa Inika have to go underwater, where they get mutated (noticing a pattern?). There they fight the Barraki, who are ancient criminal warlords trapped and mutated in an underwater prison called The Pit. This is where shit starts getting buckwild: the preceding two “arcs” are fairly straightforward but then things go really off the rails.

Basically the Toa Inika of Ice, Matoro, canonically dies by disintegration after donning the Mask of Life and sacrificing himself to keep God alive. This eventually results in the Mask of Life becoming like a sentient, embodied entity which hangs around for a while.

Also, somewhere in the mix it’s revealed that “Makuta” is not a name but a title within a centuries-old secret society of Bastards called “the Brotherhood of Makuta,” which originally were created by Mata Nui to help populate the world with wildlife but eventually began plotting a deicidal coup.

This society has just launched an invasion of another island called Karda Nui and the original six Toa go to help out, getting another new set of mutations in the process. Everything gets hyped up as like this big final battle…and then the bad guys win, because it turns out that during the moment where the Mask of Life was used to resurrect Mata Nui, Makuta (*sigh*) integrated himself into the Great Spirit’s CPU. The original Makuta destroys all his former allies, takes over the body of Mata Nui, expels the latter’s consciousness, and sends it to another planet called Spherus Magna. Spherus Magna has an entirely different set of problems: it’s a desert planet besieged by monsters and warring tribes, and the main protagonists are bloodsport warriors, but all of that stuff kinda gets chucked aside because Mata Nui shows up and starts mucking around.

It’s at this point that I kinda lost the thread of the narrative but basically all the good guys teleport to this other planet, team up with the locals, and destroy the God-Devil. The end. That’s Bionicles.

#how many times can i say the word basically

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ratsmp4 · 3 years

Text

holding myself accountable .

i would like to start off by saying that no one is required to forgive me for what i've done, both in the past and in recent weeks . depending on how long you've followed me, you may have seen this post from a few months ago . it was poorly worded and written in a moment of anger, where i was not thinking straight . i was in a very dark place when i posted it, and i was encouraged by one of my good friends, who will not be named for their safety . additionally, you may have seen this callout post made by one of my former mutuals . if not, i encourage you to read over it, as it could provide much needed context about what happened .

more about the situation will be included under the cut .

Garrett is the protagonist of the Thief games - a cynical master thief who wishes nothing more than to be left alone to steal in peace, but who unwittingly becomes embroiled in a series of epic events.

Garrett exhibits a strong sense of survival and self-interest. While on the surface Garrett is callous, cynical and sarcastic, with loyalty only to himself, he does seem to have deeper feelings for a few of his contacts: Artemus, the Keeper that recruited and trained him; Basso the Boxman, a fellow thief; Cutty, his fence. In extreme cases this seems to extend to even to past antagonists such as Viktoria, although that may be a result of Garrett's own self-interest.

Garrett also exhibits a strong sense of professional pride as a thief: he usually refuses to kill while on the job, saying that he's a thief, not a murderer,[1] though Constantine and Karras died as a result of Garret's actions only because he was able to sabotage their evil plans. Lotus was a mercy killing, as he begged for death due to the inhumane conditions that Garrett found him in. Other than that, Garrett has not killed any humans in the Thief canon. It is implied Garrett also never steals from his allies or the poor.[Fact Check]

Orphaned, Garrett spent his youth on the streets surviving as a pickpocket and message runner.

One night, he saw Artemus walking on the street as people, 'just passed him by like he wasn't there'. Thinking the man had some valuables, he decided to make a grab. However, he was caught, and Artemus, impressed with his ability to see a Keeper, offered Garrett a new life. Garrett was then recruited into a secret organization known as the Keepers, dedicated to observing and maintaining stability in the City.[2]

Not much is known about Garrett's education with The Keepers, except the fact that he was given initial training in the arts of stealth and subterfuge practiced by the Keepers. But, he found that it was much more profitable to make use of these skills as a thief than to continue working for the Keepers as an agent.[3] He was called "the most promising acolyte" in the Keeper annals, but left around the age of 20 due to his "imbalance." It was brought before the council to deal with him using the Enforcers, but Caduca informed the council that Garrett would be needed in the future.[4]

At some point in time, Garrett is now working as an independent thief in the City, making contacts with people such as Basso the Boxman, Cutty and Farkus Bernard. Garrett's first known large score comes from stealing an expensive scepter from Lord Bafford. After which, he breaks into the Hammerite prison to spring his fence, Cutty (who dies while still in prison). This leads him deep into the old Hammerite catacombs looking for treasure. Shortly after this thugs working for the local Warden, Ramirez, attempt to kill Garrett for non payment of tribute. Garrett turns the tables, escaping and going on to humiliate Ramirez by looting his mansion, even going on to rob the local thieves guild. This brazen display of skill attracts the attention of Viktoria, a somewhat mysterious independent fence. She contracts Garrett to steal a magical sword from the eccentric nobleman, Constantine.

Upon successfully returning from Constantine's bizarre mansion, Viktoria reveals that she and Constantine are old associates who were testing Garrett. Constantine offers Garrett a fortune for the job of retrieving the gemstone known as The Eye. Getting to The Eye means Garrett must venture through the abandoned and walled-off Old Quarter of the City to the old Hammerite Cathedral. A mysterious catastrophe, rumored to involve great fires and many undead, caused the area's abandonment decades ago. Garrett finds the cathedral sealed, but the Eye itself tells him of an old Keeper library hidden nearby. Writings there tell of where the talismans that open the cathedral are hidden and how the Keepers almost revealed themselves in order to assist the Hammerites and the Hand Brotherhood in containing a great evil. The first talisman was found in a place called The Lost City, the ruins of an ancient civilization buried beneath the existing city, its entrance hidden by the Keepers. To get the second talisman, Garrett enters a Hammerite temple in disguise. The third talisman was kept with a brotherhood of Mages. The fourth lay inside Keeper secured caverns. Unbeknownst to Garrett, the Talisman was recovered by the guards of the Opera House above the caves. Successful, he then returns to the cathedral and collects The Eye from amid the many undead, escaping with the help from the ghost of Brother Murus, a long dead Hammerite priest.

Garrett visits Constantine to hand over The Eye and collect his payment. Instead of paying, however, Constantine reveals himself to be the fabled Trickster (aka The Woodsie Lord), the entity worshiped by the Pagans, and Viktoria, his consort.

They bind Garrett in vines and Viktoria plucks out one of his eyes, using it to seemingly activate The Eye stone, and leave him for dead. Some time later two Keepers find and free the unconscious Garrett from the vines. The Keepers then leave Garrett to escape by himself through the caverns beneath Constantine's mansion and amongst some new and strange beasts. Once he reaches the surface Garrett decides the only thing to do is visit the Hammerites and tell them about what has happened in the hopes they would provide assistance. He heads for the temple but discovers that the Trickster's minions have gotten there first. Venturing inside he finds the remaining Hammerites in a hidden sanctuary down in an underground cavern. With stealth being the only hope against the Trickster's army, the Hammerites provide Garrett with a booby-trapped copy of The Eye. Garrett descends into the Trickster's realm, where he finds the Woodsie Lord performing a ceremony with the Eye. Garrett stealthily swaps the Eye for its trapped copy, which then explodes, thus striking down the Trickster as he attempts to finish the ritual.

The coda shows Garrett walking back to town alone through the snow. Life appears to be returning to normal. A Keeper approaches, Artemus. The two converse and The Keeper warns Garrett, telling him of a book he should read, and that he can't run away from life. Close observation reveals Garrett now has a mechanical eye. Garrett rejects the Keeper's 'help' in his life and says to tell the other Keepers that "I'm through. Tell them Garrett is done". He then walks away into the city streets. Artemus answers quietly "I will tell them this: Nothing is changed. All is as it was written. The Trickster is dead. Beware the dawn of the metal age.", foreshadowing the sequel, Thief II: The Metal Age.

Garrett's role in The Metal Age begins innocuously. Garrett provides a favor to an old acquaintance, Basso, helping him rescue his love Jenivere, so that he may retire from thievery and elope. Next Garrett breaks into the dockside warehouses to get some extra cash for rent. It soon becomes clear that the City Watch, lead by the zealous Sheriff Gorman Truart, is waging a war on crime, brutally persecuting thieves and conducting nighttime raids on the poor neighborhoods with the intent of rounding up criminals. Truart stages a sting operation in an attempt to assassinate Garrett, but he escapes by using a Flash Bomb. With the newly strengthened police force making burglary more difficult, Garrett begins to wage a personal war against Truart, attempting to blackmail him into loosening his grip on the City by exposing his corruption. In the process, Garrett acquaints himself with the Mechanist Order, a splinter faction of the weakening Hammerites led by the charismatic Karras, whose robotic security devices have begun to guard the City's wealthiest businesses and residences. In addition, he discovers that the Mechanists are manufacturing some sort of weaponized "Servant," made from a human body and emitting a substance known as Rust Gas, and that Truart has agreed to round up vagrants under false pretenses to be used for the project.

When Garrett confronts Truart, he finds that Truart has been slain by a strange creature. Trying to unravel the conspiracy, Garrett reunites with Viktoria deep in the Maw. Viktoria identifies the Mechanists as the true enemy, and the two form a tentative alliance. The combined skills of Viktoria's pagan operatives and Garrett's stealth abilities reveal that the Mechanists are gifting the Servants to the City's nobility, and that they are working on a top-secret endeavour known as the "Cetus Project." The Cetus Project turns out to be a gigantic submarine, the Cetus Amicus, and that the Mechanists are using it to access the remains of The Lost City in search of ancient artifacts. By interrogating the head of the Cetus Project, Brother Cavador, the pair discover that the Mechanists have recovered an object known as a Cultivator, and that they have already begun mass-producing them and installing them inside of the Masked Servants. While Garrett stakes out the Gervaisius Estate and steals a mask and the prototype Cultivator, Viktoria's agents observe Karras hermetically sealing Soulforge Cathedral. The pair conduct an experiment with the Cultivator, revealing that the Servants could be commanded to release Rust Gas, which would react violently with the plant matter inside of wealthy nobles' gardens, wiping out all life in the city, with Karras safe inside of Soulforge Cathedral.

Viktoria claims that there is no time to spare and proposes a plan: Garrett must gain control of the beacon controlling the Servants and command them to return to Soulforge and trick Karras into releasing the Rust Gas, while Viktoria fills Soulforge Cathedral with plants, to wipe out the Mechanists instead of the city. Garrett claims the plan is "suicide", claiming he will think of a better plan, and re-affirms that he works alone. As he leaves, a Keeper informs Garrett that Viktoria has begun an assault on the Cathedral herself. Garrett hurries to the Cathedral but is too late to save Viktoria as she is attacked by an onslaught of Mechanist forces. Her dying action is to fill Soulforge Cathedral with plants, as promised. Left with no better plan, Garrett proceeds to assemble a new guiding beacon and redirects the Cathedral's signal towers back to the Cathedral itself. The plan succeeds, and Garrett locks the servants inside the Cathedral. When the rust gas is released, Karras is killed and Soulforge Cathedral is left in ruins.

Garrett returns to the Cathedral after the reaction is complete and is met by a Keeper, who explains that the events of The Metal Age transpired exactly as written, and that the prophecies contain even more predictions. Garrett, previously skeptical of the Keepers' mysterious ways, reluctantly requests to know more.

#.text #posts that would be significantly funnier if i put them in a twitlonger instead

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