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diejager · 9 months

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Bittersweet Devotion pt.2

Pairing: Miguel O’Hara x fem!reader

Cw: angst, heartbreak, mention of cheating, mention of death, no happy ending, apology, tell me if I missed any. wc: 9.3k

Your universe, Earth-XXX, was a parallel one to Earth-616 in some sense. You had a Peter Parker, a Gwen Stacy and a Mary Jane Watson, it had everything down to the death of Ben Parker and the devastation it brought to your friend. It was the same year as Spider-Man 616’s world, it had the same political standing and same history. Your world, like many others, was a near carbon copy of 616, down to the smallest things; but like others in the spiderverse, you had differences. Some were minor changes in the course of its canon story, others were major changes in the characters and the era.

You - like Miguel, Miles, Jess, Hobart (he liked going by Hobie), Patrick and Patriv - were one of those major deviations in the original canon. You didn’t exist - or so you thought - in Peter B. or Peter’s universe even though you lived in the same year. The reason might be that in the reality, the sum of all potential universes that paralleled each other, created the multiverse - the Spiderverse.

The concept of it seemed strangely unlimited, the infinite possibilities to a different ending or a different start for its world. The multiverse was, in some sense, as old as time, a culmination of everything made imaginable by man. Found in ancient texts - the Puranas, ancient Hindu mythology - that expressed the infinite number of universes with their gods and principles. Whereas Persian literature - tales - touched the idea of learning about alternate universes that were similar, yet distinctly different from theirs.

Misconstrued by many, the strangeness of it was deemed a danger, the unknown possibilities were feared by people of older age, but venerated in the past as it was in the present for the unfathomable possibilities. It exists in fiction, where they borrowed the idea of many worlds within a reality from myths, legends and religion. Heaven, Hell, Olympus and Valhalla were all reflections of a familiar world, a material realm for the blessed, the sinful, the gods, and the worthy. The similarities sometimes frightened you, how close the people were to knowing of the reality you all lived in. The tangibility of crossing worlds and bringing about chaos to every string, every realm, every material form of the multiverse.

They, after all, were real, Hell as much as Heaven in your universe. Gods from every religion, either monotheistic or polytheistic, some you’d personally seen are Thor and Loki, brother and sons of Odin the Allfather, and the God of Thunder and Mischief respectively. Another was a big crocodile lady, Ammit, from what you’d heard from the all-knowing Dr. Strange. From God to Norse and Egyptian gods, from angels and demons, and from humans to mutants, your plane of existence was as wide as it could go without drifting off the edge and causing a mass domino effect within the multiverse.

You were curious, naturally so for a scientist, exploring the worlds that felt familiar to you but you hadn’t truly grasped - different, yet similar. You hadn’t given a second thought to exploring yours. After all, why explore yours when your horizon was as broad as you imagined it, unperturbed by any limits when it came to the multiverse? The eternal and unlimited growing number of realms in your expanding reality.

Perhaps that was the reason why you hadn’t known your universe had its own Miguel O’Hara. You rarely came back for anything, you had everything you’ve ever wanted in Nueva York, Earth-928. You have friends who could truly understand you, people who stood beside you when you fought, youngsters who looked up to you for mentoring and a dream- or it was a dream. Dreams, not dissimilar to wishes, were hopeful, naive in a way, they came and went. Some dreams would come true, while others fell, like the fallen stars that crossed the night sky.

Yours simply happened to be a fallen one, one not meant to happen and become greater. You let it go after he dropped you, after he turned his back and let his mouth run unperturbed. He brought her up, someone he swore he would remember but left in the past. A new chance to become something, to become whole again, and Miguel took it. He wanted to start anew, fresh with someone he never met, you wanted the same; you both had what you wished for, until he put his foot down, cutting the thin web that connected both your lives.

It broke your heart. Months of patience and anxiously stepping around each other, nervous about breaking the trust freshly built between you both, lost in a few weeks. You were brittle, heart fractured and threatening to fall further apart if someone was any crueller to you. The smallest glare, the tiniest scoff or the weakest remark would send you reeling into the abyss of heartbreak and the throes of anguish. Yet somehow, you found yourself being led away by a copy of the Miguel you loved.

He mumbled apologies as he held you tightly, his arm over your shoulder as he cradled you under his umbrella, hastily urging you to follow his guidance. If it were any other person, you would’ve been wary, cautious of any strangers that touched you so closely and chaperoned you so quickly; but this was Miguel, a man you trusted and that you still trusted wherever he came from. Earth-XXX’s Miguel O’Hara was still similar to the one you knew, someone you could trust. You did.

He led you to his flat, someplace near Alchemax’s building in Manhattan, a safe neighbourhood for the richer citizens of Manhattan. A cozy place of neutral tones and muted colours, yet warm as he welcomed you - a stranger as of yet - into his home. He had machinery strewn around, reports stacked on his coffee table and smaller things he had been tinkering about decorating his home. As a geneticist, he liked to play with machinery, having drawn his designs and models, built his creations from scratch and worked from the base programming to make something better. At least Miguel from Earth-928 did, and it seemed this one did as well.

You stood in his shower, where he left you in a frenzy to bring you dry clothes, drying out your hair with the towel he motioned you to use. You doubted that he had anything your size, his broad shoulders and his towering height, nothing he had in his draws - and the boxes he stowed away in his closet - would fit you. They would drag down your ankle and sit low on your collar. Granted, you were soaked down to your socks and had no temporary clothes to cover yourself with during your stay.

You had stripped from your soaked clothes and patted down your wet skin, shivering from the cold that clung to your bones even after Miguel had increased the heater in the small confines of the bathroom. It was small but big enough to move around and stretch your arms comfortably. You hadn’t felt the cold until he brought you to his bathroom, the numbness of the past months weighing heavily on your shoulders and the bleeding of your heart made everything seem so meaningless. The colours draining from the world around you, a once bright New York turned grey, the monochrome tones of black and white mixing and interlacing to form even more boring shades.

The vibrancy and life you once saw around you dulled and died suddenly, like the winters brought by Demeter’s devastation and sadness when her daughter was taken from her, stolen from the berth of flowers she liked frolicking about. How Demeter doomed the world to see her pain, to feel how she felt in the moments her daughter had to return to her husband than stay with Demeter. You felt laden by your faults and his actions. Doubtful of your relationship, of what led you both to such an ending. Had you been clearer or more forthcoming about your emotions, or had you confronted him for his behaviour, would you still be in his arms?

Were you at fault for missing something you had relied on as comfort and safety? Could you be blamed for his reaction to your meddling in his affairs in the Society? Could you blame him for dropping those words on you? After all, being reminded or compared to a past lover was anything but gentle, the gut-wrenching envy and betrayal you felt flash through you was nearly drowning. It made you feel lacking, to be reminded of his old flame, the one he was about to marry and the person he seemed to love before all. Could you even compare to what she was; what she did? (Dina had cheated on him, you knew that, but he was truly happy in their moments of pleasure and domesticity. They were a family until she died.)

You were drowning in your self-made sorrow when his voice called you, grounding you to the room. Standing before a door, naked and shivering, arms wrapping the damp towel around your shoulders. He called again, cracking the door open to pass you the - his - clothes he thought would fit you. He coughed as you took your temporary wear, your cool fingers brushing his warm ones. It was a sudden and jerking contact, you pulled back jerkingly, a shamble of an apology and a thank you flew from your tongue. His chuckle was a reassurance in the complete quietness of the flat, his low voice reminding you of better times.

The sweater hung loosely around you, dipping down your collar to expose your shoulder. It was warm, the cotton used to make it still soft after being stored away and the soothing scent of spice and pine deeply integrated into the fibres. The pants were stretched around your hips, the tight fabric thin and flexible under stress, hidden under the long shirt. The legs, however, swayed loosely around your limbs, too big for your calves, but tight enough to hug your thighs. He had certainly made sure to bring you clothes that would fit your frame. You hadn’t attempted to smell his pants, you thought it would’ve been too intrusive and disgusting to do so if only to smell a remnant of Miguel on his as you did on the sweater.

Miguel was waiting for you in the kitchen, his back turned to you as you ambled towards him. His shoulders loose and back relaxed in the presence of a stranger made you appreciate how good-natured he was in most universes you’d been to. He turned his head, gesturing you to sit on the chair facing him on the island as he returned to something he was making while you changed.

“I hope you don’t mind hot chocolate,” he started, voice light and hopeful as he turned to you, cup in each hand as he moved to stare at you. “I’m not one for tea.” He slid the warm mug into your hand, eyes watching your expression as he slowly sipped on the hot beverage.

His eyes squinted slightly when your lips curled upwards, a smile hidden by the steaming mug. You cupped the mug, feeling the warmth of the freshly brewed drink, the steam rising in soft curls and melting in the cooler atmosphere. Tentatively, you brought the rim to your lips, slowly tilting the cup. The powerful taste of chocolate hit you strongly, the sweet and dark liquid melting the tension in your muscles until you could curl over the table with an appreciative sigh.

“Thank you…” you knew his name, wanting to call him, but his reaction would be unwanted, the shock, fear and suspicion that would fill his beautiful, brown eyes. So you slurred your words, dragging out your voice until he could tell you his name himself.

“Miguel. Miguel O’Hara, ” he nodded, cocking his head upwards, pointing at you with his chin. “What’s your name? I can’t keep calling you Hey every time I want to call you.” His lips broke into a cheeky smile, teasing you when he saw that you’d comfortably melted into the drink and his island chair. He wanted to ease the tense atmosphere from before into something much calmer, to help the accumulated tension in your shoulders to fall like the rain that clouded the streets of New York.

You let out a hoarse chuckle, your throat still fresh from crying, and told him your name, trying to stabilise your shaking tone. His cheeky smirk tugged at your heartstrings, you hadn’t seen Miguel laugh or smile this freely in months. You missed it. The casual banter you shared and the on-and-off insults you’d hurl at one another, all good-natured insults meant to rile him.

“Thank you, Miguel,” you nearly choked when you uttered his name, the wound still so fresh and bleeding it slip from your tongue easily. It brought up so many memories, both painful and joyful. Your eyes glazed over, tears threatening to fall once again, to paint your cheeks with agony that you - him, or perhaps both of you - had brought on yourself. “Thank you…”

Miguel hummed sympathetically, eyes staring down at his drink, deep in thought. Perhaps he was thinking of a way to invite you to share your problems, to tell him why you broke down on the street in stormy weather. Or maybe he was thinking of the fastest way to kick you out, to get rid of the mess you became. The silence, however, was reassuring, calming the nerves that followed the eerie calmness of Miguel’s den or the loud, hectic atmosphere of the Society. His warm, worrying gaze grounded you, the softness behind his concerned stare was heartwarmingly nostalgic.

“Difficult breakup?” His words seemed hesitant, unsure of his conclusion to the cause of your appearance. Unknowingly, he had struck gold, pinning down the right problem in your life with a few observations. Of course, he was observant and aware of his surroundings, why else was he so willing to bring you into his home?

“How’d ya know?”

His sigh was telling, the deep, concerned and tired breath was only used when he knew that you wouldn’t tell him what ailed you, like the groan of a disappointed, yet worried father.

“Because I know how it feels,” he says slowly, pensive over his words, picking them carefully to not damage you further than your ex had. He knew the pain of a harsh breakup, the pain and sorrow that followed, like a dark cloud that hovered over you whenever you were awake.

“Why?” You croaked.

“Why?” he parroted, frowning at your question.

“Why did you invite me in? I’m a- a stranger to you, you don’t even know me. What if I’d been acting to mug you or potentially kill and steal from you? What’d you do then, Miguel?”

“I know the risks, but you didn’t, didn’t you? And wouldn’t, you don’t look like the person to harm another.”

You scoffed at his words. Didn’t and wouldn’t didn’t mean you would not do it later after gaining his trust, to stab him in the back after he helped you and nursed you. The simple, naïve idea that you didn’t look like a violent person was mind-blowing, it was stupid. How could he know if you didn’t mean harm later on? Like how Miguel never meant to harm you - he loved you - and yet in the end, he had.

“That’s naïve,” you muttered, eyes closed as you drank the cooling beverage, the sugary drink trickling down your throat.

“I’m confident in my ability to read people.”

He did seem confident in his ability, the straight back and the strong gaze in his eyes showed; and, maybe because you knew from experience that Miguel was observant and careful, he hadn’t gotten where he was by simply trusting people and following the herd. He tested and made mistakes, he learned from them each time and found a way to use it to his advantage. The Miguel you saw in every universe was similar in some ways, their good nature, their cunningness, their bravery and their intelligence. All aspects known to characterize Miguel O’Hara in all universes he existed in.

You conceded to his will, head bowed and shoulders slack. You breathed shallowly, swallowing the lump in your throat:

“Yeah, what gave it away?”

You thought it would be the last of him you’d see in your life, you wished it wouldn’t, that you’d see him over and over, to feel what the Miguel from your universe had to give, but you knew it was wishful thinking, a wish thrown to the stars. Logically, he had no reason to call or text you after exchanging numbers days prior. He promised to call you, and he made you promise to call him if anything ever resurfaced, be it pain, anger, heartbreak or hate. You, instinctively, believed his word.

You hated yourself for falling so easily to another Miguel, how you bent to his words and the sweet promises he uttered that night. There was no sign that he would keep his word, that he would see you again after your breakdown, except for his words and your belief in him. Then it wasn’t misplaced, all the trust and belief you had, since he called you, asking to meet up at a cafe. Miguel had set up a place and time for you when you replied with a croak, still feeling down. He had whispered reassuring words to you, urging you to meet him - he explicitly told you he’d feel offended to be stood up - and spend some time outside. The air was fresh and cool for an autumnal month, it wasn’t too cold that you were forced to wear a thick jacket, but it wasn’t warm enough for you to go out in a simple shirt.

You were hesitant to take him up on his offer, knowing how easily you could rebound. You’d crash into Miguel’s open arms, searching for the love and affection he fed you like a lovesick puppy, but, then again, Earth-XXX’s Miguel was similar, yet different from his variant. It would be a lie if you told yourself you didn’t miss him, the soft smiles, the gentle touches and the affectionate words. You had spent so much time as his right-hand Spider that it felt odd not seeing him the following morning. It was a routine you’d formed: waking up in his bed, kissing him good morning, getting to work together and eating together. Everything you’d done in the past years was with Miguel from Earth-928 the routine, the rigidity, it was grounding, it was the only semblance of normalcy in the world you lived in.

Now, you had to face the possibility that you were too broken to see another Miguel, to hold a casual conversation and form coherent and normal sentences. The purposefully slow steps you took to the cafe picked after having a moment outside the glass front were telling in itself. You swallowed the little amount of saliva in your throat to soothe its dryness and walked through the doors of the quaint establishment. It was painted in calm, brown tones, rustic in design with a warmth that rivalled the comfort of your bed. It lifted a bit of the tension you had, shoulders slumping slightly as your eyes searched for a familiar mop of brown hair.

Laying against the brown sofa, he stared out of the wide window from his booth. The warm, morning lights caressed his cheeks, lighting up the sharp edges of his jaw and nose. He was sculpted in perfection, like the youthful beauty of Adonis, crafted with the meticulous and attention-catching hands of an artist that created what was thought to be a god’s beauty. You could spend your days watching him, catching every little detail of Miguel’s face under the changing lighting, but you were standing near the entrance and he was waiting for you. His words echoed in your mind: “Don’t forget about next week, I miss seeing you.”

His eyes flickered to you, blinking as he turned to you, flashing a smile. You returned the sentiment, a shaky smile lifting the corners of your lips. You sat across from him, eyes wandering the cafe to stare at anything but him, lest you wouldn’t be able to stop the rush of emotions that would light your face in a flush. He uttered your name, greeting you in a friendly manner. You nodded back, muttering his name, pushing down the wince whenever you said it.

“Chocolate.”

The still-warm cup stared at you, light steam wafting over the reflective liquid. It was full, unlike Miguel’s cup, and drank down to the middle of the container.

“Thank you.”

He probably wouldn’t let you repay him for the hot chocolate he bought you, the smile he gave you told you as much when your eyes flickered between his and your cup. The hot chocolate was a reminder of your night in his flat, where he lent you his shoulder to cry and his ears to listen. Embarrassment seemed to flash whenever you recalled the memory, how vulnerable you were to him, your walls broken down and your heart open. Though, Miguel didn’t seem to mind your fragility, giving you as much time as you needed.

“How are you? I wanted to give you a few days to think before meeting again, I thought you might’ve needed the time alone.”

You nodded lamely, fingers curling around the warm porcelain, back slumped into the booth to hide from his knowing eyes. He was right, you had needed the time alone to clean yourself up, scour through your memories and tend to whatever mess you made of yourself. You were thankful. The last few days had brought revelations, how - both of - you had ignored the signs of a rupture in the relationship and continued to push on, like crossing a crumbling bridge.

“‘M doing better. How- and how are you?”

He smiled at your attempt, you were trying on your own after a few - forced - encouraging words from Miguel. Maybe you’d learn to live with the pain, coexisting with the numbness that filled you until it dulled to a point where it would be barely acknowledged by you or anyone in your vicinity - where it wasn’t painted on your face with bright colours. Or the pursuit to forget it, pushing it into the farthest corner of your mind and heart, painting over the crack with glue. As long as you wouldn’t drown in your sorrows, ending up playing with dangerous substances to stay afloat while your mind sunk deeper into addiction and denial.

He wouldn’t let you get that far, Miguel understood you and he lived through it as you did. Although his was a more violent breakup - she had cheated on him, his explosive reaction was natural - than yours, he hadn’t relied on anything but self-meditation and a lot of thinking. Like a friend - you were one by his standards, he’d invited you to his flat, you’d seen his organized chaos and ranted about your life while he comforted you with his shoulder and a cup of hot chocolate - he would stay by your side, hoping his support would be enough to help you.

“Great so far.”

His grin - somehow - grew even larger, enthusiasm gleaming in his eyes.

Oftentimes, Miguel would be the one to call you, your phone ringing in the afternoon of the day prior with his soothing voice on the other end of the line. He spoke easily, finding the time to invite you out for the simplest reason, to talk, to make a drink, to have fun, and - your favourite by far - to see you. His initiative had you trying to double your efforts to heal, reaching outside of your boundaries and texting Miguel whenever you had a moment to yourself. You felt guilty that he was always the one to plan these outings, so you promised yourself that you’d become a better friend than you currently were. You even remembered his teasing tone when you called him for the first time:

”Aye, finally. I thought you’d never call me, chica. I felt neglected, thought you had forgotten about me for a second there.”

It started with the first coffee date, bickering about who would pay, pushing your card before the other while still seated at your table, frowning stubbornly and throwing promises about letting the other pay next time. Either way, Miguel rarely let you pay, coming atop as the winner of your little fight with his strength and height (you couldn’t exactly put all your force into your push, it could break bone and bruise the skin.).

Then it would be random meetings on the streets that would lead you to a random bench at the park, basking in the other’s presence, retelling your day and him nitpicking anything he could with a ridiculously criticising frown. He was playing, you knew he was. You did the same after you’d gotten more comfortable talking to him, it became easier to see him as a different - as his own - person. A few hits on the shoulder left and right, but it was mostly laughter at ridiculous expressions made to emphasize your disdain for a certain event.

The months that followed were a blur to you. Rather than going to a cafe or the park, you went to restaurants and crashed at one of your flats, yours if he wanted to play games and lounge about with food and drinks, and his if you wanted to watch movies (he had the best television you’d ever seen, such high definition and speed.) and tinker away at his inventions and theories. He was certainly happy that his new friend was another scholar in the field of genes and engineering (you were mostly into engineering than genes, but you knew a few things that you’d found interesting.). You could both gush - scientifically - about the possibility of gene splicing and lab-generated mutations in humans, like the mutant superheroes.

You’d taken some liberties and went drinking, meeting at the same bar biweekly to relax after a few hard days at work. It served to loosen your nerves until either of you felt comfortable to chat up a storm about the most random subject. It’d been about the odd dent on the rim of his glass; then it’d be about how the sky was grey this week, there weren’t any warm, yellow rays blaring down on you when you went out; or it’d be about the distasteful cut of a man’s moustache. Drinking loosened your tongues, some words were said and some sentiments were shared, but none were truly taken seriously knowing you were tipsy - nearing drunk - those nights.

Every time you saw Miguel, you felt like you were rediscovering a part of yourself as well as him, the thing that made him so distinct and loveable. Miguel was expressive and honest, he slowly and gently let you down from whatever high you were, the pillar you needed to stand again after falling. He was so much different. It used to pain you how much they looked alike, but character-wise, they were like the two sides of a coin. It made you appreciate the delicate intricacies that made the multiverse.

You won’t - can’t - deny that you’ve grown fond of this Miguel as you did with the other one, but you couldn’t let yourself love him. He didn’t deserve someone broken and hashed into many lives: the masks you wore, the things you did, the secrets you hid, and the things you could do. He didn’t deserve someone who could bring him to his death; dying simply because he was connected to Spider-Woman; beaten simply because he knew Spider-Woman; kidnapped simply because they deemed him useful as leverage. All things that could go wrong haunt you. Miguel was human, he wasn’t a Spider, he wasn’t a superhero, and he wasn’t a vigilante. He was Miguel O’Hara, the geneticist working at Alchemax, with a brilliant mind and a kind heart.

You cherished every part of him. That’s why you can’t let your heart lead, dedicate how you’d react to Miguel after the months you spent together. He was so close, yet so far; he was touchable, you could hold him, kiss him and hug him, but he was unattainable, you couldn’t tell him how much you loved him. You watched him with hidden love, showing your affection as platonic, a friend watching another. You had hardened yourself to your heart’s cries, for loving Miguel was a dangerous game-

“I- what?” you gawked at Miguel, wide eyes and mouth agape. You were shocked at the words that left his mouth, his soft, wet lips moving as he repeated the words.

“I love you.”

His cheeks were flushed, burning a soft red, it trailed to his ears and nape. His open collar - his jacket hung on the back of his chair and his shirt clung below his collar, a skin-tight shirt that hugged his sculpted chest sinfully, it hid little to the seeing eyes of the crowd and your drunk self. His sudden words had all but sobered you, shaking you into clear lucidity of his confession.

“You… love me?”

He blinked dumbly at you for a second, as if taking the time to absorb what he told you and what you repeated. Miguel was tipsy, not drunk. He smiled and nodded, a bashfully affectionate grin on his beautiful lips.

“Yes, is it so hard to believe, chica?”

He often called you chica, you thought it was a friendly term of endearment between friends (truthfully and regretfully, you knew little of Spanish, even with being in a committed relationship with an Irish-Mexican.). You just realised it was his pet name for you. All this time, he had given you his heart, and yet, you had denied him of yours. He was more playful and less burdened by life, it made him more teasing and smiling. The term chica somewhat made sense, a cuter and more playful way of calling someone you loved than the deep-meaning ones like mi cielo and mi vida, a play of words like a small secret between you. This secret hid behind names given between friends, a well-kept one, close to his chest but gifted to you.

It might’ve once been - started - as friends, but it grew and festered in his heart until he found the time to express himself, to tell you how he truly felt for you - how he grew to care for you. He deemed this moment fine, bordering tipsy and nearing drunk, he’d be open, brutally honest but still aware of the words that left him. He wasn’t a lightweight anyway.

You wanted to tell him you also loved him, but you couldn’t do it, mouth slightly open and eyes glazed with heartbreak, you simply stared at him in hesitancy. You opened your mouth once to reply and closed it, open and close, again and again until all you could do was stare at him. How were you supposed to answer him after the bomb he dropped?

”Yes! I love you too!”

”Oh, Miguel, I love you too.”

”I- I love you as well.”

There were so many ways to express your feelings to the man who confessed, but none seemed to convey the true emotions that lay in your heart. You wanted to tell him you learned to love again thanks to him, that the time spent with him had made you open your eyes to the beauty that you were blinded by the pain and you slowly grew to care for - love - him as much as you did with Spider-Man 2099. He had the same smile, the same mind, the same heart, but he was more innocent, less burdened by disaster and happier.

So you simply nodded. It made his smirk grow.

“Aye- would it be better if I called you ‘mi tesoro’ instead? It’s more straightforward, no?”

Even now, his words were light and playful, his tone affectionate as he leaned closer to you. You could see the mischievous glint in his warm, chocolate eyes (you thought that was why he liked serving you hot chocolate, it reminded you of his eyes.) and the curve of his lips as they moved to form words. You were transfixed by his beauty, mesmerised by the comforting hues and the sharpness of his cheeks, missing how close he was to you.

“Or maybe-”

Softness caressed your lips, a plush, warm feeling that made you flush. He was kissing you, those pretty lips on yours. Your breath stuttered and you froze, but it didn’t stop Miguel’s initiative, a hand cradled your nape, holding you in place as he pushed himself closer to you. He moved against you, tongue slipping from his mouth and tentatively laving over your bottom lip, asking for something.

He was so warm, so caring. You could just close your eyes and follow his lead - you did. He pushed harder, yet the kiss stayed soft and passionate, he lightly nipped your lip and soothed the stinging with his warm tongue, beckoning you to open your mouth for him. Your lips parted, opening up for Miguel to dive in, muscle meeting yours halfway and curling over yours. He still cradled your head, fingers running through your loose hair and tilting your head backwards, giving him more space to show you how much he loved you. Your arms, somehow, found themselves wrapped around his neck, pulling him as close to you as he was pushing himself against you.

His kiss was loving, his hold was careful and his touch heartwarming. You almost regretted having to pull away, but you had to breathe, your lungs starving for air after having been devoured by Miguel’s adoring kiss. The moment you opened your eyes (you didn’t know you had closed them while you kissed), his smile greeted you, a lovesick one bubbling with unending joy. You almost choked from how it fit so well on him.

“That’s- that’s one way…” you spoke between breaths, chest swelling with every erratic pant, matching his similarly worn-out breathing.

That was all he needed from you. Your kiss was enough for him to know you loved him the same, a patient and gentle love he was willing to give you. Your heart pulsed strongly, lips curving and eyes squinting, you pushed yourself closer to his heat, his all-encompassing warmth that wrapped around you when you wanted to feel safe and loved. Your world couldn’t be any brighter, like the vibrant colours of blooming flowers when Persephone was given to her mother, where the snow melted and colours washed over the lands once more, painting the blank white and dead grey in joyous tones. It glowed brightly and warmed you like the summers that followed the melting ice, the clear, blue skies of Olympus and as freeing as the soaring hawks and skipping elks.

Letting go was far harder than loving. To let the person who you let in leave felt emptying, it left a gaping hole in his heart. Where it was once calm, struck a raging storm of rejection and regret, crashing waves the size of Poseidon’s rage and violent storms the strength of Zeus’ retribution. It hurt watching you walk beside a variant of himself, a happier and lighter version of him without his mutations or duty. You were the Spider-Woman of your universe so there wouldn’t be a second one unless there was a catastrophic canon divergence.

He hadn’t followed you at first, respecting your wishes of being left alone. He had to give you that much, at least, after those months spent beside his ignorant ass. He hadn’t seen it until it was too late, lost under the weight of his duty and fears that he’d forgotten he had people who cared, who felt, who loved. It was too late, it was always too late with him. If he couldn’t fix his first mistake, who’s to say he could fix this? He couldn’t save his first daughter or his second’s universe because it was falling apart. He couldn’t save anyone because he hadn’t realised his mistake in interfering in canon events, and he lost you because he couldn’t stop his vitriol, his violent temperament that had pushed you away. He always took things for granted until they were lost to him.

Was it two or three weeks before he decided to check up on you? He didn’t know anymore, the weeks blurred until he finally amassed the courage to go against everyone’s words. Through the flat hologram of his orange screen, he watched you lament on your own, body curled into itself and shoulders shaking. Your sobs were heart-wrenching to watch while he had no means of contacting you; you would’ve reacted more strongly and aggressively if he’d contacted you after leaving.

So he watched.

You stared vacantly from your window and left only for the bare necessities or to act as Spider-Woman. Crime never slept so you couldn’t stop even in your time of need. You swung from building to building so gracefully that Miguel was hypnotised by your grace. He watched these moments as a reminder of the missions he took by your side, webbing and catching anomalies all across the multiverse with fearsome speed and accuracy. You both had made a fearsome team, but that time was over, it was a memory long forgotten.

So he watched.

Your flat was cold and empty, the space filled with spectres of memories, the cool rooms vacant of life that used to fill them with warmth and happiness. It was saddening from his perspective - the observer, the watcher and the reader of your story - of your time spent alone. He wanted to tell you that you weren’t alone, that he was watching you from afar, a silent protector that would only act if you were in imminent danger - as long as it wasn’t part of the canon.

So he watched-

Besides you was Miguel - not him, another one - and he looked much too comfortable by your side for his liking. His variant seemed much too close for a friend, moving from sitting before you to beside you, arm slung over your shoulders and leaning back and, sometimes, towards you at a breath’s distance. He turned green with envy, a vicious monster brewing inside his body with the threat of bursting out, clawing at his chest. The other was too close to you for his liking.

He watched as his variant bought you drinks - always, however long and loud you’d complained and fought, he never let you pay in the end - and paid for your dates. He abhorred it. How happy you looked with the other him. How calm and satisfied your smile was. How close his variant was to you. He wished he was at the other’s place, taking his rightful place beside you. He would kiss you, smother you in love and give you whatever you wanted, whether it be a hug, a kiss or his time, he would’ve given them to you. He wouldn’t dance around the edge of your affection and his love like he was doing, like a man unsure of his feelings and anxious to act on it.

He thought the other Miguel was a coward - though he knew he wasn’t. He wanted to blame his variant and find fault for anything he did, but they were still the same person. He was Miguel O’Hara as much as he was. He wanted, but couldn’t, especially after seeing how both loved you the same, having a similar type. They were so much alike that he could’ve replaced his variant, yet so vastly different in other manners that he would’ve stood out. His history, his trauma, his curse, the other had none of them. He was normal while he was Spider-Man, a stronger, more brutal version of Spider-Man.

Granted, he loved you with every fibre of his being, but he had never showered you with as much love and affection as the other, having his character muddled through long hours of work and long-lasting tragedy. You were another of his tragedies, where he found love again and lost it by his own making. He would have left too if the Society didn’t depend on him, leaning towards him for support and help in protecting the multiverse. It was something he couldn’t sacrifice for his whims.

So he kept watching and let his heart crack and envy fester.

He watched you grow even closer to him, shoulders and hands occasionally touching, making you jump and blush. He watched you move from simple coffee dates to full-blown restaurants and bar dates, drinking and eating at your leisure - something he could’ve never provided you. He watched you wobble around when you were drunk, your arm over his shoulder and his around your waist, supporting your drunk weight. He watched you kiss, the other pressing your bodies together and you reciprocating the loving embrace you had once given to him.

He felt like crying. He was crying, silent tears rolling down his sharp cheeks in slow, thundering waves of his heartbreak. He clung to the desk, claws unintentionally popping out and bending the metal under his fist. The sound ripped through the silent room like the image that ripped through his heart. He was alone in his grief, shoulders slumping and arms shaking with the intensity of his emotions. He had locked the door, barricading it with a busy, do not disturb sign, warning the others that he was occupied and wouldn’t be reached unless there was an emergency.

“Miguel…”

He’d forgotten Lyla was here - she was everywhere and nowhere at the same time, with your help he had given Lyla an upgrade in her system that gave her access to every Spider that had the watch. She had access to every file in the database and his secrets. Lyla was loyal to him as much as she was to you, respecting your words with a promise of her own to leave you alone. That, however, didn’t mean that she wasn’t privy to his pains, watching him while his eyes were stuck to your universe’s screen, giving him some comforting words that were meant to lift his spirit. It never worked but the intention was there.

He couldn’t look at her, still facing the hologram of you kissing. He felt the surge of too many emotions to be able to think clearly, his self-control tethering on a thin line of fragile web. If he turned, he would explode on Lyla, giving her the brunt of his suffering even though she didn’t deserve it, she felt and laughed as much as any other human. He remembered programming in emotion with you, laughing about how much she would be as teasing and annoying as you. Lyla was another gift to him by you, so it would hurt him more.

“Miguel-”

“Don’t- Do not say another word.”

For a man in tears and pain, his voice was curt and stoic, playing the leading figure he’d taken for so long. It betrayed his shaky figure, fingers crushing the metal loudly and shoulders jerking with ever-wrenching choked sob. His world was crumbling around him, rippling and cracking from the seams and folding into itself. The control of his state was failing miserably as he kept staring at your mirthful smile after the kiss. It tore him apart knowing he pushed you further away and into the arms of another. It hurt him deeply.

Through everything, he heard Lyla whisper a small sorry before she popped out of existence, her small holographic body vanishing along with her orange light. Gone was her familiar light, gone was the nostalgic memory of programming her, and along her, was the support of another person. He was truly alone in this moment, to fall on his knees and let himself drown under the weight of everything.

If your love was a tangible thing, he would’ve cradled it between his warm palms, holding it tightly to his chest to feel the soothing effects you had on him. Like a balm to burns, you cooled the searing pains that the world inflicted upon him, the warm blanket that covered him when he needed rest and the pillar that held him when he fell. He’d lost something he couldn’t gain a second time, clutching his head in his misery, drowning and howling.

It felt surreal until it wasn’t until it all sunk in. He truly couldn’t grasp the utter loss and betrayal he felt. The realisation that he truly lost you to none other than himself. The irony of it all slashed deeper, how he drove you closer to another him by his own doing, making you love a Miguel with more gentleness, more kindness and time than him, Miguel O’Hara, the Spider-Man from Nueva York, Earth-928. Everything he had was lost in time, his spiralling thoughts of loss and misery clouded his vision, bringing tears forward in bigger waves.

Was he doomed to lose everything he cared about? Was he bound to love and lose? Why couldn’t he have a happy ending like everyone else? Was it because he was different? Perhaps it was, there were other O’Hara Spider-Man, but none were mutated like him, a product of self-infliction and sabotage - none had their DNA spliced and mixed with a spider’s. He was simply too different from the others, they were lean but still had a strong musculature, muscles tightened to create more strength and defence; none were big and broad as he was, with rough edges and mean streaks. They were nice and happy, faced losses of their own, but always came out on top (there were some minor - sometimes major - variants of Spider-Man here and there, but they all had some similarities in their stories of becoming.). He saw the devastation and grasped onto the thinnest silver lining he could find, holding onto it to stay afloat while others thrived where they were.

Maybe it was truly because of him. He was realistic - near cynic - he couldn’t see things optimistically, life had made him that way. The silver lining he saw in things was small, nearly extinguished by his near-pessimistic way of life. Did that have an impact as well? It most likely did, at least partly. Fate had given him a bad hand in things, he couldn’t be completely blamed for how things turned - or so he thought, hoped. A man wasn’t only the result of what he’d done, but also of what he was given. When push comes to shove, Miguel acted in a way he thought meant well for him and the others even if it didn’t seem like the right decision at first. He rarely doubted his actions while he did them, only after, could he let himself face the consequences of what he’d done. Miguel simply didn’t have the pleasure of waiting. He needed to act when it was called.

If he had waited, if he had been patient and sought out others for support, if he had spent time thinking before acting, would he still have his little girl beside him? Would he still have you in his arms? If he had shown you more affection, would you have still loved him?

Did you still love him?

Miguel didn’t know what he was doing. Standing before your apartment door in civilian clothing and a bouquet of twelve, beautiful white tulips - the meaning not lost to him. It was an attempt at apologizing for his mistakes, a desperate one led by heartache. He brushed his hair back, trying to look as kept as he could in his situation: dark bags and sickly skin, tense muscles and sore back. This was a daring move from him, it would end up catastrophic if the Miguel from your universe saw him at your front door; but he checked, making sure his variant was elsewhere before opening a portal to your place.

He hadn’t moved in a while, listening to you move around your flat, the sound of your soft steps shuffling from behind the door, a wall between you and him, reminding him that he wouldn’t be able to cross it unless you welcomed him. He held the bouquet in one hand and knocked with the other, his knuckles hitting the wood softly and hesitantly. There was a pause between every knock, drawn by his nerves and the anxiety that gripped him.

You moved and closed in on the sound at the door. He saw your shadow dance under the small gap on the floor and pause. You knew. You knew it was him even without peeking through the peephole, your spider-sense aiding you in recognizing the unknown. Although your hand rested reluctantly at the knob - perhaps still too raw from your break as he was - you opened the door for him, figure small and apprehensive.

“Miguel,” you muttered his name, greeting him with a slow nod. You stepped back and opened the door wider for him, he took it as a good sign that you let him in rather than shut the door in his face.

He nodded back, saying your name. He took a step forward, foot breaking the barrier to your flat. The second one ensured he was fully invited, both feet strongly rooted on your side of the door. He wanted to make himself smaller, to appease you, but he knew you wouldn’t have liked that. He squirmed under your stare, a mix of curiosity and concern.

He nearly sighed audibly when you gestured at him to sit and he moved to the sofa he remembered sleeping on with you, cuddling under a warm blanket while you watched a movie. He knew your home by heart like you knew his, the memory washed over him with melancholy. You sat on the armchair to his left, your back to the kitchen. He swallowed thickly and handed you the bouquet, freshly cut tulips glistening with pearly drops under your lights.

Your shoulders shook as you leaned in to take the bouquet, jolting back when your fingers grazed him. Feeling your skin felt invigorating, it breathed back life into him, even slightly. You thanked him with a slow nod, seemingly unsure of what to make of it. Was it a gift? Was it an apology? Was it a farewell sign? He figured your mind was running in circles trying to understand the meaning of the pretty bouquet he handed you. You were always an overthinker, but your mind worked brutally well. That’s something he always appreciated about you.

“I-” Miguel started, seemingly stopped by something that he couldn’t get out of his throat. Maybe a ball of dread or needles of anxiety, but it held him from giving you the words he spent nights thinking over, to give you the message he built from the deepest crevice of his heart. “I’m sorry, (Name).”

You stared at him, understanding that he needed a moment of silence to truly convey his feelings. You hadn’t uttered a word since he first started, expression neutral, not betraying whatever brewing storm you locked inside of you. He was grateful, truly.

“I know- I know it doesn’t mean much now, but I’m really, really sorry, mi vida.”

He sensed you tense, the muscles of your back contracting and rippling under your shirt. Every unseen fibre moving was bare to him, he could see and feel better than most, if not, everyone else.

“I acted out of anger and lack of sleep, but that doesn’t mean you deserved that- never. I just, my mutation makes me more animalistic, more… aggressive than the other, and I hurt you. You didn’t deserve any of that and I can’t always blame it on my mutations. I should’ve been able to control myself. I shouldn’t have lashed out at you in those ways.”

He lowered his gaze to his hands, the calloused pads of his fingers rubbing his palm, trying to coax himself into relaxation. Although your breathing softened, a calm breeze in an atmosphere thick with tension, he didn’t dare look up and see the face you were making.

“I was a bad boyfriend and a horrible friend. I’m- I’m not asking you to forgive me, I don’t want you to forgive me, but- I just needed to tell you how much I regret hurting you. I want to apologise, I don’t know what else to do, I don’t know how to fix this.” He breathed deeply, collecting every ounce of confidence and honesty to brave your reaction. “I’m sorry, mi cielo.”

He shuddered, body rippling with his pained breath. He hadn’t realised how painful it would be to face you with his fears and confession, with the threat of abandonment and rejection fresh in his mind. He was a man of pride and strength, rarely facing anything with trepidation and hesitance.

“I’m really sorry, mi cielo. I’m so, so sorry.”

He sat in silence, letting it hang over him like the blade of a guillotine, silent and brunt. Perceiving the flash of the sharp blade before it fell on his neck, sentencing him to a quick downfall with a long, lasting agony that would sting his neck as long as it would hurt his heart. The French used it for executions, the thing that spelled people’s end. At its height, it was used as an apparatus to behead traitors or people who were deemed dangerous to the people of the new republic. Down the blame went and off the head popped, like it would happen to Miguel if he wasn’t prepared for it. He truly didn’t know whether he had prepared for his rejection, for the death of his heart, to watch the flickering sparks of his flame wither out.

“I’m sorry too, Miguel-”

The rope strained, knots twisting and rippling in the tightness of the pull. It shook, whipping in the air as it straightened completely, held closely by the hand of the executioner. The wind blew but it was sturdy, withstanding the violent gales that slammed against the body of it.

“-it means a lot that you came here to apologise- ”

The crowd was filled with silence, the emptiness of the area a mock of a ghost town. Abandoned to be sentenced to death without anyone to witness. They deemed him not fit for their acknowledgment before his death, before the sparks of his life extinguished. His fate wasn’t worth their time, unlike the poorest criminals who stole for money, unlike the richest pigs who fed from the poor with their silver spoons and golden crowns, unlike the cruellest killers who gutted and left men, women and children to bleed out, and unlike the guiltless innocents cursed for something they hadn’t committed.

“-but, I can’t.”

The rope was let loose, its tail flying and whipping in the air as the blade descended with its weight. The wood chafed against its support beams, yet it flew gracefully and rapidly, singing the doom of its prisoner. The blade gleamed under the moon’s bright light, the silver whispers of peace and sleep deaf to his ears.

“I can’t love you anymore.”

It cracked down on him, his life flashing before him as it cut into him. Severing his control over his body, putting out the dying embers of hope. He clung to desperation in his last moments, wishing to relive the moments of happiness, bright oblivion and cherished love.

He wished that he could’ve seen your shadowed figure hidden in the darkness, tears lining your cheeks as you watched him take his last breath. The only person who came to see him leave, the one who he would’ve burned the world for. In the end, after everything he’d done, you still gave him a small moment of your time to witness his fall, you deemed him worthy of such an act. You offered him your kindness.

My extensive tag list of extremely patient people pt1.:

@iseizeyourmom @raynerainyday @etherealton @sciencethot @coffee-obsessed-freak @thesecretwriter @beepboopcowboy@bontensh0e @aikoiya @allysunny @fandoms-run-my-life @brittney69 @aranachan @maladaptivedaydreamingbum @konniebon @starlightaura @redwolfxx @aniya7 @alicefallsintotherabbithole @bvbdudette @wwwelilovesyou @wwwellacom @akiras-key @bobafettbutifhewasgay @opiplover @rinieloliver @uniquecroissant @yas-v @xrusitax @blkmystery @darherwings @ariparri @notivie @vr00m-vr00m @battinsonwhore05 @irishbl0ss0mz @mivanda @saint-chlorine @livelaughluvmen @battinsonwhore05 @notivie @lililouvre @giasjourneyblog @ykyouluvme @skullywullypully

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mundivagantsoul · 7 months

Text

✩ Bookshopist Moonboys✩

Part 1: Nerds, Dead Trees and Dust

Moon Knight System x Reader

A/N: Hi all! This is my first time posting my writing. I apologies for poor grammar and spelling, my only excuse is daydreaming throughout school when I was was supposed to be learning this stuff. If you have any feedback or comments please let me know, I'd love to hear from you! Hope you enjoy ♡

Warnings: mentions of violence (nature documentaries), coarse language, British lingo?

Word Count: 1K

Masterlist | Next ->

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Seated in the dim living room light with tea-steamed glasses, a certain chocolate-curled Brit scrolls aimlessly through job adverts until a particular post catches his attention

Full-time bookseller- The Old Town Bookshop

Taking a sip of his Earl Grey, Steven opens the listing, greeted with the classic rhetorical questions and enthusiasm only found in job adverts.

Love books? Are you a passionate reader who wishes to share your enthusiasm for literature with others? Come work at “The Old Town Bookshop”, where you can expand your literary knowledge and create a meaningful career with fellow book lovers!

“Living amongst books isn’t enough for you?” Marc quips from a small mirror placed deliberately on the desk's corner.

“I thought you cared about animals and the environment, and yet here you are, further supporting an industry that indoctrinates the destruction of their homes?” Jake nonchalantly adds from an adjacent mirror, oblivious to the surprised faces of his headmates.

Marc raises a brow, “Since when did you become an animal rights advocate?”

Jake shrugs, gaze subconsciously finding Viejita lazing on the lounge before returning back to Marc. “Dunno. Guess I actually pay attention when Steven puts on his nature documentaries”.

Marc mocks being insulted. “Oh I’m sorry, I just don’t find watching baby antelopes getting mauled to death entertaining”.

“Of course, you much rather maul people to death yourself”, Jake's voice mimics Marc’s, enticing a scoff from the latter.

“You’re one to talk Mr. I abuse wheelchairs and kidnap patients from psych wards and then murder them in the back of my fancy car”.

Steven interrupts the dispute before it can get out of hand.

“Bloody hell, Lads’ shut it! Look, if I’m being honest, I’m not gonna take animal ethics from either of you carnivores”, then adding, “And need I remind you two, you’re the reason we’re in this dire situation”.

It’s true, between Marc, Jake and Khonshu’s shenanigans, they’d managed to lose their only legal job, and unfortunately, being an ancient Egyptian deity’s ‘fist of vengeance’ doesn’t pay well.

Marc begins to grasp at any logic that means they don’t have to work amongst nerds, dead trees and dust. “Well… Jake and I aren’t avid readers, and the job description says we must be ‘passionate readers’”.

“Well… I’d say with the number of ‘adult’ novels you read, you’d be classified as a passionate reader”. Steven states matter-of-factly, earning a snort from Jake and a finger from Marc.

“Look, capitalism exists, fish need feeding, and it’s either this, working at the laundromat on 6th, or grovelling for my old job back. You pick”.

Sharing a glance, they sigh, “Fine, we’ll work at your nerd hub”.

Triumphantly, Steven opens the application form.

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A weathered sign inscribed with “The Old Town Bookshop” hangs atop the quaint corner store. Parallel white arches and a broad window decorate its petite structure with morning sunlight reflecting off the seemingly fresh coat of indigo, enriching the buildings' otherwise aged aesthetic.

Breathing out a puff of warm air, Steven adjusts the strap of his shoulder bag, a nervous habit he’d picked up over the years. Peering at the lit window, he opens the door. Greeted by the homely smell of paper and ink, Steven gazes around at the array of books and colours, marvelling at the unexpectedly large floor plan.

"Like the Tardis". Marc hums from the window reflection whilst Jake observes their surroundings, habitually checking for threats.

Strolling further into the store, a warm pressure rubs itself along his calf. Peering down, Steven’s met with honey eyes and golden fur.

“¿Gatito?” Jake chirps, seemingly forgetting about surveying the area.

The cat meows in return as if replying to Jake’s comment.

“Great, now we’ll be covered in dust and cat hair”. Marc comments, trying to remain apathetic about their adorable feline coworker.

Kneeing down, Steven scratches the tabby’s head, earning a delightful purr from their new acquaintance. Checking the collar, ‘Dorian’ is engraved on a fish-shaped name tag.

Dorian huh? Makes sense, you’re a pretty lookin’ fella. Steven observes before returning to the task at hand.

Following the familiar monotonous sound of a sticker gun, the Brit finds himself walking towards the counter where, surrounded by a pile of new releases, you are busy at work. The boys take in your features, entranced as the morning light caresses your face, highlighting the soft beauty that adorns your profile. Eyes roaming over your features, they notice your slight frown of concentration and inaudible movements of your mouth.

As Steven approaches the counter, your words become interpretable.

“How are we already getting Christmas and holiday content when it hasn’t even been Halloween yet?” you grumble, condemning whoever decided it was a suitable practice. “I swear if I start hearing Mariah Carey, I’m gonna…”.

Someone clearing their throat interrupts your malicious thoughts. As your head shoots up, you notice the fidgeting man in front of the counter. Shit. How long has he been standing there? You think, face heating up at the possibility of him witnessing your moral decadence.

“So sorry to bother you love. I’m here for my shift? I was supposed to start today… I’m Steven, by the way”.

The realisation smacks you in the face like a flying stop sign. Crap, it is already 8 o'clock? Internally criticising yourself for losing track of time, you scramble for an apology. “Right- yes, Steven, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realise the time”. Sticking out your hand, you introduce yourself.

God, your name sounds as beautiful as you look, They simultaneously think.

A warm, calloused hand engulfs your own as Steven rolls your name over his tongue. “All good love happens to the best of us”.

You smile warmly, and suddenly, the prospect of spending 9 hours a day surrounded by nerds, dead trees and dust doesn't seem too bad.

Thank you for reading ♡

Also please go check out the fabulous @viejita-n-co who created Viejita! You’ll find a bunch of fanart and pictures of the boys too ♡

#steven grant #jake lockley #marc spector #steven grant x reader #marc spector x reader #jake lockley x reader #moon knight x reader #moon knight #moonknight #bookshopist moon boys

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seeingteacupsindragons · 2 months

Text

Normally, my meta is pretty focused on what happens in the story, and I bring things from reality to use when it’s useful. But I like pulling stories apart to talk about how the story works, and stories only exist with a thin tether to reality most of the time, and they have wildly different rules.

This one is a little different. This one is going to have a lot of outside information brought to bear to discuss Sherliam’s relationship, but they’re things I think are relevant: A Japanese word and its origins, how creating art and stories works, what being an artist is…and how that all impacts William and Sherlock, how they relate to each other as creations of artists and artists themselves.

Basically, stuff about how art is made and the context it lives in. I think that's more useful than comparing it to reality. It’ll be interesting, I promise! Just a little different than usual.

Let’s start here. I think you’ll see where I’m going with the Sherliam thing pretty quickly, but if not, don’t worry. I’m going to explain.

I saw this post on Bluesky during aro week, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot since.

Basically, there’s a word in Chinese, that has actually carried over to Japanese (I’ll get to that in a minute) that means, basically, “person who truly understands your songs.” It’s based off this story of this musician would make instrumental music, as one does, and this person who understood immediately, without being told, what the song was about. And this relationship was so deeply important and meaningful that after the second person died, the first destroyed his instrument, because there seemed to be no point in continuing to create music without the person who got it.

Yes, I know, you’re all seeing the Sherliam parallels already, but give me a bit longer before we get there.

This word carried over to Japanese with a slightly different pronunciation (as happens), but the same kanji and the same meaning. My Japanese-English dictionary defines it solely as “an exceptionally close friend.” No other options are provided. So I looked it up in some Japanese dictionaries! They both started with the same origin story of the word, and then both came up with a handful of definitions: Dear friend, person who understands your heart, partner, comrade, eventually it got down to sweetheart, someone you can rely on. My favorite was “Peerless/unmatched friend.”

The word does seem to be fairly formal and archaic and mostly relegated to Literature™ and classic works. It’s not a word that’s canonically ever applied to Sherlock or William.

And yet. And yet.

I don’t know how common the word is in Japanese that they’d recognize or know it. Whether or not it actually influenced the story from background knowledge, intentionally or not. But knowing the concept now, and knowing the concept has existed in Japanese culture as…as an option does change how I think of some of the media I’ve seen before. The word notwithstanding, the concept exists.

As an artist myself, I deeply understand the need/desire/hope/longing/etc. for a person who just. Gets what you’re trying to do. The person who deeply understands what you’re doing and your intentions and the way you expressed yourself. Who understands you via your creations.

I am, as many of you know, looking for a new critique partner right now. I have one, but I need one or two others for Reasons. And one of them already turned up a dud because this person’s feedback had nothing to do with what I want the story to be or what I’m trying to write. It’s a lot of marketing advice. Advice on how to make the story more what they would want, or more like other books.

A good CP needs to see what the intention of the story is, so they can make that story stronger and help that story make that point to more people. They have to understand your art. Not to the degree of a 知音, but nonetheless.

Sherlock and William are, obviously, on the level of understanding each other this way. They just get each other, without explanation, and they both treasure that relationship dearly. So dearly that Sherlock, when faced with the prospect of losing the person who truly got him, would have rather died with him then survive without that connection.

Because what was the point of doing things, of making things, of being, without that person who got it. How to bear living once you’ve finally found that person?

And I think this kind of gets to what Louis was seeing in Sherlock and hoping he would do to validate William’s existence. Sherlock got William. He saw his intentions through his plans, and saw who he was and what his soul was even under all the masks and walls and machinations. He understood why William would want to die, and that he was actually trying to die intentionally almost immediately.

And because Sherlock actually understood William’s existence, he could actually validate William’s existence. The same way someone has to understand what my book’s story is trying to be to actually help it. The same way someone actually understanding what the fuck I was trying to write makes me feel…well, like writing and sharing it with people is actually worth it, because I can do this.

And, because Sherlock understood William’s intentions and plans, he made changes to the story William planned, because he saw the weaknesses from a distance, saw the intentions without drowning himself in what was already there the way William the Author did. Because he saw the intentions, but also the actual effects.

And William’s plan came out stronger and more effective and more beautiful for it all. Because Sherlock was there to see it, to understand it, and to help.

After all, Sherlock is an artist, too, even if we only see him with his violin on occasion. He knows what it’s like. And he knows William helped give him a stage to show off what Sherlock wanted to share with the world, too (forensics, etc.).

And I think it’s interesting, after all that, to remember that Yuukoku no Moriarty is created by not one artist, but two. Did they understand each other’s intentions the way William and Sherlock understand each other? Almost certainly not, especially given that we lost one of them from the series. But they had to work together, to understand each other’s intentions and art, in order to work together and create the story. To fill in where the other fell short, to give feedback and strengthen the story together.

We don’t know much at all about their working relationship or how the series came to be from the two of them. It’s really impossible to speculate if they felt in sync or they wished they were working with someone who Got Them better. But I think either way, Sherlock and William’s working together to create a story that was stronger, fuller, and better than either could have come up with alone is an interesting reflection of their story’s two creators anyway.

#Yuukoku no Moriarty #Moriarty the Patriot #Sherliam #writing #art #etc

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creature-wizard · 5 months

Text

Was Neville Goddard really trustworthy?

Figured I'd do up a post on reasons why we can be pretty damn sure Neville Goddard was full of shit so I don't have to keep linking a bunch of posts. So here it is, a list of reasons why Neville Goddard was a professional bullshitter.

Neville Goddard constantly misquoted the Bible.

When you read Goddard's works, you'll often see him citing Bible passages that supposedly support the Law of Assumption. And yet when you read those passages in context (especially with some historical background knowledge of the book or letter in question), it becomes obvious that the passages had nothing to do with the Law of Assumption at all. Examples:

Citing a passage explaining the theological significance of the crucifixion and resurrection and claiming it's about manifestation.

Citing a passage about God creating the nation of Israel through Abraham to support his claim that man can create anything through imagination.

Citing a passage describing angels as "ministering spirits" and claiming that it says angels are your personal feelings.

Citing a passage talking about the Jewish law and claiming it refers to the Law of Assumption.

Goddard quoted specifically from the New King James Version, which is available to read here. Whenever he quotes the Bible, go ahead and read it in context. You'll soon see for yourself that these passages don't actually support him at all.

Additionally, Goddard's claims that the Bible somehow encodes the truth of the Law of Assumption is literally nothing more than a conspiracy theory. The actual history of Christianity and the New Testament simply does not support this whatsoever. If you want to learn actual history of the New Testament, I recommend looking into the books and YouTube videos of Dr. Bart D. Ehrman. His work is grounded in actual research and evidence, rather than mystical speculation or theological need. You can visit Dr. Ehrman's YouTube channel here.

Neville Goddard's metaphysics are self-contradictory.

Goddard claims that "everyone is you pushed out" (EIYPO), and that you, personally, are literally responsible for each and every other person's behavior. No limitations, no exceptions. If you don't like how somebody behaves, it's your job to assume them into the person you want them to be.

And yet, he speaks as if each and every person is individually responsible for manifesting their own happiness, which doesn't make sense if EIYPO is true. If EIYPO were really true, and Goddard liked the idea of all his projections living happy, fulfilled lives, he wouldn't bother writing all of this literature. He would just go into the void state and assume a world where everyone was living their best life into being.

The fact is, the contradiction serves a sinister purpose. It allows the perpetrators of violence to be let off the hook every time while their victims shoulder all of the blame.

Abdullah probably never existed.

Goddard's loyal fans have all heard the tale of how Neville Goddard met Abdullah, an Ethiopian rabbi who supposedly taught him Kabbalah, which supposedly supports the Law of Assumption.

First of all, Neville Goddard was a gentile, and the form of mysticism he taught was, well, pretty Christian. He may have absolutely butchered the New Testament, but he constantly quoted from it and made Jesus out to be a pretty big deal.

Meanwhile, Kabbalah is a purely Jewish form of mysticism. The notion that it would support Goddard's Christian mysticism is laughable. Kabbalah is not about Jesus, and it does not support Christianity - even if Christians have appropriated and distorted it. Even a cursory "what is Kabbalah?" search will reveal that Kabbalah has nothing to do with Goddard's teachings.

However, there is another form of mysticism that Goddard's teachings strongly resemble, and this is New Thought. It's within the New Thought movement that we see the developing idea that human beings can shape reality with thought and belief.

This whole story Goddard gave about Abdullah foreseeing his arrival is exactly the kind of thing a mystical con artist would come up with. If you study esotericism and the occult at all, you quickly learn that people just make up fake wizards all the time, from Abraham of Worms's Abramelin to Helena Blavatsky's Koot Hoomi.

It's always the same narrative; someone allegedly meets this wise mystic who shares this profound wisdom, who for some reason is unavailable for comment and never authors any works aside from those they've allegedly shared with their single chosen student. Investigations of their alleged teachings inevitably reveal that they bear very little relation to their supposed origins, but look very much like the ideas popular within their alleged students' own circles.

If you want to learn more about the history of esotericism and the occult for yourself, Dr. Justin Sledge's YouTube channel ESOTERICA is a great place to start. If you want to learn more about the history of Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah more specifically (so to see exactly why the Law of Assumption has nothing to do with it), you can check out his 14 part lecture series.

If you are leaving or questioning the Law of Assumption and need help, please see this post.

#law of assumption #loa #loassumption #neville goddard #eiypo #everyone is you push out #abdullah

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veliseraptor · 1 year

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I don't know what hopepunk is and at this point I'm too afraid to ask

well anon, part of your problem here is that hopepunk is in a lot of ways a meaningless descriptor that means whatever people want it to mean.

took a bit of digging but I found the post that broke down a lot of my issues with hopepunk as a concept/subgenre, here; to quote from that:

You may notice that the philosophy is incoherent, mainly boiling down to “the things I like are hopepunk and the things I don’t like aren’t.” It builds a philosophy out of opposition to a strawman of “grimdark” that doesn’t really exist. So hopepunk means you keep fighting for what you believe in regardless of what that is, and violence isn’t the answer, except when it is. Hopepunk is about being kind and soft but also about punching the bad guy with the gun. Hopepunk is a morass of FEELING REALLY STRONGLY ABOUT THINGS!!! without a fundamental core of… anything concrete.

[...]

Hopepunk in practice is unbearably twee. The goal is to be to inspire a feeling of hope in the reader, which means that nothing bad is allowed to really happen, characters aren’t ever allowed to mess up or be mean or have flaws, and any mistake is well-intentioned and quickly & easily resolved by talking about your feelings.

and I could just leave it at that because, like I said, pretty good summation of my perspective, but sometimes an ask hits me at the exact right time for me to go off about something that consistently irritates me but I usually keep my mouth shut about for one reason or another.

and I feel like the first thing I want to say is. look. it's not like I'm out here going "hope is for losers and all I ever want is tragic stories where everything is awful forever." but the thing about hopepunk, at least in the ways I see it described, is that, in its dedication to be "the opposite of grimdark," shies away from representing darkness at all, except maybe in the most cursory, glancing ways. there's nothing to confront, nothing to push back against. villains are easily identified and unproblematically evil. protagonists are unimpeachably nice and good, and always have perfect politics. moral complexity is to be avoided, because raising too many questions might interrupt the positive feelings the author hopes to evoke.

not only does this create, in my opinion, really dull stories about very uninteresting characters, it also blunts anything the book is trying to say. if you don't want to confront any kind of conflict or struggle in depth then you've kneecapped your ability to talk about the full range of human experience. if the only antagonist you allow is a hollow caricature, then there's only so much room your protagonists have to express strength in opposing them.

the whole framework results in a kind of tepid, anodyne storytelling that expresses meaningless platitudes that the audience is presumed to agree with, often with a side helping of didacticism and "teachable moments." it's weak storytelling.

there's a world in which "hopepunk" is referring to a kind of story that I actually really like; for instance, there's a world in which one could call Malazan: Book of the Fallen "hopepunk." I am tempted to do that, just because I think it would drive people nuts. I think hopepunk wants to be doing something like the line from The Silmarillion that opens the tale of Beren and Luthien: "Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that come down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures."

but out of a fear of representing anything actually ugly, or possibly making people feel kinda bad about something, or challenging the reader in any way, everything that might have been interesting gets stripped out and what's left is literature that feels like cotton candy: maybe it's sweet, but there's nothing to bite into, and nothing that lingers.

#conversating #anonymous #lise's aggressively bitchy opinions about irrelevant and unimportant matters #lise has opinions #sometimes i read things #hoo boy i think that's been stewing in me for a while

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jeremywhitley · 1 year

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Julie Power, Queer Relationships and OTPs

Hey, two provisos before I jump into what I’m about to say:

1) My last name is not Marvel and I don’t own these characters. Before and after I write them, other people will write and/or have written them. Most of them. That’s what success in corporate comics looks like in this day and age - not that you get to write a character/group of characters forever but that other creators remember they exist and include them in new stories and they get to have a long happy life. That said, characters change and the valid interpretation is the one that leads to more stories. You, as a fan, are also interpreted to love whatever version of the character you like as long as you don’t hassle creators about it.

2) As always, I am not the perfect person to write this mini-essay, I’m just the one writing the comic and therefore the one that can explain the thoughts and feelings that went into making the decisions I did.

We good? Okay. Let’s continue!

Being gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual or wherever else a person falls in a spectrum does not make a person more or less than human. It does not make every relationship perfect. In fact, having a sexuality for which there isn’t quite as many years of literature and self-help books often leads to complications that you don’t know how to navigate. It is a rarely acknowledged but pretty obvious fact that this would go double or more for people who were also dealing with the complications of being a superhero in the modern era. A lot of those people have experiences with multiple apocalypse scenarios, a knowledge that there are parallel universes in which pareallel versions of them exist (like a version of me who types parallel the same way twice in a row, one can dream), mind control, reality manipulation, and time travel. Their life is complicated and relationships are difficult in a world where few of those things are commonplace.

In talking about Schitt’s Creek, Glen Weldon expressed a frustration and distaste for the central gay relationship in that show, not because it wasn’t cute and precocious but because it wasn’t realistic. You have a person who has been dating around and having several unresolved and unsatisfying queer relationships paired up with a freshly out, just admitted he’s gay, never dated another man love interest. It’s sweet. It also gives an unrealistic portrait of what life is like for a queer person. It’s hard to argue with people loving that relationship, but it’s impossible to argue with Glenn’s point. Dating is complicated and difficult. Adding queerness to that only makes it more complicated, not less. We often don’t know what we want or need and it’s more difficult to understand what you want and need with less context. Straight people have been struggling with telling their partners what they want and need even as their relationship has been a necessity of human species survival.

But we tend to push the idea of an OTP or “one true pairing” onto queer couples for a variety of reasons, but mainly two:

1) There are so few queer relationships in media that when one happens, queer audiences tend to hold onto it tightly in the worry that there will never be another one like it.

2) The idea that all or most queer relationships are the result of an undeniable love between two halves of the same whole reunited at last and it would be horrible to part them, makes queer relationships more palatable to straight audiences who are still growing in their understanding of the difference between same sex sexual attraction, same sex romance, and same sex fucking.

The end result is a pretty warped understanding of queer people and same sex relationships.

All of this is sort of preamble to say that in this week’s issue of Love Unlimited, I broke up a romantic pairing off panel that I created in Future Foundation a few years ago. In the last issue of Future Foundation, I had Rikki Barnes and Julie Power kiss. They had just been through an extremely dangerous prison break during which they had both almost died and saved one another’s lives. The moment was absolutely ripe for two Sapphic people to get swept up in the moment and intensely make out. It was a relationship I would like to have explored more, especially as they are two characters I care very deeply about. I think it would have been fun. I also do not think it would have worked out long term. Most relationships don’t and they are very different people.

I saw a post somebody made earlier today on tumblr about how Julie Power throws herself at every queer and available white girl in the Marvel Universe. There’s only one part of that I would prefer to not be true and that’s the white part. It is true about the comics as they have come out, but I don’t see Julie as the kind of person who wouldn’t fall in love with a person of color. In fact, to the point of that post, I see Julie as a person who is open to connection and cares a great deal about physical affection. She’s a hugger. She’s constantly taking people under her wing. She falls for people hard and loves hard. Not to get too intimate with it, but she’s probably a person who enjoys sex and physical contact and affection. Those things aren’t important to everyone or meaningful in the same way to everyone, but they are to some people.

But also, that doesn’t mean that every relationship those people enter into has to be THE ONE. We all enjoy our own OTPs and a lot of us have that same investment in people we know in real life. God knows, I have had that investment in queer friends that found love and there are people that have had that same investment in my wife and I because we’re a mixed race couple. Those facts about a relationship don’t make it work out without the same sort of effort, love, affection, and sheer luck as any other successful relationship. I think ascribing that same sort of mythological status to every same sex relationship is ultimately short sighted and harmful.

Julie’s way of finding love, like a lot of us, is to throw herself headfirst into relationships, love hard, experiences extraordinary moments, and get hurt when things don’t work out. She, literally, has a heroic impulse toward relationships. Is that healthy, maybe not. But hey, I kind of admire it.

So yeah, I broke up a relationship off panel that barely had a chance to exist on panel because that’s the way I see it going. On the bright side, she’s in another relationship now and we’ll see how that goes.

If there’s a thing I guess I want people to take away from this, it’s that it’s okay for your relationship not to work out and that you shouldn’t treat your queer friends like they’re characters in a Shakespeare play that have to love each other unconditionally and die together in a crypt if things don’t work out.

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be-the-glenn-to-my-maggie · 1 year

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You know what I want to see a lot more of? Cultural meshing or whatever the hell you call it. I want to see how human and na'vi culture (among other things) could be learned and respected by both sides. For so long, all the Na'vi have really experienced is the war side of humans, and though I agree that we as a species can be pieces of shit (especially to our planet, etc) I also want to see the highlighting of all of the culture and stuff we've created over the thousands of years we've existed. I want someone to continue what Grace started and could have continued to grow until it flourished if it weren't for that fateful day.

I want to see two friends, one human and one na'vi, speaking to eachother. Only the human is a language nerd/polyglot and is enthusiastically trying to find out everything they can about the Na'vi language and its various dialects while at the same time excitedly introducing their na'vi friend to words in not just English but Spanish, Greek, etc. They're so excited to be teaching their Na'vi friend English while at the same time learning Na'vi and showing them all the cool language families back on Earth. I want them to explain the concept of a dead language, how things can fade with time, how without our ancestors voices there is a constant shift generation after generation, slow but sure. ("Oh, so you guys say herwìva! That's so cool, we call them snowflakes in English. Oh, and look: in French they're called flocon de neige.")

I want to see a bright-eyed young religion/other enthusiast chatting away about Eywa and all of the Na'vi stories all the while having no problem showing their na'vi friend the absolutely ridiculous amount of books on mythology, demonology, christianity, and all that other stuff. Folklore, fairytales, you name it! ("Yeah, and then Zues banged another lady! I know, he never learns!")

I want some random tree-lover fighting for what little trees are still left on Earth to get so excited that he makes entire slideshows about all of the trees they had back on Earth and are fighting to bring back and what so many of them symbolize, etc. ("What's that? Oh, no, you can't really build a home inside a redwood tree. Uh. . . maybe a treehouse? Wait, you guys don't have treehouses? Omg we have to build one! We'll only use fallen branches, I promise! Pretty please!")

I want to see a poet or writer roll up onto Pandora with their ungodly amount of literature who loves reading to the na'vi children and teaching them how to write fun little poems, etc, all while at the same time paying close attention to the na'vi stories and writing them down, compiling them and even memorizing some of them to connect more with her students. ("I am sam, am I am, do you like green eggs and ham?" "And then the brave Entu snook up behind the might Toruk. . ."

I want games of London bridge and ring-around-the-rosie played right alongside traditional na'vi child games, young children connecting with young na'vi. ("And then you bring your arms down around him and boom! He's out!" "Ooh, what's that you're doing? I wanna try! Do all na'vi play this game?")

I want fun cooking/food classes where they alternate between learning about na'vi food culture and human food culture and they get to truly see how rich the na'vi food culture is while at the same time seeing the same thing about people on Earth. ("I promise you, ice cream is man's best fucking invention ever! And there's so many different kinds and so many different ways of making it, too! Hey, what do you guys do for dessert? Are they fruit based?")

I want trips to places like the beach where a sweet instructor brings pictures of beaches on Earth in the past and shows the others where crabs would have been or some other oceanic shit all while the na'vi instructor teaches them about Pandora's beaches. (no reason in particular for this one, I've just been wanting to go to the beach recently 🤷)

I want people who rode horses (both for equestrian sports and pleasure) to be in awe of the pa'li and to show the na'vi various different moves, games, etc, that they did on their horses via pa'li through things such as videos, pictures, all that fun stuff. ("And this right here is called puissance. You have no idea how long me and my horse had to train to make it safely over that jump!")

I want humans explaining the sheer amount of effort it takes in bonding with an animal. Months, years. And even then you can never be too sure. There is no tsaheylu, no "becoming one". We have to work hard, so hard, for every skill. Every trick. Everything. And even when all is done, there is always the chance of miscommunication. Of you making one wrong move and a horse you've known since you were four bucking you off, or your dog biting you if not trained properly. We are never one, always separate, no matter how close we get. Understanding only goes so deep, and yet we take risks day in and day out because we love our dogs and horses and any other animal we may have conflicts with.

I want humans explaining the fear. And yes, everyone feels fear (especially when colonial idiots pull up *cough* Quaritch *cough*), but for humans? It has always been a constant. There is no Eywa. Our perception of everything is completely different from a na'vi, who spends their whole life connected to their planet. We are alone in our minds, in our perception. When we die, there is only death. Our ancestors are lost in the wind. We are each left to interpret everything in the ways we know how, and we are so weak. Killed so easily. Everything is a threat. The ocean, a tree, animals, mountains, nature. Everything that gives us life takes it away, only there is no Eywa telling us that it is alright. That there is balance. For us, there is just panic and pain and fear, as we are attacked from all sides, begging for answers we'll never get. So we protect ourselves in the only ways we know how. Houses. Machines. And the fear, over time, our justification. (Not sure if what I'm trying to say made any sense at all lol.)

And I want na'vi taking this in, not forgiving us for our wrongdoings (because we have no right to ask that of them) but for them to just see us the way they claim to see so much. For them to see us and us to see them and for there to be understanding. No "demons". No "savages". Because that's not how it is. It's just two different mindsets brought on by two very different planets.

But what I want most of all?

A slushy tbh. Gonna go drive to my local 7/11 now. That's enough depression for one day.

Wow what a very emotional ask! I really love this! My favorite human things that fics tend to have Jake bring to the Omaticaya are small but meaningful I think. Curse words, photos and videos, children's games (the marking their height on the wood!!), high fives and pinky swears, flipping people off, books, and slang for sure.

In regards to most of this I think Norm is your GUY. I refuse to believe he doesn't teach his 50 million adopted children to read and write along with history and culture and biology, Earth and Pandora. The rest of the village kids TOTALLY get in on these lessons they all want to learn, they get jealous of their friends. Norm taking over and restructuring Grace's school is my FAVORITE headcanon, I love the idea that Spider joins him in lessons after he gets older if he never gets an avatar or gets Eywa blessed.

#anyways what an absolutly lovely ask anon #looove this idea #obsessed #i love specifically the omaticaya and the scientists relationship as their lives go on #miles spider socorro #spider socorro #norm spellman #avatar #avatar the way of water #james cameron avatar #melissa's asks #melissa on avatar (cameron)#the people need this fic we are begging for it

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cerisezero · 8 months

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I keep thinking about the times that someone has looked at the idea of writing their language and gone '…yeah no I'm gonna fix that' or 'yeah I want a piece of that action' and made it happen, for any reason. And I'm gonna make noises about it for a little bit. Maybe highlight a couple of things.

You've got King Sejong in Korea going "OK. The script we're using now is hella complex and …Chinese. I want something that's easy enough for a farmer to learn. And maybe to pay his taxes with." And he works out hangul, neat and logical and frequent winner of Best Writing System awards if such things exist. (And then the nobles don't like it because how are they supposed to look smart if the peasants can write too?)

You've got Sequoyah, thinking the settlers he's doing business with might have at least one good idea in this whole 'talking leaves' system they're using. So he throws himself into working out a syllabary that works for the Cherokee language even when his friends and family think he's losing the plot or he's possessed or… Anything. But he hangs in there. Teaches his daughter. Proves that this is something worth it, and goes on to see the syllabary he created become official and used throughout the Cherokee Nation.

These are the best known ones. But how many are there out there?

There are systems where a missionary or someone similar's come into a place, and gone 'hm, Latin ain't cutting it for writing this' - the Cree syllabics and their extended Canadian family fall into this box, though there's at least some accounts that dispute the usual story. (Given that a lot of those sort of stories come down to 'so we can make a Bible at these people', it's fair to put a big old asterisk on them, but… they're a thing.) Getting away from that issue, though? There's local creators making a bespoke system for their language when the ones they'd picked up from outside just don't fit the sounds or grammatical patterns. Writing systems that can really belong to a language and its people.

While it's absolutely not my place to say whether something is good or bad - the only people who can do that are the language users and community the script was made for - there can't help but be a few that catch the eye. For example, I'm quite fond of the Ditema tsa Dinoko script - it's a pretty recent creation from South Africa as a script for a wide range of Bantu languages, using compact triangular blocks in a way that reflects traditional patterns from Sesotho tradition. From my outside perspective, it's an elegant script. It's just one example, though - there's many creators in Africa who have done similar things, sitting down and making a script that their language needs and that isn't being shoved on them by… yeah. Vai and N'Ko are the biggest examples but there are so many! Moving on, in Oceania, we find the Avoiuli text from Vanuatu, designed so that any one character can be drawn with one stroke in the sand… and elsewhere, the scripts being created to use with signed languages which haven't used them in the past…

If I were to try and go into all of them, it'd be a whole essay. And I'd probably miss some as I'm an outsider nerd without access to the deep literature on some of this stuff. Instead, I'll link to The World's Writing Systems as an index to browse through - unfortunately, it doesn't allow searching by how the writing system was created. But there are plenty of indigenous scripts listed there too that deserve their own deep dive. (The fact it lists con-scripts specifically made for fiction… eh.) Their icon comes from the Afaka script, for the Ndyuka creole in Suriname. A lot of the letters are quite pictorial in nature - including the 'ka' in WWS's icon. Gotta say, that's a way to make things memorable.

…anyway, that's my ramble for today. Just gonna wrap with this source which I haven't fully investigated yet, and Endangered Alphabets which isn't so much for deliberately constructed scripts but (unsurprisingly) for endangered ones in general, and as such plain deserves a link.

Now I go back to my own scribbling. Maybe I'll finish a con-script enough to show off one day. Even if one rather smaller in goals.

#writing #writing systems #language #constructed scripts #conscript #long post #i like words :3 #just a ramble

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hamliet · 1 year

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In the context of fiction and media, everything is so sexualized especially when I think of shipping. Even ships with underage minors and adults are popular and why?? Fiction directly affects reality does it not? Why is it okay to show that?

Sexuality is a very normal, healthy part of human behavior. While some people are asexual and that is also normal and healthy, the majority are not. Most people like sex, find it fun and meaningful. All human experiences should be reflected in art (what else is art for?), so sexuality should be reflected in a lot of art.

Unfortunately, we live in a culture that paradoxically both idolizes and shames sexuality, and this is as prevalent among the fundamentalist religious as it is among leftist spaces. So when art ignores sexuality completely, or ignores certain types of sexuality (see, the female gaze, or queer expressions of sex) fans will create that art themselves--such as via shipping. Shipping is simply "there's a story to be told here" and that story may or may not involve sex (most often does) and even in some cases, be primarily about sex.

Fiction is both shaped by reality and can shape reality, but that's not the same as saying it's a 1=1 mirror of reality where you can exactly correlate A cause with B result. Like, look up the anti video game movement of the 90s, the Satanic Panic and the way emo music was blamed for tragedies like Columbine, and ask yourself why people who like detective mysteries aren't murderers.

Yet, there is nuance here for sure. Like, I'll just bluntly state moral policing is a boring way to engage with art and fandom, and that goes beyond just sexuality. However, that isn't the same as saying take off your critical thinking hat, anything goes. Criticism is a very necessary part of fandom and engagement, and must be allowed (shakes fist at toxic positivity). But criticism as a field is designed to open doors more so than close them. It's a discussion more than anything else (note: discussing does not mean conclusions can't be drawn; they can). I have called out the real life implications of different stories before, and I'll do it again.

Me saying "moral policing stories is boring" also isn't me advocating for amorality. Not at all. Ethical questions posed by works can elevate a work to the realm of a masterpiece. There's a reason The Brothers Karamazov is considered top-tier literature. But ethics and morality are best explored not through statements, but through examination of what someone means when they say something is wrong or right. Fiction is a fabulous way to do this.

Let's use the example of minors and adults. Sad face, because "minor" in fandom can mean anything from "short person" (yes, really, I've seen that argued that someone who is short is "minor coded") to "17 year old" to "five year old." Shipping a 17 year old and an 18 year old is way different than, say, a preteen and a person their parent's age.

Like, in real life, people do not have a magical switch in their brain when they turn 18. An 18 year old dating a 17 year old is normal. It's not ethically dubious. An 18 year old (legal!) dating a 40 year old? Is ethically suspect to me, even if it isn't illegal. Ages are the best ways we have to protect children and keep them safe, but there's a reason most laws allow for an 18 and a 17 year old to date. At the same time, no one in their right mind would object to the moral statement "minors shouldn't date adults" (unless you're Matt Gaetz) with a "WELL WHAT ABOUT" because basic guardrails can't be built around exceptions, and the alternative is so horrifying that the guardrail exists for a damn good reason. But real life or fictitious, an 18 and 17 year old is not really sketchy.

Plus, I caution that the portrayal of a thing isn't necessarily the endorsement or "normalization" of said thing. Framing matters. A story can be used to powerfully show the pain of entering a relationship in which a young person is in way over their head. In fandom specifically, the shipping "story" people are interested in, regardless of ages or whatnot, might not be a happily-ever-after one, and might be a way to process their own abuse. I think there's a famous queer author who got "cancelled" for this, but she was processing her own experiences and framed it as negative, which is very sad.

There are other considerations too. For example, the medium of a story also matters. Film (and theater) inherently muddy the fiction and reality discourse dilemma in a way that written or drawn mediums do not: they use real people, so there are multiple layers in which this discourse can be discussed. Fandom and shipping, however, does not (on the whole) use these mediums.

I also know some people age up characters or de-age them to ship them at the same age, because they like the dynamic but do have ethical concerns about ages. I personally feel squicked out when there's a power dynamic like minor/adult (as in the paragraph above), teacher/student, or mentor/mentee, even if both are adults. And yet despite this I still like stories like Scum Villain's Self Saving System which are literally designed to provoke questions about shipping and fandom and morality, because they make me use my critical thinking and are aware of the problematic aspects of their works and precisely explore what makes it problematic, and what makes it not. SVSSS approaches it like:

A teacher who abuses his pupil enters into a relationship with him when they are adults, no grooming when kids. Sounds ethically suspect, right?

What if it's set in an ancient fantasy world where people fly on swords and live as immortals?

What happens to the idea of age (past a certain point in development) when you're immortal and stay physically young? (We don't have a real-life starting point for this.)

What if said teacher is literally no longer the same soul, but has been swapped for another soul?

What if the new soul is forced to be unkind under pain of not just death but soul obliteration?

What if age becomes speculative because the new soul isn't necessarily older than the pupil?

You see, there are a million angles from which SVSSS approaches this question, and ties these questions in with themes about individuality and presuppositions (essentially: see the individual more than the "type" of character). It's not mocking the questions. It's genuinely exploring them.

So, ethical questions can be very interesting in stories, and in terms of how fans interact with fiction as well. But not in terms of preaching, but in terms of interaction, in terms of making you question things--which is not the same as tossing aside all principles of morality.

#ask hamliet #i'm sure i over simplified something here #so feel free to ask follow ups #to a degree #fandom #diskhorse

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unhonestlymirror · 12 days

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An interesting piece from The Lithuanian and Samogitian Chronicles (the end of 16th century):

«Год 1258 …Потом далей тягнул Радивил и найшол над Немном старое городище, замок от Батия збуреный, збудовал замок другий и назвал его Городком, a оттоля тягнул на Подляше, где в той час ятвяги мешкали, найшол там Бересте, Хмелник, Дорогичин, Сурож, Белско, Бранско, места и замки побуроные от Батия…».

A person who doesn't know Ukrainian and Belaruthian would most likely say this text is written in russian. It's not true! :D It's Ruthenian (Ukrainian) with very heavy Church Slavonic plaque. The original text is written in Old Ukrainian, maybe Volyn dialect. If translating this text to modern Ukrainian, it would look like this:

"Рік 1258... Потім далі тягнув Радівіл і знайшов над Ньоманом старе городище, замок від Батия збурений, збудував замок другий і назвав його Городком, а оттоді тягнув на Підляшшя, де в той час ятвягі мешкали, знайшов там Берестя (Брест), Хмельник, Дорогичин, Сурож, Бельсько, Брансько, міста й замки, побурені від Батия.."

Obviously Ukrainian words in the original: тягнул, найшол, городище, збурений, збудовал, другий, в той час, мешкали, Хмелник, Дорогичин, места, побурені.

In Ukrainian, we say оттоді/відтоді (ottodi/vidtodi), not оттоля (ottolia)... However, soft [L] and -ļa- sounds are very characteristic of classic Belaruthian and Lithuanian. You can say that's their thing. A lot of foreigners have big troubles with this exact -ļa-; -lie- sounds, and a lot of foreigners, for some reason, confuse these with russian language. Lithuanian and russian languages are pretty soft in comparison to, e.g., Latvian and Ukrainian, but the difference in softness between Lithuanian and russian is significant. russians don't use soft [L] sound that much. Although my Lithuanian pronunciation is pretty good, I myself often forget to pronounce soft [L] where it's needed.😅

Збурений (zburenyi, poburenyi) is a Ukrainian archaism, which through time ended up being одібраний. I think it was like: збурений -> забраний -> озабраний/озібраний -> одібраний, but I am not sure. The infinitive verb from which this participle was created is "забраний". I can't find this on the internet, but in old Ukrainian literature, you can sometimes meet this word. This word exists in the Slovak language, btw: "poburovan".

Not-surprisingly, russians, from time to time, claim The Lithuanian&Ruthenian&Samogitian Chronicles to be russian, although the text is not in russian at all. They probably hope for linguists not being educated enough and saying, "Well, it is written in Cyrillic, it must be russian."

P.S. In English:

"The year is 1258... Then Radivil moved further and found an old settlement above Nioman - the castle taken from Batyi - he built a second castle and called it Ghorodok (City), and from then on he moved to Podliasśie (Pidliaššia), where at that time the Yotvingians lived, he found Berestia (Brest) there, Khmelnyk, Dorogychyn, Surož, Bielsko, Bransko, cities and castles taken from Batyi.."

#just some thoughts #linguistics #languages #Ukrainian language #Belaruthian language #Belarusian language #Lithuanian language #langbr #укртумбочка #укртамблер

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nerves-nebula · 8 months

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"the actors don't like the ship it makes them uncomfortable!" yeah that does not and never has mattered. they're actors. they act as characters. they are not the characters themselves, they do not have a say in how you think of or portray the characters they act as. this is not real person fanfiction. Alex is just a homophobic creep.

anyway after talking to my friend i've decided to just tell you guys. the series i hate is The Mandela Catalogue. it's so shit. absolute garbage. Plays into every ableist trope in the book.

If you try to analyze the way characters are coded to be scary or creepy or "inhuman" it's 99% of the time just them being disabled or neurodivergent or some other marginalized identity.

the fascist undertones of the series are incredibly evident, from the stranger-danger propaganda being given at face value with no commentary on how fucked up it is to just say it's reasonable for you to shoot someone you think is an alternate/looks weird (are white people not aware of all the poc and disabled people who get shot and attacked cuz their existence is seen as threatening?)

the public announcement shit is literally fear mongering except it's in universe proven to be correct because the universe alex has created is an inherently fascist one where innocent white Christians and their innocent white children are under attack from Real Demons (where have i heard that one before)

the THINK principles are akin to a cults guideline. how is the scary thing here that there are weird looking people out there that will Say Scary Shit to you (the idea of an Unknowable Truth as it's alluded to in tmc is bullshit and one of the dumbest Monster powers I've ever heard of) instead of the fact that society is gonna collapse because this shit will make people paranoid as hell, and start shooting their neighbors. But no, that would make it a GOOD series with something INTERESTING to say.

OH and the fact that the enemies in the series are somehow supposed to Look Just Like You (they could be anyone!!) but also look biologically impossible (so many of the alternates + The intruder just look like disabled or disfigured people put through a scary filter)

and hey, while we're here, can we think of any other examples of tropes in media in which all of these apply to The Enemy?

looks very similar to REAL humans, so much so that they could fool you into thinking they ARE one! and yet are also somehow inherently biologically different in a way you are capable of figuring out just by looking at them.

has dark beady eyes and a hooked/big/prominent nose (thinking of the intruder specifically here)

Kidnaps your children for their own nefarious means (blood libel)

Kidnaps/corrupts your children by controlling the media/technology/TV screens.

Desire world domination/is part of some big conspiracy stretching far into the past

Guilty for the death (or in this instance possibly the replacement of) Jesus Christ

depicted as literal demons

Hint! it's antisemitism! it's always fucking antisemitism!!! Coming from a man who's main source of inspiration is his Christianity & mental health issues (though he doesn't seem to mind demonizing the symptoms of mental illnesses he hasn't had personal experience with) i'm not surprised! Though I am disappointed, because he supposedly wants to be a writer, and he doesn't seem very aware of any of the tropes he's propagating. like c'mon man, i thought you liked literature.

I could make another list exactly like that one but for ableism, but if i committed that hard then we'd be here all day.

Alex has even started using words like Degenerate/Degeneration in promotional material too (which if you know anything about fascist rhetoric is a bad sign) not to mention his weird behavior around queer headcanons/shipping and his tendency to mock people who read queer subtext into his work.

The only good things that come from the mandela catalogue are from the fandom but even the fandom can't stop talking about how SUBVERSIVE and UNIQUE it is when it's literally just regurgitated reactionary talking points. The fandom also loves reinforcing Alex's weird ass "no gay shipping" mandate.

like, he clearly doesn't mind the inclusion of romances. Adam had a girlfriend. what he says he minds is "sexualization" which just so happens to include every instance of two male characters looking at each other or holding hands (because being gay is inherently sexual to him, which is homophobic btw. not a "boundary")

i could write essays about how every little single aspect of this series is, thematically speaking, dogshit garbage which appeals to the majority and barely admits the rest of us exist (which i wouldnt even care about so much if people didn't act like this series was at all unique or subversive)

I've talked for fucking hours about how every time i think it can't get any worse it somehow does. i've barely touched on the ableism here, haven't even mentioned the racism OR how all the female characters are defined by their relations to the male characters.

ALL THIS. ALL THIS!!! And all you see about it is praise praise PRAISE. but guys. it's just BAD.

side note: if this post makes you feel the need to tell me why it's actually good: don't! i really dont care if you like it, good for you i guess. as far as i'm concerned the fans of it are the best part of the whole damn series (to be clear the fandom has its own problem but even then. it's generally fine) but it is NOT good source material.

#nnstuff #hateful webseries

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baeddel · 8 months

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@elancholia ty for your reply i always like them ^/////^ i will try and respond better to your whole post another time. obviously the conversation has evolved into more of a larger discussion about plagiarism & intertextuality in general, but i wanted to point out something w/r/t what i was originally asking. when you say:

The specificity of citations means that each claim is easy (for a specialist) to find and address; the points of dispute are very clear. And it's possible to pick out anomalous patterns, like century-spanning claims being sourced from one very specific document, or a consistent overreliance on "problematic sources" which are known to have been "heavily edited and sanitized" at the time they were originally compiled.

you understand that this is again not the kind of knowledge that i'm talking about in that post. if i learned how to make an argument (in this example, a 'dialectical' argument) from a really problematic and flawed book, it wouldn't really help you at all in evaluating my argument—my entire argument is transparent to you as soon as you read it, and if you tried to attack (using my example) my post based on a criticism of Clausewitz it would just be irrelevant, because i'm not actually saying anything he said.

i realize that i muddied the waters in my wording by at the end saying "in philosophy or non-fiction" in general, but my surprise was about this kind of thing, not about claims. w/r/t the kind of citation in the quote i don't feel confused about it, i try to cite my posts as much as possible for several reasons, both practical and ethical (one tumblr specific reason is that it helps to avoid establishing onesself as a kind of priestly authority with access to secret knowledge & instead invites the reader into your context so they can argue with you as an equal—since a lot of people who read your post may not know how to access the information otherwise, a concern which arises strictly in a non-academic situation).

you get where i'm coming from right—i have textbooks that are supposed to show how to make a kind of argument, which forms are valid, etc. they're aimed at training you to argue in a certain way and they don't expect you to cite them or even really remember them. why does it change when you learn how to argue that way from another kind of text?

when i went to read some of the literature on plagiarism i was similarly surprised to find other things which are considered plagiarism at least by some definitions. in one study that looked at Iranian Applied Linguistics researchers' views of plagiarism & intertextuality (click), the questionnaire included the following questions:

Creating a new piece of work structured according to a documentation standard, by referring to existing work of the same type.

and

Using a published work to identify important secondary citations that make a particular logical argument and then citing only those secondary sources to support your own use of the same logical argument.

the first one (copying the structure of another article) was considered plagiarism by 68% of respondents (15% said it wasn't and 17% said they didn't know). it surprised me a lot to learn that anyone would consider that plagiarism. the second one (copying an argument and just borrowing the citations necessary without saying where you learned the argument) is quite close to what i was talking about, and the responses were: 32% yes plagiarism, 57% no plagiarism, 11% don't know.

my takeaway is that there is not a lot of certainty about what counts as plagiarism on offer & i'm probably not the first person to experience this kind of surprise, confusion or skepticism about it.

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bettsfic · 1 year

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craft essay a day #8 & 9

i'm so fucked up about this.

13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley, Chapter 2: “What Is a Novel?” and 3: "Who Is a Novelist?"

beginner | intermediate | advanced | masterclass

filed under: ontology

summary & my thoughts

i woke up at 5am and couldn't get back to sleep, so i got up and decided "oh hey i've been thinking a lot about The Novel, i'm gonna dig into this book a bit" and 42 pages later i'm lisa staring into space.jpg. the end of chapter 3 made me cry? for some reason?? never reading before dawn again.

i need to preface my summary by saying that, generally speaking, the work of craft theory and narratology is lexical, which is to say it's primarily concerned with creating and defining terms that better sharpen our understanding of ideas that are otherwise abstract. so it may seem like "what is a novel" and "who is a novelist" are silly questions, like, doesn't everyone know those things? but what Smiley is doing is taking her education and experience in novel reading and writing and really drilling down into exactly what a novel and its creators are.

we take the concept of a novel for granted, because for all of us it's a form that has always been in our lives, and our parents' lives, grandparents', great grandparents', and so on. unlike film, television, and video games, all of which began in relatively recent history, the novel seems like a thing that has always existed. but it hasn't. in chapter 4, Smiley gets into the history of the novel, but i think it's important to fix the novel in its context to better understand that the novel is much, much newer than poetry and plays. in the grand scheme of literature, the novel is an infant.

Smiley begins chapter 2 by defining the novel as an object. in the past decade or so, with the invention and rise of ebooks, it's easy to forget that the novel is a physical thing, and moreover, because reading a novel is entirely mental, we can often forget its thing-ness. you can hold a novel, but you cannot experience the novel until you open it and read its contents.

"[Novels] take up space. Spread open, they offer some information, but they don't offer too much, and they don't force it upon me or anyone else. They invite perusal. Underneath the eaves, on either side, are hidden ones that have been read or remain to be read. The reader may or may not experience them. The choice is always her own. The book continues to be an object. Only while the reader is reading does it become a novel."

she goes on to define a novel by five elements. a novel is:

lengthy and

written in

prose, and

contains a narrative

with a protagonist.

in being both written as prose and lengthy, a novel, unlike a poem, does not ask to be memorized. "prose slips by," she says, "common as water." the concept of a narrative is also common, in that a narrative is only a sequence of events with cause and effect, which is the fundamental way we understand ourselves and our memories. we exist in reality and therefore are required to fix the present into the context of time as each moment passes, and therefore our minds must create narrative (that part isn't Smiley, that's me). the protagonist then makes a novel specific by becoming the vehicle of the other four elements.

"A protagonist is usually interesting not because he is someone special...but because something happens to him."

with these five elements, she says that the work of a novel is to create moral complexity in the reader by introducing the reader to a protagonist who is themselves morally complex.

here is where i get Confused. this entire chapter is phrased as if all of these things are true of all novels. she doesn't say these are the things a novel should be, but these are the things a novel simply is. and what confuses me is that, in the latter half of the chapter when she's talking about complexity, she's naming some things (like conflicts of morality) that some novels just don't have. so is she saying that lengthy written prose narratives with a protagonist cease to be novels if that protagonist doesn't have a crisis of morals? or is she using the concept of moral complexity so broadly that she's saying the very existence of a protagonist is morally complex, by virtue of encountering the separate consciousness of the reader? or is she really only talking about the work of literary fiction?

in chapter 3, she doesn't have the same issue of phrasing, though she's still defining. she begins the chapter with,

"A novel has an author. The desire to write the novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel."

the chapter, very cleverly and subtly, follows the life of a novelist, beginning with a childhood interest in language and an aptitude for reading. in both these interests, the future novelist develops two lives: the inner life and the outer life.

"A novelist is someone whose inner experience is as compelling as the details of his or her life, someone who may owe more to another author, never met, than to a close relative seen every day. A novelist lives two lives—a reading and a writing life, and a lived life. He or she cannot be understood at all apart from this."

when the novelist grows from reader to writer to published author, she says that they become "someone who has volunteered to be a representative of literature and to move forward a generation. That is all."

this was so refreshing for me to hear, because often when i teach or mentor writers who believe they have nothing new to say, i tell them they're not speaking into a void. all writing exists in response to other writing. it's a conversation. and when you publish or put your work out there in any way, you're adding to the conversation.

Smiley debunks the myth that all novelists lead interesting lives and that's what drives them to write. she lists of novelists who've had interesting lives and those who haven't, and pairs it with the content of their work. she reminds us again that anyone can write a novel.

"The novel is a simple, capacious, natural, and accessible form. If the writer is willing to write, if he has a clever idea, if he is dedicated and patient, if he is willing to work out each incident and idea, he might indeed come up with a worthy and unique work of art."

in terms of motivation, she drills down to five main reasons someone might want to write one. a novel can be:

a hypothesis

a dream

a therapeutic act

an ontological construct

an assertion of self

she relates novel-writing to science, insofar as the novelist approaches a project with a hypothesis and then performs an experiment (writing) to test it. as a therapeutic act, she says the process of writing one's experiences and observing them is the paradigm of therapy.

"I think that a good rule of thumb is that novel-writing will make happy a person who can tolerate and enjoy an ever-intensifying experience of himself or herself. Novel-writing forces the novelist to turn inward day after day, year after year. No consolations, in the form of praise, fame, money, or importance can compensate for that effort if it is painful."

although i've worked with many writers and have come to accept that every writer has different motivations for writing, i've never been able to truly empathize with writers who don't take joy in it. possibly this is a process/product dichotomy. i take joy in the process of writing and don't care too much about its product, but there are many writers who are driven to create a final thing. i don't have to understand that motivation to respect and accept it. what i feel all artists have in common, though, is a drive to Make Stuff.

here's where Smiley gets mind-bendy. she says that novels are a specific kind of hypothesis: the ontological construct, or "a theory of being." fundamentally the drive to write a novel comes from a foundational belief that things are not as they appear, and therefore must be written to be seen.

she says this next part really well, but it's long and makes my head hurt. i'll do my best to summarize: every novel and every novelist must acknowledge existence because novels are written in words, and words are referents to reality. therefore all novels comment on some state of existing. "in its very expression," she says, "the novel asserts that the world has being."

see what i mean by lisa staring into space.jpg?

"The novelist's ontology is his most effective form of rhetoric. A novel persuades, as any argument does, but it uses assertion, sensation, and emotion as the prime elements of the argument."

in the previous chapter, she discusses that a novel must be believable. by "believability" she doesn't mean "realistic," but that the sequence of events make sense. i think here she's connecting that thought to say that the argument of a novel is belief. she also refers to the work of novel as "seduction," which is a fun way of putting it.

Smiley goes onto say that if the novelist writes to convey the experience of being, the reader reads to have her own experience of being "mirrored back to her."

and now we get into style, and my brain has broken. she poses that style creates the ontological construct. and she admits, as all good writing teachers must, that style is something that can be neither defined nor taught, and must be discovered by the writer throughout the course of their writing life.

she refers to the journey of style as a writer "matur[ing] toward his or her most perfectly representative work" and the goal of this maturation is that "his or her style comes to express his or her quality of mind more and more eloquently."

around here is where i started crying. if you've been following me for a while, you know my whole deal is that i believe good teaching, mentoring, and editing should only to help the writer become closer to who they are and what matters most to them. i am thrilled by the concept of a "most perfectly representative work" because that's ultimately what i'm always drilling down to: how do you most clearly convey the complexity and abstractions of your own mind? how do you get that on paper, in language that can be experienced and understood by someone else? how do you respect and honor yourself and that which holds meaning to you?

although there are plenty of writing teachers out there who agree with this belief, i've never just encountered it in the wild, in a book, in different terms than i use.

as the novelist discovers their style, she says,

"He is artful; he chooses; he manipulates; he decides; he judges every word and sound pattern and character detail and twist in the action, and every one of these things is automatic, given, natural, right. The mind writing is no longer made of parts—the conscious and the subconscious, the voluntary and the involuntary; it is rather one integrated whole, focused and choosing, from all the words in the language, the single perfect one. And the closer the author comes to his (or her) true stylistic self, the more distinct he becomes from every other writer who has ever written and the more precious he becomes to the reader."

aaaand here we get to what twisted the knife.

Smiley comes to the end of the novelist's writing life, and says that a published author always has a literary persona, and that persona exists to take on all that comes with being a writer: envy, criticism, shame, embarrassment, hatred, etc. "as the author gets older and publishes more work," she says, "his or her literary persona grows larger, stronger, and more out of control."

the only antidote to the fraught life of the literary persona is to keep writing, she says, and concludes that after the death of the writer, the literary persona lives on.

"The fact is that upon death, the living person is folded into his or her literary persona and is, for better or worse, beyond resurrection."

i have a lot of reasons why this sentiment fucked me up so badly but i don't think i can write them yet. i might attempt it in this month's newsletter, but for now i need to cry for a while and maybe take a nap.

craft essay a day tag | cross-posted on AO3 | ask me something

#cead #i've gotta stop spending hours on these #but this one is really important #i'm going to be coming back to this a lot and writing it into my teaching statement

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lhostgil · 11 months

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Further continuation to the link below - Re. Classical Greek/other relevant literature + Themes in Kurt’s Story Arc in the Krakoa era of X-Books

Link to previous set:

https://www.tumblr.com/lhostgil/720380405409251328/continuation-of-the-link-belowre-prometheus?source=share

Prometheus’ Fate in Mythology

The final mention of Prometheus in mythology, is when Heracles (the Demigod son of Zeus) seeks the Golden Apples as one of his Twelve Labours. In the process of completing that task, Heracles slaughters the eagle tormenting Prometheus and frees him from his chains. During this time, Prometheus provides Heracles with valuable insight and knowledge to complete his task of obtaining the Golden Apples. After the end of that journey, Prometheus is pardoned and allowed his freedom on a condition; he is to forever wear a shackle as a reminder of his past transgressions against the gods (siding with humanity over his god-kin). Given the absence of further appearances in subsequent myths, it is generally taken that he distanced himself from the affairs of the gods...as well as that of humans.

(He disappeared into the world, never going back to be with the god-kin or providing them advice when calamity or fate finds itself on their doorstep; and is never mentioned rendering further assistance or taking any action to provide for or shelter humanity from Fate or the whims of the gods.)

As mentioned before: the original punishment was having his liver (where the seat of emotion was believed to be) pecked out daily. It essentially, is a curse of eternal hopelessness; without emotion--without the ability to have desire or motivation-- the belief of Hope (Elpis) and its power to grant respite from suffering will not present itself. [This more or less parallels with the post Judgment Day Legion of X development arc + Sins of Sinister Nightcrawlers + Sons of X]

But in all fairness, from what can be inferred of Prometheus--perhaps the greater punishment for him, is obtaining freedom only to see the humans and the world he loved + sacrificed so much for be nothing more than slaves to Fate...and the gods.

He had taken steps to prevent slavish devotion at the expense of human life from happening; but it happened all the same, with humans thinking that if they offered more than they should--they would then win the favour of the gods, and have an easy life. Forgetting that the gods did not care about their existence beyond the sustained cycle of belief, control and power that came with mindless worship. [Just look at Exodus, Mother Righteous, and even Prof X; the final one being literally described by Storm in X-Men Red #11 to act like a God-King who treats everyone like courtiers to be called on as he likes.]

He had given to them knowledge that could and would have allowed humanity to surpass the gods; the means to defy fate and create their own destiny (a future they may call their own)...something he suffered punishment for and is not shown as regretful for doing so. But humanity indulged in fate and prophecy; eschewing the light of creativity and critical thought for “glimpses of deceitful futures” when they should have pursued knowledge and attained their own form of wisdom that would allow them to be free from the “truth” that the gods told them--that fate cannot be defied, and that they should act in accordance to it; being champions of the gods for their petty little squabbles.

[The progress and prosperity shown during the Destiny of X arc is implied to be the result of Kurt’s actions--by means of his philosophy as well as his dedication to encouraging progress amongst the people. Heck, Kurt’s attitude and behaviour towards Destiny (the precog); especially when people just take her word for it without questioning further. In Immortal X-Men 7, it’s even more obvious when he’s the only one who noticed that she had been lying the whole time for her own selfish reasons...and takes it upon himself to force her to tell him a truthful vision.]

Again, all of the above is pretty self-explanatory; and honestly, when Kurt got angry in Immortal X-Men 7...it’s not Nightcrawler that’s angry. It’s the person that is Kurt who is mad that things even had to go this far; that so much death and sacrifice had to happen...not just for him but for every single person blessed with life and must choose to die, so that a handful might be saved.

Truthfully, he should have been angry a long time ago.

But the hero that is Nightcrawler cannot be angry...can he?

He is supposed to be the optimist; the happy-go-lucky one in the midst of a dangerous battle for his life, the hopeful one who shines brightly amongst the rest. He is supposed to willingly die for a world and its people who fear and hate him...and not take it personally or think: why can I not choose to live? Why must I be the one who dies for the world, killed by my own sword of hope that is made from the myriad of dreams, wishes and hopes entrusted to me by others?

#Kurt Wagner #x men comics #x-men #nightcrawler

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rachelberryy · 10 months

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Santana Lopez, Gender Performativity, and the Gaze-Death Dichotomy

For @tuiyla

This is a follow-up from this essay on Santana and Bejewelled by Taylor Swift. It also probably looks the way it does because of this post that I read recently.

(I dug out my old university notes for this, because Judith Butler is a GOAT and I felt like going big brain mode)

The top line of my notes on Butler’s gender performativity theory reads, “Gender may be naturalised and taken for granted, but it is still socially constructed and created through the repetition of everyday acts”. As far as I can tell, that isn’t a direct quote, so I’m going to presume it’s a paraphrased summary on my part. It’s the ideological descendant of an idea from Simone de Beauvoir, probably the most influential feminist philosopher of the twentieth century: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” (Incidentally, the idea of gender as a social construct in western feminist literature goes at least as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft. As per usual, TERFs don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.)

Okay. Let’s talk Santana.

Santana is an Afro-Latina lesbian, and a woman. All of those things are relevant in one way or another. We learn that when she was young, Santana was quite the tomboy, until she was socially conditioned into abandoning that particular persona. Given what we know of her family, I think it’s a reasonable assumption that her abuela had something to do with that. That delivers us to the version of Santana we get for the first season and a half of Glee. She’s a bitch, she’s aggressively sexual, she’s notoriously promiscuous, she’s a cheerleader - the feminine high school archetype. In other words, she’s both a stereotype of the idealised high school popular girl, and a whole bunch of things for which women are typically demonised.

Patriarchy, like all reactionary ideologies, is deeply idiosyncratic, almost by design, and creates these catch 22 situations where women cannot conform or rebel enough, it will hate you anyway, because that is its point. That is complicated by the fact that Santana is a fictional character (and one created by a team of male writers, at that), and therefore is also a construct of the male gaze without any agency of her own. This is doubly true for Santana, who starts out as a side character whose first proper story is as Puck’s ‘woman on the side’, and whose second proper story is sleeping with Finn.

The whole thing is a mess of contradictions, an ill-fitting mess of female stereotypes. Slut, bitch, queen bee (once Quinn is deposed). She’s the opposite end of the ‘fucked up ways in which patriarchy constructs female sexuality’ spectrum to Quinn. She’s also, as we later find out, completely fucking miserable. She’s acting, all the time, allowing the only emotions that slip through the cracks of her walls to express themselves as anger. It’s all, you guessed it, a performance. A version of her that didn’t exist until society forced it to. Those aspects of her - so many of them distinctly gendered - are entirely constructed, against her actual nature.

ii.

And then she quits the Cheerios, realises that she’s a lesbian, and begins to deconstruct herself. Glee is an exceptionally manic show, with so little time afforded to monologues by anyone not named Will Schuester. And yet, at the end of Sexy, Santana is given quite a lengthy one, explaining and exploring her character up to that point. (I can think of one other single moment where the pacing of Glee gives Santana specifically a second to breathe: the pause in the middle of RHI/SLY.) The promiscuity, the bitchiness, the anger at the world. The knives turned out so that they don’t cut inside. So much repressed self-loathing.

Part of the reason that sapphicism broadly and lesbianism in particular are such an affront to patriarchy is because they don’t abide by the rules of the game. In other words, it challenges the way in which patriarchy has determined that womanhood and femininity should be performed. That doesn’t mean, however, that it isn’t a performance, if only because, within Butler’s framework, performing and lying are not the same thing.

As I explained in the previous essay, Prom Queen, conceptually and functionally, is about gender roles in a lot of ways. Kurt bucks gender norms with his outfit choice, by embracing the prom queen title, and by dancing with Blaine at the end of the episode. Quinn, in her desperation to be popular, and validated, and feminine, chases the prom queen crown ruthlessly, because it’s the ultimate prize for a popular girl. Again, like the cheerleading, it’s one of the classic high school archetypes. The whole idea of prom king and queen is so aggressively gendered, obviously. It’s binary, and heteronormative, and rooted in about seventeen different forms of social hierarchy. It’s gender performance taken to the extreme.

The conclusion of Santana’s storyline in that episode is her reconciliation with Brittany, and Brittany telling her that part of why she lost was because people could tell she was hiding something. Exactly who and how many people knew about Santana’s sexuality and when they knew it is something the show can never quite seem to be able to make its mind up on (side eyes at Finn Hudson), but the conclusion in this moment seems to be that the performance has, to some degree, gone awry. Because what use is a performance if nobody believes it? In that moment, it’s Santana’s worst fears about being punished for her transgression come to life - she is performing femininity incorrectly, and therefore she is denied the title that represents patriarchy’s feminine ideal.

iii.

Santana comes out is outed early in season 3, and we finally meet the person who has probably shaped her character - and her performance - more than anybody else we hadn’t met to that point (so, basically, more than anyone but Brittany). Alma Lopez. Abuela.

With some of the crumbs we’re offered up to that point, I don’t think it’s too unreasonable to see Alma’s treatment of Santana to be emotionally abusive - and this is only doubled down upon by her reaction to Santana coming out to her. It’s pretty explicitly stated that Alma is one of the main reasons that Santana is as vicious as she is. In other words, she shaped the performance. She’s clearly a pretty big female role model in Santana’s life, which is why the rejection hurts as much as it does.

The Glee subreddit is home to a wide variety of deeply stupid opinions. That might seem slightly mean, but one can only read so many defences of Finn Hudson objectively bad actions before one becomes slightly cynical. One opinion I’ve seen bandied about on there that I usually don’t have much time for is that Alma herself is a deeply repressed lesbian, largely stemming from the fact that Alma’s main issue with Santana’s sexuality seems to be that she’s willing to live it openly. Its slight difference from the usual ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ line. I do think it’d be interesting to touch on it here, though. Santana, in many ways, learnt her performance from Alma, which is why her open embrace of her sexuality here - after so much angst and drama - is such an act of defiance, and that’s only doubled with this particular reading of Alma’s reaction.

iv.

While we’re on the subject of Santana’s family background, I’d like to talk briefly on the stereotyping of women of colour in particular, and the way that intersection plays into the idea of gender performativity. Santana’s race and ethnicity are a little ambiguous in certain ways. She refers to Mexican heritage, and Alma has a Dominican flag in her home, if I remember correctly. However, since it’s never explicitly stated otherwise, I’m going to run with the idea that Santana is Afro-Latina, like Naya herself was.

Santana, particularly in her initial presentation (read: performance), very much fits into some of the stereotypes often assigned to Latina women. She’s sexually aggressive and promiscuous. She has a ‘fiery’ personality type. (I’m not overly fond of that word, especially in this context, but I think that’s really kind of the point.) As she says herself, ‘My job here is to look hot.’ Of course, that line can be read shallowly, because I really don’t think Ryan Murphy or any of the lead Glee writers thought that deeply about these things, but most of this essay relies on Death of the Author theory and my reading far more into this story than its creators conceived. It also speaks to Santana’s lack of agency, both in and meta to the narrative itself. She also is hot but w/e

A worthy point of comparison here, I think, is Mercedes, who of all the main characters is probably denied agency the most; who is so infrequently allowed to be much more than a foil to Rachel, both by the writers and, perhaps more depressingly, by much of the fandom, particularly back in Glee’s original heyday. She is also frequently desexualised, again by both the writers and sections of the fandom. There is probably an essay to be written on the variety of reasons that Quinn (thin and white) is read as a lesbian and Mercedes (fat and black) is often read as asexual or earnest in her religious reasons for her celibacy when Quinn’s canon reasons are basically the same. I don’t think all of those reasons stem from those differences, and I definitely don’t want to criticise people for sexuality headcanons that offer them representation - because an asexual, fat, black woman would be kind of revolutionary, if indeed that was what Mercedes was. I also really don’t think I - a white person with half a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a Sociology A Level taught by a person for whom I once had to define intersectionality - am the person best suited to write that essay.

Which brings us back to Santana, and the ways in which her ethnicity impact her performance of gender, especially in the first two seasons when that performance is inauthentic. Death of the Author is, again, critical here - and I’m going to talk more about that at the end - but so is Gaze theory and Santana’s multi-layered lack of agency. As with all of the people of colour on Glee, Santana’s race and ethnicity are often ignored until it’s comedically convenient. I’m not saying the jokes don’t always work - Sam’s ‘Quinn once had sex with a Latina lesbian - learned that in glee club!’ comes to mind (I think part of why that works is that it’s one of the only times that it’s explicitly shown that homophobes are often deeply racist as well) - but I think that is notable that that’s often the only time it’s ever seen as worth mentioning. Santana, though played by a woman of colour in Naya, is ultimately a construct of the white men who created her, and it is through their Gaze that she exists. She has no agency in the real world, because she’s a fictional construct, and a distinct lack of agency within the narrative as a queer woman of colour.

So how does all of this relate to gender performativity theory? Said theory might be pithily summarised thus: “Gender is something we do, not something we are.” (I promise I do have a degree, I’m not just copying buzzy phrases from the inside cover of a sociology textbook lmao.) This, then, might fairly easily be mapped onto other socially constructed categories of being. So, how does one do their gender, or race, or ethnicity, or sexuality, when one has no agency of one’s own, when one is entirely a construct of the Gaze of others? When the puppet strings of the performance are juggled and manipulated entirely by someone outside the self? Ironically enough, things become even more of a performance, in multiple ways a construct. Santana the character is constructed, in the same way Santana the person, the queer woman of colour, is. Which is, of course, why critical literary analysis is such an apropos way to explore these ideas, because everything is a constructed performance anyway. And, in this way, we see how Santana’s character is flattened, whether it’s in the vaguely afterthought-like quality to any consideration of her ethnicity, or the wholesale ignoring of her blackness, or the fact that Santana the character, as opposed to Santana the person, is herself a construct.

And then the author dies. More on that in a bit.

Santana has parallels with a lot of characters. Quinn is the obvious one, which is very well-trodden ground analytically speaking - narrative foils, both craving popularity because they can’t just up and admit that they want to be loved, both very gay and very repressed, both in love with Rachel - and season 2 makes Santana’s parallels with Dave quite clear. There are also certain parallels present with Kurt, though - and it’s not just because they’re the two principal queer characters - the two token McKinley gays, as someone put it once.

The relevant mirror here is on expression. Kurt starts out as very experimental, as far as his dress-sense is concerned. It’s also fairly androgynous. “Fashion has no gender,” he tells us. Over the course of the series, however, his fashion becomes more conventionally masculine - not overly so, but certainly more so than at the beginning. In Santana, this shift is even more pronounced. The main windows we get into her fashion is late season 2 and then season 4 and 5 in New York, and while it’s not exactly like her season 2 choices were all that transgressive, they were certainly more experimental than her tight dresses from later on. Now, this isn’t me hating on this style - because girl looks good - nor is it me saying that lesbians can’t adopt a more conventionally feminine sense of style. I would hope that goes without saying. Regardless, I think there’s something worth discussing here where agency is concerned.

Because, of course, Santana isn’t a real person - a real woman and a real lesbian; she’s a construct of a team of male writers. I think the easy explanation here is that the producers got lazy, on a whole range of fronts where costuming was concerned. And that is, at least to an extent, a reasonable line of thinking. To gesture to a fairly straightforward example, after a point they just started having Rachel... mostly just dress like Lea. However, I think there’s a more interesting lens of analysis to be had here where Santana is concerned when we recall that scene where her mother informs us that she was a tomboy growing up. The three points we have, really, are that snapshot of Santana as a small child, season 2, and season 4-5. In season 4 in particular, Santana is portrayed as feeling generally directionless and unsure of herself; of where her path is headed now that she exists outside the rigid hierarchies of McKinley High. And, so, her performance of femininity is exaggerated. It’s a continuation of what the cheerleader role represented for her earlier on: burying herself in the typical female role to hide from internal conflict.

I think there’s also more to be said, at this stage, on the way we can see this in Quinn as well. In season 1, she’s the church girl: babydoll dresses, sundresses, and, of course, her Cheerio uniform - something that she uses as a wall of self defence in a similar way to Santana. In season 2, her wardrobe is largely a more mature version of that - she’s been through the ringer, and being homeless and having a child have forced her to grow up, but, as we see in her determination to be Head Cheerleader again, she’s still desperately clinging to the version of herself from Before. The biggest departure is obviously Skank!Quinn, where she briefly leans fully into a more androgynous punk look before adopting, again, a fractionally more androgynous version of her season 2 appearance, namely the addition of her blazers - which might be read as something as a symbol of male soft social power. Her story in season 3 obviously continues to bring the angst, but it’s also a period of self-actualisation. The most traditionally feminine we see her presenting after that is in her brief appearances in season 5, where it is pretty explicitly established that she’s behaving inauthentically. It’s all fairly on the nose, especially on that latter point. Obviously we can’t map that onto Santana directly, but I think it’s an interesting lens of analysis, given that, as I established at the beginning of this section, the two characters parallel each other pretty strongly in a whole smorgasbord of ways.

vi.

I’ve been dancing around the whole ‘death of the author’ bit for a while now, so let’s get into it. The post that I linked at the top of this essay describes DOTA as 'once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text’, and I think that’s a reasonable definition to work with here. In other words, the fact that this essay takes Santana as a person with agency of her own, outside of her creators’ intentions, is not necessarily incompatible with my argument that we might use the fact that she’s a fictional character to explore the idea of social constructs, because the former exists outside of the latter. Santana is a construct of fiction, and the author is dead. The two lenses of analysis go hand in hand, inverted as they may seem.

I don’t think it’s too controversial a statement to say that Glee isn’t a particularly tightly written piece of fiction. (Maybe it is controversial on the subreddit. Shit’s wild over there.) Santana is no exception to that. Her character is messy and inconsistent, and the writing varies in its willingness to explore her depth. It would be trite to say that within that uncharted depth lies the DNA of a brilliant character. I also don’t think that that’s entirely accurate, because Santana Lopez is brilliant. The brilliance, which I think I’ve explored quite widely in this essay, is in the margins, in the unsaid, the unexplored. It’s in the performance. Reading between the lines, we see the carefully constructed image that Santana herself created. That is the foundation upon which the character is built. And from that, we can analyse her in myriad ways - along with the myriad ways in which she is, herself, a constructed performance, both within and outside of the narrative, constantly deconstructing and reconstructing itself.

The author is dead. Long live Lopez.

#finally omg #this kind of ended up being a collection of Thoughts more than an essay but i at least tried to tie it all up at the end there #anyway i hope this doesn't feel too pseudointellectual lmao #and i hope you enjoy slash find this insightful or interesting #glee #santana

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