#thought soup

[knotty-et-al]

Quick doodle from wednesday [2023/10/25]

[i-swear-its-only-ironical]

So, I did Latin for 7 years. WAIT, STOP HEAR ME OUT!

I did my final school exam on Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and the one thing that significantly shaped my view on media was Ovid's understanding of love.

When we think about romance and romantic love today, we tend to think of it as a saving grace, something that completes you. Falling in love in fiction implies a positive bond, something that will eventually help you. There are whole subgenres on the idea that "Love can save you"; "The Power of Love" is a pretty famous trope, right?

Now, Ovid also saw falling in love as a strong but, alas not always one that saves you. In almost every myth he reinterpreted in his "Metamorphoses" love creates - but only through destruction. Here, love is a force of nature, something even the gods aren't immune against. Love is rapturous and terrifying, more an uncontrollable forest fire than a tender candle flame. Love is complicated, the very act of falling so big that no one can even measure the effects it will have on the individual, the community, the world.

One of my favourite scenes in the poetic cycle tells the story about Apollo arguing with Cupido (son of Venus, basically her right hand). It goes like this:

Young Apollo just slew a beast. Standing on it, bloody bow in hand, he spots Cupido and brags: "Look at my skill, my power. I am the element tipping scales in wars, only one hit with my arrow is enough to kill the most gigantic monsters. What can you do with your weak bow, your mediocre arrows? Love, this feeble thing? Forever I will be the better archer between the both of us."

And Cupido, angry, just smiles: "My arrow may not kill any beast in one strike, but it'll strike you. And it'll destroy.

And it does. Apollo gets hit by an arrow and immediately falls in love with the nymph Daphne. Cupido also hits her with an arrow, not one for love but for eternal hate.

Long story short: Apollo runs after her, she begs her father, a river, to help her. He transforms her into a laurel tree, causing Apollo's heart to break. This is why he gets portrayed with a laurel crown in mythological pictures. He wears it to never forget his first love.

This, btw, is one of a gazillion stories where Apollo falls in love with someone and that person dies, gets transformed into flora or eternally hates him. Just because he messed with Cupido once (1)! Cupido and his mother Venus are incredibly petty and power hungry. Ovid's message is rather clear: do not fuck with love! Do not underestimate it! Don't try controlling the forest fire, you will burn yourself.

Love and the loss of it, in Ovids works, is more often than not associated with pain, sometimes implied to be worse than death, sometimes implied to be better than heaven. It creates, it destroys, it lets you learn and fall and stand up again. Love isn't something positive (or negative) - it just is. And you have to deal with that, whether you like it or not.

And I love the implications with this conceptualisation, because love hurts although it may be right, it may be cute, it may be essential. "Uwu such a cute romance sto-" NO. Cute? Love isn't cute, love is bigger than your tiny, short, pathetic life. Love is uncontrollable. Love is chaos.

Sooo, this is a fandom post after all, so I'll get to Stolitz now. If you're just here for me fangirling about Ovid (love that guy, we stan someone that knows his metrics), you can check out now. Hope you had fun reading!

If you think about love like Ovid things about it, isn't it oh-so-understandable why Blitzø fears it so much? It ties you to someone, you float in an ocean and everywhere you look, you see only horizon and waves. And for someone that only has experience with how love destroys (flashback with Fizz birthday, also whatever the fuck happened with his twin sister Barbie) falling of course feels like fucking drowning. You try to act normal, as if there would be normal ground under your feet. You don't try to swim (why bother? Never worked out anyway) and because you don't even try, you start sinking, choking on your own infatuation, with no safe haven, no anchor, no land in sight. You're alone, lungs filling with water, slowly losing consciousness while the sounds of the earth above you are getting quieter, the world desaturated of its colour.

"Are you afraid to love people, Blitzy?" - Of course he is? Why wouldn't he? Are you afraid of forest fires?

And to add on that: he feels completely alone in his own conscious, his emotions for Stolas. Because like hell he'd be vulnerable in front of his friends or crush. He's way to deep anyway, everything is dark blue. No one will hear you and even if: you would not want them to listen. Blitzø wants to drown in silence, not having a say in if he drowns at all because, like I said, love is way too big for you to control.

Similar with Stolas, although his view on the fire isn't that pessimistic. He knows how powerful emotions are and doesn't even try to contain them. At first, he almost revels in the waves. Did you ever swim at night, the stars above you multiplied by the water below you? There is nothing but the waves and the stars and the sky. There is nothing, there is everything. Stolas likes loving, he sees beauty and contempt in it. But eventually he sees that there isn't land in sight, that you alone cannot survive this vastness of nature also.

You cannot control the Ocean, cannot control the forest fire, but you can try to coordinate. This is the only way to survive this terrifying ordeal called love.

So he swims, tries to swim at least and he looks for Blitzø, realising they'll both go down with this relationship if they won't find the other between the waves. And he swims and swims, screaming, while Blitzø drowns him out. He cannot hear him, because he cannot accept that pretending there is land under your feet won't magically make the ocean disappear. He'd need to swim, but what good did that ever cause him?

Ok that's all. Thank you. :)

[frogwithapen]

Welcome to

Frog's Metaphors.

Brought to you by Shower Brain (that bitch) and yesterday's missed maths exam...

Let's talk about Thought Nose Soup.

First, thoughts. Thoughts should be solid things, easy to grab. Like marbles. So you've got a bunch of thought marbles rolling around in your brain, doing their thing.

Most of the time, thoughts are just doing their own thing. Some of you might have will ordered minds. Let's imagine that as a running track, all the marbles in their lane. Other minds can be more like bumper cars, thoughts colliding into each other and sometimes sparking new thoughts. Writers know that one.

(it must be nice, having an edge to your thought holding pen)

When you want to focus on a thought, you pluck it out of the holding pen. Maybe you hold it up to light, examine it, smash it open to see what's inside.

Interrogate it to learn its intentions.

Cradle it like a flame that you need to grow.

Eventually, though, you're probably gonna drop it in a marble run and follow it until a conclusion is reached.

Multiply you by 1 and a process has occurred.

Just drop it in one of these and watch it go.

(idle musings about dinner go in, a craving for beef Stroganoff comes out)

Me, I'm ADHD, so my run is more like those marble race videos with the multiple at once and the randomisation elements that help change marble order when changing direction. Sometimes a marble gets left behind or lost. Sometimes some arsehole comes from offscreen to chuck in some extras just because.

Sometimes the thought i forgot up the track comes in like a wrecking ball and destroys the whole thing...

(You were not that big when i forgot about you)

Which brings us to thought soup! The phenomena where the entire apparatus attempts to liquify!!

Hip hip, hooray!

So now half the thought marbles in your holding pens have vanished. The half remaining have turned to gel and are sinking into the custard of your brain. And you're there trying to gently scoop them out with a fork.

Once you do get them out and into the run, they're sluggish and squishy. And the run itself is half melted, so they don't always come out where they're supposed to.

Or at all.

And then there's times you've been suffering a cold all through study week, forget how you planned to finish this, and have started wondering about making meatball soup...

(the last image i had prepared earlier)

...The cold induced snot is what turns thought soup into thought nose soup.

[weprovide--leverage]

Every episode of Redemption the plan seems to be to get an Engineered Public Confession from the evil person. From the military guy over the walkies to his workers now to debra over her livestream it seems... less thought out?

[applebutterfemme]

i was looking through some of my old google docs earlier, and wow i have written a lot of beautiful things about people who are no longer in my life anymore. that sounds sad at first, and i did get struck with a funny little mix of nostalgia and sadness for a minute. but then, getting deeper into descriptions of moments passed and things tasted and smelled, words shared, all i felt was awash with love. love for myself and for humanity in general. because yes it’s true, that we as people self sabotage and push others away and sometimes we tear apart our relationships. but we also love. we love so deeply that we take time to pour it onto paper. we hold each other and dance in kitchens and sometimes we know just what to say. and that’s beautiful. that’s worth trying again and loving again, reaching out to others again and getting to know yourself again for. 

[chaos-otter]

White privilege is the fact that two men, one white and the other black, both released from prison for the same crime, at the same time, do not have the same job prospects.

White privilege is the assumption that black on black crime is real, but no one calls it white on white crime when a white person kills another white person.

White privilege is calling poc that are born in America "[blank] American," but white people get to just be called "American" as long as they don't have an accent.

[sopuu]

back to my undertale roots

[littleogreboii]

i see a lot of people talk about edward being disabled in fma, but it's less often talked about how alphonse is also disabled. i think it's partially because alphonse doesn't experience physical pain like edward so for a majority of the series, he's not having any of those kind of symptoms, but he is still disabled. also because alphonse's experiences are unique. like you don't see ant walking, talking suits of armour in real life (unless they're piloted by a human being physically inside them) and in world, there are about 3 others like alphonse).

alphonse is dependent on edward's survival to function. after fighting scar for the first time, alphonse is literally in pieces. he can't walk or anything until edward is in a position to fix him. similarly his body is dependent on nutrients from edward's body. like there's the point towards the end where edward gets impaled and alphonse collapses. furthermore, these periods where alphonse collapses start to become debilitating towards the end of the series and massively alter his daily living.

also, alphonse constantly talks about how upsetting it is for him to not feel any physical sensations. yeah, he's not feeling physical pain, but he's also not feeling the warmth of a fire, the sun on his face, or the fluffiness of the cats he keeps petting. he talks a lot about not being able to eat or sleep, and how there's a lot of foods he wants to try.

there's another thing that highlighted by edward at one point. alphonse's body doesn't regenerate at all. the parts scar destroys are gone forever; edward stretches out the metal that alphonse has left to repair his body. and obviously human beings don't regrow limbs, but imagine if your skin didn't ever heal over a cut. how long would your body last?

also alphonse gets told several times that his body is great throughout the series, and he literally argues against it every time, because to him it is shit. like he is missing some of his senses just for some supposedly immortal body that isn't even immortal.

even once alphonse gets his own body back, the amount of physical therapy the boy has to go through. his body has essentially been doing nothing and only receiving what nutrients it can get from edward for years. by the end of the series, he's still using a cane as a walking aid. it's unknown whether he requires that cane for the years to come, but for at least a period of time he requires a mobility aid. I don't know enough to say what effect muscle decay from inactivity and severe malnourishment during a major portion of his teenage years would have long term.

[mihotose]

funniest line you can give a character who has decided he is a feminist now

[taxinealkaloids]

behold hitherto unposted htn doodles! harrow+her terrible mentor, harrow+her terrible roommate

[knotty-et-al]

"Rats in a lab coat - twisted turning / turning the twist - entangled loopholes of a (non-)sensical set of conditions"

WIP

[2023/08/12]

[i-swear-its-only-ironical]

One of my very specific favourite tropes is drug withdrawal fics. Especially some really bad psychologically addictive stuff like opiates, e.g. Heroin or Oxycontin. Oxycontin is especially wild because, like, do you know how many people get addicted to that because they got it prescribed as a pain reliever from some doctor?? I mean probably-y'all probably know but isn't that scary? It seems so mundane, so very possible for everyone to fall down into that hole while thinking it would be alright because a professional allowed you to take it. And if you eventually find out you are craving the pain reliever more than initially thought it is too late and you realise you are fucked.

Withdrawal fics are great. It has all, the angst, the uncontrollable puking, the self-loathing because ultimately you always feel like you are the creator of your own misery although there always is the underlying reason you started which mostly wasn't your fault, the deep rooted desire of having someone taking care of you at your lowest mental and physical point and not loathing you for your biggest regrets, the dramatic possibility of relapsing, the constant trying to break the cycle, the hope that the future won't be as fucked as the past might have been, the fucking angst. Like guys, y'all are missing out on withdrawal fics.

[galedekarios]

seeing a post that basically confirmed the obvious disparity in content made me think more about a scene i would have liked to see with gale and that i've been thinking about for a while now.

i always felt a bit sad that his condition is so often treated as a joke by the fandom and to a lesser extent by the game itself. i always thought that this is partially down to the fact that we don't truly get so see gale actively be in pain due to his condition, other than brief glimpses and hints:

we do hear the urgency in his voice when he explains when and why he needs an artefact and the relief in his voice when the protag chooses to help him.

we see it, too, when he is afflicted by the arcane hunger condition:

we get glimpses of it when he consumes an artefact:

he mentions it, too, in his dialogues, but it's very much downplayed by gale or phrased in such a way that is meant to overplay it with humour, or perhaps even to distance himself from it by using metaphors:

that is until we actually get to see it through his eyes, if only for the briefest of moments:

*Its teeth, its claws, it's unstoppable as it digs through and becomes part of you. And gods, it is ever-hungry...*

gale also has an idle animation where he--quite often--reaches up to touch the orb, perhaps because it flares with pain, like an old wound is wont to do:

(gif by @bladeofavernus)

from the last conversation we have with gale, and after catching all of these little moments of things he says or does with how the orb affects him, we learn that consuming the magic from artefacts no longer has any effect at all. the only solution that tara and he were able to find no longer works:

it would scare him and imbalance him, and it would finally destabilise the orb, make it more volatile.

but what happens in the game after that? the orb becoming volatile enough for the artefacts to no longer have an effect has no consequences at all: you are able to do the tiefling party, all quests in the underdark, the entirety of the grymforge, and, should you choose to do so, the entirety of the mountain pass and rosymorn monastery without an incident at all or any mention of the condition itself/any discomfort or fear it might cause.

there's no urgency here, no follow-up, to what the narrative set up... and then we meet deus ex elminster and the orb is stabilised, and the urgency that came before literally is handwaved out of existence.

what i would have liked instead to happen--or at least to bridge the gap between the artefacts no longer working and elminster stabilising it to be used on mystra's behalf--is the following:

i think it would have been nice to have a scene with gale where we do get to see--on a much smaller scale--him losing control over the orb, have the protag and the companions see what he is trying desperately to keep contained within himself, what gnaws at him, what continues to haunt him.

it could happen perhaps after a particular gruelling and intense fight--and there are enough of that in the underdark and at the mountain pass. it could have been a ! conversation, providing both friendship and romance content.

have the orb act up after expending so much energy to manipulate the weave to the fullest of his abilities, have gale manage to reign it in, but barely, show that it takes a lot of power and effort for him to do so.

that it hurts, with none of gale's metaphors to hide behind or jokes to play it off.

have the audience truly see the gravity of what he is going through.

[asavt]

Idea that wouldn't leave my head, like many others

[applebutterfemme]

i do not acknowledge winter; it’s too depressing. i prefer to think of it as fall pt. 2, holiday edition. 

[vieramars]

TMA Gerry doodles eyes on everything he owns, tmagp Gerry doodles smiley faces that are accidentally vaguely unsettling.