#thoughts and musings

[angryjewishcockroach]

One of my favorite things about Judaism is that Maimonides writes in his Eight Levels of Tzedakah that anonymous forms of donation are superior to forms of donation where the giver is known to the recipient, which plays in nicely with my desire to avoid the mortifying ordeal of being known.

[eardefenders]

Ok so I listened to SHOS pts 1 and 2 and I just have thoughts about the whole meta around mentioning Moriarty.

Because the podcast plays John and Sherlock as real. As if all of this is actually happening now in our world. It puts any listener with even a passing knowledge of Canon in the very intense position of knowing what's going to happen in a broad sense. We can see how John and Sherlock are doomed by the narrative.

We hold our breath as Sherlock talks about bodies of water though especially waterfalls.

We wonder how John will feel in the future about singing "don't go chasing waterfalls"

We scream as we hear James Moriarty get a shoutout.

But we can't warn either of them what lies ahead. If we try, they won't see it. It will be ignored or dismissed. There's also a sense that we cannot cross that line because it would also change the narrative and we can't because it's already literally been written.

Every listener has been forced into the role of Cassandra with this podcast and it is fascinating.

[angrybubbles]

You ever think about how Louis never asked about Claudia's past before she was made? It might just be a Doylist -that didn't matter for the plot- purpose, but I think it's so... interesting.

She started writing down her diary after she was turned.

Louis never asked, not that he cares to recollect.

She only makes vague references to it, and they're quite painful.

The only one who would know is Lestat. Lestat would have seen glimpses of her life when he turned her

(Or Madeline, if they decided to share that much. We'll never know.)

[im-a-vertebrate]

Hey so I’ve been thinking about Fantasy High and the religion of Spyre (because I like history and theology and at heart I just wanna add worldbuilding to stuff). In the world of Fantasy High, I think it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to assume that Helioism and Sol-worship within Solace has its own church administration. It would probably be safe to assume this is effectively an extension of sorts for the Highcourt Church of Sol (and Helio). However, the stuff that’s happened in Fantasy High over the last few years is really bad for the Church of Sol and Helio. Within about three years:

They lost their chosen one

The big man (Sol) got knocked out and heaven was run by a mad wizard principal for just under a year

The Night Yorb happened

Two deities that Sol really didn’t want coming back did, in fact, come back

Galicaea had started being worshipped as both wolf and woman, whereas I’m pretty sure Sol (and Fallinel) would prefer her without the wolf

Bobby Dawn got run out of Solace because he’s a sleazy scumbag

So it’s not looking great for them. The likely solution that the elders or whoever runs the theocracy would attempt to tighten their grip on power to make sure Sol does not slip as Number 1 god.

Which is why I’m proposing this potential scenario:

The Solesian Church of Sol secede from Highcourt’s control.

They could form their own version of Helioism and Sol-worship, probably with a more open approach. This would probably make more sense for the kind of place that Solace is, as opposed to the gatekeeper-style governance of Highcourt. A Solesian Church would likely support gay marriage, for example, and would be less aggressive towards other religions.

I think Buddy Dawn would definitely be a member, because I don’t think he’d split the same way Kristen did, although he might have a few bumps along the road vis-a-vis Bakarath. But as he’s one of the only Helioic characters who I think would want to reform the Church (after a bit though, because he needs to work through some stuff), he would be interesting to see in a position of power within an independent Solesian Church. Especially once he learns more about how Highcourt really works and what his grandfather has done.

Now what would Highcourt do in this scenario…

[otherworldseekers]

I've seen so many people express disinterest in Dawntrail by saying something along the lines of "there's nothing in it for me". And I'm going to be honest, I don't really understand this sentiment.

When I began playing ARR, I didn't know anything about the world or the people or the characters or why my own character should care about any of it. I was set down in an unfamiliar world and expected to just walk around doing generic quests waiting for something interesting to happen to my character. With Dawntrail, the WoL is a well established character with a characteristic love of travel, discovery, and the world and people at large. The WoL is traveling with well known companions, and has clear goals to pursue while getting to explore a whole new continent. Comparatively, there is far more "in it for us" in DT than there was at the beginning of ARR. (Unless you played 1.0, but the majority of players have not.)

You never have investment at the beginning of a story, whether it's a game or book or movie or anything else. You become invested over the course of the story, as you learn more about the world and characters. Going into Dawntrail, we have the advantage, first, of knowing that the devs have an excellent track record of creating complex characters, fascinating worlds and compelling stories. And second, we have the advantage of having been shown a great deal of the world we are about to enter.

Personally, I have found all of the images and information about Tural hint at some amazing worldbuilding. It's a completely different kind of place from what we're used to and I find that very exciting. I love diverse regions and intricate cultures and getting to explore them in game. If you don't... well I have to wonder why you're playing this game.

Similarly, if you've developed your WoL to be someone contradictory to their canon characterization, someone who doesn't like to travel and experience new places and people and who would not be interested in Wuk Lamat and Krile's goals... Well, it's kind of on you if you don't feel there's anything "in it for you" in this expansion. Because it's clearly been purposefully crafted to appeal to the canon WoL, the one that SE is telling their story about.

And while I completely understand the desire to develop characters that deviate from the msq and experience the world of FFXIV in other ways, I don't quite understand playing the game but not wanting to experience the story as the devs have made it. You can so easily do both.

Getting to experience the devs' story, to explore their world and meet their characters, is always what's most exciting to me about new expansions. I can enjoy the story for what it is and then decide how I want to apply it to my WoL's development. And I appreciate how much work they put into creating this experience for me and the fact that they do encourage us to create alongside them.

Of course, it's not wrong to feel that there's "nothing in it for you" in this new expansion. But they've been very clear about the fact that this is the beginning of a new story full of unfamiliar elements. So I'm just not sure what some people expected.

[lawlieisinsane]

being insane about stars, number 3, thought it'd be fun to talk about tidbits of my experience and have it recorded somewhere.

I streamed the game! If you'd like to give me some support or watch those moments I'm about to talking about for yourself, here ya go:

Half of these are also things I thought but forgor to mention on stream

Anyway!! In no particular order...

- I loved Mirabelle from the start!!! She just looks so CUTE

- I thought the change god statue was change (money) and thought the statue was gonna give me money until someone started saying about it

- I did NOT know it was a timeloop game. My friend and beloved gifted me isat so I just thought oh how cute-- what the fuck why. No I didn't read the steam page. No I got no spoilers LOL

- so I got scared shitless when I looped the first time!!! Then got scared shitless AGAIN with the Head Housemaiden, the song changed and I went WHAT THE FUCK. WHAT!!!!

- when I saw Loop I instantly fell in love. Baby! Also immediately thought haha you're weird, are you hiding something? Looks like a funny person who's mean/funny to avoid feelings, hmm

- when loop asked who or what do you think I am!!!, I grabbed the both funniest and most logical explanation I thought, "me", but then thought hm .. you're a star, you're probably my wish or a deity who thought oh damn that guys pathetic lemme go help him. I didn't expect to be RIGHT

- I kept making lists to send to my friend about where I should go cuz my memory's SHIT, and in all those I included a bullet point of "strangle loop" lmfao

- first time I saw the island things, I looked at Siffrin and thought oh are you from there? And then the dialogue about his bg, I thought oh you had trauma and can't remember, didn't you?

- Thankfully friend also told me to interact with coin to trigger The Incident. I triggered that, I THINK after a perfect loop, inside the boulangerie, staring at the croissants on the table, and it was also the first thing I did on the stream that day. When the dialogue said "You run off from the boulangerie", and later went back from fading to black and I was still there I thought HEY we're still here tho-- oh.

- I don't remember if my friend said to talk to Loop after this (think yes but I forgor), but since I love them, I was anyway I just had a break down, Loop look at my cool coin-- then things happened and I went I JUST GOT HERE WHY ARE YOU SO MEAN TO ME

- Change god interaction traumatized me! I'm never speaking with them again

- I kept saying Loop could be my therapist instead

- why's the king waist so grababble. Fr. Weird guy

- at the start I NEEDED to give flower to king, thinking if he gets some love and a snack everything will be fine! I didn't know you actually could, friend told me later

- i follow the dev on bluesky so I saw a post of them holding a Bonnie figurine and though oh haha cute!! grabbing them like a hamster!! i didn`t kNOW

- the king hides snacks in the pillars and also hes probably crying because the party stepped on his hair in the door for the third floor. Or because he's hungry. or because he's pathetic. Or all of the above.

- kept calling the starry door the "loop door", it's theirs I don't make the rules

- Messing around with my friend, apparently I kept saying sus things like "you can be both Loop and Siffrin!", or "if it's the wish that caused this why don't I just wish to stop it. Like get me out of here thanks", or "is king my dad or something. who made me."

- siffrin and the other siffrins Mal du pays should start a band and start dancing

- I love odile. She's my third fav, first being loop then Siffrin

- "this is the house of leaves" i said, then said "nah actually this is the house of can't leaves get me out of here". I'd make siffrin read house of leaves, honestly

- kept insisting to do most playthrugs without skipping so I saw a lot of cool internal thoughts and stuff!

- my funniest joke was probably "hey odile check out how hard I can dissociate" on her quest and skipped the entire dialogue

- there are 19 birds in Dormont. :)

- did not get a bunch of special dialogues because i cannot be mean to my pixel family

- I did not actually defeat loop. I let them get me instead, they were always my fav I couldn't do it lmao

- when loop was teaching the secret hand shape and said "put your finger next to your mouth" or something i actually bit my finger and then the realization hit and i OH YOU LITTLE BITCH!!!!!!!!!! i love and hate you.

- later on I convinced myself that Loop was “a star”, and “my wish”, and I still didn’t KNOW

- once Siffrin stopped saying peeou, peeou! I started doing it for them because I gotchu buddy I’ll get your whimsy back

- on the tutorial I gave the wrong answers purposefully to see the answers and then the game gave me a helpful little chart and I thought “holy fuck I’m being berated, how dare you”, but little did I know that ended up being very very helpful to me because I forger easily

- I actually did destroy the king with one good crit from Siffrin one time. It was funny.

- I also counted the rocks. I forgor how many there are, but almost twice as many as there are birbs

- jingle jangle bell pendant is my favorite souvenir ever. Ding ding!!!

some more fun things i remembered

-finished with around 50 hours, 79 loops. Siffrin actually forgor SO many of them, i swear the god i was around 40-50 and then suddenly oh woopsie loop 66, loop 69, loop 77. Id probably taken more time if it weren't for friends guiding me (i love u friends) or my worry to see through everything again and make it boring for the audience

-pretty sure i said or thought "the nostalgia sadnesses are loop shaped!! which are also Siffrin shaped!! all triangles!"

-cannot remember shit from the house even tho i did it in its entirerity many times. i still dont know places. rip.

-"oh you trapped yourself in the loops, didn't you?"

-i forgor what wish siffrin made at the start but went "I bet you wished yourself into the timeloops", then friends were asking "whats your wish siffrin", SORRY I FORGOR

-every memory i got with "you'll always remember this" message I kept saying "will I? Suspicious...~

thats all I can think for now. bye

[zaffiri-saffici]

12K words already drafted for this agathario fic. Jfc. Somebody help me; this is going to consume me.

Hopefully, I can start putting up chapters soon. I just also realized that it will be the first fic ever where I post chapter updates on a weekly or bi-weekly basis (haven't decided yet the cadence).

I definitely want to make sure I do it right, otherwise, the fact of having to go back and edit previously uploaded chapters will haunt me for life. I always catch things on a seventh and eighth review that just don't feel quite right.

I'm going to overanalyze every detail again like I did with Undone. Oh, this feeling. A gift and a curse.

[screams-in-writing]

Musings for the outcome of wotfi 24

1- Mr puzzles gets obliterated from existence via Karen (who owes smg4 a favor) or some other manner (which would make me churn out a lot more content of him to cope). I don’t think he deserves to die but Puzzles certainly needs to face some steep consequences for all his actions that his obsession led him to/what happened to others in the process of chasing that obsession.

2- Mr. Puzzles finally realizes that he screwed up in regards to Meggy, while also losing the amusement park (manefesting Mario somehow destroying the engine room b/c that’s seems to be what sustains the place) and just kinda shuts down like what more can he do-somehow ends up losing a lot of abilities to render him more of less harmless.

-Secondary to the above: Mr. Puzzles loses his power by somehow turning him back into a human (pls don’t though his appeal is the tv head for me tbh).

3- Mr. Puzzles somehow ends up as the Leggy equivalent of himself and works in the meme factory as penance.

4- who’s going to use the upper floor of the smg4 castle? What’s behind the boarded door? Maybe powerless puzzles and lock him up/keep an eye on him? Like a keep your friends close, but your enemies closer kind of a deal?

5- the whole thing is Mickey and smg4 making mr puzzles hallucinate everything, when in fact it is all a movie he’s experiencing and a warning to think before acting (unlikely but amusing to think about)

6- mr. Puzzles somehow ends up having to work for Marty after everything goes down. More of a silly thing so unlikely.

Edit- 7- mr puzzles father inexplicably makes an appearance and makes things worse

[the-purvashadha]

Madeleine is surely one of the sweetest names to ever exist. It feels like a fond nickname rolled into a name that can also be used in a formal manner.

[ninichii-xcix]

There are no words in the English dictionary that can ever begin to describe the pain of missing someone that you still see everyday. How it breaks your heart to see the same person but know that they are no longer the one you once loved the most. To see eyes once filled with love now look back at you with indifference. To hear very little words from the voice that once spoke to you endlessly until you fall asleep. To feel so unloved, unseen, unheard, unimportant to a person who once held you like you’re their most prized possession, like you were the greatest miracle in their life.

[saeculasaeculorom]

hello don't mind me, i'm just thinking about shadowlach

and how karlach is sort of like a night orchid for DJ shadowheart cause she doesn't last and she will go back to the darkness that birthed her (meaning she'll either go back to avernus and never see shadowheart again or die on the docks after defeating the netherbrain)

and it has altered my brain chemistry just a lil bit

[necromastersdomainstuff]

I’m having the thought of Nokama, early in the Toa Metru days, awarding gold star stickers to the other Toa whenever they do a good because she’s falling back on her old behavior as a teacher. Whenua and Nuju immediately catch onto what she’s doing and have to sit her down and gently explain to her that she’s not a teacher anymore, she’s a Toa operating on a team of equals, and she needs to treat the others as such.

Meanwhile Matau and Onewa are just like STICKERS?? OH HELL YEAH and do whatever they think will get them as many as possible.

[angrybubbles]

Was reading some interesting IwtV adaption criticism and just had to get my thoughts out.

Is the AMC adaption of Interview with the Vampire Gothic Horror?

Yes! It still uses story-telling tropes, character tropes, moral ambiguity, sensuality, psychology, and the limits of the human experience that Gothic Horror literature uses. Everything from the isolated haunted houses (haunted by the inhabitants within,) wealthy families hiding dark secrets, to the commentary of decay, the adaption is undoubtedly Gothic Horror.

But they sanitized it!

They adapted the elements that they could. Things that were subtext have been brought to text, and things that were text have been sunk to subtext. They dramatized things to make them more interesting, and gave more attention to character development than the earlier adaptions. I won't pretend that a lot of the chillier elements of the book didn't make an appearance on screen, but the show did a great job making up for it in other forms.

Now all the show fans react to the original books like puritans!

I'm sure some do, lol. But I also really want people to understand that a lot of what Anne Rice wrote was not just Gothic Horror, it was troubling. People don't point to the sexualization of minors as a reoccurring theme for no reason, and while Gothic horror is certainly suited to that discussion and exploration, it is really troubling just how far the in-book justifications go. There's also just how imperialist, racist, sexist, and fat-phobic her ideals are, making her works troubling on those counts as well. And don't get me started on her use of druids and witches.

But people crying over the incest? That's a genre staple; if you have issues with that don't hang out with the genre. Gothic is all about anxiety and dread, fear and guilt, isolation and rot, and how those can drive a human being to their limits. It's not about loving the act of incest, it's about why characters would feel comfort in the taboo.

These new fans just don't have media literacy :/

Look, as someone very close to the end of their English-History degree, I would be careful throwing that word around. It may not mean what you think it means, because it certainly isn't supposed to be an avenue for shutting down discourse. Discourse is healthy. Different things will be interpreted in different ways. Media Literacy is being able to not only support interpretations from the text, but also to measure their implications and intention. Sometimes we'll disagree, but someone who is media literate will stop and measure new information to consider it.

Anne Rice is a very flawed author and human being. She is also probably the only one who could have ever written the Vampire Chronicles, and we'll never get something like that again. Her work is sensational, but also extremely discomforting in a way that the genre isn't able to support sometimes. Times have changed, and we can word why better now.

[cilil]

I kinda think that Mairon is the kind of Ainu who, when you meet him, draws your attention with looks more than with his voice.

That's not to say he doesn't have a lovely voice, he's still an Ainu and that fact alone probably makes it so that at least his singing voice is immeasurably beautiful and/or powerful by incarnate standards, but in my head Mairon talks in a dry, matter-of-fact, sometimes even bored kind of way (assuming of course that it's an idle conversation, he definitely screeches like a fury when he's mad and has the smooth sexy voice down for seduction).

It's just... oftentimes he talks because he has to. Remember on that note that talking and language is not the default communication method of Ainur and arguably less efficient than ósanwë which would likely bother someone like him.

As for why Mairon draws attention with his looks, well. Need I explain why I think the one called Admirable is pretty? Need I remind us that he was labeled as fair more than even Lúthien? ;)

He probably treated making a fána as yet another craft project that he wanted to be absolutely flawless and perfect and artistic (while also effective and suitable for his tasks)

[nekomimithoughts]

Lately I feel so soft and fragile, I wish there was someone in my life I could meet up for just to pet me in silence. That's all. No expectations. No secret hopes for sex or something else. No anxiety. Just a shared moment of calmness and serenity.

[otherworldseekers]

NGL I absolutely hate how so many people in the fandom assume that Hermes never did anything to try and solve his problems and find meaning in his life except making and sending out Meteion. Our characters are there for a split second of his existence but the fandom thinks what we see and learn about Hermes in Elpis is all there is. As if someone who cares as much as he does wouldn't have already tried everything he could think of to solve the discrepancy between how he and the Ancients value Created Life. As if he just suddenly one day said "I think I'd like to ask aliens about the meaning of life" rather than the more likely alternative that he has spent most of his life trying to find answers and Meteion was a last resort. Why would you assume that he never tried to seek his answers among his own people? That he couldn't find them on Etheirys, so he sought them elsewhere?

Hermes isn't crazy or extreme. He's a respected scientist. The entire point of our interactions with him is that he's at the end of his rope. It tortures him daily, how little his friends and colleagues value the life they Create. He doesn't know what else to do to ease his suffering, to make people see that they are treating life callously. He's not even depressed he's legitimately in despair. He's run out of hope. He has no choice but to look to people outside the bubble of perceived perfection the Ancients live in.