throwingbread

[throwingbread]

One Night At The Bus Stop by Daniel Canedo

[throwingbread]

Alex Maleev - Hellboy

[throwingbread]

Matthew—Amanda Fullwood (Dark Forge Studio)

[throwingbread]

could this mean that I'm coming home

summary: Luke Skywalker’s relationships with other Jedi as he builds his new order and academy.

------

It takes some time for the festivities on Endor and in the wider galaxy to fizzle down, and even longer still for anything to even slightly settle long enough for both of them to rest. There’s always some new problem arising, some new political drama or skirmish with remnants who don’t take the Emperor’s death well or don’t believe in it at all. But Luke and Leia have always been good at adapting and they always manage to squeeze time to talk to each other, whether it’s in the corner of a peace gala or in a dropship headed to the frontlines. 

For those first few weeks, their conversations always seem to circle back around to the fact that they’re twins, and what this means for them both.  In some ways, there’s not a lot to discuss; their bond goes deeper than blood or friendship, it runs through the songs of the Force, stronger than anything Luke has ever felt.  One night, they spend hours comparing and trying to work out what was coincidence and what were actually latent Force abilities. They talk about childhood dreams of each other’s planets and how — despite both losing all they had once called home only hours before and the imminent threat — everything just felt right when they reunited on the Death Star. Like a small part of them had been missing until then, tied by invisible string to something very far away. 

Outside of it connecting her to new twin, Leia does not seem interested in the Force. She listens intently when he tells her what he knows of the Force, but Leia has never wanted to be a Jedi. She is a politician, like the mother and father who raised her were. She spends her busy days on Coruscant and Chandrila and wherever else she’s required to go to build the fractured Republic her parents tried to save. She finds as much time as she can for him , but she finds time inside of that only to learn the basics of Jedi training, nothing more.  

Luke understands. It’s alright. He’s sure more Jedi will resurface soon, now the Empire has been defeated. It’s just a matter of time...

>> READ THE REST ON AO3

[throwingbread]

It was at the Festival of Light that I first saw her - truly saw her, I mean. In Mahtan’s workshop I had seen her creations, had admired them from afar as a fellow craftsman, but the woman behind the works had remained elusive, mysterious, up until that moment. In the glow of the lanterns, she was the fire of the forges come alive. Warmth seemed to radiate from her, spreading to everyone around. She was my new centre of gravity, pulling me towards her. I asked her for a dance and lost myself in her smile.

***

I arrived home one day to find that he had grown taller than me. In countenance and bearing he looked so much like my father that my heart almost burst with pride.

***

Late at night I would stand in the garden, watching the stars with tears in my eyes as I listened to the soft strumming of his harp, wafting from the open window of his bedroom. Not in a thousand years could I create as much beauty through my craft as he does with a simple harp and the right melody.

***

He once spoke to me in the tongue of the ravens. I did not understand, so I asked him what he had meant to say. It was a tale of feathers and warm nests, of kicking and pecking your way into the world, and of trusting the air under your wings.

***

His world was one of possibilities. He saw the patterns in the way the world moves, and he wanted to change them, to interrupt the steady flow of history, to leave his mark upon it. When the rain washed away the fortress he had built out of mud and twigs, he resented it. The next time he used stone and iron. The city he built, stood in our garden for a whole year.

***

I taught him my craft, as I as a young man had been taught it, and his first thought was to try and improve upon it. I expected nothing less. He was too much like me; proud, ambitious, brilliant - and yet living in the shadow of what I had done before him, what everyone expected of him. Other people looked at him, and they only saw me. But he had his mother’s smile. It would light up his face whenever he completed an intricate engraving, whenever he cut a gemstone just right, whenever I gave him a nod of approval.

***

They once made their own language, one that only the two of them could understand. Intricate and melodious, oddly complex. I could have figured it out, of course, but some things are better left alone.

***

I never wanted any of them to die for me.

[throwingbread]

[throwingbread]

Kelpie.

[throwingbread]

Asclepius and his father. (Part 4)

[throwingbread]

Makeup by Mimi Choi

[throwingbread]

Delirium of the Endless & the Misconception Around Color

let’s talk about Delirium of the Endless from The Sandman and the misconception around her colorfulness:

(since ppl who haven’t picked up a comic book are the loudest, what’s new)

with the trailer for The Sandman s2 dropping people are back to commenting on Delirium's color or lack thereof and how it's out of character but it really isn't

I’m not going to dive into potential symbolism, since a lot of ppl are thinking surface level I’m going to explain it surface level, and purely visual

I do think a lot of people look at Jill Thompson's Delirium from The Little Endless and roll with that because she's so iconic but let's look at canon

𖦹⭒°｡⋆𖦹⭒°｡⋆𖦹⭒°｡⋆𖦹⭒°｡⋆𖦹⭒°｡⋆𖦹⭒°｡⋆𖦹⭒°｡⋆𖦹⭒°｡⋆𖦹⭒°｡⋆𖦹⭒°｡⋆𖦹⭒

Delirium isn’t colorful

never has been in canon

one of the first things ppl are bringing up is her dinner outfit, which in the show elevates her comic one by a million, are you kidding??? the Elena Dawson jacket is killer and very Delirium and the boots are *chefs kiss*

in Brief Lives, when trying to convince Desire and Despair to accompany her to find Destruction she’s wearing an oversized grey suit and tan waistcoat underneath, she swaps the latter for fishnets when talking to Dream

when Del and Dream embark to find transport to Destruction, that’s about as colorful as she gets and that is just two different two-toned outfits

her next set of outfits are earth toned and black,, green just before and when Dream leaves her, black when she’s upset bc he left, and brown when they pick back up

to pause on Brief Lives, she also wears brown and black in Three Septembers and a January

back to Brief Lives, her next outfit is an all white ensemble, again, minimal color going on here except for the hair (which ECM’s Del has)

in the flashbacks we get of her with Destruction, she’s wearing pink as Delight before she changes and a purple outfit after she’s changed but when Destruction is still around (and gearing up to leave)

throughout The Kindly Ones she has many outfits, none of which are very colorful

during The Wake, Delirium has two outfits, black leather with fishnets and a pink dress with fairy wings (again, not exactly decora kei)

in some of the flashbacks where we’ve been shown Delight, she’s always in color but it’s fairly put together, something you’d dress your little sister in for the park

in other stories where we’ve been shown Delirium, she’s wearing grey and black or a bunch of earth tones not something I would really count as colorful

consider the times as well as who Delirium’s look was loosely based on, Kathy Acker and Tori Amos who aren't dressing in tutus and multicolored scarfs

(if anything I'd go so far as to say they pulled inspiration from Tori's early band "Y Kant Tori Read" highly recommend btw)

you gotta remember, it’s a gothic comic from the 80s and 90s, Delirium is most widely seen as a personification of Delirium caused by mental instability, trauma, and drugs

Delirium is not a manic pixie dream girl (just manic)

I think atp the only thing we can be concerned abt is the colorful hair and even then, we’ve only seen two looks

from what I've seen from ECM and her hairdresser for the show, we're in for a treat so have faith

that being said, this is my rotten soldier, my sweet cheese, my good time gal but don’t impose her on the live action when this is all other artist’s interpretations outside of a 30 year old story <3

[throwingbread]

Today is the anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster and I have found this short, but insightful article by Oksana Semenik on how this disaster is depicted in Ukrainian art.

https://artslooker.com/en/five-minutes-for-the-chornobyl-disaster-2/

[throwingbread]

twisting and bitturning

[throwingbread]

A dating service where matching is based on people’s search history exists. You’re a serial killer. You go on a date with a writer.

[throwingbread]

The eight-fold word has a classic escape room puzzle structure: eight pieces of information (the House magical specialties) and eight places to plug them in (the eight steps of lyctorhood). So I thought I'd take my own crack at the puzzle and see if any insight emerges.

First: the steps as Ianthe understands them (which line up with Jod's description of what he did to Alecto, though with at least one important difference):

1. Preserve the soul, with intellect and memory intact. 2. Analyse it—understand its structure, its shape. 3. Remove and absorb it: take it into yourself without consuming it in the process. 4. Fix it in place so it can’t deteriorate. 5. Incorporate it: find a way to make the soul part of yourself without being overwhelmed. 6. Consume the flesh. Not the whole thing, a drop of blood will do to ground you. 7. Reconstruction—making spirit and flesh work together the way they used to, in the new body. 8. Hook up the cables and get the power flowing. "You’ll find that one a walk in the park, Eighth, I suspect it was your House’s contribution."

These are mostly pretty ambiguous! How do we distinguish "fixing the soul in place" from "preserving the soul," especially without descriptions of most of the trials?

Well, let's start with what we have.

Mercymorn and Cristabel's Avulsion trial is almost confirmed outright as training you for Step 8. That "almost" makes me worry it's a red herring, but let's go with it. Siphoning can very much be described as hooking up the cables and getting the power flowing.

Now we have Winnowing. This one gives us a wrinkle, because the surface purpose--borrowing perceptions--is not actually the intended lesson. Harrow starts to see this when she finds out Gideon is borrowing her perceptions back, and it's confirmed in HtN when Harrow enters the River for the first time: the trial teaches you to bind soul and body together. [Jod uses the wrong lab number, but Mercy calls it Pyrrha's trial, so I think this is the one they mean.]

Knowing it's about binding, we can see a connection to the Second House’s signature magic, which involves the necromancer tying into their cavalier to power them up. For these reasons and one more, I put Winnowing as Step 5, incorporation.

The one more reason? The key and the door for this trial have five circles on them. I think that's a clue, and I think this is the puzzle it's meant for.

We know the other doors also have unique circle designs, but we only get a description of one more: the lab that's opened by the Sixth House molar trial, which has three.

I'm going to take some leaps here. If my door theory is right, this is Step 3, remove and absorb the soul without consuming it. Which, sure: that's a reasonable description of making Teacher and the skeleton servants. Sex Pal even emphasizes the "remove" part in his description of the skeletons. But if the trial itself is lyctor practice, that means they made Teacher with . . . psychometry?

We're stretching, but psychometry is largely about connections between things. The bits of soul tying them together. Perhaps the technique you use to detect those connections can be turbocharged to manipulate them instead.

If we make this leap to mega-psychometry, things get really fun. It likely means the Houses' signature tricks are all puzzles themselves: pieces of the lyctoral process with their true meaning hidden. They can all be leveled up.

Onward. Step 1, Ianthe accomplishes by putting a sword through Babs's heart to "pin his soul in place." But normally, death makes the soul flee. What gives? Emphasizing the sword is a hint: Augustine later tells us that murder weapons make for great revenant links. We also learn from Abigail's summoning of Nonius that forcing a revenant link is a level-up of Fifth House magic.

Traditional Seventh House magic doesn't get a lot of airtime, but we know it's preservation-focused. If Step 1 is about trapping the soul with a revenant link, that leaves Step 4, fix the soul in place in your own body, and prevent deterioration. A little extra weight to this argument: the room where Ianthe says she learned this step is pretty heavily associated with Cytherea.

Third House and flesh consumption? Yeah, let's assign them Step 6, while noting with interest that we don't get a lot of detail on how this works. We do get some pretty visceral imagery when Jod does it, though, so that's nice. For regular lyctors, I like to imagine them building a tiny body trapped inside themselves for their cavaliers to live in. Delightful!

I'm saving my favorite for last, but I love this one, too: I think Step 2, analyse the soul, is from the Fourth House. The Fourth House, known for exploding things and being cannon fodder. Started by Ulysses and Titania, known for starting orgies and being corpses. Were these the true intellectual giants all along? The Fourth's magic trick is getting all the thanergy in a body to fire off simultaneously in a fission reaction. Think of the awareness that would require: grasping everything going on in a body all at once. Level that up, and I think they're our analysts.

Step 7 is reconstruction, and I think it's where we find poor Anastasia. This is the step that's most dramatically different when Jod does it, forming two bodies, both with mixtures of his own flesh and the earth's. And it's where my crackpot "secret magic level-ups" theory shines. The Ninth does bones. And with those bones, they do a fuck-ton of crafting whole skeletons from little pieces. Harrow grows Ianthe a bone arm with marrow and "topological resonance," and it's a true extension of Ianthe's body. I think the culmination of Ninth bone magic is total mastery of the body's form.

So: 1. Tie down with Fifth summoning. 2. Analyse with Fourth fission magic. 3. Remove and absorb with Sixth psychometry. 4. Fix with Seventh preservation. 5. Merge using Second energy boosting. 6. A nice Third snack. 7. Reconstruct with Ninth bone magic. 8. Siphon like the Eighth.

If that's a puzzle solved, what did we get? Some fodder for thinking about the trials we haven't seen. A glimpse of alternate possibilities for lyctorhood? And a guess that Anastasia was trying to grow some compound bodies for her and Samael.

Given the importance of Tombkeepers being an unbroken bloodline, that has interesting implications for what she was plotting with Alecto.

[throwingbread]

TIME TO THRASH FOR THE HOLIDAY

[throwingbread]

Looking forward to those cicada nights 🌕✨

[throwingbread]

rendition of my favourite scene