with-my-murder-flute

[with-my-murder-flute]

Now for the most part I am more interested in any relationship, platonic or otherwise, that the Huntrix girls might have with each other, there is. one thing that has to be said for Rujinu:

Rumi is the boyfriend.

- during the joint signing, the boys are the ones getting roses.

- "you could have picked a nicer place for our date"

- rumi gives HIM the bracelet. Bracelet for your beautiful girlfriend?

and of course:

- i am a Jinu fridged wife truther. He isn't there to have a fully fleshed-out character. He's there to give Rumi a narrative arc, to teach her to trust her real friends, and then to die tragically. He sacrifices himself for her, giving her the power to defeat Gwi-ma, a tragic backstory, and a sick-ass sword. I respect that. More movies should be like that. Woo Jinu!

[with-my-murder-flute]

tamsyn muir is so funny

[with-my-murder-flute]

Chickens deserve it. They know what they did.

between marta dyas's "chickenshits dont' get beer" and camilla telling pyrrha to try not to be such a "chicken hawk" i have come to the conclusion that the second house has a personal vendetta against chickens? somehow?

[with-my-murder-flute]

Especially, also, the House whose founder was involved in the research about how many souls would need to be stuffed into one body before a Hideous Corpse turned into an immortal human being. Who may in fact still be, I guess we can't say alive, so let's say around to this very day, as a Hideous Corpse trapped inside the tomb.

(I just realized that of course Anastasia's research would be a big inspiration that Harrow's parents drew on when making Harrow. Because of course they did.)

I forget if I ever wrote it down somewhere—about the significance of the Seventh House being master embalmers, mummifiers, pressing down the hands of the clock.

It's why Catholics are strongly discouraged from having their bodies cremated: because one day they hope to be resurrected in their literal physical bodies. And it gives God a little too much extra work if that body has been incinerated, ground up, and scattered over the mountains of northern Idaho by a plane.

A body that did not decompose (John uses the Church's word, incorrupti, singular incorruptus) was seem as a strong argument that the deceased person was a saint or especially blessed by God. Conversely, being executed for your crimes meant it was more okay to use your body for scientific dissection, since the people in charge figured you probably weren't going to Heaven anyway.

I imagine that by now they've amassed an incredible mausoleum. Ten thousand years of people. That's a lot of corpses.

(Also, no wonder John never spoke out against the Beguiling Corpse. He absolutely wouldn't.)

[with-my-murder-flute]

no actually I do want to go back to Csevet being a Jane Austen (sorry, 'Göelar') fan and Celehar not liking them lmfao. Hilarious character microcosm. Celehar dismisses them as 'delicate intricate courtships amongst the upper classes' because his disinterest in the social sphere he was born into (and then kicked out of, several times) is so complete; he reads them for something to do, but doesn't have an interest in returning to high society even fictionally.

Csevet presumably loves them (he has the new Göelar, he's keeping up) because they're social satires and his whole damn life is social satire. He's an outsider to high society (even as secretary, he's still Aisava as opposed to Celehar) and he literally LIVES the Austen-narrator role of being able to observe all these annoying rich people all the time (without being paid attention to himself) and knowing Exactly what their deal is— the Austen narrator can do this because she invented free indirect discourse; Csevet can do this because he reads their post. I imagine he finds a lot of very familiar situations and people within them. Also frankly I can see him having a weakness for Austenian romance. It's so proper! He loves propriety!

Which is additionally hilarious because he was basically the one who chose Maia's wife for him. You know the task landed in his lap and he carefully closed Ethuverazhin Pride and Prejudice and was like well. I have been training my entire life for this moment. It is time to Make A High Society Match.

[with-my-murder-flute]

Girl!

[with-my-murder-flute]

hi i miss them

[with-my-murder-flute]

Murderbot + Onion Headlines [1/?]

[with-my-murder-flute]

an incomplete mdzs/the untamed character guide

[with-my-murder-flute]

"Where in the world is the soul of Colum Asht" scans perfectly to the theme song

wdym his soul is missing?

the duality of tlt reader.

when i say that colum’s soul is “missing” i mean we literally do not know where it is. soul siphoning does not consume the soul - it pushes it somewhere else and uses the negative space it leaves behind as fuel for necromancy (pal and ianthe discuss this in depth in the unwanted guest). colum was being actively siphoned when his body was possessed by the devils at canaan house. his soul wasn’t home. that “somewhere else” mentioned in reference to soul siphoning has never been explicitly defined. we think it MIGHT be the far shore of the river and/or beneath the stoma (the same place dulcinea and/or augustine ended up) but we don’t know this for sure. we DO know that he wasn’t pulled into harrow’s dream theatre river bubble with the rest of the dead scions at canaan house, implying that his soul was not in the river with the rest of them. he’s absent for all of harrow the ninth and is the only one of the 19 necromancers and cavaliers at canaan house in gideon the ninth to be currently unaccounted for - neither alive nor dead but some secret third thing.

tl;dr:

[with-my-murder-flute]

first generation of demon hunters but they’re from my country🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦

[with-my-murder-flute]

Help I can't stop thinking about the use of Latin and Christian cultural references in K-Pop Demon Hunters.

The first one is the name. HUNTR/X is pronounced "huntrix", and -trix comes from ancient Latin, where it's the feminine form of nouns that end in -or for the masculine, like victor, victrix. It's certainly rarer in English than endings like -ess (think shepherd, shepherdess) and mostly used in legal or religious contexts. So a "huntrix" is the same as a "huntress", but it sounds more like the language western Christianity used for centuries.

And then... there's Your Idol.

Which literally begins with a medieval Christian song, the hauntingly ominous Gregorian chant version of Dies Irae. Which is Latin for "Day of Wrath", the beginning of a vivid description of the day at the end of the world where all souls will be called to answer to God for their sins. Over the centuries, Western composers have been integrating bits of its melody into anything they want to sound even a little spooky. Jaws cello? Dies Irae.

And then the title itself... when people first called pop stars "idols", they were not approving of it. "Idolatry" means to worship something that isn't God the way you would worship God himself, and for Christians (as in other Abrahamic religions) this is a huuuge no-no. The Ten Commandments literally START by saying, "You shall have no other God before me. You shall not make for yourself any graven image or idol [...] You shall not bow down to them or serve them." (Exodus 20:3-5) Christian religious leaders frequently instruct their followers to think about whether they have created any false idols in their lives, putting something above God, whether that's loving money more than doing what's morally right, or caring about looking attractive and fashionable more than caring about being principled and Godly.

So the song is literally playing up all the Christian perceptions of what idols and demons are. They're attractive but evil! They're here to steal your soul! Bowing down to them gives them power! They demand human sacrifices!

To explain demons: In Christianity, the only legitimate supernatural power is God, THEE god, God of the Bible, and His only begotten son, and/or, anything sent, blessed, or okayed by Him. Angels, saints, churches, etc. In that worldview, anything else that claims to be a supernatural entity, anything that is not God (THEE God) is fundamentally evil. Coming from Satan, Hell, demons, devils. The only correct response to them is to beat the crap out of them and send them back to where they came from. The power of Christ compels you, yadda yadda.

WHY THIS MATTERS: This is basically the attitude HUNTR/X started the movie off with. This is Takedown in a nutshell.

And it's totally wrong.

When Christian missionaries came to Korea, they found a rich interwoven tradition of Korean shamanism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. People understood the spiritual world as having a vast number of spirits and gods, who each had different personalities, tendencies, and relationships with humans.

And the missionaries said, "YOU'RE WORSHIPING DEVILS. YOU'RE WORSHIPING DEMONS. THESE ARE ALL FALSE IDOLS. THEY'RE EVIL."

They didn't care about the stories behind each god. They didn't care if a ceremony was meant to worship a spirit or persuade it to be less of an asshole. Frankly, they thought even believing in these spirits and gods at all was problematic, but if you have to grant that they're real supernatural forces... they're not from God, so they're all Satanic.

So Rumi is left trying to understand why she can be part good and part evil, but has no idea what being a demon actually means. She doesn't know their stories, how they behave, or how to live or fight with them. Literally ten minutes talking to one hits everything she's ever known like a wrecking ball. Because you cannot actually write off vast swathes of people, or centuries of religious and spiritual thought and experience, as "demonic" and leave it at that.

And I think that's beautiful.

(Author's note: This post is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC. Like everything else on this blog, I'm okay if you translate, quote or perform this post elsewhere, but you have to credit me and you cannot make money off it.)

[with-my-murder-flute]

I love you all, you’ve done nothing wrong. But I’m begging you. The “kiri” in Kiriona is not pronounced like Siri on your phone. Kiriona is legit just how someone speaking te reo Māori would pronounce “Gideon”. You roll the R a little bit and it should sound a lot more like “Kee-dee-oh-nah” sorry idk how to properly write out phonetics but you get it

[with-my-murder-flute]

I LOVE THEM!!!

[with-my-murder-flute]

for everyone just finding out about it via kpop demon hunters, the 'crow' is specifically a magpie! the imagery of magpie and tiger comes from 까치호랑이 민화, a genre of minhwa—korean folk art—that depicts the two creatures (often along with pine trees) as a sort of political cartoon, with the goofy looking tiger representing the uppity aristocracy and the sensible and dignified magpie standing in for the common people. i'm so happy more people are being exposed to this tradition!

[with-my-murder-flute]

even outside of just being a REALLY fun sandbox to play in, the elaborate worldbuilding in the goblin emperor is such a clever way of ensuring character-reader bonding. even though maia is lovely and you'd probably love him anyway, between all the michen'muras and dach'osminnoi and the untheileians and thees and thous and all the c names you can't remember, you feel just as lost and bewildered as he does, and you really get a sense of the immense scale of this burden he's been handed. so you empathise extra hard with every panicked and inept moment maia has, because god damn it you're confused and feeling a bit stupid too. you both start as outsiders to the world, but as you get through the book you slowly learn with him, and get more confident with him, and you're proud of yourself! and you're proud of him! and because you're in his isolated third-person pov the whole time, it's like you've done it together! and you root for him so damn hard because you've put the work in, and so has he, and you want to see it pay off. it's so preposterously effective

[with-my-murder-flute]

Intertwined - Siuane x Moiraine

If you'd like a print of this, link is below!