#‘hey God the Virtues are trying to unionize’

[neonnoir-ao3]

“Why haven’t you updated Tales From 666 Magnolia Street yet Neon?”

The next chapter is Stanley and Gabriel’s meet-cute from way back before they were kicked out of Heaven. I’m making up a fuckton of lore here

[drsilverfish]

15x02 Raising Hell -  a map, a script, and another stage on the alchemical road..

Hey everyone, catching up British time as ever, so I haven’t jumped into your posts yet. Did you survive Bucklemming?

Honestly, with only twenty precious episodes to the final season, this was a “classic” horribly clunky offering from them (after their better episodes in S14).

Still, there are some key take-aways.

Firstly, we have a key part of the psychological road-map of the final journey, aka Dean is back on his father’s bullshit - a revenge mission - this time, against God. And he’s so focussed on anger (a cover for his grief about Mary, and Jack, and about the meaning, or lack of meaning, of their lives thanks to Chuck) that he is unnable to let love in - to hear Cas’ plea that what has been real in their lives is “us”. 

This dude:

Jack the Ripper (ugh - rapey Bucklemming bingo card check) functions as a kind of God-mirror/ John-mirror - symbolising the old, white, murderous patriarch still wrestling to inhabit the bodies of the living (i.e. the wills of his creations/ the psyches of his sons) so it’s perhaps not an accident that Dean thinks his appearance is “cool”. Because Dean is in a regressive state of mind.  

Despite all Dean’s progress in S14, in wrestling with, and expelling, the Ghost of John Winchester (represented by AU!Michael in his head), now, in the midst of apocalyptical stress and the recent re-loss of his mother, he is reverting back to the John Winchester script - emotionally harsh and closed off, a soldier. That is underlined by Belphegor’s deliberate appeal to that version of Dean. Notice Belphegor describes himself as “a good solider” (who just wants Hell back to the way it was) - a deliberate mirror for Goodsoldier!Dean from the past.  

Yes, Dean is still looking out for Sammy (injured by the God-gun) and still trying to hunt things and save people (i.e. stop the Hellmouth from blowing wide open) - both of these were always core parts of the Goodsoldier!Dean script his father drilled into him - but he’s barely able to function emotionally, most evident in his unreasonable behaviour towards Cas.

Ketch and Rowena’s flirting just felt like the most ridiculous shoe-horned in bit of unnecessary hetero-icing, although both actors played it for all it was worth.

It was left, as so often, to the set-dressing narrative, to signal that Dean is bi and likes “meat packing”. You don’t say. And, with Ketch in shot, there’s a subtextual reference to Dean’s own earlier history of hate-flirting with Ketch (before Ketch banged his Mom). The show, like Dean, is following an old (subtextual) script. I don’t know if that’s deliberately “meta” and we can look forward to a new script or not. But as you know, I’m a sceptic on full, unambiguous, textualisation. 

Wow Chuck, what an extra douch-bag, sending Kevin to Hell.

That’s a fascinating little detail, because the entire God-machine - Anubis weighing the deeds of the dead with his abacus - seemed at least to have a promise of Heaven for a life (on balance) of virtue, even if we know Heaven itself is a place where cruel torture can happen (Cas’ torture by Naomi). But, now, we learn Chuck breaks his own rules simply for apparently vengeful and petty reasons. He really is the villain of the piece. 

I’m not sold on Chuck being genuinely de-powered by the Hammurabi (revenge/ equaliser) gun. He made that thing, surely he calculated handing it to the Winchesters could get himself shot and he included a fix-it? 

However, I’m delighted to see Amara, the feminine God-principle, back in the narrative, here to call Chuck out for being “petulant” and “narcissistic”. 

Look at that detail of the Taj Mahal in the background - a monument to love lost. Which is significant because of the cosmic mirror Chuck/ Amara provide for the earthly one in the form or our heroes. 

Some US folks clued me in at the end of last season to the significance of Reno as US  “divorce capital”. 

https://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/184580452909/chuck-and-reno

So here, we see Chuck and Amara getting “divorced” in Reno - a heavenly mirror for the TFW (Dean/ Cas) “divorce” already foreshadowed by the girls in 15x01 Back and to the Future discussing their parents’ divorce as they were attacked by Bloody Mary, but also earlier, by the break-up couple mirrors in 14x20 Moriah. 

Amara’s appearance also links to all the alchemical symbolism of S14.

If you followed my Jungian-themed S14 meta series,  you’ll know the show has been borrowing Jung’s re-working of medieval alchemical texts. Those texts used the mystical chemistry of trying to turn lead into gold as a metaphor for the soul’s journey to God. Jung suggested that journey could also be understood as a metaphor for the psyche’s journey towards self-integration. 

That fits perfectly with the Winchesters’ journey, which has always, in part, been about their struggle to emerge from the psychic trauma of their childhoods and the roles (Parent!Dean / Child!Sam - Good Soldier/ Rebel) which that trauma imprinted on them - mirrored on a cosmic scale by their supposed “fate” as the Michael and Lucifer vessels respectively. 

The narrative in S14 focussed a lot, in terms of Jungian and alchemical symbolism, on the encounter with The Shadow, which corresponds to the nigredo (blackening) stage in alchemy, and which means, in psychic terms, the confrontation with that which one has repressed (both positive and negative). 

 I’m sure @occamshipper​  will join me in being excited by Amara’s bright yellow suit. 

“Citrinitas” (or “yellowing”) is one of the stages in alchemy. It comes after the encounter with the Shadow (there’s a purification stage in between) and it represents the transitional stage before the final completion of the alchemical “Great Work” (lead to gold/ soul to God, achievement of psychic self-integration).

There is also, in alchemy, and in Jung, the related concept of The Sacred Marriage. This means, variously, the integration of the soul with Christ/ God, the conjoining of masculine and feminine principles in the psyche (we all have both, according to Jung) and from earlier paganism (and some forms of esoteric Christianity, particularly Gnosticism) the union of the God-principle and the Goddess-principle. The culmination of the Great Work. 

For now, of course, we have the opposite - the divorce of the God-principle, Chuck, and the Goddess principle, Amara, which foreshadows divorce amongst Team Free Will. But, as we wind round the final loop of the spiral narrative, we will return, I trust, to their union, externally and internally (which we’ve already witnessed on a Heavenly level in 11x23 Alpha and Omega).

We can understand Chuck and Amara as mirrors for the masculine (John Winchester) and feminine (Mary Winchester) imagos (images in the mind - not exact copies, but internal projections) within the psyches of their children, especially Dean (because he always had conscious memories of his mother, whereas baby-Sam was too little). Mary and Amara were of course, fundamentally linked in S11, as her return from the dead was Amara’s gift to Dean.

With Mary (apparently) violently killed again by a yellow-eyed supernatural being (Jack) Dean is “unbalanced” and the progress of his self-integration has been set back, hence his regression to the old John-script of Goodsoldier!Dean, mirrored on a cosmic level by the Chuck/ Amara “divorce”. 

Amara is essential to the end of the road, because as The Darkness (the destructive principle) she understands endings, unlike Chuck, for whom (as the creative principle) endings are “hard” (5x22 Swan Song). And because only by re-integrating the feminine principle (Mary Winchester, symbolising the softer “not performing” side of Dean) into the psyche can the Winchesters’ “Great (psychic) Work” be completed. Which is why I think we’ll see Mary Winchester herself again, before the end (you all know my spec by now that she was blasted into an AU by Jack, unbeknownst to him,  rather than killed).

So, despite Bucklemming’s clunky writing, we have a psychic road map (a regression and an old script to overcome) and another stage on the alchemical road towards FIN. 

[mleighlikes]

M’L Instants #36  ~Moons~ :)

Hey there lovelies, this months Instants were a lot of fun for me. What I did was take the names of some of the solar systems moons and found out the definitions of their names as well as there mythological origins for these short poems. I hope if you missed them then this collection will be fun for you to check out. Have a great day my friends :) .

Ganymede...

Beautiful youth come here be glad, for your purpose fits into the Gods plan.

From the land know as Troy a lad of great body and mind. 

He pleases the Supreme God sitting on Olympus a mountain high. 

Taken up made to pure the heavenly wine, given a gift immortal never to be lost to ravish of age. 

Forever beautiful forever thine.

Europa...

On far as the sun begins to set upon the land. 

A young woman more than her mere virtue a princess desired by he who is on high. 

He who seeks her company hides as a bull if only to see the beauty in her wide bright eyes. 

In time they become one a union made divine. 

All in the open, no longer any need to run, to be a shy lie.

Callisto...

Nymph of the land air or sea, beauty not unknowingly belonged to such a being. 

Already betrothed to another yet sought due to the desires of another. 

Behind the back kept in secret they meet, those two not meant to be a pair. 

A creature most lovely forced in to a curse to live in punishment as a bear. 

Still unsafe from wrath on high. 

Placed among the stars Ursa Major is the price paid within a beauty laid crime.

Titan...

Come to me child, union of Heaven and Earth

Great beings for a time, rule the very elements they were born from

In turn give birth to the lands and seas to the lush and arid

Colossus is your might, place down your will create the world in your image

Fear you in life, morn you in death

Your ways not long for a world such as savage as this

In time over thrown by your youth, the fear shifts from the old order to the new

Enceladous...

One thought to be birthed through Earth and Sky an ancient power over steps it's bounds

A giant massive in rage and power taken on by the next generation in the hopes of making things better

A being made to stand then to fall to it's knees in shame and dis-pare for its alliance to the side of brute existence

Struck down by the thunder of he on high made to lay waste under the ground, life without fault as a mountain crushing it under foot…

Tethys...

One of two seas taken as a daughter wife in the times of Earth and Sky

From her river there will flow the streams, lakes, and ponds

Within them will be born even more of the water of this world in the oceanids and more

Life flows from a mother to her children then from them to the rest of being on and on throughout the rest of times existence...

Despina...

Birth from the union of the sea upon the ocean.

A young woman a goddess perused by a higher being.

She takes on her natural for, not being That of a woman but of a mare.

Still seeking her, he who is great takes on the form of a stallion...

Left with child a mystery was born

One in truth as well as one in fantasy...

Galatea...

Born of a carpenter King

Hands mold, sculpt, chip away at the ivory

A form comes into being, she who is milky white stands before he

So entranced by his creation, soon becoming the object of his longing

Goddess of love soon takes pity upon he making his love a reality

Once together, a union not to break

Soon true birth, a daughter these two lives create…

Halimede...

Lady of the brine

Daughter of the old sea

Housed as one among a collection

Creatures that embody nature wild and free

A sister a daughter a spirit set free

One nymph among many calling those near to the sea...

Titania...

Greatness of a fairy Queen, we'd to her love

Yet in time another catches her eye

A young changing given a crown, made to be her joy

This is not the norm, a rival in kind makes her sleep

When she wakes her heart now in karma’s grasp

Eyes fall upon he with the head of a donkey

Her heart swooned, in time the spell will break

The glory of a fairy pale moon...

Oberon...

Noble King with the spirit of a bear

His queens light has been taken from him

Her heart longs for another, is rage builds

He seeks to punish all parties

To sleep his love must fall, he seeks aid

A potion from a loyal servant and all Now goes his way

When she wakes her disgrace complete

The Kings pride restored in a whisper and an evil scheme dream...

Umbriel...

Hidden in shadow, a crime takes place on a love

Times are proper, any defilement is cause for punishment

Only to have a simple lock of a loves hair without consent

One has snatched, grabbed, carried off what did not yet belong to anyone other than it's barer

Grief come down and smite thee

Tears of joy turn to streams of sorrow

The shadow is now ones home

The shadow will take one's soul

 Vega...

Found a home among the western sky

Lyra said to be the spirit within the lyre of Orpheus

Sad was the song of a love lost, sad was the trial of trying to reclaim a life from death

As the song played God nor man could turn away

Vega placed among the stars still resonates as the harp star today...

Polaris...

Look to the North, it's the brightest point in the night sky

Tales that say it's the end of a spike around which the world rotates

Myths and legends call it the peg that holds the world together...

What ever your fancy look to the night heavens and you'll find it there burning bright

Guiding the world from dusk to dawn through the darkest nights

Luna...

King of day sky rises and rests after his rein in the day as the Sun of dawn

Queen of night rises and rests after her rein in the night as the Moon of dusk

Divinely embody the spirit of the moon

Worshiped in times of being full or new

Shining pale is her light, just bright enough to see the world through the darkness

image: google.com/ moons of space pics

Let me know what you think and pass the thought along.

[didsomeonesayventus]

okay long time spending in gestation but I imagine that someone out of the followers I have wants to know my onion on KH3 is 

Overall, good!

so consider wordbarf of very repeated and tired onions no one actually actively asked for below:

Alright so I’ve been trying to figure out how to make these words and what my opinions even are considering this game has been out for almost a year now (KH3 existing is wild imagine it turning a year old) so this will be. mostly bullet points + incoherent and unorganized rambling forgive me

BAD THINGS FIRST lets get the salt out of the way

Literally everything with Kairi was oof. I still feel her relationship with Lea is incredibly rushed given the last time they were interacting in canon he was literally kidnapping her but go off I guess nomura they’re brother/sister friendsy now at least the fandom can sell me on that better than you can. I seethe with rage recalling that they didn’t even try to hide that killing her off was a classic case of fridging (“You lack motivation” FUCK OFF) and I have been angry since the day I was spoiled by leak stuff accidentally. I wouldn’t have minded her getting her ass handed to her if they made it look like she tried and gave us some moments where she did defend herself and get some victories and not conveniently cut away from the actually badly needed training montage (surprise! this is why we have training montages!!!!) and I get she was instrumental in rescuing everyone and the fact she wasn’t THAT bad speaks for how much she improved but it still just. bites that she still feels more like a satellite love interest than ever. 

Kairi was bad enough to get her own thing but tbh everyone who isn’t Sora also.. really suffers. The writing is really Sora-centric here and that’s not inherently bad (see good list) but it leaves a lot to be desired, especially since they dog pile the extended cast moments in at the end. There was no big confusion at Ven and Roxas sharing a face, no talks between characters who would have interesting interactions given their histories and circumstances, no obvious sign of development from anyone except maybe sea salt family and Aqua. They’re here to be more one-note than usual and resolve their arcs. Ven in particular (I’m totally not biased clearly /sarcasm) I feel is a big example given he was kinda in a really rough mental state at the end of bbs?? and 3 is exceptionally vague on just how conscious ventus was during his nap so I can’t even answer if he was able to give himself therapy the past 12 years or whatever

Anti Aqua is a damn cool concept but ultimately kinda pointless and I think we could have received it better if it wasn’t spoiled in trailers and wholly out of left field. Plus Sora coming in after what was pretty clearly set up as a Riku moment- while it gave us the incredibly gay press triangle to Sora + use a big keyblade made from ur love moment -was uh! really cheap!!!! and ruined what was clearly set up for being Riku’s thing with an almost nonsensical SIKE ITS SORA (it’s saved from being wholly nonsensical by 0.2′s opening foreshadowing + it still kinda makes sense for sora to at least help but damn if the narrative wasn’t leading us towards a riku moment)

Also everyone was hit really hard with the nerf effect in-narrative so unless you’re the dream team you’re screwed I guess and that. doesn’t quite work since it makes everyone else look... not great. And I think this is kinda a miscommunication on part of Nomura and the fans (IM MAKING ASSUMPTIONS TAKE WITH SALT) in that we kept saying we wanted people “saved” but meant having their arcs resolved in a reasonable way that preserved their agency and power and relationships, but got interpreted literally as “alright Sora comes in and solves every problem, is tough on stains, and makes julienne fries”

And yet there’s also a lot of mean spirited “oh no sora’s dumb and helpless w/out a second braincell” which was kinda funny the first couple times and I failed to pick up on it first go I’ll admit, but honestly? Yeah. they pick on sora too much. Donald and Goofy are the most guilty, and everyone else by virtue of not seeing Sora that much actually in-narrative are off the hook from me because they probably didn’t know how much teasing he’d been getting from his pals, but it felt kinda like they didn’t know what to fall back on between the three besides “oh donald and goofy pick on sora” which is cute once or twice but the amount he gets and how it clearly leads to his breakdown at the end is uhHHHHhhhHH hm.

As always the pacing is pretty awful where the disney worlds are somewhat relevant at best and then the end is 0-1000 but that is a usual KH gripe so its pretty low on the bar

Attraction flow is cute and neat at first but it gets.. really wearing towards the end and in the serious fights at the Keyblade Graveyard BOY are they a mood breaker

the “repeat the plot” worlds- Tangled, Frozen, Pirates -REALLY stick out like a sore, ugly thumb compared to the worlds that went out and did their own creative thing, and Big Hero 6 was.. cute? but kinda maybe too much of a breather.

Frozen also get an extra award for “Audio mixer most in need of firing!” because who the hell allowed the do you want to build a snowman scene.

They did nothing with Scala and I want a refund on that aesthetic if they’re not gonna do anything besides a framing device with it

HEY WAIT THERE WAS GOOD THINGS TOO!

Good news point that may or may not come to pass: Re:Mind DLC might fix some of the above salt! We shall see and probably know by the time this post is a year old sfjhdsakjgh

SORA! Sora was actually a character again!!!! holy cow they pulled up from the utter nose dive that was DDD!! god i love this dork and it was really fantastic to see him back to normal.

The graphical upgrade lost a lot of the squish and stretch that the OG graphics had but you know what? pretty. tastey. good graphics and better at doing more subtle emotions and hey have i mentioned Pirate’s glow up? Pirate’s glow up. The details in Olympus to recreate the swirly aesthetic of the clouds and explosions and lava is a great touch.

Worlds as far as levels go?? really good! They feel legitimately like worlds and explorable and with their own flavors and I LOVE battle and field themes x2 its really great I’m down for less worlds if they keep the quality. Hell we have NPCs!! maybe even too many npcs.

Writing OVER ALL/ON AVERAGE I’d say has improved a lot! It’s still not a literary masterpiece or anything but I found the disney worlds really cute and easier to get invested in even if long term they were less relevant than I hoped they would be. In every world there was at least one scene I found myself actually invested in. Like there was something to the writing that was legitimately more endearing than usual on average, and toy box and monstropolis were strong contenders for really good overall imo

honestly there were moments that- as moments -were incredible. Wayfinder reunion scene will haunt me, and Sea salt’s was good too, final world and rescuing everyone was jaw dropping, getting the LoD Back was also good, Union X, Xigbar exiting left stage pursued by a bear, wayfinder trio making a grave for eraqus, all the gummi ship scenes had great chemistry, beach party ending, hanging out with rapunzel for the first half of Corona is adorable as hell, all the nods to scenes in the movies, the easter eggs, like the game is not consistently amazing but it is peppered with stuff that I feel in a bubble ignoring surrounding context just work really really well

Damn if the end boss rush wasn’t thrilling as hell and honestly??? really good. Hard to parse out first flush but I think this was a good decision and added a lot of blood roaring urgency and wild turns, and even if I want to overhaul a number of things about the endgame I think this can definitely stay

Kingstagram is a beautiful gift man

OST? A fucking banger all around and I love how they’ve made cutscene-specific tracks that play with the leitmotifs throughout KH’s illustrious musical history

Over all there’s some really glaring issues, but overall it’s KH really at its best. I’m not sure if it’s my favorite entry and I’m still really mixed + befuddled on just how exactly I feel and I think a lot of that is I had pretty high expectations and my own ideas of how it would play out since like. 2012. it’s really hard to detach from those feelings and ideas sometimes. But KH3 wasn’t bad! It could’ve really been worse, and the fact that it got out the door in the state that it was is a good deal

now here’s to the wait for Re:Mind and to see if it’s basically the content we’d get in Final Mix that could definitely bump up my opinion

[thetygre]

Dark Souls Lore Rambling #8

Hey, remember when I said these mini-lores were going to be shorter to write? Or shorter at all? Ha ha ha ha what a liar I am

The Lesser Lords

Now that we’ve covered Gwyn and the Lords in general, I wanted to take a break and cover some of the minor divinities in Dark Souls before we get back into the meatier subjects. There’s a bunch of lesser deities mentioned in passing in Dark Souls, so I thought I’d try to shine some light on them. Please note, I’m only covering the gods referenced in Dark Souls 1; the rest are just going to have to wait.

Flan

What we know about Flan is equal to almost the sum value of bupkis. He is apparently married to Gwynevere and is a god of fire. Also, his name means ‘red haired’ in Gaelic. That’s it; everything else is a mystery. Was his marriage to Gwynevere an arranged one, or did they meet naturally? Is Flan now the King of the Gods by virtue of Gwyn being dead, bereft of male heirs (sorry, Gwyndolin), and Flan being married to Gwynevere? Is he even alive? Who knows.

I think it’s worth noting that Flan is the fire god. That could potentially have a lot of connotations, given that fire is central to the Dark Souls universe. All civilization and life stem from fire. The very cosmic order of duality is set in motion because of the First Flame. So does Flan have some tie to the First Flame? Or perhaps he has some ties to Izalith and pyromancy? Maybe Flan’s marriage to Gwynevere was the sealing pact between the Lords and Witches? Interesting theories, but still just theories.

The only thing I can speculate on for certain is the interesting juxtaposition of divine portfolios in Gwynevere and Flan’s union. Gwynevere, as established earlier, is a benevolent and providing goddess of sunlight, representing the nurturing and feminine aspects of her father Gwyn’s purview. Flan is simply a god of fire; rawer, unrefined, and more elemental. In a way, Flan fills in for the Nameless King as the warrior-prince deity, complementing Gwynevere in a dual relationship. United with Gwynevere, Flan represents not just fire in its elemental aspects, but also fire in its domestic uses, including smithing and the hearth. Or, at least that’s how I envision it.

 Allfather Lloyd

Lloyd. Not much of a deity name. Barely edges out ‘Greg the Thunderer’ and ‘Karen the Earth Mother’. The lore states that Allfather Lloyd is Gwyn’s uncle, was the founder of the Way of White, and his clerics are noted Undead hunters. His face is emblazoned on coins which are apparently currency outside Lordran, which travelers cling to as mementoes of the outside world. That alone indicates that Lloyd is a pretty big deal. It might even give us some details about economics outside Lordran; maybe coins are minted in one of the more theocratic countries, like Astora of Thorolund.

Lloyd’s clerics are even given a certain amount of respect for their Undead hunts, which tells us how the outside world views the Undead; at best cursed and unnatural, at worst slavering zombies. (Which, to be fair, isn’t exactly one hundred percent unfounded.) When everything is taken into account, Lloyd is a figure of central importance to not just the Way of White, but the whole world outside Lordran.

But things get interesting when you start to break down his name. ‘Lloyd’ is easy; it stems from the Welsh ‘llwyd’, which means both ‘holy’ and ‘grey’. But the meat of Lloyd’s etymology comes from the important part of his name; ‘Allfather’. Those of you who have been paying attention might recall that Dark Souls draws from Norse mythology a smidge. And in Norse mythology, ‘Allfather’ (or Alfodr and/or Aldafoor, if you’re feeling fancy) was one of the more important epithets for Odin, King of the Gods. Allfather has two applicable meanings for Odin; first, he and his brothers Villi and Ve are responsible for slaying the primordial frost giant Ymir and using his body to construct the cosmos, as well as the human race. In this capacity, Odin is literally all things’ father in that the universe would not exist without him. Second, Odin was the king over all the other gods, or Aesir, and his word was law. And in between is the fact that Odin is listed as the literal father of some of Norse mythology’s more famous deities, including Thor, Balder, and Tyr.

The thing of it is, when you take these meanings, a creator deity and a divine patriarch, and apply them to Lloyd, old Lloyd starts to turn up short. For starts, Lloyd didn’t create anything. The world existed even before the Lords did, so he wouldn’t be in the running as a creator deity anyway. Adding on to that, he’s listed as Gwyn’s uncle, not Gwyn’s father; if he was going to be called a creator deity by association with Gwyn, he would at least need a paternal link. Lloyd isn’t even the king of the Lords, Gwyn is. Lloyd might still have some kind of ruling position, but he definitely isn’t top banana. And, as far as we know, Lloyd isn’t the biological father of any other important Lords. So what gives?

All these inconsistencies, and a little bit of the lore from Dark Souls 3, point to Lloyd being a fraud. Lloyd started the Way of White touting himself as some distant relative of the Lords from on high. This even ties into my theory that the Way of White wasn’t always the religion of Lord worship, but originally the name for the alliance between humans and Lords during the war with the Everlasting Dragons and against the demons. Lloyd took advantage of, or may even have been responsible, for the shift to a more traditional church. The Undead Hunts are just a way to garner favor with the people and direct attention on a common scapegoat; people won’t notice that the Way of White is rotten from the inside if they’re too busy hunting Hollows.

But for old Lloyd’s sake, let’s consider a second option, and accept Lloyd’s story at face value. Even as only Gwyn’s uncle, that still gives Lloyd a lot of leverage with both humans and Lords. Lloyd might have been the one to oversee relations between humans and Lords during the Age of Ancients and the Age of Fire. The Undead Hunts are genuine efforts to protect humanity and/or to contain the Undead curse. His Allfather title is a religious one, associated with the pseudo-Catholic structure of the Way of White (Havel is a bishop, etc.). ‘Father’, after all, is the title given to a priest in Catholicism after all. So it might be that, as the head of the church of the Way of White, Lloyd is equivalent to the Pope, the high priest to whom all other priests defer; the All-Father.

Of course, these answers aren’t mutually incompatible. Lloyd still could have been the founder of the Way of White and still been a fraud as well. He might even have still been a Lord, a rogue deity like Velka. Either way, by Dark Souls 3 the Way of White has gotten so old that old Lloyd has fallen to the wayside completely.

 The Nameless Blacksmith God

There’s surprisingly more to the Nameless Blacksmith God then you would think, especially if you look at the Dark Souls meta and concept lore. The canon lore on the deity is actually very sparse, but pretty straightforward; the Blacksmith God was the Lord that forged the armor and weapons for the other Lords. I generally take this to mean the Blacksmith God did not literally craft every arm and armament for the Lords, or invented the process of smithing; rather, like how Seath is the father of sorcery, the Blacksmith God was a pioneer in his field, exemplary in his profession. He was the Lord who spearheaded the arming work during the war with the Everlasting Dragons, and may even have been the one to discover titanite and how to use it.

At some point, the Nameless Blacksmith God died, though nobody knows when or how. For a while, I entertained the theory that maybe Gwyn killed the Blacksmith to keep his secrets out of enemy hands, but I’ve come to reject that now. Gwyn’s a dick, but he’s not a stupid dick, and the Blacksmith God was a bigger asset than liability. I kind of like the idea that the Blacksmith was assassinated during the war with the Everlasting Dragons; dragon forces tried to weaken the Lords by cutting off their biggest arms supplier. There’s nothing to even remotely back that up, though.

When the Blacksmith God died, he left behind two things; the titanite demons, and the titanite slabs. I doubt that these were meant to be the Blacksmith’s legacy because I frankly doubt the Blacsmith ever planned on dying. The demons might have been made as servants for the Lords, but I’ll cover them later. Why the Blacksmith God made titanite slabs, I don’t know. There’s obviously writing on the slabs, and Dark Souls 3 actually has the slabs have translatable runes on them that tell the story of the Lords. It is entirely within reason to assume that the Blacksmith God did not leave behind the titanite slabs as resources at all; they were records, preserving history and knowledge in the strongest material available. By the time of Dark Souls, however, titanite is so scarce and so valuable that humans have started cannibalizing what would otherwise be historical artifacts, maybe without even realizing their true value.

 Gwyn’s Wife

We know even less about Gwyn’s wife than we do about Flan or the Nameless Blacksmith God. The Blacksmith God is at least referenced; no one even mentions Gwyn’s wife. It’s assumed he had a wife; he fathered his children, after all. We’re operating on the assumption that the kids actually are biologically Gwyn’s, and not just extremely devout disciples. So unless something is radically different about Lord biology from humans, then Gwyn must have bumped uglies with someone at some point.

We keep seeing a statue of a woman holding a child throughout Lordran. The statue is of a woman wearing a crown, indicating royalty; Queen of the Gods is as good a queen as any. The child she’s holding is grasping a sword, which indicates that he’s meant to grow up to be a warrior. Maybe the Nameless King? I like to think the statue depicts Gwyn’s wife. She’s worshiped as a general maternal goddess, a deity of home, family, women, and fertility. She represents renewal, and the providence of the future. Basically equivalent to the Greek Hera or Juno. Or maybe it’s some random female saint from the Way of White. Maybe there is no explanation for the mother statue, just like there’s no explanation for the statues of Athena in the Undead Parish. It’s just there for the aesthetic.

 Fina

Fina is another deity mentioned in passing reference. The only real detail we get about her as that she is described as having ‘fateful beauty’. Her name is most likely derived from the Celtic ‘Fiona’, which means ‘blond’ or ‘fair’. So, established; she’s pretty, and maybe blond. The ‘fateful’ part of her ‘fateful beauty’ description makes me think that there’s a history of people becoming infatuated with her and driving themselves to their own doom trying to serve her, kind of like our boy Lautrec. It could be that it is literally referring to the concept of fate, however, which means that Fina is also associated with destiny in some capacity. The symbol on the Ring of Favor and Protection is also the symbol of Venus, associated with the goddess of the same name, femininity, and copper. This points to Fina being roughly analogous to the Greco-Roman goddess Aphrodite/Venus, but even that is kind of self-evident.

I was originally going to propose that Fina herself was a Fire Keeper, only worshipped as a god and conscripting men like Lautrec to hunt Humanity for her, but that got thrown out the window when I realized Lautrec leaves the Fire Keeper Soul of Anastacia of Astora behind when he kills her, which is a valuable nugget of Humanity. But that in itself raises a question; if Lautrec was just hunting for Humanity and Fina is only his matron, why leave behind the valuable Fire Keeper Soul?

Maybe Fina is a jealous goddess, vain like the Greek gods, and has any woman she deems too beautiful killed, no matter how far away they are. She could also be acting on her potential purview as a deity of fate, condemning Anastacia of Astora specifically for being a heretic. Or perhaps Lautrec simply didn’t know about Fire Keeper Souls, and left behind the soul the same way he left behind the Black Eye Orb out of ignorance. I’m still partial to my theory of Fina as a Fire Keeper and Lautrec as a kind of alternate Kirk of Thorns, but I have to admit, it’s a theory standing on some pretty shaky ground.

 Old Man McLoyf

I’m gonna’ level with you, I’d completely forgotten about Old Man McLoyf until about twenty minutes ago. His face is on the Copper Coin, where he’s mentioned as the god of drink and medicine. From his name, we can gather that he is both A.) a man and B.) old. ‘Mc’ means ‘son of’, and ‘Loyf’ means ‘to praise’; both parts are Scottish. We can infer from his placement on the Copper Coin that he comes from the same general pantheon as Allfather Lloyd, revered in whatever potentially theocratic state made the coins.

And… that’s about it. I’ve seen it posited that McLoyf might have some connections to Catarina, with his connection to alcohol for celebration and medicine for healing combat wounds. I’ve even seen a theory that he might be Gwyn’s father, but there’s nothing to really substantiate that. It’s possible that, like Lloyd, he might not actually be a Lord and instead be a hero-deity or charlatan. I doubt that he’s a chaotic and wild deity of drinking like Dionysus or Bacchus. The connecting thread between medicine and alcohol is that they both cause chemical alterations within the body, so I suppose that’s McLoyf’s root purview. In that capacity, he might also be a god of bravery in the face of harm, which really only reinforces the idea that he might be popular in Catarina. Another mystery god.

 Velka

And of course I saved the best for last. There’s a lot of controversy surrounding Velka in the Souls lore community. I think it’s best to start by laying out the facts. And by ‘the facts’, I mean ‘a summary of the lore with some of my thoughts sprinkled in’. Velka is described as a ‘black-haired witch’, as well as a ‘rogue deity’. Right off the bat, this gives some cause for speculation; ‘witch’ in Dark Souls can refer to either a female practitioner of magic or the specific race of people inhabiting Izalith. I want to err on the side of simplicity and say that she’s just a woman capable of spellcasting. The ‘rogue’ part makes me think that she operates outside of the standard pantheon of gods. Velka is stated to be the goddess of sin; not of sinning itself, but of defining sin and meting out justice to those who do it.

Her priests are also pardoners, where, similar to Catholic priests, an individual can confess their sins and be told how to atone, or offer one’s self up for punishment. Also like medieval Catholic priests is the practice of indulgences with Velka’s pardoners, where one can simply pay to be absolved; however, this may be unique to the pardoner in the Undead Parish. She also appears to a goddess of magic, both performing it and countering it. She is so closely aligned with sorcery that she allows the usage of intelligence instead of faith for her followers. Her name is either Czech for ‘great one’ or ‘famous, or Finnish for ‘debt’; both meanings are appropriate to Velka’s character, but it’s more likely meant to be the Czech meaning since that is the language Dark Souls draws more from. Finally, she has black hair and is associated with ravens. Ravens already have mystical significance in both European and Asian mythology, but are universally associated with death and the presence of the gods. It’s also worth noting that Velka’s connection to ravens and witchcraft gives her some parallels to the Celtic Morrigan; however, Morrigan is a goddess of warfare and sovereignty, not justice.

Velka’s rogue status might tie into her purview as the goddess of sin and justice. The theory I subscribe to is that Velka’s sense of justice was universal, and so she indicted the Lords as well as humanity. This didn’t sit well with the Gwyn et al, and so Velka had to be disappeared into the Painted World of Ariamis, with all the other undesirables of the gods. Clearly, the Lords were not wholly successful in banishing Velka; she appears to still have some presence in Carim, or at least one surviving pardoner from Carim, and some of her items and spells are still in Lordran. As of Dark Souls, her exact portfolio is trying to be absorbed by Gwyndolin, and the two appear to have a standing rivalry; or, more correctly, Gwyndolin still has a standing bounty on Velka’s worshipers. Velka may have once had control of the Blades of the Darkmoon, but the very name indicates that they’ve shifted allegiance to Gwyndolin.

We now descend into the realm of complete conspiracy, where I state my stance on some of the theories surrounding Velka. First and foremost; no, I do not believe the Chosen Undead is an unwitting pawn of Velka’s to strike back against the gods. True, a giant raven carries the Chosen Undead from the Undead Asylum to Firelink Shrine, but this entire plot thread just seems too tenuous to me. It is placing an undue amount of agency and significance on a character that, for all intents and purposes, is barely more relevant than the Nameless Blacksmith God or Allfather Lloyd. Miyazaki has a history of letting characters directly confront their manipulators; the Fool’s Idol in Demon’s Souls, Gwyndolin in Dark Souls, the Amygdalae in Bloodborne, etc. The importance of Dark Souls is that the Chosen Undead is not significant beyond the fact that they are a person and they control their own fate; an unknown manipulator seems contrary to that philosophy.

That being said, I can’t help but see the giant raven as somehow being tied to Velka. Perhaps, once, long ago, it did indeed serve Velka. But with her disappearance, it now acts on instinct and more like an animal rather than an active agent. The raven, with the hindsight of Velka’s lore, becomes symbolic of the inevitable karmic cycle that comes to Gwyn and the other inhabitants of Lordran. If nothing else, it’s a powerful visual; ravens in the West are considered birds of death and ill omen (before we began associating them with being preternaturally smart). In Japanese folklore, ravens are the servants of the gods and act on their behalf. Given that Dark Souls is distinctly aiming for a European aesthetic, however, I think Miyazaki was going for a more Western signifier with the giant raven. It is both death and justice.

Second, I do not think that Velka is Crossbreed Priscilla’s mother. While Priscilla’s Dagger does do Dark damage and Velka’s rapier also does dark damage, I operate on the general assumption that Seath is Priscilla’s father/creator. Velka, once again, was the goddess of sin and punishment, which means that ‘Weird Science’ Seath would probably want to avoid her. At the very least, he would be in some hot water for betraying the Everlasting Dragons. If she wouldn’t discriminate for the other Lords, she certainly wouldn’t discriminate for a dragon.

Third, I do not believe that Velka was involved with the Four Kings and New Londo. True; the darkwraithes do dark damage with their Dark Hand, and they have what appear to be raven feathers on their armor. But we have no way of knowing if that material is supposed to raven feathers; it could very well be fur. Furthermore, connecting the darkwraithes of New Londo to Velka because of an aesthetic feature seems like a mighty leap to conclusions. By that logic, the darkwraithes also have something to do with Gravelord Nito because their armor looks like skeletons. The presence of the same statue that is in the Painted World is also circumstantial at best; there are also giant rats with Humanity in the Painted World as in the sewers, but nobody calls them part of a greater plot.

And finally, I do not believe Velka is the narrator at the beginning of the game. This ties in especially with the theory that Velka is the grand mastermind behind the Chosen Undead, and perhaps even the Dark Sign. And that’s just silly; the bad guy is not the narrator. That was a stupid plot twist in RWBY, mildly effective in God of War 2, and just out of place here. Dark Souls is known for its subtle storytelling, but this is just esoteric. And I say that as someone who has just written 3300 words about some astoundingly esoteric entities. What purpose does it serve for Velka to be the narrator and mastermind of the game? What does it say about Dark Souls’ broader themes? Humanity, the cycle of life, the rise and fall of civilization, empathy, hope, loss, decay, the inevitability of entropy and the ephemerality of life; those are the themes of Dark Souls. Gwyn is usurped because it’s part of an uncontrollable and inexorable cosmic cycle that repeats endlessly and meaninglessly; the concept that divine justice plays into that is simply counterintuitive.

With all that out of the way, I do think Velka used the Dark. The Dark did not originate with her, and she did not try to push the Dark to act a certain way, but I do think she used it. The pardoner’s rapier does have dark damage, after all, and the Dark Ember mentions specifically that it was used to forge weapons that could hurt the Lords. It could be that, growing desperate to mete out divine punishment to the other Lords, Velka drew on the Dark and taught her priesthood how to do the same. And this, ultimately, is the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back and got Velka banished to the Painted World. Velka, in her own way, became was broken down by the passage of time, as all things are.

And now that I’ve had my fill of lesser Lords, stay tuned for when we turn our sights back to the main stage. Darkmoon Tomb, here we come!

[stone-man-warrior]

January 1, New Years Day, 2021: 4:31 pm:

Someone stole my Yule Log, while it was burning.

A man driving a large garden cart was seen exiting a horse stable at the County Courts terror cell at Chapman‘s on Russell, going north, moments ago.

=========================================

============================================

Here we go!

There was a time when someone decided that January 1 is the day that starts a new year, and December 31 ends the previous one.

♥  “What’s the count Ump?”

♦ “Two-Thousand-Twenty-One”

♥ “Huh?... no... I didn‘t, I still have all of my teeth”

So, another trip around the Sun started today, relative to that day when someone decided it all starts over today, January 1, but it wasn‘t always like that, the years used to start on March 1, then, someone changed the whole year, added two more months to it, January and February, and stuck those at the beginning to start with, instead of the end to end with, with additional months.

There was a time, before there was a time keeper, when no one kept score, but no one is really interested in the time when the Game started, instead we are obsessed with the birth and death of this one guy, Jesus, and that is when the Game started. The truth is, the Game was well underway, when Jesus showed up, then some asshole, Markus, told a lot of lies about Jesus, so, they made Jesus join the Carpenter’s Union, so he could nail together that cross without the Department of Labor tossing a Red Flag on the play. Jesus built a cross, under direction of the Romans, so he could be nailed to it, for stuff he didn‘t do, because everyone believed Markus who just wanted to sleep with Jesus’ Ol’ Lady on New Years Eve.

They didn’t have Christianity yet when all of that happened, so, “Wives” had not been invented yet, so, it was all about Jesus’ Ol’ Lady.

They covered up Markus’ lies, by tacking two month’s onto the beginning of the calendar of events, not the end, because if the Roman‘s had put the two-month cover operation onto the end of the year, that’s evidence that Markus lied to sleep with Jesus’ Ol’ Lady, and would have demonstrated what Markus’ true motives were had their been no cover operation.

So, it’s 2021 AD now, not BC. Had Markus told the truth, no one would have to know about AD or BC, and there would probably be a lot more Mormons now than there are, had Markus and Jesus just decided to “Share, and Share Alike”, but by deduction, it’s not difficult to see that jealousy is what was driving Markus to lie about Jesus. (that’s “Jello See” for those keeping score. Green Jello is made of Old English 800 Terror ways)

It’s the ABC’s of the D-day of Jesus Christ, and has been all out of order ever since. That means his B-Day was on another day, not the day they say, but we can never know what day is really Jesus’ B-Day, because we don’t know how many days were in each month on the older Ten-Month Calendar. Considering that the word “Month” is based on a menstrual bleeding cycle, those two extra months are significant additions, to “change the bloody sheets”, spoken with a British accent, a “top, and bottom sheet”.

Go figure!

Happy New Year!

============================================

Markus picks up a signal from Jesus’ Ol’ Lady:

Markus comes up with some of the most potent pick-up lines, starts sending signals towards Jesus’ Ol’ Lady:

She responds to Marcus’ advances:

The rest, is Written.

================================

8:23 pm:

The Crusades began at that time, Pirates stealing everything that was not nailed down, and then they nailed everything they stole, to and in, their houses and boats.

It turns out, that one of the very first things the bastards stole, was Time, when they changed out the calendar to cover for Markus, and that Russian Whore, Jesus’ Ol’ Lady.

That is the day when the two started making time together. began to March, and time Marches on ever since, with two bloody sheets in tow on the way to the One Hour Martinizing to have them cleaned. Two, take the blood out.

This kind of truth sheds all new light on why they put five-minutes on the clock when there is a penalty at the Football Game. It’s the reason why a professional Basketball game score will be the same result if the game is only played for five minutes, and each team is given one-hundred points to start with.

=================================

8:37 pm:

My research on the matter includes that Jesus’ Ol’ Lady had a prosthetic leg, or foot, or she wore special shoes, had a limp. So, part of the cover story is a lot like the Russian Mother of all Hoaxes... the bastards invented all of what we are told is Greek Gods Mythology, and in that way, the bastards secretly hijacked the entire night sky, connected some dots of stars so they could remember why that was done, to keep others from doing too many dot-to-dot artworks. They cannot survive people who connect dots, and that is what the Constellations are for, all derived of Greek Mythology, and to keep people stupid all of the time.

So, that gal that Marcus teamed up with to frame Jesus, had a limp, and they needed to cover that with some Russian Lies... Olympus became Jesus’ Ol’ Lady’s street name. Marcus came up with the name for the top-level Greek God, Zeus who lives on Mount Olympus, so the story is told. That, of course was a “Insult to Injury”, pirate style, towards Jesus who was still dangling from that crucifix they made him build, so that the two could have sex right there in front of him, to do the very first ever “Christening” right there at the bottom of that cross, as Jesus’ Ol’ Lady shouted out a climactic “Hey Zeus!”, about every two-hours for the next three days when Marcus and Jesus’ Ol’ Lady were having sex right there in the mud in front of him. Those “two-hours” is why the two months were added to the end of the year, as a cover for the Russian Mother of all Hoaxes.

All of that is repeated over, and over again throughout history associated with the Crusades since then. Think about what has been really going on while everyone has been watching television for the past... how long? Since TV was invented. It’s the same as being nailed to a cross and looking at stars while others have been raping the baby.

I think it’s fair to assume that in some select circles, that Russian Whore is called: “Jesus’ Ol’ AD“.

===============================

9:25 pm:

Further research tells of a frightening truth, one that includes what happens when a person begins to attend church. There are those at the churches who know all about the pirating, they have been taught through the ages, information passed down to them as they participate in the ongoing crusade pirating. Others, who are not aware and begin to attend church are slowly educated, prepared to accept a truth that is overwhelming for naive church goers. They are prepared to accept “The Fear of God”. Eventually over time, those who continue to attend church figure out on their own about the pirating, and mass murders. The preparation they are given, is the form of guidance, and a well honed teaching method that is far too complex to explain here, but what happens is like that “Giant Fog Horn In The Sky” that I mention sometimes that sort pushes, pulls, guides people into a desired position or place, it’s all done by those who have already graduated from Pirate School at the church. Those who learn the “Fog Horn” way, are not actually ever told out-load that the church members have been raping and pillaging, and murdering and enslaving other non-church people for the past two-thousand years, instead the learning method creates a way that makes the naive ones just sort of “wake-up” one day, and they know the truth suddenly. That is when they might run away. The church people are not going to allow anyone to run away. The new graduates are given some time to decide what they wish to do, the choices are, to become a Christian Pirate, and start to go out on kill missions for the Crusades, or, don‘t participate, and become a slave, captive with a short leash. The other option is to start to say what has been learned, to others, to seek help by explaining the dark secrets of the Church. That is when the church draws the line, and kills the new pirate graduates.

I am trapped in the “Captive with Short Leash” area, while the assassins sent from high places come to try to kill me everyday, sometimes more than once per day I must fight with weapons to protect my life because of what is written on this account, and no one will send any help. I am subject to many different varieties of poisons wielded by the terror church, and suffer a number of symptoms resultant of the poisons, with no medical services available to treat the problems. All of the medical services have been completely hijacked and have been controlled by the terror army for many years, my cries for help fall on deaf ears, and blind eyes.

“So, my research shows that there are select people who are allowed to live as long as they participate in the pirating the way they are told to do and by virtue of what skills they posses. There are some groups of people who simply are not tolerated at all by the Christian church, those seem to include black people, Mexican people and those from South America who are all entered into one kind of slavery or another as long as they stay quiet and don‘t learn about the pirating. Asians are also among that group, and are targeted for take-out mostly, the way it looks to me, not many are given the slave roles. It turns out that slavery can happen even if you don‘t necessarily feel enslaved, depending on the education level and life experience of an individual to know the difference between ultimate freedom, and pseudo-freedom.

So, it turns out that I keep learning more with each passing day, and today I know more about the terrorism than I did yesterday, so I shared some of that to seek help to possibly gain my freedom with your help.

=======================

9:58 pm:

(Terror hijacked my account)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmPgMc3R8zg&list=RDUmPgMc3R8zg&start_radio=1

I am trying to show that video where Stevie Nicks “assumes the position” after raising her arm in phallic gesture at the 3:15 mark in the song Edge of Seventeen. There, she becomes “Jesus’ Ol’ Lady”, to show you and me that she is either one of the leading pirates, or, is a slave to the pirates. I don‘t know, but I am convinced that she is making a statement about the Christian Church there at that point in the video. It’s notable that other band members rarely, if ever, get anywhere near Stevie Nicks while performing onstage at any of their performances. The band members seem to stay in their own prescribed places, and the band seems to bring along with them a very large black & white elaborately painted stage floor that is on flat on the stage where the audience cannot see it, seems to have designated markings where the band members are to stay within while performing. Go watch Fleetwood Mac and you will see that floor and markings stage confinement boundaries art travels with them from place to place.

I cannot post the video now because the bastards have disabled the “Post Video Button” here on Tumblr and they did that through the Symantec Norton Security Software I use, two pop-up window happened, one was Symantec, the other said “Adobe Flash is no longer supported” and contained some text details about why in small print. They were not Firefox browser pop-ups, they were separated 5 x 7 or so windows.

She is telling more than song details here.

Her arm raised is representative of a mast, where Jesus is nailed to, as a sail on a pirate ship where he is used as a motor to propel the pirate ship on it’s way, with wind in the sail. Her arm raised is also symbolic of the crucifix where Jesus is nailed behind her as Markus is having his way... sort of.

Tumblr won’t allow me to post another video after what I already explained today, so you have to do that on your own, but when you do the Google search at YouTube, they will be waiting to get your IP Address to send assassins to your house because you read what I wrote, and are now enlightened with truth about the nature of the Christian Church. They are pirates, always have been... rape, pillage, murder, enslave, is their job description. Be prepared to fight with weapons if you choose to find and watch that video. Google will hunt you down, and that is why they are disabling the “Post Video Button“ here, so that Google can find anyone who reads this account easier.

You should consider that she is “backing up to the Vatican Choir” here in that video, to say something about what is happening, to others. She may have been enlightened sometime around when that performance took place, had to make a choice, maybe.

It’s also notable that the lyrics for the live presentations for “Edge of Seventeen“ were changed after that performance. In later versions of the song, the phrase “...somethin‘ was in him” has been changed, Stevie sings “... there’s somethin‘ within him” in later performances done live. The change is significant when combined with what I am explaining here, and throughout this account.

===============================================

1-2-2021: 12:08 am:

Local Update:

I took a number of short walks outside today, and even lingered out there for a little while, but felt far from safe doing it. I noticed my Yule Log had been stolen while it was smouldering, that could only have been done to fool others, and must have been done by the man at 3701 Russell road who I saw pushing that garden cart. I also saw someone at Monroe’s wearing a pointy blue hoodie who obviously had been triggered into action simply as a result of me stepping outside, it was raining at the time, not really a good time for doing yard work at either the Chapman County Courts terror cell, or their extension service at Monroe’s.

I heard a lot of gunfire and explosions very close by in all directions last night on new years eve, which also were triggered by the notion the I had stepped outside, as I wrote about with an entertaining story about a convention at the US Department of Labor. Those gunshots and explosions were within one mile radius, many were much closer, including one very loud explosion that shook the house, rattled the decorations, and knocked over at least one object here at my house. That explosion seemed to have been detonated on my bedroom roof, though I have found no evidence of what it may have been.

Today there was a similar explosion that I heard clearly as it sounded from the John & Serena Makepeace cannibal SDA terror residence on Russell just south of Jess Way on the west side of Russell road. Very loud explosion, tight, compact, dense... not a “booom”, more like a “Snap” but a “Bass Snap” if such a thing can happen. The quality of that report had a uniquely tight, hard packed, sort of quality that is difficult to convey with words.

I don‘t recall hearing any vehicles at all today, and I did not see any vehicles in motion at all today.

A notable addition at the Monroe pond, is there is an arrangement of items that when looked at with particular knowledge, is clearly arranged as a “Surrey” or other horse drawn cart, but without any cart of any kind actually being there, there is a handle arranged for a brake. The message I get, is that the handle operates a brake when that leads to a OxCart if I walk passed that pond where the newly cleared out “Cam Site” is at where the Yard Waste Fire has been continued for quite awhile now.

There is a “swept” vibe going on there as well, as if a broom was used to sweep the dirt around the pond, so, “Thomson Subs” is spoken at “Monroe’s, Chapman/Courts extension service there”. That big explosion was triggered after short delay of a few minutes after I walked passed that “Cam Site” at Monroe’s pond.

There are no signs of helpful people. no one has come to help.

Please send help.

================

1-2-2021: 12:44 am:

The Centurylink/Google terror operatives continue to change some of the text I write, and continuesley are turning off the keyboard number pad, I have to hit the “numLk” button whenever I want to use numerals. When I push a number when the key pad is turned off, the page goes flying to a random place on the page I am writing, making it more difficult and time consuming to write life saving information. I have scroll back to the place I was writing. When the entry is a lengthy one, that takes some effort just to go find the cursor. When the text changes live as I type, that happens mostly in an area that is just above the viewable area on my screen. I write, the page progresses down, I scroll back up to have a look, and the things that are at the very top and had gone off-screen above, have been changed. I wind up in a typing contest with some terrorist asshole on the other side of the glass computer screen who changes one thing remotely as I repair another, live.

I saw one aircraft tonight, a twin prop plane going south at about 20,000 feet, was a substantial airplane, had only white blinking lights, there were no red lights on that one. I’ve forgotten what time that was, but was well after dark.

Lighting conditions at the terror neighbors are notable:

Chartrand is still running the icicles w/red conventional holiday lights on the front house.

Monroe turned their holiday lighting off while I was outside. It’s notable that Monroe goes through a lot of effort to put holiday lighting that can only be seen from my house, on their backyard upstairs roof line, where it does not look easy to put them, way up high, facing the back.

Chapman‘s turned off their holiday lighting, there is one additional larger white bulb in a place where I don‘t recall seeing lights before.

Myers lighting is reduced to the strand of lights surrounding the front entry there, I don’t see other lights from the road.

There are still some orange lights at a unknown building at 520 or at 560 in a odd place.

Bell’s at 445 is still quiet, all the cars are gone, have not been there, is dark, has no activity at 445 since the sword fight w/fishing net a number of days ago.

And Freeberg is most notable as all of the lights, many strings there at 535, are all white now, with exception of the garage over there, where there are colored lights making a gable shape. There is one green light-bulb out at the road edge there among what is otherwise all white ones, to the best of my ability to view from the corner of Jackpine & Jackpine at the fork.

There is one trash can at the corner, has the lid tipped back, is Dietrick’s can. It’s unusual that the lid is tipped back, otherwise that is per usual to see on a Friday. Deitricks seems absent from the neighborhood, but, I have only been outside a total of about maybe one hour combined in the past thirty days, so, I cannot make neighborhood assessments due to the sheer danger of stepping out of my front door.

520 is missing one small light from the gate there that is usually there. It’s not there, other similar small light is there, in a weird spot on the ground in the yard. I don‘t go too close to 520, far too dangerous to go near that gate to know if things are normal or abnormal.

Strongs on Russell road was quiet and mostly dark, the TV is still on, I can see that from 800 feet away through the woods. That same TV has been on constant for more than ten years.

[johngaltworld-blog]

Put Your Phone Down, Educate Your Friends, Speak Artfully

The answer is simple. Lets direct them towards the imaginary place above the other imaginary place sing songs and dance with the gods for thousands of years and find the truth above us! Greek Philosophy always seems to contain mythical imagery to say the least that at times can be hard to see what is actually being said. For example in Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates gives an abstract explanation of the soul by stating “Let us then liken the soul to the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer. The gods have horses and charioteers that are themselves all good and come from good b  stock besides, while everyone else has a mixture” (524,246b). In reality the soul isn’t actually this but Socrates uses this as a metaphor to explain the souls’ goal to the place above the heavens and that is where all true knowledge is visible only to the intelligent. The metaphor is so dense and complex that at times it is hard relate it to real life, however I found breaking this down in a more practical/realistic way may be of help when thinking about “How and towards what should we be directing the souls (or consciousness) of our friends?”

As Nic mentioned in his post “true friendship is a very idealistic sort of thing. The way he (Aristotle) tells it, it only happens between two truly good people, “who are alike in their virtue” (144.8-9). I agree with Nic’s understanding of friendship and have a similar view myself. He goes on to say that this friendship isn’t driven by an ulterior motive but rather for the pure fact you are a good person want good things to happen to your friends. My views are completely aligned with Nic’s. Aristotle’s interpretation of friendship is based on the principle of goodness and without goodness you can’t achieve this type of friendship.  I believe this type of is extremely rare. I use to think I had this type of friendship with more than a few people but over the years a few people I had thought to have this bond with have turned out to be in my eyes not good and not alike in my virtue. A few people started to display characteristics that I found to be morally bad and lacking genuineness. It may just my high standards of human beings but I have said this more than once, there are a lot of shitty people out there. But instead of focusing on them I would like to build further on the rare relationships and how one might direct there soul. 

To me in the simplest terms, your soul is your consciousness it is your mind and thoughts and active part of your body that is forming these thoughts I am writing right now, not exactly a horse with wings. The body is just a house for the soul to preform functions and participate in physical aspects of living. With this is being said, if you are a good person and have been exposed and  practice good habits while living then you too have a standard of good and what is good. If I befriend someone it is usually because I have noticed they are a good person and have displayed acts of goodness that have resonated with my personal beliefs and I interact with them by reciprocating good actions to them and if they notice and think “hey he seems like a good person,” then the process to developing a rare friendship will continue. 

Once this friendship has been initiated then comes along the influence each person involves has on each other. This is where you attempt to guide your friend’s souls. This is a responsibility you have to share not encourage and share your ideas of goodness with your friends to better yourself and others. A simple example may be that you agreed to help your friend with something that is very important and another opportunity presented itself but you decline because you realize you had made a commitment to that person and you value your commitments because you would want them to do the same. You are guiding their soul and leading by example. This is just one way to guide their consciousness, another might be by sharing ideals with them if you read a very interesting text that you found to demonstrate insightful knowledge on life you will want to share it with them because you want them to feel how you felt and learn the things you learned. You do this by voicing your thoughts to them and speaking to them about what you learned and convincing them why is it good. This is rhetoric, the science of speaking well. You use rhetoric to convey these ideas of goodness through speech. You are guiding their soul and aiming for the heaven above the heaven you see as good.

I believe this friendship is so rare in today’s world more so than it was when Plato wrote about it. I cannot seem to find the quote that I had highlighted in Phaedrus regarding the distractions that often make the soul’s quest for the higher truth more difficult but I found this to be even more true today. It is hard to have these conversations and develop guide your friend’s soul because everyone is on their phones or concerned with things that in the grand scheme of life, are useless and mindless tasks that don’t contribute to your overall goodness. Since these distractions are so frequent and in your face you can forget the value of rhetoric, friendship, and being a good person. I believe Socrates, Plato, and other philosophers wrote and crafted these ideas because they were sitting under a tree staring at the sky thinking. I think this is something we could all benefit from, unfortunately I think the patience of humans getting worse by the day and we can hardly sit still for 1o minutes without being on our phones or having a screen in front of your face. I am guilty of this at times too but actively try to dedicate more time outdoors instead of inside watching tv or picking up a book instead of picking up my phone looking at mindless things, I believe this is a way to guide people to think more and in the end be a better person. 

[itsclydebitches]

Hey! I saw on one of your fics for preacher to send you prompts so here's one! Tulip learns genesis is fiore and Deblancs baby and all five get in a big fight cause tulips like "GIVE IT BACK???" and Jesse is like "HOW?" There's some "we miss our baby" angst and ends with our gayngels getting to hold there son for a bit??? Idk I think about this alot????

Hello again, @hetaliaprussia! I hope you like this. For the record, I think about our gay angels and their child a lot too :D 

AO3: x

***

Jesse knew this sensation well: the weight of a body pinning his to the floor, a hand clenched, ironclad, into the front of his shirt. Everything from the knee in his stomach to the stench of another's sweat—it was familiar. He knew that as soon as he looked he'd see the barrel of a gun pointed just an inch or so from the bridge of his nose. Jesse understood that any words he heard would be a threat. Rinse and repeat.

Except that this attacker...

Tulip's hands were shaking as she pressed the muzzle flat against Jesse's forehead. No one else would have spotted it, but he did. He could feel the wound tightness in her limbs.

"You took their fucking child?" she hissed.

"Tulip. Tulip. C'mon now, luv, you are missing some real fuckin' important context here…"

Cass dithered behind her, arms reaching to try and pull her away before panicking and snapping back. Off to the side Fiore and DeBlanc looked on in shock. They were such smug, pretentious assholes. If Jesse hadn't known for sure that the gun Tulip held was loaded, he would have found their fish-like expressions amusing.

Instead he held perfectly still. "You're not gonna shoot me," he said, bland as white rice.

The gun pressed harder into his skin. "Really? That's your response here? You're digging yourself in real deep, Jesse Custer."

"You care?"

"Of course I care."

"Well then you're not gonna shoot me. Get off, Tulip."

Jesse wormed his leg up between hers, grabbed hold of Tulip's wrist, and flipped them so that she was the one now nestled against the church's floor. It was a move that only worked because a part of Tulip wanted it to. She scowled, jamming the gun back into her jeans and shoving him off her chest. They scrambled and backed away, Cass looking like they'd just averted a bomb going off.

"Okay," he said slowly. "I appreciate your wild sides, I honestly do, but the two of you have gotta get the whole fuckin' picture before you go threatenin' to shoot one another!"

"Who did I threaten to shoot?" Jesse snapped at the same time that Tulip spread her arms wide and yelled, "What picture, Cassidy? Jesse took their child!"

She pointed fiercely at DeBlanc and Fiore who now appeared sheepish in the extreme. Alright. That was amusing. Fiore muttered something too low for them to hear and turned away, eyes drawn to the ceiling in a comical display of aversion. It was DeBlanc who took the hesitant step forward, removing his hat and placing it protectively over his chest.

"Ms. O'hare..."

"Tulip. Do I look like a blasted 'Ms.' to you?"

DeBlanc swallowed. "Tulip. We contacted you because we know you're... close with this preacher. Jesse. It is true that he has our child... though it would perhaps be more accurate to say that our child chose him."

"Huh?" Tulip peered at the four of them, most of that anger giving way to confusion. "Hold up now. You made it sound like this kid of yours is an infant. How the hell does a baby choose someone? And who the fuck would choose Jesse?"

"I'm right here," Jesse said, but no one listened.

Cass raised his hand. "Yeah. Fascinating. But I'm more interested in how two blokes make a kid together in the first place. Can clones make babies?"

"Clone—?" Fiore gapped for a moment. "I'm an angel, you twit, and we don't adhere to your idiotic gender binaries."

"A what," Tulip said.

DeBlanc laid a hand on his arm. "His question is still valid though. Certainly no one in heaven knows how our union resulted in... procreation." He turned to the group. "It's just one more reason why you must return them. There are many who would do anything to seize the child of an angel and a demon."

"A what."

"Oh wow. Okay. That explains a whole lot of stuff. Did you know about this?" Cass asked. Jesse had his fingers pressed hard into the bridge of his nose, nodding sadly.

"Yeah. Had a whole damn conversation about it last night in the diner. I was going to tell you but then someone," Jesse glared at DeBlanc, "had to go and tell my girlfriend, who recently lost a child, that I went and stole someone else's."

DeBlanc blanched. "We didn't realize. We only wanted you to give them back."

"Well I can't! I've tried!"

"How come there's no word for that?" Cass murmured. "A woman who loses a child? We've got 'orphan' and 'widow,' but nothin' else that I know of. Huh. Just doesn't seem right."

"Enough," Tulip spit, interrupting them all. With the jerky movements of someone that was at the end of their rope, she reclaimed the gun and pointed it somewhere in the middle of their circle, essentially threatening them all. "You are treating this like a joke, but you know—you know, Jesse—that it's not." He bowed his head at that. Acknowledging for once that no, it wasn't a joking matter. "Now who is going to explain what the hell is going on here?"

Cass made short work of that, slotting together all the pieces they'd gathered thus far: angels and demons (not clones), God going missing, Genesis' creation, unfathomable power now rooted in their very own Jesse—who watched the proceedings with a vaguely bored expression. He didn't even flinch when Tulip raised the gun this time. Really, she was just using it for emphasis at this point.

"So this 'baby'..." she said slowly.

"Is probably the most powerful thing in existence," Jesse confirmed. "And it's currently nestled somewhere between my soul and my ribs."

"That doesn't mean we don't love them any less," Fiore snapped and there was a moment of silence as the group tried to decided if that was in reference to Genesis' power or the fact that it had chosen Jesse. Probably the latter.

He took a firm step forward. DeBlanc and Fiore held their ground. Jesse smiled.

"So what do you want, huh?" he demanded. "Getting Cass all riled up. Trying to turn Tulip against me. She pistol whipped me earlier." Tulip shrugged to show she really didn't regret that part. "You've tried luring this thing—"

"This child," DeBlanc said.

Jesse inclined his head. "—child out of me with songs and magic and who knows what else. It didn't work. So what exactly do you want me to do about it?"

"Haven't tried the chainsaw yet," Fiore muttered and DeBlanc had to shoot out a protective arm to keep him and Cass apart.

"Easy, love," he said. "To be frank, Jesse, I'm not sure how we should go about this, but we have to do something. At the very least I’d appreciate it if you—"

"Why don't you order it?"

All of them turned to Tulip, staring. She shrugged again and pretended to shoot Jesse straight in the middle of his chest. "It's all-powerful, right? So just use that power and, I don't know, tell it to come out for a second."

Fiore spluttered. "That is the most idiotic thing I've ever—"

"Genesis, c'mere."

And they did. 

The flash of light blinded them all momentarily, filling the church and worrying poor Mrs. Hinderson miles down the road, wondering what in the name of loving Jesus that was supposed to be. As she went back to walking Pepper and resigned not to stick her nose where it might get snapped off, DeBlanc was pushing groggily back to his feet, one hand supporting Fiore while his other had latched onto Tulip's arm. Cass was on Fiore's other side, his stunned expression no doubt a reflection of everyone else's.

"Oh my," DeBlanc whispered.

They'd never seen Genesis before. Not really. Not since the brief, confusing moment of their creation. And they weren't quite seeing them now either. How did you see something that wasn't a thing, but the absence of things—everything by virtue of being nothing at all? There was light, yes, but at the same time they were a void. DeBlanc knew at once that he couldn't look on his child for long, not without a vessel to act as a buffer. Still, he reached for them.

He felt Fiore doing the same. For a moment it was only the two of them in that church, fingers curving around the edges of their child. DeBlanc felt heat, ice, the thrum of electricity, and—

—and then they snapped back into Jesse.

He bent like a bow, stumbled, and only kept his feet by grabbing hold of the nearest pew. Jesse heaved like he'd just run a marathon, but he looked as rapturous as the rest of them.

"Don't see how it's any different," he finally whispered when no one else would speak. "You two taking human form. Genesis possessing me. It's all necessary. Like child, like parents right?"

DeBlanc nodded. The pain against his wrist was Fiore's hand. The sting on his cheek was a tear.

"Well," Fiore huffed, wiping inconspicuously at his own eyes. "That may be the case, but don't think for a second that I'm letting you run off with my child alone."

Jesse froze. "...No."

"Yes."

And it began over again, Fiore, Jesse, and DeBlanc launched into full-blown bickering about who got to tag along on what adventures, their tone completely at odds with the miracle they'd just witnessed. Cass shook himself like a dog, giving Jesse a lopsided grin and suggesting that he should make Genesis pay rent. Tulip sighed, tossed Jesse the gun, and made it very clear that this was not the kind of child they'd agreed to raise. Jesse waved the gun under Fiore's nose who just batted it away.

And somewhere inside Jesse, Genesis hummed with what might be termed happiness.

When they left the church, for all their arguing, they were heading down the same path. 

[opalescentegg]

 I’m Easter-drunk and I wanna talk about medieval marriage conventions.

(Because no one saw that drunk history reblog and decided to ask me, “Hey, Opal, what are your views on the weirder parts of medieval marriage?”  I’ll try not to misspell too many things---no promises. SO!  Medieval marriage.  Just how fucked up was it?? Very fucked up, of course.  But for the purposes of this....discussion, I’ll be focusing primarily on the conventions found in medieval England.  Why England?   Well, for starters, it has an incredible history of legal documentation.  Seriously, the legal courts (from local shire courts all the way up to the royal courts) recorded damn near everything, and for the longest time too!  I know that many medieval kingdoms saw themselves as the stewards of the Roman legal (and sometimes cultural) tradition, but in medieval England that anctually worked out okay (if you allow the inclusion of the Anglo-Saxon wittan, which eventually became the modern jury, but I’m getting ahead of myself).  Also, England was the only place where FEUDALISM ACTUALLY WORKED.  Seriously!  Everywhere else it was given plenty of lip-service but, well---in France you ended up with a few centuries of “local” counts that held more power than the fucking king; then there was the Holy Roman Empire (famously not holy, not Roman, and not and Empire, to paraphrase both Voltaire and one of my favorite university professors---it was also, generally speaking, a hot mess, even on a good day); and Spain (seven fucking centuries of Reconquista does not a stable feudal society make, so sorry); and Italy.....look, the city-states are awesome, but are also about as un-feudal as it gets, so they basically don’t count for anything outside of their economic, and occasionally Crusade-oriented, bubble. Alright, to be fair, most of that last bit had nothing to do with anything----I just really needed to get some of that off my chest. But the documentation thing is actually germane to this topic. First and foremost is the fact that the “terms” of marriage were pretty sketchy for a long, long, long time.  One particular complaint that crops up again and again in English shire court rolls has to do with just how married different parties in a couple saw themselves.  A lot of this had to do with the language of marriage vows, as well as how marriages were “performed” back before the.....oh, let’s say thirteenth century.   For a long while, marriages were considered legitimate if both parties spoke some church-approved vows to one another, and did so with full sincerity and fear of God, etc., etc.   The problem there was that which words were church-approved was not always clear.  Oh, sure, someone might have the general gist of them, but not the particulars---and since most of the peasantry during the Middle Ages was illiterate, it’s not like they could just write it down for later.  Also, the “approved” words tended to change when new popes, bishops, etc. were elected, and it often took a while for information about changes to vow templates (among other things) to trickle down.   There was also a more pragmatic element to all of this.  Namely, although churchmen certainly hoped that young lovers would seek out a church for the legitimization of their union, they were more than aware of the fact that some people either did not have that option (the nearest church being, perhaps, too far away) or would find themselves too swept up in passion to seek out the nearest house of God.  That’s part of why the church-approved vows existed in the first place---the idea was that, in the absence of either the clergy or community witnesses of good standing, a couple could still make a vow before God and therefore legitimize a marriage (though it always helped if they sought out a priest afterwards, to really legitimize it; but, especially in the early Middle Ages, that wasn’t strictly necessary). This is where is gets weird.  Also rape-y.  So...consider yourself warned, I guess. First of all: THOSE VOWS. There was a lot of confusion regarding vows (part of why the church started insisting that all marriages take place inside a church, with clergy present---less easy to fuck it all up that way).  It wasn’t unusual for a man to sort of half-vow to stay with a woman, then for them to consummate the relationship, then for the man to insist that they were not actually married while the woman (citing what she thought was a true vow) insisted they were.  Interestingly, this could be brought before the court as a case of rape, seeing as how complete, explicit consent in a sexual act was not necessarily given by both parties----and, believe it or not, the medieval church was DEEPLY concerned with consent; despite any and all social and economic disparities, a marriage was supposed to be (ideally) a union between two equal souls, and that equality meant that both parties had to agree to said union by their own free will, lest they commit the grave sin of bearing false witness before God Himself (not to say that the parties could not be cajoled, coerced, or threatened into “consent” beforehand, only that no one could actually be dragged to the altar, wailing and weeping, without any clergyman worth his salt immediately declaring the pending union void due to lack of consent---no matter what Hollywood might show you.) The point is that the woman (or, occasionally, the man, because that did happen too) could sue for marriage.  This was somewhat more of a concern for women, as it concerned their “virginity” or “virtue.”  If a woman had been married and was widowed, chances were that she inherited some property from her late husband, and so could levy that on Ye Olde Marriage Market.  The prospects for completely unmarried girls and women were more tenuous. Look.  For this next part, you need to STOP THINKING LIKE A MODERN PERSON.  It sucks, I know, but you must understand how medieval people thought. The short version is that: virginity was an economic commodity.   That’s how both men and women thought of it.  So, if a peasant girl with little in the way of a dowry, and who had never been married before (and therefore had no inheritance from a deceased husband) was looking to marry, her “virginity” was the best bargaining chip she had.   Therefore, if some strapping beau had made what SHE considered vows of marriage before fucking her into the heath, she’d likely feel quite justified in dragging him to the local shire court and suing for marriage----because he had unambiguously “compromised her virtue,” and done so under false pretenses: grounds for a rape accusation, if ever there was one. And, oh, sweet children, it gets worse. I have seen comments on this here Tumblr claiming that medieval women who were victims of rape would be forced to marry their rapists. This is.......not untrue.  I cannot and will not say that such things did not happen (especially if a child resulted of that forced coupling; depending on whose medical treatises you read, conception was sometimes viewed as occurring only if both parties involved had orgasms, the idea being that women released an “essence” at the moment of climax the same way men did----the upshot is that a few learned men, I hope, at least tried to make sex actually pleasurable for their wives; the downside is that pregnancy via rape could be cited as “evidence” that a female victim “””enjoyed,””” and was complicit in, her own assault.)  However.  Things get.....interesting, if not a little uncomfortable, when the situation is turned on its head. You see, women did marry their rapists.  But some of them did it willingly----hell, some of them did it forcefully.  This is where the “virginity” thing really comes into play.  Because if a girl or woman who had successfully “defended her chastity” for all her life suddenly found herself on the receiving end of a sexual assault-----well, it wasn’t unusual for her to drag her attacker before the court and sue for marriage.  But why the fuck would she want to?????  I get it, trust me.  Still, you must remember what I said about virginity earlier.   For a peasant girl, her “virginity” was her only bargaining chip in the marriage market; a rape meant that bargaining chip was gone; sometimes things could be smoothed over by a hefty payment of money and/or livestock to the girl’s father/male guardian to “make up” for the loss of virtue and (by extension) family honor, but this was of course not always possible; and so the only way to maintain honor (and, therefore, economic security, and even economic viability in the marriage market, should her husband pass away) was to marry the rapist.  Oh, and DON’T THINK for even a SECOND that there weren’t ladies literally hauling their assaulters into the courtroom and, basically, telling them to LIE IN THE BED THEY FUCKING MADE.   Look.  Just.  NEVER think that medieval women, even the poorest and least of the lot, didn’t have power.  It was a fucking shitty kind of power, but damn if they didn’t exploit it wherever they could. Case in point: when a rapist wasn’t really a rapist. Soooo, now you’ve heard of medieval women suing her rapist for marriage in order to preserve her social and economic standing!  Well, guess what? Sometimes both of them faked it~!! Yeah.....this is where it gets super fucked up. Because sometimes a girl loved a boy.  But her father didn’t like that boy, probably for economic reasons, and forbade her from consenting to marry him (because the father  was aware of those prickly couples-only church vows, etc, etc.)  So how’s a girl to get around this predicament?   Why, by being “carried off” ( “rape” coming from an older word meaning “forceful seizure”) by some man (the lover) and his cohorts (his friends, there to watch his back and basically make sure no one comes to kill him after witnessing his “abduction” of the maiden, if anyone witnessed it at all).  Then they spend a few days hanging out in the woods before the daughter comes home to her father and says something to the effect of: “Oh, wow, yeah, so this guy, he just grabs me right out of the fields and carries me off the the woods, while I’m kicking and screaming of course, and forces himself on me right there, totally against my will, but the good news is that he’s completely willing to marry me to like make amends or whatever, and oh by the way it just happens to be that guy I’m really into but that you totally hate, what’s a girl to do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ” BUT.  Because the woman could call it a rape, and even be backed up by witnesses (the lover’s friends----I know it seems weird, but in the Middle Ages witnesses (fuck, personal references) were basically the only currency outside of the gold florin that mattered worth a damn), she could “sue” for marriage, and end up marrying the man she’d wanted all along, no doubt to the consternation of her father. ................Yeah, the Middle Ages were pretty fucked up.

[palliddata]

Game Of Insert Pun Here

By Elizabeth “Esquilax” Lavenza

This isn’t just an article about Season 7. Game of Thrones has had plenty of enduring problems since its inception, and the roots that fully sprouted this year have been festering for quite some time. The series’ obsession with rape isn’t new, for example. And if you’re the type of person who’s mentally rolling out all the justifications for why the show needs to regularly show explicit rape scenes, please remind yourself that the show doesn’t feel the need to show us hideous period-accurate pseudomedieval teeth, so the “they need all the rape because gritty realism!” defense doesn’t hold up. And since I can’t find a good place to slot in the racism issue in the rest of this article, I’m bringing it up here, because it’s yet another gaping wound on the show. The fact that non-white people almost exclusively show up in Game of Thrones to be liberated by the hyperaryan Daenerys is...well, do I even have to go into it? Part of the problem is the show’s overburdened nature: juggling plotlines on two separate continents isn’t easy, and Essos typically ended up left in the lurch, its residents and societies and cultures left unfleshed as essentially Pokémon gyms for Daenerys to beat on her way back home. Since I’m trying to keep this article focused on season seven, I’m not even going to get into the abominable, interminable Dorne story arc, which has been torn apart in plenty of other pieces.

If I had to pick one point where the show jumped the shark, it would have to be when Jon Snow became Jesus. Snow has always been the closest thing to a traditional fantasy hero in the story: handsome, martially and tactically skilled, partially noble, dramatic, and intermittently flawed but overall morally decent. So, if the show was to earn its reputation as dark, subversive, and merciless, knocking him down from this position would have been an obvious place to start, a move that would have shocked the audience in the same manner as Ned Stark’s death. Kill him, take him out of action, reveal him as a hypocrite, there were many options. The writers magically brought him back to life instead, and in doing so they perfectly set the tone of the coming seasons: Jon was The Hero, and even death could not stop him from assuming his place as the heroic savior of a world that we were led to believe was no place for heroic saviors. Even revealing that he secretly isn’t a bastard, and is therefore even more noble-blooded than we assumed (“secret noble heir” being such a contrived and hackneyed fantasy trope that critics were already tearing into it decades ago) couldn’t match up to the betrayal of any sense of actual grittiness or ruthlessness or subversion that was The Resurrection Of Jon. And since then, the show hasn’t exactly kept to its promise of ruthlessness. Sam cured Jorah’s greyscale. Jamie charges towards an angry dragon and comes out more or less unscathed. Jon and his pals embark on a pointless, ill-conceived zombie wrangling mission, and the only casualty is one of three mostly interchangeable dragons (and that doesn’t even get into how badly the “capture a zombie to prove they’re real” subplot abuses time and space to allow characters to teleport around Westeros at speeds dictated solely by the needs of the sloppy writing).

Jon’s messianic turn feeds into the central problem with what Game of Thrones became. Now, the most cliched and simplistic sorts of fantasy tend to present morality and conflict in rather simple terms. A hero or group of heroes, usually of noble birth and gifted with great power by virtue of their noble birth or purity of heart, rise to oppose a generally un-nuanced and uniformly fiendish villain, cheating death and conquering improbable odds to persevere. This was exactly the kind of story Game of Thrones wanted us to think it wasn’t, what with all the gore and sex and corruption and intrigue and major characters dying. But where are we in this season? Jon, Daenerys, and Tyrion are together on Team Good Guy, Cersei has gathered the scum of Westeros on Team Bad Guy (and Jamie has finally left her side, depriving Team Bad Guy of one of its few sympathetic, nuance-providing members), while Scowls McCorpse and his frozen pals round out the conflict with Team Pointless Zombie Murder. Dear god, the zombies. Dany vs. Cersei is a fairly cut and dried “good army vs bad army” brawl, but they can at least add some depth with the tragic factor of the inevitable deaths of the innocent soldiers who just happened, through accident of birth or fortune, to end up on Cersei’s side. The same can’t exactly be said for the zombie conflict, since GoT’s zombies don’t deviate much from the usual fantasy template of mindless monsters the heroes can guiltlessly hack up. Even Sauron, Morgoth, and their orc armies had more motivation than the scowling White Walkers, and they were capable of exercising their power in much more subtle and memorable ways. I genuinely do not understand why “inexplicably evil zombie army” was chosen to be Westeros’ encroaching doom. Surely there were less banal cataclysmic threats than an evil zombie army. It isn’t even a creative zombie army, as indicated by the fact that its most interesting asset, a zombie dragon, is something that Dungeons and Dragons players have been hacking up for decades by now.

Those are some of the major overarching issues, but the show has so many more, all intertwined with each other like an incestuous mangrove of creative laziness. The show’s reluctance to kill off major characters combined with its sexism has given us yet more interminable character focus on Theon, an unlikable, uncompelling sorrow-blob who seems to exists solely to steal narrative attention from more interesting female characters, his toxic presence depriving the genuinely likable Yara of her own character arc just so he can dramatically redeem himself by proclaiming he’ll rescue her after she ends up being needlessly damseled. The union of bad writing and bad acting made Littlefinger’s presence in the seventh season agonizing. Aidan Gillen plays him as Slick McSleaze, World’s Shiftiest Man, to the degree that you have to wonder why literally anyone in Westeros trusts him any more. The show’s terrible writing and plotting sends him into probably his most ridiculous scheme yet, trying to turn the Stark sisters against each other...for no clear benefit that would make it worthwhile for him to antagonize two very powerful, dangerous people who already hate and distrust him. And Tormund, fucking Tormund, living embodiment of the show’s decision to jettison creative merit for GIF-worthy scenelets. Tormund, who shows up at least once an episode so the writers can remind us HEY HE REALLY WANTS TO FUCK BRIENNE, who has turned Brienne’s primary role in the story into “woman who Tormund wants to fuck”, and who magically escapes death by zombie army so he can continually remind us how much he wants to fuck Brienne. The season ends with his fate uncertain, but I do not trust the show’s writers to do the decent thing and kill him off offscreen. Game of Thrones isn’t really doing anything right, other than a few visually spectacular scenes. It’s given up on being in any way a mature and subversive approach to the fantasy genre, but it isn’t even particularly good at being cliched, because even if we accept it as a standard “good vs evil” plot, it remains riddled with bad writing, bad decisions, and myriad plot holes. If you told me a few years ago that the future would see people talking seriously about a big-budget show involving dragons, I would have been cautiously optimistic. I guess the ultimate moral of Game of Thrones is that fantasy fans have to be careful what they wish for.