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she-s-a-shy-one · 2 years ago

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Aisling Tamlinsan is conceived during a Calanmai rite in a desperate attempt to resurrect the powers of the Spring Court. On the day she is born a girl, their hopes for a new High Lord heir are dashed. But she is still a child, a babe who did not ask to be born a disappointment and so instead she grows up in the dilapidated Spring, which has grown wild and dangerous in the absence of Tamlin's power. Spring is not merely flowers and greenery. Spring is thunderstorms and floods, tangled woods full of untamed creatures, the natural world taking back the fae one, inch by inch, building by building, brick by brick. The crops will not yield. Their homes decay faster than they can be built. The only food comes from those brave enough or desperate enough to hunt the Wandering Woods and even that is sparse.

Aisling is raised by those who remains, those either cannot or will not leave, not through any love of their High Lord but because their lives are bound to the Spring and they will find no refuge in the other courts. She is raised with stories of a once powerful court, a once powerful High Lord and a once powerful land. She is raised with stories of the woman who brought an end to it all, Feyre Cursemaker, Feyre the Damned, Feyre the Night Demoness.

Aisling tried as a young girl to access the primordial power of the Spring court but Tamlin's absence and neglect has warped his bloodline's ability to harness it. Every attempt to access her own magic hurts her. Eventually she stops trying. They all stop trying. They simply survive.

The imperilled Spring throws the rest of the courts out of balance. But forces sent to investigate often do not return. Spring is not blooms and lightness. Spring is teeth and fur and wild yellow eyes.

On the occasion that Aisling encounters scouts of this kind, she ignores them and their demands. What does she owe the fae who abandoned her people? Besides, those who attempt to invade their lands soon discover the blood price for such an act is too high and the rewards too pathetic to justify future attempts.

On the occasion that she encounters a certain high fae prince of the Night Court...well.

Aisling tries to kill him at first. Of course she does. Nyx Archeron, son of the Demoness. His blood spilled would be a sweet offering to Spring. Even without magic, Aisling is a powerful opponent. For all his gifts, Nyx has been raised with love and affection. He has never gone hungry. He has never been beaten by the very people he is sworn to protect. His father has taught him respect and duty, his mother has raised him with a kind heart and open mind.

Aisling's father has been nothing more than a glimpse of pale fur for over two hundred years. She has been raised to hate. To survive.

She's unsuccessful in her efforts to kill him. A pity but Aisling cannot waste time on revenge. Her people starve without her. The little that remain of her Court vanishes without her. She abandons Nyx to the Wandering Wood. Let him break his fool's neck some other way.

She's not prepared for him to abandon his command (his friends, his fellow warriors, all of whom caution his curiosity) to follow her.

No amount of cursing or spitting or scratching or snarling will force him away. She doesn't know that Nyx has spent years of his own in the Hewn City, cultivating a persona of the Night Prince, a male who demands respect and dread. She cannot frighten fear itself. But she can intrigue him.

Aisling does not soften to his questions. She does not share her meat out of the goodness of her heart. She does not allow him to sit near her fire at night out of concern. She does not begin to admire the striking lines of his face, of the black ink swirls that creep above his shirt collar. She does these things because doing otherwise would be a waste of her energy and that is all.

The days pass. Weeks soon roll by. Nyx finds himself waiting for Aisling's elusive smiles. He watches her braid her long pale hair back in the mornings, admires the lean muscled strength of her bronze flesh, the way her eyes focus on her prey with hawk like precision, pupils contracting against the dark velvet green of her eyes. She is unlike any female he has ever met and she still very much wants to kill him but Nyx also suspects that he's growing on her.

He's right of course. But Aisling would rather slit her throat than admit to it.

Months have passed before they realise. Nyx suspects his absence will not be tolerated for much longer. When he calls on his command to meet him at the border of Spring to discuss his leave, he prepares messages for his parents but the opportunity to disclose them is interrupted by a beast twice the size of any he has faced before, a mangy, fearsome creature with nothing but bloodlust in its eyes. None of his powers work against its rage. It bats his soldiers, his friends, away like ragdolls, it charges for Nyx with singleminded determination.

In the end, Nyx's life is saved by the very female who sought to end it all those months ago.

Curiously the beast will not harm Aisling, much to its own detriment. She slashes and slices like a wild thing herself until it retreats and even then, Nyx can sense her will to hunt it, her instinct to pursue her prey to the end. But the fight has left her bloodied and against his orders, his command rallies under the orders of their High Lord to contain any threats to their Prince's life. Aisling Tamlinsan is taken into custody and removed from the Spring Court for the first time in her life.

Rhysand refuses his son's requests to visit the female. Feyre too cautions Nyx's demands. They see a female whose rage is endless and violent, whose screams promise death to her captors, a female whose eyes are so familiar as to turn his mother pale. Rhys would be happier to let her rot in the dungeons of the Hewn City. Let Azriel tear out information from her, piece by piece, in punishment for attacking his child.

Every one of Nyx's attempts to visit Aisling are foiled. He is in his father's domain now, there is no doubt who holds the power here. But his mother softens at his explanation. She visits the female not as a mother but as High Lady of the Night Court.

She is unprepared for Aisling's words, for the accusations brought against her. For what does she care for her father's former lover? What does he matter in the grand scheme of all this? How can he, when Feyre the Damned stands before her, righteous as the rising moon, and tells her she has nothing to apologise for.

Feyre the Night Demoness, who brought her people to their knees, her stripped them of their home and crushed an entire court, a court that had once loved her. Feyre revenged herself against Tamlin. But she decimated Aisling's people to do it.

What makes her better than the witch under the mountain? She is no better than Amarantha in Aisling's eyes, in the eyes of the children who go hungry in Spring, of the women who slave over crops that cannot yield, of men who break their backs to build homes that will only ever crumble.

She is her the plague of her people and Aisling is glad to have been brought to these dungeons in chains, if only to have gained the chance to look Feyre the Damned in the eyes and tell her she is the villain in her story.

#aisling ni tamlin #tamlins daughter #nyx archeron #feyre archeron #rhysand #acotar #acomaf #acowar #a court of silver flames #acosf #a court of thorns and roses #tamlin #should i add more to this #pt 1

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agape-philo-sophia · 7 months ago

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➝ Predatory Mind-Virus of Domination and Slavery.

This mind-virus of master-slave relationships exists in many forms and varying degrees. For example there is the corporate hierarchy and outright slavery, among others. The system of domination we immerse ourselves into has us develop self-loathing capacities to varying degrees. We are conditioned to envy the person who has “more” of the material wealth, comfort and convenience in life. A conditioning process takes place and submerges itself into our identity construct (ego) and ways of being (behavior), whereby we dislike those who appear to be in elevated positions compared to us.

In direct slavery and other covert forms of domination and fear, there is the aspect of “ratting” people out or turning them in to the central dominators. We turn people into the dominators and turn into dominators ourselves. In outright slavery, Hitler’s Germany, and post-9/11 America, the fear of being harmed is the same and results in similar conditioning towards helping the masters control more people. In outright slavery, some would prefer to be special slaves, house slaves, and they would enforce slavery on others. They would “rat” others out or enforce violations of Natural Law Rights for the reward and privilege they gained in return. In our covert slave system of willing servitude, many people like to be masters over others. These people like trying to command others into falsity to perpetuate the current condition in order to maintain or increase their relative position in the hierarchical slave system. They also punish others with a violation of their rights for not going along with bullshit. There are those who are not in positions of power or of being rewarded by the “mommy” or “daddy” central authority of control, but they look for the opportunity. People are encouraged to turn other people over to the central authority for man’s phantasmic delusion of alleged “crimes” that have done no harm.

“Where once I served, now I have others serving me.” – 12 Years a Slave

Welcome to the current human condition on earth as we have created it: a Hell of the Predatory Mind-Virus of Domination and Slavery. Because we want and choose to be this way in our degenerated, devolved, diseased state of consciousness, our diseased hearts and minds.

Deeper study: Words, definitions, meanings, etymology.

predatory:

• plunder (goods taken by force) • pillage (from pillier “to plunder, loot, ill-treat”) • prey (earlier praeheda, literally “something seized before,” from PIE *prai-heda)

dominator:

• dominate (dominari “to rule, dominate, to govern,” from dominus) • domain (from Latin dominium “property, dominion,” from dominus “lord, master, owner,” from domus “house”) • domestic (from PIE *dom-o- “house,” from root *dem- “house, household”)

Dominator relates to ownership of domain. If you view yourself as owning something else, then you have dominion over it, at least in your mind. You view it as your property, to do with as you wish.

You can have dominion over yourself. You can rule yourself. You can rule over your personal space: the house of your vessel for consciousness, the body, or the house you have made for your habitat and survival. We, human animals, are delusional and apply dominion to any arbitrary domain we can conceive of, and claim it as our own to become the dominator over many things outside of ourselves. Vast amounts of land, knowledge, concepts, other animals (even other human animals), etc. We are insane with desires to control and own everything. We can choose otherwise, but we have bought this way of life. We are living their mindset, and helping them create their desired reality. Many enjoy its comforts and rewards, and they will fight to preserve the illusion.

The only Rules are the Rules of Natural Law, not man’s delusional “law”. Self-Governance corresponds with the Rules of Natural Law. It is not a conflict, unless you go against it, in which you are actually acting against others and yourself.

This is how we can identify dominators. Those who view themselves as owners of other domains that are not theirs. You do not own Truth. You do not own other human animals, and you do not own other nonhuman animals. Everyone who thinks they have the right to do what they want to other sentient animate beings is a dominator. People who own land they do not live off of are dominators of the earth. They have claimed dominion over the whole planet, and everyone else who came later has had to engage in slavery of some form in order to survive on this planet. They are even claiming dominion over the moon, mars and space. This is the Predatory Mind-Virus of Domination and Slavery in action, still today. People dominate the slave system we are in, and they live in opulent luxury and convenience, while others toil away in slave society to keep the top classes in their positions.

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gameshorizon · 1 year ago

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A Journey Through the Most Terrifying Horror Games

Thrill-seekers, adrenaline junkies, and horror fans, prepare yourself for a spine-tingling journey into the realm of interactive horror. Here we explore the greatest and most terrifying horror games ever made.

Turn out the lights, put on your best headphones, and get ready for a heart-pounding trip. These best horror PC games will have you grasping your controller in clammy anticipation, and indulge in everything from spine-tingling jump scares to psychologically unsettling storylines. We will look at the PC horror games that pioneered or excelled in terror and pushed the limits of what was conceivable in the gaming industry.

Amnesia: The Bunker

Amnesia is one of the most popular horror games series ever. These dark and tense games have you exploring haunting dungeons and keep the suspense up through the playthrough. With minimal gameplay mechanics, these games win over the players with mesmerizing soundtrack, spooky ambience, and the threat of ever-present danger.

The latest entry in the series, Amnesia: The Bunker, has gamers embodying an injured French soldier. Your task is simple - keep surviving. Hailed by many as the best horror PC game of the year, it features a heart-wrenching story and a gut-churning gameplay experience.

Dead by Daylight

A fascinating multiplayer horror-survival title, Dead by Daylight focuses on a group of survivors, trying to escape a dangerous murderer. It’s essentially a 4v1 survival game, where four players act as the victims and one takes on the role of the murderer. The game features intricate puzzles, arresting level designs, and hauntingly beautiful (and jump scary) dark, gloomy atmosphere.

The developers periodically release new seasons and episodes that feature new characters (for both murderers and victims) and also include well-known personalities as in-game characters, such as Nicolas Cage. With developers adding new levels, characters, and cameos from movies, other games, and TV shows, Dead by Daylight is one of the more challenging, yet fun horror games.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

The seventh installment in the Resident Evil series takes you back to the roots and the result is one of the scariest zombie-survival horror games ever made. While the Resident Evil series is mostly renowned for action and combat-based gameplay, Biohazard flips the formula.

Hardcore series fans won’t be disappointed, as the game doesn’t completely omit the combat elements. However, the game primarily focuses on survival and creates a tense and foreboding atmosphere to keep players constantly on their toes. With meticulously designed levels that focus on stealth, escape, and survival, rather than gun-ablaze zombie shooting, this title surely earns the spot in the list of best horror PC games ever made.

Alien Isolation

With a large number of Xenomorphs and levels full of shadowy dark corners, Alien Isolation offers a unique blend of survival and platforming. The gameplay never gets old, as gameplay mechanics and animations keep changing, morphing into the stuff from your worst nightmares.

Majority of gameplay is based around tip-toeing and finding creative ways to sneak away from dangerous aliens. This horror game from SEGA creates a fascinating and scary atmosphere to conjure up the feeling of being trapped without any hope, so when you finally find a way out or a good place to hide, you feel extremely rewarded - however, never off the hook.

Outlast

Outlast earns a spot in the list for best horror PC games ever made, owing to the fantastic mechanics incorporated by the developer Red Barrels. While The Outlast Trials, the latest in the series, offers brilliant gaming experience and a variety of new elements, the original Outlast ranks much higher in terms of the environment, story, narration, and characters.

The sequences in night vision create such a lasting impact that even the light feels strange once you step out of them. The developers pull off a brilliant job of scaring players by creating an incredibly tense environment that simply doesn’t allow to let out a sigh of relief unless you close the game (maybe not even then. The Mutated enemies are sure to haunt your nightmares for days at end).

Layers of Fear

Layers of Fear presents itself as a beautiful amalgamation of insanely horrific creatures and spirits and delicately created, artful environment. The game focuses on a family of artists. You explore the chilling scenery, filled with intricate pieces of artworks, haunting melodies, and attempt to uncover horrendous hidden tales of the family in one of the best indie horror PC games.

The game takes place in a haunted mansion, with tons of stuff meant to derail, confuse, delude, and scare players. Inclusion of supernatural entities, disturbing imagery, and eerie silence broken by soft piano, mixed with puzzles, atmospheric exploration, and psychological distress, make this title one to remember.

Note: If you want some more, off-beat and nightmarish games to play, Roblox offers a variety of interesting online horror games. Some Roblox horror-survival games, such as Mimics, It Lurks, Asylum, and Elmira, can surely tickle the spooky bone.

#horror games #scary games #layers of fear #outlast #alien isolation #resident evil #dead by daylight

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lightdancer1 · 1 year ago

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Nor must one overlook that the great victories of 1944-5 laid the groundwork for what the Soviet and Russian armies would become:

In 1944 there was another great offensive launched on 22 June, Operation Bagration. This and the offensive into the Balkans would start the process of creating the Soviet bloc. Here too one can also note that the reality of the Axis-Soviet War would go on to shape the post-WWII history of Central and Eastern Europe from the Elbe to Vladivostok. By 1944 the shattered army of 1941 that mostly served to die in carload lots and grist up the German war machine with a shitload of blood had US radios in its tanks and rode US trucks that gave it a great deal of speed, and achieved by sheer massing of artillery what US armies did with gizmos.

The reality of Soviet power and its limits can also be noted by the very existence of Army Group Center of 1941, still holding most of Belarus because the Rzhev and Smolensk battles were a part of the uglier side of the Soviet war, where vast armies of people dragged from all over the USSR were thrown into meat grinders of poorly-led and poorly-conceived offensives. In the course of this Belarus would go on to lose one in four of its population, for which Belarusians were rewarded by being labeled 'Russians' and their language driven even further into being terminally endangered in its own country, which is one of the many, many reasons why today's Ukrainians insist on Ukrainian over Russian in Ukraine.

Bagration would come to an end at the Vistula, at the gates of Warsaw, where the Polish Home Army rallied to prevent the Soviets from taking Poland in the assumption, always dangerous, that the Georgian bank robber wouldn't notice this and would help them to do it. Somehow, Stalin decided to refuse on it and let Oskar Dirlewanger and other subhuman monsters rampage through Warsaw slaughtering and raping every Pole they could catch.

This offensive simultaneously secured Soviet power in central Europe, hence combining with genuine logistical overstretch and a malicious pleasure in letting the Poles learn the hard way that the Soviets were never going to help Poland keep them out and that the entire idea they would was misguided, for why the Soviet Army would turn to the Balkans and move from the border of the future postwar Ukrainian SSR to that of Hungary.

Soviet people, even briefly, were stupid enough to think that the casualties of the previous years of the war and the totality of the debacle moderated the Stalinists and even during the war new waves of deportations and NKVD executions taught them, as they did Ukrainians, that evicting the people who wanted them all dead meant a return to the unlovely aspects of the prewar state because the very totality of potential collapse meant the Soviet state was meaner, not kinder, after the war.

It knew all too well the margin by which survival was won in the horrors of 1941 fighting. And the very practices it unleashed in victory in and out of the USSR ultimately set in motion the first snowballs that became the avalanche of Soviet collapse, while providing in its own way a set of profound shifts and first steps to reawakening the desires of both Belarus and the larger postwar Ukraine to not be Russians at all costs, given what their Russian overlords were so content to do them.

This, too, was the reality that made the two theaters of WWII so different. Western armies had some excesses and a habit of shooting German POWs from finding it too much work to take POWs. The Soviet army marched with a kind of looting raping and massacring wave to match that of the Germans intent on its pound of flesh and indiscriminate in those it took it from. And that started in the USSR and went all the way to the Elbe, neatly assuring that any prospect of popular legitimacy from the 1945 victory died in the very apocalyptic nature OF that victory.

And in that wave of undisciplined barbarism one can also see the future shadows of Afghanistan, Chechnya, Syria, and Ukraine.

#lightdancer comments on history #military history #historical anniversaries #operation bagration #axis-soviet war

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whumpster-fire · 2 years ago

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Ya know, as much as I love The Railway Series / TTTE and I hate the whole “Sodor is an oppressive capitalist dystopia Sir Topham Hatt is evil, TTTE is anti-worker propaganda” thing, I’ve been rereading/rewatching some of the stories lately, and... I have to admit, some of them really do teach a very unhealthy attitude towards work, and in particular treating working while sick and “pushing through” injury being treated as a positive thing.

Like, off the top of my head I can think of three stories - Edward’s Exploit, Old Faithful, and Gallant Old Engine - where an engine has been suffering from health issues for a while but continuing to work regardless, finally has something serious / potentially catastrophic go wrong, and has to push through and limp the train back to the station because the train will be late / passengers will complain and the struggling railway that the engines are reliant on for survival may close, and this perseverance is portrayed as a positive thing, and long overdue repairs portrayed as a reward for this good behavior.

Which is kinda fucked up if I think about it.

Like, this is something different from the “Thomas Comes to Breakfast” thing where an engine is blamed for being careless when really it was a human who fucked up. It sounds bad but it’s caused by Awdry’s constant struggle between anthropomorphization and depicting railway operations with maximum realism resulting in him never being able to decide how much autonomy and agency the engines have, and he conceived of the engines’ personalities as allegorical for both the quirks of real machines and for the behavior of the real-life people working with them. And the moral lessons about arrogance and carelessness still usually hold up.

But in the “engines pushing through breakdowns” stories, if you view the engines as people then their bravery in pushing through bad situations is admirable, but it seems like there’s never any blame placed on the humans putting them in those situations by neglecting “medical” care and causing worse injuries by making them work while injured, and it’s never questioned that they should put not only other’s safety but others’ profits and convenience before their own well-being. And if you view them as machines then, uhh, failing to perform necessary maintenance on machinery to save time/money thus eventually causing something to break that’s much more expensive than if you’d fixed the original problem and take it out of service for months is a fucking stupid way to run a business. And extra stupid when you’re working with heavy equipment that can fail in a way that can easily cause severe injury or death, which is true of all trains and triple stupid with steam locomotives which are a giant fucking Mythbusters Hot Water Heater Rocket on wheels.

I want to see a RWS story where an engine severely damages themselves by trying to keep pulling a train they’re in no condition to pull and it’s treated as a bad thing and a bus having to take the passengers isn’t the end of the world. I want to see a mid-level manager trying to impress TFC getting chewed the fuck out and fired after it’s found out that he pressured or guilt-tripped an engine into lying about ongoing pain. I want to see an entitled Karen passenger waving a ticket stub in the crew’s face and complaining about how much the railway sucks in full earshot of an engine who’s just sitting there in horrible pain and their fireman just snatching the ticket stub, climbing into the cab, and throwing it in the firebox.

Like I guess James’s wooden brake blocks are sort in that vein but it’s kind of glossed over who the fuck let him pull a freight train with wooden brake blocks in the first place.

#Thomas the Tank Engine fandom #The Railway Series fandom #fiction discourse

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dwellordream · 2 years ago

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Medicine for Sin: Reading Abortion in Early Medieval Penitentials

“The earliest penitential ruling on abortion takes us to early medieval Ireland. It originated in perhaps the oldest surviving penitential, Vinniani, composed in mid to late sixth century Ireland by a certain Vinniaus. A precise date is elusive, though clear use of Vinniani in a penitential attributed to Columbanus gives a reason to suppose that it was written before Columbanus’s departure for Gaul in c. 591.

Although Vinniani was not as directly influential as two other penitentials with Irish connections, Columbani and Cummeani, versions of the relevant rulings entered numerous later penitentials because of their inclusion in Columbani. In one sense, Vinniaus was writing in a monastic context. In a short epilogue Vinniaus explained that he had written a ‘few things about the remedies of penance’ for the ‘sons of his bowels … so that all evil deeds may be destroyed by all people’.

The overwhelming majority of Vinniani’s canons, however, applied to clerics or laypeople, suggesting that Vinniaus was writing with a mixed community including manaig or lay monastic tenants coalesced around a monastery in mind. After opening rulings on sinful thoughts and intentions, a sequence addressed violence and murder. Compared with subsequent penitentials, Vinniani had plenty of moralizing asides.

In one aside Vinniaus very carefully emphasized the extra responsibilities of the clergy compared with the laity. A layman received a lighter penance, Vinniaus reasoned, ‘because he is a man of the world, his guilt is lighter in this world and his reward less in the future’. Thereafter, the bulk of Vinniani addressed mainly clerical sins (Vinniani 10–29) followed by lay sins (Vinniani 35–47). This is our first strong clue to understanding the thought processes behind the relevant ruling.

Despite considerable interest in lay sin, including sexual sin, abortion was addressed in the clerical section. After dealing with clerical fornication in quite some detail, Vinniaus turned to magical practices. First he addressed a scenario in which a cleric or woman, a male or female malificus/a, in some way harmed (we will return to a semantically awkward Latin verb, decipere, in the section on Columbani below) someone through their maleficium. ‘It is an immense sin,’ he added, ‘but can be redeemed through penance’, six years in this case.

Next, if the offender (still by implication a cleric or woman) had harmed no-one but ‘had given [something] to someone out of dissolute love’, he or she received a whole year’s penance. The next ruling (Vinniani 20) was effectively the third in a triad on different forms of maleficium. The perpetrator, however, was now female: If a woman has destroyed someone’s offspring by her maleficium, she should do penance for half a year with an allowance of bread and water, and abstain from wine and from meat for two years and [fast] for six Lents with bread and water.

Breathlessness is an occupational hazard from the earliest penitential ruling on abortion. There are textual and semantic complications. My translation of Vinniani 20 is deliberately open: ‘If a woman has destroyed someone’s offspring’. ‘Someone’ could refer to a woman (as in another woman’s child) or to a man (as in a woman’s child by a man). It is likely that different readers read it in different ways.

The Latin text in Wasserschleben’s older edition requires the first interpretation: ‘If any woman has taken away [that problematic verb, decipere, again] the child of another woman [etc.]’. The difference stems from divergences between the two ninth-century manuscript witnesses to Vinniani. In Ludwig Bieler’s estimation the manuscript on which Wasserschleben based his edition better preserved the order of the original but is less reliable on wording.

Bieler justified his translation, ‘child she has conceived of somebody’, by pointing to the ruling which immediately follows: But if, as we have said, she bears a child and her sin is manifest, six years, as is the judgment about a cleric, and in the seventh she should be joined to the altar, and then we say that she can restore her crown and ought to don a white robe and be pronounced a virgin. This ruling assumed a spiritual, rather than physical, conception of virginity.

A woman could earn back her crown (corona), in other words restore her virginity. The rest of the ruling elaborated on the comparison with fornicating clerics, who would likewise be restored to their office after seven years. The rationale for the duration of penance, incidentally, was scriptural: a just man fell and rose seven times (Proverbs 24. 16).

Read on its own Vinniani 20 could have been taken in either sense outlined above. Moreover, reading partus as a young infant rather than a fetus (which is how partus was used in Latin versions of the Ancyran canon), by itself the ruling could have been read as covering infanticide. Taken together with Vinniani 21 on the lapsed virgin, however, Vinniani 20 implied getting rid of a child before the manifestation of sin through childbirth.

In relative terms, the penance in Vinniani 20 seems lenient: half a year on bread and water, and abstention from wine and meat for two years. The vowed virgin who did not kill her child, by contrast, received six years in total. Hugh Connolly has concluded that ‘Finnian did not accord to the foetus the same status as a human being after the moment of birth’. There is something to this. With some exceptions, penitentials tended not to treat abortion as severely as other offences, including homicide or adultery.

But conceiving fetal status too narrowly is misleading. For Vinniaus fetal status was inextricable from the circumstances surrounding conception and from the repercussions of birth.

Before the maleficium rulings Vinniaus scrutinized four permutations of what he called the ruina of fornication: clerical sexual sin. The key questions were habituation and social visibility. Like the virgin who lapsed, a cleric who fornicated lost his crown (corona). If his sin was an isolated incident which was ‘hidden from people but came before the attention of God’ it received one year of fasting. He would not lose his office because, Vinniaus added, ‘sins can be absolved in secret by penance’.

In the next scenario if a cleric habitually fornicated without its becoming public knowledge, his penance was three years and he lost his clerical office ‘because it is not a smaller thing to sin before God than before people’. But there were degrees of ruina. Fathering a child was the ruina maxima: ‘If any of the clerics has fallen to the greatest ruin and begotten a child, the crime of fornication and homicide is great, but it can be redeemed through penance and God’s mercy’.

This was the ruling to which Vinniani 21 later referred back. Intriguingly, the duration of penance was the same as the penance for the cleric whose fornication was habitual but not public knowledge, though Vinniaus stressed the quality of the penance, undertaken with tears of contrition, and prayers day and night. As well as losing his office in this case, the offending cleric would be exiled until the seventh year, whereupon he could be restored at the discretion of a bishop or priest.

There was one final permutation, a slightly rushed addition, which reemphasizes that durations of penance did not always operate according to a strictly calibrated calculus of moral gravity: ‘But if he has not killed the child, lesser sin but same penance’. Only one other ruling in Vinniani addressed children who were unwanted because sinfully conceived. Although it appeared within the section on lay sins, the ruling concerned puellae Dei, nuns.

A layman who ‘defiled a girl of God and she has lost her crown and he has begotten a child from her’ would do penance for three years, including no intercourse with his wife for the first year. The penance was reduced if the puella Dei did not bear a child. There was no mention of attempts to abort or kill such an infant.

The ‘ethical elite’ at the summit of early Irish Christian communities justified its position in part through its special sexual status. Disclosure of sexual sin through the birth of children to clerics or nuns undermined the hierarchical patterning of these communities. It is not surprising, then, that Vinniaus almost exclusively thought about children born of sinful conceptions in terms of clerics and nuns.

When addressing responses to the conception or birth of such children in the form of abortion or infanticide he did not address laypeople at all. The focus is telling. His penitential rulings on abortion and infanticide were shaped by questions of social visibility and community repercussions when the sexual sins of clerics or nuns became public knowledge.

Coincidentally, a rather different seventh-century Irish source, a precursor to one of the miracle stories with which this book began, handled the disappearance of children conceived in sin in a comparable way. In c. 680 Cogitosus, a monk of Kildare, wrote a vita of one of the most eminent early Irish saints: Brigit of Kildare.

One startling miracle motif concerned Brigit’s encounter with a pregnant nun: With a strength of faith most powerful and ineffable, [Brigit] faithfully blessed a woman who, after a vow of integrity, had fallen into youthful concupiscence, whose womb was now swelling with pregnancy; and, after the conception disappeared in the womb without childbirth or pain she restored her healthy to penitence.

The great temptation in the study of early Irish hagiography, especially Brigidine hagiography, is to excavate pagan fossils from Christian texts. On some readings this brief story offers a glimpse of ‘traditional heathen customs’ or even of Brigit the fertility goddess. More recently, Maeve Callan has argued that Irish pentientials and hagiography capture a ‘remarkably permissive attitude’ to abortion, and that ‘female abortionists in the penitentials … might be said to some extent represent the morality of “ordinary” Irish Christians’.

But the story’s dramatis personae and monastic context, and its appearance in texts which sought to promote Christian ideals every bit as much as Vinniani did, suggest we should resist drawing conclusions primarily about the pagan past or even lay contemporaries. Miracle stories often took the form of healing. In this case the affliction which needed healing was the problem of pregnancy for an individual and, by implication, a community defined by sexual renunciation.

Through her benediction Brigit managed to bring about the end of abortion without quite resorting to the means. Instead of the bloody effusion of abortion the conception simply disappeared ‘without childbirth or pain’, a reference to Eve’s curse in Genesis 3. 16. The miracle lay in averting the painful birth of an unwanted child together with the painful symbolism of having that child as a member of a community defined by chastity.

The apparent leniency of Vinniani 20 was the flipside of Vinniaus’s severity towards clerics who fathered or nuns who gave birth to children. It stemmed from the need to protect the sexual status which defined the spiritual elite in Christian communities. In a sense leniency did represent a position on the status of the fetus, but fetal status was evaluated in terms of circumstances of conception as much as embryological knowledge.”

- Zubin Mistry, Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500-900

#early middle ages #medieval #abortion #irish #christian #religion #abortion in the early middle ages #zubin mistry

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whumperooni · 4 years ago

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God at this point ill give you both an arm and a leg just to see more about katsuki forcefully marrying and fucking todoroki! reader stupid till she's his sweet stupid cum dump wife

m-maybe at some point ;u;

i have so many things i wanna write, but I definitely want to flesh this out more at some point!

Let’s ramble under the cut a lil though. Just for fun ♡

The whole is a mess.

Natsuo is so worried when he finds out and Shoto is absolutely fucking furious- he knows how bad Katsuki is, knows just how timid and weak his little sister is.

He knows how it will turn out.

Rei is, of course, distraught but there’s absolutely nothing she can do. Fuyumi is quietly panicked but she’s too weak and desperate to hold the family together to protest.

There’s no preventing and it’s all done up so neatly- a marriage contract, a tiny wedding complete with a weeping bride, a fistfight between Shoto and Katsuki, and Enji’s hand gripping his daughter’s arm tight enough to leave bruises so she can’t just run away like she so desperately wants to.

The honeymoon is no better. Katsuki at least has the sense to whisk her off to somewhere nice, somewhere private. A small island, a beautiful cottage secluded away where no one can hear her screams and cries- it’d be so lovely if it weren’t for the way he demands she strips down as soon as they enter their home for the week. It would be perfect if it weren’t for how roughly he throws her onto the bed, the way his teeth set into such a greedy grin as he ignores her tears and pleas to take it slow, that it’s her first time and please be gentle.

The sex is more like rutting- animalistic, feral. She’ll come but it won’t be by her own free will and no amount of scrubbing between her thighs after will allow her to feel clean and good again.

The whole week is sex, sex, and more sex. Coupled with flinches whenever his temper explodes, shaking hands as she tries to make him breakfast, whimpers that she can’t hide whenever his voice gets a little too loud.

Sometimes, maybe, he’ll just hold her close- big arms wrapped around her trembling form and hugging her close to his chest, his whole body so warm as he silently runs his hands over her stomach, sighs with something that’s almost content.

Those times breed a tiny hope that maybe it won’t be so bad, that she can survive this and be okay.

That just makes it worse later when he turns broody and snarling, rough and so very vicious.

Back home, everyone will be so excited about Dynamight and his new bride. So many articles about her, the marriage. So many people interested to catch a glimpse of her, to talk about the way the man is shaping up to be such an exquisite hero- how he’s so reminiscent of her father.

It’ll remind her of her mother and the way she stood so quiet at her father’s side while growing up, how she had always felt sad when looking at her mother.

Once home, a routine will quickly settle. He goes to work and she stays home. Her job is to keep the house spotless, to have dinner waiting on the table by the time he comes home, to do the laundry and fold it and put it away neatly, to keep her legs open and her mouth shut.

Her biggest job, though, is to get pregnant.

Katsuki is a perfectionist. Her diet will consist of everything meant to make her more fertile- whether it works or not. Somewhere, he might read that stress is bad for babies and that it could make conceiving harder- so he has to force her into something content.

And forced means forced- whether she knows it or not.

So that means careful spoiling- not too much, not too little. Rewards for good behavior will start to crop up- money pressed into her hand and a grumble to go shopping, allowing her to visit her family, a small gift, some kisses pressed to her cheek that don’t lead to his teeth tearing into her soft neck, and sometimes- sometimes- eating her out until she’s shaking, letting her fall limp against him after and drift off to sleep without him ravaging her.

It’s careful, calculated. Is it in his nature? No. But he can work out the way it grates at him by being a little too rough with villains, by going harder at the gym.

And slowly, slowly she might begin to relax just a little. It’s not too bad being married too him. He’s still violent, he stills fucks her so hard she aches for days after, he stills yells at her and makes her cry whenever she doesn’t meet his impossible standards and is acting like a “shitty woman.”

But, she relaxes. Relaxes enough that she can enjoy the sex a little. Relaxes enough that sometimes she starts to want him- that sometimes she’s eager for him to come home.

And that’s when he’ll start to rile her up before he heads off to work. That’s when he’ll leave her on the edge of orgasm and flustered throughout the day. Leave her unsatisfied and desperate for him even if it makes her feel so ashamed.

Denial starts to be a common theme. No, he’s not going to fuck her- he’s had a long day and he’s fucking tired. No, he’s not going to come home- he has a dinner with Endeavor to talk business. No, he doesn’t have time to stay “just a little longer”- he has villains to crush.

And it’s so calculated- even if he’s throbbing and so hard it has his hackles rising he denies her.

Just to make her desperate.

Just to make her fall into something needy.

She starts instigating sex- pressing against him whenever he comes home and pressing her mouth to his with a tiny whimper, waking him up with her mouth around his cock, wearing lowcut dresses and tight skirts just to try to get him to fuck her.

And the sex becomes good, better. Still rough. Still possessive. But finally getting the orgasms she craves makes it better, leaves her begging for more and mewling instead of crying and pleading no, please stop.

He’ll fuck her, fill her up to the very brim and past it. Rumble in her ear after about how she’s going to give him a baby, has her nodding her head- cumdrunk and sleepy, soft in his arms.

And in those moments, it might all seem okay- the marriage, his hunger for success, the way his hands are always so rough and his voice is always so angry.

The thought of a baby seems okay in those moments.

And, maybe, all her sadness is her fault. She could be a better wife to him. She could be sweeter. Of course he’ll be angry and frustrated if she’s always just a sad, teary, moping thing. It’s her fault.

She can be better. She can be better for her husband.

It’s what he deserves, right?

And maybe a baby will make everything alright. Maybe Katsuki is right- maybe that’s just what they need.

She can give him a baby. She can be good.

A baby- a baby will make everything better.

And it’s so hard not to feel that way when his cock is buried inside of her, when she’s coming and being filled with his seed and her brain is going dumb, her mind is going blank.

Weak, stupid, desperate- she won’t even realize the way he’s training her to bend to his will without any fuss, without any of those tears that had plagued her before.

#tw noncon/dubcon #tw breeding kink #Anonymous

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sharkselfies · 3 years ago

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The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast Transcript - Episode 4

Our journey comes to an end with the transcript for episode 4 of The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast, where Dave Kajganich, Soo Hugh, Dan Simmons, and Adam Nagaitis discuss the last two episodes of the series. Once again, Adam steals the show with his revelations about Mr. Hickey, but we also hear about everyone’s favorite death scenes, the fight to let Mr. Blanky say fuck, the many changes the writers made to the ending that differed from the novel, and the importance of trusting your audience’s intelligence.

The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast - Episode 4

[The Terror opening theme music]

Dave Kajganich: Welcome to the fourth and final installment of The Minds Behind AMC’s The Terror as we discuss our final two episodes of the show! I’m Dave Kajganich, creator and co-showrunner of the series, here with the honorable Dan Simmons, creator of the novel The Terror on which the series is based. Also with us is Soo Hugh, executive producer and co-showrunner of the show, and Adam Nagaitis, who plays a man who plays a man called Cornelius Hickey. Welcome back!

Adam Nagaitis: Hi!

Dan Simmons: Hi Dave.

DK: So we launch into our final episodes. Now we are in an episode where the show begins to bend time. We cover a lot of ground in episode nine, a lot of distance, we say goodbye to quite a lot of characters, and we start to really bend the tone and the shape of the narrative towards the kind of horrible collision that’s coming between Crozier and Hickey and our Tuunbaq.

Soo Hugh: So in nine we say goodbye to so many of our characters. I mean Dave and I cried so--

[laughter]

SH: The amount of tears that he and I shed editing this show, especially with nine and ten. For you guys, Adam and Dan, which were the deaths--well, what did you think of the deaths?

DS: What’s your favorite death?

[laughter]

SH: Yeah, what was your favorite death?

AN: My favorite was probably, the one that really moved me was Fitzjames, it’s such a fantastic story, his character’s so interesting, that transition, discovering, you know, admitting who you are, and the firework at the Tuunbaq being his feat of courage, and then to end up, to embrace death, and to do it in such a beautiful way. And then the line of “there will be poems” that Mr. Bridgens says.

[show audio]

[sad, eerie music]

Bridgens (through tears): It was an honor serving you, sir. You’re a good man. There will be poems.

AN: It’s a beautiful death, it’s probably the best you can ask for, in that situation, you’re with a friend. Yeah, it’s quite sad. Of course you gotta love Blanky’s death as well, that’s, I’m cheating, now, yeah, but Blanky’s death is the greatest line to go out on, surely.

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq growling, shales crunching underfoot]

Blanky: What in the name of god took you so fuckin’ long?

[Tuunbaq snorts, Blanky laughs maniacally]

DK: We weren’t entirely sure whether AMC was going to permit us to use that word, a curse word, because on AMC you’re not meant to. Luckily for us, there are a number of AMC shows that have a precedent of using that word and we argued successfully that, you know, could you ask for a better show, a better scene than a Victorian disaster show to use the F-word, and they finally allowed us to use it, and we’re really grateful.

SH: I think just visually Bridgens’ death was so beautiful, and that pull out. And what was interesting was in our research found, we discovered, there was a corpse they discovered who had rolled over and was found sleeping on a set of papers, and in the show Bridgens takes Peglar’s diary when he chooses to die out there in the cold alone comforted with his memories, we see him roll over, and so that’s just our nod to history. Now it turns out we don't know whether or not it was actually Peglar’s diary, it could have been Armitage’s--

DK: No, I think we know it’s Peglar’s journal, but we don’t know whether the man lying on top of it was Armitage or Bridgens.

SH: Then there’s Goodsir’s death. Oh my God, Goodsir! I can’t believe Hickey! Adam! Goodsir!

AN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. He had it comin’!

[laughter]

AN: I forgot that death, I forgot all of those deaths, actually, what a--so beautifully acted. I mean, unbelievable. It was perfect. The pure clean images of the coral, and the shell, oh I loved it, and the end, I think it’s an orchid, I just loved it, I absolutely--it’s something that I don’t like talking about, that death, it’s really horrible.

[show audio]

[the rising music from the scene of Goodsir’s death]

DS: They were all very moving in their own way, saying goodbye to each of the characters, surprisingly powerful, you know, some of ‘em were not major characters, but everything connected for me watching your version. When--earlier, when Fitzjames is out with Crozier alone, and Fitzjames sort of acknowledges that he’s a fake, that he’s just been faking this heroism, you know, the admiralty thought they sent a hero, they sent Fitzjames, he was the man of the moment, but he hadn’t done that much, so he had the courage to say that, and Crozier immediately had the compassion to point out, “No, you’re here, now, and you’re doing fine,” that’s not the dialect but that’s the essence of his message. So all through these scenes with the different characters, I found compassion again. [It] was the way Crozier touched men who were close to the end, the tone of his voice, you know, it wasn’t mawkish, he wouldn’t like being at all sentimental, but it was so supportive. It was like Goodsir helping the poor boy at the beginning of the show, telling him how death could be good, how you see light, you cross over. The kid died in terror; some of these people did. But most of ‘em, they’re like--Fitzjames, when he’s, you know, when he finally has to be carried in the sledge, and he has a sense of humor at the end, he can laugh at himself, somewhat, ‘cause he tells Crozier that that the bullet that went through his arm into his chest, that area is now so gangrene--er, rotten, you know, the bullet is finally going to kill him. Haha.

[polite awkward laughter]

DK: Well you pointed out a line from the first episode, where Fitzjames is talking to Franklin and he says, “Sometimes I think you love your men more than God loves them,” and Franklin's response is “For all your sakes, let’s hope you’re wrong,” and we brought that line back in a different way in episode nine, which is where the survivors of the Terror Camp attack are about to leave, and they know Hickey’s out there somewhere, and Fitzjames’s impulse is to hide or destroy all of their extra supplies so that Hickey’s group can’t benefit from them, and Crozier has the opposite instinct, which is because he knows some people in Hickey’s group probably made that decision because they were afraid that the alternative was worse to stay with Crozier and so many people, that he wants to offer them the resources in case they can use them and in case they wanna make a different decision in the days ahead.

[show audio]

Fitzjames: And the supplies we cannot carry? If Hickey’s band are waiting us out to loot the camp?

Crozier: Some of the men with them made their choice out of fear, I’ll not take away any chance they have to survive. We may meet them yet again, and if we do, I want them to make a different choice. Leave our supplies in a tidy pile, as an offering. I want the men with Hickey to know that’s how we meant it.

[shales crunching underfoot]

Fitzjames: More than God loves them...

DK: Lines like that are a real test, I mean, you struggle with them in the editing room. Did we earn that line? Is it important that an audience remembers that as an index point that line has now been sort of superficially applied to one man, but more sincerely applied to another man, and, you know, that goes back to sort of a close reading of the book, Dan, just sort of scouring through your dialogue trying to figure out how does a master, if I can refer to you that way, approach this idea of a relationship with an audience? And we learned an enormous amount from your book about restraint and indirection, and credit, giving the audience credit. And I will say this, the series is different enough from your novel that I would encourage everyone who has seen the television show but not read your book to seek it out, because they will have just as rewarding--even more so, possibly!--a time of learning about this history through the lens of horror than they did watching the show. So I think they complement one another. I hope they do, and I hope people will seek out both.

DS: That’s kind of you, Dave. My wife keeps track of the tie-in version of the book, and it’s selling very well, so some people are gonna get that.

SH: There is this fantastic scene that is in your book, that we had neither money nor time to shoot, but it’s where they discover leads, and they take the boats out going around, and they realize they’re just going around in a circle. We didn’t have the time to shoot that and we re-jiggered our narrative so that the leads ended up being a ploy on one of Hickey’s secret mutineers. Nine is a very quiet episode, and in some ways when you, in television shows--did you miss a set piece, in nine? Did anyone miss having a bigger narrative punch?

DS: Well, I'll answer, then let Adam answer, but for me, who had that boat scene and really liked it a lot, I didn’t miss my stuff too much, because what happened was when the young man, a boy actually, who’s secretly under Hickey’s control tells Crozier and the others he sees open water, and they rush to the rocky beach to see it, and of course that was a lie and a ploy to get them there so Hickey can seize them, but my heart just flew, that, “Open water! Ohh boy!” You know? How would men have felt if they’d heard that, in reality, what was their reaction? ‘Cause the open water could conceivably be their savior, they could get other places, not just cross over and start marching through middle Canada, but they could go anywhere on open water, and to see it all locked in with ice was just stunning to me, it was such a disappointment. So no, I don’t miss my part of it very much.

AN: I never thought of it as something that suggests a quiet narrative like you described it, Soo, to me it sort of links--I see nine and ten as one episode, really. It’s this slow build, the creation of that relationship that these two--the antithesis between these two camps, and between the tactics employed... I just think that the way you guys wrote it and put it together is flawless, I just think it’s so beautifully weighted, between, you know, the deaths that to me they don’t seem to just sort of monotonously pile up, they’re all just so beautifully handled and acted. And the whole time you have this tension building, slowly, slowly, that, you know, that it’s gonna come to a head. I didn’t feel when I watched it that it ever lacked punch. It had such clarity and such patience that made it really beautiful.

DS: And I don’t know if we can say the C-word on podcasts… cannibalism?

[laughter]

DK: Yes, that one we can.

SH: Yes.

DS: Oh, ok. You know there was a--if Hickey hadn’t already divided the troop into his people, the anointed, and then Crozier’s group, it would have happened anyway because of the cannibalism. And when you think about it, think of that rugby team or soccer team or whatever that crashed in the Andes. They went back into society. They were cannibals, they admitted it, they got a book deal. And so, presumably, even in England, these people would have been forgiven, or they would have kept it secret like some do. So cannibalism, what it did in this show, I think, divides the people. I didn’t see, until he was forced to imbibe in cannibalism, I didn't see Crozier even considering it. And so that fascinates me, just how far people will go to survive.

[show audio]

[tense music, tent canvas flapping in the wind]

EC: I’ll give you some advice. Don’t indulge your morals over your practicals. Not now. Don’t you also wanna live?

SH: Dave, we talked a lot about this, is when you’re in that moment, you’re not Dave Kajganich and I’m not Soo Hugh, in that moment, choosing whether or not we decide to eat someone. Something else will take over, whether it is the Goodsir in us or whether it is the Hickey in us, in that moment. I think that’s why when we shot that scene, you know, after Gibson is cut up, Adam, remember when we shot the reaction shots from each one of you eating your first bite of human flesh meat, and we took so much footage, we shot so much. We shot, you know, closes, mediums, just because Dave and I, you know, at that point, we were very confident of how to shoot everything, that was probably the moment when we were like ugh.

DK: Well we wanted to know how little we could get away with, and what we found, of course, which is typical for the show, the performances were so terrific, that we didn’t need very much. And I remember on the mix stage, the first mix that they did of the show, of that episode, I mean, there was quite a lot of chewing.

[laughter]

And so when I said, no no no, let’s pull all of that out, and use the most minute changes in expression, because all of you at that table were so well in character, that even the slightest muscle movement on your face communicated everything we needed you to. And we were obviously very interested in not overplaying that scene, knowing that audiences had been waiting for it, wondering how, in what kind of taste we would show it, you know, how we would modulate it, and you know a rule throughout the show was to try to present everything with its most practical face, including this. And so, you know, hopefully when that lands for people it will be both satisfying in the sense that they will understand how these characters made that decision but it won’t feel that we have over-articulated it, somehow.

DS: I’m not religious, but I’m obsessed with religion, and in your story, the way you structured it, you have, in a sense, we’ve already talked, or at least I have, about how Hickey seems to be evolving towards Messiahdom, I think he near the end he thinks he is the Messiah, but it’s Goodsir who provides The Last Supper. How much more powerful a story of Christ is there, than, you know, “Take, eat,” and it’s yourself? And it’s fascinating to me that the man who dedicated his life to helping people and curing people and being empathic at their ending, his last act is to kill as many of Hickey’s people as possible. And, you know, so there’s--that’s where the trial was, it wasn’t when Hickey was gonna be hanged, it was inside Dr. Goodsir when he decided that “These people need to end and I will do it.”

SH: So should we talk about the big scene at the end--well, it’s not the end, it’s the Tuunbaq sequence in 1.10?

DK: To set it up, Adam, you know, Hickey--we’ll keep calling him Hickey even though we’ve established he isn’t--you get an important piece of information in episode nine where Tozer, Sergeant Tozer, relays to you a piece of information that he hasn’t shared with anyone, that he watched Collins be killed and he watched Collins’s soul be pulled out of his body. And, you know, for Hickey, suddenly a lot of things make sense. What happened to Private Heather, who was alive for many episodes but no longer sort of present in his body, I mean you even have a scene where you poke his brain hoping to get some kind of reaction out of him, and you take that piece of information and you suddenly realize you’re not longer in a kind of survival story, you’re in kind of a spiritual story, you’re in kind of a mythological story, suddenly. Can you talk about how you decided to play that so it was sort of clear to an audience what that opportunity was? Because we did not devote a lot of dialogue to it, it was going to have to be something an audience felt as much as was described to them.

AN: I can only describe the way that it--the process--the mind of it, that, you know, you see Hickey has a plan, up until that point, he’s started--the way that I thought about it was that, you know, once he starts to hear things, he starts to have this space of this area, creates this space in his mind and he understands the things that have come before him and his curiosity leads him to, you know--one element in him is still practically engaged in survival, and outmaneuvering the captain, and heading south, and coming up with a plan and, you know, a story as to what happened, but then there are other elements of, you know, consuming human flesh, that there might be an answer there, it might be an enlightening experience. And if it’s not in that, is it something else? And he finds the hill, and he understands when he sees that hill, that he hears something, and then he’s not quite clear on what it is, what’s drawing him, and what’s talking to him, and what he’s feeling, but he’s becoming one with this realm, and, you know, he starts to, once he discovers the supernatural element--not that he hasn’t already established that there is one, but the fact that it’s such a specific--he’s been developing his knowledge of the summoning song that Lady Silence sings to become a Shaman, you know, the rules of this particular realm, this empire. And he’s been gathering this information as we go along, all the way through the series he’s been taking pieces of information, and he pockets it and learns and keeps it for later.

[show audio]

[mysterious music]

Hickey: Tuunbaq… a spirit that dresses as an animal, and yet we shot it with a cannon and drew blood. How do you reconcile that?

Crozier: I can’t. There’s much about this voyage I can’t reconcile.

Hickey: What mythology is this creature at the center of?

Crozier: About the creature I have no answers, Mr. Hickey. We were not meant to know of it.

AN: And when he gets this key piece of the puzzle, that the Tuunbaq is taking souls, and that... there’s a hierarchy of what the Tuunbaq wants to eat. You know, a captain, and important people, he realizes that he really is the center of this universe. I suppose the way that I adjusted it was that everybody else became irrelevant. Completely irrelevant. I no longer needed to worry about manipulation, control, fear. Everything was gonna sing for me, everything was gonna work as if I had magic hands, and my voice just dictated what the universe would do.

[show audio]

[mysterious music continued]

Hickey: I didn’t have anywhere near an equal on this expedition. But you. I wanted to thank you for that. On the eve of what is quite an important day.

AN: Every single conversation was an annoyance because it was getting in the way of me listening to the universe, this world, this empire, this realm that was now speaking to me. And I was talking to the Tuunbaq, you know, from this distance, and we had this dance going, and everything that happened was just getting in my way. It was all gonna work itself out because I’ve been chosen to ascend, to reach this ascension, to, you know, ride the Tuunbaq into my new empire, to take my new throne, and I was finally gonna be given the answers to these questions that I’d been asking.

[show audio]

[rushing wind, men singing weakly in the background, creaking]

Hickey (shouting): Bugger Nelson! Bugger Jesus! Bugger Joseph and Mary! Bugger the Archbishop of Canterbury! None ever wanted nothing from me!

SH: When you offer the Tuunbaq the tongue, and there’s that pause, what’s gonna happen, and he bites your arm off instead, and that look on your face of just, you know, “You too have failed me.”

DS: Et tu?

[laughter]

“Et tu, Tuunbaq?”

[laughter]

AN: “Et tu, Tuunbaq,” that’s a great T-shirt. But that scene, I drifted, but that scene in particular, is a slight difference to what his plan was, which was to climb the hill, sacrifice the men, sacrifice the tongue, and to become one with the Tuunbaq and to take my place on the throne in this new realm. And to find the answers and maybe, you know, climb through to a different realm, or who knows what. This empire was now my empire, which was the culmination of all of Hickey through his entire life has been leading to this point, and he’s quietened himself enough to hear it, and then suddenly he gets sick, because somebody poisons him. And so it’s a slightly different feeling, as he’s climbing the hill, and it’s a different--something else is happening inside him. He’s still perfectly capable of executing his plan, he gets carried away in that scene, and then by the time the Tuunbaq appears, he kind of focuses again, and becomes very excited. It’s a relationship with the Tuunbaq, it’s a dance, that everything is for him and the Tuunbaq. Everyone else is irrelevant.

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq snuffling, boat chain clanking]

[the Tuunbaq roars, sound of chomping flesh, then the screeching sound of the soul being eaten]

SH: And what he gets so wrong about the Tuunbaq, and I think what a lot of the Western characters in our show get wrong about the Tuunbaq, is that the Tuunbaq is not a deity, the Tuunbaq doesn’t ask to be a god, right? All it is is just this arbiter of what is good or what is not good for the land, you know, there’s no sense of the Tuunbaq wanting to be the ultimate creative force here, and I think that’s where Hickey was wrong, right?

AN: I think he sees it as a supernatural creature, and again, because everything comes through him, and the universe revolves around him, that it’s a challenge for him, it’s a question for him, and he deals a lot in questions as opposed to answers, and what his position is in the universe, and by the time he meets this creature that eats souls--and the creature’s sick, and it’s because he hasn’t united with it yet! It’s because of me that it’s sick, it hasn’t, I haven’t been in contact with it, and we haven’t united ourselves and taken over this empire, and he doesn’t see it for what it is. SH: And when you guys see the Tuunbaq’s death in the very end of that sequence, how did you guys feel?

DS: Speaking for the novelist here, I was surprised; and then I got through the surprise and thought yeah. And then I immediately wondered how Lady Silence would have to pay for this death, ‘cause you’d already shown me that she’s in charge of protecting the Tuunbaq, so it was controlling it in some way, and she wasn’t really up to the task, so I liked that in going, when Crozier’s with the Inuit band, learning that she’s been punished and sent out by herself. But the Tuunbaq’s death itself just seemed right at that time.

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq’s death scene--growling noises, boat chain clinking, Crozier struggling]

AN: It was a horrible thing to watch, as a viewer, it was so sad, and it spoke to me of this sort of contemporary sort of--to me it was sort of a global warming issue, not to bring it ‘round, but it was sort of like, that’s it, they’ve killed it.

SH: No, absolutely, yeah!

AN: They’ve killed it, they’ve killed the Tuunbaq and we’re actually rejoicing at Crozier’s survival. But really, the man deserves death, with the creature that creates balance to this culture should be alive. And we have this upside down world that we are celebrating, which is so, you know, intelligent of you guys to create, and it’s difficult to take, but that creature is gone, and so balance is gone, and here we are.

DK: The very specific and subtle thing that we put in the show that probably no will decode it ‘til they hear this podcast, but was important to us as a structural element, was Sir John dies, when he’s killed down the fire hole in episode three, he has some flashes of subjective kinds of hallucinations, I suppose, or visions, I don’t know what you would call them. But one of them is of open water, it’s just a vista of the future of the Arctic, that there are going to be these, you know, that there’s going to be a huge melt, and there’s going to be all this open water. And for the final shot we tried to match, as much as we could, the angle, so that all of that frozen water that Crozier is sitting on at that seal hole would maybe possibly evoke that memory, to speak to what you’re saying, Adam, which is that this whole thing is a kind of, from the Netsilik’s point of view, it’s a huge tragedy in which these Europeans are the terrors, in a way. And not to be too reductive about it, but, you know, we wanted the season to have that kind of change of polarity, which is one reason why we couldn’t quite use the sort of the ending of the book, as much as we loved it, Dan, it felt like a lot of things that would feel--that would pull the point of view of the season across that line too much and too late. We wanted to try to modulate it a little bit so that every episode felt like you were giving some room in your point of view for Lady Silence’s perspective, or the Inuit’s perspective, and that that change would sort of happen so slowly you might not even notice that it was happening at all, which is one reason why we made that decision.

DS: You gave every character I saw room to have his or her own apotheosis, which is a big theme with you guys, I meant, the arcs end and people becoming someone else. Crozier grows into his leadership, I think, beautifully. Maybe he deserved punishment, but I found Crozier and his empathy, as Fitzjames is dying in the boat, it’s Crozier that touches him and lets him know, you know, through physical contact, that he’s not alone. And giving them room is unusual. I just find there’s so many unusual elements to what you three have created, that, I have to warn you, I think it deserves a lot of intelligent attention.

DK: Well I hope we can volley a lot of those right back to the book, Dan. Well we should take some time at the end to--given that after the sequence, this really becomes almost a kind of silent film to deliver the ending to Crozier’s arc--to really sing the praises of Jared Harris in this show, I mean, what he did with this role is remarkable. So, Dan, I would love to know what you thought of Jared Harris’s Francis Crozier?

DS: After watching the ten episodes of him and all those, and watching what he did with it, I just wanted him to adopt me.

[laughter]

SH: He would love that!

DS: But it certainly--leading is the operative word, isn’t it? He just, he didn’t give 100 or 1000 percent, he gave more than that to the character. He became Crozier for me. I’m the one who had to dream up the man, and see what he looked like, and write about him for about 1100 pages, 700 finally in type, and so I had my Crozier, he was pretty solid. But now Jared Harris is Crozier. There’s no doubt in my mind.

DK: The ending of the season is quite different from the ending of the book, Dan, how did you feel watching the ending of the show, and, in all candor, do you feel that it was satisfying? Do you feel that it was at least a good companion piece for the ending of the book?

DS: Well I’m glad I didn't video record my reaction the first time I saw the different ending, because speaking for two million readers I stood up and shouted, “What's wrong with my ending!”

[laughter]

“Is it chopped liver?” And I realized it would be. I realized that I don’t think you could have taken my ending and made it a sensible finale visually in the way it went. So I tracked--the whole episodes, the last two episodes, were enlightenment to me, because I’m just a viewer now, I’m watching something I didn’t create, these are not my ideas, so I sat back and enjoyed it, as horrible as they were. So when I watch your ending, the only thing I was bothered by was I’m sentimental. And the real Crozier, I believe, and certainly the fictional Crozier that we’ve all created, was so lonely, he was so alone in life, I think he was less alone than Crozier was, and, you know, rejected by Franklin’s niece several times from marriage, a life where he really felt rejection, probably more than Hickey did, and at the end I wanted him to be with someone. So as much as I liked your ending and I really thought it was proper and appropriate for the series, I woulda put a person next to him as he’s fishing out there in, you know, in his Inuit outfit at night waiting by a seal--he’s not fishing, he’s waiting by a seal breathing hole to kill it. So if I’d seen a glimpse of two of them, you wouldn’t even need to see their faces, you know, the sentimental side of me woulda been happy.

SH: But we leave that ambiguous in the ending, in terms of he’s not with Lady Silence, she, you know, had to pay the bill in some ways for the loss of the Tuunbaq and her destiny is to venture forth alone, and in some ways her storyline is the most tragic of all the characters in our show because, I mean, the price she paid is so harsh. But in terms of the last shot, which Dave and I just knew from pretty early on that was gonna be our last shot, and it felt right. We don’t know much about Crozier’s biography, you know? For all we know that child could be his, it may not. We actually didn’t want to fill in too much of the coloring book at that point. It’s up to the audience to describe whether or not that last shot is--it’s interesting ‘cause we had this big argument, lovely argument in the color suite, the grading suite, of how we grade that last shot. Whether we grade it bright and sunny to be optimistic, or we grade it with a lot of contrast and stamp down a lot of the light to make it seem that, you know, there’s a sense--a harshness, to this reality. And in some ways we split the middle, so the audience can decide whether or not the life Crozier has at the end is one of punishment, reckoning, or whether or not he will move on and have something different.

DK: And I think something in that final shot that certainly we couldn’t have planned, that tipped things in a warmer direction was the child that plays that boy in the shot, who’s meant to be sleeping against Crozier as he’s waiting at the seal hole, really fell asleep because he was wrapped up in fur, and Jared’s a very welcoming person, and he fell asleep. And in the middle of that shot he twitches in his sleep, like children do. And I think that if you catch that it’s quite undeniably a warm moment. You don’t know whether that’s Crozier’s son, whether that’s just a friend’s son, someone he’s taking care of, but you do get a sense that there is a community and that it’s a warm one, even though that life will be difficult and he will occupy no position of leadership in that world, he will be--you know, he’s missing a hand at that point, it’s going to be a rough rough road ahead of him, but we decided to sort of be as ambiguous as we could but for that child who twitches in his sleep, which we just loved that, that that’s a part of that final shot of the show.

DS: Now you’ve made me wanna go back watch that scene about ten times. I think you did at the ending essentially what you chose to do throughout the series, which is to trust in the intelligence and the sensibilities of the audience. So in that sense I like it a lot, but I admire it too. It just, I’m just sentimental, I just want Crozier finally to find somebody.

[show audio]

[”The Gates of Paradise” by Robert Fripp, which is the music from that aforementioned final scene of Crozier and the little boy asleep at the seal hole, plays]

SH: And with episode ten, the story of the Franklin Expedition on AMC is completed. And Dave, you’ve been working on this project now for ten or twelve years, I’ve been on it for two and a half years, Adam you’ve been on this journey for a long time, Dan you’ve probably been--how long has it been for you?

DS: Oh, since about 1994!

SH: Yeah, wow. I mean, what is it about this story that means it’s hard to let go? Even now I feel like there’s a grieving process that I feel like I have.

DS: I know why it’s hard to let go. You created real people, you did something that is incredibly rare I think, for any media, movies, series, anything. They’re real people, and when they suffer the viewer suffers with them. When they try to fight back and survive, that’s the viewer’s impression, and we’re sorry to see each one of them go, including Hickey. So, I think there’s a success in what you set out to do.

SH: We’re just so thrilled that, you know, you gave us the trust to do your book but also that you love it! We were so nervous that you would hate this adaptation!

[laughter]

DK: Well and now what’s amazing is we all get to sort of take a seat in the theater of real history playing out again, now that they’ve discovered the ships. You know, we’ve been told by Parks Canada and by people we’ve met who are actively on the archeological expeditions now, dives to the ships, that there is a chance that they will find a ship’s log, and that all of the questions that have come up and perplexed us and preoccupied us and fascinated us in the researching of both the writing of the novel and the creating of the television show, that those questions may have answers soon. And so now we are all now back in that position of being riveted by this actual history. And what a treat it will be to have a conversation in a year when we have learned hopefully much more about what actually happened on this expedition.

[“The Gates of Paradise” begins playing again softly in the background]

DS: If I were on the expedition ship and found the log, the diaries, everything, I would hide them.

[laughter]

DK: Agreed.

AN: Yep, absolutely.

DS: I mean we’ve all done a lot of work here, who cares about reality?

[laughter]

DK: Well thank you, Adam, thank you Dan, for joining us, Soo and I have had a fantastic time having this extended conversation that hopefully is interesting to people who have watched and appreciated the show. So thank you for the opportunity to do it, it’s been fantastic to talk to you both, and onwards we go, into the future!

SH: Onwards ho!

DS: Onward.

AN: Onward. Thank you so much guys, it’s been a pleasure.

DK: Thank you, and thank you for everyone who’ve watched the show and thank you for everyone who’ve read the novel, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback!

[“The Gates of Paradise” fades out]

#the terror #the terror amc #dave kajganich #soo hugh #dan simmons #adam nagaitis #the minds behind the terror #personal #aaah the last one! we're finished!#as always lmk if you catch any mistakes and google docs link will be in the reblogs #this has been a great project and i hope this was helpful for you guys!#<3

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michaelburnhamfanclub · 4 years ago

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season three is where star trek discovery claims to have found its stride, and i must admit that with the season’s premiere, i was more than inclined to agree. however, now that s3 is complete and we’re able to take a holistic view of all of the resolved and unresolved arcs, i’m still pretty unsatisfied

with the s3 finale, it became clear that the season’s mission in terms of its protagonist was a concise one: to fully prepare michael burnham for the captain’s seat

i was thrilled when michael finally was promoted to captain, but it’s really worth examining the ways that the show went about its final preparations for such a promotion. there were a few major tenants to michael’s character arc across these thirteen episodes, and the following two themes are the ones i think are most worth unpacking in terms of what they do in service of michael’s promotion:

1. michael’s ongoing and complex relationship with isolation

2. michael’s inclination to subvert authority and protocol in service of what is right

i’ll try and unpack these a little bit below the cut

michael and isolation

ever since the very first episode of the very first season, michael burnham has been a character entrenched in her own isolation. in season one, michael found friendship and community on the discovery by forging bonds with sylvia tilly, ash tyler, and paul stamets and by redefining previously broken bonds with saru and the alternate philippa georgiou. one of the main reasons why s1 is kinda still my favorite season is this very aspect of it: michael’s success and the federation’s survival depended on the creation and strength of these bonds

season two continued michael’s experience of isolation by introducing her estranged and tortured relationship with spock. the major theme of michael’s character in this season was her instinct to “reach” for the people who always seemed furthest from her despite everything (i.e., she “reached” for her parents, spock, tilly, etc.). this was the final message she imparted to spock: the act of reaching for others will always be the most worthwhile thing, even if you are unable to ever touch them. michael was finally able to connect with spock only to be launched into the future

season three picks up on this theme in what i think is the most conceivably devastating way possible. michael is isolated for a whole year from the crew of the discovery, and when she returns into the fold, nobody reaches for her.

now, a huge part of why the first and third episodes hit me so hard is because i really thought they were going somewhere meaningful with this. she loses so much, and the gratitude directed towards her in the third episode is directly acknowledged as NOT ENOUGH. michael stands among her found family in the halls of the discovery, a family she has mourned for a year, and tilly says, “you let us go, didn’t you?” and there seems to be purpose to it

the first half of season three sees michael feeling lost, struggling to find a single reason why she should feel like she should belong with these people on this ship anymore. tilly and saru both clearly understand this, and instead of seeing any efforts on their part to welcome her back into their family, they further contribute to her feelings of isolation and make HER apologize for keeping THEM out of the loop (and yeah i understand that these apologies have to do with breaches in starfleet protocol but rn i’m only focusing on the interpersonal implications). the only meaningful connections that michael is able to maintain this season are with book and georgiou. and while i adore them both, georgiou leaves before the season ends and book is from the future and isn’t a discovery crew member, which makes it feel like when michael says she doesn’t think she belongs on the discovery, she’s RIGHT

this first half of development would’ve been all well and good if it had been carried out to its logical conclusion, which would have been the discovery crew fighting to make michael feel like she belongs, but that never happened. instead, we get unification iii, which is a great episode on its own, but it only resolves michael’s internal feelings regarding her place in starfleet, not the interpersonal tension that’s made her feel more isolated than she’s been since, like, maybe even early season one.

this is all to say that i don’t understand how this unfulfilled arc generates michael’s preparedness to stay on the discovery as captain, unless we’re going with the “the captain defines themself as separate from the crew because they’re the captain” narrative that star trek does admittedly love. i would be more into it if i was sure that discovery would actually explore that isolation with the care it deserves

it could be cool to potentially explore a discussion or resolution of this arc next season by bringing commander nhan back as michael’s first officer, another character who felt disconnected enough from the discovery’s crew to actually decide to leave, but idk i guess we’ll see

michael and authority

i’ve talked about how michael’s s1 character arc was a journey to learn how to subvert authority before. she starts the show as “the mutineer,” and this is a signifier we can’t forget

my roommate and i have also talked a lot about how the command structure of the discovery is so fucking weird, and i think a large part of it is because it naturally organizes itself around its heart, which is a position that michael instinctively and effortlessly occupies (though that is not to say that this effortlessness is not without its own suffering---michael being the heart of the discovery is what leads to the reinforcement of her martyr complex, though that’s not the focus of this post so i won’t dwell there)

season three’s essential question that it sets up with michael centers around doing the right thing her way or doing the right thing starfleet’s way. in her year alone, michael is finally able to define herself outside of starfleet, and she likes who she finds. this is one of the main reasons she struggles to reinsert herself into the crew of the discovery, this is the reason she rejects the idea of being the crew’s captain outright, and this is the reason saru gives for demoting her. this is the eventual reason that michael sends paul in an escape pod to the federation hq instead of immediately trying to jump for hugh, saru, and adira. this is the reason that she is eventually promoted to captain

tbh i would have had less issue with this storyline if not for a couple key details: (1) michael was punished for subverting starfleet protocol when other characters (like keyla or tilly) were encouraged or rewarded for it. (2) idk i feel like we’ve exceeded the bounds of the whole “needs of the many/needs of the few” ideological tenant, which was (i think) something that the ni’var president even SAID.

when it comes down to it, i just think that michael’s complicated relationship with subverting authority deserves a much more complicated storyline. i do think that this is something we’ll see more of in s4 because it’s always going to be one of the greatest tenants of her character, but that doesn’t change the fact that it seems to have fallen rather flat in s3 for me. i’d argue that this is because discovery doesn’t seem to want to commit to its serialized style as much anymore, but maybe that’s for another post lmao

i don’t think i’ve quite found a way to properly articulate it yet, but michael taking the captain’s seat was supposed to be the culmination of three seasons of buildup. however, the buildup that the show suggested in the s3 finale seemed to be based on things that michael had already earned by the s3 premiere. her relationship with authority this season felt. idk. maybe it’s because this was kinda the first time the show attempted to show michael as a subordinate on the discovery instead of as the heart of the discovery, but it felt like it just wasn’t the natural place to take that particular element of her characterization. i’m hoping that s4 will deliver on this front, but the main thing is that i don’t think s3 did

tl;dr s3 was not what i was hoping for in terms of furthering michael’s character, and now that she’s captain i would love for these two elements of her characterization to be explored to their full and complicated conclusions

#star trek discovery #michael burnham #god this is long #been trying to settle my thoughts for days and well here they are #as they exist today at least

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llamasgotoheaven · 4 years ago

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In Celebration of Cassandra: The Princess With No Happily Ever After

(Quick Note: This essay contains major Tangled The Series spoilers. Read at your own risk.)

I really appreciate Tangled The Series so much.

In more than a dozen ways.

My favorite thing though, is the way it wrote Cassandra, and juxtaposes her against her sister Rapunzel.

Lemme explain:

Since the very dawn of disney princess movies... Since Snow White and Cinderella and Aurora sang about what they wanted and wished for, and pushed themselves to endure in their hardest moments, we always saw them being rewarded by fate for it.

They get a found family, and a prince who rides off with them into the sunset, they become a beloved queen in their kingdom, lavished with love and riches.

That is a narrative so many young girls grow up being spoon fed. It’s the feminized version of the American Dream that was born of an era when war was so overwhelming nobody really knew wtf else to do other than survive the horrors and anxiety engulfing them. I can appreciate that for how motivational and powerful it is as a message.

That said, there is a bitter reality many of us know. Whether you’re a girl, any kind of minority, or a white man, odds are you’ve possibly had the experience of several consecutive horrible years, or you will have that experience sometime in your life.

We all at some point have the experience of doing our damndest every day, of toiling to reach our goals, and to be the best version of ourselves, hoping deep inside of ourselves that it will pay off.

What happens when it doesn’t? What happens when somebody you love gets everything you ever dreamed of? What if it looks like they had it handed to them, while you had to bust your ass and get next to nothing in return?

What happens when you have a character like Cassandra? A girl who from the start, was just as goodhearted as any disney princess is, and you as narrator throw so much pain and hardship at her, while she has next to no emotional support to encourage her through it all? A disney protagonist like Cass, who still does her damndest and then watches her best friend get everything she’s dreamed of, while not getting any of it herself? In fact she’s actively blocked from some of her wishes by Rapunzel’s victories.

Cassandra’s vengeful, understandably upset character arc happens.

To top it all off she is being manipulated by an evil ancient spirit to be even more bitter. Of course she’s pissed and afraid by the end of the show.

The brilliance of this lies in the fact that disney is again being self-conscious and reflecting upon how hokey their repetitive, somewhat commercial optimistic messages can get. This particular character arc is disney taking its old “dreams do come true if you don’t stop believing” mantra and turning it on its head. It’s subverting our expectations. What if they don’t come true for so long that you have a harder and harder time believing, until you give up? What if your friend is the one who has it all, who is a really good friend but still cannot possibly understand or conceive of the layers and layers pain you’ve been through?

I think this is something true of many of us who grew up indoctrinated by disney rhetoric. Particularly millenials, who had access to a lot of movies growing up.

A lot of us feel like Cassandra. Many of us didn’t get a happy ending once we grew out of our adolescent years, even if we did our best most of the time. This happened to some of us while we grew up in an americanized culture that told us we could have anything if we work our hardest and preservere through pain. Tangled The Series effectively said: “Y’know what? Those girls and those people deserve to be seen as well. They deserve to have their story told, they deserve to be empathized with.” They became self-aware of the fact that not everybody will or can feel a deep connection with characters like Eugene and Rapunzel, who always seem to bounce back into a chipper optimistic mindset.

To wrap this commentary up I want to end on a more positive note: While it’s true that Cassandra has suffered incredibly, and as is put in a place where she inflicts pain on the people who care on her herself... She manages to forgive herself, and to move on to carve her own path. She removes herself from the life that’s making her miserable. She’s also incredibly resilient, indomitable and capable because of her negative experiences. They turned into opportunities for growth, maturity and self-reflection. I’m convinced that because Cassandra is so powerful when she’s self-isolating and bitter, she can be unbeatable once she accepts the help and love she deserves.

Hopefully we can all bounce back the way Cass does in the finale, and gradually let go of the pain to become less cynical and more wise individuals.

Maybe we can let love in again, and accept that we’re incredible with our without our dreams coming true,

We should by no means overglamorize hardship, or seek it out, but maybe our fairy godmother not showing up to save us is a different type of happily ever after. It’s a happily ever after that is nuanced, self made, and realistic. It’s one that prepares us for the volatility of life outside of traditional fairy tales, and doesn’t disappoint us when the universe is unfair.

#this is not super structured but im procrastinating my thesis by doing this instead #which is why i won't sit here editing as if i'm writing for the NYT #when cass sang you don't know how much I've ben denied well I'm not being patient anymore my heart gave her a standing ovation and i cry #tangled the series #cassandra #cass #this is also why fiona in shrek 4 actually stabbed me in the chest when she said she spent her life waiting for a true love who never showed #it's like. yeah. that's how it be #as a person who had been envious of her friends her whole life cassandra really stuck with me and I suddenly felt so seen by disney #long post #rambles #thought throwup #disney #disney+#disney princesses

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blaydiud · 3 years ago

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𝑨𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒅𝒃𝒉𝒂𝒓.

It came to him in a dream.

One unlike all others- similarly terrifying, but lacking everything the rest had.

No voices dripping with hate, pain and sadness belittling him and calling for his name, no cold claws digging at his flesh and trying to drag him under, no fire licking at his skin and smoke filling up his lungs. Glenn, who usually flickered between getting sliced by an axe and angrily blaming him for his death, was nowhere. Patricia, who usually stood within a certain distance with a melancholic gaze laced with venom and a disapproving silence, was nowhere.

Father, who alternated between begging for his son to avenge him and hatefully cursing Dimitri’s very existence as his child, was also nowhere. Instead, before him was emptiness. Silent, dark- this wasn’t the eternal flames that awaited him, nor heaven’s unreachable embrace.

This was nothingness. Quiet, lonely, inert. Both everything he had ever wanted, and everything he feared. A life spent isolated nowhere, where nobody could help him but at the same time he couldn’t harm anyone for the exact same reason. He could live in peace at the price of never fulfilling the ghosts’ wishes, an existence he wasn’t sure if meant as a reward or the worst kind of punishment.

Then came this horrible, bone-crushing, oppressive presence. Unseen, as if some horrifying beast was prowling in the darkness ready to pounce on him at any given second. Yet no matter how much he ran or looked around, the prince found nothing. The presence followed, weighing on his very soul, giving him the most primal reaction of fear as his knees threatened to buckle. A once predator being proven that, in fact, he was prey all along. It wasn’t like when he was little more than eight years of age, abandoned in the forest surrounding the Itha Plains by Gustave with no more than a wooden bow and a tiny dagger to defend himself, coming face to face with a bear.

Because then, even though he was just a small child, Dimitri knew that he had a crest, that it was strong, and that maybe it could make the bear go away.

Now he wasn’t even sure of that.

It was perhaps the worst feeling conceivable- a looming threat that couldn’t be identified, one he couldn’t tell when or if it would attack, but it was there. And if it were to move, it would surely spell his end.

Going against all instructions taught by Gustave when it came to surviving in the wild, Dimitri ran. It felt like he was going nowhere, after all everywhere looked and felt the same. He might as well have been standing, thinking that he was running, probably posing as some pitiful entertainment for whoever was watching him. Was it the Goddess, finally showing him her true face? That he was nothing but a toy for her to play with, only to be discarded when she deemed fit despite his prayer and devotion? Would she kill him with her own hands and leave his soul trapped in this hollow hell forever, unable to move on? She might as well do it and get things over with.

He continued to run, heart thundering against his ribcage, his muscles growing tired but unwilling to stop, everything in his brain telling him to run run run or it’ll get you.

Dimitri tripped on something and fell face down. The ominous feeling felt more real now, as if it were standing right before him, and something assaulted his nostrils for the first time in years.

The smell of bone. Overwhelming, pungent, strong, enough to make him cough and gag and hope for his nose to return to its non-operational state, but it only got thicker with each gasp of air he gulped. Dimitri got up on weak knees, only to trip and fall against something hard- bone. Not a human skeleton, but it was bone. If anything, it looked like a beast’s jaw with teeth protruding from it, smooth and razor-like. Looking up, he spotted what could only be the jaw’s matching palate, forming a cage of fangs keeping him trapped, like a squirrel in between a fox’s teeth waiting for death.

Death didn’t come, so Dimitri wriggled his way out through the cage- holding his shirt against his face in an attempt to keep the smell of bone at bay. Taking a few shaky steps back, he stared at what could only be identified as a beast’s skull. Much bigger than him, with a pair of black horns emerging from pale bone and twisting inwards in an elegant yet ominous curve. In the skull’s forehead was a triangle shaped protrusion, the crest of Blaiddyd engraved on to it.

Countless scenarios went through his mind. Was his Halfa Bladid, the monster that lived in the mountains of Sacred Gwenwhyvar and gnawed at unruly hunters who hoped to bite more than they could chew? Tale books described it as a huge wolf, yet this looked much more like a dragon. Perhaps Conmac, the snake rumored to swim through a hidden lake in the plains of Itha? But this...thing, had his crest in it.

His family’s crest.

What was this, to him? The boar, finally showing its face? Dimitri gulped down. If this was truly the boar, then his life was over- he felt completely powerless against it. It felt strange, to feel such an intense reaction of fear towards what was literally the skull of a dead beast- yet its mere presence felt overwhelming. Intimidating, repulsive, violent, aggressive.

It was just like Areadbhar. The symbol of pride and power of the royal family that absolutely nobody wanted to see in action. The mere act of walking before the doors that lead to its resting chamber made his bones rattle as a child- no servant dared to enter without King Lambert’s company. Even Rufus refused to even look at the lance. It felt less like a weapon, and more of a beast, collared in a dungeon, always awake and waiting.

Yet, Areadbhar reminded him of Father. Tall and proud, scary but warm. Powerful but merciful in his own way.

Areadbhar meant death, and his father...did, too.

Amidst the empty silence, Dimitri heard whispers. Tiny, quick hushes, all coming from the skull’s direction. Hesitant, the prince carefully made his way back to the imposing figure, and pressed his ear against the bone.

「 𝖨 𝖻𝗋𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗒𝗈𝗎 𝗉𝖾𝖺𝖼𝖾. 𝖨𝗍 𝗆𝖺𝗒 𝖻𝖾 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗉𝖾𝖺𝖼𝖾 𝗈𝖿 𝗉𝗅𝖾𝗇𝗍𝗒 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝖼𝗈𝗇𝗍𝖾𝗇𝗍 𝗈𝗋 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗉𝖾𝖺𝖼𝖾 𝗈𝖿 𝗎𝗇𝖻𝗎𝗋𝗂𝖾𝖽 𝖽𝖾𝖺𝗍𝗁. 𝖳𝗁𝖾 𝖼𝗁𝗈𝗂𝖼𝖾 𝗂𝗌 𝗒𝗈𝗎𝗋𝗌: 𝖮𝖻𝖾𝗒 𝗆𝖾 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝗅𝗂𝗏𝖾, 𝗈𝗋 𝖽𝗂𝗌𝗈𝖻𝖾𝗒 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝖽𝗂𝖾.

𝖶𝖾 𝖼𝖺𝗇 𝖼𝗈𝖾𝗑𝗂𝗌𝗍, 𝖻𝗎𝗍 𝗈𝗇𝗅𝗒 𝗈𝗇 𝗆𝗒 𝗍𝖾𝗋𝗆𝗌. 」

From the corner of his eye, he saw a pair of striking blues- then the world went dark.

Later that day, Areadbhar had been delivered to his room as a gift from the royal court and his uncle, its grotesque blade buried in its soft cyan sheath, almost giving it a harmless look.

He still felt eyes on him, but those weren’t from the ghosts.

Dimitri has acquired: Areadbhar!

#[ ah this takes me back… ] (drabbles)

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