#AND VERY HEAVILY RELIGIOUS

[animationismycomfort]

[stolenkissesdiaz]

i see ppl being disappointed/worried about eddie saying he’s straight but like…the conversation was also about disguises? and self-hatred? punishing yourself by not letting yourself feel joy or letting urself get things you want? he literally talked about getting a full beard in the same convo? the entire theme of their talk was that eddie was subconsciously punishing himself? like the first time eddie’s sexuality is brought up it’s in this one conversation? he was also so comfortable and chill about a goddamn fucking PRIEST flirting with him as if last szn he wasn’t avoiding seeing his gf since he didn’t want to sleep with her bc he found out she ALMOST became a nun. like yeah he said he was straight everything else about the scene implied he is very much not.

[serpentface]

What exactly are living gods in the blightseed universe?

Ok here's the (DANGEROUSLY vestigial at this point) Meta Deeplore:

There is a material form of energy that is utilized by biological bodies essentially as an animating force. This IS the vaguely defined, extremely ambiguous magic in the setting. It is what produces the actual experience of Consciousness and can be basically considered 1:1 with conscious experience. All life utilizes this energy (whether actually conscious life in the traditional sense or not).

It cannot be created or destroyed, and rather follows pathways of dispersal between one material plane and a parallel plane. This parallel plane is 'the ether' 'the dreamlands' etc, and has its own matter. Discrete entities from the dreamlands are essentially formed as a byproduct of consciousness and, when interacted with, are deeply susceptible to the influence of conscious Thought (they are essentially matter organized By consciousness and can be reorganized by consciousness)

These are the entities that can become living gods. Dreamlands fauna occasionally slips into prime material reality, at which point they are directly under the influence of consciousness and can be transformed. Dreamlands fauna in of itself is not directly perceivable but produces a sense of Presence, like the feeling of being watched when alone in the wilderness, a 'third man effect', a sense of inexplicable awe or fear, seeing shadows from the corner of your eye, etc. The combination of their tangible effects and their susceptibility to consciousness creates a self-reinforcing cycle that produces living gods.

IE: if one is on a forest and people experience the sensation of its presence, belief that there is some entity there may develop. This will follow the lines of the cultural worldview- say there are already beliefs in spectral hounds that encounter travelers at night, it might be interpreted as a location-specific hound, given a name and identity through stories. This in turn causes the dreamlands fauna to physically embody that form and the assumed qualities, and people will start having absolute materially real encounters with it, thus reinforcing the initial beliefs that created it and generating new elements of the mythology. This is what a living god is.

They need persistent, localized, and coherent beliefs to hold their forms. If a village creates a living god and is then wiped out in a disaster, the god will gradually lose its form and return to its initial state of a sense of Presence. This is also a limiting factor on the 'size' and power of a living god, if an entire religion formed around it and became a widespread phenomena, the living god itself cannot 'keep up'. It is sustained on direct and localized interactions, so belief becoming widely dispersed (especially if the localized belief is lost) will cause it to gradually become less discrete. The effect of this property is that living gods are almost always minor deities or spirits tied to a specific location by a specific nearby culture. A lot of deities in larger religions may have once had a living god component that is now indiscrete.

The living god of the Ur-tree is an unusual exception in that it was created over millennia, basically by the survival instincts of the Plants it interacts with, and has held its form over hundreds of millions of years due to this being ubiquitous and un-susceptible to cultural change. The only thing that could 'kill it' is if its forest was entirely destroyed.

So 99% of living gods can be described as thoughtforms created by the process of folkloric/religious development. They are created BY people and not the other way around, and nothing about their nature confirms or denies the existence of other deities or etc.

And yeah I'm going to be 100% real I am REALLY tempted to dump even this extremely ambiguous magical element like it is soooooooooooooooo fucking NOT important to the setting at this point. I've kind of allowed 'literal god entities created by mortal belief' to be just a tiny part of the world's fabric by their nature, like it works within the worldbuilding for such a hugely significant concept to ultimately be insignificant in the overall framework, so I COULD just Leave It but idk. If it were not for me wanting to still have my big fucking god tree and a talking dog as an actual character it would be out of here soooo fast..........

[shorthaltsjester]

sometimes people will say “going dark” and then what they’re actually talking about is just people no longer presenting a carefully constructed version of their emotions and experiences.

like. emotional turmoil is not the same as darkness. laudna in this Fictional Universe that has tangibly different stakes wrt to death and killing than our own, is at best like . morally neutral for what she just did like. man has been secretly trying to kill you, and then just tried to do so again, killing him back is a fair choice. and even if i was someone who is excited by delilah’s inability to escape from the narrative, this shit isn’t about delilah. laudna made a choice. if delilah is back or whatever it’s a choice that laudna made because something in that grants her more control than her existing conditions did. this isn’t some Delilah Takes Over, it’s Laudna Expressly Makes The Choice To Call Forth Something within Herself to remedy the lack of control that’s been thrust upon her. if y’all want to Continue to limit Laudna’s agency (as the cr fandom is so, so want to do when a female character makes a choice that isn’t Good according to some weird system of virtue ethics) go ahead.

likewise with orym. little guy is not “going dark” because he has finally made direct action about his emotional turmoil in dealing with a situation which has similarly left him without control and has also placed him in a position where his stalwart conviction towards protecting and honouring those he loves and has lost alike is constantly met with other people he cares for going well.. what if they had a point/we are killing other peoples loved ones/etc. which like . yeah that might be frustrating and in fact might lead him to go, actually, i can’t afford to try and maintain some abject morality where I carry a locket that will literally only provide guilt. orym is completely committed to his beliefs, the locket and what it represents has never been a limit to what he will do, only a reminder of the consequences of what he might cause in those actions. but they Are at war and orym has a billion things on his plate. he can put down the locket. especially when bor’dor is the explicit manifestation of that locket’s symbolism. the subtext rapidly became the text and orym doesn’t need a reminder. it’s there in the fact that team issylra is walking away with two friends, not three.

these are character who have at every turn denied their own emotions in various forms while still being acutely aware of what they deny, whether that awareness was/is fully realized or not. many of laudna’s early convos with ashton show us that there is some awareness to the lighthearted spooky goth girl and how that persona fades when she thinks too much about what has led her and maintained that reality. likewise the entirety of orym’s story thus far is defined by his grief in a very literal sense, it Has extended from that grief to also the commitment he had to the purpose of figuring out the assassination attempt on keyleth but as we have seen, that purpose has fallen apart. paired with the quasi-reopening of his grief that was getting to see will again only to have to turn away, i don’t think there’s a lack of awareness in orym of how much he hurts. but between his actions and 4SD, that hurt tends to get buried under guilt or Responsibility.

and now, finally, both of them have admitted to that Not in the safety of small introspection or one-on-one conversations but with actions that they cannot shy away from or deny. laudna killed bor’dor and orym encouraged her to. and it Is a complex situation but truly I don’t really think it’s a “going dark” one. because they’re not giving into some overhanging Darkness of Morality™, they’re admitting that they are hurt and have long been hurting.

or, y’know, tldr for those who continue to deny laudna and orym agency or fully villainise them for whatever weird reasons . you could listen to laudna and ashton’s conversation that pretty much lays it out explicitly. laudna claims she’s weak for having chosen to kill bor’dor. ashton denies that and affirms instead that, no, she’s hurt.

[glimmeringtwilight]

Okay the new trailblaze quest has been VERY juicy with the sunday lore I'm so excited

[ringwraithmd]

had some convos tonight im a little buzzed but here are my takeaways. these might start some fires.

somehow they person I talked with is both Anakin apologist and Anakin critical. Idk how they have that exist at the same time, but I'd like to say this to him: the Jedi were victims, the Jedi were not evil, no Obi-Wan isn't evil, Obi-Wan didn't repress and abuse Anakin, no Qui-Gon Jinn was not the bestest Jedi who did things differently than any other Jedi and if only he lived he would've saved Anakin Skywalker. Anakin Skywalker did not fall because he was sleep deprived and had one bad day, he fell for a number of reasons, including that he made choices, which choice as a theme is something George Lucas very deliberately has chosen to emphasize repeatedly in Star Wars. Also, Jyn Erso is an actually interesting character and I think she does care about rebelling, the problem is the repressive totalitarian regime she lives in. It's understandable she'd be a little cynical and despondent after 20 years of Empire. TLJ is not the best sequel trilogy movie, Kylo Ren's a little bitch and should've died sooner. Dave Filoni can kiss my ass. "within the context of the prequels it's hard to see the jedi as the good guys --" no. absolutely not. get some reading comprehension you moron. that's the whole point. the whole point is the jedi were the victims of a plot designed to force them into a position where all they had were bad choices. Anakin chose to murder men, women, and children long before he ever became Darth Vader which is a fact so many people seem to gloss over. "they killed his mother -" and?? he didn't just kill her torturers, he killed children, too. your boy committed massacres and genocides in canon. im not talking about legends or any recent books in comics, but solely about the movies. I get still liking him as a character, but to say that Anakin has done nothing wrong is a take that I just can't understand.

folk music is different than country music. im sorry but it is. yes there are similarities. no I can't explain the differences. but country music is not necessarily folk music, or "stomp-clap" music as you called it. tell me you don't listen to country without telling me. arguably the best argument you could've made about the push back of country music pop-ification is the rise in popularity of artists like Zach Bryan, but you didn't, you started talking about fucking Mumford & Sons. my good dude. no. google them. they're literally described as a folk rock band.

edited 6/23 bc I realized I was drunker then i thought and this was semi-incoherent. hopefully that clarifies things.

[20w14a]

Do Unto Others by MSI gives me Elquackity vibes while Pt. 2 gives me Quackity vibes.

[dearest-valentine]

.

[transingthoseformers]

TF Surge: Sunstorm propably believes that said higher power saved him (while the others died) so that he could serve it. I haven't decided if he has his powers from other continuities, or if he's just imagining them and thinking the higher power granted them.

The transfomers don't have religions in TFES, at most just folklore and superstitions, so Sunstorm's beliefs are even more abnormal than what they'd be if religions existed.

It would be interesting if he thinks he has his abilities but doesn't, it's gotta lead to interesting results

[lesboslibra]

Hold up a second, wdym funerals were a secular event and religion was not involved in any funeral rites? Do you mean just in the Illiad? I know you said that wasnt your main point but then why state that and not even say anything about it. that's the opposite of what every class around antiquity/classics I've taken says, and one was literally a class on just pagan (greco-roman classical) religion!

I’m a classical archaeology grad student, and in class we talked about ancient views of death/handling of the body, which of course made me think about the Iliad and Achilles’ treatment of the dead.

Firstly, funerals were a secular event, and religion was not involved in any funerary rites. But that’s not the main point I want to bring up, it’s this: that touching a dead body was a sort of taboo, and anyone who had handled a dead body needed to be cleansed before they could return to society. Also, burials happened quickly, they needed to get the body in the ground as soon as possible (most likely of for practical reasons of course).

We’re all familiar with how Achilles treats Patroclus’ body after he dies, and while that in and of itself is a good enough point to show what they meant to each other, it takes on another dimension when you take into account the traditions and practices of the time period.

Achilles refusing to bathe himself after touching Patroclus’ body, and the multiple instances of him holding, caressing, and general touching of the body are extreme measures, one of a man that has lost himself in his grief. It could also hint at other things, like Achilles’ own death, because in a sense he had become it. He would not bathe after battle, would not bathe, eat, or drink after touching and holding Patroclus, and prolonged his burial for so long that divine measures that to be taken so his body would not spoil. Achilles disregards tradition, disregards the norms of the Greeks, and as we see once he finally confronts Hector, disregards his own life now that Patroclus is gone.

I think it’s so interesting when you can analyze the actions of the characters in the Iliad against the cultural background of Ancient Greece, because there’s so many subtle things that you’d miss if you weren’t aware, but the audience of the time would’ve caught that added nuance. Anyway! That’s my two cents :)

[arolesbianism]

Euphrasie vc haiiii Claudie can you help me with something real quick ^w^ (<- visibly trembling because one of her circle wall ornaments keeps looking smudged to her no matter how much she wipes is and it's now 3 am and shes been at it for the past 6 hours)

[nexus-nebulae]

"unless one is willing to accept the Blessings of the Miracle as punishment" im normal about this sentence

[ozzgin]

hear me out...

yandere prison..

runs normally, but the warden hired very specific people

and you just got falsely accused of a heinous crime

Yandere!Prison x Reader

A few years back I actually wanted to make a dating sim with a similar premise! So I might just redraw my old cover and recycle the characters, haha. content: gender neutral reader, violence

You've been accused of a crime you didn't commit. Even worse, you were speedily shipped to a maximum-security prison, despite your horror and your desperate protests. Your lawyers are scrambling to get you out as soon as possible, but it's not a guarantee.

You thought you'd be killed within the first moments after arriving. The three men you're sharing a cell with, however, turned out to be reasonable enough. Unexpectedly so.

The blonde one greeted you with a wide, merry smile. He's the friendliest of the bunch, despite his heavily scarred features. One of them seems to wear a mask at all times, and he doesn't speak much. The last one is polite, though he keeps his distance. His answers are curt and to the point.

You quickly noticed that all other inmates avoid you religiously. The tables empty when you put down your lunch tray, and during breaktime the yard fluctuates with people migrating to whatever corner is farthest away from you.

Today, you finally found out why: one of the prisoners happened to bump into you, and he promptly fell to his knees, begging you to not mention it to your cellmates. You are apparently sleeping next to the leaders of the biggest gang around. Even the guards are terrified to approach them the wrong way; the last one to do so was placed on permanent medical leave.

And yet, they are nice to you. In fact, you'd go as far as to say they're strangely protective of you, always looking out for your safety and hovering in your vicinity like trained dogs.

On your way back, you find the inmate who pleaded for your silence; his head nearly cracked open, held against the bathroom sink by your beloved blonde bunkie.

"Oops! You weren't supposed to see this," he laughs awkwardly. "Why don't you return to our room? I'll join you in a moment."

He flashes you his usual smile, innocent and somewhat silly. This time it appears particularly eerie, given it's stained by fresh splatters of blood.

[More yandere stories]

[catch-in-my-peripheral]

i’m gonna open a word document and write down all my thoughts later i think

[zatdummesmadchen]

((THE TAGS!!!!)

watching western ultras start reblogging posts about how iran is evil actually while zionists are reblogging the same exact posts is truly depressing you are fucking idiots

[gilbir-t]

Some Fiddlestan

Now I actually have a lot to say about this ship or at least what my interpretation of it is. Stan and Fiddleford would meet right after Ford gets pushed into the portal. And Stan is looking for answers and Fiddleford helps him. This would be around the time Fiddleford is starting to lose it and is newly traumatized. They could bond over their shared experiences with Ford. Both of them could relate to people having low expectations of them (Stan being the “dumb” twin and Fiddleford being the first McGucket to go to college/generally how he was raised). I personally think their relationship would be healthier than Fiddauthor. Ford is wrapped up with Bill and (in my hc) doesn’t return the feelings. Ford also kinda develops a superiority complex and ends up not treating Fidd very well anyway, so I feel like being with Stan would be a breath of fresh air. The desire is actually mutual. Stan’s probably been in a lot of quick relationships and Fidd (another hc) has been in maybe a few but definitely not with another man. After being married to Emma-May (she divorced him at this point) and having to conform to a heteronormative roles/religious standards of intimacy, being in a relationship where you are heavily desired would be really freeing. Stan being Stan and Fiddleford being desperate, their relationship would probably be mainly physical. They’d care about each other but it’s not a deep love. There would be kinda toxic undertones to the whole thing though, mainly Fidd still being in love with Ford and using Stan as a replacement. And also Stan would struggle to be emotionally vulnerable and use physicality to distract from his emotions. These problems could be why they broke it off and stopped being friends. That or Fidd going crazy and running a cult.

No I don’t know why I wrote a whole paragraph about a Gravity Falls ship