#Disentangling

[tenth-sentence]

In practice, though, the fact that half the DNA in your body comes from your mother's line and half from your father's line makes disentangling the information as difficult as unscrambling an egg.

"Why the West Rules – For Now: The patterns of history and what they reveal about the future" - Ian Morris

[homoquartz]

a show doesn't necessarily have to be ABOUT queerness to BE a queer show. it's a cultural dialect that cishets don't quite speak.

edit: i gotta clarify that the shows do indeed still have to have actual queer characters in them to count

[leaflingsound]

making myself say one nice thing about izzy's death scene. his bloodied hand getting caught in ed's hair on the way down and staying there is a fucking heartbreaking detail that I would be going cuckoo over if literally anything else about his death and subsequent shitty funeral made any sort of narrative or tonal sense at all.

[aziraphalecrowley-fell]

I do so adore how my demon drapes across my torso and legs, making the sweetest noises as he conducts his sleeping ritual.

[undertalethingems]

He shouldq just deleted the house. Much simpler.

Sans and Papyrus' house is weird, for a number of reasons, so teleporting Frisk and Alphys out actually was the simpler option =u=;

[tenth-sentence]

What I do expect from such an exploration is at least some assistance in disentangling the benefits we might aim for from the pitfalls we might legitimately fear.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

[thethirdromana]

There's something interesting in the contrast between how we're presented with Mina's thinking vs Van Helsing's thinking.

Most of Van Helsing's process of deduction is hidden from the reader. We know he does research and figures out that it's vampires, but we never learn exactly how he gets there, or what other theories he discards along the way.

Meanwhile Mina, The Information Sharer, has her process of deduction right there on the page. We learn about it at the exact same point and in the same way as the other characters do.

[sammygender]

we really sleep on sam/lisa and dean/ruby

[cubbihue]

I’m not an artist don’t judge me. But I had to make this. There is something wrong with my brain.

HHBAKSHABSDKHASBAK OH MY GODD

god i love this so much. i love everything about this. when will he come back from the war. where's our boy.

[braceletofteeth]

The one and only future Palm worries about.

[cosmik-homo]

Actually saw a clickbait article the other day about how a 'recent doctor who episode' - "boom"- 'makes a great case of challenging one of the shows greatest traits and blowing it out of the water'- heavily reworded from my terrible memory, ok, but that WAS the sentiment- by Not Having The Protagonist Run. And that bullshit mediacontentfarm thing made me see red so badly I AM NO LONGER ASKING POLITELY. WE NEED ANOTHER MOBILITY DISABLED DOCTOR WHO.

*Another because one. When I was having self doubts desiging my disabled Doctor oc I was like 'how would a cane-reliant doctor func- oh. Right.'

[aziraphalecrowley-fell]

There is something endearing about watching Crowley sleep.

Can I disentangle myself without waking him up? I do so enjoy this, but he has been asleep for six hours and I’m feeling peckish.

[nemo-of-house-hamartia]

My brain is currently doing this:

*needs to play w/ FFXVI*------> Wants to focus on my Cid/Neva/Barnabas stuff.

*needs to play BG3* -------> Wants to focus on Mephisto/Aranea, Asra/Stag King, Hiraeth/Gale and all my precious Hellions.

*needs to finish Dragon Age Inquisition*------> Wants to focus on Vela/Blackwall, Ravhona/Cullen and Arryn/Dorian.

*needs to play CoD*-------Wants to focus on Alejandra and Jason and John.

AND REPEAT.

And then the executive disfunction of the ADHD comes into play, and I end up just staring at the ceiling.

I have too many characters that I need to develop more, but the brain is not braining and the mood is not mooding, so fucking hell.

I will just stay in my little corner and mull this over by myself, hopefully I will manage to settle down somewhere lolol.

[thesuninperigee]

not necessarily enemies-to-lovers or friends-to-lovers, but definitely narrative foils to lovers.

[quatregats]

Went back and reread some of Master and Commander again and goddamn is that book rich with detail...truly I did not know how to appreciate it on the first (or second) read-through...

[adolin]

Spinning the Concept of Paul in my mind. The Conception of Paul. Basically: do we know for certain that none of the original Lyctors ever considered pulling a Paul, and ended up rejecting it as a viable alternative?

Palamedes and Camilla seem to think they have stumbled on something unheard of. Ianthe absolutely never considered an alternative; but the again, she followed the instructions she had been given and didn’t think about it much after that. On the other hand, we know the original Lyctors were researching immortality for 200 years, and were doing soul fusions on the regular (Teacher, etc). I think there’s actually a good chance they DID stumble on the same theory that Palamedes considered, and didn’t go through with it because they perceived it as the worse alternative.

Or: “It takes a very specific kind of codependency to do that kind of mutual death.”

When Palamedes and Camilla came together to create Paul, it was an ultimate act. They didn’t expect to retain any individual awareness, even after death — for all intents and purposes, they both ceased to exist the moment Paul was born. Compare that to traditional Lyctorhood, which kills the cavalier to fuel the necromancer’s power, but the necromancer retains their individuality: yes, the cavalier dies, but when doing a soul fusion like Paul is… both cavalier and necromancer die.

To someone like Palamedes, dying together to create something new is preferable to killing Camilla and living on. From what we know of the original Lyctor/cavaliers dynamics, I think some of them, maybe all, would’ve found it the worse alternative, not necessarily an improvement like Palamedes did.

(Of course, there’s also the possibility that yes, actually, Palamedes and Camilla were the first ones ever to consider a soul fusion as a Lyctorhood alternative. tbh, I thought that a month ago. But the more navel-gazing theorising I do, the less plausible it seems to me that Palamedes, who’s scary smart but also 20 years old, would’ve figured in a few weeks in Canaan House something that eluded many brilliant minds collaborating on that same research for decades, many of them also brilliant necromancers.

Some of the things Palamedes says to Cytherea in their confrontation in GtN IMO don’t match up with what we know of Lyctoral abilities, so I’m inclined to believe he doesn’t know everything rather than taking everything he says as face value. Maybe Paul is one of these things, maybe they’re not. I don’t think Pyrrha’s reaction in NtN is necessarily telling, especially not in front of a BoE audience and through Nona’s confused POV, but I think any future interactions she has with Paul will make it clearer).