#I had no idea it’s so geographically distinct

[linguenuvolose]

Recent youtube interests:

urban planning

history (especially early human evolution and the first civilisations and communities)

geography

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

The debate that's older than I am.

That being; "Eowyn's cooking is awful enough to kill grown men, or is Rohan's cultural food that strange to foreners?"

So, I'm curious what you think a regular meal is like in Edoras for one. I live in Midwestern America, and a staple is plain but calorie rich food to keep you full longer and to deal with the cold better, and sometimes I wonder if Rohan could be the same way. Of course, making outsiders not used to such a "strange" diet.

But it could also go the other way that people in Edoras (especially Eowyn) do not know what a nice meal looks like, and will continue to cook horrors for generations to come.

Do you have any thoughts? :).

Ah, the Éowyn stew scene….one that I would have on my short list to “discuss” with Sir Peter if the opportunity ever came to pass!

I think if you accept that scene as canonical, then the only thing you can reasonably infer from it is that Éowyn never learned how to cook. (And why should she? From the time that she was 7, she was living in the king’s own household with only him, Théodred and Éomer as family. They had staff for cooking, and she probably would have been shooed out of the kitchens even if that was a place she wanted to be!) 

Anyone who wants to go from there to the idea that Rohirrim food is bad overall or that they’re making things that are so culturally distinct and unusual that their food is off-putting to outsiders is certainly welcome to make that their HC, though I don’t personally see it that way. And I think the books back me up — there are *several* scenes with large groups of people from across Middle Earth taking meals in Rohan, and nowhere in any of them is even a single whisper of a hint that there’s anything strange or unpleasant about the Rohirrim food.

Geographically speaking, a lot of Rohan does seem like the American midwest or central plains — lots of open, grassy land, a full four seasons of weather, landlocked but with rivers. They had wild boar and probably deer and rabbits, since those were in the surrounding lands. They raised “herds,” which probably meant horses but could have also been cows. They had lots of farms — Saruman’s troops burned a bunch on their way to Helm’s Deep! — and could have grown all kinds of grains and produce that are appropriate for that climate (Aragorn says parts of Rohan are only 60 leagues south of the Southfarthing, though much further east, so perhaps their growing options wouldn’t have been all that different from the Shire, at least outside of the mountainous areas!). They could have fished in the rivers. 

So they’d have had access to lots of different types of ingredients, none of which are especially unusual either here or in-universe. And I don’t see any reason why the cooks of Rohan would be uniquely inept or incapable of using those ingredients to make things that were good! I happen to agree with your characterization — a lot of Rohan isn’t *fancy* or *cosmopolitan* so they’re not making really elaborate, complicated cuisine with a capital C, but they’d have things that were hearty and filling and would keep you on your feet for long days of physical work. And that doesn’t have to mean lacking in flavor or skill! And then, of course, there are also plenty of royals and nobility in Rohan, and they could have easily had fancier, more sophisticated food since they’d have resources to get the best ingredients and full-time staff to handle just food preparation.

So that’s my thought! It seems like you and I are probably on the same page here, though certainly let me know if you’ve got other ideas and opinions — I am *always* happy to hear them! And thanks for asking!

[bowtiepastabitch]

Let's Talk Costuming: A Very Professional Midwife/Cobbler!

At last, the long awaited sequel to Avaunt! aka my post analyzing Aziraphale's (and by extension the other angels as well) costumes from the Job flashback!! I knew Bildad's robes reminded me of something but it has been hiding stubbornly in the back of my memories for weeks, and I was doing myself a little doodle and it came to me, so here we are, friends, buckle up.

For better or for worse (depending who you ask), Crowley's costuming for this bit does not mirror Aziraphale's Renaissance-inspired aesthetic. That is, he is neither buff nor naked, as demons are often shown, nor is he a fucked up little guy

Scene from Michelangelo's Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel altar wall fresco, 1534–41 (featuring buff, naked, fucked up little guys)

The historical evidence that we have for the clothing of ancient Israel is spotty to nonexistent. To my memory, there are no real descriptions of clothing in the Old Testament aside from the instructions for priestly garb. (Note that I'm using "Old Testament" simply because Good Omens is based on a Christian interpretation of religion) None of the art from the period and surrounding time/geographic region, of which there is very very little surviving, depicts clothing anything like what we see in this episode either.

And then it fucking hits me.

It fucking hits me like a sack of bricks.

Weirdly specific Children's bible that stirred up childhood memories so I stole a photo from Amazon; published in 1972

We had this one as a kid, as well as several others, and THAT my friends is what Bildad the Shuhite reminds me of. Modern illustrations of bible stories, especially those used in children's materials. Now Christians are god-awful about giving credit for art, so please forgive me when these don't have sources.

Goodsalt.com has a lot of this stuff labeled as 'religious stock imagery'

This is why the style felt so familiar yet unplaceable: I grew up expecting this as the default outfit for bible stories. If you grew up christian, you're probably at least a bit familiar with this weirdly specific style of art. (Side note: if you have any idea where it came from please let me know, but I can't find any older styles of religious art like it. Anything pre-20th century harkens more to Renaissance style than anything, which in turn is a refresh on Medieval) This is, more than anything, in fact best described as religious stock imagery. It bears a lot of resemblance to clothing worn still in areas thereabout the historical region where this takes place, but it has a distinctive flair that the costume is definitely emulating.

The stripes and colors both feel deeply reminiscent of that art style, and it makes total sense considering this is in fact intended to have the feel of a bible story more-so than any other flashback in Good Omens has. Even the odd floofiness of his beard and hair make sense when put into this context and compared against the beards in the illustrations!

We even see that 'illustrated bible' inspiration right in front of our noses, but my brain didn't even process that because again, this art style is so pervasive it doesn't feel out of the ordinary. It was everywhere in the church I grew up in: posters on the walls in the children's wing, in our bibles and our coloring sheets, all that jazz.

The cheery bright colors, which certainly would not be available as textile dyes for another almost 4500 years, add a definite stylistic flair that makes this not only inspired by modern imaginations, but historically impossible. This of course contributes to the larger theory of how the costumes betray the unreliable narrator which I explore in this post and will almost certainly expand on when the impulse strikes me. The angels can be excused as miraculous, but this is definitive proof that what's happening here is at least in part fictitious, and more importantly for our analysis, that its heavily influenced by MODERN biblical stylization.

Those reds and yellows would have been available sooner, though not 2500 bc soon, but that shade of blue wouldn't be achieved until the industrial revolution and the invention of synthetic dyes in the 19th century. It is, however, very popular in biblical illustrations.

And so, friends, lovers, countrymen, we come to everyone's favorite part. What does this MEAN?

When we talked about Aziraphale and his Renaissance-angel-drag-queen era, the biggest emphasis was on the accentuation of his angelicism and holy glory. He's set apart from the humans in a way we've never really seen the angels before, and he also fits in with the other angels in heaven, who are also dressed ostentatiously to the nines. Crowley, on the other hand, does not have his demonic nature highlighted but downplayed. Instead, he fits in among the humans *almost* flawlessly.

Aside from his incredibly amazing and goofy glasses, which I think are an obvious anachronism of memory, he's dressed in pretty much the exact style as the human people around him, a style hugely shaped by latter 20th century aesthetics of biblical times. From a storytelling perspective, it makes total sense for Crowley to be fitting in among the humans, since he's sympathizing with them and even passing himself off as a human midwife/cobbler right under the angels' noses. He even takes a human name!

From a meta perspective, the modernity of the stylings tells us that whoever is narrating is having their memories shaped by somewhat recent events. However much is true remains under question, and there's tons of fascinating time-fuck theorizing to go around, but whatever is being remembered here is being re-evaluated through the lens of the last fifty or so years max, a mere blink in the eye for our angel/demon duo.

Whether it's the not-pocalypse, the arrival of Gabriel, or something that happened we haven't seen yet, SOMETHING has caused our narrator to reshape these memories recently. The overall character arc of Season 2 belongs to Aziraphale, as he struggles with himself to bring to terms the part of him that sees his own good as an extension of his being an angel and the part of him that can see how awful heaven is, so I think the importance of Crowley being more human than ever while he is more separated from than ever plays a big role in the story we're being told and that will hopefully carry over into season 3.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Foundations

José Llanquileo is four years into a five year sentence for arson. For three years he was living in clandestinity with his partner, Angelica, and for a year was one of the Chilean state’s most wanted fugitives. In 2006, the two were finally captured. She was acquitted on charges of illegal association, under the antiterrorist law. He was convicted for burning pine trees on a forestry plantation belonging to a major logging company, as part of a land reclamation action. Now he gets work release during the day, and furloughs on the weekends, so he has time to take us around Temuco, introduce us to the hungerstrikers, and tell us his story.

We’ve come here as anarchists, to learn about the Mapuche struggle, to tell about our own struggles, to see where we have affinity, and begin creating a basis for long-term solidarity.

Fortunately, we can start on a good foundation. The leftists have had a patronizing attitude towards the Mapuche, says José, but “the anarchists have been very respectful, and shown lots of solidarity. I think we should be grateful for that.” He’s clear, however, that the Mapuche’s struggle is their own. Marxism was influential at a certain moment, but they are not Marxists. One could characterize the Mapuche way of thinking as environmentalist, but they are not environmentalists. They have affinity with anarchists, but they are not anarchists. “We are Mapuche. We are our own people, with our own history, and our struggle comes directly out of that.” Contrary to the assertions of the leftists, the Mapuche are not the marginalized lower class of Chilean society. They are not the proletariat, and the idea of class war does not correspond to their reality. Consequently, they may find some affinity with the revolutionary movements that developed in the context of class war in European society, but these movements do not adequately address their situation.

“The Left consider the Mapuche as just another sector of the oppressed, an opinion we don’t share. Our struggle is taking place in the context of the liberation of a people. Our people are distinct from Western society.” Moreover, the Mapuche people have a proud history of fighting invasion, resisting domination, and organizing themselves to meet their needs and live in freedom, so their own worldview and culture are more than sufficient as an ideological basis for their struggle.

This point is stressed by nearly everyone we meet, and I think our ability to become friends and compañeros rests directly on the fact that we respect their way of struggle rather than trying to incorporate them into our way of struggle.

I want to be upfront with the people I meet, with whom I want to build relationships of solidarity, so on the first day I tell him my motivations and assumptions. The comrades who put us in touch already told José I’m an anarchist, and informed him of the kind of work I do, so the fact that he invited us into his community and took time off to guide us around is a good sign. I let him know that many US anarchists already have a little familiar with the Mapuche struggle, and our understanding is that their culture is anti-authoritarian, and they organize horizontally. Is this correct?

José says it is, but I notice a little eurocentrism on my part, a difference in worldviews, when he automatically replaces my word, “horizontal,” with the word “circular,” to describe Mapuche society. There is no centralization of power among the Mapuche, who in fact are a nation of several different peoples, living in different geographic regions, and speaking different dialects of the same language. The land belongs to the community, and it is maintained collectively, as opposed to individually or communally. Each community has a lonko, a position generally translated as “chief,” but each family has a large degree of autonomy, and many decisions are made by the whole community in assemblies. Lonkos are usually men, but have been women as well. There are other traditional roles of influence: the machi is a religious figure and a healer. Men and women can become machis, but they are neither chosen nor self-appointed. Those who have certain dreams or get inexplicably sick as children, and who demonstrate a certain sensitivity, will become machis. Then there is the werken, the spokesperson, a role that has taken on explicitly political characteristics as Mapuche communities organize their resistance. Historically there were tokis, war leaders that different communities followed voluntarily, though currently no one plays this role, as the Mapuche have not gone to war since being occupied by the Chilean and Argentinean states in the 1880s.

I ask about gender relations and how the Mapuche view things like family structure and homosexuality, making clear my own feelings but also trying not to be judgmental. José says the Mapuche family structure is the same as in European society, and there is a great deal of conservatism, pressure to marry and have children, and disapproval of anything that falls outside of this format. He thinks that maybe it didn’t used to be like that, and perhaps the Catholic missionaries and conservative Chilean society have changed traditional values. In any case, the women we meet during our limited time in the communities are all strong, active, vocal, and involved, and in the homes we stay in there seem to be a sharing and a flexibility of roles. The people in our group, meanwhile, don’t try too hard to present as heterosexual or cis-gendered and don’t have any problems.

* * *

It’s an exciting time to be in Wallmapu. All the communities in resistance are united behind the hungerstriking prisoners, but behind the scenes, important debates are taking place. The hungerstrike, based directly on the ongoing struggle (all the Mapuche prisoners are accused or convicted of crimes related to land recovery actions, such as arsons targeting the forestry companies, or related to conflict with the Chilean state, such as the seizing of a municipal bus or a shooting that gave a good scare to a state’s attorney), has focused the Mapuche nation and captured the attention of the entire Chilean population. It has won a popular legitimacy for the Mapuche struggle, undermining the demonization of the direct tactics they use and weakening the government’s position in casting these tactics as terrorism. In this situation, the Mapuche can go beyond calls for greater autonomy or land reform within the Chilean state.

“The so-called Mapuche conflict doesn’t have a solution. The demands we have necessitate a break with the framework of the state. What we demand is sovereignty and Mapuche independence. We consciously propose the historical foundations of these demands [...] Our struggle is fundamentally opposed to capitalism and the state [...] I believe we have to open a space internationally to spread our demands. The Mapuche struggle has to be internationalist, as the struggle of a people. Many of the things that affect us, like capitalism and the states that represent it, the US, the EU, are an enemy to peoples, First Nations as much as oppressed classes around the world, and that’s a point of concordance.”

“The biggest problem is the advance of capitalism, in the form of investment on our lands. This is one of the principal threats that the Mapuche face because it means the exploitation of natural resources. These resources are on Mapuche lands, so investment means the expulsion of the inhabitants,” José explains. “Even while we’re recovering our lands, this investment is going on, which endangers everything we have achieved.”

* * *

After a few days, we leave Temuco and head for the hills, to the town of Cañete, and then to the first of a couple autonomous Mapuche communities in resistance we’ve been invited into, in the area of the lake Lleu Lleu, south of the city of Concepcion. Mapuche communities have two names, or rather, the place has a name, and the group of people has another name. José’s community, Juana Millahual, at Rucañanko, sits on a steep hill above one arm of the lake. It is a small community, with just a few dozen families. José’s brother is lonko. The houses are mostly small, rectangular, wooden buildings sitting atop low stilts. José explains that the traditional houses, the ruca, had thatched instead of tin roofs, but these have been mostly burned down over the decades of struggle.

The oldest knowledge they have of the community is in 1879, when José’s great grandmother had 10,000 hectares. Now the community only has 300 hectares, but they are in the process of recovering 1000 more hectares, 220 of which they have occupied. “In these territories there is a profound transformation where big capital has exploited natural resources and where the Mapuche are trying to recompose their spaces.” They’re recovering their traditions and parts of their culture that were nearly lost, and when they retake a plot of land, they take it out of the hands of Capital “which says it exists to serve man and must be exploited. When the Mapuche occupy it, there is a revolutionary change, a profound transformation to the social, cultural, religious, and economic fabric.” When they recover land, their machis come and the whole community performs a Ngillatun, a major ceremony, to purge it from its time as private property and to communalize it.

At his house, during his weekend furlough, José tells us more about the Mapuche history. The Mapuche territories used to extend from near the present locations of Santiago and Buenos Aires, Pacific coast to Atlantic coast, south to the island of Chiloe. Farther south, on the southern cone of the continent, other peoples lived. They were hardy nations that survived the extreme temperatures without problems, but were mostly exterminated when the Europeans came.

José explains that winka, the term the Mapuche have given to the European invaders, simply means “new Inca.” Before the arrival of the conquistadors, the Inca nation were already engaging in a sort of regional imperialism, which the Mapuche wanted no part in. The Inca armies got as far south as present-day Santiago, where they were defeated and consistently prevented from advancing any farther. When the Spanish arrived, the Mapuche treated them as just the most recent invaders, and defeated them as well. It’s a point of pride that the Inca, who had an advanced, centralized civilization, fell easily to the conquistadors, while the Mapuche, who were decentralized, never did. What the Spanish couldn’t understand was that there was no single Mapuche army. Each group of communities had their own toki, and if the Spanish won a battle against one group of warriors, as soon as they advanced a little farther they’d have to face another one.

During my time in Wallmapu, I think a lot about what it means to be a people. From the traditional anarchist standpoint, a people or a nation is an essentializing category, and thus a vehicle for domination. However, it becomes immediately clear that it would be impossible to support the Mapuche struggle while being dismissive of the idea of a people.

Hopefully by this point all Western anarchists realize that national liberation struggles aren’t inherently nationalist; that nationalism is a European mode of politics inseparable from the fact that all remaining European nations are artificial constructions of a central state, whereas in the rest of the world (excepting, say, China or Japan), this is usually only true of post-colonial states (like Chile or Algeria) that exist in direct opposition to non-state nations. Many other nations are not at all homogenizing or centrally organized.

Going beyond this, though, is it essentializing to talk about a Mapuche worldview or way of life? The more I listen, however, the more I doubt my accustomed standpoint. To a great extent, Mapuche is a chosen identity. Most “Chileans” have black hair, broad faces, and brown skin, while less than 10% of the population of the Chilean state identify as Mapuche. In a context of forced assimilation and a history of genocide, choosing to identify as Mapuche is, on some levels, a political statement, a willful inheritance of a cultural tradition and hundreds of years of struggle, and an engagement with an ongoing strategic debate that perhaps makes it legitimate to talk about what the Mapuche want, what they believe, in a more singular way. At one point, when we’re talking about mestizos, José makes it clear that someone is Mapuche if they identify as such, even if they have mixed parentage. In other words the Western notion of ethnicity, which leaves no room for choice because it is based on blood quanta, does not apply. Also, the fact that the Mapuche call the Europeans the “new Inca” show that they do not have an essentializing, generalizing view of sameness between all indigenous peoples. On the contrary, many people we met specified an interest in connecting specifically with other First Nations that were fighting back against their colonization, showing that what they cared about was not a racial category, but a struggle.

So if Mapuche is a chosen identity based on a very real shared history, shared culture, and ongoing collective debate of strategy, is it actually all that different from the identity of anarchist? Well, yes: it has a longer history, tied to a specific geographic territory and cultural-linguistic inheritance. Anarchism also contains a greater diversity of worldviews, but on the flipside no one I met tried to present the Mapuche as homogenous, even as they talked about a Mapuche worldview.

In sum, the concept of belonging to a people brings a great deal of strength to the Mapuche struggle. Because the state falls outside of and against that people and their history, I find some elements of the Mapuche reality, of their world, to be a more profound realization of anarchy than I have found among self-identified anarchists. And considering that those anarchist movements that have been able to maintain just 40 years of historical memory (Greece, Spain) are consistently stronger than anarchist movements that have a hard time even understanding the concept of historical memory (US, UK), it is no surprise that the Mapuche, who maintain over 500 years of historical memory, are so strongly rooted that they seem impervious to repression.

[beguines]

In March 1939, on the eve of World War II, the Hindu Mahasabha issued a statement endorsing the Nazi project, framing its support from an ideological affirmation for the revitalization of the culture, the symbolism and the expectation that it would provide a spark of its nascent but analogous nationalism at home:

"Germany's solemn idea of the revival of the Aryan culture, the glorification of the Swastika, her patronage of the Indo-Germanic civilization are welcomed by the religion and sensible Hindus of India with a jubilant hope . . . I think that Germany's crusade against the enemies of the Aryan culture will bring all the Aryan nations of the world to their senses and awaken the Indian Hindus for the restoration of their lost glory."

In another speech in July 1939, in Pune, Savarkar drew explicit distinctions between Jews and Germans: "Nationality did not depend so much on a common geographic area as on unity of thought, religion, language, and culture. For this reason, the Germans and Jews could not be regarded as a nation." The engagement between Hindu nationalism and European fascism had a series of implications. It established the Hindu nationalist movement as an ethnonationalist ideology with an emphasis on race, territory, and nativism as opposed to purely religion. As author Eviane Leidig has argued: "Hindutva is not centred on religion (although Hinduism does play a significant role) but rather on how religion is politicized in such a way that being Hindu generates belonging as an ethnonationalist identity."

Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel

[aheathen-conceivably]

What led you to taking the family from New Orleans to New Mexico?

Thanks for the question, my dear! It honestly hurt my heart to do so, since my own love and attachment to New Orleans is woven so strongly through the 1920s. But I knew from the get-go we’d be leaving the city for a couple reasons….

One, I simply can’t stay in the same sims world for too long. I’m like this in gameplay, but I learned in the 1900s-1910s that that instinct is even stronger in storytelling. Being able to find new angles, builds, lots, lighting, etc. is part of the fun and really makes me look forward to moving the story forward. Likewise, I really like the clear visual distinction of a new world every decade or so (because it won’t always be exactly every ten years), as it creates visual chapters and keeps things feeling fresh for me and I hope, y’all too!

But more specifically, I always knew that many of the end goals of the 1920s would require leaving New Orleans. One was Antoine’s toxic attachment to his past, and his need to let go of that in order to move forward. The other one, and arguably the biggest, was to end the decade with Antoine proposing to Zelda. As I discussed in detail here, this was not possible in New Orleans. Likewise, I did not want Violette’s formative years to be marked by legally mandated segregation (especially in school), so that she could have more freedom in her story and identity.

Now if you look at the map in the post linked above, you’ll see that the choices of where to move them is not exactly plentiful. The easiest choice would have been the Northeast, but I knew pretty early on that I wanted to have a desert backdrop for the 1930s. Thematically, I think it harkens to the images that we associate with this decade and also the concept of the American West, which by the 1930s is beginning to be exposed as a myth (this is a theme I find fascinating and y’all will see as the years go by). Its also meant to provide a heavy contrast to the warm, tropical air of New Orleans, and how that climate kind of intersects with the idea of decadence in the 1920s.

As far as sim-specifics, I try and look at all the worlds and see what can realistically be used for what decade and geographic location. From the get-go I was intrigued by Strangerville, since it’s a world I never really play in and the military base has some good story potential (oh? Is that a spoiler you say? 👀). I also don’t see it used that often, and I especially think the downtown is so cinematic. This really fell in line with the ideas I already had about leaving New Orleans and the themes of the West, so I referenced the map in the linked post, and ultimately decided on New Mexico. Then with subsequent research and studying Strangerville’s landscape (namely the rocks and the road and how I could incorporate that into the story), I finally placed the town in the Northwestern corner of the state, with easy road access both North and West for wherever the next decade takes us 😉

[justsasuke]

So I know in cannon all the countries are treated as if everyone speaks the same common language (I get it makes story telling easier) BUT lately I've had the brain worm of IF each country did have its own language to go with it's culture....what accents would Taka have?

This made me think about how Sasuke gets a lot of comments about how he's "clearly from Konoha" and in canon it's always because he's a softie or whatever (which, we've all seen how Konoha is, we know being soft isn't a trait that's from there) but what if it's actually because when he speaks he has a very distinct Konoha accent that he never really lost despite years away? And he could lose it, he has a good enough ear to pick up a different accent but what if it's not exactly a Konoha accents so much as it's the Uchiha accent. Because they lived in such a condensed environment there's no way they wouldn't have their own way of speaking that's similar enough to Konoha to get mistaken for it by those who don't know but still different. Sure, this means everyone who meets him will know where he came from but he refuses to lose the accent because it's the way his mother talked, his father talked, his aunts, uncles, and cousins talked. It's the way his brother talks, and it's another reason he's so easily recognizable as an Uchiha.

Suigetsu knows this and respects it (heck, he has a strong Kiri accent that he's not losing because it's where he's from and he wants people to know) but still definitely teases him about it sometimes. That one time he said "you really are from Konoha" wasn't actually commenting on Sasuke's no killing policy, he was saying "your accent is showing, dude" jkjk.

.

As for the rest of Taka, I'm not sure how their accents would compare to the ones we have in our world but I do think that Karin would have a southern accent. In my experience southern accents in the languages I know tend to be wider, have more tonal ups and downs, be more dynamic, and carry a lot of emotion which I think would be perfect for Karin. She usually speaks standard* but will slip into her native accent when she's emotionally charged. Only Sasuke and Juugo understand her when this happens, Suigetsu does not.

*Standard being what most people communicate with outside of small villages and in large cities with lots of import/export. It probably started in the Land of Fire and then was generally accepted across the rest of the major 5 nations. Other smaller nations don't use it that much but it is used in Otogakure because Orochimaru is from Konoha. Even though he probably uses old standard so no one understands him anyway.

Suigetsu has a Kiri accent which...probably sounds slightly sinister and a little slippery. It's a fairly well respected accent in the business world because Kiri is known for the quality of their assassins but is heavily associated with organized crime so if you have it civilians won't really trust you.

Juugo has a more rural, rough accent that comes from limited exposure to "modern" civilization and a lot of exposure to mountain villages and farmers (not helped by his time in the northern hideout where most everyone spoke the same except for the employees) He can't speak standard and is embarrassed about it and how rough his language sounds so he doesn't speak a lot at first. His accent is hard to understand for most people in the 5 great nations because it's so rural, but people from smaller countries like the land of birds get it. Sasuke understands it but only because he traveled to the northern hideout with Orochimaru a lot.

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I'm not sure if this correctly corresponds with where each member is from geographically and how the language would be there, tbh I feel like the linguistics of the elemental nations + other countries could be a whole study in and in of itself, but these are my current thoughts on the topic. It's such a fascinating idea and I'll definitely be thinking about it more.

[hxhhasmysoul]

"JJK really went from a loved manga to a mid-to-bad story with insufferable fans 🙏 may more of us hate it in the future. It snatches the spotlight from genuinely good shows and its another case of "general shonen fan will call any trash 'goat' if the fight is well animated".

I used to be a fan, until the start of the culling game. And after this controversial, inconsistent and inhumane adaptation of shibuya, im glad that I have no interest in both manga and show anymore.."

Thoughts on that statement? Do you think culling game really that hard to understand, cause I saw quite a lot start dislike JJK since that arc....?

If I had seen this in the wild I would've blocked the account that produced it. I block for very liberally and while I will block for obvious bigotry and shitty harassment behaviour, so like serious reasons,I will also block for general annoyance. Fandom is my hobby and I don't want it to be annoying and stress me out through unleashing my adhd and flood my brain with thoughts. And this qualifies as annoying.

But since you brought this to me I will actually explain why I find these kind of posts annoying and not worth engaging with.

While I would've blocked it before I got to the second paragraph on the "may more of us hate it in the future" alone, I will actually start analysing it from the second paragraph where op pretends to give an explanation for this turn in attitude towards JJK they experienced.

Reason 1:

"I used to be a fan, until the start of the culling game."

Op invokes the Culling Game arc as if it's an obvious reason to dislike JJK and hence your question at the end of the ask. And I will get to that but I need to set the stage first.

Reason 2:

"And after this controversial, inconsistent and inhumane adaptation of shibuya,(...)"

(Side note, I find it genuinely dodgy that Shibuya, an actual rl geographical location is not capitalised when the abbreviation of the manga's title is.)

What is controversial, inconsistent and inhumane about the adaptation of the Shibuya arc? The working conditions at Mappa are inhumane indeed, but it's an industry wide problem and with how JJK is a beloved title the animators actually could do a strike with a chance of the company making concessions. I don't think there would've been the same amount of fan support and pressure for animators of smaller titles. And the way the anime is produced isn't really the reason why JJK as a story should be hated because the story isn't responsible for industry exploitation that has been happening since long before JJK was even conceived by its author.

The word "controversial" honestly feels flippant when it's together with the far more appropriate "inhumane" and feels like it was added for the aesthetics of having 3 adjectives.

Now the word "inconsistent" actually makes me believe that the outrage in this sentence is not genuine and is typical posturing of "I'm critical of the media I consume so I'm a good person" crowd." This is the only adjective that actually describes the adaptation and not its creation process. And the inconsistency of the adaptation is in its animation quality. And that inconsistency stems from the inhumane working conditions. Pulling is out as a reason as to why op is "glad that I have no interest in both manga and show anymore." feels really callous and shows their hand, that they are upset that they can't consume the pretty moving pictures in peace anymore.

Huh...

"It snatches the spotlight from genuinely good shows and its another case of "general shonen fan will call any trash 'goat' if the fight is well animated"."

This is a typical example of trying to put on the guise of intellectualism through being against the popular thing. There's also this classist distinction between high art and pop culture with the idea that only a certain level of education and intelligence allows for interacting with high art thus it's only for the intellectual elite.

So there's a certain group of people who equates obscurity with quality because if they can claim liking things that others don't know about they feel like they are smarter than the rest. This way they can make an appeal to intellectualism even if they are not interacting with what would traditionally by the upper classes and social climbers be considered high art.

Popularity means that the unwashed masses like it and and the intellectuals will look down on them and their tastes, even if the intellectuals are leftists. The mob is defined by its stupidity and by liking primitive and simplistic things for vulgar reasons.

In this framing, the moment JJK became popular it lost any claim to quality. JJK is liked by the "general shounen" fans who only like pretty moving pictures. The shounen fan mob doesn't care about the "genuinely good shows" and because the mob is huge and loud those better shows suffer in obscurity. Of course no show gets specified by op because they are addressing this to those who are in the know - like those who are at their level will immediately conjure the image of those "genuinely good shows" and nod along.

And now we will circle back to the Culling Games arc. This arc feels like a HxH arc, especially Hakari and I love it. But not only for that. The arc is much slower than the previous ones and I actually hoped it would be a signal that the story will slow down like this, take more of its time to follow one or two characters and delve deeper into them. I love how that arc fleshes out the power system so much more. I hoped we would get more on the new and old characters, and we get it on same Yuuji, Megumi, Maki, Noritoshi, Hakari, Kahimo, Charles, Higuruma though not enough on Kirara, Uro, Remi, Ishigori or the Kyoto school characters or later on Hana and Angel, the time wasted on Yuuta could've been used much better. But alas then Gege cut the breaks and put their foot down on the acceleration pedal and it makes me sad.

The thing is that the Culling Games are disliked because of how slow they are and how much reading there is in them. You will read the chapters online and the comment section will be full of:

"wtf, i'm not reading that lol."

"what did i just read, i don't understand a thing"

"ugh, does anyone know what's even going on in this manga?"

So saying that JJK fans are "insufferable" "general shonen fans" who only like flashy animation and the bring up the Culling Games as a reason why JJK is bad, is very funny to me.

People also stop liking JJK at the Culling Games because the Shibuya arc removes or sidelines several favs of the western tumblr and twitter fandom. Sexyman Nanami gets killed, cute Inumaki gets sidelined, sexyman Gojou gets sealed, sexyman Chousou stays in the tomb with a woman and it's becoming very hard to be delusional that Kenjaku isn't a real important character of their own but actually sexyman Getou who will return soon.

There are many new characters introduced who aren't sexymen, apart from Higuruma and Kashimo (canonically Kashimo doesn't have a defined gender but when has that ever stopped the fandom).

And the western fandom does not like Yuuji and even among those who claim to like him there's a not insignificant subset that likes their head canon of him as a manic pixie dream himbo that they like as a background to their favs and not as someone the story concentrates on.

Basically the Culling Games are not fast and flashy enough, and the arc is really hard on those fans who were skipping dialogue when it delved into lore and power system in the previous arcs. Already Shibuya gets difficult at times if you didn't pay attention to the world building in the earlier chapters but with the Perfect Preparation and the Culling Games and anything after I imagine it must be a chore to read when all the concepts seem new but the plot and character arcs heavily rely on the previously established world building.

The truth is that if you delve into the fandom tags it quickly becomes perfectly clear how poorly the fans are acquainted with the text. How to many fans the characters exist mostly as their head canon versions and not as they are in the text. You will see fans complaining that the manga changed into something else from something they liked. But when you learn what they think the manga used to be it becomes apparent that they were ignoring huge portions of the text for one reason or another and just focused on the parts that interested them. That they blow out of proportion the significance of their favs and get disappointed when the story doesn't centre them.

It's okay not to want to follow a story when the character you liked dies or gets sidelined but that doesn't mean that the story is bad for it, that it's definite proof of bad writing or whatever. And it's not the story's fault that someone only liked one or two characters and didn't care about the rest, it happens.

And this is the crux of the issue. People who write opinion like the one above speak as if they represent some large group. The language of the post you cited suggests that there's some general consensus about the quality of JJK, about the Culling Games being the reason to dislike it. That the choice is exclusively between these two options:

thinking that JJK is "mid-to-bad" for some reasons that should be obvious to the reader

or being a part of the unwashed anime fan masses who like it only because of the animation.

You're either among the intellectuals who are in the know and also morally correct in their hatred for the story or you're an insufferable cretin.

People like the author of that post can't just dislike something, can't fathom that something can be not for them. For them it's not okay for something to exist in a neutral way and not be for them. Them not liking a thing means that there's something "objectively" wrong with the thing and the people who like it. And they can't fathom that a serialised story not going in the direction they like doesn't mean that it's "objectively" badly written. It's natural to feel disappointment when the story one used to like turns into something they don't enjoy anymore. But posts like this hint on the fact that the author believes that stories exist just to satisfy them personally and when it fails to do that it needs to be publicly denounced and anyone who dares to like it needs to be shamed and informed of their intellectual failures.

[bubblesandgutz]

Every Record I Own - Day 759: Modest Mouse This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About

It’s been five months since I’ve written one of these album posts, mainly because 2022 was such a busy year. When I made my last album post on August 1st, I was still talking about my favorite albums from 2021. While I enjoy talking about current music, I think I get more enjoyment writing about music that I’ve had plenty of time to sit with, and consequently, I felt like I was running out of things to say about new releases.

I wasn’t sure how to dip my toes back into this project. Then on New Year’s Eve I got the news that Jeremiah Green passed away.

I’m sure Modest Mouse meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And for most people, their impression of the band starts around 2004 with their big hit “Float On.” For me, Modest Mouse will always be that curious local band from the early ‘90s.

A quick recap on Seattle in the ‘90s: Nirvana blew up in the fall of ‘91, and their success helped turn the spotlight on Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees, and Mudhoney. Seattle was suddenly seen as a hub of underground rock music. But the reality is that we were a geographically isolated city with restrictive liquor laws and the Teen Dance Ordinance, a law that made all ages concerts virtually impossible. Rock music in Seattle was for the 21+ crowd. If you were a kid and you liked going to shows, you had to go to the youth centers out in the suburbs, or you had to go down to Tacoma and Olympia, or you religiously attended the one tiny all ages venue in the sketchiest part of downtown, The Velvet Elvis, that was strangely exempt from the ordinance on a technicality (namely, it had fixed seating, so you couldn’t “dance”). There was a distinct generational gap between the crowd that saw Nirvana play at the Central Saloon the summer before Nevermind came out and the local teenagers who picked up guitars in its wake.

Botch started playing in ‘93 and by the end of ‘94 we were playing shows at The Velvet Elvis. We were also playing spots like The Old Fire House in Redmond and Ground Zero in Bellevue, the suburban youth centers that held weekly concerts for the underage crowd. Some weeks you’d get a touring acts like Neurosis or Rocket From the Crypt, but we were so far off the standard touring circuit that most of the time you just got local bands. 

Modest Mouse was a name we saw around a lot. The name sounded a bit twee for our tastes, but we knew their drummer Jeremiah had been in a hardcore band called Drown, and he’d been an early fixture at The Old Fire House. Despite the small nature of the underage scene in Seattle and the crossover in our musical  interests, I wouldn’t hear Modest Mouse until Botch went out on our first tour in ‘96. In San Francisco, we played at the famous Epicenter Records. The bill was Modest Mouse, Scenic Vermont, Trial, and Botch. There were maybe 20 people there. But man, Modest Mouse fuckin’ ruled. They could be sweet and pretty one moment and screaming over distortion and feedback the next. We all became fans that night.

There was so much I identified with in their music. For one thing, it felt like every song started with a nugget of an idea---a solid verse/chorus structure---and then drifted off into some noisy exploratory jam session. It didn’t feel far off from what Botch was doing in that regard. We’d start a song with a couple of riffs that worked together, and we’d just jam in the basement until the rest of the song fell into place. It’s funny... I just assumed that was how every band wrote together. That’s what Fugazi and Drive Like Jehu did, after all. But in hindsight, I think it was a very unique approach, or at least it’s one that’s fallen out of favor with newer bands. When I listen to those early Modest Mouse songs, you can feel the excitement of a band bouncing ideas off of each other, letting happy accidents turn into whole new parts. 

There was something else that really resonated with me about those early Modest Mouse records. There was a sense of wonder with the western landscape, a fascination with geography, and a sense of loneliness and alienation when you become uprooted from your childhood home. It was all there in their record titles---Interstate 8, The Lonesome Crowded West, This Is a Long Drive. I’d only moved to the Northwest in ‘92, so I felt uprooted too. But there was also this new appreciation for wide open spaces. After living on an island you could drive across in a couple of hours, it boggled my mind that you could just get in a car and drive for several days and still not see the other side of the continent. Modest Mouse’s music captured that excitement for the open road and the possibilities it offered.

This Is a Long Drive had come out just a few months before that SF show. This album, along with the Broke single, got a lot of plays in our camp after playing with them. National success for Modest Mouse was still somewhere on the horizon, but by the time summer was over it felt like they were taking off regionally. They sold out a show at The Velvet Elvis that fall. I didn’t even know bands could sell out The Velvet Elvis back then. Sure, it held maybe 125 people, tops, but I didn’t realize there were 125 kids hip to the weird art house theater tucked in an alley in a grimy part of downtown. 

By the time The Lonesome Crowded West came out, they were a national act. A year or two earlier you’d only hear their music at friend’s houses or on the local college radio station. Now you heard their music in coffee shops, bars, and record stores all over the States. They belonged to the world.

Weirdly enough, my only interaction with Jeremiah would happen years later. At some point in the late ‘00s, after the success with Good News For People Who Love Bad News and his brief hiatus from the band, I was at a grocery store in Seattle with a mutual friend. “You guys know each other, right?” the friend asked in lieu of a proper introduction. We both shrugged and smiled, introduced ourselves, both saying “yeah, I know” in response. We were the same age, had come up in the same scene. I’d gone in to work a shift at The Old Fire House Teen Center the day he stopped by to talk to my boss about quitting Modest Mouse. We were in the same musical orbit, likely going through the same growing pains at the same stages of our lives, which is probably why their music hit me the way it did. 

RIP Jeremiah Green. Thank you for the music.

[kardomahgangster]

So growing up, I've had people point out to me that I say "won" weird—for me in "I won" it sounds like [wɑn] (rhymes with "gone"), while in "I have won" it sounds like [wʌn] (rhymes with "gun").

I used to think it was my own idiosyncrasy, but in the last few years I've met other people who have the same pattern of speech (I've also noticed it occasionally in media). There's no clear social or geographic generalization I can make (I'm from the mid-Atlantic coast, US, others have been from Ontario, Texas), so I thought I'd look in academic work to see if anything has been said about it. And the answer is... no!

Not a single online dictionary mentions it as a variant pronunciation, and not a single article or book on English verb paradigms classifies "win" as a verb with three allomorphs (that I could find, anyway). The closest I can find is some work on Early Modern English which suggests "win" in some dialects once patterned with "drink" and "sing"—to me, this suggests a pattern of [wɪn], [wæn], [wʌn], though (which sounds wild to me!)

Anyway, I thought I'd put this out there in case anyone else has noticed it, heard about it, or has ideas on what might be going on! I'd also be interested to hear if anyone uses the [wɑn] (rhymes with "gone") pronunciation for all cases of "won", or if anyone has yet another pronunciation they use for "won"!

Appreciate anyone who answers, or reblogs this to get more responses!

[envihellbender]

Backrooms fatty

Characters: u/urbexmallrat (OC), unnamed monstrosity

Content: fat monster, creepypasta thinly veiled fetish, impossibly big

—

r/FindingTheBackrooms posted by u/urbexmallrat 21 hours ago

Anyone seen this monster in the Backrooms?

Hey guys,

I was recommended this subreddit by r/urbexuk after no one there could help me. I thought The Backrooms was just a dumb creepypasta but honestly it’s the best explanation for what I stumbled upon. Bit of background, I’m a photographer, I’ve had pictures published in National Geographic so I’m the real deal. Outside of this occurrence I’m just a normal guy with a camera, I’m really into urbex and working on a book right now. There’s a shopping centre near me that I went to as a kid in the early 90s. I’m from a small town just off the motorway and the building used to be this huge busy place a couple of miles away. There was an arcade, cinema, all that stuff. It was really, really huge. It’s so weird to me that it was abandoned and honestly, it’s terrifying and fascinating to me that this place is completely deserted and being taken over by nature when I went there every weekend until I was 12.

Just to set the scene, here’s some pics of the place. Maybe it’ll be familiar to someone and you can explain away what I’ve seen. Hell, I’d love it if someone could do that.

The first photograph is of the entrance of a shopping mall, the windows have been smashed or bordered up, and the tiles on the floor have weeds and dead grass growing through the cracks. The walls have ivy and half dead trees clinging to them, and beneath that is a Starbucks that has had all of its furniture removed and strange symbols spray painted on the walls and floor inside of it. There’s a giant fountain in the middle of the entrance walkway, the water inside it is murky and covered in a strange slime. The second is of the entrance to an arcade. The machines are covered in a thick layer of dust and there are forgotten toys in a crane machine. There’s some strange orange teddy bears that are filled with stuffing in odd selections that have lumps in them. Their eyes are tears in their fabric, they look like a strange cross between a rabbit and a goat. The third photograph is taken from an above walkway showing the floor beneath, there are some abandoned shops and an outdoor coffee shop that has a couple of feral cats sitting by a dormant and decrepit coffee machine.

See? It’s called the Silver Bells Shopping Centre. I’d be interested to hear from anyone else who remembers it because none of my childhood friends or family remember it. So weird. I still have a Garfield Teddy from the crane machine at that arcade, it sits on my shelf. Here it is:

The photo shows a strangely shaped stuffed animal, one of the orange toys from the previous picture.

Anyway, I was using the opportunity to go find parts of the place we don’t usually see. I intended to go see some back storage rooms then go to the cellar. I guess I found that… anyway, I went to the food court which was kept on the lowest level and found a McDonalds. I hopped over the counter and slipped down the back. There was a lot of rats living in the now empty deep fat fryers but I figured live and let live. Weirdly I don’t remember having left the kitchen, but I must have done. I walked forwards, expecting to reach a door to take me out to some storage place. Instead I was walking for a good five minutes without going through anything and when I turned round the McDonalds was gone and there was just that terrifying yellow painted brick wall. I took some photos:

The first photo showed a family of rats living in the deep fat fryer, five were staring at the phone with bright red eyes. The second shows a blurry wall with light yellow bricks. The third, forth, and fifth all show different parts of the corridor, they all look essentially the same - yellow bricks, which stone floor, and nothing else distinctive.

So I had no idea how I ended up there but honestly I was mostly just assuming I was lost and took photos to help find my way back. I was wandering around these corridors for a long, long, loooooong time. My phone alarms kept going off - I have one at 2.30pm, one at 5:10pm, and one of 7:30pm so that’s how I knew time was moving even if my mobile clock hadn’t moved (yeah I know, how were my alarms going off if the time on my phone wasn’t moving, no idea!) After the last alarm I finally saw a door, and was over the fucking moon, so happy I got scared of going through it. Kind wish I hadn’t. Well. I guess doing that meant whatever weird monster I saw could guide me out, after it took what it liked from me. I can’t explain what I saw, or how I got out. And it doesn’t matter. I don’t care, I just wanna know what the fuck happened to me and what the fuck did I see. Here’s the monster I saw, doesn’t seem to match any monsters you guys have on file so I’m hoping that I missed something. Not sure how I feel about being the one who found out about a new species …

These sets of photos are much worse quality than the other pictures, and it’s not entirely clear what they are. The first shows a strange pile of flesh, a bright light - perhaps the camera flash - reflects against it. If you focus you can see that there’s a smattering of black hair over it, and angry purple marks where the skin has stretched obscenely. At first it simply looks like a closeup, but the photographer’s shadow shows that the navel or the occupant is significantly bigger than the owner of the flab. The second shows the adipose from a different angle, there’s one gigantic hill of fat, there’s another on top of it, and one more. This looks more human, but the way the light flashes and reflects on something on the otherwise of the wall shows that the height of the photographer is half that of the lower most fat roll. The third is an eye, a milky brown iris with bloodshot whites, that is crushed between a bloated cheek and sagging forehead, causing it to be a pinprick. The final photo shows the photographers digits held up against two enormous bloated brown lips, showing that just one of the slug like features is larger than the camera man’s entire hand.

So yeah. That’s the monster I found. If I had to estimate the size… well, it was significantly taller than me and I had to climb on it to get most of the photos. I’m six foot three, and I barely came up to its navel. I’ve seen elephants, whales, and stuff but none of them came close to it. Honestly if I didn’t know any better I’d say the creature was as big as I predicted the shopping mall was. Does this mean anything? Anyone see anything similar?

Update 1: please can every ignore my teddy and focus on the actual post lol

Update 2: I don’t know everyone’s focusing on my teddy but it’s Garfield lol don’t any of you remember Garfield?

Update 3: ignoring every question about my teddy now lol but thanks for everyone who asked me about the monster. Seems this isn’t a common experience but u/roadkillnapster pointed out that without a decent photo that shows more of the overall shape, it’s possible it’s a known monster that’s gotten really fat. Seems possible to me. Any fleshy monsters that could be similar?

Update 4: wow I wasn’t expecting so much conversation off my post, lotta people want to see it and have asked if I could show more videos and photos. I mean I don’t know but I’ll see if I can set up a livestream, so glad a lot of you wanna get to the bottom of this too!

Update 5: and thanks for freaking me out about my Garfield teddy, the wool is doing this weird expanding thing so it’s doubled in size and now I’m all scared it’s haunted lol

[dollmaidcrystal]

Mistress Aspyce Attempts to Find a Bull

For the past three years, Mistress Aspyce has been making an on-again-off-again effort to find a bull. She's not even particularly sure that she wants one, but the internet has been constantly bombarding her with messages about how great life is with a bull to cuckold your sissy maid with. That level of marketing is enough to make anyone curious!

Here's how that's worked out so far:

Mr. Money

Occupation: He'd be a competitor with Mistress's business, if they didn't stick to distinct geographic areas.

The Pitch: Successful, handsome, a reputation for being sexually available, and he has a lot in common with Mistress Aspyce's vanilla identity.

… But on the First Date: He couldn't comprehend the idea that I had consented to her being there. "Why would you tell your husband you're going behind his back? Doesn't that mean that he would know?"

What happened: Mistress recently had an opening to make a move into Mr. Money's turf. She's been forced to do some hard thinking about whether she's considering it because it's a good growth opportunity or because she's still holding a grudge over that date.

Baby Moo

Occupation: Beautician

The Pitch: He's gorgeous. Mistress's sissies all became low-key jealous over his effortless beauty and decided that he was too pretty to be called a "bull." After some debate, we started referring to him as "Baby Moo."

… But on the First Date: He and Mistress hit it off, and he was Mistress Aspyce's side piece for some time.

What happened: Baby Moo hung his entire sense of personal identity on the idea that he could get any woman he wanted whenever he wanted. Having Mistress as a sugar momma meant he wasn't in full control of that relationship. That kicked off a psychological breakdown followed by a journey of self-discovery. I'm not sure what he's up to now, but, wherever he is, I hope he's less full of himself.

The Jock

Occupation: Personal trainer, but he aspires to go pro at Call of Duty one day soon.

The Pitch: Big, strong, slightly dim, and a gamer.

… But on the First Date: "Yeah, I picked up Darktide. I've been playing the Space Marine."

"You mean you've been playing a Veteran. Space Marines are" (waving hand gestures) "taller."

"Naw, babe. Space Marines just look big 'cause you see them in power armor. They're just regular dudes when they're off the clock."

**What happened:** Mistress spent the rest of the date explaining, in great detail, the proud traditions of the Adeptus Astartes and the 22 extra organs needed to create a space marine. She hasn't heard from him since.

The Porn Star

Occupation: Porn Star

The Pitch: He's a porn star. You can download his credentials as video-on-demand, and his credentials are long.

… But on the First Date: One glass of wine in, he started talking about how he wished directors didn't only see him in topping roles.

Two glasses of wine in, he starts talking about how he's really more of a switch in real life.

Three glasses of wine in, he's showing Mistress pictures of the cute pink dress and panties he bought, but never had the nerve to wear for anyone.

What happened: Four glasses of wine in, he starts on how doctors only want to pump you full of poisons so they can make you sicker, and he's too smart to EVER let one of them stick a needle into him.

That's a deal breaker normally, but a porn star saying that is an emergency that you're ethically obliged to inform his coworkers about.

—

I suspect there may be a sequel to this post one day.

[lunchcase]

Pumpkin Soup with Ground Bacon

Location: International restaurant, Melia Jardines Del Rey

Somehow, with no bacon bits in sight, the orange stuffless soup has bacon flavour in it, mixed with a creamy pumpkin flavour. Texture wise it isn’t that creamy - more clear than cream, but it’s like you can taste the creamy thickness instead?

The cream cheese soup I forgot to take a photo of that I had two nights ago was similarly interesting, in that it was cheese soup that felt creamy and clear at the same time. This place has some wild textures. Vicosity.

This is the last of my drinks posts in Cuba, and it seems off to end on formless pumpkin and bacon soup, clash of two titans and specialty of nowhere, but all things end not bittersweet but savoury, I guess? So lets be sentimental with this faintly unappetizing photo of pumpkin soup.

This is what I've learned. When a Victorian-era doctor prescribes seaside habitation for feminine lassitude, that is incredibly valid (don't @ me). The sea and sun is unfortunately a privilege, which is criminal because it's rejuvenating. For me, at least. Past Casey scoffed at the idea of just sitting on a beach doing nothing. Certainly it must be boring after some time, she thought. Past Casey is naïve and a fool. A naive fool. A moron, if you will. Post-beach bask Casey knows better and understands the healing power of Doing Nothing, Basking Under the Sun, Sea Breeze and Ocean Waves Flowing through a body like wind through an ocarina making music. Appealing to all senses. I am calm.

Looking out into the ocean at night as indiscernible dark waves crash into each other and lap the shore, the picture of paradise abruptly and jarringly now an entrance to the underworld, I understood a second thing: the reverence and sheer fear the mass of water elicits from any kind of sailor. Even on the shore, the waves illuminated by the uninhibited moon, I felt a panic grab me. What's the word? Sublime terror? A leviathan, vast, drowning, deep set bone chill awe? To be lost in the complete darkness of a continental watery grave; I too would pray to all the gods and speak of the ocean as a lover I hope will be kind.

An observation: it's quite clear who is a tourist and who is not when we were at the city of Moron, the nearest city to the resort. Mostly, the general tourist is white, and they receive nary a glance from the locals except by the most entrepreneurial among them. The white gaze, in this case, treats everything as part of the vacation experience. For my friend and I, who are not white and therefore not the standard tourist but an emerging other breed who travel with less geographic reservations inherent in previous generations of our kind, we are a sight as exotic as they are to us. Their gaze followed us as we roamed, curious and unfamiliar as they were to us. A mutual touristing moment. People came up to us. Two separate unrelated individuals at two distinct times of day asked us where we were staying, that they worked at that resort, today was their day off, and their daughter was born just yesterday - "congratulations to all the new born daughters," - so have you got anything to give her? Money, preferably, but she'd also probably like chocolate. Can newborns eat chocolate, I asked, and they shrugged and said why not? I didn't have chocolate or anything really on my person, because I didn't come from the circles where such travelling tidbits were exchanged, so I didn't prepare anything, sorry. I heard an old-but-not-quite-elderly white couple mention how they brought their family to the resorts here every year, though, and now that their kids flown the nest they come themselves, so maybe try them, with the know-how. Good luck, with you and your daughter and again you and your daughter. We walked a little faster.

[late-to-the-fandom]

Chapter 2: The Waking Isles

In which Elisewin makes a case for completing quests in geographic rather than campaign order. Rated G. Read on Ao3 here.

Renathal remained admirably equable the entire morning Elisewin spent assisting the baby dragon with the repair of her stuffed toy. He followed them about the cliff top, dutifully accepting the bits of fluff and scraps of cloth they thrust upon him with the sort of magnanimity only an eternal Prince could achieve.

He maintained this diplomatic composure through the afternoon, in which Elisewin did nothing but sit at an old dwarf-visaged dragon's side, listening quietly to his reminiscing and occasionally prompting him to speak. He frowned a little but held his tongue when she delayed their journey to the Obsidian Throne another day to help a merchant collect materials necessary in creating some sentimental token for his husband.

But when she insisted they halt again to help a dragonkin nonentity with an equally meaningless task - something to do with frogs - Renathal felt the time had finally come to put his foot down.

"Granted, I know little of this young Prince.”

Renathal’s mouth twisted slightly at the title, and the texture of the Hornswog’s long, sticky tongue as he snatched it from the air bare-handed before it could reach Elisewin's arm. He gave the warty creature a firm kick and it hopped away with a sullen croak.

"But,” he continued, inspecting the angry red welts now rising on his palm, “I have the distinct impression he is the sort to rush headlong into a dangerous situation unprepared and without backup should none appear on his timeline.”

“Probably,” agreed Elisewin absently, kneeling in an attempt to pick up the Hornswog’s intended victim: a tiny green frog. It hopped about madly, evading her hand. “That would be the standard response of most princes I know.”

She tossed Renathal a wry smile, then slung her travel bag off her back and undid the clasps. Renathal scowled.

“A different situation entirely,” he declared, rubbing his injured hand surreptitiously against his armor to soothe the unpleasantly growing sting.  “But certainly all the more reason why our time would be most prudently spent providing him aid without any further undue delay.”

Elisewin’s face was buried in the deceptively small bag’s vasty depths, but there was amusement in her voice as she answered, “I had no idea his cause mattered so much to you. Weren't you the one who said this whole affair was … what was it?” She withdrew from the bag, holding a glass jar, and screwed up her face in mock thought. “The petty, pointless infighting of an only marginally relevant race?"

A rustle of foliage made Renathal ready his decidedly-silent sword as he watched another of the rotund red creatures eye his former Maw Walker greedily. Crouched on the ground, he supposed she looked like some sparkling lavender frog herself.

"Yes, and I maintain that position," he declared unrepentantly, then paused to execute a quick lunge, a swift jab from the butt of his sword, and an over-loud snarl, encouraging the cowardly Hornswog to seek easier prey. "However, even that, for all its debatable importance in the grand scheme of reality, is still more deserving of our skills than this ..." He waved his injured hand at the frog, still circling them manically. “Whatever this is."

"This is important to Keshki,” said Elisewin, who had not moved throughout the entire exchange except to finish unscrewing the jar. “Just like reclaiming the Obsidian Throne is important to Wrathion. Just like Theotar’s tea parties were important to him and taking back Revendreth was important to you. And yes -"

She forestalled the argument waiting on Renathal’s tongue with a raised hand, the one holding the lid. The other set the jar on the ground in front of her and allowed its bright occupants to swarm the surrounding air.

“You are absolutely right. In the grand scheme of the universe and as far as concerns the immortal planes, nothing here is really of any importance whatsoever. Which means these Hornswogs are as much a deadly enemy in need of culling as the Djaradin and the primalists."

Entranced by the cloud of fireflies, the frog ceased its panicked circles, gave a more sedate croak, and hopped drunkenly into Elisewin's lap. It relaxed visibly until its body was almost flat, tiny eyes transfixed by her flickering firefly halo. Renathal had sympathy for the creature's instinct; Elisewin's small, fond smile had a similar effect on his own tensions. She cupped it gently in her hands and tucked it securely into an outside pocket of her bag, then wiped her hands on her robes and refastened the jar.

"What's important here," she posited, "is not that either group represents a truly significant evil, but that their culling provides significant assistance to the person we're trying to help." She replaced the jar in her bag and raised a long, dark eyebrow at Renathal. "Do you consider Keshki any less deserving of assistance than Wrathion?"

"Not at all,” he said earnestly, switching his sword from one hand to the other so as to offer Elisewin the unmarred one. "However-"

"Well then!” she interrupted brightly, allowing Renathal to pull her to her feet. “Since we're already here and she needs our help, why not help her and then continue on? I am confident Wrathion’s own contingent will manage to keep him alive and relatively out of danger for a few more days at least."

Elisewin shook back her hair, brushed down her robes, then knocked Renathal's sword from his injured hand and yanked it to her.

"Oh, leave it," he said dismissively. "It is worth neither the anima expenditure from our limited reserve nor the time it will take to locate it in that bag. We have a long list of people to assist, and, apparently, no method for establishing whose need is most pressing."

His sardonic rebuke might have been addressed to the eavesdropping Hornswogs for all the attention Elisewin paid. She had already retrieved a roll of colourless cloth from a hidden pocket and was winding it expertly around his hand.

"Everyone always needs help," she mused as she worked. "And everyone believes their need is most pressing. Sitting down and trying to sort them into some kind of objective order wastes a great deal more time, I assure you. Not to mention giving certain requests priority over others tends to create bad feeling among allies."

"You were always quite willing to prioritize my own requests?" 

"That's because you are my only priority."

She fastened the bandage with a quick, practiced motion. Between the soft silk and the sentiment that still thrilled the Dark Prince to his core, the burning in his palm all but ceased.

"But, with that one very notable exception." Elisewin placed an honorific kiss to the back of Renathal's bandaged hand before returning it to him. "I consider all other quests and calls for aid to be of the exact same importance. Keshki's frogs as much as Wrathion's throne."

"Theotar's tea parties as much as Revendreth politics?"

"Just so." She met Renathal's wry smile tooth for fang. "There is more to being a hero than heroics, Renathal."

The rustle of foliage provided a familiar warning, and Renathal wrapped his arm around Elisewin's waist before the subsequent spring. He stepped back, pulling her with him and out of the path of the Hornswog's leap. She flicked a careless hand and a burst of purple sparks over her shoulder, knocking the creature off-balance without tearing her affectionate gaze from Renathal, who stooped, fumbled in the grass for his weapon, then straightened, stealing a quick kiss on the way. He adjusted his grip on his sword and his soulbind, and rallied his regal humour once more.

"Then, by all means, let us be heroes," he declared, and darted forward to face his new foe.

[zerogate]

As early as 50 C.E., the theologian Philo cautioned against a literal interpretation of the Garden of Eden, writing, “To think that it here meant that God planted vines, or olive trees, or apple trees, or pomegranates, and any trees of such kinds, is mere incurable folly.”

The fourth-century Christian thinker St. Ephraem, in his Hymns on Paradise, similarly cautioned that, “It is with the eye of the mind that I saw paradise...” But theologians who argued for a symbolic reading of “the divine garden” remained a distinct minority. St. Augustine registered the conflicting points of view. “Some interpret [Paradise] in an exclusively corporeal sense,” he wrote. Others give it “an exclusively spiritual meaning,” and still others take it in both senses, “sometimes corporeally and at other times spiritually...” St. Augustine personally favored the literal reading, and shaped the convictions of later generations of Christian theologians who maintained that the earthly paradise had not disappeared, but had only become inaccessible as a result of mankind’s fall from grace.

Centuries later, in 1617, John Salkeld synthesized prevailing views on the reality of the Garden of Eden in his work A Treatise on Paradise and the Principle Contents Thereof. Relying on theological authorities such as St. Augustine, Salkeld set out to prove that the earthly paradise was “a real and corporeal place” and not merely metaphysical. Catholic dogma at the time supported the same literalist point of view, insisting that descriptions of Paradise were “not allegory but history.”John Calvin, the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer, similarly declared that the Garden of Eden was “situated on the Earth, not as some dream in the air.”

In the fifth century St. Augustine admitted that, “It is probable that man has no idea where Paradise was.” Medieval geographers located the lost garden everywhere from the North Pole to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, although the prevailing Church view held that the earthly paradise lay “in the east,” in the regions of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers or in the farthest reaches of Asia, at a great height so as to have been unaffected by the waters of the flood. Like Yangsang, the terrestrial paradise was described as a place of eternal spring, neither hot nor cold and filled with fruit-bearing trees and healing waters. Early in the eighth century, St. John Damascene wrote that Eden “was temperate in climate and bright with the softest and purest of air. It was luxurient with ever-blooming plants, filled with fragrances, flooded with light, and surpassing all conception of sensible fairness and beauty.”

[...]

The belief in a geographical paradise persisted widely until the end of the seventeenth century when the Church conveniently declared that the Garden had been erased from the surface of the planet by the Great Flood. The question then remained not where Paradise lay, but what it meant. Although the expulsion from Paradise is the core western myth, the notion of the fall was a later accretion.

At the end of the second century, Christian writings by St. Theophilas of Antioch and St. Irenaeus reveal an understanding of the story of Genesis prior to the invention of original sin. According to these erudite bishops, Eden was “a means of advancement” for “maturing and becoming perfect.” The eating of the fruit of knowledge did not condemn humankind to suffering, but the act of disobedience ultimately furthered its maturity and capacity to perfect itself. Eden was thus not so much a perfect place, but a place where being could be perfected. Mankind’s departure from the enclosing walls of Paradise and its bucolic luxuries led the first couple to become all that they could be. As the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote in 1785, it was a necessary transition from an unreflective, animal state to one of full humanity. Freedom, he suggested, begins when the nostalgia for a perfect place ends and one embraces the present moment. 

Nonetheless, Paradise persisted as a perennial dream and an incentive to geographical discovery. The religious dissidents who abandoned a repressive Europe for North America discovered what seemed a blessed land, where history could begin anew. They described New England as being “like the Garden of Eden, a new Eden.” In a more literal sense, when Columbus sailed close to the isthmus of the Orinoco in South America, he believed he had discovered one of the four rivers that issue from Eden. As he wrote to Queen Isabella of Spain during his third expedition, “I believe that the earthly paradise lies here.. which no man can enter except by God’s leave.”

The belief in Eden, the widespread conviction of an impending apocalypse, and the desire for gold and fortune led to voyages of discovery in which explorers saw in the lands that opened before them the shape of a lost paradise. Following Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci (1499-1502) surveyed the coast of Surinam and Brazil and wrote that: “If the earthy paradise exists anywhere on earth, I think it must not be very far from this area.”

Yet as D. H. Lawrence recognized, to believe in Paradise was to consign oneself to Purgatory, to be forever seeking something beyond the horizon, beyond life itself. “Why pin ourselves down on a paradisal ideal?” he wrote in 1953. “It is only ourselves we torture... Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss.”

--  Ian Baker, The Heart of the World 

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

Lovely, wonderful Ari,

I had the pleasure of reading your wonderful story yesterday. It was delightful; I had a particularly tough week this week, and so the thought that I would be ending my week by reading your story motivated me to get through it.

I have to say that I'm really fond of your imagery. There were several examples in your prose that I found to be absolutely delightful, and they really made me smile because I just thought that they were so beautifully constructed, and often they were, in a way, obscure but familiar enough to make them absolutely compelling. I really like, for instance, the way you introduce the appearance of knight Suguru in the story. I thought it was such a fantastic way of commencing the narrative and introducing such a key character in the narrative, and it's just set up the whole storyline in such a fantastic way.

I know you mentioned that your story is not bound in a concrete way to a specific historical period, time zone, or geographical region, but honestly, that thought really got me going and got me thinking for a long while. As someone who has studied Anglo-Saxon England before, I just found myself thinking that, in a way, almost that cultural, socio-political specificity, in your case, almost wasn't needed because for me your story, in my head, evoked the whole feeling of storytellers and orators reciting stories in mead halls to a widespread audience and how those stories, over time, evolved and changed and sometimes new specificities were added to them depending on the audience present and how new geographic locations and names were slightly changed but regardless of those changes that were made to suit the audience to whom the story was being told, the key essence of the story remained and, for me, your story has that essence and by retaining that essence almost, in a way, your story is kind of, in a way, true to the time period that I suspect you're sort of circling around which, in my opinion, is kind of around the era of Beowulf.

I'm sorry if this is not really making any sense, and perhaps it is not, and it's been a while since I've really truly delved into the period of Anglo-Saxon England, but I guess that was just a way of me almost saying that I really, really enjoyed the story. I enjoyed the experience of reading the story. I enjoyed the experience of falling in love with the characters. I thought it was great overall. The characters were distinct and had distinct personalities, and I thought the interactions worked extremely well. I just enjoyed the overall plot that you constructed. I don't think the fact that it is not bound and pinpointed to a specific historical period is a weakness, but rather, in a way, it is a strength of this story, in my humble opinion.

All in all, I just think you're a gifted writer. I enjoy your work. I've read your work before I read your stories that have to do with Suguru, and I thought that you had a great handle on his character and personality. I am incredibly fond of his character, and I can tell that you are too, and I'm glad that we are bound by our fondness for him.

I think that it is extremely commendable that you spent and evidently edited this work and just spent so much time with the story to produce such a beautiful result, which I thought was fantastic and grossing and just very compelling, so I wanted to thank you for sharing it with us.

HELLOOOOO LOVELY WONDERFUL ANON this ask was such a treat u have no idea 🥺🥺🥺🥺

FIRST OF ALL i’m soooo so so insanely happy that this fic could make ur week a lil better !! TAT that means the world to me !!!! good job getting through it, i’m giving u a big big warm hug <3333 and i hope next week is kinder to u!!!! pls take care of urself!!! spring is almosttttt here now 💐💐💐

gosh i’m so glad that u enjoyed this fic……. ur comments are all so thoughtful!!! I’M SO RELIEVED U LIKED THE IMAGERY it’s what i love writing most tbh so knowing that it hits is such a great feeling :’33 i def enjoy my imagery more obscure and “mismatched” hehe, it’s a huge relief to know u enjoyed those bits as well!!

AND ANON THE TIME PERIOD THING…. this was so interesting to read bc i am (shamefully) very unknowledgeable abt history in general, it’s one of my weakest subjects :’33 i’m so so so amazed with ppl who study certain historical periods like that’s so insanely cool to me…. and the fact that u took the time to think of one that fits w this fic!!! 🥺🥺 aaaaa i’m just so grateful to be able to get this perspective from u……. the anglo-saxon period huh!!!! i really wish i knew more abt it pshdhdh but i 100% trust u anon !! that’s so interesting !!! knowing that the lack of historical accuracy didn’t stop u from being immersed in the fic is such a great relief too…..

all ur comments were truly so thoughtful and attentive, it brought me soooo much joy to read this!!!!! the characters and interactions of this fic are very precious to me so my heart is just bursting w warmth knowing u fell in love w them a little too!! :’3 WE’RE BOUND BY OUR FONDNESS FOR SUGURU SO TRUEEE approval from another sugu stan always makes me happier than anything else!!! it’s an honour to me that u think i have a good grasp on his very complex character…. calling me a gifted writer is so unbelievably kind too 💔💔💔 sniffle..

this was just the sweetest thing anon… it genuinely does mean so much to hear this kind of thing, thank YOU so much for reading my novella of a fic and for writing this out!!! for sharing ur own insight on the historical period, and ur thoughts on the characters!!! i’m hugging u very very tightly and hoping that the coming week treats u as kindly as u deserve 🥺🥺🥺