#a false news story is hatched

[ladyjenise]

Thoughts on why Ganondorf makes "that face" in Tears of the Kingdom

I'm several months late, but I didn't want to post spoiler stuff when the game was fresh and, frankly, I had quite a whack summer. So here we are.

Anyway, onto the meta: my thoughts on why Ganondorf makes "that face" in Tears of the Kingdom.

Yes, this face:

One of the first things I want to do is credit some rad metas that helped me along in my thought process:

-Discussion of Ganondorf's facial design from a technical and creative standpoint

-Discussion of Ganondorf's outfit

And now to the actual meta! Will include spoilers for Tears of the Kingdom.

When the screenshots of Ganondorf making "that face" first hit the internet, there was a lot of lol and wtf, which was fair. Most people weren't that far in the game yet. Actually, not sure it was even out yet (there was an early leaked ROM floating around at some point pre-release). I don't want to dwell much on people's initial reactions as I think if you're here reading you've already processed your initial feelings on seeing it. And your initial reaction of LOL WTF is fine. Out of context, it probably made little sense.

But let's talk about context: Ganondorf makes this face after killing Sonia for her Secret Stone. He's literally laughing over her dead body as Zelda calls out vainly to the fallen queen. It's a very heinous, dramatic act. And I think, in context, that confused people even more because his face, on first glance, feels over the top and silly for such a serious moment. However, it's not there because Nintendo's devs don't know what they're doing. At least, that's what I'm trying to argue here.

Let's discuss the build up to this scene in the story chronology: Ganondorf tries to use moldugas to attack the fledgling kingdom of Hyrule. It goes badly because Rauru, alongside Sonia and Zelda, are able to use Secret Stones of the Zonai to fend off the attack. It's a very lopsided victory.

Ganondorf takes a moment to pout before observing the Secret Stones. Ganondorf correctly observes that brute force will not be enough. Not one to sit back on his failures, Ganondorf is clearly already hatching a new plan. End of scene.

We next see Ganondorf at the court of Rauru and Sonia, bending the knee in what we know is a false act of fealty. Of course, this scene is a reference to the plot of Ocarina of Time (where we spy on Ganondorf through a window as he bends the knee to the King of Hyrule, who is out of the shot). it's also a glimpse of Ganondorf the schemer.

If you had not met Ganondorf before playing Tears of the Kingdom, you might actually think Ganondorf is just a mindlessly violent guy (and he is that too, don't get me wrong). You might not have expected this dude to roll up to the court of Hyrule and start playing the political game. His character design looks like the exact kind of guy who could punch your head clean off your body. Just look at him:

He's a brick wall. He looks like a big tough guy, and maybe he's just some big dummy who only understands violence. It's a stereotype Nintendo has subverted again and again with his character. And there Ganondorf is at the court of Rauru serving backhanded compliments like a pro. And while Rauru assures Zelda that he knows Ganondorf is up to shit, he's really got Rauru convinced that he can handle him. As we shall see, Rauru was mistaken. But that's Ganondorf for you. His character is about subverting expectations. This is what makes him so very fun.

Even his costume, with the reversible robe, tells you a lot about who he is. On the outside, a calm, clever, cultured man. On the inside, he's ready to fuck your shit up. I love it.

Back to the scene.

After assuring Rauru he simply wants to play nice and have the protection of Hyrule, Ganondorf serves some cunty lines implying Rauru is an interloper and an outsider etc before leaving. And it's at this point I noticed that when Ganondorf takes his leave, he makes this really flourishing move with his arm that made me stop and think.

You can probably find the scene online somewhere, but here's a screenshot of what I mean:

And note that he also uses his sleeved arm, creating that extra diva flourish as he goes. We also get a real good fast look at how colourful and different his sleeve is. He's turned his back to Rauru and the others after swearing his fealty. His changeable nature is displayed to the player. It's a nice wink and nod to Ganondorf's later betrayal. Only Zelda has a real inkling that he's really, really bad news and probably shouldn't even be there. But if you've played Ocarina of Time, you understand that Zelda isn't listened to until it's too late.

Returning to the flourish itself: Ganondorf didn't have to do this. And Nintendo didn't have to waste animation time having him do this. But they did. And they did it again when he laughs over Sonia's body. And they do it again when he swallows his Secret Stone. They just. keep. doing. it.

Why?

Why do all this extra dramatic animation for Ganondorf?

Those familiar with kabuki (a classical form of Japanese theatre) are probably screaming KABUKI, and I would agree. I didn't immediately get there at first only because my background was in another form of classical theatre: Greek (ask me about my unversity minor lol). I'm not going into a deep dive on either classical Greek theatre nor kabuki because that's a lot, I'm not really an expert or super familiar with the details, and I also think their Wikipedia pages will probably give you a decent summary of what you might want to learn details on. However, classic Greek theatre is old as shit and has a lot of great stories with characters you'll recognize. I recommend.

What I need you, dear reader, to understand about classic and ancient forms of theatre is their emphasis ON emphasis. It's a lot of what we might think of as exaggerated elements, over-the-top forms, and straight up spelling shit out to the audience. Real archaic shit. Because the world we are watching in these memories IS archaic to Link. There's 10,000 years between the memories we see and Link's time. It's like we, as Link, are viewing a kabuki play or a Greek play about stuff that happened then. It makes perfect sense to have Ganondorf act like he's in an ancient play. And that's how you get shit like this:

This is all theatre.

But why is ancient theatre so weird? It's not. We think it looks weird because it's unfamiliar to us. Most of us don't grow up watching ancient plays. Even those of use who read Shakespeare in school are usually sweating through the now-archaic English (it was only 400-ish years ago!) You're not equipped, and that's cool.

And honestly, if you are familiar with Ganondorf, he truly is a creature of theatre. Just look at this castle he builds in Ocarina of Time:

He destroyed Hyrule Castle to build this giant fucking castle levitating over a pit of lava. Like why? Because he CAN. Because he can't do anything in halves.

Also, his outfits. Look at this shit. He can't tone it down. I don't think he could if he tried.

Coming back to Ganondorf's face when he kills Sonia: when Ganondorf's face contorts and he starts to laugh evilly, we are told in very certain terms that he's made a critical choice. If you weren't sure before, you're being told now: He's evil. There's no going back from this. And he's embracing it. There is zero remorse. Killing her was the act he needed to move from man to monster. It's very important that you, the player, understand this. It's a moral thing. And I don't mean like "If you like this character after you are a bad person" type of thing. That's not what I mean here (and what people who have weird obsessions on the internet often misunderstand just so they can start fights over dumb shit). What I mean is that the storytellers need you need to understand your character's motivations for wanting to fight this guy.

And the next scene plainly shows what I'm talking about: Ganondorf takes the Secret Stone and literally turns into a demon king. He's no longer a man. He's this other, immoral being now. Bye bye, human Ganondorf, hello monster Ganondorf! That's it.

Going back to his eating of the Secret Stone, which changes Ganondorf from good ol' demon king to the for realsies demon dragon, he says some lines about giving up his "body" and "mind" and, frankly "everything", just so he can win. But also it's a desperate last attempt at keeping hold of the power that has so horribly blinded him to the truth.

That last part is ironic for Ganondorf, a man who was clever enough to get into the heart of Hyrule, steal their powerful relic, kill the queen and ALMOST become king. Because that's his ultimate failing. He's smart, clever, and his wins get the better of him. His addiction to power means he never stops to consider he might have weaknesses he cannot yet see, or that, as Rauru warns him, his arrogance and blind faith in his own abilities and talents might be his downfall.

In a way, the story is just as much about Link searching for Zelda and Zelda trying to figure out her role in the world as it is about the fall of a powerful man. Is it tragic that Ganondorf let himself become so corrupted by power that it would slowly transform him from man to demon? I guess it depends on who you ask, really. (I think it's fucking cool)

[smolbean-17]

SEASON 3 THEORIES

Part 1 (Episodes 1-3)

I never made any theories for Season 2, but quite a few of my theories from Season 1 were really close to what actually happened, so I figured I’d give my shot at theorizing Season 3.

I can’t really guess how exactly these plot points will land and in which episode, but I think these things will happen in the first 3 episodes, in no particular order. We’re getting all 3 eps in one night so they’re going to be establishing quite a bit.

Ep1 - Confined

This is the episode where we will see Omega and Crosshair confined at Mt. Tantiss together. Omega has her Season 2 hair, and seems more optimistic than she does later on in the trailer.

At this point I don’t think Omega is treated as a prisoner. I think she’s restricted of course, but it seems to me from the trailer that she’s serving as more of an assistant to Nala Se with limited freedom. Hemlock promised her she’d be treated well, and I feel like he was telling the truth. And maybe Omega has chosen to behave herself (for now) and has made a plan of luring them into a false sense of security so she can find a way out.

And then she sees Crosshair up and alert and not being tortured (and being escorted to another part of the facility? More cloning experiments?) and she decides to escape with him somehow.

Crosshair is disheartened and incredibly sad, maybe because he found out about Tech and perhaps believes his other brothers were captured/killed. Who knows. Someone either screwed with his emotional state before this shot, or maybe he’s just drained from his captivity. But I think it’s the former.

It will show more of the inner workings of what’s going on at Mt. Tantiss, but it won’t reveal too much. I think it will mostly establish what Omega is doing there.

Ep2 - Paths Unknown

As for the boys, we will see that there’s been a passage of time. How much time, I’m not sure. But probably a few months. That’s when we hear Hunter say the famous “Omega’s been waiting for us a long time. I’m not making her wait another day.” (pretty sure that’s all one quote that’s been sliced up)

It’ll establish that Echo has left again with Rex, probably to liberate more clones and look for hints about where Omega is along the way. Hunter and Wrecker are alone. They set up base on Pabu, recruiting help from Phee who is more than willing to help. But they never stay there long, and they run themselves ragged trying to find Omega and not getting any closer. Both Hunter and Wrecker are more angry and determined than we’ve ever seen them.

Ep3 - Shadows of Tantiss

Meanwhile, Omega finally hatches her plan to escape…

Things obviously don’t go according to plan, and she doesn’t get too far before she’s stopped. Just in case, they inject her with a tracking implant…

and she gets imprisoned.

It looks like this little cage situation is the same as this one from the leaked trailer:

Omega’s hair situation is really the only thing throwing me off lol.

So she meets Crosshair again. She tries to get through to him and show him that she hasn’t lost hope. He argues and Omega gets through to him in the way only she can. She finally gets him to agree to an escape.

The episode could end with Hunter and Wrecker getting a call from Rex and Echo that they finally have info on Omega, thus leading into Ep4, A Different Approach (which would make since if you consider they have new information).

So these first 3 episodes will be jam packed with information, and maybe not a ton of action, but will be establishing episodes to move the story along.

Another thing I noticed from the leaked trailer…

Are we getting a flashback(s)? That looks like Hunter’s old armor paint job, and that backpack and helmet to the left is very distinct and only belongs to one person…

I would seriously love to see Clone Wars era Bad Batch again. Maybe flashbacks are interspersed throughout the season for extra exposition/character development/emotional damage. Maybe the first episode opens on a flashback!

Let me know what you think! Part 2 coming soon!

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

[caltropspress]

Hellhounds on His Trail: E L U C I D's REVELATOR

I speak what I see.

—Saul Williams, “Elohim (1972)” (1998)

I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and systematic derangement of all the senses.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Letters of the Seer” (1871)

Every technological change begins with a spiritual revelation.

—Nathaniel Mackey (2016)

1.  LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE

The same motherfucker got us living in his hell. 

—Chuck D, Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” (1988)

I must forewarn you even now: what I intend to speak about, and in which I shall get myself entangled for reasons more serious than my incompetence, they are, I believe, without solution or exit. Two years ago, ELUCID promised that I Told Bessie could be significantly darker: “Trust me, it could be way more apocalyptic.” REVELATOR fulfills that promise. I Told Bessie introduced ELUCID as an anti-mystic mystic; on REVELATOR, we find him between the forge and the flame. He speaks from filthy tongue of god and griot, offering a <brand> of spiritual healing in the same <vein> as Dälek’s “Spiritual Healing” [for brand read “fire,” “cauterize,” “marked ownership”; for vein read “cold,” “spike,” “artery”]. At turns, his speech sounds of languages diverse, horrible dialects, accents of anger, words of agony, and voices high and hoarse. On ITB, ELUCID had just arrived in Heaven, trespassed its gates, yet stubbornly refused to sit down, to repose. On REVELATOR, he’s at Hell’s wrought-iron threshold, absolutely ruptured.

ELUCID emerges as a transgressive and dark magus speaking the omniversal language of Sun Ra. The first words spoken on REVELATOR, evidently ad-libbed, recall both Fritz Lang’s expressionistic Tower of Babel and Mister X’s psychitecture: “Metropolis…inverse overlord skyscape…” Another filmic nod would be to PTA’s There Will Be Blood (2017), where the climactic and classical rage of Daniel Plainview is unleashed as he screams: I am the Third Revelation! Plainview is, as his name intimates, an unbeliever, and he masterfully coerces preacher Eli Sunday into stating he’s a false prophet and that God is a superstition. 

See, the First Revelation was in the Old Testament (Show me your commaaaandments, as ELUCID drones on “Barbarians”); the Second Revelation was Jesus sermonizing that new shit; why mightn’t it be that the Holy Spirit was preparing another? ELUCID delivers the Third Revelation; he is the Seer, the Revelator—entering through a hatch [re: portal] of Houston horrorcore and disharmonic hard bop. REVELATOR is his unexpurgated rendition of K-Rino’s Stories from the Black Book (1993). The mutant blues of ITB have turned to hypnotik hip-noize—serrated, jaggy, shrapKnel-shattered, caltrop-piercéd. We witness, firsthand, the doom gospel he has previously preached about in practice, in praxis, in the demoniac rhythms and the patterns. Ganksta N-I-P’s “Reporter From Hell” (1993) amalgamated with Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873).

2.  NOISOME THE EARTH IS

“Here in this hymn-deaf hell,” Rimbaud reports back, but in ELUCID’s hell all we hear are hymns—shrieks, semiwept, semisung. “A black wail is a killer,” Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Jo Stewart, and Yolanda Wisher write in “4 Telling” (2021), a posse-cut poem. Production of “a satanic symphony,” Rimbaud says. Sounding like EPMD in the pulpit, Rimbaud claims “[t]heology is serious business: hell is absolutely down below.” He describes moonlight when the clock strikes twelve, “the hour when the devil waits at the belfry.” Go get a late pass, in other words, as PE presses on “Countdown to Armageddon” (1988) and ELUCID reiterates on “MBTTS” (2016). “Watch me tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned,” Rimbaud writes, appealing to the Devil, “...I will unveil every mystery.” 

ELUCID unveils histories of mysteries during his descent. On record, he shares what he sees. He sees Rimbaud in Hell. He sees Kanye and JPEGMafia in hell, Ye with BURZUM in Gothic script emblazoned across his chest. He sees Rubble Kings with SS skulls and sigs sewn onto Flyin’ Cut Sleeves denim. He sees Black Benjie’s assassin in Hell. He sees Richard Hell in hell holding White Noise Supremacists to account for how they treated Ivan Julian (“Mutants can learn to hate each other and have prejudices too,” the latter told Lester Bangs). He says peace to SKECH185 and sees him “playing devil’s advocate with Steve Albini’s Black friend.” Finally, he sees the cerberus in hell—the “monster cruel and uncouth,” according to Dante (c. 1321)—the 3-headed anti-crowd dog. He sees its three gullets, red eyes, and unctuous beard and black and belly large. He sees the wretched reprobates. He sees muzzles filth-begrimed. He sees hellhounds here, there, and everywhere.

3.  ROUND US BARK THE MAD AND HUNGRY DOGS

From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept A hellhound that doth hunt us all to death—

—Shakespeare, Richard III, 4.4.49-50 (c. 1592-1594)

“Hands off,” ELUCID commands on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” the opening salvo on REVELATOR [salvo, a discharge of weaponry; yet also salivate: dog’s drool, secretion, spittle, spit the verse]. “It’s just happening,” he shouts—it’s happening to us; we are subjects of history, its malevolent thrum. “I can feel it ’fore you say it,” and I’ve no reason to doubt him. But allow me to litanize anyway.

In Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (2018), Bénédicte Boisseron writes that the dog, the canis familiaris, is “an unwilling participant in the history of social injustice,” a casualty to a depraved Pavlovian conditioning. She cites an “association between canine aggression and black civil disobedience,” reflecting a “prism in which race and dogs insidiously intersect in tales of violence.” She refers to these as cyno-racial (dog-black) representations.

Bloodhounds—aptly-named barking, beastly embodiments of biopower—were “imported from Cuba or Germany” during slavery and “trained to pursue escaping slaves in both the Caribbean and the American South,” Boisseron writes. Dogs were designed to “become ferocious only when in contact with blacks.” The Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (1838) provides insight into this odious operation:

A negro is directed to go into the woods and secure himself upon a tree. When sufficient time has elapsed for doing this, the hound is put upon his track. The blacks are compelled to worry them until they make them their implacable enemies; and it is common to meet with dogs which will take no notice of whites, though entire strangers, but will suffer no blacks.

The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1849), meanwhile, offers a suspenseful, first-person account:

We had been wandering about through the cane brakes, bushes, and briers, for several days, when we heard the yelping of blood hounds, a great way off, but they seemed to come nearer and nearer to us. We thought after awhile that they must be on our track; we listened attentively at the approach. We knew it was no use for us to undertake to escape from them, and as they drew nigh, we heard the voice of a man hissing on the dogs.… The shrill yelling of the savage blood hounds as they drew nigh made the woods echo.

The training, of course, isn’t only about ghoulish intimidation; the hunt would often climax with violence. “When the slave runs away,” Boisseron explains, “the master needs to symbolically reassert his domination through a ritualized act of flesh cutting.” [FANG BITE!] Frederick Douglass spoke of such savagery: “Sometimes in hunting negroes…the slaves are torn to pieces.” Mutilation of runaway slaves, Boisseron claims, enacted “a rhetoric of edibility.” Derrida called it carno-phallogocentrism, linking the slavehunter’s virility and carnivorism, savoring “deeper shades of carnage,” as ELUCID says on “ZIGZAGZIG.” It has never relented. In the wake of Michael Brown’s murder in 2014, the DOJ issued a report that detailed “puncture wounds” left in children by the Ferguson K-9 unit. The victims of these “bite incident[s]” were always Black. 

ELUCID also speaks of how victims “force-feed a war machine” on “ZIGZAGZIG”—regions and relics swallowed whole, irrevocably. In their plateau “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…” (1980), Deleuze and Guattari write: “You become animal only molecularly. You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog.” Somewhere on a desolate Yonkers street corner, DMX sleeps with a pack of strays, lying in wait.

4.

Police forces…have used dogs to break up rioting mobs…. The dogs’ snapping teeth, swift movements and indifference to the crowds’ menacing threats have made mob control a routine procedure for the forces which have the dogs.

—“A Progress Report of the Assembly Interim Committee on Governmental Efficiency and Economy on Using Dogs in Police Work, California” (1960)

If a dog is biting a black man, the black man should kill the dog, whether the dog is a police dog or a hound dog or any kind of dog… [T]hat black man should kill that dog or any two-legged dog who sicks the dog on him.

—Malcolm X (1963)

In a contemptible case of cultural exchange, two German shepherds trained by a Nazi stormtrooper were used by police in Jackson, Mississippi to attack crowds in support of the Tougaloo Nine—Black students attempting to access books from a whites-only public library. That was in 1961. [TRUST NONE!] Two years later, Bull Connor utilized dogs to disperse protestors in Birmingham, notoriously documented by Charles Moore and Bill Hudson. Hudson’s photograph of fifteen-year-old Walter Gadsden in the mongrel maw of law enforcement fills textbook pages to this day, while Moore’s photo would be aestheticized and reproduced in Andy Warhol’s Race Riots series in 1964. “Police dogs is one of the accepted practices in police riot work,” a swinish Alabama sheriff said in ’63. Not much has changed. When people demonstrated outside the White House gates after the death of George Floyd, an orange fascist—who ELUCID begrudgingly won two long-standing bets on—threatened them with “vicious dogs.”

“Dogs were once perceived as dangerous due to rabies,” Boisseron writes, “but today the black man is the one responsible for making the big dog look ‘un-kind.’” A.G. rapped about the dogs with the rabies on 1992’s “Runaway Slave,” looking backward to understand his present, but by the ’90s, the ever-evil LAPD was calling Black people “dog biscuits.” An officer in a St. Louis suburb faced suspension after posting to Facebook that Ferguson protestors “should have been put down like a rabid dog the first night.” The aggression of the dogs, Boisseron points out, has “metonymically shifted from zoonotic to a racial context.” In essence, society shouldn’t fear the dogs—society should fear a Black planet populated by Black men. [FEAR ALL!]

The messaging has frequently been mixed—deliberately muddied (mutted, we might say) to defy understanding—racism skewing absurdist. In “A Dark Brown Dog” (1901), Stephen Crane used a “little dark-brown dog…an unimportant dog, with no value” with a “short rope…dragging from his neck” for allegorical purposes. [SHORT LEASH!] A child drags the dog “toward a grim unknown,” the child’s intolerant family. The dog is by its very nature powerless, “too much of a dog to try to look to be a martyr or to plot revenge.” Eventually, the drunk father beats the dog with a coffee pot and tosses him out of a fifth-floor window, falling dead in the alley below. Crane’s well-meaning story speaks to mystery writer Stanley Ellin’s comparison of the “solicitous white intellectual” and the “arrant racist,” the former of which “sentimentalized Black lives” and “patted them on the head as one would a pet spaniel.” To retreat to such romanticizing, Ellin says, fulfills the “function of the stereotype, and it matters very little whether the stereotype is that of vicious hound or pet poodle.”

As a child of the ’80s, ELUCID was exposed to the same surfeit of televised copaganda as the rest of us. McGruff the Crime Dog colonized our commercial breaks, asking us to join the feeding frenzy against drug dealers and burglars (Take a bite out of crime!). Meanwhile, Harlem World’s Herb McGruff provided counterprogramming and warned us of the real “Dangerzone.” “The idea of dogs attacking black people has become a haunting and unresolved image in the collective memory,” Boisseron writes, or, in ELUCID’s words: Eating everyone eventually. THE WORLD IS DOG!

5.

On SEERSHIP! (2020), a project ELUCID labeled a “work of spirit”—a work of glitch-hop and runt pulses and ill-bent illbient—we hear a blare of noise at roughly the one-minute mark. That calamitous blare is sublimated into the soundfury that sets off “THE WORLD IS DOG.” ELUCID’s bogeyman-down production, in collaboration with Jon Nellen’s urgent drumming and Luke Stewart’s grave-groove bass theories, provide for the sonics of a slave escape, equal parts panic and empowerment. “The dissonance is real,” ELUCID raps on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” “—I be feeling woozy,” and that’s the vibration here. In Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1865), Harriet Beecher Stowe describes how the vengeful and unforgiving escaped slave Dred defends a runaway from a hellhound:

…a party of negro-hunters, with dogs and guns, had chased this man, who, on this day, had unfortunately ventured out of his concealment. He succeeded in outrunning all but one dog, which sprang up, and, fastening his fangs in his throat, laid him prostrate within a few paces of his retreat. Dred came up in time to kill the dog…

“THE WORLD IS DOG” is pulsing and gnashing, a sequence of switchbacks and untoggled kill switches, a hyper-aural freak-out, to borrow some phrases from ELUCID’s New York Times blurb for Ornette Coleman’s “Science Fiction.” We should’ve anticipated the arrival of “THE WORLD IS DOG,” should’ve been listening to the panting precursor curses. Be it the gold chain punk asphyxiation of Soul Glo opening for ELUCID at the ITB release show at Mercury Lounge in 2022; the absurd matter we heard from his Shapednoise feature in 2023, wherein he “backhoed the graves”; or his appearance on Kofi Flexxx’s “Show Me” a few months later (I show you what it look like…)—the signs were all there. When word got out that ELUCID was spinning Miles Davis’s “Rated X” (1974), we should’ve known it was over, cataclysmically. 

If “Rated X” is the model, then ELUCID has set out to attain “music’s most elusive grail,” as Gary Giddins calls it in Visions of Jazz (1998): “the promise…of an open-ended form that defies harmonic conventions and regulation eight- and twelve-bar phrases in favor of a flexible but contained form.” An anonymous internet blogger called “Rated X” a “demented church service where the organist has become possessed by an evil spirit and worshippers have fallen into a trance.” ELUCID puts the incendiary fuse in fusion—dark energy acceleration | emergent fervor, fire & brimstone | Tony Williams Lifetime-type EMERGENCIES [ecphoneme—bang—ecphoneme—bang…]. This is rap-fusion—uncontrived, channel alive. 

6.

“Fire for fire, wade in the water,” ELUCID raps on “YOTTABYTE,” singing the same sorrow song of a century-plus before. “Wade in the Water” (Roud 5439) was a spiritual that reminded the runaway slaves to use streams and rivers to throw the hellhounds off the scent. “If you hear the dogs,” Harriet Tubman said, “keep going.” If “THE WORLD IS DOG” begins in a dreaded delirium, it ends [DEVOLVE!] in radical resistance.

The faded amateur photograph that graces the cover of I Told Bessie shows a man fending off a German shepherd; or, feasibly, the man is elevating the dog—healing it, calming it, exorcizing its engrained demons. Admittedly, it’s a crazy mixed-up world, a doggy dogg [dog-eat-dog] world, and the dog can occupy valences of both killer and companion. Everyone is dehumanized in the slave hunt, in the crowd dispersal. The hunters and the cops are the actual beasts (“That’s the sound of da beast,” KRS howls; “the murderous, cowardly pack,” Claude McKay snaps); the hunted resort to instinct, fearing for their lives, amygdala swelling with signals.  

In Martin Delaney’s serialized novel Blake; or, the Huts of America (1859-1862), protagonist Henry Holland, a.k.a. Blacus, a.k.a. Blake, wields a “well-aimed weapon” and “slew each ferocious beast as it approached him, leaving them weltering in their own blood instead of feasting on his.” Delaney doesn’t only draw scenes of retributive slaughter; his characters also speak of how “da black folks charm de dogs.” Threats neutralized. Power harnessed. The Yorkshire Terrier on the cover of Swans’ The Seer (2012) bares Michael Gira’s chompers—he’s merged with the pup. Hip-hop auto-interpellated dog into dawg (s/o to Althusser).

7.

As we learn from “Amager,” ØKSE’s song featuring billy woods, dogs only violate at the behest of men. woods relates a narrative of detainment at Trondheim Airport. The purportedly “colorblind drug dog” exudes innocence (“flopped on the floor, head on his paws”), though its mere presence smacks of discipline and punishment. As the Norwegian customs agent “palm[s] [woods’] clean drawers,” woods sardonically reflects, “I been a nigga too long.” He “know[s] the dance” and “know[s] the damn song,” resentful of this choreography of incurable racism that has been all too common and recurring throughout his life. He understands what’s happening epistemologically (“I know they hoping… I know I’m clean…”), but he also knows “those clammy hands going from the crack of [his] ass to the weight of [his] balls” are suggestive of castration, and when you’re crossing borders, what, what, say what, say what, anything can happen. As they go through the rigamarole of “mak[ing] calls, x-ray[ing] the empty suitcase, / [And] going back through [his] pockets,” woods stews with “impotent rage,” the aforementioned emasculation working its spell. He doesn’t begrudge the animal laboring under the aegis of the Tolletaten, though: I pet the dog as I leave. Scathed but saved. He charmed de dog.

8.

After dealing with so many strays I had learned one thing: be patient.  

—E.A.R.L.: The Autobiography of DMX (2003) 

Perhaps no figure better illustrates the subjugation and subversion of the hellhound than DMX. In the lead up to the millennium, Dark Man X embodied the dog of vengeance; he exemplified the undoing of the dog’s quasi-innate hatred of Blackness. In ELUCID’s words, he emerged as a “whole new nigga” with “skin [untorn], eyes [ungouged], hair [unshorn].” DMX’s arrival in 1998 felt like centuries in the making. He waged a vendetta in the name of every runaway slave and Civil Rights demonstrator. He’d slept on the streets and shared the concrete with his dogs, strays like himself:

Stray dogs are normally scared of people; they’re scarred by whatever neglect or abuse put them out on the street. Or if they’re lost, they’re depressed because they can’t find their way home. But that morning I decided that no matter how long it took, I was going to get that dog to come over to me. I was going to convince him to trust me and make him mine…. I started looking all over for strays that I could catch and train for myself…

DMX charmed de dogs and the rest of us in the process. He stayed shitty, cruddy, trading the cartoonish bow-wows we’d become accustomed to (via Snoop) for fierce grrrs and arfs, elevating rap’s onomatopoeics. With “Get At Me Dog,” he turned a familiar B.T. Express funk sample feral. In the video, the most achromatic Hype Williams ever managed, X holds possession of the Tunnel crowd, on a stage but of the people. His only bling: a stainless steel choke chain that collars his neck. The black-and-white video disorients with strobe effect and negative exposure—pitch blacks suddenly transform into flashing whites. Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen look on from the periphery of the crowd like, well, out-of-place bitches. The video captures the raw power of DMX, his stygian intensity, reminiscent of Tadayuki Naitoh’s 1971 photograph of Miles Davis. Like X, Davis harnesses his rancor and exhibits his self-possession.

The success of DMX’s subversion of the dog trope likely apexed with his Woodstock ’99 performance. Before a majority white crowd of hyperthermic slavehunter descendants, DMX rocked what Thomas Hobbs calls “blood-red dungarees.” X “growls viscerally” and “convulses” across the stage in a manner “akin to a Bad Brains gig in a sweaty punk basement.” DMX—like Dred and Blacus before him, like ELUCID to come—subdues the monstrous, cowardly pack, and has them eating Milkbones out of his hand by the end of the 45-minute set. 

9.

The first thing we feel on REVELATOR is a snarling, ravenous “fang bite” and the exhale of “dog breath.” We search for alternatives: the RZArector’s fangs on 6 Feet Deep (1994) maybe, a presence that Kodwo Eshun argues is akin to a head “filled with revelations that impeach the daylight.” We might think of the parallel universe of “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” (1928) where “dogs all have rubber teeth,” but REVELATOR doesn’t offer up that heavenscape—only a hellscape where teeth tear rabidly, rapidly. The “dog fangs [which dig] into black flesh,” Boisseron writes, are “deeply ingrained in popular culture.” We’d prefer the hip-hop context for “biting,” like when Rakim invokes “biting and borrowing” on “Follow the Leader,” where “brothers tried and others died to get the formula.” We’re on a “short leash” here, but Chuck D speaks of how he “cut the leash” on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” and how prison bars “got [him] thinking like an animal,” and so I think we should act accordingly, tactfully, and lick our wounds.

ELUCID strafes us with 2-syllable units, iambs or IEDs, right from the start: 

Fang bite Dog breath Short leash Pit fight

We’ve not felt shelling like this since the opening words of DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot (1998): 

One-two One-two Come through Run through Gun who? Oh, you don’t know what the gun do?

We’re propelled and pummeled by a Dark Enlightenment acceleration; unquestionably, we’re on our heels. ELUCID activates a sequence of 3-syllable units—anapests—as we descend into Hell:

From this height At this speed Downhill Careening

Later, the 2- and 3-syllable units alternate: “Shit that binds, / Spit out, / Ribs came spared.” Such blunt syllabics occur elsewhere on the album as well. “YOTTABYTE,” for instance, introduces a more dactylic, grounded pattern: “Hard science, / Scum gutter.” These are billboard throw-ups in Mister X’s Radiant City. They’re terse skull snaps like when Michael Gira sings, “Space cunt, / Brainwash” on “The Apostate.”

“I’m not psychic, but I’m reading,” ELUCID clamor-raps. The rapper has repeatedly denied the spiritual and supernatural in favor of tangible work, learning, reading. He much rather attend a demo or browse a bookstore than show his face at a séance or a church service. “The more I thought, the less I prayed,” he raps on “BAD POLLEN.” In this regard, he’s a dialectical materialist, much to the dismay of so many nimrod New Age seekers. ELUCID is not your self-help savior. Appropriating occult symbology in song is not inscribing sigils on the navel of a newborn. More likely he’s standing in solidarity with the child laborers pulling opal from the ochre mines of Madagascar. “Black Jesus hated bill collectors—I do the same,” he raps on “IN THE SHADOW OF IF.” 

In The Conjure-Man Dies (1932), Rudolph Fisher’s Harlem murder mystery, the titular conjure-man, one N’Gana Frimbo, is the closest forebear to ELUCID, a practitioner of the aesthetics of alchemy but one who knifes through the nonsense:

There are those that claim the power to read men’s lives in crystal spheres. That is utter nonsense. I claim the power to read men’s lives in their faces…. Every experience, every thought, leaves its mark. Past and present are written there clearly…. My crystal sphere, therefore, is your face.

“I receive it, then I weigh it,” ELUCID explains. He’s no Knownot but he also knows that he knows nothing, in a Socratic sense (one day it’ll all make sense, trust me [TRUST NONE, FEAR ALL]). He’s a member of a tribe on a quest, receptive of vibes and stuff, asking questions like: What? Can I kick it? Does it live or die? Who gon’ tell me why? Who goes there? Who dare disturb the hive? He remains unflappable, constant, “still inside,” channeling his “honey child” while killa bees are on the swarm angling for the fatal sting.

Our “small world” is razed; it “devolve[s]” as hell is raised—it’s not that tricky. The dog’s got “jaws that grind” and “teeth that tear”; Dante tells us Cerberus “displayed his tusks” and “rends the spirits, flays, and quarters” his enemies. “Where’s a pit, there’s a plague,” ELUCID says, demonstrating syntactically that life is parallelism to Hell but we must maintain. Boisseron discusses the “hysteria around pit bulls” rooted in an “overblown fear of rabies,” and we watched a “plague” of reckless media representation caricature Michael Vick as the very animals he electrocuted. “Pit bulls have been historically used in America as a weapon of stigmatization against blacks,” Boisseron explains, and so every Black man takes up residence in the Bad Newz Kennel when the public deems it convenient, whether they would ever dare to hold the jumper cables or not. If the stigma doesn’t catch up to you, the sickness will. ELUCID’s “pit” evokes morgue trucks reversing up to the trenches in the potter’s field. Careful where you step, or else risk experiencing “a quick trip to glory if you slip.” Pitfalls on every corner, beneath the buildings of every block. Like DMX said on “Get At Me Dog,” If you don’t know by now, then you slippin’.

“Be not afraid,” ELUCID advises, bending Biblical. It is I. It is I. It is I. If we can keep up, he’ll usher us out of the ravaged world. If not, “don’t know, don’t care—get out my way!” ELUCID’s “in the garden,” his own private Gethsemane, agonizing and “pouring for everyone whole came before [him]” and didn’t survive the onslaught. He pours out a little liquor, and like Pac who had his “back against the brick wall, trapped in a circle, / Boxing with them suckers till [his] knuckles turn[ed] purple,” ELUCID is intoxicated by his own dogged determination. Pac was simply rewriting McKay, who likewise found himself “pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Glorious as it sounds, ELUCID’s exhausted—as we all are—by song’s end: voided. All he can put together are fragmented, clipped, incomplete idiomatic and figurative expressions: “razor walking”; “bridge to nowhere fast.” Still, he bites back. Like DMX, he’s “eating everyone eventually,” indiscriminately, re-establishing the order of “the world [that] is dog.” He, too, is dog. Sic ’em, and get sick wid’ it.

10.  TEKNOHELL

Today the plagues of Revelation are…the disastrous results of…the irrational use of technology.

—Pablo Richard, Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on The Book of Revelation (1995)

“Police dogs were often framed as technology,” writes Tyler Wall, a scholar of racialized state violence. He cites a Baltimore K-9 officer who claimed “[t]he dog is the most potent, versatile weapon ever invented…. You can’t shoot around corners, but dogs can go anywhere you direct them—like guided missiles.” These comments anticipated the NYPD’s rollout of actual automated, data-gathering robot dogs, of course. But “CCTV” and “YOTTABYTE” escort us into an arena of Ballardian extreme metaphors and emergent technologies—a teknohell—where “Spot bots” prowl every city block.

“CCTV,” co-produced by ELUCID and August Fanon, screeches like a dial-up modem gone diabolical—a discordant din of panic chords. They’ve programmed drum patterns around the sound of the CCTV shorting out—the dread comes in sine waves: megahertz hurts | multiplexing and motion-detecting | low-frame rate. The cameras are everywhere we look, but ELUCID splits the veil and the surveillance. The mandala is a panopticon, a C-band satellite dish for bodies to rot upon. Impaled by feedhorns. Parabolically resting in peace. In “a moment of clarity,” ELUCID fucks the noise and begs, “Don’t be mad at me.” I ain’t mad at cha. Who could begrudge the corner boy who cracks the lens of a varifocal security camera with a rock in the courtyard of the low-rises (they call it “the Pit” on The Wire)?

The ill communications that ELUCID was channeling on Armand Hammer’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips continue to nauseate him. A year prior to that release, ELUCID told Gary Suarez that he was working to “dismantle what isn’t serving and then download and update with what does now.” For the man who “feel[s] a way about proving [his] identity to robots,” he can also acknowledge damage has already been done, which is evident in his diction. On SEERSHIP!, he despaired: “Every device I own knows my latitude.” On “NY Blanks,” he warned: “computers are listening.” In Jacques Derrida’s “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy” (1983), he describes a Tetsuo-like man/machine [MAchiNe] who loses clarity between the sender and the receiver of electronic messaging:

And there is no certainty that man is the exchange [le central] of these telephone lines or the terminal of this endless computer. No longer is one very sure who loans his voice and his tone to the other in the Apocalypse; no longer is one very sure who addresses what to whom. But by a catastrophic overturning here more necessary than ever, one can just as well think this: as soon as one no longer knows who speaks or who writes, the text becomes apocalyptic.

In this sense, REVELATOR is, at turns, an apocalyptic text. Much of ELUCID’s work has been. The cover of SEERSHIP! features a P1 phosphor font choice, as if it’s destined for a monochrome monitor. One might come to believe ELUCID writes in matrices of terminal green.

11.

In Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies, N’Gana Frimbo is questioned by Dr. Archer:

“You actually are something of a seer, aren’t you?” “Not at all…. I filled in the gaps, that is all. I have done more with less. It is my livelihood.” “But—how? The accuracy of detail—”

“Even if it were as curious as you suggest, it should occasion no great wonder. It would be a simple matter of transforming energy, nothing more. So-called mental telepathy, even, is no mystery, so considered. Surely the human organism cannot create anything more than itself; but it has created the radio-broadcasting set and receiving set. Must there not be within the organism, then, some counterpart of these? I assure you, doctor, that this complex mechanism which we call the living body contains its broadcasting set and its receiving set, and signals sent out in the form of invisible, inaudible, radiant energy may be picked up and converted into sight and sound by a human receiving set properly tuned in.”

ELUCID showcases his broadcasting set and his receiving set, but his carries the outlaw spirit of an illegal cable box or the pirate radio signal from the short-lived Dread Broadcasting Corporation out of West London in the 1980s. ELUCID as DJ Lepke in limbo.

12.

The title “VOICE 2 SKULL” evokes a note to self, a Nextel push-to-talk, or a voice-to-text: ELUCID as fully automated, as a cybernetic MC. But the human essence—the flesh, blood, and bone—is still there: “I get up before everyone and lose my mind first— / For even just an hour, I work in sound and feeling—sometimes fury, / Asking the whys and hows when lies turn to vows.” That is, he grinds; his work ethic, the grating of gears. He starts his day, travels where he will, but always “free roaming” and “pinging stupid” as a “transcontinental satellite receiver freaking forth.” On “XOLO,” as tek, he “reach[es] inside—only to [his] elbow, / [And] pull[s] it back out like [he] was rewound.” Like a VHS tape, or Betamax. Functioning as some new plastic idea. We’re all wired and wasting away with “mirror[s] in pockets” as we busy ourselves “looking hard in the camera.” Not squinting to make sense, merely modeling a manufactured exterior. 

13.

Digital overlords don’t need free promo…

—ELUCID, ØKSE’s “Skopje”

The teknohell is ever-present on REVELATOR—you can’t escape its server rack bracket clutches. “Defrag the files,” ELUCID raps on “BAD POLLEN,” attempting to counter what Nathaniel Mackey calls a technology of decay. RFIDs, modems, CCTVs, pagers—all this tech isn’t anachronistic; it’s timeless—e-waste salvaged or scavenged—but ELUCID evolves, keeps it moving [...like a moving target], even if that means “bloody fingers on the keypad,” which we heard of on Valley of Grace. His own magnetic fields fuck up electronics; he lives in the “chaos hour shadow play” mentioned on “THE WORLD IS DOG.” “The situation’s unreal,” as Chuck D says on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal,” Harold Pinter responds. Ultimately, ELUCID is “wholly unimpressed by your social media metrics,” at least according to “MBTTS.” He offers up “brick and mortar rhyme for distorted time” and “offline [is where] [his] core thrives.” He knows what’s what: these gadgets and gizmos are “soon to be rendered useless: and then what?,” as he inquired on Small Bills’ “Even Without You.” Merchandise is Brand New Second Hand as you sit in an ergonomic swivel chair before Roots Manuva’s radiation-emitting dusty microwave. ELUCID searches for a truth beyond the motherboard.

14.

I tell you this in truth; this is not only the end of this here but also and first of that there…the end of history…the death of God, the end of religions…the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West…the end of the end, the end of ends, that the end has always already begun, that we must still distinguish between closure and end…. it is also the end of metalanguage on the subject of eschatological language…

—Derrida

…so let me shut the fuck up.

—Editor’s note [me]

Tell me a lie, tell me a truth becomes ELUCID’s Max Headroom mantra for “CCTV,” minus the sputtering, the glitching. We like to think that the “truth [will] find you where you at—it’s fine, it’s fair,” he raps on “RFID,” but, more often than not, revealing the truth requires trying. Your responsibility, Toni Cade Bambara insists, is to “try to tell the truth,” and “[t]hat ain’t easy.” It’s tough to summon the strength when we “have rarely been encouraged and equipped to appreciate the fact that the truth works.” The machinery of lies and disinformation come fine-tuned with a gleaming chrome finish. As for truth, we’re numb to its virtue; neutered by negative thoughts and clouded past experiences. But if we can pursue truth, prove it, and impress it upon our enemies, according to Bambara, “it releases the Spirit.”

The “cattle prod [will] shock you back some reality,” ELUCID raps. But truth can seem a hackneyed notion in the wrong hands. In Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” (1965), Jesse, an abusive cop who takes sadistic pleasure in cattle prodding Civil Rights protestors, is charged with bringing the singing of jailed demonstrators to an end. He targets the “ringleader” of the group: “I put the prod to him and he jerked some more and he kind of screamed—but he didn’t have much voice left.” The protestor refuses to call for the others to stop singing, either out of defiance or debilitation from the beating he’s suffered, so Jesse’s frustration grows: “...the prod hit his testicles, but the scream did not come, only a kind of rattle and a moan.” Revisionist history can’t absolve the truth of that barbarity.

In one final [ex]plosive shout before “CCTV” transitions, ELUCID says, “Steal me your blues.” A call for reappropriation of what has already been plundered on a mass scale. The blues are never blameless. ELUCID collects blues and deranges ’em—traditional | twelve-bar | crowbarred | prison blues—deep cobalt with sapphiric crazing. REVELATOR most obviously invokes Blind Willie Johnson’s version of “John the Revelator” (1930), what with his scum gutter growl of Who’s that writin’? Jeff Place called Johnson a “guitar evangelist,” a man who was blinded by lye in his eyes at seven [the means of his marring and age should not go unnoticed], a reenactment, perhaps, of John the Revelator’s being dunked into the boiling oil cauldron—not nearly the “musky oils” ELUCID spoke of on “Obama Incense.” The teknohell is home to a Victor Talking Machine, no doubt, and the 78 RPM shellac record of Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” (1937) spins centripetal. RJ’s bottleneck slide screams phoenix as he sings, I got to keep movin’. For protection from the dogs—zig, zag, zig.

August Fanon and ELUCID sacrifice the frenetic for a straightforward refrain to conclude “CCTV,” something to mesmerize with layered vocals, subliminal messages not so sub- that they’re unmanageable. Take freedom: ELUCID wants you to hear the message, the charge. “All power to oppressed people” isn’t just a slogan for him; for others, as we know, it undeniably is. He asks for a “red light on the virtue signal for the come-latelys”; or, as PremRock says on ShrapKnel’s “Human Form”: “Closeted moderates post black squares then act scared of actual progress.” On “NY Blanks,” ELUCID “refuse[d] to kneel and pray for hashtag another slain name, / On the dashcam frame of sight.” Technology pervades every moment of life and language—from sonogram to dashcam and the SMS notifications of each and all else in-between.

15.

Child Actor’s production on “YOTTABYTE” traps us inside the machine with hex bolts knocked loose and rattling around. Again, technology works its way into everything. “Stints and priors, / Sweat labor, / August sun,” ELUCID raps, seemingly on a chain gang—the teknohell is a maximum security prison: biometrics | video analytics | signal-jamming | duress alarms. Data storage facilities bursting at the seams. 

“Terabyte, gigabyte, niggas bite,” ELUCID spit on “Bitter Cassava,” adding with a whiff of cybersexuality, “I heard ass taste better in the summertime.” Do androids dream of having a romp with the provocatively named Deckard? Do Nexus-6 replicants have rape fantasies? “Came out the pussy and wrote a classic,” ELUCID says on “YOTTABYTE,” and I’m left wondering what Jodorowsky’s love machine from Holy Mountain (1973) might have to do with this. Cold and sterile tech-infused corporeality | conjugal visits with slinky cyborgs | proto-pornbots.

“SKP” presents as more sound poem than song—its patterns erratic, and therefore erotic—unpredictable with vocals pitched down and up arbitrarily. Andrew Broder provides a mellowed pulse backdrop, tunneling toward something visceral, and not the gear boxes and springs, the sensors and metal tubes, that make up a robot’s innards. ELUCID has previously proclaimed he was “a dyke in a past life,” a Sister Outsider standing alongside Audre Lorde: “Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos.” “SKP”—Some Kind of Power—draws inspiration from Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1984), which reframes eroticism, removes it from the teknohell. 

I know you know the codes, ELUCID says. His lover has the key—they each possess a copy. And the key is crucial, at the crux of the relation; listen to what woods says on “INSTANT TRANSFER”: “It’s all skeleton keys on the keyring I keep, / Keys I never seen before for places I never even been, / Luxury cars—I key ’em and go to sleep.” Keys, keys, keys, as Angela Carter writes in “The Bloody Chamber” (1979)—to china cabinets and safes and every other secret place. The narrator’s husband, though, forbids his young wife from using one key in particular. Not the key to his heart, as she presumes (“skeleton key to ya heart,” ELUCID echoes on “CCTV”), but “the key to [his] enfer.” He teases and tantalizes her and throws all the keys into her lap as “the cold metal chill[s] [her] thighs through [her] thin muslin frock.” Something’s not quite right; “we was down singing off-key: how?” ELUCID says on “XOLO.” The key might crack the code | stroking and fondling | heavy petting | as artificial intelligence records the taps and timbre of your keystrokes, stealing sensitive passwords—a sensate focus therapy for anonymous internet users. Probably best to keep the key under the mat.

“The erotic is a considered source of power and information within our lives,” Lorde writes. ELUCID answers: “Knowing is enough—deepest core informing all.” The erotic, Lorde notes, “offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation.” “From here forth,” ELUCID says, “you spit, you scream, you burn my tongue too raw—be soft.” Erotic, Lorde explains, is from the Greek eros, “born of Chaos, and personifying power and harmony.” Harm may precede harmony; pain prior to reaching “beyond the posture and the program.”

“Call me out my name,” ELUCID commands, “I’ll be the one you cum for.” Even if he brushes against the sophomoric at times (“Baby, please pop that pussy for breakfast” would be one such example from the archives), ELUCID’s sex raps swerve sophisticated. Lorde says the erotic is often “confused with its opposite, the pornographic,” which would demonstrate sensation without feeling. When ELUCID says “call me out my name” to his lover, he’s exploring “how acutely and fully [they] can feel in the doing.” Lorde explains, “[A]s we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up…being satisfied with suffering and self-negation…with the numbness.”

The technological bent to “SKP” climaxes with connectivity (¿Tu Tienes WiFi?)—a mutual dependance—“power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person.” In 2020, ELUCID told Tim Fish about how a trip to South Africa inspired Valley of Grace (2017): “...my wife was there, she was still my girlfriend then, and she was working at a law center, working towards protecting sex workers…. So being there, she’s at work for at least 8 hours a day, and I’m in the flat just hanging out….” At the end of “SKP,” ELUCID declares “in a union made now, tomorrow anything…,” and we feel the phantom phrase “…is possible” in the absence that follows.

“There are many kinds of power,” Audre Lorde tells us, “used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise.” 2Pac, for instance, never achieved ELUCID’s level of erotic power in song. On “How Do U Want It?” (1996), Pac was forward with his proposal, seeking consent (“Tell me is it cool to fuck? / Did you think I come to talk? / Am I fool or what?”), but copped to his preference for pornographic perversions, the “positions on the floor” he invokes: “Ironic, ’cause I’m somewhat psychotic.” Lick before you bite, ELUCID raps on “BAD POLLEN,” his own nod to the erotic/psychotic dichotomy. But it’s more tempered than Pac’s imprudence. He seems to taunt Pac’s shortcomings on “YOTTABYTE”:

Wiggle with the lights on, Ripple off thrust, Ooh, it’s just us, Yes, I need it how I want it, Feel like Southern California with my belly full…

Not to say ELUCID’s erotic power is purely PG-13; it’s not. On “BAD POLLEN,” he “wake[s] up and thrust[s] inside [his] missus, / Two fistfuls of hair, [his] face buried.” Flashes of a possessive desire, an “I Wanna Be Your Dog” energy: So messed up—I want you here…in my room…I want you here. But even when ELUCID goes raunchy, it’s organic matter, raw materials—mud and bone and verdant muck—not nuts and bolts and a nexus of cables. His trysts always involve talking out the mud, crashing through the walls…, scorch, [and] stimuli response.

16.

I might work with the wires wet if we talking ’bout power…

—“INSTANT TRANSFER”

With SKECH185’s analog(ue) tape dispenser on loan (also note the Basinskian “disintegration tapes” mentioned on “IKEBANA”), ELUCID patches and splices the first bars of “INSTANT TRANSFER” in a terse trimeter:

Five side, keep the tape warm, Wrapped rays weighing way more, Racks raid how we wage war, Slack walk to a main course.

The alliterative and consonantal groupings (“wrapped rays”; “racks raid”; “weighing way”; “we wage war”; “slack walk”; “keep the tape”) and slant rhymes present an inconsistency that models a human touch—the warmth of the analog tape undermining digital media and the instantaneous [gratification and otherwise] operations of an ATM withdrawal, just as we see the plastic bank card repeatedly guided into the multi-function maw by a human hand in the “INSTANT TRANSFER” video.

Nostalgia is no retreat from the teknohell. Even on a memory song like “HUSHPUPPIES,” the hum of Integrated Tech Solutions interferes when ELUCID recalls the “static sizzle with the grease in stereo”—frying fish and the kitchen TV set in concert with one another. “HUSHPUPPIES” feels like a loose adaptation of Henry Thomas’s “Fishing Blues” (1928), a fond recollection of fish as sustenance. Both ELUCID and Thomas begin with an urgency; Thomas “went up on the hill about twelve o’clock,” and ELUCID speaks in a tongue-twisted, nursery rhyme: “Must find fried fish—it’s Friday.”

REVELATOR has us fearing for the worst: fish fried in sulfuric waters, gilled vertebrates pulled from the River Styx—but it’s not that. “HUSHPUPPIES” feels down-home, a brief view of before, of Bessie-time, of salve and saviors and stove-top safe haven. “Put on your skillet,” Henry Thomas sings, “Mama gonna cook ’em with the shortenin’ bread.” “HUSHPUPPIES” works as a child-vision folk song, much like the “choking on a church mint” episode of “Guy R. Brewer.” ELUCID is an artist composing twenty-first century folk ditties, intent on inclusion in the Roud Index. I’m wary of the “sugar water, lemon sugar, water lemon” lyric sequence, though—the words transmit, mutate, like a gain-of-function in the kitchen sink. I feel he’s trapped speaking with “the language of the on-again/off-again future, and it is digital,” as Laurie Anderson once said.

17.  PEOPLE TEND TO THINK THAT A PAGER’S FOUL

In 1991, Q-Tip asked us if we knew the importance of a skypager. The responsibility fell to Phife Dawg to explain it in full:

The “S” in skypage really stands for sex, ………………………………………………….. At times I miss the pager so you don’t get vex, Having bad days like a voodoo hex, Conceptually, a pager is so complex that I be standing on the verge, ready to flex.

ELUCID portals us to that very ’90s dimension to pick up on Phife’s “-ex” rhyme scheme.

Skypage text, alphanumeric, Blind days—rain taste metallic, Dark roads lined with tall pine, Fire tongue in the annex.

Where Phife’s explication was elementary with its backronyming and monosyllabic rhymes, its simile and succinct storytelling, ELUCID’s post-millennial penchant for broken language and Holocene imagery elevates the archaic device of the skypager to the status of fetish item. One can see the huddled assemblage of survivors circled around the faint LCD glow on the annex floor, the acid rain falling through the collapsed roof.

18.

“14.4” drags us through the mass hysterics of Y2K mania with Saint Abdullah and The Lasso layering assorted ambient jazz touches to the Tron grid. ELUCID and SKECH185 fuck with the trellis modulation, raising a “Napster ’99” download speed from the titular 14.4kbps. They float over dial tones: “I dial in; you dial it down,” ELUCID says as he receives the signal from Armand Hammer’s “Landlines.” He’s charged with a “couple hundred-thousand watts,” so “do hold the line.” ELUCID and SKECH rap with “revolutionary millennial movements,” in the words of Eugene D. Genovese, “born in social catastrophe or in the fear of impending catastrophe.” Still, though, in the West African tradition, “time is cyclical and eternal; the religious tradition cannot then therefore readily provide for an apocalypse.” Fear all? Maybe it’s more fear none than we first thought.

I sometimes configure ELUCID as Aaron Dilloway (of Wolf Eyes, and—for our purposes here at present—their 2006 limited-release Dog Jaw) with a contact mic—full-contact stage presence | kilowatts killing | bringing the pain in a really real way. He wades in distortion, awash in both antiquated and active teknology (“*69—hit redial,” he remarks on “XOLO”). Hell is populated with tek—yottabytes of it like motes in sunlight, refracting his digipoetics. He announces proudly, “Afrika Islam loop in the key of my Lord,” which is a permanent—nearly park jamming—register for him to operate within. He dials in to Zulu Beats on WHBI 105.9 in New Jeruzalem and cracks codes for the afterfuture.

19.  THE HAINTS OF HAM RADIO

Never polemical, ELUCID makes aslant references to oppressive histories, dating back antediluvian. One second he’s “in ya sundown town holding [his] dick dolo,” and the next he’s bouncing to bear witness to an “illegal chokehold.” He time travels from crabgrass frontiers to a sidewalk slab on Staten Island. He may be “too old to comfortably rock logos,” but he’s in-the-ever-know [and the ever-now] of former lives—he embodies Gift of Gab running from Feds in his red Pro-Keds, and he hits the racks of Saks Fifth Avenue with the Lo Lifes. Nowadays, though, he’s Naomi Klein’s No Logo incarnate. In another nanosec, he’s a po-mo narcocorrido singer reading “the note like Chalino, except it’s off the SIM card.” He’s hopping through traversable wormholes of genealogical blues “from Ham to Cush to Nimrod.” Settle our assassin’s eyes on Ham, hm?

In A Season in Hell, Rimbaud “set out in search of the true kingdom of the children of Ham.” Wyatt Mason argues that part of Rimbaud’s legend can be attributed to the rumors of him as “the scoundrel who sold slaves in Africa.” Though it’s accurate that Rimbaud was free roaming, sub-Saharan, his vagabondage through the Horn of Africa might not have included slave-trading—that point is disputed by his biographers. In The Rebel (1951), Camus called Rimbaud a “bourgeois trader” of percussion rifles and Ethiopian coffee, but made no mention of slaves. In 1994, China Achebe stated that “[w]hen Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry” because poetry and slave trading “cannot be bedfellows.” When he wasn’t tagging up the Luxor Temple on a lark in Egypt or running guns across the border into Shewa land, Rimbaud’s travelogue was interlarded with diagnoses of typhoid, synovitis, and osteosarcoma—his right leg eventually lopped off. Perhaps we can ascribe his disease-ridden body to A Season in Hell’s most profane moments, such as when he writes, “I’m an animal, a nxggxr. But I can be saved. You’re all fake nxggxrs…”

The so-called “curse of Ham,” a blasphemy on Black people courtesy of Christian whites, has long contaminated the discourse—a shibboleth adorning the flowstones and helictites of the teknohell. “According to the scriptural defense of slavery,” Eugene D. Genovese writes in Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), “...the enslavement of the blacks by the whites fulfilled the biblical curse of Ham.” But Genovese’s research indicates “the slaves did not view their predicament as punishment for the collective sin of black people. No amount of white propaganda could bring them to accept such an idea.” When ELUCID talks of “hammers hang[ing] on loop” on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” or “hammers out the Hummer” on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” I construe this cargo pants weaponry, this pakinamac in the back of the Ac’ (or Hummer), as a means of countering white propaganda, comparable to Treach’s chainsaw or Havoc’s scythe. Throughout REVELATOR, we find ELUCID going ham—hard as a motherfucker—but ELUCID’s too humble for any Tisci gilded throne. Instead, think of him as John Henry driving steel through the carpal tunnels of sinners and thieves. He sings a Scaramangan screed as he works, something gleaned from Seven Eyes, Seven Horns (1998): “Alphabetic hammer, magnetic grammar.”

ELUCID advances with “apocalyptic movement,” which Derrida defines as “the gesture of denuding or of affording sight,” a gesture which is sometimes “more guilty or more dangerous,” such as when Noah gets krunk in his tent and “Ham sees his father’s genitals.” ELUCID sees through the myths, the slander; instead, he exposes us to a soundtrack of staticky swells as he ascends out of the teknohell. I imagine the noise is a replication of what Joyce’s radio in Finnegans Wake (1939) sounds like. Here’s that signal recounted superlatively:

tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modem as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute…equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for distance getting and connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini-Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker, capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emittences, key clickings, vaticum cleaners, due to woman formed mobile or man made static and bawling the whowle shack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegotumy marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes.

In Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun (1998) | [“MBTTS,” ahem], he writes that “Long-distance telecom systems intensifies sensations of imminent Revelation.” Oh, indeed.

20.  POST-INDUSTRIAL DOOM GOSPEL FOR THE GODLESS

On “Old Magic,” ELUCID announced himself as the “revelator, armed and dangerous,” so nothing he does on this album should come as a surprise. This lot of doom gospel spells shatters expectations, though. “I’ve been revelatin’” is what he told us on “Smile Lines,” and he’s yet to cease or even slow. The Book of the Seven Seals bulges, busting its binding and bending back its raised bands. REVELATOR, lyrics transcribed and beats notated in neumes, passes as ELUCID’s Book of Revelation.

I see it all, Michael Gira throat-sings. I see it all I see it all I see it all I see it all I see it all… over the sunn oh godspeed charnelhouse chanting and gunmetal grind of SWANS’ “The Seer” (2012). ELUCID is all-seeing as well—omniscient shit. It wasn’t always this way. On “Blame the Devil” from Save Yourself, ELUCID admitted that “revelation had [him] spooked.” In his preface to The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), George Bernard Shaw describes the Book as “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict which was absurdly admitted to the canon under the title of Revelation,” which only adds to the terror for an ’80s child who grew up with crushed crack vials underfoot.

On “Blame the Devil,” ELUCID saw the “seven eyes, seven crows” and “was lost.” “Now I’m found,” he would continue, “End of days—amazing time, / Everybody’s got a word—mine just happens to rhyme.” No longer cowering in church corners, surrounded by the congregants of what he has called a “death cult,” ELUCID’s Revelation remix has a liberation theology reverb. Pablo Richard’s Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on The Book of Revelation (1995) places the curious record in the context of revolutionary power:

Revelation arises in a time of persecution—and particularly amid situations of chaos, exclusion, and ongoing oppression…. Revelation transmits a spirituality of resistance and offers guidance for organizing an alternative world…. Revelation is wrath and punishment for the oppressors, but good news (gospel) for those excluded and oppressed by the empire of the beast…. Revelation teaches us to imagine the present and final eschatology with a sense of joy and hope…. The book of Revelation is helping to create a new historical and liberating language.

21.

In The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire (1990), scriptural scholar Leonard L. Thompson points to the difficulties of understanding the “symbolic, metaphoric, even bizarre language of the seer.” John the Revelator confessed to being “in the spirit” when he composed the book, what Eugene D. Genovese might call “religious frenzy” in another context. Thompson receives the Book of Revelation as a nesting language, one in which “highly symbolic language” nests into “ever-larger contexts—ultimately into a cosmic vision that includes the whole social order, the totality of nature, and suprahuman divinities that invade but transcend both society and nature.” I think it wise to receive ELUCID’s lyrics in a similar manner. Lucien Goldmann might call it Towards a Sociology of the Rap Album. “The seer tends to develop his material concentrically into ever-widening rings,” Thompson contends. ELUCID reps such a structure in his verses, in his songs, even lending his own phraseology to the process, be it those “shimmer rims spinning loopy” on “VOICE 2 SKULL” or the “orbitings” we hear about on “IKEBANA.” ELUCID will “leave the meter running” only to “trigger doomsday.” He sips “Ethiopian coffee” and seconds later “space junk” floats by. We’re hipped to the particular and the panoramic. Scaramanga was similarly skilled. Samuel Diamond writes of how “Seven Eyes, Seven Horns” is “as much a meditation on symbology, semiotics, and brand identity as it is an erudite MC’s spin on a passage from the Book of Revelation.” Or, as Scaramanga Shallah himself says on the song, “What a script…” [as in, whew].

22.  MYSTIC STYLEZ

All a mystery…

—“THE WORLD IS DOG”

…nothing could have been more impressive than this cool, deliberate deep voice, stating a mystic paradox in terms of level reason.

—Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-Man Dies (1932)

To bring it back to that damnéd Derrida essay once again [back is the incredible], MC Deconstruction redefines “apocalypse” as revelation: “Apokaluptō, I disclose, I uncover, I unveil, I reveal the thing that can be a part of the body, the head or the eyes, a secret part, the sex or whatever might be hidden, a secret thing, the thing to be dissembled, a thing that is neither shown nor said…” This revelation “not only affords seeing but also affords hearing/understanding.”

We’ve prior seen ELUCID as mystagogue—a mystik journeyman, a Walkman invader—he whose function is to initiate us into the mystery. As Guru was above the clouds, the mystagogue positions himself, according to Derrida, “above the crowd [which] he manipulates through…a crypted language,” but, despite what some dum-dums [to borrow a term from diggity Das EFX] may argue, ELUCID is not beyond understanding. We must strive to understand misunderstanding; we must endeavor forevermore to miss understanding. Those who throw fits and fail to accept these norms—I have to presume—have not been listening to hip-hop very long or well. “Words mean things but don’t have to,” ELUCID declared with Derridean flair on “Split Tongue.” “[I]f anything has outlived its usefulness it is ‘coherent’ metaphor, one with explicit contours,” writes E. M. Cioran in The Trouble with Being Born (1973). “It is against such metaphor that poetry has unceasingly rebelled, to the point where a dead poetry is a poetry afflicted with coherence.” “I’m okay with not understanding,” ELUCID said on Small Bills’ “Here Be Dragons,” “—I’m okay in the dark.” Dark Man X knows all directions.

Listening to ELUCID’s music, you enter a delirium, which Derrida refers to as a Verstimmung—“a social disorder and a derangement, an out-of-tune-ness…. The tone leaps and rises when the voice of the oracle takes you aside, speaks to you in private code, and whispers secrets to you.” On “IKEBANA,” ELUCID cops to “talking out [his] head, a fever set in.” Like Rimbaud in Obock, shivering, with his knee gauzed over, not a poetic thought to be found.

23.  SOUND & CEREMENT

Sound has a grammar to it—believe me—that will cause that thing that you call bending to open up in a way you won’t believe it.

—Ornette Coleman (2005)

…I just bend the rhyme…

—“Sir Benni Miles” (2021)

ELUCID, more than any other active MC, embodies a compositional approach that conflates poetics and musicality in a manner that doesn’t favor or diminish either—symbiotically rendered, synchronistically flexed: the orphic bend. In an epistolary novel by Nathaniel Mackey, Orphic Bend denotes a fictional album title of a fictional band. ELUCID asks on “RFID”: “Why play if I can’t bend the rules?” To forbid ELUCID these ludic junctures would be ludacris, a loss of not only file data but of finely wired rap filigree. ELUCID stays bent in both senses—his sentence inclinations, his word inebriations—bent like Miles Davis’s mouthpiece; dead bent like DOOM’s swilling death-drive to fund these experiments. These are “games I win at—mark me,” ELUCID gloats, but he also invites us to “share this reality.” If we’re willing, he’ll leave none of us behind; he won’t orphan us.

“We’re all eventually orphans,” Mackey has said. Elsewhere (namely, “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol [1987]), he kindles, he forges, the meaning of orphan and Orphic, “an orphan being anyone denied kinship, social sustenance, anyone who suffers, to use Orlando Patterson’s phrase, ‘social death.’” Mackey continues:

Song is both a complaint and a consolation dialectically tied to that ordeal, where in back of “orphan” one hears echoes of “orphic,” a music which turns on abandonment, absence, loss. Think of the black spiritual “Motherless Child.” Music is wounded kinship’s last resort…. Music is prod and precedent for a recognition that the linguistic realm is also the realm of the orphan…. This recognition troubles, complicates and contends with the unequivocal referentiality taken for granted in ordinary language…. Poetic language is language owning up to being an orphan.

ELUCID has previously instructed us on “the difference between loneliness and being lonely,” referencing like a hand reaching out—to Gwendolyn Brooks, who feels the “under buzz” of loneliness. But ELUCID’s bent is in the direction of populating his cathedral with the motherless children of his bastard style.

24.  INSIDE REPEATING NUMBERS

To stave off the dogs, the teknohell, and the unknown opps, ELUCID makes endless calculations but with an imprecise science. One can imagine the setting for such calculations resembling N’Gana Frimbo’s consultation room, what with “obliquely downcast light” and “lateral walls…adorned with innumerable strange and awful shapes.” Those strange and awful shapes—like glyphs carved onto dusty clay tablets—included “gruesome black masks with hollow orbits, some smooth and bald, some horned and bearded; small misshapen statuettes of near-human creatures, resembling embryos dried and blackened in the sun…forbidding designs.” The conjure-man’s mantelpiece showcases a “murderous-looking club, resting diagonally.” The club is actually “the lower half of a human femur, [with] one extremity bulging into wicked-looking condyles, the other…covered with a silver knob representing a human skull.” ELUCID holds the club like a stylus, dealing in tally marks and totalities until the skull smudges out an answer.

Numbers are concrete, seemingly. “Numbers don’t lie, but they damn sure don’t tell stories either,” ELUCID rapped on “NY Blanks,” skeptical of statistics. On “IKEBANA,” he starts with “3800 out the credits.” I ain’t count it, he admits, “but it’s sweat labor.” He narrows the narrative with estimates: “ten or something”; “on time, but off-key”; “almost, almost over…so close…almost over….” These are “complicated chemicals” that only work to deepen what Rimbaud called “numerical visions.” Do the math. On “YOTTABYTE,” it’s “dead money [and] thirteen guineas for a pickaninny piano.” On “BAD POLLEN,” he “brought a trunkful of tiny violins to the bloodletting.” ELUCID can “play one on each finger for every seven bodies.” These aren’t exact measurements or accurate costs. As he says on “INSTANT TRANSFER,” he’s “counting up in the dark” (in Frimbo’s consultation room, right?). Persevering and perseverating on “14.4”: “System error, / Less than zero, / Humanity pending.” Sounding like he needs to get his affairs in order.

The numbers game inevitably leads to money—nasty business like toxic assets and credit derivatives—and money is time; time, money. “Can’t clock the kills,” ELUCID says on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” echoing Master Ace in ’90 (“Can’t Stop the Bumrush”) and Jay-Z in ’96 (“Can’t Knock the Hustle”)—earning miles while on the clock as a touring musician, tallying transatlantic and domestic flights. But is there ever a time when he’s not “waiting on money, thinking of murder,” as he raps on “BAD POLLEN”? Does the hustle, the bumrush, the killing ever cease? Or is it an interminable loop of episodes mimicking bell hooks’ oft-quoted (by all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons) opening sentence from “Killing Rage: Militant Resistance” (1995)? “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder,” hooks wrote. “I’m at the age they start to count my nights out,” ELUCID raps on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” because death or revolution seems “a black power nap away” (“IKEBANA”). “Time wore us out,” according to ELUCID, speaking in the past tense as if the deal has already gone down, the jig is up, the end is here. The “24-hour drones” he mentions on “14.4” survey the damage. Too easy to get greedy and selfish at the end (“Give me a minute…give me five…”), shuffling off this mortal coil as “we wait—who knows the hours?”

25.

“IKEBANA,” despite the time-and-numbers crunch, sketches a scene of restorative habits, a survival guide for the godless. It falls short of He-is-risen optimism (Orpheus is the figurehead here, not Jesus), but we’re headed from hell to the heliosphere. ELUCID wishes the world “good morning” with “oatmeal” and “Ethiopian coffee.” He’s calculating to find peace. He feels that “everybody knew” but him—crying it out; they must know the secret to peace. Miscalculations leave him envious. Everyone laughing at his ignorance, at “all [his] comings and goings”—the state-of-the-art GPS tracking of the teknohell. RFIDs on the heels of his feet triggering field detectors.

The solution is a sometimes-turn inward: Being alive, I must look up. If the Ethiopian coffee doesn’t cut it, he’ll order an “everything bagel with the tofu scallion” or “vacuum the whip” (as he does on “VOICE 2 SKULL”). We’ve heard of his domestic resolve before. On woods’ “As the Crow Flies,” ELUCID was “cleaning up [his] kitchen, / Emptying the fridge, bleaching counters, [and] sweeping corners.” By placing his “silverware in order,” he rebuilds the rubbled world. Peace is plucked from panic elsewhere, as on “YOTTABYTE” where he’s “squatting in a Barcelona hotel room playing Wu-Tang Forever,” observing the world rather than his phone, nourishing himself through sights rather than storing up the cache and cookies of his frequently visited sites.

After many calculations, the epiphany points toward what he details on “BAD POLLEN”: “I squeeze my children’s hand and walk harder against the wind,” the same wind that rustles the dead roadside bracken, as Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road (2006). ELUCID turns to his children, his family. woods, it should be stated, does the same, as noted on “Niggardly (Blocked Call)”: “I walk ’em to school, then the park, / Hold they little hands when we cross the street.” A small step to cross the street is far simpler than crossing the Rubicon.

“IKEBANA” is another ELUCID and Jon Nellen production, and Gabriel’s muted horn is buried in the mix of the song’s bridge, a distant and dour reveille as ELUCID sings softly. As he bemoans everybody knowing what he doesn’t, Nellen’s percussion pulls us to where ELUCID wants to be: looking up. Being alive, he’s looking up out of hell. We hear his will to struggle, to survive, and to exist, but we also hear our will to “look up,” or research meaning, reflected—manufacturing it if we have to—as in, “You must learn” (life being nothing more than a boogie down production). Improve ourselves through awareness of others, of our loved ones especially, of our situation within all the scattered “scorching space junk, x’s and orbitings.” You must change your life, in Rilke’s words.

26.  MAN THREATENS LANDLORD

Kill your landlord, no doubt…

—“Roaches Don’t Fly” (2021)

“SLUM OF A DISREGARD” celebrates thirty years of skullduggery since The Coup’s “Kill My Landlord” (1993), but underhanded housing policies—what ELUCID calls “comforts of material conditions core-rotted”—are nothing new. Look at Langston Hughes’ “Ballad of the Landlord” (1940):

Landlord, landlord, My roof has sprung a leak. Don’t you ’member I told you about it Way last week?

Last week is “way last week” because any leak sooner than soon, quicker than quick, becomes an inundation, a deluge, and the subsequent damage, mold spores, and stench overwhelms. Hughes’ subject alludes to withholding rental payment until the landlord “fix[es] the house up new,” but the landlord threatens back with “eviction orders.” The threat is communicated through the tenant’s account, through a series of questions—a dialogue masquerading as a monologue for the first five stanzas of the poem. The landlord is absent, a ghostly presence only there to extract profit. When the tenant turns to intimidation (“If I land my fist on you…”), we suddenly hear the landlord’s voice summoning police and precipitating an ugly and familiar scene:

Copper’s whistle! Patrol bell! Arrest. Precinct Station. Iron cell. Headlines in press…

For his threat of violence (which the landlord exaggerates as an attempt to “overturn the land”), the tenant receives a sentence of “90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL.” But for his neglect and threat of dispossession, the slumlord suffers nothing.

“The house is built on deceit,” Boots Riley raps on “Kill My Landlord,” acquired through primitive accumulation and the successive decades of sniping and stealing, compressing a courseload of Proudhon property is theft readings into a solitary verse. ELUCID’s landlord—nay, slumlord—is on a “Tel Aviv holiday” when the crisis hits. While the landlord uses ELUCID’s monthly rental payments to feed IDF soldiers [...my taxes pay police brutality settlements, billy woods shouts back], ELUCID struggles to get him on the phone. When he does, he finds the slumlord’s “sincerity was threadbare” and “urgency been missing.” ELUCID “smile[s] like watermelon slice,” a simile which upends the slumlord’s own race-based neglect through subversion. ELUCID will grin and bear it (for the time being), but he won’t let it go without signaling to the slumlord—or himself at least—that he’s privy to the power dynamics which undergird the exchange. In doing so, ELUCID enacts a stratagem used by poets before him. “We sliced the watermelon into smiles,” Terrance Hayes writes for fourteen consecutive lines in one of his sonnets from American Sonnets from My Past and Future Assassins (2018). In Langston Hughes’ “125th Street,” the poet doesn’t allow racist stereotypes to overshadow Black joy:

Face like a slice of melon grin that wide.

Hayes, Hughes, and ELUCID invoke historical [mis]representations by combining the smiling, subservient Tom caricature with the conniving, watermelon-thieving Coon to deliver a knowing wink to the reader/listener. In a promo video for REVELATOR, images of James H. White’s Watermelon Contest (1896) flash across the screen—an Edison film under Brakhage-like production techniques.

The longer ELUCID stays on the line with his slumlord, the sharper the sting. Mahmoud Darwish once asked, “Why did you lean on a dagger to look at me?”—and ELUCID listens long-distance to the slumlord “turn the dagger slow” with every second that passes. This is an abrasive exchange—ELUCID’s complaints and his characterization of the slumlord’s speech effectively evoked through consonance: “Too late to make it right, / Tongue-tied talk, / Make noose quick.” The slumlord stumbles over his words, speaks offensively, and we’re reminded to “believe what people say they are and do.”

Like “Ballad of the Landlord,” the conversational lines within “SLUM OF A DISREGARD” are one-sided. We hear ELUCID, in father-mode, pressing: “If this happens all the time, what’s the plan?” The slumlord’s excuses are elided, for his words are meaningless drivel. “Both my boys have my eyes,” ELUCID coldly explains, “—don’t force my hand.” His hand, like the tenant’s fist in Hughes’ poem, communicates to us that stakes is high. “Don’t force my hand,” he pleads, but Darwish writes that “we are forced to return to the inhospitable myths / where we have no place.” On “Between the Lines” (2001), Slug rapped: “If I see you as a threat to my seedling or my sibling, / I’ll die to pull the plug on your machine.” This kind of escalation really isn’t escalation at all—it is meeting the violence of the slumlord, a violence aimed directly at the face of children. “Black mold, / Black lung, / Black child,” ELUCID chants, delineating the equation. He receives “no callback” and his fury rises. An international call culminating in a rat’s nest of cords and wires—a switchboard in a landfill.

“Abuse of power comes as no surprise” isn’t just a Jenny Holzer holdover, it’s ELUCID seeing and stating that which has become so tiresomely obvious. We would have to delude ourselves to see something other than what stands before us. “I am not a prophet claiming revelation, or that my abyss reaches heaven,” Darwish writes in “Mural” (2003), “By the full power of my language I am the stranger.” We’re no stranger to oppressive language, language that oppresses. On October 9, 2023, Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” A year later, nearly to the day, ELUCID tells a truth to counter that lie: My landlord is a Zionist.

27.  FRESH AS FUCK ON STOLEN LAND

With his home in disrepair, ELUCID looks elsewhere to ease the tension of his rent-strife. “IN THE SHADOW OF IF” documents a search for refuge. He seeks to construct alternate realities and “alt timelines” where he’s making “[his] own breaking news” and “Lucy shit[s] diamonds” instead of habitating the sky with them, her kaleidoscope eyes gouged out. But you would need kaleidoscopic vision, of sorts, to manifest such a place. Though ELUCID has copped to “nam[ing] a thing or two into reality” on “SKP,” “IN THE SHADOW OF IF” postulates an added if—if he wasn’t “born in the year of this country’s last recorded lynching,” maybe he’d be better off. But as he says on “Microdose,” the question—and the reality—is “who stopped recording?”

Fleeing the city, ELUCID heads upstate and beyond—somewhere coastal that he can walk “barefoot in the sand.” We discover him “stepping over dead fish in a bucket hat.” This is the downbeat of deep ecology. “Salt and sulfur,” he raps, and he “can’t tell where the wind blows.” Gusts die down and Hell reemerges (as if it ever left) | guts tighten. “I’m on that Black leisure for the increase,” he says, calling in a reservation at The Black Dog while reclined on his beachchair on Martha’s Vineyard’s Inkwell. ELUCID uses his ink well. But this all seems a reverie, an abstraction, as he challenges us to “pick a coordinate / [And] show [him] where localized perceived violence didn’t come with receipts, / White sheets.” Klan presence pervades any and all vacay getaways. You might not see the hoods and horses up north, but you will see “too many flags—one too many flags.” He’s not gonna front, “seeing all those flags outside the city make[s] [him] nervous.” These are ELUCID’s dead flag blues. They represent “physically violent reminders.” Natasha Tretheway writes that flags “inscribe both a figurative and literal white supremacy onto the physical landscape and the psyche landscape of the American imagination.” Go back to “The Blackout” (1998) where Jadakiss warned that those “rednecks up in the mountains’ll try to slay you.” ELUCID ends up feeling like he’s “been cursed to concrete,” cordoned off by external forces, told to stay in the city, which makes him wonder how he’ll keep from going under. 

“The devil is a lie,” he exclaims, realizing “we are the ecology.” The mob made the devilry, manufactured it out of gurgling hate, and unfortunately “a moment to pause never goes on sale,” so peace can’t be purchased. ELUCID told us he was a “green book reader” on Armand Hammer’s “Stole,” navigating the netherworld of where no Black man, woman, or child is welcome. Time is warped; he angles through a simultaneity of oppressive timelines—“twenty years behind and ahead.” The “Black futures” he sought to build on “Stole” start to feel unattainable. Instead, he finds himself gripping “black steel in the hour of submission in search of a place to land… / …in search of a place where our blood don’t precede us.” Fact is, they built it on Indian graves. The land is composed of blood-soaked soil—runaway slaves torn to shreds, lynchings, and extrajudicial killings. On the original “Black Steel,” Chuck says, “Here is a land that never gave a damn.” ELUCID wants “purple rain” and “wild greens,” a lush and fertile vista where’ing the flowers grow and the price of avocados is free. “Search[ing] for a place to land”—forty acres won’t do. Can a reparations calculator really tell the cost of dispossession and plunder?

28.  WHO’S THE SUN SEEKING?

Xoloitzcuintli guides ELUCID into Hell, but ELUCID guides us out of Hell, penning a travelogue in miniature—traffic patterns and images of languid BK denizens. Virgil-level guidework, as Mos Def once said, “from the tree-lined blocks to the tenements,” so you don’t get vicked. On “No Grand Agenda,” ELUCID spoke of his “daydream on city buses, / Brooklyn pushing [his] button,” and on “XOLO,” we appear to receive the full panorama once the sound of sulfuric screeches and barking dogs in the distance fades:

Staring at the sun— a corner florist fell asleep with his mouth open on St Felix,  downhill on Dekalb, Green light succession, Stop-and-go, rubbernecking, Swerve, change directions,  Head in a smoke cloud…

He squints through the sunlight so that “he won’t burn” his retinas. Not to worry—he comes protected. REVELATOR’s cover image (photograph’d courtesy of A. Richter) shows ELUCID in shades. We can map the antecedents—be it Miles Davis’s shield sunglasses, Porsche 5620s with the frame screws (precursor to Kool Moe Dee’s steez); be it Sun Ra’s Courrèges Eskimo slit glasses that he rocked on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1969; be it Afrika Bambaataa’s future-geometry set of shades. ELUCID’s might as well be a Makrolon face-shield, as he’s protected from the welder’s flash of Hell’s ultraviolet flames. On “CCTV,” he fends off the “sunshine and teargas,” the “flash bang” of dispersal orders, the anti-crowd dog’s growl and howl, the Brooklyn confetti of uprising. He does so just as the Irish travailed through the Troubles, as depicted with punkish punctuation in Ciaran Carson’s “Belfast Confetti” (1989)—with shrapnel (the titular “confetti”) in motion like movable type. ELUCID’s text goes explosive in the same ways as Carson’s: “Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, / Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type.” ELUCID’s sunglasses allow him to “see now”—all the “details” with “color-cut clarity.”

Elevating out of Hell requires him to forge his own way, an avenue that becomes familiar: “I’m acclimated, black upon a path, / I made it outta clay.” Rakim crafted in the same Creator-cum-MC way on “Follow the Leader”: “Planets as small as balls of clay.” Get the fuck back, ELUCID orders, Stay the fuck down. Run for your life; duck down—his alarum’s a Rude Awakening. When ELUCID summons N.O.R.E.’s “theoretical niggas on the run eating,” the tempo starts to increase, steadily. Fire kindles and ELUCID says what we already feel: “The house is burning here…yeaaaah.” 

In William Melvin Kelly’s A Different Drummer (1962), Tucker Caliban is a slave descendant who, after serving the Willson family for generations, has had enough. He shoots dead his livestock, salts his land, and sets his house aflame in an act of defiance. The Lasso’s tempo-shift tracks with Kelly’s description of the inferno:

Orange flame climbed the white curtains in the center section of the house, moved on slowly to the other windows like someone inspecting the house to buy it, burst through the roof with the sound of paper tearing, and lit the faces of the men, the sides of the wagons, and the faces of the Negroes…. Sparks curled up and then died, dissolving against dark blue sky…. [T]he rubble of the destroyed home looked like a huge city seen at night from a great distance.

Tucker’s family leaves the town of Sutton and the other Black residents soon follow, baffling the white residents who watch the procession of “suitcases or empty-hand[s]” headed for the state border. As a crowd watches Tucker blast bullets into his horse and cow, witnessing the “sticky blood r[u]n down” their fur,” as they watch him ax “the twisted tree” on the Willson Plantation, “on which his great-grandfather and grandfather had been slaves and then workers,” they think he’s gone mad. Enlightened Harry Leland refutes this, though. “It’s his land. He can do anything he wants to it,” he tells his young son.

29.  P.L.O. STYLE

You may burn my poems and books You may feed your dog on my flesh…

—Samih al-Qasim, “Enemy of the Sun” (1968)

ELUCID dropped a zim zala bim on Armand Hammer’s “Solarium,” but—in recognition that magic can’t be the only survival method—he now promotes a zigzagzig. DJ Haram provides the sound design—a metallic gnashing, a chittering of rebar stakes, and a bass that throbs, muted and distorted, like eustachian tubes swollen from proximity explosions. On “Old Magic,” ELUCID offered a “double portion of protection,” but even charms and conjurings aren’t always enough. Under “war clouds” and a “cruel sky,” his “niggas survive like a moving target.” Zig. Zag. Zig. With the Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding of the last letter in the Supreme Alphabet—the zed, the end. Another bend of the body—an Orphic bend toward protest. The thousands upon thousands of Gazan orphans crying out to be heard.

For years, dead prez’s M-1 has argued that the struggle for Black liberation and the struggle for Palestinian liberation were “the same struggle.” “We have always been an international cadre,” he has said, “We have to see ourselves as a movement without borders.” Teknology allows deaths far and wide to be televised, rewound, reproduced on a “watch again” | replay | “share” exploitation loop. “I didn’t watch the video,” ELUCID says—and who can say which video? We wade through yottabytes of video footage like tonnes of debris. The video could be of grieving mothers in Khan Younis carrying the corpses of children, or it could be of Philando Castile bleeding out in the passenger seat of his Oldsmobile 88. ELUCID willed himself to not watch the video—to not tune into the Black death | Palestinian death broadcast—because he already “remembered in [his] body,” in his bones in which the trauma sings, in the code genetically imprinted.

The specter of Palestine pervades REVELATOR. Listeners are more likely to scan ELUCID as “abstract rap” than “conscious rap” or “political rap,” but that’s only because ELUCID’s art is so innately revolutionary and activist, lacking the sharp edges and defined features of more contrived artists. The abstraction is that the unacclimated will perceive ELUCID as a mystic on the mic rather than a rebel. He can be both; he can defy categorization; he can perform more powerfully than any single genre tag or pigeonhole could signal.

The history of solidarity reaches back to the 1970s with communiqués shared between the Black Panther Party and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (Method Man’s P.L.O. Style would never…). Kwame Ture (née Stokely Carmichael) dreamt of “having coffee with [his] wife in South Africa” and “having mint tea in Palestine.” Liberatory lucid dreaming. We collectively hope—and work—for better futures, for the dogs of Abu Ghraib and the hounds of the Great Dismal Swamp pace the same Hell. “I shall not compromise,” Samih al-Qasim writes, “And to the last pulse in my veins / I shall resist.” al-Qasim’s poems were discovered in George Jackson’s San Quentin cell after his death. “Enemy of the Sun” would even be misattributed to Jackson because he had transcribed the poem by hand.

ELUCID finds the energy, the caloric boost, in “locust and wild honey”—embracing this ascetic appetite of John the Baptist. He changes out his alpenflage cargo pants for a camel’s hair robe and leather belt about his waist (getting down with the animal pelts). He shelters in a “deeper shade of carnage,” turned from a whiter shade of pale, and “stare[s] into the fire,” scrying, divining answers from the glowing embers. On “14.4,” he said he “live[s] between two mirrors,” spitting catoptromancy raps wearing the “bulletproof Girbaud” from “YOTTABYTE,” backpocket containing a bulletproof wallet. Layers of protection. It’s the only way to “fix up sharp,” as he says on “IKEBANA” with dizzee rascality. Dressed to impress, he’s a “stiff-lip maroon.” In Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (1973), we learn that “in Surinam, as in Haiti, Jamaica, and elsewhere, warriors underwent complex rites and wore amulets intended to make them bulletproof…. [I]t was their gods and obeahs that spelled the ultimate difference between victory and defeat.” You already know ELUCID’s been spellling. And because the world always has been and continues to be dog, Cujo, Stephen King’s rabid St. Bernard, can be traced to Cudjoe, the Jamaican maroon leader. “A fearless rebel [who] boasted numerous bloody victories against the British,” Boisseron writes.

When ELUCID sees the “heads of state laughing” on “ZIGZAGZIG,” he knows they’re “liars” and that “hate has a logic.” They laugh “an idiot’s unbearable laughter,” to quote Rimbaud, still sweating through his Hell szn. But so are we all, grappling with the fact that “there’s no conscience, no authority.” ELUCID “live[s] to tell the story, / …to sing the song”—witness to atrocities, articulator of awfulness. When he can, he hammers out a warning. But he’s always on alert for imminent attacks which strike “without a warning.” Despite our teknological advances, we’re still a primitive society—our world still reduces to rubble, routinely. MPR500 precision-guided missiles fall from the sky and a Palestinian child stashes snacks in an abandoned IDF ammunition box. We search for survivors by hand—“Stony ground, metal poke out rubble, / Body twist angles akimbo, / Covered heads huddled”—hoping and praying for signs of life—head aching like rebar through skull, an inglorious Phineas Gage. 

On “Revelation Narrative” from Horse Latitude (2017), we hear the voice of a young child calling out: I want mama. How prescient. But the past tells the present, the future. 1948 | 1967 | 1987 | 2000 | 2008 | 2023 | & every increment in-between. ELUCID calls “from river to sea in lieu of peace, absence of truth.” He finds the gutless heads of state “guilty as charged.” They’re “monster[s] out the darkest abyss,” and—like dogs, like hellhounds—they exhibit a “gnashing of teeth.”

The death toll tolls for thee. John Donne felt the weight of every dun: “Each man’s death diminishes me, / For I am involved in mankind.” ELUCID makes the same pitch, even to those deaf to reason. His mathematics don’t need to be supreme; the most basic arithmetic tells a truth:

Who can still ignore the score? One more—to what end? Man-made horror beyond comprehension.

30.  I WOULDN’T TRUST IT IF THE POET DOUBT

After Revelation come a Genesis…

—Small Bills, “Falling Up” (2020)

No variety of literary originality is still possible unless we torture, unless we pulverize langage.

—E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (1973)

ELUCID pulverizes language. The lyrics on REVELATOR read like Bible page cut-ups, like Gysin and Burroughs put the scissors to ’em, like garbled Ghostface transcriptions. Narrative gets negated—not to confound, but to complicate communication. In doing so, ELUCID mirrors our shattered contemporary speech patterns, only it's art not the garbage glibness that the Geto Boys apprised us of in ’89—talkin’ loud but ain’t saying nothing. His Orphic bend and cadence flexing leave us levitating, lost in what Rimbaud calls a “hallucination of words.” More from Rimbaud:

I regulated the shape and movement of every consonant, and, based on an inner scansion, flattered myself with the belief I had invented a poetic language, that, one day or another, would be understood by everyone, and that I alone would translate…. Worn-out poetical fashions played a healthy part in my alchemy of the word.

On “VOICE 2 SKULL,” ELUCID cops to “complicating noun combinations over drumbreaks.” He felt the existing “language insufficient—chess pieces to the checkerboard.” His new language includes words for the living and “words for the departed” (“ZIGZAGZIG”), as if a seraph touched a burning coal to his lips. His diction ushers in cosmic agonies. His voice is “the strange instrument of death,” loaned from the conjure-man Frimbo. Listening to REVELATOR, I see the colors, geometry, and nonlinear wanderings of Wadada Leo Smith’s scoring of improvisation, his Ankhrasmation language articulated into words.

31.

In 1965, Amiri Baraka ended his liner notes to The New Wave in Jazz on this hushed note: “New Black Music is this: find the self and kill it.” Nathaniel Mackey has interpreted Baraka’s statement in the following way:

...in the course of improvising and getting to the point where you can play free music, you have to find yourself. You have to find out what your sound is. It may be something innate, but you have to practice and find what it is, where it is, and how to get it out, and how to translate it through a horn or a piano or a bass—whatever—which you likely call “technology.” How do you technologize yourself? How do you utilize that technology to render something that may be unspeakable, or there before not spoken—and maybe unrenderable? How do you get out a version that at least approximates that self and, at the same time, registers your refusal to be satisfied that you have properly and authoritatively, or with some finality, articulated that self?... In some ways, you have to be prepared to lose that self, or even to be an instrument of losing it, which is to say, to be killing it.

By this measure, ELUCID has found out what his sound is. On REVELATOR, he’s getting it out, violently. He’s translating it through his trauma mic—that is his chosen teknology. He has killed the self, and—to speak in the terminology of today—he keeps killing it.

“This ELUCID for whoever’s asking,” he once said on Armand Hammer’s “Resin,” and he’s forever been “staring at the sun” (“XOLO”). Often overlooked is the irony (or anti-irony, depending) of the MC’s name. Elucidate—to “throw light upon,” to “render intelligible,” perspicuity for the patron saints of post-rap. These ideas are at odds: How can he complicate and clarify? Make the equation make sense [ELUCID = light = “sun”]. “[W]e know that every apocalyptic eschatology is promised in the name of light, of seeing and vision,” Derrida writes, “and of a light of light, of a light brighter than all the lights it makes possible.” John the Revelator’s apocalypse is “lit by the light of El, of Elohim,” he adds. [T]he glory of Elohim illuminates it [21:23]. It’s as if ELUCID is “applauded by sunrays,” as Saul Williams says on “Elohim (1972).” Gnaw on this while you head-nod:

 ...what imposes itself as the enigmatic desire for vigilance, for the lucid vigil, for elucidation, for critique and truth, but for a truth that at the same time keeps within itself some apocalyptic desire, this time as desire for clarity and revelation, in order to demystify or, if you prefer, to deconstruct apocalyptic discourse itself…

ELUCID takes on the apocalyptic tone, and whoever takes on the apocalyptic tone comes to signify to, if not tell, you something. What? The truth, of course, and to signify to you that it reveals the truth to you.

Images:

A close-up of “the Envious,” Anonymous, The Last Judgment, (ca. 12th century), Gold and glass mosaic, Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello | A hand-colored woodcut of a 19th-century illustration shows an escaped slave trying to elude slave hunters and their dog. (North Wind Picture Archives/AP) | Gilbert Shelton, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Unknown issue (detail) | Bill Hudson, “Parker High School student Walter Gadsden being attacked by dogs in Birmingham, Alabama,” The New York Times (May 4, 1963) | McGruff the Crime Dog PSA, “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” 1984 (screenshot) | Robert Cohen, “Ferguson police officers during a protest in August 2014” (Associated Press) | DMX, “Get At Me Dog” music video, dir. Hype Williams, 1998 (screenshot) | Tadayuki Naitoh, “Miles Davis” (1971) | Jacob Riis, “The Trench in Potter’s Field on Hart Island, New York,” (ca. 1890) | Barry Williams / Getty Images, “Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD officers look at a robotic device from Boston Dynamics” (2023) | The Wire theme song, dir. David Simon, 2002 (screenshot) | Dread Broadcasting Corporation flyer (ca. 1981-83) | Unknown photograph of computer desk (c. 1999) | Stephen King, Cujo, first edition cover, 1981 (detail) | Joan E. Biren, “Portrait of writer Audre Lorde at work at her desk, surrounded by papers, books, and posters” (1981) | Image of ham radio (Lehigh Special Collections) | Self-portrait of Arthur Rimbaud in Harar, Ethiopia (1883) | Scaramanga, Seven Eyes, Seven Horns, interior cover art, Sun Large Music (1998) | Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-man Dies, first edition, Covici-Friede Publishers (1932) | Illustration in Abel C. Thomas’s Gospel of Slavery, 1864 (detail) | Gordon Nye, “New York City Rent Strike” in the Yiddish newspaper Di Varhayt (1907) | Afrika Bambaataa (unknown) | Sun Ra, photograph for Rolling Stone (1969) | REVELATOR album cover, Alexander Richter (2024) | Richard Ansdell, “The Hunted Slaves” (1862) | “Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton outside an unnamed Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon,” Unknown photographer (1980) | Wadada Leo Smith, “Kosmic Music” (2008) | A close-up of “the Envious,” Anonymous, The Last Judgment, (ca. 12th century), Gold and glass mosaic, Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello

[knight-otu]

Toady's Devlog for 04/17/2024

Toady One, from the Dwarf Fortress Development Log:

We posted an Adventure mode beta over on Steam. There are lots of good bits to it but some missing bits as well, so we're slowing rolling it out this time, while still letting more people test it out and have some fun. A lot of the Adventure mode experience is there. You can currently, in the released beta, create a party in character generation, visit your old forts, retire, unretire, get NPC companions, take quests, fight monsters with the various melee/wrestling/ranged options, set fires, tell stories, and travel the world. Portraits are available for dwarves, humans, elves, goblins, kobolds (minus some clothing variations), animal people (no items), and necromancer experiments (no items). These portraits are in both modes. So there's fun to be had, but there's quite a bit more to do before we'll do the full launch. Non-exhaustively: Clean up the big crash issues etc. Quest log / information screen Butchering and crafting Ability use, from necromancy to pet animal to spit Composing Motion/attack indicators Building interactions (levers, doors, etc.) Wrestle button Stealth vision arcs Better UI for stuff like going through hatches over ramps Some other info like movement speed / encumbrance Tracking / odor / weather / light / time etc. information Some travel map stuff like visible armies and zooming and highlights Minimap / map memory Trading and bartering (and the town shops being generally a mess) Assuming false identities Full personality customization in chargen Graphics and audio that didn't make it in for the initial beta release Get Classic conversions for the new buttons etc. The new stuff: chosen mode with deities, town improvements, dungeon improvements, healing options, and so forth As we mentioned before, cabin building is a larger interface project, so that'll come with the update after the full launch. A Future of the Fortress reply for February questions. A Future of the Fortress reply for March questions.

[multicolour-ink]

Do you think they’ll keep Bowser as the main villain in the inevitable sequel?

If not him I could see Wart as he’s rarely used so you can get a lot of leeway on his character and if not him then maybe Cackletta and Fawful but I would save them for a third movie.

Side note (because I've been meaning to bring this up but haven't had the chance to): I honestly thought the post credit scene was going to show Kamek hatching a plan to rescue Bowser. He's not even seen anywhere; you would think he would be plotting on getting his king back!

Considering that the games are pretty infamous at this point of having Bowser as a final villain no matter what (see the M&L series as a prime example) it wouldn't surprise me if the sequels introduced the other villains, and then had Bowser be the "final boss" at the very end. Whether by manipulation, possession, or just his own choice, doesn't matter.

But then again, while this can be accepted in the games, in the movies it will be too noticeable and critisied by audiences: so they're gonna have to shake it up.

They could do stories like Super Paper Mario (where Bowser isn't the final boss), or just change things up a bit with existing stories.

Like say if they did Dream Team

(spoilers for the game!)

they just have Antasma as the main villain, and completely omit the alliance and the Dreamy Bowser fight at the end.

If they DID have Kamek rescue him in the post credit scene, then they could've false advertised that Bowser was going to plot a revenge scheme. Only for the sequel to come round, and a new villain is introduced and Bowser has to throw out the revenge plot in order to team up with the heroes. That would be hilarious!

[lucent-nargacuga]

The false puffball, Batamon, and Starborn

False Puffballs

False puffballs (Drakon caelestis), more commonly known as pseudopuffs or even just puffballs, are the result of convergent evolution. Nobody is certain how and why they evolved to become near-identical to true puffballs (or Astrals), as true puffballs inevitably outcompete them. False puffballs evolved from true dragons 1.5 billion years ago, and as such, their blood is always a bright lavender hue.

Unlike true puffballs, false puffballs are not purely magical in origin; as far as science is concerned, false puffballs are normal animals (although they have a much higher magical potential than most). False puffballs reproduce asexually and will lay a single egg at a time. Once an egg is laid, it is usually deposited on another planet, where it will remain for roughly one hundred years before hatching. The egg will slowly absorb life energy from the environment around it, which influences the young's physical traits and element(s).

Newly-hatched false puffballs are very independent and are able to fend for themselves immediately after hatching. During their first one thousand years of life, young false puffballs are extremely adaptable and their physical traits will change when their conditions do. They are able to grow new body parts if needed, and body parts that hinder them will fall off. (Attempting to raise a false puffball hatchling is extremely difficult, as they thrive in rough conditions. There are many sad stories of all of a hand-reared hatchling's limbs falling off due to disuse.) For the next three thousand years or so, their wings, horns, tails and other physical traits will lose their malleability and will develop into their final appearance.

False puffballs are fully mature at around five thousand years old; they can live for up to one million years.

While false puffballs tend to develop elemental abilities similar to those of true puffballs, they cannot use copy abilities, inhale, or float. Despite this, false puffballs have the capacity to become incredibly powerful. A famous example is the hero known as Celesta Knight, a false puffball from the faraway Conquest Galaxy who led four other heroes into battle against a terrifying threat and banished it back to the realm from whence it came.

True puffballs instinctively fear false puffballs and many will hunt them. False puffballs are few in areas inhabited by true puffballs. In areas where true puffballs are absent, false puffballs are numerous.

False puffballs can be considered superpredators.

Batamon

When the egg of a false puffball comes in contact with Dark Matter, it becomes infected and will hatch into a Batamon.

It is extremely rare for Batamon to live longer than one thousand years. Those that do will never develop wings, horns, a tail, or any other defining characteristics other than colour. Batamon are unable to use magic and are effectively defenceless. Their bodies are fragile, too, and they tend to prefer avoiding conflict due to being so weak.

Starborn

When the egg of a false puffball comes in contact with a true puffball, it becomes infected and will hatch into a Starborn.

Starborn are functionally identical to normal false puffballs. However, they tend to be more powerful, and can be differentiated from a normal false puffball by looking at the eye; Starborn always have pupils shaped like a four-pointed star, and normal false puffballs do not. Due to it being very unlikely for a true puffball to come across the egg of a false puffball, Starborn are incredibly rare.

In places uninhabited by true puffballs, Starborn are revered.

True Starborn

When the egg of a false puffball comes in contact with an unusually powerful true puffball (known as a blue star Astral), it may absorb the life energy of the true puffball and hatch into a True Starborn.

True Starborn are very similar to regular Starborn, but are even more powerful and rare.

There are currently no True Starborn known to exist, but that will change in the future.

Other Infected False Puffballs

Only Dark Matter and true puffballs have been confirmed to be able to infect false puffball eggs. However, research is underway to determine if false puffball eggs can be infected by pure forms of Dream, Heart, and Soul Matter as well.

Some claim that undead can infect false puffball eggs, but this has yet to be proven.

[leolaroot]

DISCLAIMER I DONT KNOW SHIT ABOUT EVOLUTION. ADDITIONAL DISCLAIMER IM ALWAYS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.

trill evolution..

BOTH species are called Trill but I'll henceforth use Hosts (humanoids in the show) and symbionts (the. worm) for ease of communication.

trill Hosts and Symbionts are two separate species of amphibians that evolved in the extensive cave systems on trill. at this point they're essentially both just salamanders. Hosts are actually reminiscent of earth marsupials (think closer to surinam toad if you want a non-mammalian example(also warning if youre going to google surinam toad and somehow dont know about her yet. some people find images of her pretty gross. idk. be prepared)) because they've developed a pouch to carry their spawn.it protects the eggs until they can hatch, and provides a safe environment for tiny pollywogs until they're strong enough to swim alone. symbionts sometimes take advantage of mother hosts by joining a clutch of pollywogs and living inside a Host pouch.

as the Host species begins to grow larger, they become less dependent upon the water and spend more and more time on land, the caves and rivers becoming more of a Spawning ground. Mothers are forced to spend lots of time there while clutches are young to keep her pouch especially hydrated.

symbionts do not evolve in size. they're well suited for the subterranean caves and their small size helps fit in with hatchling hosts. they have developed language and communicate nonverbally using directed telepathic energy (the blue electricity in the water we see in the mak'ala scenes)

the hosts don't view symbiont species as a negative at this time, host species is developing language and culture of their own. beginning to create organized societies on land but still very dependant on the water. but any water won't do, a new spawning pool will result in unhealthy offspring. the nutrient rich water that leads to healthy growth is dependant on the byproduct of symbiont living. when populations move, they bring symbionts with them. it's a good sign to carry a false baby, as they can now help fortify your infant's health from inside the pouch.

new mothers act strange. this is an understood fact. sometimes they speak like they don't know who they are. sometimes they insist they've lived in the caves their whole lives. sometimes their abdomen seems to glow blue.

an important and central member of her community grows sick. she's carrying young, but she's old enough to have adult children of her own. one terrible day, she dies, and the babies are too small to survive outside. her daughter takes her own siblings into her pouch. within days, she is insisting that she is her own mother. she knows stories she was too young to experience. she remembers when their community first left their cave. she has the knowledge of a matriarch. each time she speaks in her mother's voice, her pouch glows so brightly everyone can see. the clutch of infants grows, but she keeps her symbiont. she still returns to the water to protect it. she grows old, lays her own clutches of eggs, but never lets that symbiont go. her community has almost gotten used to her strange doubled way of speaking. when she reaches the end of her own life, she passes the symbiont onto her own daughter.

joining is still very common, but sharing a symbiont is for a LONG time exclusively matrilineal and used to preserve community history. a joined matriarch is a living memory of your people.

[floatingaroundinmymind]

Prologue for a fantasy story; feedback appreciated!

The world's savior was found on a Tuesday. 

On a single patch of green grass amid frost tipped weeds and crystalline ants lay a single man-sized egg in the village square. The children found it first and then the fishermen and farmer's wives. The elders spoke in hushed whispers, spun silvery tales of prophets and heralds to man, saviors in times of need. And so a gilded shrine was built to honor the Prince of Men, a nest with the good down, adorned with the finest silks and purest gold. 

And into the walls men carved such intricate patterns, eyes of the village to watch and protect the young prince--the grandest being an ornate carving of the imagined prince among his people. The women produced their fineries, dresses and robes, stockings and cloaks with which their skilled fingers distilled every ounce of hope. There was deliberation, talk of how to mold the new angelic host, of how he should come to know man and the world of men in the days since prosperity. 

Oh, but it was folly. 

Seed of discontent, sown by human or heavenly hands? Flower of malevolence in full bloom on crimson earth, beneath smoky skies; new ashen snow in frozen summer. And the egg, in a golden cage. 

No one was there when the egg hatched. The scant sunlight filtered in through the rocks above, seeping into cracks between yellowed blades of grass and craggy holes in weak, sputtering spurts of life. And as it hit the large, pale slabs of raw stone and shone on the streams of water which trickled off their crumbling steps, Aurea found they were alone. 

They crawled out of the egg, amniotic fluid spilling onto the previously untainted floor. The bare ground was cold and stark against the warmth of the egg and Aurea felt its solid, stony weight beneath her feet. 

The gilded cage sat upon a raised pedestal and through the golden slats, Aurea caught glimpses of greenery, the trickling of water dropping off into some dark abyss beyond the reach of both the sun's rays and their eyes. Aurea shrugged off the cracked bits of shell that clung to her body, the sticky residue from the egg clinging to each piece. 

Against the bars closest to the stairs were a wooden bowl, cloths of some sort, thick boots, and a folded set of garments upon which a crown of branches sat waiting, watching as if it too awaited their arrival. The bowl was large and filled with water for washing, the fabric beside it needlessly ornate for what amounted to washcloths.

Instinctively, she cupped the water in her hands and rinsed her face, felt the sticky fluid run off it and reached for a washcloth, wiping the rest off. Aurea's face reflected back at them in the ripples—blonde hair curling around the edges of their face and ice blue eyes searching for some sense of self in the not quite child nor adult face that stared back. Tearing her eyes away from the false self, the process was repeated with the rest of their body until the water remaining in the bowl had turned a dingy yellow, the remnants of birth clinging to the bottom. 

Cleansed as they were, the slight chill in the air had now grown to a freezing magnitude, aided by the dampness of Aurea's hair and the absence of the egg's warmth. It was then that she turned her attention to the garments beside the now dirtied washcloths. Stacked neatly there were four pieces in the set, accented by golden threads and vibrant purple hues with an off-white serving as the base, earthen browns meant to balance the more striking elements.  

She held the garments in her hand, noted on one there were holes for arms, a head and more confusing ones on another piece. Aurea stared at the large carving on the wall furthest from them, a winged herald among ground people. The regal figure was clothed in strange robes, trousers and fine boots—the very same set neatly folded before her.   

Aurea turned away from the carving feeling the stone figures' eyes lingering long beyond their rocky casing and attempted to dress herself. 

As she slipped on the clothing still she felt eyes watching. It was a low hum in the background that made its presence known louder with each passing minute. Half-dressed, Aurea turned back to glance at the stony faces on the wall and noticed on the opposite wall a pattern. 

Eyes.

There were eyes carved into every wall surrounding the great gilded cage.

They didn't roam—there was no life behind them. They simply stared at her half-naked asking questions that only the ancient hands of men knew, answers that the wind pretended not to know as it blew through the cavern. Their silent, ever-present gaze never once left Aurea and she could feel each pupil on her body, covering her whole being like a million unwanted hands touching, poking, and prodding at her like she was an animal in a cage. 

There was nowhere to hide. 

She turned, suffocated by the prying eyes, feet slipping on the water from before and reached for the gilded bars as she fell. The bars gave way and Aurea hit the ground—the cage door was open.  

The large golden door now lay wide open, the mysteries of the world outside the cage waiting. Its hinges were old and worn but still functional—the same could not be said for the lock whose chain was rusted brittle and broken, the result of many years left unattended.  

Still feeling the burning gaze of the carvings, Aurea finished dressing, threw on the boots and wrapped herself in the massive cloak provided, the fur-lined hood tickling her cheeks. They stepped carefully over the cage threshold and took in the cavern with caution and awe.

From atop the pedestal holding the cage there were a set of stairs which led down to level ground. On either side of the steps were countless stalagmites guarding a large lake which seemed to circle around the base of the steps, back into some far corner beyond sight. Far above even the cage, there were cracks in the cave ceiling through which small rays of light penetrated and water from some unknown source seemed to endlessly trickle in, dripping off the stalactites and down onto the stalagmites and into the subterranean lake.       

As Aurea descended the stairs, small pillars of white came into view. Dozens of old candles were littered at the base of the steps and led outward into a narrow corridor, ancient wax drips dried on their bulky stalks. 

Alongside the candles were dried bundles of herbs, some ashen and all bound with thin string, the likes of which Aurea could faintly smell mingling with the earthen scent of the cave. 

They followed the trail of candles in darkness through a winding path. The only constants discernible were the drip of water, the occasional streak of light and the sense of a gradual ascent. When the path opened up once more, there was a great out pour of light and with it a scant few steps which led to somewhere outside the cave.

The outer world was immobile. Beyond the threshold was a vast expanse of white blanketing the ground as far as the eye could see and hazy in the distance, a faint plume of smoke against the slowly darkening blue sky. Aurea stepped forward as if on impulse, one foot in front of the other as she stared at the source of the smoke and felt snowflakes float onto her nose and ears, dampening both with their presence. 

The wind's chill penetrated even the thick coat and trousers that Aurea wore and they had grown hungry, an ache seating itself deep in the pit of their stomach. The smoke in the distance was far, but close enough to reach, Aurea thought. And off she went towards the source.

*

"Wren, come tend the fire." 

Grandma sat curled by the fireplace on a much loved rocking chair. The wrinkled face still held the woman's countenance well, playful nature coming through in her twinkling ancient eyes and calm voice. Oh, but she was always like this, lightly complaining about the ache winter brought to her brittle old bones—Wren never minded. 

"Just a moment."

Wren moved slow down the stairs, the outline of her lithe form barely visible in the faint firelight and short brown hair swaying with each step. 

There was something comforting about the way Grandma called her each winter night, the loose routine they had settled into as Wren talked about the stars and Grandma taught her about the past, the olden days most had forgotten. Grandma had always said winter was the season for dreams and so Wren thought it seemed fitting that each passing winter felt a little like a dream itself—lazy and uncertain but with a hopeful tone. The slow meandering pace of the nights overshadowed the brief periods of sunlight called day as the long arm of time stretched itself thin again. It would be a matter of time before spring came and brought with it all the beauty of nature.  

Until then on tonight, like most nights, Wren was relegated to retrieving firewood from the storehouse and preventing the small flame that gave life to all inhabitants from going out. 

"Be careful, the wolves have been restless lately—strange men in the area. Be on your guard." 

"I know, Grandma. I learned from the best after all." Wren winked, patted her hunting knife in its sheathe and lit the lantern like always, the wick seized up in dancing flame. 

Shrugging on a thick coat and slipping into equally warm boots, she turned the front door knob and stepped out into the cold, started down the steps and towards the direction of the storehouse.  

It was a short walk from the main house to the storehouse indicated by loosely staked poles with symbols carved on them so one could navigate nearly blind if they had to. The lantern lit up the path as Wren walked, snowflakes dappling the black wool coat she wore. Undoing the latch and pushing the door open, she grabbed a few hefty pieces of wood and made her way back out, nightly routine nearly over.

The pale moonlight was at its peak now, an imperfect crescent that cast a lonely gaze over a stark white land covered in coniferous trees of varying shades and exposed rock.   

And there face down in the snow, far from Wren but just close enough, was a girl with blonde hair. 

[poisonborz]

Driving around random places in Germany, like, the smallest who-cares towns and villages, reveals its massive history and how these region was so important and culturally richest in Europe. But tall highs mean deep lows sometimes I guess. We stopped at Deggendorf recently on our autobahn trip for the night - normally we choose some scenic city and also look around, but weather was bad - so anyway here's that sob of a town, some tiny old town center, but otherwise a 30k population dustbin. When quickly walking around - really nice and busy market with lotsa social life on weekdays as well which I always admire here - as the only attraction is the standard german unit of one medieval town hall and one old church, both rather nice and somewhat reconstructed since the town was mostly leveled during WWII (also a standard german unit of history).

Kind of sad to see murals from the 50s on a 14th century church, in place of probably much grander artworks.

But there is a small tablet hanging on the side.

"In 1383 the jews of Deggendorf were killed…the legend that emerged to justify this crime...is false…the slander perpetuated over centuries not only distorted the memory of Jews in the Middle Ages but also harmed the reputation of their descendants into the recent past."

Ehm, ok why? It's internet search and dismayment time! Ahm, how wonderful, this was the place of one of the best covered up vile pogroms in late medieval times in the area! Story time.

So it happened in 1337 that a large fire broke out, consuming most of the town. Reconstruction was hard, and the needed money came primarily from lenders/bankers, who, by medieval tradition (more like a necessity, as lending was a sin) were the Jewish people. Besides only being able to practise a few crafts to earn a living, these families already had to pay protection money to the king for free practising of their religion ("Reichssteuer"), and were a closed community. Now the whole town was indebted to them.

In the summer of 1338, a plague of locusts destroyed the harvest. Meanwhile, it was thought, the jews of the town lived a good life from their interests. On the eve of September 30, a day before the usual day of next payments, they thought of a good solution: townsfolk surrounded the jewish quarter and looted and murdered everyone in it. And… nothing happened.

Probably to suppress revolt in an unstable time, Duke Heinrich XIV of Bayern pardoned every participant, and signed a decree allowing "finders keepers" on the belongings and houses (meanwhile divided among themselves) of the massacred. In addition, "the bonds, mortgage deeds, and other documents held by the Jews, or what they should have otherwise repaid to them, shall be completely annulled". To not much surprise, this move resulted in further pogroms and killings in the whole region. However macabre, all that is was still a rather common occurrence in western Europe. What happened in later times makes it stand out.

Killing folks - even if "godless pagans" just because you owed them money, getting off for free, and then living in their houses is not such a cool story to tell to your children. Decades after the massacre a new narrative started to emerge. Folk songs and stories started to appear telling another version of the story: the Jews of Deggendorf hatched an evil plan and stole the Sacrilege from the church, trying to smelt it into coins. The Sacrilege cries and bleeds, child Jesus and Virgin Mary appear, alerting the townsfolk, who rush to rescue but a fight and fire breaks out. But the Sacrilege miraculously survives and hovers in the sky (:DD) descending on a monk who immediately becomes a miracle healer, promptly building a temple in the city to safekeep it.

This is the legend of "Deggendorfer Gnad" (Grace/Miracle of Deggendorf). In the following decades, 17 huge oil paintings were made and hung in the church to tell the story in vivid images for every visitor. Pamphlets were printed and distributed, songs being sung, and trinkets sold. The legend of the miracle spread far and wide, and soon Deggendorf became the largest pilgrimage site of the area.

Then there were the "Gnademarkt" market days hosting merchants selling textiles, household items, candles. In 1737 they recorded 140 thousand visitors. The church building and its decorations expanded heavily, featuring now a baroque tower and an expanded altar with vivid sculptures of Jewish figures using their hammers to smash the Sepulture.

As soon as the 18th century Enlightenment, notable politicians and writers lashed out against the festivities and the pilgrimage as being antisemitic, which voices grew louder in the next century. If you expect the story to end with "after the Nazi regime and WWII this festivity also ceased to exist" then, well, no, Deggendorf welcomed tens of thousands of pilgrims throughout the 20th century. The bishops of these decades defended the tradition that it's "part of the Bayern folklore" and harmless, "it doesn't glorify the murder" and "no amount of articles and pamphlets will stop it". To ease up the situation a bit, the church changed the festive theme a bit from miracles "the sins of the pasts, in medieval times to the 20th century" In 1968 bishop Rudolf Graber changed the plan to create a professorship in Judaic Studies in the newly formed University of Regensburg. Instead, he created one in Dogmatic Theology - the position taken by a certain Joseph Ratzinger, if the name rings a bell. This didn't stop researchers to study this story more fully, although with less funding thereon. Church historian Manfred Eder's dissertation in 1992 was the first work that comprehensively revealed the historical background.

Only in the aftermath of this study did the festivities stop for good the next year.

[librathefangirl]

No Kin of Mine (But a Kin of Kind)

ao3 (2k+; One-Shot)

(Dragon Meliodas AU) The first time Meliodas met his would-be brother was in the secret highly reinforced cage in the pit of the dungeons. Of course, this was before he was forced into the form of a demon and enslaved as a son of the Demon King. It was years before he would even consider Zeldris his kin. … The hatchling shifted from foot to foot, his hesitation hanging heavy in the air – until suddenly he pushed himself through the food hatch and into the cage. Febuwhump 2023 Day 14: Captivity.

Warnings: Captivity, Cages, Chains, Imprisonment, (Self-)Starvation, Referenced Off-Screen OC Deaths, Suicidal Thoughts.

Oh-uh, new AU alert! This is actually one I've thought a lot about lately, and definitely want to write at least one full multi-chapter story for in the future (dealing with their present-time lives). The context for this AU is simple; Meliodas was never the Demon King's son or an actual demon, he was born a dragon.

Read on ao3 or under the cut!

The first time Meliodas met his would-be brother was in the secret highly reinforced cage in the pit of the dungeons. Of course, that was before he was forced into the form of a demon and enslaved into the life as a false son of the Demon King. It was years before he would even consider Zeldris his kin.

Meliodas was still reeling from the realization that he was the only one left of his entire clan and edging closer to meet them in death by the minute. He’d accepted it though. After all, death was a welcome embrace in comparison swearing any kind of loyalty to the so-called king of the realm.

The Demon King was a monster. That was all there was to him.

It had been weeks since Meliodas saw the light of day or shine of the moon. He wasn’t even sure how long. It was all just a pointless circle of pain as demons came and went from the room. He’d seen the Demon King himself a handful of times – he’d bargained and threated and sworn his horrible plans – but it had been a while since last. Mostly it was just his underlings coming into the room. Only the Demon King’s most trusted were allowed into this part of the dungeon. That also meant his most cruel. After all, who else would take the two young of a family and slay everyone else in hopes of making weapons of dragons. The demon didn’t even have the guts to fight his own war.

Zejlah was dead too. Meliodas was certain of it. With the way her back was shaped, she would never have been able to fly or even fight properly – they’d called her useless, defected. Meliodas knew in his heart they’d killed her when they took her away – and he had been completely helpless to stop them. His parents were dead. His sister was dead. He hadn’t protected anyone… He was alone now.

Meliodas had been lying down in the cage when he caught the new smell. His body screamed at the restrictiveness of the cursed chains. They weren’t pointless per se, even a dragon of his age could match most demons around here. At least the non-battle ones, whose focus lied with weapons and not directly participating in the conflict in the goddess clan.

It was a new demon in the room. One with a sent Meliodas didn’t recognize. They were powerful. Meliodas could sense a great power approaching – but also one that seemed… sheltered. Like its holder didn’t know how to properly use it yet. Like they lacked the knowledge and skill, maybe even the confidence to wield it. The demon peeked around the corner. Definitely lacked the confidence and-

Oh. It was the hatchling.

Meliodas knew about the hatchling of course. Everybody knew about the prince of the Demon Realm after all. He had never seen him before. Given the way he was literally tiptoed up to the cage, looking over his shoulder every other step, he clearly wasn’t allowed down here. Meliodas wasn’t sure how he got past the guard, but he supposed the hatchling knew his way around the palace. What he didn’t get was why? The spines of his back stood up as the hatchling came closer. Was he here to poke at him too? To hurt him like his father?

Meliodas let out a low rumbling growl. The hatchling immediately froze. His eyes widen as he met Meliodas’. The hatchling swallowed. The sound echoed slightly in the quiet room. He rose his hands up – he had no weapons or tools. Meliodas couldn’t help but notice that they were trembling. Was this really the Demon King’s hatchling?

When Meliodas didn’t move or growl again, the hatchling swallowed again and stepped closer. He stopped at the thick bars around the cage. He quietly watched Meliodas as Meliodas watched him. He seemed young. Old enough to sneak around the palace alone, but still young. Meliodas didn’t really understand demon ages – their lifespan was so short. The hatchling couldn’t be all that older than Zejlah had been, comparatively speaking. He had a wild tuft of black hair on his head and eyes in the greenest shade Meliodas had ever seen.

His father had told him about that. That a demon’s eyes turned black with their power. It happened when they used their powers, but they could also do it voluntarily. If they choose to, they could cover just their eyes without actually using their powers. They did that to intimidate, or when they felt threatened. Meliodas had never actually seen a demon’s true eyes before now. Why was the hatchling showing them to him? Even if Meliodas was chained and caged, no one else did that.

Meliodas tilted his head as he observed the hatchling. The hatchling gasped quietly at the movement and a spike of curiosity mingled with the heavy stench of anxiety. Meliodas felt his own interest rise. This hatchling was nothing like he’d imagined. Nothing like any other demon he’d met so far. There wasn’t anything evil to him, no sinister sadistic urge.

The hatchling kneeled on the ground, pulling the bag he had carried off his shoulder. As he opened it, Meliodas was hit was a scent so delicious that his stomach let out a loud earnest scream for food. He couldn’t remember the last time he ate something. The demons had given him food – a malnourished weapon was a weak weapon – but he hadn’t eaten it. The water he’d still drunk. Accepting death and choosing death was two very distinct things.

The food the hatchling pulled out of the bag was nothing like the food Meliodas had been given. That had barely counted as food. This was a proper, actually cooked meal. By the size of the fish, this wasn’t the hatchling’s food either. No, it was decent size for a young dragon. Meaning, he had to have gotten this specially with this in mind.

Meliodas rose as much as the chains allowed him, his spines rising in fear once more. He had brought him food. His father must have sent him. In an attempt to keep Meliodas from starving himself.

While the hatchling’s eyes widened again. He seemed determined to not shake this time. He met Meliodas’ gaze head-on. Oh, he reminded Meliodas of Zej. In his eyes there seemed to be the same spark Zejlah had gotten so often. The spark that meant she had just decided to do something inherently stupid that was going to pale Meliodas’ scale by the end of it. For a while, he’d been certain he would be the youngest dragon with pale scales – all thanks to his reckless little sister of course. He guessed he was saved from that fate now. It wasn’t like he actually cared if the demon hatchling was reckless or not. He had no reason to.

As Meliodas watched him the hatchling took a deep breath and opened the food hatch. With a strong push he sent the fish a good bit into the cage. When it came to a stop, he looked up at Meliodas. Meliodas glared at him. Nice try, but he wasn’t falling for it no matter how much his stomach rumbled.

 The hatchling frowned when Meliodas didn’t eat it. He rubbed his hands together. The determination gave room for the anxiety again. Good. He could be anxious. It didn’t matter his feelings; Meliodas had made up his mind. He wasn’t going to be some weapon. The goddesses had never done him anything. If they’d declared war against the demons, it probably was their demons fault. It wasn’t like Meliodas had seen any reason to save them. So, the Demon King could continue his poking and his hurt and his stupid little games. Meliodas didn’t care anymore. The demons had already taken all his reasons to live, why not let them take his life as well.

A loud sigh pulled Meliodas’ focus back to the hatchling. There was a clear smell of frustration coming off him. It seemed so out of place with the nervous fiddling, Meliodas tilted his head amused. Only for a moment. Then he lied down on the ground again. The hatchling wasn’t here to hurt him, and he didn’t have the energy to play his games – whatever they were.

The hatchling shifted from foot to foot, his hesitation hanging heavy in the air – until suddenly he pushed himself through the food hatch and into the cage.

Meliodas startled. What the hell was he doing?

The hatchling stared at him wide-eyed as he got to his feet. Yet still, there was no darkness in his eyes. When was the last time someone was this close to him without any weapon or tool to hurt him? They watched each other, waiting for someone to strike. Slowly, the hatchling moved to the fish – and pushed it even closer to Meliodas.

Why? This didn’t make any sense. Sending the hatchling into his cage, unarmed and unsupervised, it didn’t seem like something the Demon King would do. It didn’t make sense. If this wasn’t the Demon King’s doing, the why was the hatchling so determined to get Meliodas to eat.

Why?

The hatchling gasped and stumbled backwards until he fell on his back. Sitting up, he stared at Meliodas. His eyes were impossible wide, and his mouth hung. Meliodas stared back, equally shocked. He hadn’t meant communicating with the hatchling.

The hatchling drew a shaky breath and got back to his feet. He stretched to his full – yet still very small – size, keep holding Meliodas gaze.

“You need to eat,” he said. Meliodas was too busy to wrangle his own emotions to even try to get a grasp on the hatchling’s. What was he doing?

Why do you care? Meliodas asked. The hatchling’s eyes widen slightly again as Meliodas’ voice reached his mind. The hatchling dropped his gaze. The frown was back on his face.

“I… There’s enough death as it is. We shouldn’t be killing creatures of our own realm.” He looked back up at Meliodas. “Father will kill you if you don’t cooperate. And you will kill yourself if you don’t eat!”

Well, yeah, that’s the idea, little hatchling, Meliodas wanted to say, but he kept the thought to himself.

But why do you care? Meliodas asked instead. This still didn’t make any sense.

“I don’t want you to die,” the hatchling admitted. Tears shone in his eyes and oh by the goddesses, how was this Meliodas’ life? How was this the Demon King’s hatchling.

Meliodas huffed out a sigh and pulled the fish closer to him. The hatchling got a stupid grin on his face as he saw him eat it. Meliodas ignored how fucking good the food tasted and instead focused on how ridiculous the situation was. The Demon King’s hatchling had snuck into the dungeon, broken into his cage and then manipulated him into eating with the power of hatchling tears, all because he didn’t want a dragon he didn’t even know to die.

While Meliodas ate, the hatchling talked. Meliodas didn’t know if it was because he was nervous being in cage with a dragon or if he just didn’t have anyone else to talk to. He talked a lot. He didn’t mention the war or the goddesses or the dragons. Instead he talked about stupid everyday things. Mostly what he had done today, and how dumb he thought his master was for not letting him carry a sword outside of training. It was almost endearing. Of course a hatchling wasn’t allowed to carry a sword. Not even the Demon King was that foolish.

When Meliodas was done, the hatchling was too busy to notice. He was in the middle of a story of how his master – Cusack? – had been teaching him to form his wings. He wouldn’t be taught to fly yet, he’d told Meliodas grumpily, but he was learning how to shape his wings. The idea of creating your own wings with the power of darkness was absurd and intriguing to Meliodas. Meliodas didn’t stop him from his story. He just put his head on the ground and listened to the hatchling talk.

Neither seemed to realize what they were doing until suddenly a door open with a startling creak. They both shut up to their feet. The hatchling’s eyes widen yet again as he stared at the staircase leading to the door, his hands pressed against his mouth. His fear was almost overwhelming.

Without thinking, Meliodas pushed him to the ground with a gentle nudge and folded his wing around him.

He was hiding a hatchling under his wing, and he had a demon against the most sensitive part of his wing, were two thoughts that fought for the prize of most panic-inducing.

The guard peeked his head around the corner. His tense expression quickly became a bored one when all he saw was Meliodas glaring at him from the cage. By some miracle, he didn’t notice – or didn’t care about – the open food hatch or the hatchling’s discarded bag. He disappeared up the stairs again, grumbling about someone hearing voices and the door slammed shut behind him.

Meliodas sighed deeply, pulling back his wing. What the hell was he doing?

“Thank you,” the hatchling whispered as he looked at him with a genuine expression.

Meliodas just huffed and lied down on the ground. He turned his head away form the hatchling. He hadn’t done it for him. Meliodas would just have been blamed if the hatchling was found in his cage. That was all. He was just looking out for himself. He had no reason whatsoever to care for the hatchling. Least of all try to protect him from his own kind.

It didn’t matter if he reminded him of Zejlah. Or if he had stupidly green eyes that never turned black as he looked at Meliodas. Or that he had a stupidly pure grin. Or that he stupidly cared that Meliodas lived. Or that he stupidly would just sit around and talk to him.

Behind him, the hatchling crawled back through the hatch, picked up his bag and snuck back out from the dungeons. In the absolute silence that followed, Meliodas told himself he was still just trying to understand the confusing night. He didn’t actually wish that the hatchling had stayed.

---

And just like that, we are officially halfway through my Febuwhump stories! Yay! (And even though February is now over, don't worry, I will continue finishing all of these stories!)

[mejcinta]

The Dragons Rhaena Can Claim In HOTD (Since Aemond Stole Vhagar)

The misinformation in this article is baffling, it's almost as if the writer did not even pick a book or do proper research; filling fans with false hope!

A dragon cannot be stolen.

Moondancer was hatched to Baela, not claimed.

Seasmoke is going to be Addam's dragon.

Vermithor and Silverwing will be claimed by two fools.

We know how Rhaena's story closes beautifully. Her relevance is NOT tied to claiming and riding a big ass dragon alone. There's a point to her story and, I'm sorry, but Daemon is not going to be Daddy of the Year to her and give her any of the things suggested in this article. Mssschew!!!

[cleave-and-plough]

episode 2 emphasizes the world's stakes and starts to give utena some direction after her initial rejection of the duelists' code. the council refer to themselves as the chick that will hatch from the egg of the world, claiming they will die if they do not smash the world's shell. their path is at once certain and veiled: they receive mysterious instructional letters from end of the world, which they follow without knowing exactly why. juri briefly questions the arrival of utena, but touga assures her that it must have been ordained, and she agrees.

this search for meaning and purpose is echoed by wakaba, who appears at first still heartbroken by saionji's rejection, lost in a book and initially unresponsive to utena. however, she quickly softens, revealing that the book, which tells the story of rejected heroine finding new love and once rang so false to her, feels wholly new and true after her heartbreak. this allows her to recontextualize her situation and find new hope in her love for utena, at least for now. in a world so shaped by storybook figures and threads, it's notable that wakaba finds meaning in romantic art, particularly writing, after her love letters were shamed. the academy seems torn again by the double worlds, with the traditional romance and chivalry of the council clashing lightly with the student body's modern sensibilities.

at the same time, the council wield significant power within the school, lending credence to their higher reality - the academy remains a stage for them to act out charmed yet unremarkable lives, while the true story unfolds behind the curtains. they use this power now to relocate utena to the abandoned east dorm to live in a domestic arrangement with anthy, who cleans house and cooks elaborate meals for her betrothed. and yet, despite this display of the council's power, anthy's name is handwritten on the door. this was the most striking image of the episode for me - although the council can freely place utena and anthy wherever they wish, even giving utena an official placard on her door, anthy's name is written in pen. perhaps this merely reflects anthy's ephemeral presence: at any point, she could be won by another duelist and relocated. and yet there's something intimate about it: once again, the writing is on the wall. it may not be wakaba's confession of love, but it brings a new bond into existence, even if utena cannot understand it and anthy cannot explain it to her. in spite of this uncertainty, their life begins peacefully enough, accompanied by a petite animal friend who brings some levity to the drama.

yet, as the council reaffirm their faith, utena and anthy take their tentative first steps together, wakaba rediscovers her purpose, and all seems right with the world, saionji remains defiant. unwilling to accept the will of end of the world or the outcome of the duel, he instead exalts the aspirations of his own exchange diary, manifesting and enacting his personal desire for possession of anthy. saionji makes an excellent foil to utena: his selfishness, his lack of principle, and his embrace of violence starkly contrast her authentic knightliness. when he challenges utena, she at first refuses, then plans to forfeit, having no desire for "unnecessary" fighting. a true knight will not strike the first blow.

like anthy's handwritten name, i was also struck by a new principle of utena's: she cannot risk expulsion. in the first episode, she prominently cites the school rulebook in arguing for her right to wear a boys' uniform (another instance of her respect for codes of conduct), which takes on new light now as she reveals her dependence on the school. recalling the prelude, she may have no family to turn to, and the school is possibly her only home. so, now knowing the council also has the power to remove students who oppose them, utena is cornered and accepts saionji's challenge.

as the silhouettes whisper over the haunting oranges and reds of sunset, losing may be harder than she thinks, and the critical narrative moment of the episode occurs during the rematch. faced with saionji's aggressive kendo-based style, utena fights defensively, surprising herself with her own unwillingness to lose the duel. saionji presses harder and harder, eventually kicking her to the ground and readying for the final blow.

at this moment, a miracle occurs. utena's ring glows, summoning a spirit resembling the prince down from the castle above, which enters her body and imbues her with the will and power to fight and win. she stands, poised and determined, and with a single strike she cuts the blade from saionji's sword, his rose sliced to petals.

the sequence is spellbinding. since her childhood, utena has dreamt of becoming a prince and yet lacked any real means to do so, only being able to partially satisfy herself through wearing a boys' uniform and achieving athletic success. here, in the forest, she can be the knight she both remembers and foretells, and i suspect that at this moment she was at risk of failing herself. was this because she rejected the honor of the duel? or because she knew in her heart that it would be dishonorable to allow anthy to be returned to saionji's abuse? (i believe the latter, especially given her later denial of it - she may be understandably unsure of her relationship to anthy, but she cannot resist what began the day she saw her in the greenhouse and smelled the scent of roses.) thus, as she falters in body and spirit, the prince descends to remind her of her promise, her strength, her nobility. she is granted the power of dios, the power to bring the world revolution. and she triumphs.

returning to the dorm, anthy cuts to the heart of the matter. "you didn't lose on purpose?" so far, utena has distanced herself from the basketball team's recruitment, wakaba's embrace, and the distasteful duels of the council, and she was excited to live in a single room in an empty house. she may be seeking something, but she chooses to walk a solitary path toward it. so she tells anthy it wasn't for her. it was for chu-chu. and she turns away.

anthy makes an unreadable expression, which softens into a smile. thinking about the gazes in the opening and the first episode, i wonder: what does anthy see when she looks at utena? a charming girl, the idol of the school, defender of the helpless? or another captor, a new betrothed who won her hand through violence and seems to think nothing of it?

stray thoughts:

himemiya seems to mean "temple princess," which sounds very suitable.

i of course remember chu-chu, but on this second viewing, it seems achingly poignant and comforting that anthy, eternal object, does have at least one friend at the school.

i thought utena would be given a pink rose for the duel now that she's the champion, but she still has a white one. it hasn't come up in one of these posts yet, but i suspect the use of color will only become more and more meaningful as the show continues.

the next episode features a school dance, which seems like prime material for a crossing-over of the worlds: a high school prom meets an elegant, aristocratic ball.

[sakialumei]

about me / links

Hello! My name is Sakia. I'm a multi-fandom artist, writer, and general crazy lady. 28 / fem / she/her

Ask Box is Open

Tags and Links

General Art Tag

General Fic Tag

Archive of Our Own

Featured Fandoms / Works

Astarion x Lilith Tag

Solo Astarion Tag

Aria of Echoing Shadows: E (ARCHIVE WARNINGS APPLY) - High-born, impressionable, and the descendant of infamous necromancers — she is the perfect target for Astarion. They grow close, but between the manipulations, long battles, and literal haunting of their campgrounds, they discover that their pasts intertwine and their lifelong tormentors are close allies. A vampire lord and a master necromancer make for a terrible combination. Now, it is up to Astarion and Lilith to uncover the secrets obscured by their abusers and put an end to whatever diabolic scheme they hatched... whatever that could be. An expansion on the Astarion romance and story line combined with an original story line for Noble Tav. IN PROGRESS

A Charlatan's Masquerade: E (ARCHIVE WARNINGS APPLY) After escaping the tyrannical household of her father, runaway Lilith and her mother Taisia settle in the remote arcadia that is the barony of Rosefair, far from Baldur's Gate. Peace is disrupted when the once-abandoned Castle Rosefair suddenly is occupied by a new, mysterious lord: Astarion Ancunin. After she discovers his terrifying secret, Astarion extorts the runaway to assist him in his lordly duties and perhaps even help him rise to the power he always coveted. Meanwhile, Lilith vows to uncover the secrets of the Ascended Vampire and possibly even find a way to defeat him. That is, if he doesn't devour her body and soul first. IN PROGRESS

Hunting the Sun: E (ARCHIVE WARNINGS APPLY) - For centuries, Cazador Szarr coveted the secrets of disabling his most debilitating weakness: the sun. The answer lied in a magical flower dubbed the Corona Lily. Cazador discovered that the flower's magic had passed onto a newborn girl, so he burned the baby's home, killed her parents, and assumed the title of her father. After two decades, his flower managed to escape, so he is forced to send his spawn, Astarion, to bring her back. As the two journey back to Baldur's Gate, the secrets of the flower unravel and weave about a new fate for them both. Tangled-Inspired AU COMPLETE

Quiche x Ichigo Tag

Just a Drop of Magic: G - The Mews and their new co-workers take a day trip to a famous theme park and everyone seems to be in high spirits. And yet, Ichigo cannot help but feel bittersweet about the experience when it comes to broken dreams. She won't stay sad for long, not if Quiche has anything to say about it. COMPLETE

Don the Wings That I'll Become: T - Chosen by the Planet, Ichigo Momomiya and her friends are turned into Reyvateils, beings that can transform their powerful feelings into Song Magic using a mysterious and ancient language called Hymmnos. As Ichigo and the others grow more powerful and deepen their understanding of Hymmnos and Song Magic, they soon learn that there is more to the aliens' invasion than meets the eye. Who decides which side Earth belongs to? IN PROGRESS

Xander x Mozu Tag

Leo x Sakura Tag

The Princess and the Pauper: T - To prevent all out war between Nohr and Hoshido, a peace treaty will be sealed with the arranged marriage of Prince Xander and Princess Sakura. The shy Hoshidan princess asks her handmaiden, Mozu, to switch places with her out of fear and curiosity for her new fiance. To complicate matters more, the two princes are falling for maidens who are not their betrothed. It’s a romance of false identities that would make Shakespeare proud. COMPLETE

[rockyp77mk3]

Majority in the Senate! Trump wants to terminate the Constitution. Maybe you should tell him that it's wrong and he isn't going to get his way. His days are numbered fella. Soon there will be indictments for him and his Family and then the DOJ will get his hooks in him for the Jan. 6 insurrection. I love it when a plan comes through! Ooooofuckingrah bitch!

Indeed, the Democrats have a majority in the Senate but they no longer control the House. This loss of the House effectively pulls the teeth of this most pernicious administration and may serve to slam the public coffers shut on Biden's free spending.

You mention the incident of 6 JAN. I think you will find that once the new congress is sworn in there may be far more to the story than the corrupt soon to be former speaker and the biased media are telling the public.

I honestly do not know exactly what Trump said regarding the Constitution but if it was in any way contrary to the law of the document then he is wrong. I suspect however that this may be a spin imparted by the Dems. We will see.

You say the DOJ will bring indictments against Trump? I suppose Trump would be worried if the current DOJ still held one shred of credibility to thinking people. We will see about that too but I invite you to recall some recent history regarding charges against Trump, each and every one false and in part based on a curbstoned report written by a disgraced, former, foreign intelligence agent.

Don't count your mindlessly vindictive chickens until they hatch.

[aritany]

11, 18, 44, 51, 64, 68, and 76? (sorry for the spamming, I thought it would be fun to go off of one of the readings you once did for me :p :D)

11. JUSTICE: TRUTH (What is the 'truth' of your novel i.e the prevalent themes or overarching motifs?) 

one: who you are is good enough.

two: it is okay to want things.

three: life is beautiful if you're looking for all the ways it'll show up for you.

18. THE MOON: FEAR (What worries you most about your future writing career? What are you anticipating?) 

i worry that not being active enough on writerly social media is going to actually impact the success of my books. i hate it on twitter and i don't like writing emails. i thought the whole point of traditional publishing was that i don't have to bend over backward doing this part of the job : - )

44. NINE OF SWORDS:  NIGHTMARES (What would be the worst possible outcome for your writing career?)

either nobody else ever signs me after my debut, or they keep signing me and i never get a say over what i'm writing or what changes get made

51. TWO OF PENTACLES: TIME MANAGEMENT (How do you balance your writing with the rest of your life?)

historically, i do not,

(i wish i could say that i want to make this change, but i kind of love when a project swallows my whole life)

64. ACE OF WANDS: NEW GROWTH (How do you grow the seed of an idea into a full story?)

i sit on it until it hatches like an egg

68. FIVE OF WANDS: DISAGREEMENT (Do your characters ever act of their own accord? Or do you find that adage false or silly?)

very often i am the boss and then sometimes i am informed that i'm only the boss because they've all agreed to let me think so

76. QUEEN OF WANDS: CONFIDENCE (Writers are often introverts; is there anything in your publishing journey you aren't as confident about such as the public aspect?)

oh god i have to film a video advertising my book and i think i would rather have my wisdom teeth put back in. i also don't love the concept of being accessible 24/7. if i receive one more email and then get a follow-up text within a single business day asking if i've seen it i'll lose my mind i really will

thanks for the ask jules!! these were fun questions :)

[whereareroo]

GOOSE FEATHERS

WF THOUGHTS (9/20/24).

For all of my professional career, I was surrounded by rich Republicans. It was a world that was dominated by white, Christian, men. They were nice guys. At the same time, the classic stereotypes are true. They had names like Conrad, Chester, Roscoe, and Woodward. They lived in mansions. On the weekends, they played golf at fancy restrictive country clubs.

In those days, we didn’t have migrant problems. We had goose problems. Suddenly, probably because of climate change, Canadian Geese began to invade the wealthy enclaves of lower Connecticut. The rich folks hated the geese. The geese pooped all over the manicured lawns that surrounded their mansions. The geese pooped all over their fancy golf courses. It was a major problem for rich Republicans.

The rich Republicans fought back against the nasty geese. At their homes, they deployed their dogs and their undocumented Mexican landscapers to chase the geese. In addition to using dogs and undocumented Mexican landscapers, the fancy country clubs initiated “goose control plans” that featured armies of dog decoys and various electronic noisemakers. At their homes and at their pristine clubs, the Republicans employed exterminators to spray goose nesting areas with cooking oil. The oil seals the airflow pores in goose eggs and suffocates the embryos before they hatch. I guess the Right To Life doesn’t apply to geese.

For the past ten days, I’ve been thinking about the Republican hatred for geese. We keep hearing about the false story, popularized by Trump and Vance, that “illegal” Haitian immigrants in Ohio have been stealing and eating pets. At first, the false story was about cats and dogs. When that story was debunked, it morphed into a claim that the Haitians were stealing ducks and geese from local lakes. It’s all a bunch of racist, xenophobic, bunk.

The goose story is a sad commentary on the status of the Republican Party. Everybody knows that Republicans hate geese. In 2024, it appears that their hatred for migrants now exceeds their hatred for geese. Republicans are trying to argue- -even though the underlying facts have been repeatedly debunked- -that migrants are bad people because they’re capturing geese. Isn’t that a hoot! Not too long ago, Republicans were paying migrants to capture and kill geese. Suddenly, Republicans are protectors of geese! The new Republican position is that geese are more important than people. The Republicans apparently don’t understand that geese don’t vote.

Even though I’ve gotten a giggle out of all of this, I realize that it’s a very sad situation. Trump and Vance will do anything- -such as creating false stories- -to appeal to their racist and xenophobic supporters. They do it because it works. America is full of racists and xenophobes. It’s so sad that in 2024 one of our major political parties is actively seeking support from racists and xenophobes. Do you want to go back to those days, or do you want to move forward? The choice is in our hands.