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tylertheevangelist · 1 year

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Is Karma Biblical?

“She’s going to get what she deserves.”

“What goes around comes around.”

“Oh man! Instant karma!”

These are some popular adages in American culture, repeated by nonbelievers and Christians alike. Indeed, I have heard such things said by Christians in the church, sometimes rationalized through scripture. Our pop culture conception of karma lacks an understanding of what it actually means or its origins. There is a widespread misunderstanding that equates karma to the biblical law of sowing and reaping.

So what exactly is karma? Where did it come from? And does it have anything to do with biblical teaching?

What karma is.

The word “karma” is derived from Sanskrit and literally translated means “action” or “fate.” The Cambridge Dictionary defines karma as “the force produced by a person's actions in one life that influences what happens to them in future lives.” The Oxford Dictionary refers to it as “the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences.” Merriam Webster describes it as “the force generated by a person's actions held in Hinduism and Buddhism to perpetuate transmigration and in its ethical consequences to determine the nature of the person's next existence.”

At its core, karma is a view about the afterlife – or rather afterlives, plural. The doctrine of karma, properly understood, is inextricably linked to reincarnation. A belief in karma requires a belief in past and future lives. Karma is concerned with death and deliverance: it is the force by which the actions of your present life propel you towards your eternal fate.

In both Buddhism and Hinduism, karma is a means to achieve spiritual liberation; that is, to end the cycle of death and rebirth. When you reach this spiritually enlightened state, you transcend time, discard your sense of self, and merge with – or realize you are – the universal consciousness. Buddhism calls it nirvana; Hinduism calls it moksha (or oneness with Brahman). One of the paths to spiritual enlightenment in Hinduism is karma yoga, the path of taking “right action.” An adherent of karma yoga works toward their deliverance by acting unselfishly – that is, fulfilling their dharma (duty) without concern for the outcome of their actions.

As you can see, the American pop culture bastardization of karma – where it’s thought of as “getting what you deserve” or that the good or bad things you do come back around to you – fundamentally misunderstands the concept. Sometimes people will casually refer to an immediate realization of consequences as instant karma, without appreciating that the phrase is an oxymoron.

Karma isn’t about realizing the consequences of your actions, at least not in the present life. If you fail to reach enlightenment by the end of this life, your karma impacts what kind of life you receive in the next incarnation. But the ultimate goal on the path of karma is to transcend your individual desires and separate yourself from the realm of earthly consequences. Karma is work done to prepare for the next life, not to get what you want from this life.

Why karma isn't biblical.

There are a number of reasons why the concept of karma is at odds with biblical teaching. First of all, it is inherently and inseparably tied to an unbiblical doctrine of death and the afterlife. The Bible teaches – notwithstanding the people Jesus raised from the dead who may have died twice – that man only dies once (Hebrews 9:7). According to the Bible, man doesn’t die over and over again, nor does he come back in different incarnations.

Second, its soteriology – or view of what saves you – is unbiblical. Karma puts forth a works-based view of salvation whereby you earn your way to nirvana or moksha by doing enough good things and suffering through enough bad things. On the other hand, the Bible teaches that you cannot earn salvation (or get to heaven or achieve oneness with God) through works. Biblical salvation is an unmerited and free gift of God’s favor (Titus 3:4-7, Romans 3:28, Romans 4:5, Galatians 2:16, Galatians 2:21, Ephesians 2:8-9, Philippians 3:9).

Third, not only does karma have a false soteriology, but – as hinted at above – it has a false savior. In karmic doctrine, you are ultimately your own savior. This, however, doesn’t work because no matter how many lives you live, you are not able to be your own sacrifice; imperfect sacrifices offered repeatedly cannot save (Hebrews 10:1-3). Imperfect lives, no matter how close to perfection they come, cannot deliver. Even with an infinite number of retries, you would fall short every single time (Romans 3:23).

The christ of karma is a false messiah. What we need is a sacrifice without blemish (1 Peter 1:19) – one who can live a singularly perfect life; one who can pay for our sins. We are blemished lambs, by our sinful nature unfit for that purpose. Jesus is the unblemished lamb who has no sins of His own to atone for and can therefore atone for ours (Hebrews 7:27). Only He can be the savior, not us. The contrast between karma and the Bible has been summarized well: “Karma is you getting what you deserve; the Gospel is Jesus getting what you deserve.”

Finally, karma demands that we take active measures to achieve our salvation. But the Bible reveals that we are transferred by God into His kingdom (Colossians 1:13.) It tells us that we are the passive—not the active—participant in our salvation and our rescue from the kingdom of darkness is wholly the product of God’s grace.

The difference between karma and the law of sowing and reaping

Is the law of sowing and reaping a biblical nod towards karma? There are multiple references in the New Testament to a person reaping consequences for what they sow (1 Corinthians 3:6, 2 Corinthians 9:6, Galatians 6:7-8). Despite the superficial similarity, this is not at all similar to karma, for the following reasons:

The law of sowing and reaping has nothing to do with reincarnation and is primarily concerned with rewards for the present life.

The law of sowing and reaping is for the salvation of others, not your own salvation.

The law of sowing and reaping is not for earning salvation, getting into heaven, or attaining oneness with God.

The Bible says that we reap without sowing and that we reap up to 100 times that which we do sow; this is not equal reward for equal action.

Let’s go through each point:

The law of sowing and reaping has nothing to do with reincarnation and is primarily concerned with rewards for the present life.

In the Bible, sowing and reaping is never tied to reincarnation, and it is often used to describe the reaping of rewards in the present life as opposed to the afterlife. The apostles both sowed the word of God and reaped its harvest within their lifetimes (1 Corinthians 3:6). The Corinthians were told that if they sow generously (2 Corinthians 9:6), they will reap in this life (2 Corinthians 9:8,11). God abundantly blesses and provides for the needs of these “cheerful givers,” and their generosity enlarges the harvest of righteousness in the form of souls being saved. While these effects do endure in eternity (v. 9), nevertheless the souls are saved – the harvest is reaped – during their earthly lives.

The law of sowing and reaping is for the salvation of others, not your own salvation.

It is noteworthy that, in reference to salvation, the aim of sowing and reaping in 2 Corinthians 9 is the salvation of others and not your own salvation. The idea that you would sow for somebody else’s salvation rather than your own is diametrically opposed to the doctrine of karma. This is because sowing to the poor, when done by those who adhere to karma, isn't about the salvation of the poor but their own salvation. Giving selflessly without thought or desire of return aids in their advancement to nirvana or moksha. And some sects discourage giving to the poor because it prevents the poor from paying off their karmic debt and thus prolongs their process of samsara.

Both of these are very different from the biblical concept of sowing and reaping. Biblical sowing and reaping encourages caring for the poor for the sake of the poor’s physical and spiritual needs. Taking care of the poor for the sake of one’s own enlightenment under the guise of selfless detachment is antithetical to biblical teaching, as is neglecting them so they can pay off their karmic debts.

The law of sowing and reaping is not for earning salvation, getting into heaven, or attaining oneness with God.

Galatians 6:7-8 says, "if you sow to the flesh you will reap corruption, but if you sow to the Spirit you will reap eternal life." Does this contradict the idea that sowing and reaping is not about working for your personal salvation, given the phrase "you will reap eternal life"?

On the contrary, similar to 2 Corinthians 9, these verses also refer to the salvation of others. They specifically speak of ministering to others and not of personal salvation. This is made clear by reading the passage in context. The preceding verses say “But let each one test his own work” (v. 4) and “Let the one who is taught the word share all good things with the one who teaches. Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (v. 6). Teaching and sharing the word are references to ministry work. Sowing to the Spirit means that through your ministry, others will receive eternal life by believing. We are personally saved by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8-9), not by the acts of sowing and reaping themselves.

The Bible says that we reap without sowing and that we reap up to 100 times that which we do sow.

In stark contrast to karmic philosophy, God provides for us out of grace without us having sowed anything (Luke 12:24). Because of God’s grace, we reap in much greater proportion to what we sow: “a crop thirty, sixty, and a hundred times what was sown” (Matthew 13:8). Not karma – grace.

Doesn’t God give people what they deserve on judgment day?

For the unbeliever who rejects God, they absolutely will receive from God what they deserve according to their sins (Hebrews 10:29-30, Revelation 16:6, Revelation 2:23, 2 Timothy 4:14, 2 Thessalonians 1:6, Romans 12:19, Revelation 18:6). But believers will be judged not for what they deserve – they deserve death and hell – but rather for what they have done (Revelation 22:12, Matthew 16:27). In His grace, God accepts the believers’ service and rewards them for their deeds performed in service to Him.

Doesn’t it say that believers will receive their due for the good and the bad they did?

2 Corinthians 5:10 states that all believers must stand before the judgment seat of Christ and receive their due for what was done in the body – whether good or bad. However, “whether good or bad” does not mean that the believer will be punished on judgment day for their bad deeds; rather, they “suffer loss” for them (1 Corinthians 3:15).

Bad deeds are compared to wood, hay, and stubble; good deeds are compared to gold. The analogy concludes with fire thrown onto all their works, where the bad is burnt up and only the good remains. But, because the wood, hay, and stubble could have been gold – i.e. the bad could have been good – they suffer loss. As such, they are rewarded according to their good works, but not at all punished for their bad ones.

Bad karma does not accumulate and carry over to a terrible next life: Jesus already took the punishment. The gospel is that Jesus gets what you deserve for bad deeds; you get rewarded for the good. Perhaps (per Matthew 13:8) you will receive much more for the good you’ve done than you even deserve – 30, 60, or 100 times more.

What about the proverbs?

Sometimes proverbs are invoked by way of describing karma biblically. The problem is that proverbs are general principles, not laws without exception. For example, the proverbs stress that working hard leads to wealth, while sloth and laziness lead to poverty. These concepts are true generally, but not always. Certainly there are very lazy people who are rich and very hard working people who have basically nothing based on extenuating circumstances. This is why we must approach the book of Proverbs with consideration for nuances and exceptions. These are not hard and fast rules from which doctrinal claims should be carelessly extracted.

That being said, let’s consider two verses from the book of Proverbs: Proverbs 22:8 and Proverbs 11:8. The first says that “whoever sows injustice will reap calamity;” the second, “the one who sows righteousness gets a sure reward.” Are these the biblical equivalents to karma? No, and for a few reasons.

Firstly, as aforementioned, these are not to be taken as dogma, unlike karma which is a dogmatic principle. Some people who sow injustice do not reap calamity because they place their faith in God; God’s mercy delivers them from calamity. The grace and mercy of God isn’t a consideration in karmic philosophy.

Secondly, the calamity and rewards reaped are not for the next life, multiple lives, or reincarnation. That cannot possibly be what is intended here, given the total absence of such concepts from the Bible.

Lastly, it is possible or even likely that – as with 2 Corinthians 9 and Galatians 6 – Proverbs 11:8 refers to sowing for the righteousness of others and not your own righteousness. As explained above, this notion is contrary to karmic philosophy.

Karma is thoroughly unbiblical. It posits a false view of the afterlife, a false view of salvation, and a false savior.

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel – not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.” -Galatians 1:6-9

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sunset-embers-warriors-designs · 4 years

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I have several ideas about how I would have written Starclan’s function in warriors and I MUST write them down I must express them. I have two different ideas, one in which I maintain the canon fact that Starclan cats can fade/be killed, and another in which I do away with the fading thing.

First, a few things I would want for Starclan regardless of whether or not the spirits can fade:

- All cats, regardless of the age they die at, are given a full warrior name. Kits or apprentices who die early are either named by their leaders at their vigil and carry that name to Starclan, or they’re named by Starclan spirits.

- After a leader dies, the -star suffix is removed and they return to using their warrior suffix as a Starclan spirit. Perhaps the -star suffix is given up right at the moment of death, or the -star suffix is given up after the leader ceremony of the succeeding leader to indicate an official transfer of leadership.

- The point behind everyone having a warrior name in Starclan as opposed to any of the “determined by status” suffixes (kit/apprentice/leader) is to further express that all cats are equal in Starclan. There aren’t any clan borders in Starclan’s hunting grounds, and neither should there be different ranks.

No Fading Starclan:

- Cats in No Fading Starclan are given otherworldly wisdom upon entering Starclan, regardless of the age of the cat. All of Starclan shares the same knowledge of the past/present/future.

- However, this knowledge takes a form such that Starclan aren’t able to express it to the living in clear and understandable ways, which is why they speak in riddles when delivering prophecies. Like Starclan is trying to translate some kind of language of the universe into meows and at most it does like a google translate quality.

- Individual Starclan cats each have a limited amount of spiritual/magical energy which they can use to interact with the living world. The longer the clans all exist, the more manpower Starclan has, which explains why their abilities from arc 1 to arc 4 grow from “clouding over the moon during gatherings” to “entering the living realm to fight a ghost battle.”

- Similarly, the Dark Forest spirits have their own kind of energy that grows the more cats they have in their realm. However, as a punishment for their sins, they don’t get their godly wisdom, and their ability to reach out to the living is a little foggy. They ARE, however, able to latch on to cats who have negative energy surrounding them, and will try to bring troubled souls into their ranks prior to their deaths so they can gain more energy when those cats DO die.

- In this AU, spirits can’t be killed, so the Starclan/Dark Forest battle ghost casualties (Tigerstar, Hawkfrost, Spottedleaf) will not have died. Instead, the buildup to the battle is the Dark Forest attempting to take power from Starclan by reaching out en masse to the troubled living cats with the end goal of “replacing” or at least being on par with Starclan in terms of power, in order to maybe fight their way into the good afterlife or continue reeking havoc as revenge on Starclan/the living. The battle itself is then the Dark Forest’s attempt to overthrow Starclan and gain control over the living clans to ensure they stay in power. Ivypool’s role of convincing her fellow Dark Forest trainees to fight for their clans/Starclan instead then takes away the power the Dark Forest had built up for itself, and having this rejection of the Dark Forest’s influence become a part of the clan’s history/culture keeps the Dark Forest from rising back up. Not to mention, the Dark Forest having used to much energy to manifest and do battle will have left them drained, especially after their defeat, and even if Dark Forest cats have the ability to replenish their individual powers somehow, it would take a long time to do it.

- Spottedleaf continues to exist, as previously mentioned, but as a general rule in every single one of my AUs she and Firestar aren’t romantically interested in one another at all. The only interest Spottedleaf would ever have had in Firestar was because the “Fire Alone Will Save Our Clan” prophecy was Her prophecy, she was the one to interpret it, and she felt responsible to see it through even after her death. When Firestar dies in the battle, Spottedleaf feels that her role in that prophecy is finally through and she just does regular Starclan cat things like climbing starry trees and eating ghost mice.

- In the case of the great battle, spirits who have manifested on the physical plane I think should still have the ability to kill the living, so the deaths in the great battle still happen just for the sake of being consistent with who’s alive in what arc.

- Also regarding the great battle, perhaps Tigerstar’s spirit can kill Firestar’s mortal form, gloat about it, but then Firestar’s spirit rises up and with his Starclan Spirit Powers he takes Tigerstar down. I just think that would have been cool.

Fading Starclan:

- In Fading Starclan, there are actually two levels of Starclan, but the living clans only KNOW about one. The living clans know Lower Starclan, the Starclan made up of recently dead/not-faded spirits who impart the prophecies onto the living. Lower Starclan are Also recipients of the prophecies they then translate to the clans, but they don’t fully understand them and believe these premonitions to be coming from some essence of the universe.

- In fact, the prophecies are first foretold by Upper Starclan, which is made up of the energies of the faded spirits. Upper Starclan spirits, since they’re faded, lack the identities they had in life and are more accurately interpreted as a hivemind. Like a God with a million faces. Upper Starclan are the ones who block the moon with clouds, control the weather, and do stuff like set fires in the living world to impart prophecy.

- Lower Starclan functions more like a transitional spiritual plane. It’s a place for the spirits to rest from their mortal lives, and then eventually shed their previous personalities and ascend. Lower Starclan being given the prophecies first to then give to the living gives the living cats more reason to listen, because these messages are coming from spirits who are still personable and likely cats who the living interpreters knew and respected in life.

- The Dark Forest is a place to hide away the spirits of cats who would impede on the goals of Upper Starclan. They eventually fade away too and are permitted into Upper Starclan because they’re no longer a threat without their mortal memories/personalities getting in the way of their roles as God(s).

- The Tribe of Endless Hunting’s spirits also fade away into Upper Starclan because the two groups have the same origin. Like Endless Hunting and Lower Starclan manifested because of the split in the groups and Upper Starclan just said “Okay We can work with this”

- True Reincarnations only occur when an Upper Starclan spirit returns to a mortal form. Jay’s Wing, Lion’s Roar, and Dove’s Wing’s spirits had all faded into Upper Starclan but were reborn as new mortals in order to fulfill the Power of Three Prophecy. This also explains why they have “the power of the stars”, they were part of the Cat God Collective prior. Cinderpelt/Cinderheart was a “reincarnation” that was NOT sanctioned by Upper Starclan, which is why Cinderpelt and Cinderheart have separate souls.

- The reason the Power of Three thing happened was because Upper Starclan saw their Dark Forest Timeout corner spirits being naughty and worried that those spirits weren’t as out of the way and not hurting their goals as previously presumed. The battle was orchestrated to reinstate faith in Starclan and have some of the more troublesome Dark Forest Spirits fade so they would stop causing trouble. Technically, Tigerstar, Brokenstar, and Hawkfrost are all part of Upper Starclan after the great battle, but none of them have those identities anymore, or at the very least, those identities are not “in use.”

- The only spirits that can walk in Both Upper and Lower Starclan are legendary/historical figures like the clan founders and probably other significant cats who have legends made of their life experiences.

- Goosefeather, by some mistake or intention(?) was granted a mental connection to Upper Starclan instead of just Lower Starclan like other medicine cats, which is why his visions were so intense and so far into the future, and just the sheer number of them. He could see Lower Starclan spirits as well like Beetail because I guess if you can connect to Upper Starclan than Lower Starclan is just a side effect.

- Spiresight and Shadowsight might also have this connection to Upper Starclan? Idk I can’t decide. Shadowsight did as a kit at least, but perhaps Upper Starclan decided to chill after seeing how poorly Goosefeather’s connection turned out for him.

- Upper Starclan’s concept otherwise is very vague. Their goals seem to be to ensure the continuation of the clans, which ensures their growth and power, but power for what reason? idk what to do with that

Since the Broken Code arc isn’t complete at this time I’m not sure what direction I wanna take for either Fading or Not Fading Starclan to explain Starclan’s disappearance or Ashfur’s ability to mess with other spirits... perhaps in the Fading version, Ashfur is the one Lower Starclan cat to discover Upper Starclan and figures out how to tap into his full spiritual ability before shedding his mortal personality and uses this to cause chaos. idk what to say for Not Fading rn tho

#warriorcats #warrior cats #warrior cats headcanon #warrior cats au #starclan #power of three #omen of the stars #the broken code

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jaigeye · 3 years

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DEATH & DYING: Mandalorian Funerary Practices, Burial, Remembrance & Grieving

"Mando'ade usually bury in mass graves anyway. We all become part of the manda. We don't need a headstone." / "Collective consciousness. Oversoul. We don't do heaven." ―Mirta Gev

In ancient Mandalorian religion: “Arasuum is the god of decadence and idle consumption, battled in the creation myth in the War of Life and Death by Kad Ha’rangir, the destroyer god of change and growth, a force of creative destruction. If to live is to adapt, then something that remains forever, eternal, must be constantly adapting, never stagnating. To remain the same is to perish.”

Metaphysical Understanding of Life & Afterlife

Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la: “Not gone, merely marching far away.” - (Tribute to a dead comrade.)

This struggle between idleness and change was reflected in the ancient Mandalorian belief in the afterlife: existing as a plane of spiritual energy in constant conflict between stagnation and growth, every Mandalorian who perished was believed to join the army of the afterlife, defending their families that dwelled in the eternal, peaceful homestead. Mandalorians believed that this home beyond death was the only place they could truly reach a non-transitory existence.

The ancient gods were largely forgotten in contemporary times.

The concept of a literal afterlife waned, in favor of a belief in the Manda. The Manda was described as an oversoul, a collective consciousness, and the very essence of being Mandalorian.

To join with the Manda after death, a Mandalorian was required to be knowledgeable of their culture, and practice its tenets in their daily lives.

Practices: Funeral rites, Burial, & Cremation

Cremation:

The Mandalorian "kote kyr'am" or glory death was an event where Mandalorians honor their fallen warriors who died facing Jedi, or impossible odds.

This was done to ensure that their warrior’s spirit may join their ancestors. The body was burned on an elevated pyre.

Clan members would shout war-cries to the sky, and speak loudly of the dead’s great feats in life. This goodbye ceremony was a night of mournful celebration; drunken feasting, and brawling, was common. Telling stories about the deceased’s life was important.

It doesn’t matter what side a Mandalorian was fighting on, friend or foe; if one died in battle, they were due a warrior’s funeral.

Ashes are scattered & not kept.

Burial:

Mandalorians are pragmatic people. On Mandalore, most Mandalorians were buried as simply as possible within mass graves that had no markers.

Private, single-plot burials for the dead are uncommon.

Exceptions and Outliers:

Among nomadic communities of Mandalorians, those currently fighting a war, or those who live on planets unsuitable to the practice of mass burial, cremation may be the accepted burial method even if one did not die in battle. Sustaining a cemetery and transporting corpses en masse can present a great challenge.

Some highly placed individuals, such as Mand'alor, were offered the option of having a marked grave.

Boba Fett wished to just set the Slave I on autopilot and allow the vessel, carrying his body, to drift in space. After removing his father's remains from Geonosis, Boba Fett buried them on Mandalore.

A notable exception: “The helmet [of Fenn Shysa] was all he’d brought back. It was an apt memorial for a populist leader, to be commemorated in the same way as any ordinary Mandalorian.” - His helmet was displayed on a pedestal.

Philosophical Understanding of Death, Grieving & Remembrance

Philosophy:

Death is another step in the process of life. For those left behind, it offers the chance for change, growth, and adaptation to life without your loved one. For the dead, it is but another step in the path.

Remembrance:

"The armor I wear is five hundred years old. I reforged it to my liking, but the battles, the history, the blood all lives within it. And the same goes for every Mandalorian." "This armor is part of our identity. It makes us Mandalorians who we are." ―Sabine and Alrich Wren

The dead’s possessions, often their armor, are kept in memorial. If a full set of armor couldn't be recovered, it was commonplace to retrieve smaller parts such as helmets, gloves, or plates instead.

Beskar’gam is passed down bilineally. (A bilineal system is one in which two lines of descent, matrilineal and patrilineal, are both socially significant.)

Possessions have value. Jedi may value the metaphysical qualities of the universe, but Mandalorians see the physical as significant. The armor is a part of you. To pass down a part of you is a way to live on forever.

Even if the Beskar itself is melted down and reforged, the metal itself does not lose the power of its inheritance.

Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum. “I'm still alive, but you are dead. I remember you, so you are eternal.” [Followed by repetition of loved ones' names.]

It was a Mandalorian custom to recite the names of loved ones and friends who have passed each night before sleep. This was a means of keeping their memory alive.

The uncertainty of life meant that most Mandalorians celebrated the time they had at every opportunity, taking part in communal singing, drinking, and enjoying time with family.

The concept of aay'han was a Mandalorian term that encompassed the joy of time spent with loved ones while remembering those who were no longer among the living, relatively similar to the Basic term "bittersweet".

Headcanons & Conclusions

Death is not demeaning - is not shameful.

Despair is something one must look in the eye.

In death, you become one with the masses. Whether cremated or buried in a mass plot, you become nameless, faceless. You don’t get a “Here lies...a good mother and friend..”. This is part of the point.

By giving descendants your Beskar, you will be remembered as a protector. They will be safe, thanks partially to you. This is enough.

The meaning of life is that it ends. Death is a creative motivator. What better way to avoid stagnation than to live while you can?

The living may get a tattoo or engrave a symbol on their Beskar that was important to the deceased, to remember them by.

The Mass Graves might be something more akin to an underground catacomb, so more can be added over time.

Children are buried with the same gravity and respect as Mand’alors and war heroes.

Death is known. It is respected and known as an arduous mental, physical, and emotional process, both for those who succumb to it and those left to remember. Among Mandalorians-- to whom arasuum, the act of never adapting, is a sort of spiritual death-- physical death is not the end, only another part of growing and changing.

- Any Mandalorian would be perfectly willing to ask, and be asked, what their own wishes for death are. Depending on their clan, home planet (or lack of) and condition of their life, they may prefer a certain type of burial or have specific requests. It’s not embarrassing or scary.

- Mandalorians do not swaddle the grieving in their sadness. They are allowed to feel it powerfully, vividly, but they are also given tasks-- expectations -- rituals and practices to follow, so they might find a sense of purpose in death.

- They do not believe in the practice of beautifying a body for viewing. The mere idea of modern American standards of burial being applied to Mandalorian corpses would most likely be seen as deeply sacrilegious! Using embalming methods and protective caskets would be seen as a futile attempt to ignore the reality- it would be seen as an act of avoidance.

- Mandalorian clans often gather around the dead to wash, dress, and speak to them before they are taken away to be buried or cremated. This process can take anywhere from hours to weeks. (Corpses are not an inherent health threat. They would know this.) Spending time with the body is powerful and helps to process grief. They do not see the body as a cursed, diseased object, but a vessel that once held their loved one.

People spend time with their mothers, their brothers in war, their children. One might spend time brushing the deceased’s hair, telling them stories.

Sociologically, Mandalorians are staunch believers in the idea that it takes a village to raise a child. They take it quite literally. A neighbor, clan member or acquaintances death may be taken just as seriously as the loss of a very close loved one.

On the war-torn planet of Mandalore, where even before the purges the unwelcoming, life-resistant desert overtook the landscape, the only places with much lush greenery are the areas that are fertilized by the mass graves of Mandalorian people. These places are regarded with gratitude and to damage them or wage fights in them is seen as an unforgivable act. Death can be restorative.

(anything above headcanons & conclusions is canon, all below is my own interpretation)

material i reference here:

Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice

Legacy of the Force: Revelation

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Knights of the Fallen Empire

General EU/SW Legends

Wookiepedia

Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

#death tw #dying tw #funeral tw #burial tw #cremation tw #hi.#sw meta #mandalorians #the mandalorian #mandalorian culture #i want to be clear i just love this topic!!!!#i did NOT glean any of this information from any other existing cultures #i'd like to note however that the funeral pyre - which i picked up straight from #existing mando lore -- derives from viking..roman...hindu..and sikh burial practices #also among jains and buddhists.#anything above the headcanons and conclusions comes straight from canon #but id be happy to edit if theres something harmful either in my interpretation #or in canon notes that would be better left unmentioned altered or rephrased #this is mostly just me going wild about my interest in star wars + mandos + death LOL #but yes. enjoy. thank you #babygirl i will subject you to my interests #watch this get 3 notes like queen your interests are scaring the hoes

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ashley-face · 3 years

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Note: For you, baby birds - an Egon Spengler x fem!reader (bordering fem!OC) multi-chapter fic that no one asked for, but I started typing out the moment Ghostbusters: Afterlife revived my hyperfixation for the first time since the 2016 film came out.

I wanted to play around with different source material that mentioned Ray Stantz having siblings (mostly because Egon and he are god-tier comfort characters. We’ll see if I’m in a really silly goofy mood; I might do a Ray x reader one-shot, too), namely basing a lot of the reader’s backstory on Ray’s sister Jean from the novels. I mean, a polyamorous pansexual journalist? Please. So, used that as the foundation, then took a metric fuckton of artistic license for the rest. Drop me a comment if you like it. :)

Not beta’d ‘cause we’re gonna live forever - let’s goooo! (and happy holidays!)

Rating for this chapter: Teen

Warnings for this chapter: Some strong language, OCs, minor angst/mention of childhood trauma, my desperate need to pretend like I know diddly about physics and a criminal lack of our Egie himself.

Already Dreaming | Chapter 1

Roman author Pliny the Younger claimed the specter of an old man with a long beard and rattling chains was haunting his house in Athens like a proto-Jacob Marley coming to torment Ebenezer Scrooge.

In 856 A.D. the first ever poltergeist was reported tormenting a German family in their farmhouse by throwing stones and starting fires.

Several millennia later Einstein posited that since all energy of the universe is constant and that it can neither be created nor destroyed - it can only be changed from one form to another - what happens to that energy when we die?

The energy in our bodies that releases in the form of heat goes into the wild animals that eat us, worms that digest the dirt we decompose in, and the roots of plants that absorb the nutrients we’ve left behind. During cremation energy in our bodies merely releases in the form of heat and light.

But what about those little ghosts Wolfgang Pauli theorized about? Those invisible neutrinos that once never existed in the realm of particle physics, and that he claimed could conserve energy throughout the beta decay process? Where does that energy go? How is it metered?

Why are we so reluctant to give credence to existence after death in physics?

Will we ever fully quantify the universe to its smallest components using our limited resources for testing fundamental particles at such a large scale, casting an enormous net to trap a fairyfly?

“The poet William Blake wrote, ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an Hour’,” you gasped, unable to contain yourself as your brother Ray eagerly awaited your response, 20 July 1956 issue of Scientific in his hand and a school print out of “Auguries of Innocence” in yours.

Ray laughed, elated that you were employing critical reading of a totally different material to show proof you had understood what he had been talking about, and at the tender age of 13 years old. He rested his chin in his palm, listening with rapt attention.

Carl, the oldest of you three, had thankfully departed for basic military training (to the dismay of your parents and your relief.)

It had been so long since you could talk to Ray like this without Carl’s constant snide remarks sprinkled in. You were free to wax poetic about prose and protons, wraiths and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Ray knew you, understood your quirks better than your own mother did. You weren’t "difficult” to him, you were his sister and he would always protect you.

Especially after your father, one of Islip’s beloved general practitioners, tested you for hypoglycemia and anemia when you showed symptoms of hypotension, bouts of vertigo and arrhythmia.

The weekend that Carl temporarily moved back to your parents after graduating from boot camp he found you in your room on your knees, swaying. You were clutching Ray’s old Dopey Dog stuffed animal in a death grip.

“Pops!” Carl shouted, dropping next to you, clueless as to what to do.

You immediately snapped out of your trance-like state, a deer in headlights and only a bit worse for wear, unable to recall when or why you had gone into the attic to grab a toy you hadn't touched in ages.

Ray, having heard Cal, rushed into the bedroom and joined you on the floor, taking your wrist so he could check your pulse like dad had taught him.

“I’m okay Sunshine," you soothed, then assured your oldest brother earnestly. "Really Carl, I just get low blood pressure sometimes."

Carl's brow furrowed, frustration mounting as he became more aware at how out of the loop he'd been, squashing a writhing resentment that festered under his ribcage.

Soon you started to daydream and disassociate constantly. Ray ruled out low blood pressure and suspected that the incidents were brought on by remnants of forgotten dreams being triggered by outward stimuli when awake - a familiar sight, sound, smell. Déjà vu. He’d be able to sense it, recognizing a particular far-off look you’d get, and acted as a tether to bring you back to earth. If anyone gave you grief or called you “space cadet” he’d gently put them in their place.

Ray was a Stantz, after all, and that name carried a certain reputation, no matter his uncanny resemblance to a large teddy bear. Carl had been a star quarterback (as well as a bully), simultaneously adored and feared grades 7-12, but Ray had not been on any sports teams. Yet he still towered over a good portion of his peers, broad shouldered and strong from tinkering in all manner of electronics, heavy equipment and car work. He was also unfathomably kind. The sort of kind that brought to mind, “Demons run when a good man goes to war.”

To make up for his absence Carl showed you how to shoot a rifle (badly), and tried to teach you how to perform basic maintenance on pedestrian vehicles, just like he had with Ray. You watched him work underneath the chassis of your father’s old 1960 Chevy C10 while holding an oil pan, providing the correct tools as needed. It was stilted and a bit awkward, but an attempt none-the-less.

Where Carl was impatient and hated too many questions Ray explained the science that went into a modern combustion engine no differently than your father would tell you a bedtime story, drawing rough figures on paper, thrilled to have such a captive audience.

The oldest Stantz sibling didn’t stick around too much longer once he got into the U.S. Airforce Academy, and not a moment too soon. More often than not he’d stumble in late three sheets to the wind drunk, picking fights with your father.

Mom always wrapped her robe tight, shuffled on her house slippers, fixed him the blackest cup of coffee a human could consume without it becoming sludge, and would let him unload. Her side of the family, the MacMillans, did not let bad blood come between them.

Carl coldly shrugging off a hug from either you or Ray before climbing into dad’s car on his way to the airport is the last you see of him for a while, leaving a void.

You were Ray’s shadow throughout your formative years as he encouraged your rants about Pablo Neruda’s changing writing style or cryptozoology being labeled a pseudoscience, the implications of a soul, the composition of the spirit. He’d sneak you out in the middle of the night, tromping through wet farmland in oversized wellies and carrying heavy flashlights to unveil the Great Mysteries, owing that the Great Mysteries were located in the backwoods of Long Island.

At some point you ended up wrangling a few neighborhood kids around your age to join the cause.

They became your best friends and Ray dubbed you the Scooby Doo gang.

Victoria Ertl, the Daphne Blake of the group, wanted for nothing. Her father worked for an up-and-coming computer sales company by the name of Apple Computer, Inc. Her mother frequently went missing or excused herself to “go take a nap”, leaving Vicky to her own devices. Those devices being extraterrestrials and witchcraft.

Christine Marcu, who shared the unofficial title of Velma Dinkley with you, bothered Ray about invention ideas and had a particular affinity for spirit photography.

Tony Bacheldor turned out to be an odd combination of Fred Jones, Shaggy Rogers and Scooby as despite being highly intelligent his fervent desire to explore the unknown was usually outweighed by the fact that he suffered from acute nyctophobia. He also had a voracious appetite and attained infamy for eating 8 Vienna hot dogs (buns included) in one sitting.

The event was entered into a shared notebook utilized for miscellaneous experiments, simply titled 8TH WONDER OF THE WORLD(?).

Ray claimed he saw himself more as an amalgamation of all five, but you weren’t convinced - he was Fred Jones.

As you reached puberty your “episodes” were less and less frequent, unofficially filed under “unsolved” to your friends’ disappointment, chomping at the bit to see you in action for themselves.

A fateful trip to Queen of All Saints Cemetery irrevocably changed that.

Ray got a tip from a fellow paranormal aficionado about a ghost sighting there. Vicky, Chrissy and Tony meet you at the Railroad Ave entrance to sneak through an unrepaired part of the dilapidated fence.

Fog obscured the pathways that wound through the grounds. Chrissy switched on a headlamp she had found while dumpster diving for parts, signally for you to do the same with yours, then she huddled with Ray to verify the exact coordinates of the sighting.

"I will excommunicate you if your 'reliable source' is Sagar," Chrissy slapped a tree branch out of her way, heading off the gravel paths to a particular cluster of headstones. "He hasn’t paid me back the money that I lent him to buy the newest issue of Captain Steel. Stupid jerk."

Ray pouted, fiddling with a contraption he’d brought to assist them.

"Damn, I'd meant to pick that up for myself today."

Tony took great joy in debating Ray about Superman being a superior hero to Captain Steel and almost butted in. You subtly motioned for him to not interfere.

Chrissy's button nose scrunched in irritation, but Ray missed it and persevered with his lament.

"What a cliffhanger, too! Dr. Destructor was just about to--"

"Knock your block off if you don't zip it," Chrissy bared her teeth, braces flashing.

Vicky diffused the situation by leaning over to Ray, overexaggerating her interest. "Is that an Atari controller?"

Bloodshed successfully avoided, Ray held up the controller-esque item in question, "Good eye, Vicky! It’s a modified electron capture detector, a device for detecting atoms and molecules in gas. Tried tweaking one of the multiplayer ones for a Sears Tele-Games Super-Pong IV console ‘cause it helps make finer adjustments for picking up heat signatures or cold spots--"

He rambled and the others hung on to his every word. Soldering the reconfigured wiring was no easy task, but--

Your vision went fuzzy around the edges, a spike of panic lancing through your stomach as the fog circling everyone crawled along the dirt, through the dark, alive. Tendrils coiled up Ray’s thigh and you blinked rapidly to dispel the hallucination.

Oh my god, oh-my-god, is this real? I’ve never been lucid like this before during an episode. Je-sus, Y/N, be rational, you spaz. It’s an actual ghost and-

You struggled to warn the others, paralyzed and powerless like a waking nightmare. Run!

A faint figure formed in the mist, ethereal and evocative; a middle-aged woman in a Gilded Age gown staring at you, and you become fully cognizant that no one else can see her as she gets closer and closer. Suddenly you could hear her, slipping into the air, into your lungs, through your consciousness, an echo chamber of noise.

"Do not be frightened, I mean you no harm. I'm here as a warning, dear girl, and I must be brief.”

"Be not afraid," said the angel that was pure eldritch terror. Absolutely passed frightened and straight into pants-pissing hysterics, but that’s fine.

Ice ran through your veins, but you pushed on. You have to.

A warning? A warning about what? You concentrated, praying she heard you. “What is your name, ma’am?”

The apparition smiled sadly in acknowledgement, “My name is Veleda. At the turn of the 20th century a selfish, wicked man and his foolish sycophants attempted to knock on Hell’s Gate. They used myself and others like us to usher in an era of gods. His insidious plans have been unfolding long since after his death, beyond the veil, and–”

She was gone - vanished without a trace. The fog dissipated as swiftly as it came.

You collapsed like an unstrung marionette, dropping limply to the grass.

The stars sparkled blindingly without light pollution above you, but the view was obscured by Ray as he pulled you between his legs, his chest a grounding presence at your back, frantically whispering, “breathe in 1-2-3, exhale 1-2-3.” Chrissy, Vicky and Tony joined in a circle around him, gasping as if they’ve overexerted themselves.

Wait, you’d stopped breathing? So you gulp in oxygen, heaving and clutching Ray’s knee. Breathe in 1-2-3, exhale 1-2-3.

“Y/N, we strongly believe you were under some sort of possession from a free floating entity,” Ray recited from Spate’s Catalog of Nameless Horrors for his own benefit so he wouldn’t unravel, hiding in the nape of your neck to block out the terrifying image of your limbs seizing in a rictus that he could only assume was painful.

Tony leaned back, heart rate gradually returning to normal, propped against Vicky whilst Chrissy lay half-sprawled in her lap. “Shit. Goddamn it,” he shakily wiped sweat from his brow. “This is what we wanted. What I wanted...To discover what goes bump in the night. To face my fears. But I…I thought...”

"It'd be like Laurel and Hardy's A Haunting We Will Go?" Vicky barked out a laugh, then groaning at the irony. "Not that we’d have to wrangle her to the ground and make sure she didn't swallow her tongue?"

Ray stopped matching your breaths once you could confidently resume on your own and said sincerely, “Hey, don't beat yourself up. We do this for for anyone that has ever been doubted and taken for granted in what they believe in, or what they’ve been through. We want them to know that we're ready to believe them. If it's too much, you tried. That's more than I can say about…a lot of people.”

At home you plead your case to Ray as he took your vitals, dad’s medical bag at his feet. You’re convinced that your parents will keep you apart if they found out about what you dubbed “Graveyardgate”. You'd been running around playing supernatural detective of your own volition and beating himself up wouldn't solve anything.

Ray conceded, only because you agreed to research further into your situation together. And though you both barely fit in your full size bed you asked him to stay.

He does.

Carolyn and Daniel Stantz don’t discourage your adventures owing Ray kept his promise. Your mother readily quizzed you both in the kitchen about the differences between gray aliens and little green men as she tasked you with chopping root vegetables for her great-grandmother’s neeps and tatties recipe. And your father may have been a small town doctor, but his medical zines were a proverbial kindle to the fire, fueling your fascination with the human body.

They nurtured Ray’s natural aptitude and excitement in whatever subject he applied himself to (math was another matter entirely - pairing mathematical problems to the correct formula was his kryptonite) from infancy, and in turn they made sure you received the same.

Unfortunately, a handful of cousins labeled him and you as the black sheep of the family. Aunt Lois, a matriarchal figure on the Stantz’s side, barred each person who brought such slander up in front of her from receiving her delicious Christmas korolevsky cake and she sent Ray a detailed account of the occult called Tobin’s Spirit Guide.

As the inevitable influx of college placement tests and applications begin to take Ray away from you in his last two years of high school you face the music head-on. You had mentally prepared yourself for him leaving the nest - he was destined to do something great for humanity.

It was cruel to be greedy.

During your sophomore year you started a book club with you as president, Tony as vice president, plus Vicky and Chrissy as treasurer and time keeper respectively.

This is a temporary substitute for your paranormal escapades. “R & D” as Tony called it. Better to be safe than needing an exorcist.

Miss Scarlet, who was gracious enough to allow you the use of her English room, straddled her desk chair backwards at the first meeting and asked point blank if this was a coverup for a ghost and monster hunters club.

Vicky shook out her curls, feigning aloofness, “I can neither confirm nor deny such an accusation Miss Scarlet.”

Miss Scarlet turned into a silent benefactor and sometimes provided great research material to show her support.

Eventually the club spiraled into a Ray Stantz fan club the second Vicky and Chrissy started to see boys as not just boys, or friends, but boy-friends. You and Tony (who firmly established himself as the "no socio-sexual contact or reactions" X on the Kinsey Scale) were glad that Ray was graduating.

Attraction and hormones were a double-edged sword.

However, you make the most of the girls’ adolescent infatuation by…well, pitting them against each other.

For important behavior analyses, of course.

Vicky and Chrissy cottoned on to your scheme and refused to speak to you or Tony for 48 hours. Hour 54 they approached you, swearing you to secrecy, and pursued other romantic prospects.

—

One day, during a gathering for your Aunt Lois’s birthday in her eclectic Victorian home, the same conservative and catholic side of your relatives who did not think highly of you reprimanded your parents for Ray’s wayward thinking and its influence on you over dinner.

No one let you interject, holier-than-thou cousin Gav suggesting Ray join a seminary to answer life’s mysteries with the most reliable source mankind could ever need.

The Bible.

Oh great, goodbye Roman Catholicism, hello full-fledged 17th century Puritanical radicalism. They would’ve burned me at the stake.

Carl turned to his fiancée (a mousey, subservient woman named Mary-Lou he’d found who-knows-where - you curbed the urge to slip her a note asking if their engagement was a result of Stockholm syndrome - blink twice for no, scream for yes) and sneered that Ray hadn’t been disciplined enough, a mistake that would bite him in the ass.

Silence followed.

Ray calmly laid his silverware down and advised if anyone had a problem with him they could hash this out some other time. Today was meant for celebrating Aunt Lois and everybody owed her, your parents and you an apology.

I cannot imagine how cathartic that felt. You had to bite your lip to keep from losing your shit at the collective wave of shame that went around the room, you and Aunt Lois sharing a look across the table whilst she sipped her merlot, hiding a coquettish grin.

Of course Carl had to get in the last word, baiting Ray on the sidewalk as you tried to go your separate ways afterwards. Your mom sighed, coming between her sons to keep the peace.

“You don’t give a flying fuck about me or anyone else! You’re all insane and you live in a house of horrors!” Carl roared.

The moment he stepped forward and insinuated violence toward your mother an uncharacteristic surge of raw anger overcame you, consumed you, and you sent all six and a half feet, 230 pounds of Carl stumbling.

Your dad and Ray strongarmed Carl and Mary-Lou to the curb, hailing them a cab. Daniel Stantz stated in no uncertain terms that they were not welcome in his home until Carl checked himself into anger management or rehab, trembling from residual fear of finally standing up to his own flesh and blood.

Realistically, even if he was unsteady from drinking all evening, you should not be able to exert enough force to push him, adrenaline notwithstanding.

Ray whispered your name, cupping your tear-stained cheeks as impotent rage was replaced with remorse.

You wanted to love him. You wanted him to love you. Why was Carl such an asshole? Why was everyone against you?

Carl and Mary-Lou got into the taxi - Carolyn Stantz watched the car set off with profound sadness, heartbroken that she had failed her firstborn.

The family did what they could to erase the events of that evening and the toxicity that surrounded it.

However, to everyone’s astonishment, Ray did apply to the Union Theological Seminary alongside the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University at the same time that he applied for MIT’s School of Engineering and the California Institute of Technology.

Of course he got into all of them and chose Columbia.

On the day Ray left for university, eyes bright like a G dwarf star and full of potential, he handed you his well worn copies of Phantasms of the Living and Tobin’s Spirit Guide - you nearly refused them, likening the gesture to him breaking off a piece of his incandescence.

Incidentally, his seminary studies were cut short. Ray rang home to tell you that even if he dropped out (you suspected the seminary asked him to leave) he had learned quite a lot and found a profound intersection between science, spiritualism and religion.

Your fingers tangled in the living room phone cord, disregarding how expensive the bill was going to be as you chatted to him until your body begged for sleep.

Yup, Raymond Francis Stantz was going to be extraordinary and you couldn’t wait.

_____

1978 April

It’s spring break of your senior year and as luck would have it Ray’s spring break is over. Vicky went on vacation to the Bahamas, Chrissy would be back from visiting her bună midweek and Tony went AWOL at a convention in Texas. You convinced your parents that Ray being a train ride away, and you being a responsible 17-year-old with a part-time job to purchase a ticket for said train ride, you should be allowed to pay him a surprise (unchaperoned) visit.

Daniel sighed at his desk, knowing you would not be denied, and ruffled your hair affectionately. You were smart, generally disliked most people, and would avoid strangers. There was no reason to worry.

So you threw a few favorite books into a messenger bag alongside your amateur star charts of Long Island and dad's pocket transistor, then walked to the Central Islip train stop. You boarded with your thoughts whirring and a soft soundtrack of rock playing, making the commute downtown fly by.

Arriving at Penn Station was akin to stepping into a macrocosm totally separate from the rest of New York - you had never been there by yourself outside of trips with your parents to see a couple of Broadway shows, Christmas tree lightings and museums, so your gaze bounced around in awe as you headed to the subway for the remaining leg of the journey, everyone a swarm of intensity like vibrating molecules. Once you get off at 116th St and head upstairs you are jostled so hard by a hasty business woman you start to fall, but keep your balance and recover, freezing when you spot the building in front of you.

Whoa, there it is. Columbia University, in all its Roman classical style glory. A possible peak into your future.

You crossed the street as ELO’s Mr. Blue Sky filtered out from your transistor, somehow not drowned out by the general din of the city. A crisp wind encourages you to hurry.

The steps to where Ray claimed to have a post-lecture smoke are mostly people-free, so you hunkered down for, per your watch, about 40 minutes. The time passed uneventfully as you got lost within The Haunting of Hill House.

“Y/N!” a cheerful, welcoming voice disturbed Eleanor Vance as she reminisced on childhood memories about encountering a poltergeist.

Ray had spotted you first, elated at your unexpected presence, leaving the lecture hall with someone matching his stride. An unlit cigarette is tucked back behind his ear.

You scrambled up to throw your arms around him, melting into his powerful embrace and the smoky scent that permeated his leather jacket. You could finally, properly breathe again and you whispered, “Surprise, Sunshine.”

His smile widened as he pulled away to introduce you to his friend Peter Venkman, a psychology major.

“Sunshine, what a cute nickname,” Peter teased, hazel eyes sparkling with simultaneous blackmail fueled glee and a hint of genuine amusement, then he snapped his fingers, “Because he’s Ray! A ray of sunshine!”

Peter is the type of guy who perpetually exudes an aura of “butter wouldn't melt in his mouth”, which you find out quite early on is true, only because butter wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near it.

There’s no reason to feel embarrassed about the endearment you’ve used for Ray since you were a kid, and your brother isn’t flustered by Peter’s remark as he explained the meaning of it in correlation to your passion for astrophysics.

You still feel your cheeks flush all the same.

Peter is relatively harmless and his teasing is unlike the sort of mocking or disingenuousness you faced in the past. But your skin still feels too tight and you’re unsure how you should handle this sort of attention.

Romance wasn’t a complete stranger to you outside of stories, but unlike Vicky and Chrissy, you had turned down admirers throughout high school (excluding a platonic date with Tony to senior prom). Thus, engaging with professional lotharios like Peter was definitely out of your wheelhouse. In a moment of panic you compare the situation to being in a debate and try to match his energy in hopes that it’ll throw him off.

“Tell me Venkman, do you want to major in psychology to have a better grasp of the conscious and unconscious phenomena, or are you going tens of thousands of dollars into debt so you can be the one to answer Freud’s most pertinent question: ‘what do women want’?”

Ray’s brows shot into his hairline as he glanced at the other young man.

Peter's posture relaxed, hands shoved further into his jean pockets and lips turned up in a satisfied expression. How was it you got the inkling that you’d passed some sort of test and now he seemed handsome without the roguish façade?

“Thank God, I was dreading you being Francis's mini me. She’s got moxie.”

Ugh. Moxie? Are you Al Capone? Referring to you in the third person made you scoff in disdain, and then annoyance, “I refuse to believe you call him Francis like I call him Sunshine.”

“To be fair I also call him Francine. Gotta switch it up a bit, lest the honeymoon phase of our budding relationship grow stale.”

The honest confusion that puckered Ray’s lips as he lit his previously abandoned cigarette was comical. The soft utterance of, “we’re in a relationship?” that succeeded it was legendary.

—

1978 September

If your relatives were the betting type they would have put money down on your following in Ray’s footsteps - and they would've been half right, as you were accepted into Columbia University's brand new computer science undergraduate course with the intention to pursue a masters in journalism.

You are assigned to the ancient dormitories of Furnald Hall on the 10th floor. It’s a double suite and your roommate’s name is Azucena Olvera.

On move-in day your dad insisted on dragging your sparse luggage filled with hand-me-down clothes and texts into the shoebox-sized space, ignoring your protests. Your mom ladened you with homemade sweets.

They can’t stay long as traffic will be abysmal getting back and your mother is forced to drag your father out before you have more vitamin supplements to your name than sense.

It turned out your roommate was there. Her bedroom door is open and you find her black-clad form curled up on a twin sized bed, buried in a novel you'd learned about a year or so ago called Interview with a Vampire. After introducing yourself you inquired about the premise, to which she regarded you blankly for a beat, mumbling it was pretty self-explanatory by the title.

Undeterred by her sarcasm you admit to being fascinated by the concept of some no name reporter taking a chance on such a strange tip, offering to lend her Carmilla as a trade when she was done. Azucena smirked as you started to unpack, initiating light conversation about how general classes will go, somehow segueing to the West Virginia Mothman, telling her about your friends back home and where they’ve gone to study or work.

You looked down at your watch - 7:46PM. Ray called before mom and dad dropped you off, saying he was touching base with a professor and would meet you in front of the dorms to treat you to "the best Chinese on the northeast coast" at 7:30PM. You tossed on a windbreaker, snagged An Elementary Treatise on the Differential and Integral Calculus, mom’s snacks, nearly forgot your keys (priorities), bounded down a set of precarious stairs and burst outside in record time.

Ray just about spit his cigarette out at your grand entrance (or exit, really), coughing and chuckling. "Did you think we were gonna leave without you?"

You beamed at him, noticing that Peter was there and not out with his flavor of the week.

This goofball. He'd be so smug if he knew how much he'd grown on you.

Peter winked your way. "You're the lady of the hour, kid, and we would've just sent Spengs here to fetch ya. He's all about the history of some sketchy secret tunnels in the basement of this place. Which are dime a dozen in the city, but what do I know? I’m just a pretty face."

The aforementioned "Spengs” was what some may describe as an elongated version of Poindexter from Felix the Cat; the epitome of an academic or caricature of a genius scientist. Tall, lean, sensibly dressed, his eyes obscured by a nearby street light reflecting off his glasses. You easily imagined him in a pristine white lab coat, holding a beaker overflowing with some dubious concoction.

But as he approached you, posture stiff and hand outstretched to perform the globally widespread greeting of introducing oneself via handshake, his attention shifted downwards.

More specifically, to your jacket pocket, where An Elementary Treatise on the Differential and Integral Calculus poked out.

He remembered himself, large hand engulfing yours, fingers warm, chemical rough, but a nice weight as his severe mouth softened and the streetlights finally allowed you a glimpse of umber irises with a bilateral hint of evergreen.

"Dr. Egon Spengler. A pleasure. If you do not mind, after we’ve eaten, I would appreciate hearing your opinion on Babbage's calculations. Are you familiar with Ada Lovelace?"

An effervescent sensation spread from your stomach to your throat, and you know logically that you're not actually turning into bubbling liquid, but your brain has trebuchet logic into a blackhole. The pitch of his voice is so low you wondered if he’s ever used an oscilloscope to measure the Hertz.

You couldn’t help but stare, and it's your turn to remember yourself. The moment lasted a span of minutes, but seemed so much longer, stretched into decades as you replied, star-struck, “Y/N Stantz. The pleasure is all mine. But uh, yes, Ada Lovelace translated parts of Luigi Menabrea’s work on the Analytical Engine and collaborated with Charles Babbage. I apologize, Sun-” you caught Peter and Ray observing the entire interaction with varying degrees of curiosity, “Raymond said he’d met someone else he deeply admired in his field of study, but you’re–prodigious to already have a PhD or a doctorate of some kind. You can’t be much older than us.”

Peter took that as his cue to insert himself back into the conversation, pulling you into a one-armed hug, “Ah yes, our very own savant. Met him in a women and gender studies class he signed up for by mistake ’cause Dr. Spengler left us plebs in the dust testing out of every core curriculum and taking his ‘accelerated sequences’. Degrees are old hat to this guy. Also, kid, did you know they started a new parapsychology program this semester as well?”

No, you didn’t, but you’re pretty sure the question was rhetorical.

“Introducing a parapsychology class is a golden opportunity to capitalize on a niche as hell field. Imagine the funding for graduate research, the accolades. Naturally I thought, ‘I’ll introduce my favorite eggheads to one another so a: my ears stop bleeding, and b: they’ll go feral at the chance of getting in on this, too.’ Bless their nerdy lil’ hearts, they’ve been attached at the hip, to my everlasting regret.”

“That’s only because together we’re on our way to convincing you that the existence of manifestations and apparitions is scientifically viable–” Ray remarked in a sing-song lilt, coming around to your other side.

You snort, well acquainted with the fact that if your brother found anyone that showed a modicum of inquisitiveness in not only anything involving engineering, biology, physics, chemistry, etc, if they ever had a passing thought about the Fermi Paradox, the Arrow of Time, the location of the Ark of the Covenant or how the Nazca Lines were formed, he was in their life like an Alabama tick.

Peter showed genuine interest in psychological phenomena, but his hard stop was Casper the friendly phantom.

Egon headed down 115th St toward this infamous Chinese restaurant Ray recommended, and as the other two men continued to banter he glanced over his shoulder at you.

What the hell happened? Had he experienced the same subtle full-body shiver as you touched? The same sort of pins and needles caused by the compression of nerves, or static generated when cathode ray tubes bathed the inside of a TV with electrons, triggering the front glass to fluoresce and emit an electrical charge?

Out of your peripheral you noticed him flexing the hand you just shook.

You’d accidentally (other times purposefully) shocked plenty of inanimate objects and people, but–

“Ray, you gotta convince Y/N to let me do a full interview about Graveyardgate. She would be the best person to start as a control variable for–”

“Vex-man, I told you that in confidence,” you chastised Peter, introspection put on the backburner. Vex-man was a derogatory moniker you only used when he crossed a line.

Peter squirmed away, ensuring he was no longer within punching distance.

Too late, you groaned internally as Egon fell back to take Peter’s place, his laser focus once again on you.

Despite not enjoying having to discuss it, and despite having just met Egon...these guys might be the best people to talk to about it.

My first day on campus and we’re dabbling in unauthorized behavioral experiments. You turned around and started to walk backwards, gesturing wildly and hamming it up, “Well doc, it was summer of ‘76–”

Peter clucked his tongue at you in mock exasperation for your brattish snark that he was solely responsible for.

Ray rolled his eyes, but internally he was happy you were ready to exorcise a figurative demon - a part of him hated remembering too, even if it had solidified his motivation and purpose to keep doing what he was doing, skeptics and critics be damned.

And Egon.

Egon deadpanned, “I know where Venkman lives. And I work as a coroner part-time.”

“Alright H. H. Holmes, we’re gonna need to unpack that before I end up as a statistic.”

You tripped on uneven concrete, cackling.

#ghostbusters #the real ghostbusters #ghosbusters ii #ray stantz #egon spengler #peter venkman #winston zeddemore #egon spengler x reader #egon spengler x original female character

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ageof9thhouse · 5 years

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Signs in the Eighth House

Just as the number 8, the 8th house is where one’s karma lies. In the broader sense, this karma could be anything, hence the reason for this house to be called “mysterious”. It is not exactly known to the person where their karma comes from or where it is going. Since it is the opposite of the 2nd house, where one’s parents’ love and care for each other is specified, the 8th house symbolises the trigger point which caused that love or relationship in general. Meaning, the sexual and the passionate energy. The 2nd house is the comfort zone of people and the relationship with the tangible environment. Meanwhile the 8th house is the psychology, the relationships between the heart and soul and the karma carried out through the parents. The planet Pluto is the ruler of this house. Pluto, in Greek Mythology, is known as the God of the Underworld, Hades. Hades was the first son of Kronos and the first to be swallowed by him. Together with his siblings they banished their father and with Zeus and Poseidon, they drew lots to see who would rule each realm… Hades got the underworld fittingly as his name means “the unseen one”. He was also known as the God of wealth because all the precious metals buried deep in the earth were in his kingdom. Hades is the ruler of the dead but he isn’t death itself. Thus, while he “drinks tears like wine” he does not kill anyone. He is simply the host of the dead and the torubled souls. His realm is a place of freedom from the pain of the world and his Queen, Persephone offers rebirth and a blessed afterlife. But we all know that he kidnapped her even though she fell in love with him later on (a case of Stockholm Syndrome). Hades, even though one of the more humble of the Gods when he wanted something he made sure he got it. Together with his queen they represent life and death and the cycles of nature —and the 8th house represents the transformations we are bound to go through no matter how painful. In the end we rise from the ashes better and richer (soul-wise) than ever. Self-mastery involves shadow work with your lower drives. If you fail to master this energy, it will master you. In other words, the unconscious will run your life from behind the scenes and work itself out through fate. This often manifests as obsessions and compulsions and events over which you have no conscious control which can be seen in one’s 8th house.

♈︎Aries / Mars in the 8th House:

Aries/Mars here is in his big brother’s house so he does not feel too unwelcome here maybe feels a little clumsy not knowing how to deal with such power all of a sudden. The person with this placement is ever seeking ways of personal transformation. Starting with new projects or just anything new is their superpower. However, not being able to finish those passion projects is the cost of this power. When accepting the fact that chaos is inevitable and control is an illusion the person confronts their inner demons, only then the transformation really happens. Either one of the parents might have Aries in their charts (rising or sun). The karma coming from the parents is for the person to become fearless in the face of the new and taking the lead. After a psychological breakdown, the person is completely anew and fearless to start from fresh. Vengeance though can become the main drive and that is when the person needs to be careful. People with this aspect might attract a lot of Aries or Mars energies into their lives - from these energies, a karmic bond is established good or bad. Obsessions might include proving oneself to be the best at something and forcing other people to do whatever they think is the right thing. When they master the need to be always in control they are able to manifest good things into their lives.

♉︎Taurus / Venus (Day Chart) in the 8th House:

When the opposites fill the other one’s place it puts it out of balance. One’s mission is to maintain the peace which that balance is lacking. Taurus/Venus (Day) in a person’s 8th house may indicate that the superpower of this person is to make others feel comfortable and laid back. They put others at ease. The cost for this power is that the chart owners themselves feel uneasy and disturbed by outside interference constantly. This karma can only be eased down once the person starts to value and secure themselves. People-pleasing is something they are good at but not something that they necessarily should be doing. Since there is no sense of feeling secure or comfortable coming from within these people may obsess over material things in order to feed their starving subconscious. The more these people value things outside of their own being, the more backlash they receive from their inner selves. The karma coming from the parents is for the person to fall truly in love with themselves and care for their own well-being. Maybe as a child, they did not feel worthy of their parents. Perhaps one of the parents had Taurus in their sun or rising and could not manage that energy in its right element and they might also attract a lot of Taurus energy into their relationships - from these energies a karmic bond is established good or bad. However, overdoing this self-love once it is achieved obviously will have its consequences. Laziness and over-indulgence in the good things life has to offer will bite them back later on. When they find a balance between keeping their own peace meanwhile putting others' minds at ease as well, they will master the power of serenity.

♊︎Gemini / Mercury in the 8th House:

With this placement, there is this feeling of the “magician” going back to the tarot cards. A master manifestor once the person appreciates the duality within. In Buddhism, this is called “shunyata” the emptiness of inner and outer dharmas. Nothing can exist without everything else also existing. People with this placement must understand that we exist within a web of relationships and once it is well understood one must not misuse this power otherwise the consequences are hard to overcome. These people are blessed with powerful thoughts but depending on the intention set out through these thoughts their own manifestations can get the best of them. A great deal of cleansing of the subconscious is required for this placement since Mercury is a trickster who loves to challenge its subjects just for the sake of it. There are great power and karma carried through one’s words. These people can have an immense effect on other people’s subconscious as well. Through the exchange of thoughts, they blend with other people and if they did not master this power of theirs they can get lost in those people’s minds. The karma coming from the parents is for the person to watch out what kind of intention they put out to the universe through their interaction with other people. Perhaps one of the parents had Gemini in their sun or rising and could not manage that energy in its right element. People with this placement might also attract a lot of Mercury energy into their relationships - from these energies, a karmic bond is established good or bad. These people also gotta be careful about obsessive thought patterns and delving too deep into the matters. The thing they are most passionate about is certainly understanding the unknown but some things are just simply beyond our comprehension

♋︎Cancer / Moon in the 8th House:

Moon is our mother, sense of security and our ancestors. There is a great deal of karma coming from the person’s past. They are deeply connected to it and they are very curious about it as well. Their power is to build such strong connections with people and giving them their sincerity. The cost of this gift though is the fact that most people they give this nurturing energy to might have had banished them in their life before. There is a great fear of abandonment coming from being too attached to people since they have had been left behind before (perhaps by the mother herself). These people might find the solution in never attaching to people ever again but in fact they must build a strong intuition in order to allow the right people in their lives. Otherwise, a sinister feeling inside will sprout because they do not feel the same warmth coming from other people that they think they themselves expose. Forgiveness is a big theme here. They have to learn to forgive the past and not devolve too much into it. Compassion will be their best friend when it comes to fighting off their inner demons which especially come up when they feel the most vulnerable. The karma coming from the parents is for the person to not treat their emotions as if they are burdens and learn to forgive their past troubles and maybe even the parents themselves. These people should learn to not to obsess over the past. Perhaps one of the parents had Cancer in their sun or rising and could not manage that energy in its right element. People with this placement might also attract a lot of Cancerian energy into their relationships - from these energies, a karmic bond is established good or bad.

♌︎Leo / Sun in the 8th House:

When Apollo comes to give light to a house that wants to stay in the dark, tensions are high. These people may want to keep their own self identity under shadows. Something significant may have had appeared in their childhood which caused the child to grow too soon and as an adult now the child within is suppressed down to the subconscious. Their own psychology is a matter these people are highly interested in understanding. They like to put light on things that are hidden from them even when they are not ready to see things as clearly as they are. They like to think of themselves as strong people who can handle any psychological or emotional burden which they are and it is their power but they tend to push things too far to the point of they can no longer handle the load. They have got to learn to let other people in so that they can ease the heaviness of their own emotional baggage. Once they let the child within to come out and play they are bestowed with very strong creativity and positivity. Free self-expression will be their escape from their own darker demons and allowing themselves to play. These people are obsessed with other people’s talents and the way they carry themselves - but once they let go of their control on emotions and let their joy run free, they will see themselves become just that. The karma coming from the parents is for the person to take care of the child within. Maybe the parents were not the best at allowing the kids to be kids and asked too much of them hence they had to grow up way too early. Perhaps one of the parents had Leo in their sun or rising and could not manage that energy in its right element. People with this placement might also attract a lot of Leo energy into their relationships - from these energies a karmic bond is established good or bad.

♍︎Virgo / Ceres in the 8th House:

Deep within, there is a lot of anxious energy haunting the person of the chart which strives to be recognized. They tend to over-analyze everything that is happening but will most likely keep this to themselves since they do not like to be viewed “concerned” by other people. They are obsessed with solving problems to the point of disturbance in their own psychology. They have immense powers of healing and finding solutions but the cost of this power is an out of control feeling of being uneasy or unsafe. Through meditation and being open to spiritual matters they can ease this feeling but these are highly skeptical and practical people. They tend to stay in their own way of their journey to mindfulness. They are fascinated by other people’s concerns and problems that they tend to forget their own which only makes their personal matters worst. They have great karma when it comes to dealings of allowing things to be and not interfering with them. The karma coming from the parents is for the person to take care of their own well being and consciousness. Perhaps, as a child, they weren’t properly taken care of by their parents and the roles were reversed in a way. They wanted to fix or heal their parents their whole life but maybe did not get the chance to do that so they are passionate about doing this for other people. One of the parents might have Virgo as their sun or rising sign and these people tend to attract a lot of Virgo energy into their relationships for them to learn karmic lessons.

♎︎Libra / Venus (Night Chart) in the 8th House:

People with this placement have got a lot of subtle but potent influence on other people through one on one interactions. They have the power of attracting anyone into their lives and easing their emotional burdens as well. The cost of this superpower though is that if they are not careful with their intentions about the core reason why they want to have an influence on this particular person they might take on their bad karma as their own and obviously no one wants that. Each relationship transforms the person for the better but sometimes the worst. They might feel an intense bond with almost everybody in their lives and this will take a toll on them psychologically. They are also likely to have people obsess over them to point of claiming ownership over them. And another theme with an obsession with these people is that they themselves might obsess over being liked by everyone. They are passionate about peace and harmony and are willing to do anything in order to maintain it even if it means sacrificing one’s free will. The karma coming from the parents is for the person to practice and teach good manners and bring harmony into relationships. Perhaps, the parents were in an inharmonious relationship in which the two fought a lot without ever trying to bring peace into the situation between them. One of the parents might have Libra as their sun or rising sign and these people tend to attract a lot of Venusian energy into their relationships for them to learn karmic lessons.

♏︎Scorpio / Pluto in the 8th House:

The lord of the underworld here is in his full power and in the comfort of his home he is not willing to hold anything back. Scorpio is in search of emotional power and the mysteries of life and death. This cycle between the two is neither good or bad, - it’s the part of nature that demands change and evolution. And the biggest thing with Hades’s character is that no matter what you cannot negotiate with him. The biggest karmic lesson with this placement is to surrender. These people’s power is about using their soul’s energy to transform the self through a confrontation with the powers of the unconscious. The goal is to overcome death and dissolution and avoid falling back into chaos and unconsciousness. Not the easiest of the tasks but the rewards are definitely worth it as Hades is also the Lord of the riches. To enter the darkness and heal the split in your psyche – the wound at the heart of being human – the pain of being conscious is the lesson one taken over from their parents. Perhaps, the parents were in denial of their subconscious’ scream for help and kept their demons hidden away which only caused them to go down a road of spiral. One of the parents might have Scorpio as their sun or rising sign and the chart owners tens to attract a lot of Scorpio energy into their relationships for them to learn their karmic lessons.

♐︎Sagittarius / Jupiter in the 8th House:

The nature of Sagittarius is to be free and in this placement that is the request from the chart owner’s psychology. These are very passionate people who are the rulers of their own territories. They have the gift to find their way to enlightenment and higher knowledge of the truth once they open up their horizons. The biggest karma for them is that it is hard for them to open their minds to things but once they do they are ready to be fired into the future. They are obsessed with the idea of living life to its fullest but there is a tendency to overdo it. Too much of the unrealistic optimism results in facing the harsh reality of the world which leads them to a dark place where they feel trapped within their own minds. They tend to curse their own fate and shun the universe whenever their high expectations are not met. They have to come in peace with the reality of being human in an imperfect world. But the pain of the wound creates wisdom if they can accept and work with it. The karma coming from the parents is for the person to discover the truth of a human’s immortal soul that releases us from the wheel of birth and death – the quest for enlightenment. Perhaps the chart owner comes from a lineage of teachers who couldn’t finish this task. One of the parents might have Sagittarius as their sun or rising sign and these people tend to attract a lot of Sagittarius energy into their relationships for them to learn karmic lessons. For them to free themselves from their emotional burdens they need to open their minds up and accept the good and the bad universe has to offer and offer help to others to learn their lessons.

♑︎Capricorn / Saturn in the 8th House:

When the sign of harsh lessons and the house of karmic lessons unite their powers the person with the placement meant to go through a lot but in the end, they come out of this struggle of perfecting a human as a dextrous being. The native goes through a lot of challenges which require self-mastery. They crumble down to the ground and build themselves up again, each time they end up more solid and wise. The person is bestowed with great wisdom beyond their years but the universe always demands them to renew themselves so their lives and self-identity suffer from reoccurring earthquakes. They are obsessed with being the best at everything they can and in the meantime influencing other people. They might be especially obsessed with impressing their father and their own father might be their biggest competition in some extreme cases their enemy. In Greek mythology, Capricorn is the Father Time, Kronos… The one who swallowed Hades (and the rest of his children) only to be overthrown by them in the end as it was predicted. The biggest lesson for this person is that they cannot change the outcome but they are sure to be changed by the outcome. The karma these people had inherited from their parents is that the old way of things must be periodically overthrown so that life can be renewed. Perhaps the owner of the chart had parents who were too controlling and stuck in the same cycles and it is up to them to break this cycle so that progression can happen. Meanwhile, they have got to learn to build a solid structure for them so that they will not be damaged when their world is shaken up as it is their karma. One of the parents might have Capricorn as their sun or rising sign and these people tend to attract a lot of Capricorn energy into their relationships for them to learn karmic lessons.

♒︎Aquarius / Uranus in the 8th House:

People with this placement are passionate about feeling united with other people. They tend to attract a lot of friends into their lives and they themselves are very understanding friends but the cost of this is that in order to keep their social circle they tend to either conform to their needs. In order to feel like a part of the group, they know exactly what to do but this also means they often step out of their way to become a part of it. Their biggest fear being, feeling unaccepted they are very accepting of other people and when they work on their people skills these people are very good at influencing others. They are humanists with morals. Their karma will work against them when they deliberately deny these morals in order to please others. The karma they inherited from their parents is to increase in moral consciousness in other people as well as themselves of course. Perhaps the parents were oblivious to other peoples’ issues. One of the parents may have had Aquarius as their sun or rising but was not able to manage its aim of uniting the people and recognizing that all beings are interconnected. With this comes a great deal of empathy with others comes into play. The person has to learn to control this nature of an empath for it is hard for them to distinguish their own emotions and thoughts from the rest.

♓︎Pisces / Neptune in the 8th House:

People who have this placement tend to underestimate the power of their psyche and subconscious in their everyday life. If the mind is in a good state they have the power to manifest good things into their life, if it is in a bad state though, they bring hell down to earth for themselves. The universe asks of them to be conscious of their subconscious, joining of two worlds: the divine and the human. These people are creative in nature and have to take care of their inner world instead of running from it. With a power of great manifestations comes great responsibility for one’s soul journey. As the Pisces energy can be creative and imaginative, as well as dark and destructive. Lurking in the unconscious, always threatening to overwhelm the ordered structures of life. Being this close to the abyss would make anybody nervous and we all know Pisces often tries to avoid a confrontation. But the thing is the forces of the unconscious are usually only dangerous when they’re repressed or denied. And this is the karma the chart owner inherited from their parents who might have Pisces as their sun or rising but could not deal with the Piscean nature, hence it is now both the blessing and the curse (if it is not dealt with careful) of the child. The Pisces fish are a symbol of spiritual liberation, they show the happiness and freedom of the soul swimming in the waters of nirvana. There’s no need to struggle or swim against the tide. People with this placement tend to attract a lot of Piscean energies into their lives to learn and teach karmic lessons.

(Art: “Ixion Thrown into Hades” by Jules-Élie Delaunay)

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catflowerqueen · 2 years

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Actually, some thoughts I had on my “psychopomp y/n” fnaf prompt

(Which I probably won’t actually make into a full story—in part because I already have so many other WIPs in addition to school and work stuff consuming my time. But if I DID do something with it…)

I feel like Y/N might allow themselves to be seen by the general populace? In a kind of “not trying to hide their presence” way? It’s just that they would be going by “form you are most comfortable with” rules, so people would just be seeing what they expect to see. (which honestly really works out in favor with the typical art style people draw y/ns on here—not giving them actual eyes or too many distinguishing facial/body features, for instance) In most cases as they wander the Pizzaplex and try to figure out what is actually going on to cause the paperwork issues, this just translates to them looking like generic stranger. They don’t stand out in any way, are probably wearing Fazbear merch of some kind, etc. And this holds true for the majority of animatronics as well.

But not Sun and Moon.

Considering they safeguard the daycare and have to be able to match specific adults with their children, their facial recognition software is a lot better, and they would be actively on the lookout for distinguishing features and weeding out the familiar from the unfamiliar. So Y/N would actually stand out quite a bit and look very out of place. After all, no one would be going to the Daycare section unless they had a specific reason to—or were extremely lost or something. But Y/N wouldn’t be wearing a typical “help me I am lost” expression, even as they don’t really know what they are supposed to be looking for at the start. So Sun and Moon would see them with a very distinctive look. I’m thinking something like formal wear, almost? Like some sort of business person attire, in dark or neutral colors.

And this would persist for a bit even after they find out about Y/N/s psychopomp status, mainly because they wouldn’t have any prior conceptions about what a psychopomp would look like? If the kids are young enough, they might not really have a concept of “death” yet, or know how grim reapers are typically depicted—and if Sun and Moon kind of casually ask them about what they know of psychopomps, they might not even have heard of the term before. And Sun and Moon certainly wouldn’t want to actually let the kids know why they are asking or that there is an actual psychopomp/grim reaper in their midst for fear of scaring them, so by the time they would actually learn about it, their perception of Y/N’s form would have already solidified.

Well. To an extent, anyways.

Because I feel like over time, as the two of them got to know Y/N, their perception of them would change into more positive views, resulting in them seeing Y/N in more casual outfits and brighter colors. Among… other changes, both physical and not, after certain “plot points” happen.

As for Y/N’s “true” form, they may or may not actually have one? I feel like their entire situation and, for lack of a better term, “species” would very much be “concept based.” Perhaps they get to pick one as they ascend the ranks, or it would be something of a Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods situation where their physical form really does depend on people believing certain things about them.

Or the situation itself could be like… the fundamentals of what they actually do and what their “job” is are unchanging, but the “way” they go about doing it is based on perception, or the amalgamation of ideas or something. So, like… psychopomps like Y/N existed before humans did, but they didn’t really get a sense of sentience or the ability to emote until humans started having collective ideas and theories about the afterlife and what it really meant to die. And the idea about what that would involve changed over time, and are still changing even now. Ideas about bureaucracies and such from media like “The Good Place” and “Good Omens,” and even “Dead Like Me” are really popular now, so that’s what they are going with. (But even if the public moves on to different ideas later, now that sentience/sapience ahs been achieved, that isn’t a guarantee that the psychopomps are going to change the way they do things to model that direction since, again, the fundamentals of their job existed long beforehand. And I’ll get more into those fundamentals in another post)

And this might actually be another point of bonding for Sun, Moon, and Y/N? In that all three of them exist for a specific purpose that they did not get to choose, and fundamentally cannot change what they are or what they do, even if they wanted to, and have very limited say in things like their appearance. Or even their names—at least Sun and Moon were given them upon creation, but I get the feeling (in part to go along even better with the fact that Y/N technically is supposed to stand in for “Your Name”) that psychopomps like Y/N don’t really have names, in general?

Y/N does, but that’s because they picked one out specifically because it helps them when they need to physically snoop for information/not look too creepy when they hang out with Sun and Moon. (Possibly Sun and Moon even unknowingly gave them the name. Like if they were throwing out different names in an attempt to identify them when they first met and Y/N just latched onto one, or if it was some situation where Y/N’s reluctance to admit they didn’t have a name got interpreted by Sun and Moon as it being some sort of situation like “my name is a concept that has no direct translation to actual words” and so they asked Y/N if they could give them a “nickname” to use when referring to them.

#fnaf security breach #psychopomp y/n #still feel free to utilize that prompt for your own though #since i am still unlikely to write this #at least not anytime soon #y/n x sun #y/n x moon #y/n x daycare attendant

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dex-xe · 3 years

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(And an ask requesting Captain + anyone Angst #5 - I lost all the asks by accident cause I’m an idiot!!)

Pat & the Captain Angst #5: “I don’t want to feel this. I want to be numb again.”

Pat & the Captain General #48: “I won’t hurt you.”

(I combined these three because I really felt they’d work well together. I didn’t wanna make the romance obvious but it’s definitely implied!! Anyway, thank you to you for sending these I really love this one!!)

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Pat had always felt fairly content with his tiny attic bedroom. Four walls barely metres apart, a sloped ceiling, and small window that gave him a rather pleasant view of the gardens of Button House. He’d chosen the room mere hours after his tragic and sudden death. One glance at the miniature single bed tucked into the corner was all he got before he was forced to dedicate his afterlife to those four walls, hoping his choice of attic room would place the least amount of burden on the apprehensive ghosts already haunting the other bedrooms. It had suited him just fine. Being a man of small stature, he wasn’t particularly bothered by the cramped nature of his quarters, always one to make do without complaining.

That was all until the past week, when the suffocating closeness of his bedroom became abundantly clear. A few nights prior, the Captain had entered Pat’s room following their nightly patrol. They’d been deep in discussion about the best way to build a shelter; so that if, in the unlikely event the deceased pair managed to get lost in the wilderness, they’d thrive and survive. The conversation wasn’t finished so Pat didn’t hesitate to invite the Captain in to sit and continue.

Very quickly, Pat had realised his mistake. He was hesitant to even call it a mistake but, as the discussion developed and continued, they had strayed, as ghosts often did, to reminiscing about their lives. Comfortable ground for Pat, slightly more treacherous for the Captain. It had started innocuous enough with the Captain regaling the odd story of woodland walks and the flora and fauna he had discovered.

But soon enough, Pat had watched the Captain begin to slacken both physically and mentally and his stories had become looser and more personal. He told tales of his overbearing father and doting mother, his more successful and respectable older brother, and his grandmother; his adoring grandmother who lived up on a hill and waited every day for her nervous little grandson to trek up to help her bake bread and plant flowers. Pat couldn’t lose the golden opportunity that had fallen straight into his lap.

The Captain had returned the following two nights and Pat had learned more about him in three days than in the previous seventy years, and he was determined to bring the Captain to a place he wasn’t even sure the soldier knew existed. Very strategically, the Captain had been avoiding bringing up anything that could potentially lead to his romantic life, he’d refused to indulge Pat in talking about Carol and had quickly shut down Pat’s amusing first date anecdotes.

It reached night four before Pat finally broached the subject, waiting for the perfect moment. The pair sat in comfortable silence, curled up and knees pressed together, in the window seat of Pat’s miniature bedroom gazing out over the shadowy gardens.

“The stars are rather bright this evening, no cloud cover, see?” The Captain muttered contemplating the inky black sky. “I wasn’t much of an astronomer in life, I can’t say I know very much about the cosmos but I can appreciate its beauty.”

“I don’t know much either,” Pat confessed, but he pointed up into the sky just to the Captain’s right. “But that one’s Ursa Major.”

“It is?”

“No idea, could be!” Pat chuckled. The Captain smiled softly at him and turned back to the view. “The best date I ever had was taking Carol stargazing.” “Mhmm,” the Captain shuffled awkwardly in his seat, but said nothing to drive Pat away. So he pressed on.

“We’d only been together a little while. We wrapped up in so many layers and went up Bromley Hill, I held her hand the whole way up, to keep her warm, you know? And we lay down and just talked and drank hot chocolate. It was so wonderful: that was the night I realised I was in love with her. Yeah, good night!”

“Sounds lovely,” the Captain mumbled. Silence fell between them as Pat waited patiently for the Captain to talk, a technique he’d picked up over the past nights: give the Captain a minute to think and he’ll be willing to share.

“When the soldiers were getting rowdy of an evening,” he began slowly. “I would take myself off. The banks of the lake have a rather wonderful view of the sky. I’d just lie there and wait until the early hours, when the men had disappeared for bed.”

“A regular occurrence?”

“Now and again,” the Captain said non-committed. “Occasionally, very occasionally. I wouldn’t be alone, friends would join.”

“Friends?”

“Friend.”

“This friend would keep you company?” Pat asked carefully, eliciting the smallest hum of agreement from the Captain. “It’s nice, isn’t it? To have someone to share a night with?”

“And what precisely do you mean by that, sir?” The Captain turned suddenly. Pat realised he’d stuck his foot in it - rookie mistake really. He sat staring back at the Captain in silence before deciding on a response: in for a penny. “Well, you and this... friend. You’re like myself and Carol. Someone you can talk to, relax with, and truly be yourself around.”

“And how do you gather that from me telling you of my friend?” The Captain interrogated.

“You wouldn’t let just anyone gaze with you,” Pat pushed his glasses further up his nose. “I know you, Cap. They must have meant a great deal to you to let them anywhere close to you.”

“Do not compare him to your wife, Patrick,” the Captain huffed and turned back to the window.

“Why not?” Pat pushed.

“You loved Carol,” the Captain said. “She was your wife, he was but a friend.”

“And?” Pat avoided the Captain’s glare pointedly.

“Completely different situation.”

“You know, Captain, I’m not entirely sure that’s true.” The Captain spluttered and raised his stick towards Pat. His eyes were wide and very, very afraid of wherever the conservation was going. Pat half thought he might get up and run from the room as, like a deer in the headlights, his fight or flight reflex was taking far too long to kick in.

“Now listen here!” He stuttered. “I don’t know what you’re insinuating about Havers but I shall not sit here and listen to you slander a good man. You did not know him, he was nothing like your beloved Carol.”

“I wasn’t saying anything about him,” Pat argued. “But he was ‘beloved’ to you, as you put it?”

“How dare you-,” the Captain started. “I don’t understand, what are you- I don’t understand? He was never... ‘beloved’. Not by me.”

“You cared for this Havers?” Pat waited before the Captain nodded slowly. “You cared what he thought, what he had to say?” Another nod. “You wanted to spend time around him, make him happy? He made you happy?”

“What is this is aid of?” “Your face would go red when you saw him, yeah? Hands would get sweaty? You wanted to be the very best version of yourself in front of him?” Pat locked eyes with the man opposite him, both deathly afraid of the unspoken words. “You found him... physically attractive?”

“Now, what are you-,”

“I hate to be the one to break it to you, Captain.” Pat said quietly. “But that sounds rather like what love is.”

“No, it isn’t. It wasn’t.” The four walls of Pat’s tiny bedroom closed in, suffocating the pair despite their lack of need for breathing. “It wasn’t love.”

“Did you ever feel that stomach-flippy thing? When he walked into the room? Like you’re going to explode with emotion, or be sick, or perhaps both,” Pat asked. “Think about your other friends. Think about Robin. Does that happen when you see him? Or Mary? Kitty? Does that feeling happen?”

“No.”

“Now think of your Havers.”

Oh God. The Captain’s stomach fell over itself with the image of Havers’ dark eyes floating in front of him. His insides twisted and turned as he listened to Havers’ voice describing the intricate details of their weapon plans, the silky smooth tones of his voice flowing straight into the Captain leaving him shell shocked. How had he never noticed that feeling before, that horrifying swirling feeling. It made him feel both comfortingly warm and ridiculously sick at the same time, as if every illegal thought he’d ever had for Havers were about to burst out from inside him.

“It’s there, isn’t it?” Pat prompted. The fear in the Captain’s eyes told everything Pat needed to know, guilt overrode his body. “It’s okay, Cap! You’re okay.”

“I- I- is that?” He stammered. “It- love?”

“I shouldn’t have pushed you,” Pat conceded.

“No. No, it’s not love! What are you talking about?” The Captain was overcome with anger all of a sudden, frustration threatening to spill out. “He was, well. No, he was a ‘he’ to begin with. That’s not- that’s not how love works.”

“Love is love is love,” Pat told him. “You can fall in love with anyone. Legal now, Cap.”

“I- I’m sorry,” the Captain’s head was scrambled.

“Don’t you dare say sorry, mate. You’ve bugger all to be sorry about.”

“I really- I don’t want to feel this. I want to be numb again,” he stumbled over his words, avoiding Pat’s gaze and pointedly staring out of the window instead. “I can’t feel this-.”

“Feel it, please,” Pat grabbed the Captain’s wrist in a tight two-handed grip and locked him into place. “It’s not healthy to keep everything inside.”

“We’re dead, Patrick!” The Captain urged. “We have no need to feel, no health to maintain.”

“Up here,” Pat tapped the Captain’s head carefully, the cold tip of his finger brushing through the thin grey hairs at his temple sending a small shiver through the Captain’s spine. “Healthy, up here. You need to take better care of yourself. It’s like a dam, holding back gallons of water simply increasing the pressure inside. Let a little emotion spill over once in a while, keeps your head on right.”

“Water will not spill, Patrick, it will flood. And then where will we be left: vulnerable to enemy attack, that’s where.”

“There’s no enemy,” the Captain moved to interrupt. “No, no enemy. Just allies. Let me in, just for a little while.”

“I can’t-,” he stopped, a single tear tracking its way down his cheek, burning hot onto his skin. “I wouldn’t know where to start.” Pat finally released his tense grip on the Captain and opened his arms, nodding to give the Captain silent permission.

“I won’t hurt you,” Pat whispered, brushing his hand over the scratchy khaki uniform at the Captain’s shoulder. “You don’t have to be the big, brave Captain you always try to be, not in front of me. Just for a moment, let go.”

After only a moment’s hesitation, the Captain dove forward head butting Pat in the chest, pushing him back against the window frame and practically folding himself in half to curl into the open arms. Seventy years of denied feeling poured out of the Captain to pool in their laps, warming their lonely ghostly forms. Pat dropped his legs to either side of the Captain, allowing him to curl closer and lie steadfast against his shoulder taking as much affection as he could having suppressed anything he wanted for years.

“Thank you for talking to me,” Pat whispered. “It’s a big thing to come to terms with, a big, big thing. But a good thing, yes? It’s good that you cared for him, good you felt a way you didn’t know you had. It’s all very, very good and very, very okay. And it’s for you to know and me to hopefully find out a little bit more about, okay? No one else need know.” He paused, his calloused hand finding the Captain’s in the darkness. “You can talk to me, Captain. Whatever you want to say, whenever, and I’ll listen. Hey, I’ll listen to you rant and rave about the shades of brown in his eyes for hours if it means you can start feeling again. Is that okay?” The Captain nodded vigorously, unable to trust himself to produce words.

Pat’s tiny bedroom no longer felt quite so suffocating to either man, nor did it feel like the dingy attic, barely tall enough to stand straight, that it had before. Instead it was a sanctuary to whispered secrets and profound confessions of adoration, four beige walls protecting the Captain in a way his emotional barriers had never quite been sufficient at. He tilted back to glance up at Pat, who smiled softly down at him running a hand over the Captain’s back and leaning to rest his chin among grey hair. The gentle look in Pat’s blazing blue eyes causing the Captain’s stomach to give off a familiarly warm flipping sensation.

#for some reason this isn’t appearing in tags #which is mighty odd #let’s try again #bbc ghosts #patcap #ficbymax

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nacrelyses · 3 years

Text

okay brain if i make the post will you shut up

so love, me normally can be interpreted in a romantic sense, and it would make sense for it to be interpreted in a romantic sense of someone who desperately wishes they weren’t so different from the norm, so “bad”, so “abnormal”; that they’re so tired of being different and being treated different that they just want to be loved like they’re normal, loved like a nobody

but that’s not what i’m making this post about god damnit keep on track-

[under a read more because it’s very heavy. tw external and internal queerphobia, existential despair, also this is so long oh god 2k words]

i could make a joke about how “cross my i’s, dot my t’s” is a joke about going on testosterone but uh i’m just going to talk about first stanza

“I was delivered holding scissors, I live deliberately, I’m a quitter And a winner anyway, cause I never agreed to participate in this game”

this’ll come up later in this long ass post but the child is delivered holding the scissors to cut their own umbilical cord. when a child is born and they are a queer individual, it is up to them to cut the ties that hurt them the most - even the most close and familial ones. in the way that an umbilical cord is cut because the baby no longer needs the mother’s nutrients, the child is born with the inevitable fate of having to cut off those whose approval and love they can no longer thrive off of, or can no longer receive. or, it could be a metaphor for the scissors of fate, where the child is born with their fate in their own hands and they, being an outlier in queerphobic society, must make do with what they’ve got.

“i live deliberately, i’m a quitter” the child lives deliberately in their quest for self discovery and their need to understand and accept their queerness but at the same time they are a quitter in all the things that society considers normal but they cannot utilize to function: a white collar job when the child is an artist, a nuclear family when the child just doesn’t want one, keeping in contact with your parents when the parents do not accept their child.

“And a winner anyway, cause I never agreed to participate in this game” this comes up later in the post as well but yeah the child never agreed to participate in this game of life. they didn’t ask to be a player, but by default of their unwillingness and their lack of consent, they are made a winner because they are the only player at the table of their own life. they are made an unwilling winner for something they never had the consciousness to consent to experience. they can be called “strong” later in life for overcoming queerphobia, lauded as a “winner” over their oppression, but it rings hollow because to be a real winner, you have to have agreed to be playing in the first place.

and then the chorus, this is pretty obvious. like the

“And I'd rather be normal. Yes, so normal I suggest that we keep this informal Cause a normal human being wouldn't need To pretend to be normal to be normal Well I guess that's the least that I owe ya To be normal in a way I couldn’t be C’mon, c’mon, and love me normally”

because you know, that could kinda be interpreted as a queer child talking to their queerphobic parents. it doesn’t fucking matter if their parents are proud of them for their grades or their achievements now because no matter what, they’re proud of the persona of the child they’ve constructed for themselves. they’re proud of a fraud. the child knows they’ll never truly be loved the way they are, that their parents will only love who they want the child to be and they’ll only love the image they have of their child. think of it like internalized queerphobia, homophobia, transphobia, the idea that similar to i/me/myself, it would be easier if i were a girl [or cisgender, for a general application] and it would be easier if i were normal. the child would rather be normal in the way their parents see normal and they feel that they owe their parents, for all their parents have done to provide for them and pay for their bills and everything, the bare minimum of pretending to be normal so that they don’t break their parents’ hearts. and it’s really for the sake of everyone in the family because if they’re outed, the parents will argue, the parents will be sad, their siblings will be upset by the arguing and the mourning, they feel as though they owe their family this bare minimum of pretending - both for their own safety, and for the prosperity of their family. moving on.

“If I could live in third person, well I don’t think life would be much worse than it is In the current tense, presently, this sentence ending in question marks or dot dot dot…”

the child feels like if they were an outsider witnessing their own life in a third person perspective, it still wouldn’t change a lot. or it wouldn’t be much worse, it might actually be better, in a sense, because they’re fully disassociated from the identity that alienates them so from their parents and their parents’ approval. but they’re living in first person, so this sentence (their life, basically, drawing upon how a suicide prevention thing a while back was using a semicolon as a symbol of your life being an author’s sentence) ends in two ways. a question mark, showing how their existence as someone outside the “norm” of a queerphobic society is rife with constant questioning and identity gaslighting because of how “abnormal” it is to deviate from the norm that you are left without many resources to figure yourself out. you die at the end of the day perhaps not even knowing who you truly are because society has not yet normalized terms that could better articulate your identity, and because you can never really know yourself. or, your sentence ends in a dot dot dot. forever unfinished. you leave with so many loose ends - maybe you move out and cut off contact with your family forever, and live perhaps happier but never knowing if they change their mind (oh god now i’m thinking about change your mind from steven universe and how steven’s entire story is a metaphor for the trans experience). maybe you decide to continue pretending and you cut off the option of really getting to know yourself a little bit better, and you die never knowing who you could have been. so living in full disassociation would at the very least not be much worse than how the first person tense currently is.

“I drank myself to death to be the afterlife of the party When the afterparty came, I was rolling in my grave”

no i am not an alcoholic, thank you very much, i am a responsible person. but the substance abuse reference can be applied to any self destructive habit that arises out of a need to cope - in this case, the child’s need to cope with their fractured identity. maybe they turn towards being hyperfeminine or hypermasculine in an attempt to feel connected with their assigned gender, which branches out into so many different destructive habits (aforementioned drinking, drugs, eating disorders, etc). they do so to become the “afterlife” of the party - if you think about a “party” as a moment in time, it can be the moment you are in in your life. the child turns towards these destructive habits to try to achieve the unachievable. to bring the afterlife into life, to bring their parents’ false image of the child into fruition when that is never impossible and that in itself becomes destructive. but they do this in the current moment of their life, in the current party, so when the afterparty comes, they’re already dead. when the afterparty comes, they roll in their grave because it’s a hollow call for what they could have been: a more genuine person to themselves, a happier individual free of parents’ queerphobia.

“I want you to love the way they so seamlessly, like a dream for me, so beautifully, oh so dutifully jam that square peg in the round hole in their hearts”

the bridge monologue is very very romantic-coded and i don’t think i can pull much meaning from the first bit but here, have the “jam the square peg in the round hold in their hearts”. the child has learned to “seamlessly”, like a second instinct, to jam the square peg of their parents’ false image into the round hole in their hearts, to somehow cram something into a space that was never meant to fit and should not be fitted at all. this quote speaks as though it’s the child talking to their parents, telling them, “i want you to love me, but you are only loving me as i am now, when i am literally destroying myself to be who you’re capable of loving”

“I want you to tell 'em that you love the way that they don't stick out like sore middle fingers That they crawl their way up the side of the bell curve, stick their flag in the peak, and slide their way back down I want you to tell them that you love the way that they're not maladaptive, not malcontent, not malignant or maleficent, but rather that you love them exactly the way that everybody else is”

yep. so the bell curve, the statistical graph, the idea that their child could sit perfectly at the average as the cishet kid their parents expected them to be. the way that they’re not “maladaptive, not malcontent, not malignant or maleficent”, which can all be adjectives weaponized in queerphobic rhetoric against the queer community. and the final line, that their parents love the child “exactly the way that everybody else is”. their parents hold their child to a supposed “norm” that does not really exist because of how suppressed queerness is in society, that the norm is most likely not the norm at all and who’s to say what’s a norm? their parents love them when they are “normal” and it feels like that’s the only way they’ll ever be able to love you. they’ll not be able to learn how to love a different you.

“I was nothing before so I couldn’t have asked to be born I'll be nothing again, so what am I between now and then? Is there nothing to fear? Cause sh*t's getting weird So to God who made this man, you better have one hell of a plan”

deep breath. okay. okay. first of all, will wood’s inflections from the last line of the first bridge all throughout the second bridge are gorgeous and hit so hard.

but yeah. here we go here we go ho boy

the idea that birth in itself is actually an immoral thing, since children don’t ask to be born. they don’t ask to be brought into this world, to experience this world, to develop mental illnesses and to face queerphobia or discrimination or danger in any sense because of who they are. they don’t ask to be born into a family that consistently alienates them and forces them to keep quiet about something that’s so important to them. and the child, in learning that their parents are queerphobic and will never accept them the way they are, realizes now even more that they never asked to be born. they didn’t ask for this closeted life. they didn’t ask for this kind of pain, this kind of false love, this kind of otherness. they never asked for any of this.

“i’ll be nothing again...” the idea that life is finite, that they’ll become that “nothing” they were before they were born if they come out to their parents because in that sense, it’s the parents asking themselves, “why did we have a child that turned out this way? we didn’t ask for this kind of child. we never asked for this kind of person. we never asked to raise them as they are now.” look if you can’t fucking accept that your child will be anything other than a cishet individual made to play out your nuclear family life so you can project your ideas of parenting and hopefully help parent your grandchildren in all the ways you fucked up your own kids i want you to-to- the window is right there. leave. fucking leave.

“Is there nothing to fear? Cause sh*t's getting weird So to God who made this man, you better have one hell of a plan”

is there really nothing to fear, from your parents? they’re supposed to be your closest guidance but is there truly nothing to fear from them if they hate the idea of who you really are? the child is questioning their identity (”shit’s getting weird”) and everything they’ve ever perceived their parents as is thrown up in the air.

and we can’t have all this internalized queerphobia without some religious trauma, can we? the child asks the all knowing, all seeing God, “what was your plan for me?” did this God intend for this child to have to go through this pain? this suffering which is often carried out in the name of aforementioned deity? this God better have one hell of a plan, really, because this child sure as hell needs one, and this God better have a good enough excuse to be able to redeem themselves in this child’s eyes.

all the choruses are just the child constantly asking their parents: “am i normal enough?” “do i need to pretend more?” “i know i owe you this much at least, can you tell me you love me? the normal me?” “can you tell me you love me at all?”

#this was over 2k words but here *throws this and dives out the window*#will wood #the normal album #love me normally #also god bless tumblr never putting word limits on their posts #will wood analysis #love me normally analysis

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yamayuandadu · 4 years

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For the character breakdown, I’d love to see hadad, anat, shapash, yam, mot, athtar, kothkar and khasis... really any of the ugaritic pantheon, of course you don’t have to do all of them >.<, I’d just love to see your hot takes

I shall rise up to the challenge! I’m the only person on this site obsessed with Ugarit as far as I can tell... I covered everyone you asked for plus Ashtart and Yarikh. As much as I like burrowing through jstor and academia edu and persee and so on, I kind of wish there were more people approaching Ugaritic, Mesopotamian, Hittite etc. myths the way many do with Greek ones tbh - sometimes i’d just like to see which figures people think would be into gossiping and so on or which tacky modern fashion they think suits them equally as much as I want to find out if Yarikh’s portrayal in Ugaritic poetry owes more to Nanna/Sin or to the Hittite moon god. ALSO as far as this sort of light hearted takes go, there are two japanese artists on twitter who draw Baal cycle fanart: here and here.

Hadad: How I feel about this character: one of my fave mythical protagonist. I think I genuinely only like Inanna more. Going from a very relatable desire to get his own house to triumph over death is quite the journey. The relative powerlessness many interpreters point out is interesting, too - the fact he mostly gets somewhere because of allies and because even if El was the king of gods, Hadad’s attributes made him the king of people’s hearts arguably, so he has to win against overwheming odds. All the people I ship romantically with this character: Anat, Ashtart/Astarte/however we transcribe her name this week... Kothar? My non-romantic OTP for this character: given the Seth-Baal equation in Egypt and the uncertaininty over whether Astarte papyrus is about Seth or Baal under Seth’s name it’s funny to imagine them as friends. Also I’ll talk about it more underneath but since Dagan was a god with similar purposes further inland (and is attested earlier iirc) and Ugaritic texts - even though they rarely feature him - call him Hadad’s father - it would be cute to assume he also taught Hadad everything. My unpopular opinion about this character: I’m a Dagan parentage truther against all odds. It was the norm outside Ugarit! I think “Dagan isn’t in Ugaritic myths because they take place in Ugarit but people thought Dagan lives further inland in Tuttul based on prayers etc.” is enough to explain his absence from myths, and also note that in the epic Baal is “Dagan’s son” even when he’s at a low point (ex. when Yam demands he gives up his freedom or when he’s dead) and only El’s and Asherah’s son when he’s victorious for the most part (ex. during palace construction) - imo this makes it plausible that Dagan is his real dad and El and Athirat are only his parents in the way vassal rulers called emperors fathers. Likewise I think any references to siblings can be interpreted in the light of ex. kings of Ugarit calling kings of Carchemish or Alashiya brothers. One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: I really like how corny the Hittite/Hurrian storm god cycle is with Kumarbi constaly raising new challengers to attack Kummiya and dethrone Teshub/Tarhunna, I actually wish the Ugaritic one was longer too via a similar plot device. Also I wish Dagan actually appeared in myths alongside his son - Noga Ayali-Darshan had a theory he was in some oral tradition predating Baal cycle as the god announcing Yam demands a tribute since in Hurrian “Song of the sea” and in Egyptian “Astarte papyrus” a grain deity does this but a possible reconstruction isn’t much... Anat How I feel about this character: well, she’s not Inanna, but she’s still pretty good. I mostly like the parts of the Baal narrative which show her unpredictable character, like her probable parents being afraid of her, listing various never shown enemies she vanquished, or Mot’s death. Aqhat myth doesn’t interest me much. That myth fragment where she and Ashtart pity Yarikh because other gods treat him poorly is interesting, too. All the people I ship romantically with this character: Baal, Ashtart, that’s it I think. My non-romantic OTP for this character: she seems to get along really well with Shapash during the segment of the Baal cycle where Baal is dead. My unpopular opinion about this character: I really hate the speculation popular among bible scholars which amounts to making her, Ashtart and Athirat interchangeable to justify her irrelevance in the iron age. One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: honestly? I wish an “Anat cycle” existed. She pretty clearly had a fair share of own adventures considering Baal enlists her help on the account of past accomplishments. Yam How I feel about this character: out of all antagonists in the basic middle eastern “storm god vs sea” narratives I think he has the most fun personality - Hedammu is barely a “character” and Tiamat lacks the more human dimension Yam has. All the people I ship romantically with this character: nobody, he has to move past the Astarte papyrus characterization and learn some respect for that smh My non-romantic OTP for this character: his nameless rude messenger who refused to bow down when speaking to the assembly of the gods My unpopular opinion about this character: contary to what this (very good) paper says, the Yam battle is more thrilling than the Mot one - the strength of the Mot part of the narrative comes from the visceral descriptions of Anat’s emotions but Mot is a flat villain compared to Yam. One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: he had a seemingly positive role in cult and there are 13 known people with Yam theophoric names (out of 6000 or so people from Ugarit known by name) so I sort of wonder if there’s some lost myth where he’s the hero or something. Mot How I feel about this character: if nothing else, feeling offended by being offered bread and wine instead of corpses is pretty funny and a great introduction. And the pathetic attempt at a comeback shut down by Shapash is All the people I ship romantically with this character: unshippable by design tbh. My non-romantic OTP for this character: if the theory about Horon - the god from the “anti-snakebite text” and the “may horon crack your skull” curse - being a cthtonic god too - just a generally benign one - is true I think they could have a lot of comedic potential. My unpopular opinion about this character: I don’t understand where the idea of a nonexistent myth about Mot kidnapping Shapash and Yarikh comes from and I wish it wasn’t all over the place online. One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: some more detailed description of the afterlife - Mot, rephaim, Horon if he really lives there - would be useful... Shapash How I feel about this character: she seems severly... underrated? There are maybe two papers about her (and one underlines the fact there isn’t much research on her) and yet she’s the second most prominent goddess in the Baal cycle AND has her own narrative in the anti-snakebite texts! She might actually be more remarkable than her Mesopotamian counterpart - with all due respect for Utu/Shamash, in myths he’s the boring sibling between himself and Inanna/Ishtar... All the people I ship romantically with this character: I don’t have any real ideas, some papers assume she and Horon were a thing but this is disputable and Horon is pretty nebulous himself... My non-romantic OTP for this character: “Kothar - your close friend!” from that one hymn has that covered. Since she’s basically a divine herald perhaps they travel together? My unpopular opinion about this character: I suspect the reason why she isn’t studied more is because many researchers are stuck with some sort of false “good mother goddess - evil sex goddess” dichotomy of ancient middle eastern religion and while you can force Athirat, Anat and Ashtart into these roles, Shapash with her aura of a divine equivalent of a mundane earthly official doesn’t fit into it and as such is ignored. One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: I said I hate the false Mot myth spreading online but I actually do wish there was a myth or at least a cult text of some sort showing what sort of relation existed between her and Yarikh - safe to say it didn’t mirror Shamash and Sin... Kothar-wa-Khasis How I feel about this character: huge fan of artisan gods and he seems genuinely nice. One of my Ugaritic b-list favorites. I like that he’s a reneissance man - armorer, architect, even a musician... The theory that he was developed based on Ptah since Memphis had a large foreign population is great. All the people I ship romantically with this character: Baal sort of? I imagine Baal is actually relatively knowledgeable about architecture given the length of the window debate in the Baal cycle... My non-romantic OTP for this character: Shapash, as I said earlier. My unpopular opinion about this character: based on the tale of King Keret some researchers argue he’s meant to be ugly like Greek Haephestus, but since I like the Ptah theory and his appearance isn’t described elsewhere AND King Keret might be satire where everyone is their worst self possible, I prefer to imagine him as handsome One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: supposedly from Caphtor and yet we never see Caphtor (Crete) in Ugaritic myths... come on, ancient scribes, surely someone went there? Maybe even recorded some proper Minoan myths? Ashtart How I feel about this character: she’s my favorite Ugaritic figure of limited relevance. An Ishtar/Inanna equivalent who seemingly curses other gods and presides over political pacts is a pretty solid premise! And it’s funny she rebukes Baal seemingly for insufficient dedication in battle. I wonder if the Egyptian fragment which implies Yam acted lecherous towards her is a factor in this tbh. Perhaps an earlier oral tradition had both these elements...? All the people I ship romantically with this character: Baal (her title is “face of baal”/”of the name of baal”, c’mon...), Anat (almost always listed together!) My non-romantic OTP for this character: Keret curses his son with a formula invoking both Horon and her so perhaps that’s who she’s learning curses from. My unpopular opinion about this character: I hate that “Astarte is Asherah” is widespread just because people want to defend the historicity of the biblical Jezebel narrative which probably even the biblical compilersdidn’t view as historical. One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: I wish she didn’t vanish from the Baal cycle after Yam’s defeat :C Attar How I feel about this character: this sure is... a guy. He’s so pathetic in the Baal cycle it’s hard to even see him as an antagonist - sorry, Handbook of Ugaritic Studies... All the people I ship romantically with this character: nobody, Shapash points out he’s single as the reason why he can’t rule and i don’t think that changes in any subsequent texts? But then Marriage of Nikkal and Yarikh iirc mentions he has a daughter... My non-romantic OTP for this character: again, nobody. My unpopular opinion about this character: he’s actually a pretty vital part of the Baal cycle and the fact he gives up on own accord makes him more interesting than the other “failed god” in a similar narrative, Ashtabi. One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: a god with the same name was prominent in present day Yemen so I guess finding some direct connection would be nice - it fits with him leaving to “rule elsewhere” in the myth! Yarikh How I feel about this character: he’s so pitiful in the fragment which compares him to a dog begging for scraps... His main myth is pretty good too, tbh it’s the best middle eastern marriage myth imo - I actually don’t care for Dumuzi much, but Yarikh is cool. All the people I ship romantically with this character: only Nikkal-wa-Ib My non-romantic OTP for this character: given his mistreatment and Nikkal’s father(?) saying he could be a son in law of Baal I assume that in some unknown texts they must have been allies. Note that the Hittite storm god has the sun and moon gods acting as his metaphorical eyes warning him against Kumarbi’s new plots in song of Ullikummi. Also I assume Anat and Ashtart must consider him a friend given how they help him when nobody else does? All around he feels like a god in Baal’s orbit even though we have 0 direct proof for it. My unpopular opinion about this character: I think trying to correct him to Nanna is a doomed endeavor tbh. Their wives have similar names but Yarikh doesn’t give the impression of a “Father of gods” type deity in what little we know about him. One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: more myths. None we know show him as the moon even though it’s literally his name! I am afraid I don’t have anything interesting to say about El and Athirat. Handbook of Ugaritic Studies has an amazing El summary that I generally stick to, I can post a cap if you are interested.

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atrayo · 3 years

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Channeled Angelic Wisdom of the Jewels of Truth Series on the Birth of Creation & Manifest Destiny

Hello All,

Today's blog entry will be a duo of statements from the angels nameless as they often are without ego but still ever with rich personalities in spirit. The topics will be on the Birth of Creation and about a form of Manifest Destiny. Each of them has a tinge of controversy attached to them along the way.

First, the Birth of Creation comes to the view of the metaphysical creation of our Universe physical and otherwise ethereal in essence and substances. Not so much the scientific astrophysics view more so a spiritual outlook that the whole afterlife birthed our Creation. The dicey bit is that besides Heaven getting into procreation, so did Hell itself as providing extreme contrast to our reality.

The second statement of Manifest Destiny takes it to a higher notch with a ballsy declaration regarding all human religions having been corrupted over the eons. That albeit their impetus was righteous and aims ideally noble the translation has been off-putting to the heavens. Particularly our ancestral forefathers globally slaughtering barbarically in the Name of God and all that disgraceful acts of conspiracies, etc... The angel leans into that stance overall as I channel him inspirationally by psychic automatic writing.

So without further adieu may you find today's recently channeled angelic wisdom and metaphysics statements intriguing as in expanding your horizons whether you refute the claims or not.

PS: In the Manifest Destiny statement, the angel declares that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. that have died as Prophetic martyrs arose again in Paradise as Arch Angels, which I found fascinating.

Birth of Creation:

3073) To what is reborn comes away misunderstood by the masses as a realm heretofore obscure as it is singularly native. All that arises in the Eternal "Now" Moment is sacred to God in each of thy living souls of the divine truly and forever reborn by grace. Many are, for lack of a better word, spiritually dumb, not fully oriented to the Omniscient Holy nature of God(dess) in an Inclusive farthest-reaching capacity of Being Immaculate.

This is a tale of the birth of your cosmic universal reality you call the physical terrestrial universe(s). All Creation(s) are oriented similarly to this sacred disposition one way or another metaphysically. Do not be offended for your universe to exist it requires Contrast as the polar opposite paradoxical conundrums of every iota under the stars of our combined Infinite Heavens.

This contrast is both good as godly in righteousness and terribly horrifically evil simultaneously depending on its context derived in situ of its locality or zone of reality. Regardless, of what is and what is not come again to further understand the superb nature of our/your Totality. Now is the moment to comprehend that Creation is composed metaphysically of equal portions of the Splendid Heavens and the Horrible Hells. A cosmic collision of the entire collective of the afterlife in order to beget a new life and death on a whole macro and micronized stupefied basis. Universally what this signifies is many things all at once to the keen spiritual metaphysical observer.

That (Im)mortal life is intrinsically good and evil for a Creator God's rationale as our Ultimate Supreme Designer of the Infinite Ages overall. Those who wish to escape reality through holy precepts must have rendered life-affirming services mystically much like the prophets of Enoch and Elijah accomplished. Each one skipped a mortal's carnal demise by death and indeed walked with God upright and willing by their own volition in a biological manner into the endless Heavens.

Reality is good, neutral, and evil each with its inference of principled or dynamical views. Such are each as modalities of equal parts of Heaven, Null Space, and the Hells. Akin to a collision cosmically of matter, space as the void or oblivion, and anti-matter all at once much like a Big Bang Universal Birth. Heretofore, everything as what follows is history albeit ancient in its recounting.

Many will come away with more questions and that is beautifully excellent! Seek and ye shall find indeed by a meditative neutral faith in God alone. All is revealed to the ardent explorer of the peaceful Omnipotent disposition of the Soul of God(dess). Amen. ---Ivan Pozo-Illas / Atrayo.

Manifest Destiny

3066) All-Holy Faiths as religious Institutions and spiritual philosophical traditions of God(dess) or that of the minor lesser gods and goddesses by any number of cultural pantheons as kingdoms go. Are broken as Adhoc local regional well into stately movements of the masses to reassert the power of the Divine upon this world. To this end, they have limited phenomenal successes as their native worshippers proclaim earnestly as they swipe across global histories. Whether by peaceful considerate influences as permissions exist or by the wicked sword through the sheer barbaric slaughter of all enemies foreign and domestic.

In this regard all that is beneficent and Holy of God and by God alone upon this world. Including our kindred as the lesser minor deities of other pagan religions whether dead via antiquity or well into modernity are the angelic host reborn solemnly we declare. Humanity has an inherited knack of corrupting religious and spiritual authoritative bodies via centralized institutionalizations seeking supremacy over the masses instead of liberating souls.

Whether such inhumane corruptions promote racism with slaves or 2nd or 3rd class worshippers, misogyny as sexism with adultered patriarchy, and influential power over under educated peoples to be led or misled like cattle. We the Angelic Host of countless Paradises do declare boldly and with great convictions that the trio of the Abrahamic faiths as religions has accomplished collectively throughout global history. More inhumane suffering than by its beautiful idealism sought out to heal and redeem humanity as a collective grace on a macro whole basis of God-centric worshipped divinity on earth.

For every glorious stride forward of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the embodied Peace of God upon the world. Humanity collectively throughout numerous historical epochs has regressed these faiths via subsequent generations of worshippers. With the inhumanity of persecutions and outright conspiracies and other ill-assorted corruptions of the Majestic Inclusive Will of a Living and Loving Compassionate Creator God of gods Supreme!

For instance, the Crusades in antiquity of the Jews to reclaim the holy land from the other Semites in the region of the Canaanites, Hittites, etc... With a resurgence now in modernity with a renewed crusades against the Palestinians. Then there are the Christian Crusades during medieval times oppressing the Jews and Muslims alike. Including the so-called Northern European Christian Holy Wars of the Protestant Reformation.

All throughout the centuries, the Christian Papacy permitted sex scandals to foment against their nuns and youths with subsequent cover-ups in your modernity. Not mentioning missionary atrocities against indigenous cultures around the world for centuries until the 20th century that is. Then the wholesale slaughter of all enemies of Islam by Kingdoms of Sunni and Shia sects and now well into the modern Islamic reformation period by fanatical heretics called by the world as terrorists.

Hundreds of thousands if not a couple million souls have perished by Man's barbaric Judgments in the so-called Name of God! God's Merciful Judgment is at hand albeit not to destroy humanity but to save it from its chaotic animal nature. Faith of God(dess) by any other tradition at large is a precious gift as a living embodiment spiritually of God upon the world. To abuse it as a privilege or a solemn sacred right of inheritance leaves the world disgraced overall.

A superior faith or religion from the sum of many diverse faiths as a recombination is soon to arrive in your next century. The Abrahamic Religions notwithstanding are now deemed fully broken by the Lord of Hosts Supreme and the Seals of the Covenants are cracked by loss of grace upon the world.

Many other prophets of antiquity and now into modernity as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. having been slain as martyrs of the Glory of God upon the world. Are now risen as bonafide Arch Angels each according to their tenets in life, not unlike that of Enoch and Elijah for instance.

The Angelic Host doesn't play ego-centric games of cultural global Institutions of so-called religious authority. The Power of God is always decentralized for the very reasons humanity has corrupted it. By exclusive mandates as strict dogmas, theologies, and poor suppositions of the Inclusive Majestic Love of God(dess).

No one individually as a spirit of a soul is at fault nor do we hold humanity totally in contempt. It is the elite castes as rulers of humanity across immemorial histories that these slow-motion horrors have persisted nearly unchecked. By the sincere Patience of God and the Heavenly Host, we shall overcome together with humanity as the coalition of the willing to heal these jagged edges in time with Absolute Love lived with tender moderation.

It will be by a global near-catastrophic Holocaust 2.0 of World War III and its aftermath decades in recovery of the global planetary human civilization. That the proverbial Phoenician Phoenix as the Hawk Standard shall rise upon a near-global human empire. This is sadly after the more wholesale slaughter of the masses due to War World IV nearly ninety years from now give or take away a decade.

That the aforementioned reconstituted global major religious bodies and their spiritual New Age traditional counter-parts with Intuitive psychical gifts of God recombine as One. Into a truly global meta-religious authority more powerful than the current Persian Baha'i faith tradition to date.

This is the renewed Word of God(dess) and it is Good for all Souls remaining faithful. Regardless of individual cultural spiritual and religious-philosophical traditions upon this world currently. The Angelic Host Rejoice for Humanity at large for it will be renewed with another chance to reclaim their Pristine Divinity upon the world in Peace versus by Chaos.

For evil to flourish in the world as the maxim goes Good People merely do nothing out of apathy, fear, and selfish agendas. The Lord God forgives you all totally and forever in advance but with the dearest caveat of stopping the cancerous evil from spreading.

Or the rot of the animal ego-centric meta personality of humanity vying constantly for power over others. Will consume you all like locusts eating not just your dreams of plenty but also the flesh by means of violence and destitution. Be the wiser and remember you are angelic spirits reborn in the Perfect Image and Likeness of God(dess) as our reincarnated siblings come back into the world. Amen. ---Ivan Pozo-Illas / Atrayo.

Ivan "Atrayo" Pozo-Illas, has devoted 26 years of his life to the pursuit of clairaudient Inspired automatic writing channeling the Angelic host. Ivan is the author of the spiritual wisdom series of "Jewels of Truth" consisting of 3 volumes published to date. He also channels conceptual designs that are multi-faceted for the next society to come that are solutions based as a form of dharmic service. Numerous examples of his work are available at "Atrayo's Oracle" blog site of 16 years plus online. You're welcome to visit his website "Jewelsoftruth.us" for further information or to contact Atrayo directly.

#Jewels of Truth #Atrayo's Oracle #Angels #Ivan Pozo-Illas #Automatic Writing #Spirituality #Spirit Guide #Spiritual Teacher #Psychic #Channeler #Birth of Creation #Manifest Destiny #God #Metaphysics #Mysticism

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