#access animus healing

[missr3n3]

[CCTV Recording from the Access Animus Healing Compound]

(slowly i am learning how to be a real analog horror editor lol)

[accessanimus-archives]

Apologies for the long absence, I've had my hands pretty full as of late. It turns out converting poorly maintained VHS tapes to any sort of legible digital media is harder than it looks.

In addition, I had a favor to pay out after asking some former associates for hosting space. As a result, I have also been hard at work salvaging what I could of an old resource for learning the truth about AAH, as well as the other oddities surrounding Las Piedras.

Without further ado, please take a moment to peruse the revival of LP County Watch:

[mysticstarlightduck]

Magic System, But Badly Tag! (1)

Thank you so much for the tag @cowboybrunch (here)!

Rules: Explain the magic system of your current WIP as poorly as possible. Bonus points if you use bullet points.

Let's talk about the magic system of Song of Thorns (:

Elemental

ATLA vibes but medieval

someone really should keep an eye on the Initiates - these angsty teenagers with a god complex should not be left unattended

Powers range from "Look, I can light a candle with the tip of my finger, isn't it neat?" to "I CAN CONTROL THE STORMS, FEAR ME" and it is complicated

Lesson No. 1 - Don't trust the nice instructors on the weird-looking trial maze or you will die = STREET SMARTS

who cares about reading all those ancient tomes, let's improvise in the middle of an untamed wilderness or ocean brimming with wild magic, now that's a good idea

Animus Codex

soul magic with a celestial's blessing

can weave fates, lives, and entire existences with a series of secret runes on a specific set of cards/tablets

a select group of people know what tf is going on with this magic but everyone is too afraid to really ask

rune casting requires ancient magic components that definitely are anything but safe

either the celestials loved this civilization way too much or hated it with a passion

Sanguinex Arts (human only)

Lazy human royals really wanted to be vampires but didn't want to transform themselves and made it everyone's problem

"Can I copy your homework?" "No, absolutely not -!" "Too late already did it."

A cheap knockoff of something beyond mortal comprehension created by an insane set of human sorcerers who could not give less of a fuck

"I think I understand how they do it" - they did not, in fact understand how it was done

Feast your eyes on the eldritch abominations and trauma inducing shite created by human stupidity at its finest

A distortion of all that is moral and decent, used by the royals to expand their lifespans and oppress those who do not have access to their power

A generally bad time

Traditional Hemomancy (Vampyr/Fey only)

an ancient Vampyr tradition, tied to their very existence (and which was cheaply copied by humans to create the Sanguinex)

"General rule of thumb - do not piss off a vampire who has something or someone to protect, unless you fancy seeing how your insides look on the outsides"

Create & Destroy, Life & Death - this magic can heal or kill and is connected to the balance of nature

Blood Magic mixed with Matter Manipulation

"Roses are red, violets are blue, if the moon turns crimson you'll die soon" - a lesson some characters in this book should've learned before venturing further into this land

generally chill and laid back sorcerers who really don't want to have to use their powers to hurt people and just wanna have a good time

Alchemical Sorcery

Fucked Around and Found Out, Special Edition.

Potions slowly change you to be able to cast magic but it's fine because you know what you're doing. Hopefully.

Chemical components and suspicious magical ingredients create unforeseen creations = chemistry magic

You are cursed with the knowledge you wish you never had

Need to go to an elite academia to get a certificate permission in case you blow stuff up with your alchemy

Let's shape the very matter of existence after chemistry class 101

Melodis Mortem (forbidden)

"The Song of the Dead" - just a fancy name for a bunch of academia dropouts practicing off-the-book necromancy in a cult.

Let's raise your great-grandpa from beyond the grave because what could possibly go wrong- and he is now a murderous ghoul. Yeah, my bad. We'll do better next time.

Necromancer bards

All these books, guidelines and bloodied ritual circles might just be a way of hiding the fact they don't know what tf they're doing and are relying on lucky improv most of the time.

🎶Spooky scary skeletons send shivers down your spine🎶

"Well, well, well if it isn't the Consequences of my actions."

Mechana Ignis (elven only, secret)

combustion magic

steampunk/solarpunk elf society

gunpowder/"Sunpowder" go brr

"Nah, we ain't sharing this with you lunatics, bruv. This is our magic that goes boom and pew-pew on command. Not yours, nuh-uh, you're too fucking crazy to use it responsibly."

elves bored with eternity decide to do cool science stuff to pass the time and the world isn't ready for it

Tagging: @sleepy-night-child, @kaylinalexanderbooks, @smol-feralgremlin, @oh-no-another-idea, @littleladymab, @little-peril-stories

@the-ellia-west, @winterandwords, @cowboybrunch, @eccaiia, @sarahlizziewrites, @illarian-rambling

@leave-her-a-tome, @writernopal, @anyablackwood, @unstablewifiaccess, @forthesanityofstorytellers

@i-can-even-burn-salad, @cakeinthevoid

@lassiesandiego, @thepeculiarbird, @clairelsonao3, @memento-morri-writes, @starlit-hopes-and-dreams and OPEN TAG

[doodle-do-wop]

You said you have lore that you made up LMAO might I know some of it?

YES YOU MAY!!!

You get Team V lore this time my friend and here it is:

Team V stays an established and functioning Team past (god knows what shannon is up to) and since the Council sends them off to meet with powerful people sometimes as part of their assignments and its not exactly the 'put together' look they wanna give when the address to meet the Team is Sophie's backyard full of screeching animals so the Council builds Team Valiant an official building in Eternalia called The Animus Sanctum (no the team did not get a say in the name mostly cause Emery didn't wanna deal with another round of 'The Council can't pick cool names so the teenagers call it the Stinky Dino Hut or something')

The Animus Sanctum is part Team Valiant headquarters part sick ass hangout spot for the team. Its got a very showy entrance, a glamourous meeting room fit with a pentagon table that seats all five of the team's members (four normal chairs with a custom diamond shaped panel displaying the color and animal for each respective member....and one Stina sized chair with the same stuff just specifically built for someone with Stina's legs because the girl is just short of being Goblin height), a library full of books, smaller meeting rooms more suited for sitting with important people and chatting(or just inviting a friend over and hanging out), as well as a healing station (yes that was added in because Sophie's on the team), there are livable spaces inside that are more homey as its expected that sometimes their work as regents will keep them very busy at the Animus Sanctum so they'd need the kitchen, living room, etc around.

The third floor of the building actually has bedrooms for each member of the Team to sleep in if they stay the night for whatever reason (not wanting to leap home so late, needing a bed to crash etc), and each bedroom has a lock on it (yes the lick strip locks, Sophie hated it and very much protested the design) and like the chairs have a color below the lock representing which room is which member's (similar to the chairs Stina's whole room had to have custom furniture because once again, the girl is built different)

The first two floors of the building can technically be accessed by anyone but there are guards posted to the building and the other two floors (its four full floors total plus an extra little floor that has the leapmaster) can only be accessed by Team Valiant members as the doors will unlock so long as they have their team pendants and lick the lock.

They have a training area but that's not part of the building at all, its a separate location that doesn't have any special name besides 'the training grounds' and its mostly just used for Team Valiant team building exercises that require more space than just the Sanctum.

The bedrooms weren't personalized when built(beyond custom furntire), that was up to the individual team members to pick how they decorated their rooms but if you go into Dex's room you'd think you just walked through a portal to his actual bedroom in Rymshire.

(there's tons more lore like the collection cards but thats a post for another lore dump)

[vulpemarshmallow]

Part 1 Art by @Ezrasnail. 

On the run, Amaryllis and the others find their way out of the city of New Daeda, though not out of Daedamour itself, as they commandeer a boat and sail out of the city and into a smaller town where they can hide. They then travel to a cave made from a material known as fire quartz, led by a dream Amaryllis had, as well as the guidance of a small red dragon they met in the escape from New Daeda. There Amaryllis finds the identity of I.A.: Irithyl Alabaster, a friend of one of their parents who happened to be the one who transported them out of the Baronies and into Crossmeda. Irithyl says they are there to help Amaryllis learn more about their magic. 

Once they leave the cave, Dharren, who is possessed by the animus of a dead hero to the drow, known as The Saint of No Stars, and who, to the rest of the world, had been nothing but a malicious threat, hears of a lighthouse where he could find something related to himself and the animus. A minotaur named Eador, a former companion of Saint, helps them in their quest to reach the lighthouse, where a difficult battle leads to the defeat of a monster within the lighthouse, and Eador’s betrayal of Dharren. 

There, Amaryllis finds a large piece of fire quartz, an artifact called Aricma, that reacts with their magic, absorbing the energy from their wild magic surges and letting them access it later on. Though it would seem they had found the key to controlling their magic, they have to flee again as New Daeda is still hot on the Chosen’s heels. They are constantly followed by one of the cardinals of New Daeda, Delrin, until his final defeat. 

They travel to the Coastal Baronies looking for a guide to bring them to Gnashor’s Valley, where they could find respite for a short period of time, and take part in the yearly tourney that decides the leadership of the valley through combat. Once in the city they are harried by another cardinal, Sevas, who threatens Rosie’s sister. Rosie then kidnaps him, ties him down, and nearly kills him, though he is healed by Melody. A mysterious spell is cast from an unknown source and a battle ensues, and when it’s over Sevas’ body is gone. 

The animus within Dharren lashes out during the tourney, killing 66 innocent bystanders in the stands, and that night Amaryllis asks Irithyl how to kill Saint, otherwise known as Yckwyt, and is given the schematics for a crystal dagger that would need to be charged with magic, and would kill both Dharren and Yckwyt when used. 

The tourney ends with finding Gnashor Braun deceased, and Ja’ark winning the title of Gnashor. 

Sevas, now undead, also contains a piece of Yckwyt and is defeated by the party after a hard won victory in which an ally reveals herself to be another cardinal of New Daeda, an archmage known as Triss. 

As they move to leave, Hemmet comes down with a petrifying disease and passes away. A human necromancer known as Ponder joins the party as the Chosen then run again, and along the way to the Mistlands, Rosie, Melody, and Amaryllis’ homeland, they are aided by the evocation professor of Boggsmire, the massive wizard’s college to the north of the Crossmeda. The professor turns out to be Eador in disguise and is once again defeated. 

[teecupangel]

Wait, wait, wait.

What if...

DESMOND is Desmond. Like the way Aloy can communicate with anyone with a Focus as long as they like 'connected contact details or something' and the reason why Aloy meets DESMOND in GAIA Prime bunker is because DESMOND had been in contact with GAIA and his 'connection' was turned on to public (because this is Desmond, he's not super into tech like Rebecca) and it paired with Aloy's focus.

Let's say: Elisabet got to the family bunker and she tries to connect with the Alpha team using the backdoor she added so she could contact Shaun after Project Zero Dawn 'officially' starts. When she gets there, she realizes what Faro has done and she starts to get depressed but Shaun snaps her out of it (insert a sweet scene between Shaun and Elisabet with also mentions of Rebecca) then they remember that there's a 'modified' APOLLO in the bunker.

To be more exact, it's an early build of APOLLO that Shaun has been tinkering with, adding more information about the Brotherhood and the real history of the world according to the memories accessed in the Animus. (all complete with his commentary, of course, because it's Shaun)

So Shaun focuses on adding as much info of APOLLO that they can send to GAIA and Elisabet tries to open a faster connection with GAIA.

Instead, she notices that something is connecting with Shaun's APOLLO (which he keeps calling HERODOTUS because he has enough Isu bullshit that he can't accept naming anything nice on supposed gods) and she focuses on that because, if it's a rogue AI or something, they're in trouble.

But it isn't.

It's the Animus that was connected to Desmond's Stasis Pod.

It's been trying to connect to HERODOTUS.

So Elisabet connects with it and they see a hologram of Desmond who had been trying to make contact to them for years.

His body still needs to be healed but his mind had been, well, in some kind of endless sleep where his company was usually his bleed and their memories. When HERODOTUS was installed in the bunker, the Animus turned out to be compatible with it and they could now see Desmond as he is in the Animus' white room.

So they spend their last years catching up while Elisabet worked on preparing a better connection with GAIA and Shaun tries to add more and more to HERODOTUS.

Desmond helps using his genetic memories and his bleeds help with their memories. (maybe add scenes of Haytham lecturing about the American Revolution with Connor in the background providing a more neutral commentary to Haytham's lessons; Ezio talking about the many artworks he saw Leonardo Da Vinci make and even adding in his own commentary; Altaïr talking about the books that had been in his library before) Maybe some of the books were even transcribed by Desmond using his memories.

But everything must come to an end.

Shaun dies of old age and Desmond and Elisabet stay with him till the end.

Elisabet continues with all the updates she could think of and Desmond tries to remind her to slow down, to eat and to take breaks. During those breaks, Elisabet and Desmond talk and they bond as father and daughter.

Before she dies, she tells Desmond that she realizes that HERODOTUS was simply too large to be sent via the 'online network' so she changed her plans.

She requests Desmond...

When I die, stay with GAIA?

A copy of Desmond's Animus was being transferred to GAIA PRIME. That would give Desmond a direct connection with GAIA. It would take decades but it would be faster than trying to copy HERODOTUS into GAIA. If Desmond is with GAIA, Elisabet believed they might think of a way for HERODOTUS to connect with GAIA without directly connecting the bunker to GAIA Prime because it takes too long.

So Desmond agrees and they spend the last few years of Elisabet's life together, focusing more on just talking about anything and everything. (maybe, at this point, Elisabet tells Desmond she's sorry she's leaving him behind. Desmond smiles at her and tells her that it should be 'thank you'. Thank you for all the memories we shared)

After Elisabet dies, Desmond stays in the bunker (and here we can have a scene of Desmond being alone until he feels a hand on his shoulder. He turns around and it's his bleed of Ezio, having some form thanks to the upgrades Elisabet done on the Animus' hologram function and Desmond's own Bleeding Effect)

"You'll never be alone, fratello mio." Ezio says as he sits next to Desmond, "We'll always be with you."

Desmond turns around and sees all his bleeds (even Haytham and Edward) and smiles as he said, "Thanks, guys."

But something happens in the copying.

When Faro took out the Alpha Team and deleted APOLLO, it also messed up the backdoor Elisabet installed between the family bunker and GAIA Prime.

The decades that Elisabet estimated turned out to be centuries and she didn't realize it because she's stressed and her calculations was spot on (for a working backdoor). Instead, it's like the decade to century version of that annoying '1 minute' that we see when we're copying something but we know that 1 minute is more than just 1 minute.

So when Desmond finally connects with GAIA, the corruption has already been complete and Desmond has no idea what the fuck has happened so he tries to check the systems but he's not that techy so it's slow going and there's a lot of information to be looked at.

That's how Aloy finds him in GAIA Prime.

At first, she assumed he was another recording because he shows as a hologram that looks similar to the ones she see using her Focus.

But then he goes...

"Eli?"

(Cue the other ideas we have but now with Desmond and Aloy having a more grandfather-granddaughter thing going on that is super awkward because Aloy is a clone of the daughter he watched die and missed all these centuries and Desmond is the father of the woman Aloy believed to be her mother but he looks and acts like a weird young man)

(Also, for more hilarity and lightheartedness: Desmond's bleeds just coming and going anytime they please so it's like Aloy has some distant grand-uncles)

Also, when they get to the family bunker, they get HERODOTUS because Aloy just freaking takes the entire thing that houses it and puts it on a mount then go back to their incomplete GAIA. Desmond finally wakes up from his stasis because his body is finally healed. It's been healed centuries earlier but Desmond never woke up because he wants to honor his promise to Elisabet to help GAIA and he believes he can better do it as a sorta-conscience floating in the Focus-sphere than as a human. He finally wakes up because he has enough of feeling powerless while Aloy fights machines and assholes all on her own. (also, there may be one or two Carjas that he wants to punch)

His bleeds still remain as either holograms or possessing Aloy's overridden machines.

(AltDes is my OTP but I ship Desmond with everyone so I'm game with any pairing you guys can think of XD)

Desmond dying gives us the easiest way to throw him anywhere we want thanks to how mysterious the Eye, the Calculations, the actual Global Aurora Borealis device, and all these other Isu bullshit work.

Throw him back to the past to meet the other AC protagonists? Now easier with the existence of the Reader.

Keep him alive in the modern day or throw him further forward (like Watch_Dog Legion timeline maybe?)? Yeah, just say the device didn't kill him but changed him somehow and there was a delay (temporary death), or use some other Isu bullshit to revive him.

Wanna make crossovers? Easy. Every other series you can think of can be part of the Calculations that the Isus didn't choose. Just to name a few:

Horizon Zero Dawn? Change Abstergo to Far Zenith and you're good to go (Faro being a Templar gone rogue is also optional)

Resident Evil? Abstergo's main line of business is pharmaceutical which is also Umbrella's main line (you can make the initial viruses based on some failed Isu research to survive the solar flare)

Prototype? The Zeus virus can be based on a failed Isu research that perhaps Tinia researched (OG Alex Mercer being a Templar optional)

BBC Merlin? Magic came from the humans who got experimented ala Aita and Juno in Atlantis who then passed it on to their descendants together with the Isu genes (also if you like the headcanon that eyes turn gold when they use Eagle Vision, this means Desmond gets to be treated as a sorcerer who has no idea what's happening)

Animal Crossing? Desmond wakes up in a world where evolution was different and he is being driven to a town by some animal-looking person who isn't weirded out that he's sitting on the back of his taxi and, for some reason, now in debt

Armored Core? The Templars decide that making bigass robots is a good idea for some reason and the whole 'humans had to go underground for a while' can either be because of the solar flare, some other Isu bs, or because humans are humans

Prince of Persia? The dagger of time is a POE and it's the one that pulled Desmond to this timeline

Dead Space? The Marker is a POE and the supposed civilization that got taken out by the necromorphs before could be the Isus who couldn't escape to Earth

In conclusion:

It is very easy to turn Desmond into an isekai protagonist.

[gamehacker]

RF Online Game Evaluation

RF Online is one of one of the most interesting and amazing MMORPGs that I have ever played. RF or Rising Force Online is a greatly multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by South Korea for Windows-based PCs, which is a combination of classic science fiction and also fantasy. The story of the game revolves around the far-off globe of Novus. It fixates the gripping three-way conflict amongst 3 races namely the Bellato Federation, Accrecia and Cora in a magnificently provided 3D setting. Concerning The Characters The Bellato race are dwarf-sized yet has the ability to possess magic, swords, staves, guns, bows and technologically advanced weapons like the MAU or Massive Armor Unit. What I loved about the Bellato is their capacity to ride the MAU. A MAU is a huge robotic that can just be piloted by a Bellato. There are 2 kinds of MAUs offered in the game hacker apk download. One is Goliath, which is a MAU that concentrates on melee assaults. The other is Catapult, which has a lengthy array assault capacity. Since it can not be healed as well as its life can only be recharged in a Bellato NPC shop at a costly rate, a MAU has a high maintenance. However, they can destroy other races with just a few attacks as well as they are effective storage tanks in fight. On the other hand, the Cora are elf-like animals who have strong affinity with nature. Although they can possess staves, bows, guns and swords, they are much more efficient using magic. They also have the capacity to summon an Animus to help them in fight. I am not much of a follower of a magic wielding character yet an effective Cora mage with a summoned Animus can destroy a MAU given with the appropriate technique. The 3rd are the Accretia, who are highly advanced race that changed their entire body with cybernetic parts. They have the ability to hold swords, bows, launchers and guns. Although they do not have the ability to ride the MAU like the Bellato or summon an Animus like the Cora, the Accretian artillerymans are pressures to be considered. Accretian artillerymans with effective launchers can handle various other gamers with just a couple of hits and also they can secure a MAU from a range. Functions Leveling is accomplished by eliminating monsters as well as skills are created by using certain type of weapons or assaults. Equipping unique shields or weapons also improve the status of a character. There are a lot of tasks available for each and every personality depending upon their race. The various tasks offer various abilities that are one-of-a-kind per various other like invisibility, unique melee assaults, unique long variety attacks, ability to ride the MAU or summon an Animus. One more distinct attribute of this game is the election of an archon weekly as well as council participants that will be liable in shielding the race. Each gamer chosen is approved unique capacities that vary from increase in condition points to increase in assault or protection. In addition, each race has their corresponding money that can just be utilized in each race's NPC. If they do, this somehow restricts significantly the progression of other players who maintain on changing races considering that they have to start over once again. Every particular time of the day, all races gather in a map to take part in the Chip Wars led by each race's archon. The outcome of the battle determines which race deserves to mine for resources that can be utilized to make unique items as well as equipments. It identifies the race that will certainly have control over the Holystone Keeper also, which is the guardian of the mines. The race who wins the battle likewise receives race aficionados, raising the race's assault as well as protection, which provides it preeminence for a certain duration. The loser gets a debuff or reducing of condition and also will certainly not be able to run in the mines. Opposite races can strike each various other whenever. Nonetheless, gamers of the same race can't strike each other unless they take a Chaos Potion or they are in a Guild Scramble, which is a guild vs. guild suit. Review I locate this game addicting and fun as a result of the full personalization readily available for each and every personality and the unpredictability of fights caused by its player kill or PK system. The PK system keeps you awake even if you are just leveling on normal monsters because any kind of race can just attack your field and also strike you. The only refuge to remain is at the base of each race where intruders can't strike you. The leveling system and also character condition modification are one-of-a-kind. The national politics associated with the political election of an archon or council is likewise an asset in the game as it adds a little bit of realistic look to its globe. On top of that, the Chip Wars are impressive! Entering into a Chip War is like entering into a world battle wherein just the strong survives. Although the accessibility of a nuclear toolbox transforms the trend in a blink of an eye throughout the battle, it is still excellent and also adrenaline pumping since you just never ever know what to expect. The music is excellent also. The game experienced a disadvantage in its economic situation due to gamers that used item duplicators. Additionally, the use of fly hack devices increased the progressing of several characters. Essentially, a fly hack program enables a player to maximize his experience by attacking a beast from above without the beast harming him due to their range as well as the failure of the monster to get to a flying character. The inequality in the game eventually made me give up playing because I was left behind by players who made use of these cheats and I found it difficult to go toe-to-toe with them also if I routinely played the game. One more low point of this game is the extremely fundamental low-level characters. Furthermore, travelling to reach a certain factor in the area is slow and rather tough. Apparently, the programmers disliked the advancement of the game due to they have ceased adding brand-new functions in it. They can destroy various other races with just a couple of attacks as well as they are reliable containers in battle. Every specific time of the day, all races gather in a map to take part in the Chip Wars led by each race's archon. The race that wins the war likewise obtains race lovers, boosting the race's strike as well as protection, which provides it supremacy for a particular period. The PK system keeps you awake even if you are just leveling on routine monsters because any type of race can simply attack your area and strike you. The only safe location to remain is at the base of each race where intruders can't attack you.

[vexvamp]

Wings of Fire: Revenant

The Final Chapter

Part 3 of 3

Part One - Part Two

  Truthseeker watched as Peacemaker slowly dissolved into the cloudy horizon, his rainbow scales the last thing she could see before he disappeared completely.

   “Kinkajou!” Turtle suddenly shot across the cliff and barreled into the Rainwing in what Truthseeker could only guess was meant to be a gesture of affection. “Are you all right?!”

   Kinkajou gestured to the chain around her mouth and made a series of unintelligible noises.

   “Oh…right,” Turtle said, his gaze wondering shyly over to Truthseeker. His wide, gold-flecked eyes hid nothing, and in them she could see all the awe, the curiosity, and the fear that he felt at the revelation that in the body of this seemingly ordinary dragonet lay the soul of an ancient seer. Hesitantly, he reached out to her. “Could I…um…?”

   Truthseeker glanced at his shaking talons, secretly worried that he might fumble and drop the key off the side of the cliff. “Maybe I better do it,” she replied.

   Turtle hesitated for a fraction of a second before finally stepping aside and allowing Truthseeker access to Kinkajou. She could feel his apprehensive gaze burning with the intensity of the summer sun as she took the heavy lock in her talons. There were a million questions that she knew he wanted to ask, but never could. A million things she wasn’t even sure she could begin to answer.

   With a sharp click, the lock gave way, releasing its hold on the interwoven tangle of chains. Kinkajou gave a shake, and the coils of metal slid away like snakeskin, falling into a single, benign pile at her feet. Truthseeker could already see blue and purple bruises blooming in the places where the links had constricted her skin.

   Kinkajou looked up at her, the same intensity burning in her leaf-green eyes, though Truthseeker noted that it seemed more weighted with curiosity than fear. “Thank you,” she said after a long moment, for once seeming lost for words.

   “Kinkajou!” Turtle barreled into the Rainwing, nearly knocking her to the ground.

   “Ow, ow, ow! Turtle, take it easy! Haven’t I been through enough with you squashing me to death!” Kinkajou growled, though her voice was seeped with affection.

   “Sorry,” he replied, wrapping his arms more gently around her and pulling her to his chest. He rested his head against her shoulder, the flashes of distant lightning reflecting on the tears rolling down his cheeks.

   “You idiot,” Kinkajou growled softly. “What were you thinking, almost bringing Darkstalker back to save me?”

   “I’d do anything for you,” he breathed.

   “Don’t make it cheesy, now,” she replied teasingly, but Truthseeker noticed that she too had tears in her eyes.

   After a long moment, the Rainwing pulled away, wiping away the moisture on her cheek and plastering on a cheery smile in its place. “Come on, we need to check on Moon.”

   Turtle nodded, and the pair of them glided over to the opposite cliff, Kinkajou faltering only slightly from the painful bruises along her wings. Hope stood protectively over Moon, who lay on her side with her injured wing spread awkwardly on the cold stone. Peacemaker’s fire had left a gaping, blackened hole, and although she was trying hard to hide it, Truthseeker could see that Moon was in pain. Kinkajou immediately embraced her friend, at the same time admonishing her for taking such a big risk to save her life. Moon quickly silenced her, and Turtle and Kinkajou immediately went to work on just how to word an effective healing spell.

   Truthseeker turned her back to them, satisfied that the three friends no longer needed her. On talons that seemed to be made of stone, she made her way back to the edge of the cliff where she’d last seen Peacemaker. She stared off into the far distance, but could see no sign of him against the dark horizon. The storm was beginning to break up, and she could see the black, star-flecked sky showing through gaps in the clouds. The lightning too was becoming less frequent, with flashes of light only occasionally silhouetting the distant mountains. It was almost as if the strength of Peacemaker’s anger had brought on the storm, and his absence had chased it away.

   She hung her head, feeling that love, that loss, that need to be near him as clearly as she had all those hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, when she’d left him enchanted and imprisoned beneath the mountain. She had tried so hard to make their future happy and safe, but she had failed, and because of that she had lost him. And now here she was, losing him again to the darkness in his soul, the darkness which seemed unwilling to be banished.

   “Truthseeker,” Truthseeker heard the soft, comforting voice and whirled around. Hope stood a few steps behind her, her eyes soft with sympathy and dark with the same loss that Truthseeker felt.

   Truthseeker felt the tears come swiftly to her eyes and spill heavily down her cheeks. Her throat felt tight and her breath burned in her lungs, but she could do nothing to stop it. The tears came of their own volition, one after the other in hot, sticky droves.

   Hope stepped forward and spread her wings as an invitation for Truthseeker to come into her arms. Truthseeker went to her, falling into the mother’s embrace and allowing herself to be cradled like a tiny dragonet. Sobs wracked her body as she leaned against Hope’s chest and felt the older dragon’s wings wrap comfortingly around her. The grief she felt was so great that she feared she would fall into it forever and the world would become nothing but blackness. For so long she had chased it away and not allowed it to grab hold of her, but now that she was in its grasp, it seemed she might never escape.

   “I’m sorry,” Hope breathed, “this is all my fault.”

   Truthseeker looked up at her. “No…why do you say that?”

   Hope sighed. “I tried to keep you and Peacemaker apart because I was afraid it might bring back memories of his old life, and it was because of that, that all this happened. Moon confronted me about the two of you, and I let my stupid pride get in the way of seeing sense. I wasn’t careful enough about what I said, and Peacemaker must have overheard. That’s how he got his memory back.”

   Truthseeker remembered the dream she had, had before awakening with the memories of her old life surging through her head. In her dream she had felt Peacemaker’s shock and devastation all tumbling down on him at once like a churning avalanche of ice and snow. She had felt his disbelief give way to realization, then to sadness, and finally to anger, before she saw the details of his deadly plan come to life before her eyes.  She realized now that she had felt all the same things Peacemaker had upon learning the truth about who he was and who he had been.

   “You couldn’t have known this was going to happen,” Truthseeker said.

   “Maybe, but it doesn’t help that I was one of the dragons who chose to enchant Darkstalker in the first place. I thought…I thought we could have a second chance. A chance to be happy. But then again, I…I guess I never really understood the curse of animus magic. Arctic never liked to speak about it after we fled the Ice Kingdom, and I suppose now I understand why.”

   Truthseeker gave a start at hearing Hope mention the husband she had lost all those hundreds of years ago. She could remember the troubled Icewing from her years spent as Clearsight, and flinched as she recalled the day he had died.

   Hope hung her head. “The magic was Arctic’s undoing. That night we left the Ice Kingdom, he was careless with a spell and…” she hesitated, her haunted eyes staring off into the distance, “a lot of dragons died. It was an accident. He never meant for anyone to get hurt, but… but it haunted him, and I don’t think he ever got over it.” She snorted. “Then my dear, loving mother let it slip that she’d brought me to the Ice Kingdom in hopes of bringing Animus blood into our tribe, but conveniently left out the fact that I hadn’t been privy to that plan. I tried to explain to Arctic that I cared about him and that I would never deceive him like that, but I don’t think he ever really trusted me again. He couldn’t believe that I really loved him. After what he did, I…I think that he must have thought that no one could.”

   Truthseeker could see two thousand years worth of loss and longing in Hope’s eyes as she stared off at the storm clouds being chased away into the distance. “You still miss him…don’t you?”

   “I loved him,” Hope replied. “Not a moment goes by that I don’t wish that things had been different…that somehow we could have had a second chance to make things right.”

   She glanced back down at Truthseeker. “But you…you have that chance.”

   “What?”

   “Peacemaker isn’t lost, Truthseeker. There’s hope for him, I know it. I saw it when he looked at you.”

   Truthseeker pulled out of the older dragon’s grasp, a fresh wave of tears burning in her eyes as she faced up to her. “But I did everything I could, and it still wasn’t enough!”

   “Not enough? You saved Kinkajou’s life! You stopped Peacemaker from reclaiming the powers that would have destroyed his soul! And you think that’s not enough?”

   Truthseeker hung her head, unsure of how to reply.

   “You got through to him when no one else could. You convinced him that he could choose to do good when everyone else believed he could do nothing but harm. That means something.”

   “So what do I do?”

   Hope took one of Truthseeker’s talons in her own. “Find him. Bring him home.”

   -----

   The storm was starting to break up by the time Peacemaker made it to his final destination, and he could see the soft, milky light of dawn just beginning to light the horizon. His eyes burned and his head throbbed. His wrist was sore where the chain had dug in and his shoulders ached from the strain of Kinkajou’s weight. But none of this could distract him from the pain opening like a chasm at the center of his chest.

   It was over. He would never have his magic back and he would never be king. All those dreams, all those futures, were gone, broken apart like the storm clouds drifting away on the wind. All he had managed to do in pursuit of these shattered dreams was hurt everyone who had ever meant anything to him. He was alone, powerless, and lost to the world. He was a dragon with no identity, no purpose, and no home. He belonged nowhere but the nightmares of those he had harmed with his anger and selfishness.

   After what seemed like an eternity of flying, he came upon the great stone chasm, stretching like a scar across the side of the mountain. Since he had last seen it, it had become overgrown with grass, ivy, and tiny blue flowers, all spilling like a waterfall over the side of the abyss. The tangle of fauna trembled as he whisked past it into the darkness of the cavern below. He continued that way until he came upon a small crawlspace at the back of the cave, the walls riddled with long, deep claw marks.

   All the fear he would normally feel at being enclosed in the dark, claustrophobic cavern faded to insignificance in the face of these new memories. He placed a talon against the marks along the cold stone wall, feeling how deeply etched they were into the rock. Each mark was a day he had spent down in this dark, cold, airless place, alone and wondering if he might be there forever. He remembered the stone pressing against him on all sides so that he could barely move, the sensation that he was suffocating, with only a tiny hole in the roof letting in a trickle of fresh air, and the feeling of starving to death but being unable to die. The marks on the walls had given him a sense of control, a sense that the days here were numbered and that one day they would come to an end. They’d given him a sense that one day he might be free.

       As he made his way across the cavern, noting that it seemed much bigger than last time he’d been here, he felt his talons brush against something cold and smooth. Glancing down, he saw the bracelet of twisted copper, inlaid with three sparkling moonstones, reflecting some unseen light. The bracelet was stretched and warped, and most of the copper was entirely covered by layers of blue-green tarnish. Peacemaker brushed his talons against the cool surface of the moonstones, remembering the day he had given this bracelet to Clearsight, believing that in the future, one of their dragonets might inherit it. Instead, she and Fathom had used it to imprison him under the mountain for two thousand years.

   Because they were afraid of him, he thought with a pang of sorrow. His best friend and the dragon he loved were afraid of him. They thought he was going to destroy the whole world. Were they right? He remembered the soul reader and the stark white sand shining against the black. The proof of his diseased soul. Three moons, how had he let this happen?

   The pain of the memories was so great that it was as if the whole mountain had suddenly collapsed on him all over again. He wanted nothing more than to give into the crushing weight and let it bury him, suffocate him until he couldn’t think or feel anything ever again.

   Then his eyes wondered back to the enchanted bracelet. It had broken but…maybe he could fix it. Maybe, if he wound the links of copper back together, the power it held might return. He reflected on his two thousand years of sleep, with no pain, no memories, and no thought of the world around him. It seemed peaceful.

   He was just beginning to hold the bracelet up to the weak light shining through the entrance to the cavern when a shadow fell upon him. He looked up and saw a dragon standing silhouetted against the steadily rising sun, her violet eyes shining with determination.

   “Seeker?!”

   He saw the silver scales beneath Truthseeker’s wings flash as she lighted down on an outcropping of rock above him. With a start, Peacemaker realized that it was the same place where he had once confronted Qibli, just minutes before he’d been enchanted and woken up a different dragon. Anger threatened to boil in him…but then he remembered the soul reader. What would he have done with a dragon whose soul was so obviously dark and rotten? He thought about Arctic, and his stomach gave a sickening clench.

   “Why did you follow me?” he demanded, trying to sound stronger than he felt.

   She shifted her wings. “We weren’t finished talking,” her voice, though soft, had no trouble carrying down to him.

   “I said everything I needed to say. Now leave me alone,” he heard his voice break midway through that last statement, but tried his best to hide it.

   She frowned. “Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Come on, why don’t you come up here with me, so I can see you better?”

   Peacemaker started to ask why she didn’t just come down to him, but then realized that she was deliberately trying to distance him from his former prison. And perhaps she too was reluctant to venture down into that place of darkness, so crowded with bad memories it seemed difficult to breathe.

   Reluctantly, he raised his wings and flapped through the stagnant air to the outcropping where Truthseeker perched. She reached out a talon, as if to embrace him, but he quickly shrugged it away.

   “What are you doing here, Seeker?” he growled, using anger to drown out the agony of longing burning in his chest. “I did what you asked. I let Kinkajou go. What else do you want from me?”

   But Truthseeker didn’t seem to hear him. “What’s that you’re holding?” she asked.

   Peacemaker raised his talon, the moonstones in the tarnished bracelet glinting in the pale light streaming through the mouth of the cave. In the shock of Truthseeker’s arrival, he had completely forgotten he was holding it.

   Truthseeker’s eyes widened. “That’s…” She seemed to reach out for it for a moment, before recoiling as if she had been stung. When she spoke again, her voice was no more than a whisper, “Why do you have that?”

   He turned away. “I found it in the cave, that’s all. I wasn’t going to do anything with it.”

   She narrowed her eyes. “If that’s true, then give it to me.” She reached out a talon for the bracelet, and Peacemaker instinctively recoiled before he could stop himself.

   “You’re lying,” she hissed, “what were you going to do with the bracelet, Peacemaker?”

   He turned away from her. “It doesn’t matter.”

   “It’s matters to me!”

   He whipped around to face her, his long tail thrashing. “I was going to do the only thing I could do with it! I was going to go back to sleep under the mountain, where I can’t feel or think or hurt anyone ever again.”

   “That’s insane!”

   “Maybe, but it’s the only option I have left. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

   “Peacemaker, that’s ridiculous. You belong at home, with me, Cliff, Auklet, Moon, your mother, and all the other dragons that love you.”

   He shook his head. “I can’t go back there! After all I’ve done, they…they could never forgive me.”

   “How do you know that?” she challenged.

   “I hurt Moon! I threatened Turtle! I...” the lump in his throat almost kept him from uttering the words, “I tried to kill Kinkajou! She was one of my best friends. She helped raise me, and I tried to kill her!”  

   “But you didn’t!”

   “Only because of you!” he cried, his breath coming out in rapid, hoarse gasps as he tried to fight against the tears burning in his eyes. “If you hadn’t stopped me…I…”

   “You wouldn’t have gone through with it.”

   “How do you know?!” he choked out the words. “I was so….so angry…so hurt, I…I think I could have...” He trailed off, the tightness in his chest and throat making it impossible to get the words out.

   Truthseeker straightened up. “Even if that’s true, the point is that you didn’t. You had the opportunity to hurt her and get everything you ever wanted, and still you chose not to.”

   “Because of you,” he repeated.

   She shook her head. “I don’t make your decisions for you, Peacemaker. In the end it was all up to you, and you chose to do the right thing.”

   “But it’s not enough. I came so close to doing something terrible…and they’ll never be able to forget that.”

   “You’re right, they won’t,” she replied.

   Peacemaker looked up sharply, surprised by that response, but Truthseeker’s gaze remained gentle.

   “They won’t ever forget it, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t forgive you. Will it happen right away? Probably not. It may take a long time. What you did was wrong, and you’ll have to earn their trust back, but I know you can do that. You just have to show them that you’re willing to be better, and I know that you can be.”

    “How?!” he burst out. “How do you know I can be better?! How do you know I won’t end up right back where I was two thousand years ago, when you trapped me under this mountain to save the world from me?”

   Truthseeker flinched at the reminder of what she had done to him all those years ago, but she didn’t allow herself to be swayed. “Because tonight you did something that you never could in your life as Darkstalker: you gave up something you wanted for the good of another dragon. You cared more for her wellbeing than your own.”

   Peacemaker hung his head and wrapped his tail dejectedly around his talons. “Was I really so bad, you know…before?” he murmured quietly, though by now he already knew the answer.

   Truthseeker reached out and stroked a talon comfortingly across the spines that ran along his head. “You had your moments. But you were also funny and clever and thoughtful and even kind, when it suited you. That was the part of you I fell in love with, not your mindreading or your animus powers or any of your enchantments. I loved you for the dragon I got to know before…before you decided other things were more important.”

   Peacemaker flinched, drawing in his wings, as if they were a cloak that could conceal him from the sins of his past.

   Truthseeker placed a talon gently beneath his chin, turning his head up so that he would look her in the eye. “But you know what? You’ve been all those wonderful things and more in this life. Why do you think you have so many dragons that care about you?”

   Peacemaker sighed, his heart heavy with the fear that he may have destroyed a life he had only just begun to appreciate. “I just wish things could go back to the way they were…before I got my memory back.”

   He looked up suddenly. “You don’t think that Turtle might…? I mean, if you asked him…”  

   Truthseeker shook her head fiercely, “No.”

   “But he would only have to erase my memories from the last few hours and…”

   “No, Peacemaker!” she growled, her violet eyes suddenly alight with determination. “No more enchantments! No more magical shortcuts!”

   Peacemaker shrank back, surprised by the ferocity in her tone.

   She sighed, the fire dying from her eyes. Slowly, she reached out a wing and laid it comfortingly across his shoulder. “All this magic brings is pain. All these wounds need time and care to heal, not cheap magical tricks. Before I left, I talked to Turtle and the others, and made them promise that if I brought you back, there would be no more spells on you ever, ever again.” She raised her head, the sharp spines lifting along her neck. “And I’ll see to it that they keep that promise.”

   “But…how do I go back? How do I live knowing what I’ve done…who I’ve been?” Before he had been so afraid that no one else could forgive him, and now he feared that he might not be able to forgive himself.

   Truthseeker reached out, taking one of his talons in hers, so that he could feel the warmth of her scales soaking into his. “I know it’s overwhelming, and I know you’re scared, but you won’t be alone. I’ll be beside you every step of the way.”

   “How can I ask you to do that?” he breathed. “After all I’ve put you through?”

   She shook her head. “You’re not asking anything. This is my decision. I have no more futures to weave, no more prophecies to give or destinies to fulfill. For once my life is my own, and I get to decide where I spend it.” She leaned into him and rested her head gently against his shoulder. “I want it to be with you.”

   Peacemaker sank into her, feeling the tears come unabated to his eyes. Her voice was filled with such profound devotion and kindness that the force of it almost took his breath away. What power had ever had a lure so great that it had driven him away from her?

   “Truthseeker, I…” he choked, barely able to get the words out. “I love you.”

   He realized suddenly that this was the first time he had spoken these words in this lifetime, though he had wanted to so many times. Even in his previous life the exchange had been rare. They were seers then, and love was something promised in visions and prophecies, not something that needed to be proven in small moments or kind acts. Perhaps that promise of love had cheapened its value, and made them feel it was something they were entitled to, not something that had to be nurtured and cared for like the flowers in Peacemaker’s garden.

   “I love you too, Peacemaker,” she replied.

   For a moment they stayed like that, the rising sun shining through the entrance to the cavern and warming their scales with a light that promised to chase the night away. Neither of them noticed when the bracelet held loosely in Peacemaker’s talon slipped away and tumbled down, down, down through a crack in the stone, where it would never again be found.

   After what seemed like an eternity, the two young dragons pulled out of each other’s grasp. The cavern was filled with golden light as the sun continued to climb, and Truthseeker gazed out at the patches of sky beginning to show at the edge of the horizon.

   “I think the storm has gone,” she murmured.

   “I think you’re right,” he replied softly.

   A warm breeze blew in from the mouth of the cavern, carrying the scent of dew-laden grass and the nectar of wildflowers.

   Peacemaker brushed Truthseeker gently with the tip of his wing and nodded to the mouth of the cave. “Come on, let’s go have a look.”

   Truthseeker blinked at him, as if surprised, and then gave a nod of agreement.

   The two of them flew side by side out of the darkness of the cavern and into the morning light. Truthseeker had been right; the storm was completely gone, and only a few tattered clouds remained at the edges of the sky. The sun was glowing amber as it rose, staining the pale blue horizon with vibrant shades of yellow and orange. They lighted down together on a tangle of grass and ivy dotted with delicate blue flowers and sparkling with raindrops.

   Truthseeker gazed in awe at the expanse of swirling color staining the sky, the light of the rising sun sparkling in her eyes.

   “It’s a beautiful morning,” she breathed. Her gaze found him again, and he knew she was putting forward the question, though she didn’t utter another word.

   It needed to be his decision.  

   Peacemaker smiled at her. “Okay…let’s go home.” 

-----

No critique desired. Please respect that. Wings of Fire belongs to Tui T. Sutherland The art belongs to me, and you are not permitted to steal, trace, copy, reference, or otherwise redistribute it in any way. I also do not want to see this posted on RP sites, Facebook, YouTube, etc. without my permission. That's still art theft.

[huntedbyacreature]

into the mirror cave

“The first thing I talked about with Rian was the mirror cave . . . What are Rey’s conflicts? This image reflects a little bit of the Kylo/Rey Force connections, as well as the duality of light and dark, good and evil. Some of these were being pulled from what I knew of The Force Awakens, but also little glints of information from Rian and mirroring the cave in Empire.” — James Clyne, VFX art director, The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi

“The idea is this island has incredible light and the first Jedi temple up top, and then it has an incredible darkness that’s balanced down underneath in the cave . . . In this search for identity, which is her whole thing, she finds all these various versions of ‘Who am I’ going off into infinity, all the possibilities of her. She comes to the end, looking for identity from somebody, looking for an answer, and it’s just her.” — Rian Johnson (x)

“The idea that if there’s a Jedi Temple up top, the light, it has to be balanced by a place of great darkness. We’re drawing a very obvious connection to Luke’s training and to Dagobah here, obviously. And so the idea was if the up top is the light, down underneath is the darkness. And she descends down into there and has to see, just like Luke did in the cave, her greatest fear. And her greatest fear is [that], in the search for identity, she has nobody but herself to rely on.” — Rian Johnson (x)

Some (long, rambling) thoughts on the mirror cave sequence below the cut.

Rian certainly took a page from the heroine’s journey and mined some Carl Jung here. In this post I’ll discuss the mirror cave and hut scenes and how they trace the “crossing the threshold” and “wedding the animus” steps. In a future post I’ll discuss Rey’s confrontation with Luke as the “confronting the powerless father [figure]” step.

crossing the threshold: descent to “a dark place” 

“There's something else beneath the island … A dark place.”

“You went straight to the dark.”

“That place was trying to show me something.”

For an excellent read on the heroine’s descent, see “The Descent: the Heroine’s Journey in The Force Awakens” and “Bride of the Monstrous: Meeting the Other in the Force Awakens” by @ashesforfoxes.

the heroine’s journey and the animus figure

A quick summary of some relevant Jungian concepts follows.

While the male hero goes on an active quest as a rite of passage (involving some physical feat like slaying the monster), the heroine goes on a more inward-focused quest (reconciling the monster within). The heroine’s journey involves an awakening within herself, by descending to a place where she can liberate her inner goddess.

In The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Jungian scholar Marie-Louise von Franz reminds us that this journey within is fundamental to the process of the heroine’s individuation, that it is “a time of initiation and incubation when a deep inner split is cured” by descending into the unconscious.

In The Heroine’s Journey, Maureen Murdock describes this descent as a “journey to our depths” that “invariably strengthens a woman and clarifies her sense of self” because it is a process of “looking for the lost pieces of myself” or seeking to complete oneself. As Murdock writes:

Persephone is pulled out of the innocence (unconsciousness) of everyday life into a deeper consciousness of self by Hades. She is initiated into the sexual mysteries … She becomes Queen of the Underworld.

Similarly, Rey is compelled to descend to that dark place underneath the island where she is pulled into a “deeper consciousness of self” mediated by her Force bond with Kylo. “That place was trying to show me something.” Note, “dark” here is not “evil” but it can show us something about ourselves (for instance, our greatest fears) as it represents the unconscious part of our psyche.  

Persephone’s descent into the underworld is when she faces the unknown and matures. She had to leave her family and the familiar, namely the world above ruled by her mother Demeter in which she was kept in an infantile state of girlhood. The world below with Hades is where she accesses what Jungians call the animus and actualizes her selfhood as a woman.

So what is this animus? The anima and animus are “soul-image” archetypes projected onto a person typically of the opposite sex. The animus represents the masculine aspects of the female psyche. As von Franz tells us in The Feminine in Fairy Tales, the animus “has to do with ideas and concepts” and in fiction is typically represented by a man. In her essay “The Process of Individuation” in the Jung anthology Man and his Symbols, von Franz notes:

A vast number of myths and fairy tales tell of a prince, turned by witchcraft into a wild animal or monster, who is redeemed by the love of a girl—a process symbolizing the manner in which the animus becomes conscious.  ... Very often the heroine is not allowed to ask questions about her mysterious, unknown lover and husband; or she meets him only in the dark and may never look at him. The implication is that, by blindly trusting and loving him, she will be able to redeem her bridegroom. But this never succeeds. She always breaks her promise and finally finds her lover again only after a long, difficult quest and much suffering.

The parallel in life is that the conscious attention a woman has to give to her animus problem takes much time and involves a lot of suffering. But if she realizes who and what her animus is and what he does to her, and if she faces these realities instead of allowing herself to be possessed, her animus can turn into an invaluable inner companion who endows her with the masculine qualities of initiative, courage, objectivity, and spiritual wisdom.

The animus, just like the anima, exhibits four stages of development. He first appears as a personification of mere physical power--for instance, as an athletic champion or “muscle man.” In the next stage he possesses initiative and the capacity for planned action. In the third phase, the animus becomes the “word,” often appearing as a professor or clergyman. Finally, in his fourth manifestation, the animus is the incarnation of meaning. On this highest level he becomes (like the anima) a mediator of the religious experience whereby life acquires new meaning. He gives the woman spiritual firmness, an invisible inner support that compensates for her outer softness. The animus in his most developed form sometimes connects the woman’s mind with the spiritual evolution of her age, and can thereby make her even more receptive than a man to new creative ideas. It is for this reason that in earlier times women were used by many nations as diviners and seers. The creative boldness of their positive animus at times expresses thoughts and ideas that stimulate men to new enterprises.

Fairy tales from the female individuation perspective are all about wedding the animus or reconciling with the monster, which is deeply identified with the heroine’s innermost self. This part of the journey is necessary to heal that inner psychic split, to become whole. Reconciling her animus in a positive way allows the heroine to access new ideas and concepts and achieve her creative potential. Rey must acknowledge and integrate her positive animus to “become what you were meant to be” (more on the positive vs negative animus below).

(Edit: See also this wonderful meta by @skysilencer elaborating on the anima and animus as parts of the psyche.)

rey’s mirror cave journey and kylo ren as her animus

Following the beats of the heroine’s journey and Jungian concepts, Rian has given us what many of us have predicted all along: Rey joining with Kylo Ren as her animus on her journey of self-discovery.

Rey descends through a black hole that pulls her into the ocean depths beneath the island. When she emerges at the mouth of the mirror cave, her hair is undone. This is the first step of her growth from girlhood to womanhood and the liberation of that inner goddess.

Rey kept her hair tightly coiled in those signature three buns all her life on Jakku because she clung to the infantile hope that her parents would return and recognize her. We now know that this hope was a fiction she fabricated to give herself a reason to live. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Rey imposed her own rosy narrative on a harsh reality in order to survive. “Child . . . you already know the truth.” Indeed, as Maz correctly intuited, Rey already knew the truth: her parents were nobody and they were never going to come back for her.

Rey’s loosened hair represents letting go of that past and uncoiling that fictional narrative that was holding her back.

The new undone look also signifies a sexual awakening.

And who should be there, listening patiently, as a companion to Rey’s awakening? Rey narrates her mirror cave journey to none other than Kylo Ren, who is with her on that journey as her animus.

Recall, the animus first appears as “mere physical power” but in a higher form gives the woman “an invisible inner support” as mediator of a meaningful spiritual experience. At first, Kylo appeared to Rey as a creature in a mask, a manifestation of mere physical power. Through their Force bond, Kylo certainly manifests as a “muscle man” particularly when he refuses to throw on something to cover those gleaming pecs. Later, he becomes a source of spiritual support when he assures Rey “you’re not alone” after she confides to him she had never felt so alone as in that cave where she sought answers.

Also, recall, the animus has to do with ideas and concepts. Kylo represents the idea of “let the past die” on Rey’s path to self-actualization. Rey needs to hear this in order to move on from her disappointment at being so casually tossed aside by her parents. While Rey clings to the past (her parents, Luke the legend who she says the galaxy needs, the myth of the Jedi and the Jedi “page-turners” she takes on the Falcon), Kylo wants to throw it all away. Kylo wants to tear down the curtains, just as those red velvet curtains in Snoke’s throne room burned away to reveal the black void of space around them. Kylo wants to live in that black void of cold reality where Luke and the Jedi are demythologized and deconstructed, where he can see clearly Rey’s parents for who they were as opposed to the childish way Rey put a curtain over the truth with her own make-believe tale (“they’ll be back … one day”). Rey needs a cold splash of that demythologization to grow up.

As Rian Johnson tells us in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, there’s “a sin in venerating the past so much that you’re enslaved to it.” Yet the idea is not so simple, as Rian also acknowledges the need to reconnect with the past (and implicitly the need to re-construct myths by which to live):

If you think you are throwing away the past, you are fooling yourself. The only way to go forward is to embrace the past, figure out what is good and what is not good about it. But it’s never going to not be a part of who we all are.

We become “enslaved” if we go too far in either direction, whether venerating the past too much or wanting so badly to desecrate and “kill” the past. The extreme and destructive way in which Kylo seeks to “kill it” represents the negative animus. That side is, paradoxically, too emotionally tied to the past (and fixated on perceived past wrongs), unwilling to simply let go of the anger and resentment. To integrate her positive animus, Rey needs to acknowledge and learn from the past by looking at it in an objective way, which requires distancing herself instead of letting the past rule her emotions. Both Rey and Kylo need to embrace the past and the fact that it is part of who they are, in order to move forward.

Let’s distinguish the positive animus from the negative animus, which can be identified with the heroine’s shadow. The negative animus often appears as a sort of “death-demon” or murderer (“murderous snake” for instance) and “personifies all those semiconscious, cold, destructive reflections that invade a woman in the small hours” according to von Franz. Bluebeard would be an example of the negative animus: a seducer who is ultimately destructive and must be overcome. The negative animus can be that inner critic reinforcing feelings of worthlessness.

In what ways is Kylo a negative or positive animus?

Negative animus: Kylo who embraces the monster role (“Yes, I am”). Kylo who says “you have no place in this story . . . you’re nothing” and resents the past. Kylo who is filled with so much self-loathing he stabs in the heart the man whose heart he has too much of (“You have too much of your father's heart in you, young Solo”) and wants to blast out of the sky the “piece of junk” in which he was conceived. Kylo who rages against the galaxy, who wants to impose a new order on the galaxy.

Positive animus: Kylo who says, “But not to me. Join me. Please.” Kylo who responds to “Ben” and who Rey sees turning in the future (“If I go to him, Ben Solo will turn”). Kylo who desperately needs to make peace with the past. Kylo who tells Rey, “You’re not alone.” Kylo who fought side by side with Rey, perfectly in sync. Kylo who we are rooting for to ultimately make peace with the galaxy.

Kylo has the potential to be Rey’s positive animus, but at the end of the film she cannot reconcile with him yet because he has not yet transformed from the murderous negative animus to Rey’s positive animus.

rey’s search for identity

“Who are you? … What’s special about you?”

Here, I digress a bit to discuss why Rey “nobody” is the perfect reveal and try to address some of the criticisms about the jarring sequence in the cave.

First, the way this sequence is filmed and narrated is superbly meta. Just as Rey is pulled out of her “everyday life” into another realm of consciousness, so are we as the audience pulled out of the immersive experience of the breakneck-paced dramatic narrative into a more self-reflective space. Some have criticized this moment as violating that rule of immersion, breaking the fourth wall and taking us out of the film. Reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s popular Infinity Mirrors exhibit, Rey’s mirror cave scenes evoke the experience of being in a modern art installation. You are part of those infinite possibilities. It is you, the audience, who create those infinite selves. This is entirely intentional and I believe indicative of Rian Johnson’s brand of auteurism: entirely self-aware and humbly transparent about his intentions. We are meant to reflect on our own assumptions about Rey. We are meant to question, does it really matter who her parents are? Why do we think it matters? For the fans who wanted her to be blood-related to a legacy Star Wars character: what does that say about you and your view of a character’s worth? your view of what builds character?

In The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rian explains that he wanted to explore, “What do you keep from the past and what do you not? What is the value of the myths you grew up with? What is the value of throwing those away and doing something new and fresh?” In a very meta way, his treatment of Rey’s struggle with her past in The Last Jedi also led the fandom to question: What is the value of the mystery box?

So much criticism has been leveled about the “empty mystery box” and how anti-climactic it is to show us Rey’s own reflection at the end of the corridor of infinite selves after teasing us with those murky shadows behind the glass, as if mocking fans for their intense speculative interest in her parentage, which was arguably one of JJ’s deliberately constructed mystery boxes.

Did Rian totally deconstruct and wreck that box? Well, not exactly, because the point of the mystery box was never to yield a white rabbit like a simple magic track. From JJ’s TED talk:

The thing is that it represents infinite possibility. It represents hope. It represents potential. And what I love about this box, and what I realize I sort of do in whatever it is that I do, is I find myself drawn to infinite possibility, that sense of potential. And I realize that mystery is the catalyst for imagination. Now, it's not the most ground-breaking idea, but when I started to think that maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge.

The mirror cave itself is a representation of the mystery box and Rey’s infinite potential. Rian, in a sense, preserves that mystery, that infinite possibility.

JJ goes on in his TED talk:

And then, finally, there's … the idea of the mystery box. Meaning, what you think you're getting, then what you're really getting. And it's true in so many movies and stories. Look at "E.T.," for example — “E.T." is this unbelievable movie about what? It's about an alien who meets a kid, right? Well, it's not. "E.T." is about divorce. "E.T." is about a heartbroken, divorce-crippled family, and ultimately, this kid who can't find his way … When you look at a movie like "Jaws," the scene that you expect … she's being eaten; there's a shark …The thing about "Jaws" is, it's really about a guy who is sort of dealing with his place in the world — with his masculinity, with his family, how he's going to, you know, make it work in this new town.

So many thought Rey was Luke 2.0 and that this story was about her going from nobody to somebody by virtue of discovering she belongs to an elite bloodline. So many thought The Last Jedi would be about passing the torch to the next Jedi. Well, it’s not really about the next Skywalker or the next Jedi. This story is about a girl finding her place in the world, who can’t find her way because she kept telling herself a lie about her past that trapped herself in her own mystery box, a box of her own making that allowed her to live with hope and at the same time limited her growth and kept her all alone. She told herself “they’ll be back … one day” when she knew her parents were never coming back. This story is about a girl who feels so alone. She meets a boy who feels this too: “You’re so lonely.” When Rey and Kylo are Force bonding together, their scenes are marked by silence, stripped bare of the noise and the sturm und drang of an epic-scale John Williams score, stripped down to the intimate-scale essence of their story: “You’re not alone.” “Neither are you.”

What Rian gives us is what we were really going to get all along: the revelation that the real substance is not in the box’s contents (the answer to the mystery of Rey’s parentage) but in that negative space around the mystery box, which is about two kids dealing with their loneliness.

So what do we make of Rey gazing at her own reflection, disappointed and alone?

Some have criticized the mirror cave sequence as an indulgent interlude emblematic of the vanity endemic to today’s narcissistic navel-gazing “me” generation—both the vanity of the auteur as well as the vanity of the film’s populist self-empowerment message. The mirror cave with its echo chamber and mirrors do bring to mind Echo and Narcissus. When Rey snaps her fingers, she hears nothing but her own sound, infinitely echoed. When Rey looks into the mirrors, she sees nothing but herself, infinitely reflected. (Edit: To be clear, I’m not agreeing with the “me” generation assessment. Also, it’s true that there are covert narcissists who feel vulnerable and neglected and that a deep-seated sense of insecurity or lack of self-esteem is at the root of narcissism. Rey and Kylo both exhibit some of this insecurity.)

Yet Rey is the opposite of a Narcissus. She doesn’t worship her own image or hold a grandiose view of herself (or lack empathy for others for that matter). Rather, she must learn to love herself instead of seeking love and validation from stand-in parental figures. As Kylo says, “Your parents threw you away like garbage. But you can’t stop needing them. It’s your greatest weakness. Looking for them everywhere, in Han Solo, now in Skywalker.” Here, unlike Narcissus who needed to detach himself from excessive love for his own image, Rey must come to embrace herself as worthy and self-sufficient. (Edit: Also, here, Rey is horrified rather than delighted to see her own reflections. See also Reyflections of Existential Horror from @and-then-bam-cassiopeia.)

As Rian tells us, her greatest fear is that she has nobody but herself to rely on. She must face that fear head on and realize she is enough, that all she needs is right in front of her nose (as Yoda might say).

She also comes to realize: “You’re not alone.”

wedding the animus: “when we touched hands”

“I thought I’d find answers here. I was wrong.” Yet the mirror cave does show Rey something vital to her search for identity: her own duality. At the end of that seemingly infinite hall of mirrors, Rey sees two shadowy figures walking forward behind the glass who then merge into one to form her own reflection. The shadows evoke a masculine figure and a feminine figure.

The “Kylo Kira Force Mash” concept art and its placement together with the mirror cave concept art on the same page in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi suggest to me that the two shadows merging into one and emerging as Rey’s reflection is supposed to represent both (1) the duality of masculine and feminine within each of us, in particular Kylo and Rey wedding into one as Rey assimilates Kylo as her animus, and (2) the duality of light and dark within each of us.

Recall, the idea of wedding the animus is that we need to reconcile and integrate both sides (both masculine and feminine, both light and dark) to become whole.

The mirror cave scenes are followed by a “wedding the animus” scene. After Rey narrates her mirror cave journey to Kylo, sitting with him in the hut through their Force bond, she proceeds to engage in perhaps the most intimate act we have ever seen in Star Wars (or Disney for that matter). She extends her hand, and the camera zooms obscenely close to Rey and Kylo’s bare fingers making contact.

In this moment, as she gasps, she sees a future with Ben. She sees him turning against Snoke. (Yes, he does turn against Snoke, but her vision is incomplete as he doesn’t turn against the First Order yet.) Likewise, he sees a future with her: “When the moment comes, you’ll be the one to turn. You’ll stand with me.” (I do think that in Episode IX we will see Rey standing with Kylo and turning to help him in some way, but Kylo’s vision is also incomplete in that she rejects his plea to join him in the throne room and does not turn against the Resistance.)

Yes, this moment is more intimate than a simple kiss or other physical act of intimacy, because Rey and Kylo are envisioning future lives together, standing side by side. Wedded to each other by the Force. The Force theme begins to play at this moment, as if underscoring the divine inevitability of this union.

Why does Rey fail to see clearly that Kylo would not yet turn in the throne room? “Ben, when we touched hands, I saw your future. Just the shape of it, but solid and clear.” Here I’m reminded of those shadowy figures again, and these verses from Corinthians 13:11 and 13:12 much referenced in literature and film:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

Rey is somewhat naive, like a child. In the mirror cave when she touches the glassy surface and in the hut when she touches Kylo’s hand, she sees through a glass, darkly. Rey’s knowledge of herself and her past is imperfect. Rey’s knowledge of Ben and the future is imperfect. Her vision is obscured by her naiveté and hope, by her optimistic insistence on clinging to rose-colored glasses and red curtains.

Chapter 13 in Corinthians is about love (sometimes translated to charity). What is a theme throughout Star Wars? Compassion. As Joseph Campbell points out, this means to suffer together, to feel someone else’s suffering as our own and wish to relieve that suffering.

Kylo began to feel compassion for Rey in the interrogation room when he discovered her loneliness. “You’re not alone.” Her suffering at Snoke’s hands likely contributed to his resolve to conceal his true thoughts from his master and slay Snoke at the right moment. When Rey is cut on the shoulder by a Praetorian Guard, Kylo glances towards her anxiously, further evidencing his compassion for her. However, he lacks compassion for her concern with her friends and the plight of the Resistance. He is still thinking in terms of “you’ll stand with me” instead of “we will stand together” working towards a shared goal.

Rey begins to feel compassion for Ben Solo through their Force bond, when she sees that fateful temple-burning night from Kylo’s point of view and learns that Luke lied about how he behaved. She also feels Ben’s loneliness. “Neither are you.” She extends her hand out of compassion. However, she didn’t ship herself to the Supremacy for Ben Solo, she went there to save her friends, and he understands that when she turns to the window port and demands, “Order them to stop firing!” Recall Rey’s reasons to Luke before flying off on the Falcon:

If he were turned from the dark side, that could shift the tide. This could be how we win.

Rey too is thinking about her own agenda, as opposed to what Kylo wants to accomplish: “We can rule together and bring a new order to the galaxy.” Kylo’s proposal to Rey, which involved a future together, is met with what he might have perceived to be an attempt on his life, though Rey’s grab for the lightsaber might simply have been her way of sending the message: you are not worthy of this yet. Neither of them are truly able to see from each other’s point of view; each has more to grow to reach that common ground and to truly love and suffer together. 

At the end of the film, Kylo remains a negative animus who has not yet fully processed and embraced the past as part of who he is, full of murderous rage (“blow that piece of junk out of the sky!” and “more! more!”). His rage masks his true misery and self-loathing, which is pitifully obvious from the way he looks at Rey through their Force bond at the very end of the film, then slowly closes his fingers around the projected gold dice as he realizes despite his ascension to Supreme Leader he truly holds on to nothing. He's not angry and resentful in that moment. He's heartbroken and sad.

But … Ben Solo will turn. The structure of the heroine’s journey mandates that Rey will somehow reconcile with her positive animus.

[feminist-propaganda]

Maid Is A Show About Jungian Archetypes - Episode 5: The Shadow

This Episode is one of the most significant of the mini-series. It's a huge turning point for Alex because she is about to discover something inside of her that is both extremely deep and terribly painful. Because this topic sucks, I am going to be trying to add a lot of sarcasm to this post - the purpose is to lighten the mood cause Shadow works makes me hella angsty.

Indeed, Alex is about to uncover something that she has been avoiding to see or feel, something that she's quite actively resisted ever since being a young child. But now, as an adult, and probably because she is at a crossroads in her life, she's begging the Universe to change her fate and wishing for transformation. Intuitively, she understand that she needs to look at her Shadow to recover parts of herself and heal them.

The Jungian archeype that perfectly matches this Episode is the Shadow. It is what Jung described as the Personal Unconscious and it's something both Freud and Jung agreed on - simply they gave it different names.

If you're like me, and you only studied Freud in school, than the following diagram might be helpful.

In his first model of the Mind, Freud famously used the analogy of an Iceberg to describe our psyche. Icebergs as an image are used a lot to refer to things that appear to be smaller than their true size, because most of their mass is underwater, and humans typically look at Icebergs from above the surface (I feel like this was a time when nuclear submarines hadn't been invented yet - but I digress).

So the Iceberg analogy is pretty useful here because Freud says most of our mind is unaccesible to us. There is only a very small fraction of what is going on up there that we can describe, document or share. Most of it is either shameful or useless or forgotten or repressed. The parts that are partly accessible, according to Freud, are the Ego and the Superego. These are the parts that we present to the world (the Ego) or the ideals we choose to honour during our lives (the Superego).

` If you were a famous politician, than your Ego would be the part of you that thinks you're serving the People and that shakes hands with the common folk during photo ops. The Superego would be the philosophy that you based your politics on and that you believe in (like humanism or liberalism). The Id, which is the part of the mind that is utterly and completely foreign to the politician would be something dark and obscure, that motivates and moves them, but that is never ackowledged or discussed. So possibly, unconsciously, this theoretical politician that I completely made up, is actually aroused by power and obsessed with money. That's why he's a politician.

Jung completely agreed with Freud on the existence of the Id, or the Personal Unconscious, except he went ahead and called it The Shadow.

We have already discussed the Personal Unconscious in this series of essays that I am doing on the topic of Maid. Episode 2 was about Alex's Animus. So how does the Anima-Animus system relate to the Shadow? The answer is that the Anima-Animus system is a part of the Shadow. The Shadow is a much more general term, that designates all things that are both Unconscious and Personal to an individual mind.

Remember, the Animus is a piece of the Unconscious mind of a human socialized to be a Woman. It is all of the traditionally masculine attributes she must repress in order to fit into modern society. If the process of individuation is not succesful, than the Woman might project her Animus onto Men she encounters and become obsessed with them. And then calls it romantic love. Gross. I know.

So without further ado, let's head into this brilliant Episode! Probably my favorite out of the whole show.

Archetype 5: The Shadow

In the first sequence of the Episode, we see many scenes of Alex waking up in the middle of the night or in the early hours of the morning to a crying, coughing, sick toddler. She walks over to her daugther's bed, and takes her into her arms and cuddles her, trying to comfort her.

That moment when you wake up is always interesting - wouldn't you say? Sometimes you're extremely aroused - you probably just had a wet dream. Other times you wake up in tears - you probably had a sad dream. You can also wake up in a panic - you probably just had a scary dream. And so on and so forth. Those minutes in the morning when you wake up sometimes define your whole day. If you feel crabby in the morning, your co-workers are probably going to notice your mood is off hours later.

Those moments are the bridge between the night and the day; the personal and the collective; the dark and the night; the intimate and the collective. They're also moments that Freud might've described as Preconscious.

Remember the iceberg? Notice how just below the surface, there is a thing layer called the Preconscious. This is the part of the mind that is not immediately available to us, but that stores information that you can use if you search for it. Let me illustrate with an example. You probably know exactly what your name is. But if I ask you what you did 3 Christmases ago, you might have to think about it for a minute. It might irritate you that you can't remember. But if you relax and methodically go back in time and think about where you were living three years ago and what your family was up to, you might piece it back together. It's frustrating to think that you wouldn't immediately remember something that seems so obvious. But that's how the brain works. It's optimized. Not super useful information, stuff that you don't need on a daily basis, is locked away in clunky, convoluted neural networks. Accessing them is kind of like extracting data from a very poorly designed distributed database. You need to go through a ton of IP addresses before you find the sequence of bits that you're looking for. If you have time to think about it, or to search the database, the information is accessible. Now, it's the same for dreams, have you noticed? If you want to forget a dream, you can. You just have to close your eyes again, and stop thinking about it, and the dream goes away. But if you want to remember it, you also can do that. You can think about it, and write it down in the morning. There's a name for that by the way. It's called Shadow work.

But back to Alex, and those difficult nights. As a mother, you quickly learn that you have to make a lot of decisions (Do I allow sugar in my household? How much TV do we watch? Do we do shower time at night or in the morning?). One of the hardest decisions that mothers have to make is how long they should ignore their kids when they cough at night. This is kind of horrible because sometimes your kids can pretend like they're coughing to get you to allow them into your bed. But then sometimes your kids are really sick - and you need to go and comfort them. If you react too early than you're encouraging manipulative tactics. But if you react too late than your kid might become so uncomfortable you won't be able to calm them down. Which do you pick?

In Alex's case, ignoring her kid when she's coughing is an even heavier decision because she's living in poverty. The apartment is humid, and breathing the wet air is irritating Maddy's sinuses. Alex chooses, in that first sequence to get Maddy. And as the sequence progresses we see Alex's facial expression go from surprise, to confusion, to worry and finally into despair and even helplessness. The fact that Alex is getting up in the middle of the night to care for her daughter shows that she's willing to acknowledge that her daughter is sick, and beyond that she's also willing to see that something is very wrong with her housing situation.

Alex not only chooses to comfort her daughter, she also talks to the handyman of the building. She asks him to check the wall of her apartment because there is water leaking through the stone. The handyman does not seem concerned by the situation - he wants to get rid of Alex - but she insists.

Maddy getting sick is hard on Alex for many reasons: first and foremost it's excruciating to see your child in pain. Then, if Maddie is too sick to go to daycare then Alex can't work. She might eventually lose her job for missing too many appointments. Finally, Maddy developping a chronical sickness means Alex might have to move out of the subsidized housing solution she designed with her case worker.

Episode 4 was about Alex developing her Persona. But according to Jung, the process of Individuation requires the Persona to be shattered so that the subject can encounter their Shadow. We can only become fully functional human beings if we ackowledge our ares of darkness.

Let me explain this a bit. Let's imagine for a second that Alex had stopped her Individuation process at the Perosna stage. Alex would probably have designed a very convincing image of herself succeeding as a single mom. She might be telling people everything is fine; and she wouldn't want to be in any other situation. She'd say she's happy to clean homes, and she appreciates the flexible schedules. If Alex was stuck in the Persona stage then she would be living under the pretense that she was doing a perfect job as a mother, that all of the decisions she was taking were appropriate. According to that framewrok, the living situation in the humid apartment can only be considered to be an adequate sitatuon. Ergo, there would be no need to worry about Maddy coughing at night and finally, Alex would not have to confront the handyman of the building.

You see, a person that confuses their Personas with their true selves can not move forward in life and address their shortcomings. The have faith in the white lies that they say to the world. What I am saying is that it's useful to have a Persona to do job interviews or to go on first dates. It is not useful to carry that Persona around all day and ignore threats and dangers as a result of this egotistic attitude.

I say this to explain that Alex is doing a great job - I don't mean to kick her while she's down. I mean that in order to keep progressing in her quest for financial independance & emotional security, she absolutely needs to go deeper into how and why she got herself into the fragile situation that she is in now. Developing a Persona was useful in Episode 4, encountering the Shadow is necessary to get to the end of Episode 5.

The Episode progresses into the introduction of the House of Barefoot Billy, a local celebrity, famous for robbing houses and being a child. The estate of his mother is being sold after she died, and Alex's cleaning company has been hired to wash it down before it is put on the market.

The house is full of knick knacks : piles of papers and ceramic kittens. It's dusty but it's not disgusting. Alex's partner for the clean is interested in the potential value of a cabinet full of porcelain relics. Looking through the items on display, Alex finds a Nazi figurine.

This, much like the awakenings in the middle of the night, seems to be another reference to the encounter of the Shadow. In both cases we have the choice to look at a situation from afar. We can make a quick judgement of the problem so that the outcome is beneficial to us in an immediate way (these ceramics are valuable, I will sell them on eBay; my kid is just being dramatic, I will keep sleeping in my bed) or we can choose to look closer and realize that the situation is gloomier than what we initially thought and then choose to face the trials and tribulations required to resolve the issue at hand (these items are from Nazi Germany, i will not sell them because I am a humanist and I condone genocide; my apartment is full of black mold and I need to move out).

As you can see, looking closer at something, being analytical and factual, is not as rewarding as wishful thinking. In one case I can get a quick reward (cash, good sleep), in the other I barely get a reward (the peace of mind knowing that I live by my principals, the trouble of going through yet another apartment search).

In both situations, we see that Alex is willing to look closer, to listen more carefully, to touch the wall and feel the water forcing it's way into her home. This tells us that Alex is open, receptive to the Shadow, she's willing to listen to the cold, hard truth. This is the perfect time for Alex to make a realization, or a breakthrough.

Something is awfully wrong about Barefoot Billy's house, and unfortunately it's not just the Nazi ceramics. Alex finds locks on the cupboard doors in the kitchen and in the upstairs bedrooms. It appears that as a boy, Billy might've been locked up in small spaces by his own mother.

Because Maddy is so sick, the daycare decides to call her grandfather to come and pick her up. When Alex discovers this happened, she becomes very upset and rushes to Maddy's side. What we know about her father so far is that he's a born again Christian. Alex quickly alluded to this in the previous episodes. He's also re-married and had a couple more children with a second wife. At this point, it's difficult to understand why Alex is so reticent to be in his life. Sure, the portraits of Jesus crying in the hallyway are kind of weird, but the house is nice and toasty and Wife #2 is absolutely charming. She's been taking care of sick Maddy all afternoon. Nevertheless, Alex takes Maddy home to the humid apartment. On her way back she stops by Sean's work to scold him for allowing the grandfather to do the pickup.

During the night, Maddy coughs again. Alex finds her freezing in her bed. She puts her finger into her wall, and it shrivels under the pressure of her index - like a sheet of wet paper would. Below it she finds rrak stains. Alex rushes Maddy to the hospital, where the doctor examines the child's ears and nose. The doctor tells her the living situation is unsustainable, and that the landlord is required by law to do everything in his power to get rid of the black mold.

Alex is completely ouf of options, so she drops off Maddy at her grandfather's house. While Maddy is with Wife #2, Alex is asked to go sit in the living room, her father wants to have a word with her. He feels bad about not being around, he wants to help out with Maddy's upbringing, he thinks he can make it up to Alex. But more importantly, he wants her to stay at his house, for as long as she wants. Alex thanks him ever so much; and goes off to work.

On the second day of the three day clean of Barefoot Billy's childhood home, Alex makes more distrubing discoveries. First, as she cleans the windows, she notices some trees being ruffled in the forest nearby, as if someone was running away. When she walks out into the garden; she finds a campfire. Someone has been burning wood there, this is within 50 meters of the house. Next - Alex finds a closet in the attic with more locks on it. The wood is drenched and humid and the door to the closet is stuck, (a reference, perhaps, to the black mold in Alex's own home) but together, the two maids force it open.

Interestingly, Alex decides to crawl into the closet. She takes her co-worker's lighter to look at the walls, and finds the drawings of a child. They represent a woman vomiting and a man with big teeth. At this moment the door of the closet shuts and we cut to a scene of a toddler running to a cupboard in a kitchen and hiding there. In the backround we hear Paula's voice.

We cut back to the scene at Barefoot Billy house - this time Alex is out of the closet, she's panting and crying uncontrollably. She has a glass of water, as her co-worker tells her to breathe, then cracks a joke. Once she's able to settle down, she realizes she needs to start looking for her mom.

Some thoughts about this.

First - we know that the toddler hiding in the cupboard is a flashback scene from little Alex. Whatever this child was hiding from, her mother had to deal with. We heard her voice in the backround while the kid was looking for shelter. So, what Alex realizes, coming out of the closet, is that her mother was in danger then, and that she is very probably in some more danger now. She's disapeared for weeks, and there is a sign on her house that says "For Rent". The number on the sign is her boyfriend's cellphone. Alex goes all around the town, in all of Paula's usual places, asking if anyone's seen her.

Alex's search takes her into the center of the town, where she encounters the friend that she made at the domestic violence shelter back in Episode 2 - a.k.a Danielle. You might remember that Episode 2 was about the Animus, a part of the Personal Unconscious. Danielle is wearing impecable makeup, her hair is in a fancy do, and the first thing she says to Alex is "Are you okay? You look like dog shit."

This is meaningful. Danielle has gone back to her abusive relationship, where she is being physically attacked by her partner. Yet, she looks great and smiles at Alex. It's as if she's taken the right decision going back to the domestic violence instead of trying to escape it. Alex responds "No I am not okay. Maddy is sick and I can't find my mom". In that moment, you could almost believe that Danielle's strategy is the winning one. I mean what's the big deal? Sure, the partner sometimes "loses his temper", but in the end what's important is that the family stays together. Right?

Wrong. When Danielle's partner comes out of the car, he hisses at her "Who is she? Do you know her?". Danielle denies that she ever met Alex, and walks away with her man on her arm.

Alex's eyes are filled with tears. She does look like dog shit - let's not even try to deny that. She's skinny, she's always worried, always stressed, her teeth are clenched. She's wearing her dirty work clothes and the old washed out coat she never seems to take off. Yes, it absolutely sucks to be her right now, but somehow she's still better off than Danielle over here living in denial.

You see, encountering your Shadow, which Alex is very busy doing this Episode, is not going to be nice or pleasant or fun or Instagrammable. It's going to be a lot of crying, a lot of panic attacks, a lot of darkness, a lot of wet Autumn days spent running around begging the universe for a fucking break. But man is it worth it.

Alex drives to the domestic violence shelter and begs for Danielle's number. The old woman that manages the Shelter finds the words to soothe her. "Who knows what she's up against?" She says about Danielle. "She could be trying to break a cycle of abuse going on for generations". Alex looks at her in bewilderment. The idea of a cycle of abuse going on for generations had apparently never crossed her mind. Or maybe it had? But she never wanted to think about it?

Here's where it gets really interesting, so I hope you're still with me, team. It's so much easier to think that one woman made one bad decision and needs to make one good choice to wrong that one bad decision that one woman made. That's okay, that's acceptable. We can all live with that. In fact, we all desperately want to believe it's true. This is why we spend so much time bashing single mothers. It makes us feel so much better about not just ourselves - the whole world. "She should've waited" , "It was obvious he was not daddy material", "She barely even finished high school". This is not just other mothers, this is nieces and nefews and husbands and wives and grandfathers and grandmothers. This is absolutely everyone, including the single mother. She bashes herself.

The reality is so much harder to accept. But here it is. It's not just one woman. It's not just one bad decision. It's all of the women & it's mostly unconscious. And it's not one good decision - it's a lifetime of WORK to avoid falling back into the cycle of abuse. And you can't ever right that wrong. It's not a scale, we're not in court. No matter how much we want it to be abstract and mathematical, it's bodies and people, it's skin, it's wombs. It's living cells. Meaning it's more like a wound, it can heal but it will always leave a scar. The tissues remember. The cells remember. The brain is wired. The behaviors are memetized. That's a generational curse. That's what Danielle is up against, and it's also what Alex is up against. She's just not completely aware of that. Yet.

In her dream that night, Alex is Barefoot Billy, walking towards her house, hiding in the woods. She gazes up at the window and sees Danielle screaming for help. She wakes up from her dream: it's a perfect parallel to the opening sequence of the episode. The rude awakening. In the kitchen, Alex meets her dad - hunting, like her, for a midnight snack. Staring at the cupboard, she recognizes the one from her flashback and asks him if as a child she would hide there. Alex's father tells her that's impossible, he built that cabinet long after she moved out with her mother.

In the morning, Alex goes back to her apartment, and meets with the handyman that has peeled off the upper layers of paint on the wall. The entire surface is covered in black mold. It will take months to refurbish. The damage is deep and has spread like cancer.

Everything has been unpacked now and Alex is ready for the ultimate test. She drives back to Barefoot Billy's house and crawls into the closet. She shuts the door and breathes deeply before closing her eyes. She allows herself to remember.

In the cupboard it was her. And it was her mother who ran after her and opened the door. And that was blood dripping all over her face. And it was her father crying on the kitchen counter. And that was the night when they went to Alaska.

Of course this changes everything. About everything. Alex runs to her car, rushes to her father's house and picks up her child. Before leaving she tells her dad she remembers the abuse. "I was hiding from you!", she says.

How do you break a generational curse, you ask? The first step is to go back and name all of the things that happened. No sugar coating, no protecting, no embellishments. Lying to children (you went to Alaska as a baby because your mother was chasing a boyfriend, she's unstable and makes stupid decisions) only teaches them to stop trusting their gut. Yes it's painful for a child to know that there was domestic violence in their home, but children can deal with these problems and move on.

[missr3n3]

describing my ocs personalities by way of memes

source images under the cut:

[accessanimus-archives]

I guess I should make some kind of introduction post.

My associate is not particularly tech-savvy, so for all intents and purposes, this blog is a solo effort.

I'd prefer to remain anonymous for the time being, so you can call me whatever you want. All I'll say is that I'm a cis woman in my late twenties.

This blog mainly exists to open a line of communication, since other modern methods (Twitter, Discord, TikTok etc.) feel inadequate or unappealing. I may post updates about my archival efforts if something comes up as well.

I'm not sure how to end this post. I suppose I can show this picture I took at Velero Bay a couple weeks ago.

[tyfye49-blog]

Wings of Fire: Time Twisted

(Artwork by @jade-mountain-academy)

The Prelude

---

In the beginning, our continent was ruled by man. Mankind was intelligent and crafty, but it was greedy and prideful all the same. Man was willing to kill his own father for power.

In time, a great creature came from the stars. A formless serpent with powers beyond man's comprehension. It could bend space and command the physical world at will. It's body was made of nothingness, and thus, it's its serpentine "form" never truly remained the same. Only it's quartet of eyes, which glowed with a bloody, red light, remained the same. The creature called himself Sorrauul, and his name meant "soul". He hated man as man hated man.

Sorrauul wanted to take the continent from man, for man did not deserve the land it warred over. In a single breath, Sorrauul engulfed the continent in black flames, scorching the souls of millions of men into nothingness.

The few that survived are now in hiding, scavenging off of what little remains of their people.

Having cleansed the continent of the virus which was Mankind, Sorrauul felt fulfilled. But not forever. He soon sought out a new purpose; to bring new life, new perfect life, back to the now barren landscape which was his new home.

Sorrauul took up six talonfuls of material: a talonful of desert sand, and talonful of tropical flowers, a talonful of mud, a talonful of ice, a talonful of mountain air, and a talonful of seawater. Upon these materials he spilled his lifeblood, instantly imbuing them with power. And from these six, small talonfuls, six small eggs appeared.

The eggs each harbored a perfect creature. Each was perfect because Sorrauul created them in his own image, and in his eyes, he was truly perfect.

From the egg of sand hatched Thermecla, whose shiny, pale-yellow scales radiated the dry heat of the desert sun.

From the egg of flowers hatched Veredence, whose soft and vulnerable scales could shift to match all the colors of the world.

From the egg of mud hatched Cottata, whose brown and amber scales drew their immeasurable endurance of the very earth.

From the egg of ice hatched Cryoptis, whose sharp, glittering white scales were freezing to the touch.

From the egg of mountain air hatched Aeracrea, whose sleek, fiery orange scales could cut though the sky faster than the winds could carry her.

From the egg of seawater hatched Hydrelus, whose ocean-blue scales could withstand the most crushing depths.

Sorrauul brought his six daughters into the world, proclaiming it was now theirs to own, and they would bring about an era of perfection for him.

It did not take long, however, for Sorrauul to become dissatisfied in his daughters. He began to suspect terrible things of them, and in his paranoia, Sorrauul devised a plan to monitor his daughters.

Sorrauul reached his massive talons into the sky, far past the clouds, far past the atmosphere, and he took up a talonful of stars. In another talon, he took up a talonful of light being reflected off of the three moons. With these materials in his claws, Sorrauul once again spilled his lifeblood, creating yet another egg.

From the egg of night sky hatched Nixos. Her scales were as dark as the ethereal form of her father, and with the power she drew from the three moons, she was able to spy on the minds of her older sisters for her father. With the light of the stars within her, she was able to see infinitely into the future so she could tell Sorrauul if her sisters would try to betray him.

Nixos told her father that her sisters held no ill-will toward him, and that there were no futures in which they would attempt to betray him.

While this might have been true for her older sisters, the same could not be said for Nixos herself, but of course Sorrauul didn't need to know that.

Time passed, and Sorrauul grew dissatisfied once again. While he did believe that each of his daughters was perfect in their own right, he didn't feel like they were similar to him enough to be truly perfect beings above all others.

With this in mind, Sorrauul pooled his own essence into his talons before spilling his lifeblood over it.

An eighth egg was formed. It had no real form; it was made purely of magic.

The egg never actually hatched; it instead reshaped itself and became Sorrauul's eighth and final daughter. Her name was Majirra, and from her scales spilled forth a magic so powerful it could manipulate the physical world, just like her father.

Sorrauul knew from the moment he looked at her that she was perfect just like him, even though she did not look exactly like him. She did not look just like her sisters either, but she resembled them more than she resembled Sorrauul, so he finally relented the expectation that any of his children would be exactly like him. With that, he decided to declare them a new, individual species, and he called them dragons. And to him, for the time being, dragons were perfect.

It would not last. Nixos knew it would not last. She knew what would happen to her little sister. She knew what she would do to her father, and what he would do, in return, to all of his daughters. But Nixos knew there was nothing that could be done except to set the events in motion.

One night, when the three moons were vacant from the sky, and Sorrauul and his eldest daughters were sleeping soundly, Nixos snuck away with Majirra and told her of Sorrauul's rapid spiral into madness, and the impending destruction he would cause. Majirra was not the least bit surprised to hear this, and implored her wise sister to tell her what could be done. Nixos readily explained that Majirra would have to make a great sacrifice for her future generations, and what she would have to do to Sorrauul to ensure their survival.

The next night, Majirra woke her older sisters from their slumbers with haste. She did not tell them what was about to happen to her, only that they would have to run away, and that they would have to split up and hide themselves around the continent for the time being. Before they took to the skies however, Majirra requested they hold out their talons. With a swift motion, she parted the scales on each of their palms, including her own. She gently spilled her lifeblood into each open wound before healing her sisters once again. They flew off without saying a word.

It is unknown exactly what happened next, but what is known is that the essence which made up Sorrauul was sealed far away from the continent, but not before he could flay his youngest daughter alive for her betrayal. Some say her scales were forever stained a deep, bloody red.

Even after being sealed away, Sorrauul could still feel Majirra's essence, his essence, alive in the hearts of his other daughters, and once they had eggs of their own, Majirra's essence was alive in them as well, and in their children, and in their children's children.

Majirra was mocking him. She had to be. In her death, she found a way to not only live on in the scales of her collective children, but she also granted a number of them access to the same magic that only Sorrauul deserved to have. And it made Sorrauul's ethereal blood boil. With the last sliver of power he still possessed, he laid a horrid curse on Majirra's traitorous blood; he demanded that each of her perfect descendants, any dragon born with access to his magic, would have to pay the ultimate price for using that magic. Each usage would cause fragments of their souls, and by extension, Majirra's soul, to be ripped from their bodies and transferred back to Sorrauul, as he was the rightful owner of the great power which flowed through their veins.

Children of Majirra found that using their incredible magic would slowly turn them towards a darkness which clouded their minds and made them lose sight of their morals. They were driven insane. The tribes that they belonged to began to fear them for their abilities. Dragons of magic slowly became more and more rare. However, the longer a tribe went without having a dragon of magic (or as they are called now, an Animus dragon), the more strength would build up in the magic blood that was still present. Once an Animus was born after these long periods, they would have massive reserves for magic in their blood, making them unnaturally powerful.

It was dragons like these that were also the most vulnerable to Sorrauul's steadily growing power. Animus dragons with huge stores of magic were like beacons to Sorrauul's presence, and once he found them, he would forcefully latch hold of their minds and their souls, shrouding away their magic in intangible clouds of darkness. His influence would then begin to fester within their minds, and each of them would gradually become more susceptible to Sorrauul. Eventually, these powerful Animus dragons become nothing but hollow shells, even more so than magicians who used too much of their magic. These shells were then used directly by Sorrauul as his proxies.

Proxies for Sorrauul rarely lasted long enough to truly fulfill their purpose, which was to conduct the genocide of the entirety of the dragon race. Their bodies were often made fragile by their strain against Sorrauul's influence. Sometimes, they burned themselves out at birth, completely destroying themselves and their magic so that Sorrauul couldn't take hold of them. There were very few who were pliable enough to truly carry out Sorrauul's will, and those that did possessed enough destructive power to eradicate all the dragon civilizations, forcing the tribes to start anew each time.

After thousands and thousands of years passed, one Animus dragon was born whose magical power surpassed that of all others before him. He was the brightest beacon to Sorrauul. But once the darkness reached the unhatched dragon to take control of him, Sorrauul was surprised to be greeted by the dragons mind instead of immediately rejected by it. The unborn dragon had been expecting the darkness, for it had access to the same powers it's ancestor, Nixos, once had.

At the moment of hatching, the baby dragon's mind perfectly integrated with the dark influence of Sorrauul, creating a near-perfect being with the omniscience of Nixos, the unbridled magic of Majirra, and the megalophoric mindset of Sorrauul. From the moment of it's hatching, the baby dragon had it's sights set on a perfect future, a future in which it would be the only dragon in existence amongst a legion of perfectly obedient minions.

His name was Darkstalker. He was eighteen when he failed the first time. He will be over five-thousand when he fails the second time. He will not get a third chance. It doesn't matter. Someone else will do it for him.

---

This is Time Twisted. For all intents and purposes, it is the same story as Wings of Fire, but of course, with a few minor (major) differences:

- Sorrauul did not exist in Wings of Fire. Snowdrift does not exist in Wings of Fire. Precipice does not exist in Wings of Fire. Slate does not exist in Wings of Fire. Cocoa does not exist in Wings of Fire. These are all characters of my creation.

- In Wings of Fire, dragonets are considered fully grown at around eight years of age. In Time Twisted, dragonets are typically considered fully grown between ages twenty-two and thirty.

- In Wings of Fire, the War of Succession was meant to last for 20 years. In Time Twisted, it was meant to last for 30 years, and was ended after 27 years.

- In Time Twisted, the Dragonets of Destiny were meant to go off and stop the war at age eighteen, but they instead escaped at age sixteen.

- In Wings of Fire, it takes the Dragonets a little over a month to end the war. In Time Twisted, it takes them over two months.

- In Wings of Fire, it takes the Dragonets about 4-6 months to complete Jade Mountain Academy. In Time Twisted, it takes them three years.

- In Time Twisted, Moonwatcher is 15, Kinkajou is 14, Winter is 15, Peril is 20 (but has the relative mindset of a 17-18 year-old), Turtle is 15, and Quibli is 15.

- In Wings of Fire, dragons usually live to be about 200 years old. In Time Twisted, current dragons can only live up to around 150 years.

- In Time Twisted, Darkstalker and Clearsight were 18 and Fathom was 17 when Darkstalker was put into his enchanted sleep. In Time Twisted, over 5,000 years pass before Darkstalker re-awakens.

- In Wings of Fire, the Scorching occurred 5,000 years ago. In Time Twisted, the true, original Scorching occurred over 85,000 years ago. However, 7,000 years before the events of Arc 1, the Scavengers had long risen above the dragons again, until another Proxy caused another extinction event, which is what the original Scorching is recorded as in recent history.

- The continent layout is largely different between Wings of Fire and Time Twisted, as well. In Time Twisted, the continent is still shaped like a dragon, but it is almost twice as large as a whole.

- In Wings of Fire, fully grown dragons are massive in comparison to fully grown humans. In Time Twisted, a fully grown human typically stands up to shoulder height of an average fully grown dragon.

- In Time Twisted, dragons are capable of functioning quadrupedal and bipedal, meaning they can function by standing upright on their hind legs and using their front legs as arms. Their thumbs are also capable of being opposable.

- In Time Twisted, Dragonflame Cacti are renamed Hellfire Cacti, and Dragonbite Vipers are renamed Wyrmfangs.

---

Here's a small list of important dragon terminology in Wings of Fire Time Twisted:

The word "drake" or "drakes" are to a dragon as "man" or "men" are to a human. The word "dreya" or "dreyas" are to a dragon as "woman" or "women" are to a human. Also, because female dragons are the more dominant gender of the species, the terms "dreya" and "dreyan" are to a dragon as "person" or "people" are to a human. ---

---

[lennyandkarlmarx]

The Faces of Covid

In Perverts Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Žižek discusses the ideological vagueness of the film Jaws. It’s impossible, however, not to recontextualize the Spielberg classic in a post-pandemic world. Certainly the scenes of crowded beaches juxtaposed with the brutality of the previous shark attacks take on new meaning as photos of tourists packed tightly together like sardines chum the plague infested waters of not just beaches but public pools, sports bars, and the Golden Corral’s soda fountain. Bruce the shark served as a blank canvas to which anyone could project their deepest fears and anxieties; Covid-19, invisible to the naked eye, functions more as a Rorschach test, where various features of the crisis it’s causing are horrifically fused together to serve any ideological purpose.

There are few perfect ideological specimens, but we can still group together many of the reactions to the Covid pandemic into a few broad yet distinctive categories. First, there’s the re-openers. These petit bourgeois ghouls are smart enough to know it benefits their material interests to toss a few pre-existing condition virgins into the volcano, but smart enough to articulate this in any way other than demands for a haircut or gym access. These are the most prominent of the groups, likely due to the media class’ ability to simultaneously use them as a heckler’s veto to explore their own materially driven desires to re-open, while still allowing themselves to serve as the good cop, clucking their tongues at these simpletons who want basically the same thing that they do, but demonstrate it by pointing a rifle at a mall cop.

The aforementioned media class is part of a broader coalition of professional managerial class liberals, all of whom want desperately to re-open, but want also to maintain the image of a dutiful soldier of science and communal effort. Many of these types of libs were subscribers to the I Fucking Love Science Facebook page of the earlier era of social media, and probably share frequent posts about how to properly wear a face mask, and photos of hayseeds who go out unprotected, all of this while on their way to an awful board game party with friends who have totally also been quarantining so it’s fine! The next stage of life for them will probably be excruciatingly long tweet threads about how they’re really concerned about the mental health effects of quarantining, and how maybe we need to strike a balance somehow.

Much more fun, even if it’s somehow bleaker than the first two groups, is the hyper conspiracy theorist. Similar to the re-openers they simply don’t believe in the basic reality of the pandemic, but unlike their smooth brained brethren, they take this in thrilling new directions, from burning 5G towers, to asserting the virus is real but it escaped from a biological weapons laboratory in China, or Langley, or Israel, or Saudi Arabia. While their theories are often baseless, bordering on a level of delusion usually reserved for the relationship advice subreddit, they usually come from true enough concepts. Similar to how their liberal cousins the anti-vaxxers have accurately assessed that pharmaceutical companies are not to be trusted, but took that fact to the most absurd possible conclusion, the conspiracy theorists understand that their lives are being made miserable by systems far above their pay grade; unfortunately, since the space in their brain where the necessary vocabulary would be is filled with racial animus and memorizing various Wikipedia pages, they too aim their distrust in random directions and fire at will.

Speaking of not having the necessary vocabulary, the next group is angry essential worker, who is rightfully furious at the screw job they’re receiving, but without a class lens through which they can view themselves, end up angry that people on unemployment are getting paid more than them. This group is of course the most ripe for conversation, but as material conditions continue to trend toward squalor, their own crosshairs will get broader and broader until it’s a scattershot ideology of whatever they’ve picked up from the previous groups via proximity. Any origination could likely do an effective job recruiting by appealing to the dire straights many essential workers are in, but it seems none are primed to do so, and the most prominent political figure of the millennium who might have at least added some crucial vocabulary words and phrases to their lexicon is instead busy trying to oust critics of Joe Biden from his delegation.

The final group is the lowly eco-fascist. Leftist author of the meme book Settlers J. Sakai also wrote a pamphlet on eco fascism called The Green Nazi way back in the 2000s that almost predicted word for word the screed of the New Zealand shooter, who labeled himself an environmentalist of sorts before going on a racially charged shooting. The spirit of the green Nazi lives on in both conservatives and liberals who share posts with sentiments like “the planet is healing” or “we are the virus.” This rhetoric has already been rightly picked apart to death for their use of “we” to mean both a lowly peasant living on less than a dollar a day, and the C Suite at Chevron as equally responsible for the impending climate apocalypse. This group will likely serve as a little bit of a future window into the upcoming conversation of centrists and tech bros into more overt feudalists and fascists.

Even these groups can be split into two distinct camps: people for whom their material interests are benefited by the pandemic becoming a genocide, and people who haven’t reached a state of class consciousness to understand that someone else’s material interest is why they’re being lead to the slaughter. Like the first family in Jaws that gets into the water after a local boy is brutally ripped apart, so too shall we all go, by choice or by force, because the state and its many sponsors are like sharks that just can’t stop swimming.

[missr3n3]

i am so fucking good at video editing

[missr3n3]

here it is!! the video i spent m o n t h s working on!!!! its also been one of my favorite projects to work on, so i'd appreciate it more than words can describe if you all would check it out <333