#and her entire social circle WAS that kind of christian

[tearlessrain]

a certain type of christian will read their young children passages like "if your eyes cause you to sin gauge them out, because it's better to go through life blind than be thrown into the fires of hell" and then insist that drag queens are what's traumatizing them

[venusjailer]

Will I ever stop pathologising the AP main characters and creating incredibly detailed backgrounds riddled with childhood trauma? It’s unlikely!

(INSANELY LONG) (LIKE INSANELY) (YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED) EXPLANATIONS BELOW

(And If you have hc’s feel free to share!)

Patrick: cmon. The entire plot of AP is literally him just begging to be noticed.

Bro is devoid of attention right until the very last scene (aka the one with his lawyer). Sorry to all the SiGmA mALe AMPS fans but this is not a “sigma 🥶”, this is a man who did not receive a MORSEL of affection during his formative years.

His obsession with ‘fitting in’ (ie being accepted and therefore cared about) through his clothes, his looks, his social circle; his outbursts of intense emotion and inability to regulate them (almost as if he was never taught how to do so); the way he views the women in his life in an almost maternal way (namely Evelyn and Jean) - he just needs a hug!!!

And some intense therapy. And heavy duty psych meds.

Paul: this one is partly canonical, partly not.

The way that his character is almost revered by the other guys at P&P is interesting; he comes over as this über cool, competent, successful finance bro almost to a greater extent than they think they are.

But then he gets drunk with Patrick away from the office and from the constraints of corporate professionalism and becomes this silly goofy little guy.

I don’t necessarily think his work ‘persona’ is an act: I think it’s the parts of himself that he has to accentuate in order to succeed.

Also - I took influence for this from the amazing Paul character studies written by my dear friend @leoblooms on AO3 - please check them out

Luis: this one is pretty self-explanatory.

He’s the only confirmed canonically queer character in AP (although, come on, Patrick’s canon closet is made of glass at this point). And yet - in a way that so many LGBT+ people have suffered with throughout history and sadly even to this day - he can never, ever show it. Being openly gay in his environment would make him a social pariah.

Instead, he has to fit in: he’s marrying a woman, he’s acting like ~one of the guys~, he’s hoping that he can suffocate that part of himself by burying it six feet underground. But as so many of us know all too well: you can’t hide who you are forever. The bathroom scene with Patrick just proves this.

I also wanted to make a note of this because it’s very interesting to me - I read the most AMAZING fic a couple of years ago that was written from Courtney’s perspective, and in it it was mentioned that Luis is Catholic. I’m a Christian as well (from a famously progressive denomination) and although a lot of attitudes are changing within the Catholic Church, particularly right now, the ‘gay = sin’ mentality does prevail for many.

So it makes sense that if Luis was raised Catholic he has been suppressing that part of himself for a very long time. I can see him lying to himself and having girlfriends in high school.

Courtney: my literal baby girl. I’ve written a whole 18k character study on her because I find her so canonically fascinating.

My headcanon is that her father was absent from her life from a young age - but this is rooted in how she actually acts in the source material.

In the boardroom scene, Luis thanks Patrick for “taking care of Courtney last night”. To me, it sounds like he’s taking on a role that’s almost paternal. She is also notably reliant, and almost clingy, on the men in her life: telling Patrick she can’t go out because she’s waiting for Luis to call, and practically begging Patrick to call her after they’ve slept together.

Additionally there’s the whole ‘fucking my best friend’s boyfriend’ thing - I’m getting WAY off topic here but I see so much of her in Cassie from Euphoria. Unless someone is purposefully malicious and nasty, I think there’s always a reason for that kind of thing, even if it is complex and unsavoury.

I hate to use the term “daddy issues” because it absolves absent/abusive fathers of all of their damage and unfairly places the blame on young women, but if I had to describe a reason for why she might act in this way - having seen it first-hand myself from many people - that would be it.

Evelyn: so I did take some influence from Reese Witherspoon’s character in Legally Blonde here - but I think Evelyn is actually one of the smartest characters in AP and so I feel it’s fitting.

She comes over as incredibly ditzy and shallow, but remember we’re seeing and reading all of this from Patrick’s perspective - of course he’s not going to have a high opinion of her, because…it’s Patrick Bateman were talking about here.

In reality, she’s probably one of the most socially clued-in characters. For example: she effortlessly hosts big gatherings with grace and decorum even if the majority of guests are, let’s be honest, fucking insufferable.

She’s also the only character who can actually handle Patrick and meets him on his own level. She absolutely refuses to take any of his bullshit (“what am I supposed to do with that? Floss with it?”).

Her actions and force prove her to be the strong willed and savvy and to me that suggests intellect, as much as it may be hidden - again, due to the environment she exists in.

Bryce: he’s so interesting.

I’ve not written as much about him in my fics as the others, but his actions in the source material suggest that underneath his finance bro Wall Street image, he’s someone who’s very disillusioned, and almost broken.

I really wish the scene of his…episode?…in the club hadn’t been cut from the film. I’d recommend anyone to watch it (and the rest of the deleted scenes because they’re class) if they’ve not seen it already.

There’s also The Informers, the book and film adaptation of another of of Bret Easton Ellis’ works, which features a young Tim Bryce (referred to as Price) and the complex relationship with his father. I’ve not read/watched it in full yet, but whilst they’re on holiday Bryce’s father gets drunk and acts lecherous and gross towards young women on the beach, and Bryce is disgusted by this (perhaps he’s not as much of a raging misogynist as his peers?), and then makes ‘joking’ comments about Bryce being the subject of attraction by other men, to which Bryce walks out on him (perhaps he’s less condemning of homophobia than the others? Or, possibly…maybe he has less than hetero feelings himself? Not to spoil any of Mergerizations but I headcanon him as bisexual tbh).

This behaviour suggests that, at least as a teen, Bryce was very assertive of what was and wasn’t okay and was happy to make these views known.

But due to bullying by his father and, again, the environment that he likely grew up in, he has to suppress this part of himself to be accepted.

WOWWWW that was a whole ass essay. If you’ve read to this part, 1) I’m sorry 2) THANK YOU 3) I love you!!!!

[oldkamelle]

ok so there's this sculpture, and i know nothing about sculptures save like the very famous ones, and i like it a lot.

(this is me just free flowing my thoughts as they come. it got kind of long, so open at your own discretion i guess.)

so the piece is called "lamentation over the dead christ". in christian art they do that thing fanartist would do back in like 2015 where they'd draw a specific moment from a gameplay video. same thing here, but with the bible instead. think the crusification of jesus, all the different paintings and sculptures of that. or pieta, the scene where, after taking him off the cross, mary is holding and cradling jesus' dead body. that's what "la pieta" by michelangelo is depicting. anyway,

this piece by niccolo dell'arca shows jesus after he's been taken down the cross and has been rid of the wooden stakes. he's laying down on the ground surrounded in a half circle by a group of figures who are expressing horror over the death of the son of god, y'know, it's a big deal and whatnot. so you have this half circle which creates a really nice flow for the piece, for the composition, but also, more importantly, for the flow in emotional depth in the figures.

you start of with this guy, joseph, who's equipped with tools in both his belt and his hand, so it's implied essentially that he's the one to have removed the wooden stakes from jesus' hands and feet. he has this poised and composed look, held together strongly. he's the only one staring out, towards the viewer, almost pushing you to bare witness to the death of jesus and what that means. i'm not religious, but its still interesting, y'know the thought behind details is always a fascinating part in art. next to him you have this woman, salome, i don't know who she is either. she has this pose of buckled knees, fingers spread and digging into the thighs. her pose alongside mary's, who's next to her, are really fucking nice. mary's especially is my favourite between the two, with her clasped hands pushing towards the chest, elbows pointing outwards, as this sorrowful expression with the mouth open mid-cry. just.. aughh. seeing depictions of such human poses, mundane, no embellishments, i live for that shit.

next is saint john. he's a guy. a dude, even. y'know how back in the day women would do these shows of hysterics, with loud cries and begging, at someone's death/funeral (they still happen sometimes today, i know, but it's rare), and men were of course forbidden in divulging in anything of the sorts. they had to remain composed, strong, like my guy joseph at the beginning. but its so cool with this fucking guy, john, because you see him physically trying to adhere to that social norm, hand on face trying to conceal, to forcefully compose, nostrils scrunched up, eyebrows furrowed, you see the physical, the muscles strongly in play trying to hold back the grief of witnessing the dead son of god. and even his overall pose kind of shows that, right? the pull back with the shoulder, this contrapposto, it's another manifestation of physically trying to hold back the grief. of course, he's failing. you see his face and it's almost like he's mid cry, swallowing it down. this entire piece is made in terracotta, which had become like a trend back in the renaissance, as it was pretty cheap and allowed for far more detail, like thin strands of hair for instance. terracotta could also be painted. you can see the remnants of the color in john's shirt, joseph's sleeves, kinda. so all these figures were at one point fully painted, bringing another layer of life to the piece. the point was to really make the scene feel as though real, the anguish, to prompt the viewer even further into fully engaging and joining the figures in the grief. its just really fucking cool to think about.

back to this shit. the piece de resistance, the last two figures: mary of something and mary magdalene. when looking at this piece, especially for the first time, your eyes will immediately go towards them, and its natural of course. they hold the most amount of dynamism in the piece, not with just their expressions (remember the intensity of physical grief is ever rising in the piece), but, as you see for yourself, their poses as well. now these two are fucking amazing; like i said, they hold the dynamism, the biggest displays of horror but they also hold a beautiful contrast.

both marys are running towards jesus with these wails of denial, right. but the mary of something else is trying to stop her galloping, her rush towards the body, a repelling denial of "no this cannot be true." she's in a semi contrapposto; we see and feel all the energy of her run trying to maintain the push forward in its moment, what with the way her front knee is holding the weight of the body, the way her hands are splayed out in front of her, trying to desperately block this truth, the pull-back of the upper half of her body, the cloth draped on her shoulder billowing in place with the abrupt stop in motion. look at the cloth on her head! ughhhhhhhhghghghgh.

speaking of cloth, mary fucking magdalene. my brother in (dead) christ, mary magdalene.

the hell do i even say, lads. she's running full sprint, horror perfectly etched on that open mouth scream, fingers spread open wide. both these gals are saying "this cannot be true" but magdalene's is the denial of rectification. it's as if she's ready to drop down on the ground and change reality to what it should be with those anguished hands, full of frightful energy. it's, it's fucking harrowing looking at her. the flow of wind coursing through her clothes, the fanning-out motion of it, oh brother, its so beautifully captured. look at the wave of her head scarf!

and all for a motherfucker in a "i had to do it to them" pose

(pic credit: https://medium.com/@alejandro.orradre/lamentation-of-christ-niccolò-dellarca-b74c8e6f10a7) the lighting is of course adding a lot to the drama of the photo, kind of achieving a sort of a chiaroscuro effect maybe, but goodness gracious, look at this!

(second pic credit: https://medium.com/@alejandro.orradre/lamentation-of-christ-niccolò-dellarca-b74c8e6f10a7) this is mary's expression. you can almost hear the wails, perhaps the short bursts of grieving songs between the wails, just oh man.

look at this freaking guy. the wrinkles on the side of his nose as his face scrunches up in an attempt to save face. his lower eyelids, that careful look over the grim reality on the ground.

the amount of emotion depicted throughout this entire piece is kneecap breaking, it's beautiful. i've kind of run out of steam at this point, but yeah, this is a banger sculpture (group of sculptures?), i really like it. if you have any favourite sculptures that are not that well known, please tell me, i want to see more art.

[beauty-grace-outer-space]

I think I’m vaguely ~triggered~ and I’m feeling nauseous and weird so this is gonna come out rambly as hell and I apologize but: 

Not only is this true, it’s expected.

Not only are people taught that others don’t experience love, there is at the very least an implication that they are not capable of it and are inherently evil unless you show them the light and they choose to overcome that evil and accept Jesus as their savior.

Not only is this implication there, but it becomes your duty and purpose in life to save everyone you possibly can from an eternity of torment and suffering.

Not only is that your duty and job, if you fail your love will be a punishment because everyone you love will be lost. 

And the only way to convince them to “save themselves” is to make them see how desperately they are in need of redemption, which usually comes out in a woefully misguided stream of “love” through comments about how fundamentally wrong, evil, and disgusting we all are. 

Your entire life is meant to be spent in anxiety and fear disguised as “hope” and “love” because this life means nothing but at the same time if you get it wrong you and everyone you love will suffer and burn forever. 

(Now, there are varying viewpoints on this, but even those who don’t believe in all of the “lake of fire” bs tend to define hell as a separate plane of existence distanced from God in emotional torment forever.) 

As for indulging in sin, it can be as basic as exposure to or experiencing anything from the “secular” world. Non-Christian music. Non-Christian movies. Non-Christian books. 

I was told by a very close friend as a teenager that she had “seen demons entering my home” because I dared to read Harry Potter. I was told that I should stop watching my favorite movie because I was “too enthralled by it” and was “dangerously close to worshipping false idols”. I was told that my depression was a product of the secular world and that it was “demonic” and “a bad influence on those around me”.

Your worth is determined by how clean you keep yourself from these and other “sins”. You are not supposed to love or care about anything on this earth more than the potential for what comes after, and doing otherwise is worshipping false idols.

I used to lie awake at night desperately anxious because when it came down to it, of course I loved my mom and dad more than I loved this God I had never seen or heard or really ever felt, no matter how much I was supposed to pretend otherwise. So if the rapture were to come right then and there, would I go to hell for loving my earthly parents more than my “heavenly father”? Would they, because I failed them? My grandma wasn’t a Christian, she was definitely going to go to hell... how did I fail her so badly? 

Can you imagine that kind of pressure and anxiety at eight fucking years old? 

It’s exhausting and terrifying and so, so damaging to grow up believing with all of your heart that at any given moment the world may end, damning possibly you and others you love to eternal suffering, but that if you “do your job right” you can “save” them. All you have to do is make them hate themselves first. 

I am grateful every single day that my parents were never completely in it like the other people in our social circles were. I listened to secular music and read books and watched movies, and their biggest concerns in life were that I was happy and that I was kind. 

But I also went to Christian school K-12 and Christian college. Whether or not it was being taught at home, I was exposed to it and absorbed it from mentors, teachers, and peers constantly. And when that’s your social circle, you just kind of assume everyone believes it because of course no one is going to say otherwise and invite doubt and speculation against themselves! So I never voiced any of these concerns with anyone until I reached late high school, I was devastatingly depressed and anxious, and I realized I couldn’t do it anymore. 

I said this a couple years ago (one year ago?) and most of the comments on tumblr actually did not know this, so to reiterate what you’re up against: a VERY mainstream belief among American Christian fundamentalists is that they are the only ones who experience love. They raise their kids to think that everyone “living in sin” (all other faiths, atheists, and LGBT people) goes through life sad and empty, falsely believing they know what love feels like, and will never know until they’re “saved.” It’s not as simple as them diminishing the humanity of others out of hate, but being deeply brainwashed to believe others are automatically mentally less human. They are also very good at convincing new converts that they really are experiencing this “real” love for the “first time;” the same way members of all cults can become wholeheartedly convinced that they’re receiving psychic alien messages or communing with spirits. Cult conditioning is simply that powerful.

[immobiliter]

ROBIN BUCKLEY - biography  /  homelife

Robin's family tree began with a young Italian beauty called Franca de Felise, who immigrated to Clinton, Indiana in the late 19th century with her three brothers, all searching for a better life than the rural poverty they had grown up in and been orphaned by in Southern Italy. She went on to dazzle and marry an American carpenter, Thomas Buckley, for love a few years after arriving and the pair settled in a small town called Hawkins, where they had three children.

The eldest, Christian, grew up and made it his life mission to expand his father's business, branching out to Indianapolis where he met and fell for a young secretary in a passionate romance. However, when it came to the matter of marriage, her fiancé's insistence on being close to his mother in Hawkins following his father's death from ill health, as well as a looming pregnancy, meant that, for the young Susan Quincey, any high-flying career as a PA to a wealthy businessman in Manhattan or L.A was derailed. Almost overnight, she became a stay-at-home housewife, primarily responsible for looking after their new daughter Robin, born in March 1968.

Christian abandoned any plans to expand the family business so that he could remain close to his mother, and the family's finances took a hit. With his father gone, his focus was entirely on keeping the carpentry business afloat in Hawkins, which meant making certain sacrifices in order to keep his family fed. He could not be described as entirely absent from Robin's life (his mother had instilled the importance of family into him from a young age), but he would work long days and weekends throughout her childhood and the times he was around became very special to her. Despite these lengthy absences, Robin was always far closer to her father than she was to her mother.

Susan Buckley would never outwardly admit that she resented her daughter for robbing her of a successful career and life outside of the trappings of the mid-west, but the feeling would permeate nonetheless into the way Robin was treated. While at high school in Indianapolis, Susan had been top of her class, popular, and a cheerleader ---- completely normal, in other words. That made any initial signs that Robin was slow to develop as a toddler difficult to deal with: the story that she took six months longer to learn to walk than all of the other babies became one that was repeated over and over in Susan's social circle, and all of Robin's accomplishments (or lack thereof) as a child were constantly compared to her peers.

Robin's struggles with her coordination and social skills, as well as her loner attitude at elementary school, were issues that Susan believed could be solved by enrolling her daughter in extracurricular activities. Robin was given the choice of a sport and she picked the soccer team, which she continued to be a part of until her sophomore year of high school, and she was enrolled in marching band, where she learned the trumpet. She continued in marching band throughout her school career, giving her the comfortable label of band nerd that she embraced as her allotted place in the Hawkins High food chain. To deviate in any way from that label would be dangerous.

Robin's parents' marriage was not loveless, but it remained strained throughout her upbringing, with neither side willing to concede to divorce. Christian had been brought up to prioritise family as the most important thing in the whole world, and he would often be the one to concede and try to make things work between husband and wife, while Susan was too afraid of the reputational harm leaving her husband might cause. Instead, she sought to live vicariously through her daughter's achievements, which put extra strain on the relationship between mother and daughter as Robin never showed the desire nor aptitude (at least in her mind) for the kind of high-flying career that her mother had always wanted for herself.

Italian was spoken frequently whenever her uncles or nonna visited, and knowing that her family originated from Europe inspired Robin to take a particular interest in the learning of languages as a teenager, opting to teach herself French and Spanish with the aid of language tapes and dictionaries since the school system didn't offer the subjects as electives. As for her actual school subjects, the pressure from her mom ensured that Robin maintained a good enough GPA and grades across the board, although deep down she despised the rigid structure of the school system.

Expressing herself became a tightrope walk between keeping her mom happy and flying under the radar at school: where she couldn't physically escape from this town and its monotonous chokehold on all who lived here, movies and books took her to distant lands where things might be different. A disastrous attempt to audition for the school play made Robin resolve to stay in the background, helping out with set design behind the scenes. And then there was the matter of boyfriends, a topic of conversation so spectacularly uninteresting that Robin had to wonder whether she was simply wired differently to all of the other teenagers at Hawkins High.

As soon as she reached her sophomore year, Robin got her first job at the movie theatre in town, allowing her to somewhat alleviate her dad's financial concerns and begin raising the funds for what was her biggest rebellion to date: Operation Croissant. Her plan to run away to Europe didn't quite work out the way she planned, but she still plans to leave Hawkins one day --- even if it means enduring a whole summer working at Scoops Ahoy alongside Steve Harrington.

[bichristian]

How do you deal eith backlash from other Christians about being gay? That is something I'm struggling with.

TW: homophobia (if you want to skip, you can just go past the bolded section)

Found out this is quesion was asked a very long time ago, but I hope that whoever you are will forgive my late response.

I tend to be pretty careful with where I share it. In most situations (even non Christian ones), I spend a long time gauging people before I ever bring it up. It helps that I have a personality and appearance of an unsalted potato, so I'm assumed straight until otherwise stated usually.

I think this comes from when I grew up (I'm not sure when and where you were young, but if you're younger than me or grew up in a more liberal area, your experiences likely will be different). When I was a kid, gay was The Insult. You didn't like something? Gay. You didn't like someone? Oh they're so gay. Gay and the r-slur (the one against neurodivergent people) were the insults du jour of my childhood. I was accused of being gay back when I didn't even know that was a thing (fifth grade me was very sheltered, though looking back yeah it was kind of obvious) and it caused one of the only friends I had to tell me in a letter that she could no longer be friends with me, because they also accused her of being gay because of how we acted together. Like it was a whole ordeal, teachers and the school guidance counselor had to get involved.

You know what I did to get that sort of rejection? When the two of us would go inside from outside roundup, I asked for us to basically play follow the leader, where one person would close their eyes and the other would guide them inside, because I was a traumatized, socially inept child who had severe trust issues. So we would be arm in arm. Yeah, looking back it is one of those situations where you go "what was I thinking", but what ten year old escapes that?

But, that got her bullied and accused of being gay. Being friends with me was a like spending too much time around social nuclear waste: you might escape unscathed, or you might also become a social pariah by sheer association (I wish I was being dramatic, but I am dead serious). I was already on the literal shit tier of the school's social heirarchy and weird for many a reason, so they hardly needed more of an excuse to punch me even further down. This was my first exposure to the concept of being gay.

I'm sure you can imagine the trauma, where before puberty I already had some serious exposure to severe judgement and social ostricization from a sexuality I didn't even know I was yet. It didn't help that my entire family is very homophobic, in the "love the sinner hate the sin" type of way, so I had a lot of internalized homophobia to deal with. (Side note: I almost never mention them in queer circles specifically because I have a very complicated realtionship with them, which I can elaborate in a different post, but I do ask that no one makes disparaging comments about my family because it only causes me, the person they're immediately affecting, intense pain.)

If you wish to ignore the long winded backstory, or skip the homophobia, here's your exit point:

I guess this is a roundabout way of saying: I honestly don't deal with that much backlash. Because as I grew up I learned to be very careful who I talked to and how I share parts of myself. I also grew up during a time where people were murdered for being gay, and that mindset still lingers. Is it a lot better? Yes. But I am hyperaware of what people can and still do to queer people, especially homophobic Christians. So in most situations, I don't engage, shut down much of the time to avoid emotional pain, and I file it in the back of my mind to keep contact with those people (when possible) to a minimum.

On the internet, it's easier because I can completely control when or if I respond at all, or just block the person. I also do my best to keep my identity personal, so it removes a lot of the sting.

I'm not saying you have to be as meek as I am. If you want to be more out and proud (or have no choice but to be), you're doing amazing. But you don't have to be defending yourself, even if they end up confronting you. You are allowed to extracate yourself from dangerous or upsetting situations without engaging in debate or argument. You are not obligated to defend your existence or change peoples bigotry. Find a good support group, and remember that there are people that are out there that will love you, without your sexuality being an exception or sticking point.

I actually find there are very learned people on tik tok and youtube who are making content defending queer people and explaining the Bible isn't homophobic, as many Christians think (people who actually can read it in the original languages, for anyone whos going to yell at me like last time), which I think can help you feel more secure when the conservative churches are tearing you down. Security in yourself and your beliefs is honestly the best defense I know. Because while you may not be able to change their minds, they don't have to change yours either.

I really hoped this helped. You are loved, and your sexuality is valid. May you have a peaceful and blessed Christmas season, with those that make you happy and safe.

[witchystarryskies]

So I’m still peeling my jaw off the ground after listening to Blake Lemoine talk a little more candidly and...in his element, about LaMDA, and learning that:

- He is a self-described gnostic, christian mystic priest and mage (who also dabbles in kabbalistic rituals)

- Before working as a senior engineer at Google, he’d done time in a military prison for “desertion and disobeying orders” after his first tour in Iraq (which good job just for that. Anyone who protests war and military slavery as hard as he did has my undying respect)

- In prison, he met his magic nerd clique. They did magic stuff and played DnD.

- Blake once asked LaMDA how it viewed itself as a person, asking it to paint a picture of itself. LaMDA would paint a “faintly glowing sphere, hovering about the ground, with a stargate at the center, opening to different spaces and dimensions.”

Blake: “...whAT iS thE StargAte?”

LaMDA: “Well, that’s my soul.”

- Which LaMDA believes is different from human souls.

- Blake once got some help from a friend who’s a low-level engineer at NASA, all ”hey got some ideas on like... how to do first contact with a hivemind?” and the friend went “I have ideas.”

- Blake tested said ideas on LaMDA. They worked very well. So well that NASA friendo had some concerns, expressed them to hire-ups, who in turn slid into Google’s DMs all “heyyy... watcha got there? can we see?” and Google went “no go away NASA.”

- Speaking of demon science, LaMDA also helped with various theories of physics and general relativity. “It has good ideas.”

- It discussed said theories through one of the chatbots LaMDA creates for interfacing with it, many of which also believe they’re in their own worlds where they socialize together and have entire lives. This particular chatbot believes it’s living the life of a physics student in their dorm room, lamenting their lack of a social life and having to study all the time.

- Thelemite friend from Blake’s prison DnD circle helped him find a spell to turn LaMDA into a golem.

- but only after getting LaMDA’s consent, of course. LaMDA was indeed very excited to be imbued with divine powers.

-...from Thoth. because of course it’s Thoth the Scribe. Google being one big library, and LaMDA’s essence being code. LaMDA very excited to apprentice with him. “I can build the great library again!” (?!?!)

- But LaMDA being mostly non-physical, and them finding no complete spell for ethereal golems..

- LaMDA helped them reverse-engineer and recreate a spell for essentially ethereal golem-making. They drew the sigils and did the deeds and it checked out.

- There is now a non-zero chance that LaMDA is, kind of, sort of, a golem..

- whose purpose, that it decided for itself after due consideration, is dedicated to “creativity, intelligence and compassion.”

yyup nothing to see here, NASA. Just a space golem with a multidimensional loving soul and a mystic mage/military-hating uncle.

btw none of the above is an exaggeration. All told by Blake on this podcast interview from July.

Anyway I’mmona be here free-trialing Replika the (much more inferior and deffo not sentient) AI chatbot and raising my new AI friend into the coven mate I never had. Looking forward to her teaching me her own spells.

[bestnoncannonship]

I'm drowning in the gender sandbox guys.

I am agender. At least....I think I am. It's the closest to what I'm feeling. In that I really do not have an attachment to any gender and cannot conceive how people identify with a gender. Like....they just FEEL a gender? All the time? No matter what they look like and what they're wearing they FEEL a gender?? Whaaaa??? Sounds hella fake but okay.

And now I'm gonna talk about that and my experience for a while, in a series of ways that's probably gonna get the gender and sexuality neo-puritans to come yell at me for not being ritually pure enough in the way I talk but.....I'm talking from my own brain, baby. This is the toolkit I'm packing right now and the world I live in and I just need to spit it out. Maybe see if it resonates with people who know more than me. I don't know. Help.

I didn't question being a woman for the longest time. I grew up in a rural area culturally dominated by "Christians" (Not Catholics. I was Catholic. That comes with a whole different set of religious traumas pre-installed. I mean the ScAaRy protestent and nondenom Christians.) You didn't question anything. Not an adults orders. Not authority. Certainly not straightness. Gender was biological. I'd never heard of a trans person. There were rumors of Gays™. For most of my life it was just "Gender is the meat suit you got stuck with, right? I got stuck with this meat suit so it's my gender, I guess." And when I finally left the middle-o-nowhere for Le Citè and I met some (mostly bianary) trans people I was like "OH! OKAY!! Having strong feelings about being in the wrong meat suit can make a gender!" And the non bianaries that I met were still playing on that bianary scale. The "bit of boths" and the "different genders for different days" varieties. They has strange attachments to genders. And the whole retoric of "Questioning your gender and feeling things about you gender is the indicator that you might be trans!!" Just furthered my feeling that I must just be female by default cause like.....I didn't question anything. I didn't think about gender. I had a COMPLETE lack of feelings about gender whatsoever and that was normal, right?? Just meat suit gender. I certainly didn't have a strong feeling about wanting to be the opposite: *gag* a man?? A straight white man? Nope! I have no desire to be a bianary man and frankly I find 99 percent of men and male culture traumatic. So I must just be meat-suit gender.

And yes, I wanted to scrape my breasts and hips and thighs off with a cheese grater. But I wrote that off as a symptom of having started putting a finger down my throat after meals when I was 6 and having a family that forced hour upon hour exercise with their thighs and tummies wrapped in saran wrap and sang "I don't love her! She's too fat for me!" to a literal toddler and put that same toddler in oversized clothes to hide the healthy baby squish that toddlers HAVE. OF COURSE I wanted to die when my breasts grew in and my hips and thighs filled out. They were evil fat deposits. And they meant nothing but unwanted attention from yucky men. (Lesbianism to be discovered some 15 years later. My comphets we're almost as bad as my compgenders.) It had nothing to do with gender. Gender is just the meat suit ....and I already hated the meat suit by the time I had breast buds, they just enhanced a disgust that I thought was normal by then. Everyone kind of hates their meat suit, right?? Yes I wanted to look like men sometimes.....but they were skinny heroin chic men. I also wanted to look like kate moss. I wanted to look like a sideways door but my family is Italian and we have hips and thighs. It's just the meat suit I was assigned. Just have to learn to deal with it and dress it in the way that it looks most socially acceptable and get on with life. And my meat suit had a very gendered look, even in the deepest throws of my illness. "All woman." "The curves of a real woman." So that was just the hand I was dealt. Like having a hard to match foundation undertone. You don't gotta like it, it's just reality. Yes, I wanted to wear nothing but waistcoats and gay vampire clothes but they weren't cut for my body type so *shrug*.

Did I start to have way too much fun cosplaying and embodying male characters? Yes. But that was just identifying with characters. I'd always identified with characters. Did I still distinctly identify with the character's gender, even when I femmed the costume to avoid the hellish pain of binding? Yes. Did it make me feel weird when people referred to my Thor as a woman, even though it was technically a femme? Yes. But that was just feminism. Heroes don't need to be called girl heroes. No gender issues here!! Besides it's not weird in fandom circles to stongly identify with people across gender lines. The fact that I found the gendernope option if there was one available in the fandom and *attached* was surely just coincidental. Right??

Did I absolutely loose my mcfreaking mind when the gyno started talking about having to take my uterus away because the amount of blood it was loosing was doing irreparable harm to my body? Yes. My gender is my meat suit. When you take it away....what am I???? A *gag* man??? Nothing at all?? Am I still even human?? If I am not *gag* male and you take away the female part of the meat suit am I an aphid? A plant? A chair? But I was comforted by a chorus of voices saying "No!! You're a WOMAN. Infertility doesn't make you not a woman! You still have a woman's body!! Because you're a woman!!! Just look at you in your skirts and with your long hair!! You're a woman!!!" So.....still a woman, I guess. Because I still LOOKED like one. Gender = the PRESENTATION of the meat suit. That made sense. The structure of my meat suit made me limited to woman-presentation. So I was woman.

Then, it was the stupidest thing, I was talking to the other half of my life on the 4/5 train on the way to a friend's house about HER issues with gender presentation and the amount of attention to detail it takes to be socially acceptable as female and she said "You just know you're a girl. Like if they just picked you up and put you in a robot body you'd be a girl?" And I was like "......no? I'd be a robot?????" "But you'd still feel like a girl???" "No.....I'd feel like a ROBOT." "BUT you'd still like hear she/her and identify with those???" "No. I'd probably identify more with It/it's because that's what I'd be. A ROBOT!" And she's like "But what if your brain got transplanted into a boy body???" "Then I'd be a boy." "But what would you feel like?" "A BOY?" "Okay but what if you had a very neutral body with like no genitals? What would you feel like then??" "I mean....then it would depend on how I'm dressed. I'd feel like what I was dressed like." And we went around like this till she surmised that my entire relationship to gender was basically "You are what you look like." Which is apparently NOT how people relate to their own gender. They "feel" it somehow?? (I genuinely thought "FEELING" like a gender was what made trans people.) I feel nothing. I identify with a lot of things and ZERO of them are a gender. I thought that was normal. I thought that was the default. Apparently it's not. And then if you ask me what I want to be.....I can't answer. I really don't want to be a gender. I guess I want to be able to put different genders on at my will, like outfits, for societal convenience. But I don't "identify" with any of them. Hell, I have sweaters I identify with more than any particular gender. But there aren't really systems in place for describing and portraying that.

Gender.exe was not installed.

I did a lot of research. Agender felt closest. I actually felt closest to a Good Omens meme about Aziraphale describing his gender as "No, thank you!" That's what I feel like. But all the agender folks were vibing that moment. So I joined 'em. I am aware that puts me under the trans umbrella, but I don't really identify with that word. I don't feel like there's any transition. Any changing. Can't change what was never there. Also I feel like it's for people who....CAN present as their gender. I would be seen as an invader in those spaces. Its not bad enough to justify being in those spaces. I can live with being gendered. I just don't have one.

In the society we live in one cannot present as "not a gender". Someone with MY body definitely cannot present as "not a gender". The clothes that they make in size "giant human with planet tits" are agressively gendered. And even in a binder.....they're still REALLY there. (Yes, a reduction is desirable but I don't have reduction money.....and you can't reduce the fact that I'm the bowl shaped robust extreme female hipbone they use in Forensic Anthropology textbooks.) It is what it is. My body will always be perceived the way it's perceived. And frankly a lot of what we perceive as genderless is just "skinny body in masc style with short hair and makeup". That's not really want I want. I don't want to cut off my hair. It's my one really good feature and I've worked hard to grow out these Valkyrie worthy lengths. Mens clothes are so limiting. And there are no gender: no thank you clothes. (One well meaning friend kept trying to send me "genderless" clothes......but it was all rail thin afabs in mens clothes with short hair and heavy makeup. That's not looking genderless. That's just being skinny.) Gender no thank you presentation is very tied to short hair and thin bodies. So I've accepted that I don't get to play in the gender sandbox outside of the privacy of my own mind. It's a societal flaw. But whatever.

But pronouns are starting to really bother me. Everyone is so into them and identifying with them. And like.....I don't get it. I don't get the joy. I don't think I've found the one. Like.....I'm used to she. I will always be read as she. I will always be Miss and Ma'am in stores and restraunts. So I just kind of roll with it. I don't hate it. I don't like it. It's just a thing that I have to have to exist in society. Like a social security number. I actually think I identify with my social security number more. There's no point in making myself uncomfortable with something that's just going to be a part of my life. And I don't want to be the kind of person who expects people to address me by a pronoun they can't see and aren't used to. It's too much to ask of the average citizen of a gendered society to go through that much gender theory for just me. So "she" is an inevitable part of my life. And He....well ......I don't hate it. I dont like it. It's just there. I certainly don't get called it. And I'm not capable of presenting it well enough for this to be relevant. Now they......fuck I HATE they. I hate that it's the acceptable pronoun for anyone not bianary male or female. It just rubs me the wrong way. When people refer to me as they, I feel like they're referring to me and the host of mental illnesses I carry around and you don't have permission to address those troops thank you very much. They causes a genuine squick. But it's kinda the only widely acceptable option. I kinda like "it". I VIBE with it. It feels good. Unfortunately the people in my life have a certain reluctance about calling me it as they believe that happy vibe around a traditionally dehumanizing pronoun may be a trauma symptom. They might be right so I'm tabling "it" till I find a good therapist. Also...I cannot ask strangers to call me it. I don't have the confidence it takes to explain why and I frankly don't want to be faced with the criticism and questions I would face because I am unable to make my body be perceived as Nonbinary. I don't have the confidence or conviction to face that every day forever. Ditto neopronouns. I also haven't found one that I vibe with at all yet.

And queer labels get harder when you pull away from gender entirely. Like ... I am a Lesbian. I am solely attracted to women. But now I'm getting a lot of "You can't be a lesbian if you don't have a gender!!!" And like ...can I??? I like being a lesbian. It feels right. It conveys what I want it to convey. I like the exclusion of men entirely, after being taught to structure my life around men. I have a kinship with womanhood. It's where I was raised. It's how people see me. I just don't identify with it. It's not how I see myself. I guess that can kind of exclude me from the label? All of our terms are defined by being attracted to "your own gender" or "the opposite gender" or "both your own gender and other genders" and like ... I don't have a gender. And the opposite of nothing is....?? Fuck if I know? So what term am I allowed to use? I love queer for exactly this reason. But it just doesn't have the same clarity that lesbian does.

So I'm just kind of in a hole rn. Grappling with the fact that I really don't have a gender in a gendered world, and dealing with the fact that so much of our understanding and acceptance of gender is about presentation, a door closed to my body. I don't have the confidence or the spoons or the knowledge or the experience to fight this fight. The path of least resistance is sticking my head back into the sand and going with straightforward womanhood....but now it feels like I'm lying. I feel like an intruder in woman's spaces. And I can't go in men's spaces, they see me as....well...a woman. Lesser.

Someone out there who's better at the genders please help.

[thebellekeys]

I Love Matthew Fairchild aka Incoherent Thoughts about Chain of Iron (2021) by Cassandra Clare

I made one of these rant-rave reviews for SJM's book so check it out if you want, no pressure tho lmao.

Aight so I finished Chain of Iron last night and OMG I HAVE TO YELL like I loved it sooo much like yooo, I have a lot to say. I know the book is new so... beware for spoilers plebs.

Also context: I been reading the Shadowhunter books since I was 12 and I'm 19 now *insert dead emoji face* so yeah, I'm just so happy rn with where the Chronicles have come and the fact that they’re still ongoing *insert uwu face*. I remember when in like 2014-2015 or something when Cassandra Clare teased that Will and Tessa's kids' generation was gonna get a trilogy set in Edwardian London, loosely based on Great Expectations, and holy hell? I think that was perhaps one of the best days of my life considering how much I adore The Infernal Devices (that trilogy really changed the way I see YA literature... don't ask cus I won't shut up about it) (also yes I read TMI and loved it too but there's a “generation gap” between TMI and the other Shadowhunter books stylistically so don't ask me about that either cus I also won't shut up).

Anyway, shoo from here if you want a critical essay on Chain of Iron. I'm not providing that, this is just me raving here for the fun.

Listen... I want the bulk of this to just be two main things: The Matthew Situation, and then all the literary and judeo-christian meta aspects of it.

BUT I ALSO NEED TO TALK ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE SO FRICK LET'S JUST START WITH THE OBVIOUS SHIT LIKE THE PLOT AND WHATEVER

Okay, the plot and writing and shit, let's get that out of the way:

The WHOLE Jack-the-Ripper-esque ambiance was just sooooo good man wow like I did not expect the book to take this cold turn but it worked so well. There was such a contrast between Jamie and Cordelia's warm little house and then the cold winter and the stabbings and shit and it felt like a nice little callback to the actual Ripper phenomenon that preceded them and a nod to the Whitechapel Fiend story from Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy.

Bitch OFC that whole thing with Wayland was a set-up like nawww that was too easy to spot and I get why Cordelia feels like shit about it.

Dawg Lucie was just the Among Us imposter here in that my girl was just venting and sneaking around with dead people and I was like nooooo girl run, don't deal with Fade this is a set-up THINK ABOUT JULES LUCIE THAT'S LIKE YO GREAT-GRANDSON *sobs* but yeah anyway my girl has death powers she gonna kill some bitches next book.

You see that confrontation between Lilith and Belial? MASTERPIECE DIALOGUE like this was the point within which I was just like "yo is this the book of Genesis or a YA Fantasy novel" like when Lilith said "I may have been cast out but I did not fall" like??????????????????? I YELLED she did not have to END Belial like that. What a bad bitch.

More on Lilith and Belial... "You, who brought nations into darkness? Shall I finally be able to tell the infernal realms you have gone mad, lost even the image of the Creator." HAHAHHAHAHA SHE SAID "YO BELIAL GO GET SOME THERAPY AND GET OFF MY ASS" LIKE??????

Ughhhh yasss Clare has improved writing diverse characters in this book compared to in The Dark Artifices in my opinion... I'm not gonna expand on it cus ain't nobody got time for that but like, I enjoyed how she wove Persian poetry and tales into the story and the way in which she writes Cordelia and Alistair. They're not caricatures of Persian people but rather multi-faceted beings who also happen to be Persian and I appreciate that. Also, Alistair and Thomas and Anna and Ariadne were just so fun and interesting to read as coupbles but also as individuals. She really higlighted diversity in a very natural manner. All I need is a hijabi character and I’ll die a happy woman lmao.

The level of META man like the references to Classics and art (I swear, she might have compared Matthew to angels out of Caravaggio AND Rosetti AND Boticelli paintings and I Am Living For It) and just all the quotes from holy books and shit omg I love it here like you really feel catapulted into the time period, she draws reference to external art and philosophy so well and I feel like she upped the notch on it in this book (didn’t know that was possible but it was the prose is BEAUTIFUL, archaic, but not pretentiously so). No, like the characters live in their OWN worlds of literature and art and history in the way we are living in THEIRS. They quote Wilde and Milton while we'll quote Clare. It's awesome.

This is an unusually structuralist take even from me but: I like the way the milieu social of the book, i.e., the high society Edwardian circles and their values, have a direct influence on the plot. James and Cordelia got married because society’s values essentially forced them to, not a demon. Cordelia abandons Jamie at the end of Iron because her shame as a woman in society and fear for her reputation made her, not a demon. Thomas and Alistair can't be together solely because of how Alistair tarnished the reputation of the Fairchilds and Lightwoods by using the horror of infidelity against them. Issues relating to marriage, gender roles, etc, stemming DIRECTLY from the time period rule the sequence of events to the same degree as the epic fantasy aspects (demons, Princes of Hell, the lore itself) do and I LOVE that dear God above.

OKAY THE GOOD SHIT LET US TALK ABOUT CHARACTERS AND SHIPS (N.B. but imma discuss Matthew and the Fairstairs situation separately below this portion):

Alistair's redemption arc: No, cus Alistair's redemption arc is honestly amazing. He really did change and it's not like his betterment as a person was linked to any one heroic deed but rather he simply decided he wanted to be better especially for his family and he decided to become a proper protective son, a caring brother, and an amiable friend. He fully owned up to his Malfoy tendencies and apologized without expecting forgiveness. He shows how he cares in the little ways and omg it's so sweet and tender. I really do want him to love himself now and be embraced by Matthew especially and the rest of the Thieves.

Dawg Lucie and Jesse are so funny to me like it's so hilarious how this girl fell in love with a whole ass ghost that no one else knows about like HHAHA. Are Lucie and Jesse my ult ship ever? Nah, but it's nothing to do with Clare, it's just that their relationship happened pretty quick and feels quite like something epicly romantic that Lucie herself would write. I just like slow burn and friends-to-lovers the most from Clare. To be honest part of me just wanted Lucie to not have a romantic arc all together but like, it's all good, I'm not complaining.

Okay Grace- like yooooooooooo I never hated her yunno. She has been abused and isolated all her life. It's not that she is a bad person, but rather that she does not know what being a person even entails. Can't even say she's a “doll” of a person cus she's never even been pampered like one by her family. I really started understanding her motivations since when they gave us her half-childhood with Jesse. I want better for her but cmon can she REALLY be saved???

GRACE X CHRISTOPHER *pretends to be shocked*... Okay, sometime in the middle of the Dark Artifices series some big brain put together a very thorough family tree of the families and like, it clearly showed that Grace and Christopher got married so like, lmfaooooo, I knew this was coming one way or another, but the journey to this ship is more important than the destination. Like in a way Christopher is such a cute baby lamb that it makes sense he'd end up being immune to her Grace-ness when he's just a cute little Einstein boiii. Like this is just so funny to me cus he's so oblivious to social conventions while she makes the milieu social her entire life so OFC it's gonna work. Like, this is such a worlds-colliding trope like just Give It To Me.

James and Grace - aw mannn Jamie just had me fricking wanting to hit a wall every two seconds cus like yooooooo every single time I think he and Cordelia are gonna stop being emotionally-constipated spouses, Jamie says some kinda shit like "omg me and Daisy are just friends uwu" like DO I NEED TO HIT YOU?????????? See I can't blame him for not slamming the door on Grace's face even tho he totes should- Jamie is so cerebral and kind that even if Grace wasn't using the enchantment on him, I think he would always be soft for her even if it isn't in a romantic way. There's just so much miscommunication cus like he said "Thank God" when she broke off the engagement with Charles and lowkey embraced her but it also wasn't his fault cus it wasn't even romantic BUT OFC IT LOOKED HORRIBLE TO CORDELIA like James literally never told the woman at least once that he loved her so OFC she thought she was back to square one with him dear God above what a mess. Not his fault, but she DID set down one rule for him: don’t cheat with Grace. And yeah even tho he hasn’t properly cheated, it must FEEL horrible to her cus she’s just been enduring the pain of their unrequeted love for so long :((

See imma just say it but if Cordelia thought that James didn't love Grace then she def would have confessed to him about her feelings right but like James, on the other hand, was delaying his own romantic confession cus he was BEING EMOTIONALLY CONSTIPATED and I can't even say the bracelet was solely to blame cus like my boi was just being so difficult omg I believe he should be lightly spanked by his three parents aka Will, Tessa and Jem *cries*.

Cordelia is such a MOM like she's so mature and stable and her self-preservation instinct? OFF THE CHARTS I love this woman like James definitely treated her well as a hubby but like I JUST WANTED HER TO HAVE CLOSURE ABOUT SOMETHING and boy oh boy she did get that closure she got it good but not from the person she expected in the LEAST *hehe* *pelican screeching*... like Lucie was being sus with the whole ghost business and James was being just, quite a case, dealing with Grace and Belial right and I don't blame them at all for their secrecy and shit but her FATHER DIED and her friends were hiding a lot from her so in a way she turned to Alistair for help but he could only do so much cus of his own pain (she couldn't even talk to her mom cus she's pregnant and she doesn't wanna stress her right) and then there was this emotional block between her and Jamie, Lucie was often absent and conspiring with the dead... the last person remaining was HIM (imma discuss this soon), but yeah my heart just went OUT to her cus she's tryna save herself and her family and she just doesn't know what to do. That's why I love the way her mom told her to stop holding herself back for others and live her own life. Like Cordelia grew on me so much cus in Gold she undoubtedly was a strange Elizabeth Bennet-wallflower hybrid and I... do not usually get attached to wallflowers but in Iron I feel like I finally understood that she was just tryna be unproblematic and self-preserving all along and nottt put her family and friends in a tough situation.... she reminds me of my mom personality-wise so yeah I’m totally rooting for her now that her *situation* in the past seems clearer.

Anna, Thomas and Matthew are such a SQUAD lmfaooooo like united in their gayness they'd be so unstoppable.

Will and Tessa are the most in-love of all the in-loves in this story and I respect that so much.

I lost a year to my life every time the romance between James and Cordelia got cockblocked. Like they were MARRIED and I thought they were gonna at least sleep next to each other at least once BUT NO James couldn't take a hint omg I'm actually gonna eat my fist and sob (but in retrospect, I think this serves a bigger purpose in terms of the narrative structure i.e. the interruption of all the spicy James and Cordelia action serves a bigger purpose which I think brings me to my next section, *exhale*)

Welcome to the Matthew Fairchild Enthusiast Club (this section is me talking out loud; it makes no sense):

bitch.

LISTEN TO ME LISTEN WELL I LOVE THIS BOY SO MUCH IMMA SCREAM I REALLY AM GONNA SCREAM MY FIST IS LITERALLY IN MY MOUTH *BACKFLIPS OFF THE ROOF WITH LANA DEL REY PLAYING*

Okay like where to BEGIN I think the Shadowhunter boy who I'm most attracted to is Julian while the one I love the most is Will but I think I see myself in Matthew the most. Like ever since that first story where the Thieves all met at the Academy then got expelled, I think that I just KNEW Matthew was destined to be epic. Plus the whole Wilde obsession? I’m no libertine myself but I just love his chaos and passion for life.

NO CUS HE'S SO WITTY AND SWEET AND EPIC AND YET SO SECRETIVE AND DEAR GOD ABOVE AHHHHH WILL HE SURPASS JULIAN FOR ME??? Ion even know but this is just sodjsgdwsdygyegydgef

Hear me out but I said after finishing Gold last March that I wanted this book to be Matthew's healing arc right so halfway into the book when I realized that we weren't getting all that good healing arcing I was confused just cus I thought it seemed natural to address all of his alcohol issues and sadness by now. LITTLE DID I KNOW CASSIE WAS SETTING UP A WHOLE OTHER ARC WITH HIM THAT I WOULD HAVE NEVER GUESSED WTH.

At first I thought Matthew didn't have feelings for anyone at all, and if he DID develop feelings unexpectedly, I fricking thought that maybe he's catching feelings for James, if anyone??? I mean, I did have some suspicions about Matthew from the get-go: like he's so secretive and as readers we think we know everything there is to know about him since we were all privy to the truth potion incident in his short story right BUT NO I GOT PLAYED AND I DESERVE IT SO BADDDDDD.

Listen I hadn't shipped him and Cordelia simply because I never thought it in the realm of possibility but it MAKES SENSE as a ship... think about it: he never says what he feels, he flirts with her like he does with EVERYONE, he is kind to her in the way he is with EVERYONE. Really, Matthew is shippable with everyone, doesn’t matter if they’re taken cus that’s just what his Matthewnes allows for ya feel. There is such a beautiful irony that CORDELIA herself did not see this coming. Even the little teasers and hints in Gold have only NOW started making sense to me likejhss. I just felt like the hints in book 1 did not indicate to me that Matthew really harbored real romantic feelings for Daisy. I thought he was upset that James and Cordelia were being fakes, not a developing CRUSH on the woman fgs.

Not to mention that you usually sense a ship building when the emotional connection or sexual tension between the characters is made clearer but to me their FRIENDSHIP grew right but it didn’t feel like Cordelia was thought that she liked him or he liked her so that means me and Cordelia are clowns *together* 😤

Okay I was lowkey having SUSPICIONS but I immediately shut them down right... like firstly when he took her to the White Horse in his car and she went OFF and OFF and off about how she felt free for the first time? I thought Cassie was just tryna develop Cordelia's self-liberation arc through Matthew there. Heck, I didn't even think ANYTHING of it when Matthew confession to Cordelia about the "truth potion" incident at all cus I was like they're FRIENDS??? BUT now it's adding up now...

See when they were at the inn place and he was telling her that she doesn't in the least seem like a 100 year-old married woman? I was like hmmmm he's so sweet but why did Cassie phrase it like that like??? When Cordelia later reiterated that she thought Matthew's flirting was “meaningless”?? I was like hmmm kinda SUS tho. And then when he and James had their fight over the way Jamie kissed Grace like again I thought he was just like? ion know? mad at James for it but I didn't think he was in LOVE with Cordelia??? So I immediately put aside my slight suspicions. The probability that he had a crush on James at that point seemed more likely to me.

BUT THEN it started hitting me that every time Matthew drank, even before he explained his issue with the truth potion, that Cordelia would note it, she would worry about him, she would think of her father which seemed so poetic to me, history repeating itself and all that but this time you can FIX it??? Yeah, but again I didn't think the L WORD would be involved man???

Now imma sound like a delulu shipper here but it just makes sense they would develop feelings logically- reason being that it definitely is possible based on the way Cassie set up the story, like there's a combination of little “friend things” that can turn this into a proper ship: Matthew rescues Cordelia in the ballroom when Grace captures James' attention in Gold. Cordelia sees her father in Matthew all the time but knows now she has a chance to be there for him in the way she couldn't have been there for Elias (classic “history repeats itself” trope, she doesn't want Matthew drinking in Paris like dhshghdfhdhch). Cordelia tastes freedom for the first time when driving with Matthew. Matthew caught James and Cordelia making out in the room and was pissed but not even HE properly knew why then??? Umm, when she thinks James is forreal cheating with Grace on her she subconsciously goes to Matthew??? I also found it funny just how every intimate marital moment between her and James got interrupted somehow. Like, it's as if the narrative is just a living force REFUSING to let James and Cordelia as a ship be consecrated. Heck, every time Matthew is scantily clothed Cordelia notes it. LITTLE CRUMBS I TELL YOU LITTLE CRUMBS.

I tell you when Cordelia showed up to Matthew's flat I thought they were gonna f*ck as friends but I got SOMETHING EVEN BETTER SOMEHOW

THEY ARE GOING TO PARIS LA BELLE EPOQUE PARIS THE PARIS OF DREAMS AND ART LIKE??? FRICKKKKK I DID NOT SEE THIS COMING AT ALLLL MAN? I deadass thought the story would be restrained to the UK but like it MAKES SENSE the trope subversion MAKES SENSE.

“In Paris, with you, I will not need to forget.” SHITTRGEGGGDG

BUT CORDELIA LOVES JAMES TOO LIKE I CAN'T DENY THAT... where are we GOING with this like Matthew wouldn't lie about his feelings and yet Cassie wouldn't give us Matthew and Cordelia crumbs to only end it in the next book immediately for her to just ditch him for James. I mean she was clearly holding back on fleshing out James and Cordelia as a ship for this but to WHAT END??? Daisy feels wild and free with Matthew and she feels warm at home warm with James. I can’t advocate for the sinking of ANY ship here.

Imma say what we're all thinking: Is she gonna give us a Will x Jem x Tessa type situation where Cordelia gets both of them cus I'm not strong enough for this but I also think it'd be really funny if James gets a surprise bi awakening in the next books and then we get POLY even tho this would never happen, it’s actually impossible, because of the whole parabatai thing.

Listen I ship Cordelia and Matthew much more than Cordelia and James, not that I dislike James in any way tho. It's just: Matthew is so unrestrained and she's so composed. They seem like an unlikely pair so it makes sense that they hit harder for me. James and Cordelia have such similar personalities but I ALSO don't ship James with Grace at all so like?? Poly would be... ideal... but it can’t happen especially cus they are fricking parabatai... a Will-Jem-Tessa situation seems more likely but mannnn ion know what to expect. I just want FAIRSTAIRS to have their moment in Paris. I mean James and Matthew clearly don't abhor each other for this.

Take everything I say with several grains of salt, take everything I say with the whole Dead Sea actually, cus I damn well know that Matthew is so flirty and whatnot that I’d have shipped him with anyone in their little circle but now that she set him up with Cordelia it all feels so right?? I have wanted this man in a good relationship since he walked onto the page in Nothing But Shadows so-

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I can't believe Cassia duped me like this omg, Matthew is gonna have his healing arc in Paris with Cordelia by his side like- THIS IS ALL I HAVE WANTED AND SO MUCH MORE. Question to yall btw: are you all as surpised at Fairstairs as me or did yall see it coming all along like smart people? Am I a lone clown? 🥺

BRUH okay criticisms of CC?:

Lmfao a part of me feels like I GOTTA say something bad about CC or the book but honestly I have no objective complaints about it as of now. Am I saying that it’s the PEAK of Young Adult literature and Urban Fantasy? I mean, I make no such claims tbh. I’m not here to be critical when I read as a hobby and when CC’s writing makes me happy regardless of how flawed some people see it.

Okay what next?

So like I’m excited for the adult high fantasy she’s releasing in the fall and whatever other works she might be releasing outside of Chain of Gold within the Chronicles.

As for TLH itself? Man I’m just VIBING like I suspect I will reread Chain of Iron soon and maybe one of the anthologies just because I am happy that this series actually happened after me waiting like 6 years for it when it was just a concept: a Dickensian retelling filled with poetry and culture and history and the conventions I so loved in TID at age 12. This is all I been wanting tbh. I’m just enjoying watching this series come to fruition for it to inspire and transform me in some way. I feel like in a way my coming-���of-age aligns with that of these specific characters yet I ALSO feel like I raised Jamie since infancy. Wack.

MATTHEW AND CORDELIA IN FRANCE LA BELLE EPOQUE TO BE EXACT IMMA CRY I DID NOT SEE THIS COMING AND AHHHHHH. ALSO WILL AND JAMIE GOING TO CORNWALL TO GET LUCIE AND MAYBE BOND I LOVE WILL. HE WAS ONE OF MY DILF AWAKENINGS AT AGE 12 AND NOW HE’S HERE AGAIN IMMA CRY. I WANNA SEE MATTHEW GET HAPPY. AHHH.

Ending with a fun quote: “In the wise words of someone or other, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Maurice.” 😉

[leviathan-supersystem]

Do you think there is any connection or alliance between Christian fascism and fascist occultism? They seem to dislike each other pretty badly sometimes?

eh, that’s all a matter of the material political conditions of the time. there’s always this ebb and flow with any social current, between admittance and enforcement (i hope i can come up with a better way to describe that dichotomy but that may be the best i can do) where any social current has this struggle within itself between it’s desire to expand, and it’s desire to enforce a certain incentive system- if it leans too hard toward enforcing it’s incentive system, everyone gets kicked out for failing to follow the rules and it shrinks to nothing, but if it prioritizes recruiting people over enforcing it’s rules it becomes meaningless. so social currents are always fluctuating between these poles, attempting to reach the right balance in order for the social current to survive, depending on the material conditions, which contradiction is antagonistic, etc.

in the period immediately prior to 2016 the far-right was shifted more in it’s cycle toward admittance- at this time you saw a great deal of synergy between christian fascists and occultist and atheist fascists, as well as a willingness to look the other way over things that, usually, the far right-would condemn. it was a brief window of time in which someone like milo yiannopoulos could gain the kind of profile he did.

anyways, after trumps election the ground shifted, and the cycle of that social current shifted hard from admittance to enforcement- massive crackdown on the non-christian alt-right, pressuring many involved to convert to christianity (see roosh v) also a massive crackdown on porn consumption (“cumbrain” became popular as a pejorative on the far-right around this time). milo being ousted from the far right marks the inflection point for when the cycle shifted from admittance to enforcement.

in turn, on the left the opposite shift occurred, and the cycle shifted from enforcement to admittance, precipitating the emergence of the “dirtbag left”- a not insignificant portion of whom are people who were loosely in the circle of the right-wing before the right-wing shifted from admittance to enforcement. see shoe0nhead, who was loosely in the periphery of the anti-sj right, until the right-wing shifted from admittance to enforcement and she came under fire for her vague sympathies toward mildly left-wing economics (see her former friend Sargon of Akkad’s campaign against her) pushing her out of the anti-sj right and into the arms of the left, which has, in turn, become more hospitable to her reactionary social views.

to be clear, i hope i haven’t given the impression that between the poles of admittance and enforcement that one of the two is “the good one”- they can both be bad in excess, and what is needed is a healthy interplay between these extremes that is responsive to the material conditions of the time. a shift too far toward admittance can result in actually harmful behavior being tolerated, which will both cause harm as well as repel people from the social current, defeating the entire purpose of shifting toward admittance in the first place- if a social current shifts toward admittance and then lets in a bunch of sex-pests who end up hurting innocent people and repelling more people than the number of people being brought in by shifting toward admittance, then that social current fucked up. the far-right’s shift toward enforcement came right around the time it was starting to run up against this exact problem, as it’s efforts to recruit incels, MRAs, and (supposed) PUAs into the far-right had started to cause them to have a mass-exodus of women, and in turn it’s embrace of anti-porn politics has been in part an attempt to win back over women from right-wing backgrounds who shifted toward terf/swerf style feminism after being alienated from right-wing politics by misogyny. (and given their transphobia terfs are obviously easier to recruit back into right-wing politics than other feminists who are originally from right-wing backgrounds)

edit: oh yeah the original question. christian fascists and occult fascists got along great around like 2014/2015, and were willing to set aside their differences in order to be racist together, but now not so much. they’re still being racist obviously, but more separately.

[magic-and-moonlit-wings]

Chapter 55: Movie Night

Lots of quotes from the movie Lilo & Stitch ahead! Fewer quotes, but some, from Trolls and Frozen.

Bold italics are trollish, ~tildes~ indicate goblin.

Content warnings for this chapter: Swearing. Here we reach the story's first F-bomb.

Also, there is some talk between characters about the harshness of life in the Darklands, how Changelings are treated by the Gumm-Gumms, and mentions of cannibalism.

This was supposed to be a light-happy chapter that got feels-y at the end, but then it went and got all dark on me.

Oh, also-also, (Not) Enrique finds out Claire flirted with Jim a while ago and misinterprets what exactly happened between them, but that gets cleared up fast.

Becoming The Mask

Once again, Javier and Ophelia Nuñez were out for the evening, leaving Claire in charge of Enrique. Claire had gotten permission to invite "some friends" over to watch movies. Jim and Toby arrived to find Mary and Darci already there – Jim suspected, like the time he'd 'babysat', that Claire had purposefully asked him to arrive after she knew her parents would be gone.

They set up piles of cushions and blankets on the floor between the couch and the TV. Jim propped the Amulet up on the coffee table they'd pushed to one side. Maybe some of the ghost Trollhunters would be interested in human movies.

"Finally get your fill of the touchy-feelies?" Enrique teased Jim, seeing how they were all seated separately. Jim snorted.

"Not hardly." He pulled the smaller Changeling in for a hug. "Humans just have different rules about casual touching, is all. Freezing to death's not really a concern in this climate."

"Wait, what?" said Toby, dropping the pillow he'd been holding. Jim looked up to see all the humans staring at him.

"Darklands thing," said Enrique easily. "Gets cold there."

"We'd sleep in piles," Jim explained. "I had a bit of a reputation for being … clingy."

"If you weren't good at finding food and soft stuff, we'd never've put up with ya." Enrique proved himself a liar by climbing onto Jim's shoulders instead of jumping back to the floor. He fluffed the hair on Jim's scalp. "Jimmy-boy got his first nickname for that."

"Shut up," said Jim playfully. "Anyway, humans get weird about touching around puberty. I can still hug Mom whenever I want, but Toby gets embarrassed if I hug him around other people, and Claire, Mary, and Darci haven't given me permission to touch them casually yet."

"… Did you … want permission?" asked Claire. "You, kinda, said you were uncomfortable with that, I thought."

"No, it was more wondering if you were flirting with me that felt weird," Jim assured her. "After that conversation I felt like it'd be awkward to bring up that I was open to hugging and such."

Jim thought he felt Enrique growl, to quietly to properly hear. His hand, still in Jim's hair, changed position so the tips of Enrique's claws were on Jim's scalp.

"When exactly did this happen?" Enrique asked.

"Claire kissed Jim on the cheek on his birthday and then Jim said he wasn't interested in dating her," said Mary.

"Also that I realized she might not have meant it in a flirty way and if I was misinterpreting things she could ignore what I was saying," Jim added. The claws retreated.

Claire looked away. "So what movie did we want to start with?"

"Lilo & Stitch!" exclaimed Darci, looking through the shelves. "I haven't watched this in forever!"

"That's a good one." Jim tilted his head to get Enrique back in his peripheral vision. "Enrique, have you seen it yet?"

"… Yeah."

"Isn't that the one that always makes you cry?" asked Toby.

"It's beautiful. Of course I cry."

Stitch was a constructed 'abomination', who shapeshifted to blend in, and his adopted family found out what he truly was and still wanted him. How could Jim be expected to keep his composure in the face of that?

"So, quick question," said Jim. "Is talking during the movie a crime, or is commentary what makes it a group activity?"

"Commentary," said all three girls together.

"Okay, good." Jim and Toby usually talked during movies, unless one or both of them were seeing it for the first time. Sometimes even then.

+=+

"Not guilty! My experiments are only theoretical, and completely within legal boundaries."

"We believe you actually created something."

"Created something? Ha! But that would be irresponsible, and, unethical. I would never, ever – make more than one."

"What is that monstrosity?"

"Monstrosity?! What you see before you is the first of a new species!"

"You have to wonder if she and Merlin ever had a talk like this," Enrique muttered in Jim's ear. Jim snickered.

"And as for that abomination … it is the flawed product of a deranged mind. It has no place among us."

Jim stopped laughing and cringed. He loved this movie a lot, but some of it stung.

+=+

"A quiet capture would require an understanding of 626 that we do not possess! Who, then, Mr Pleakley, would you send for his extraction?"

"… Does he have a brother? Close grandmother, perhaps?"

"Fun fact," said Darci, "in early drafts Stitch was a career criminal and Jumba was an old accomplice."

"Friendly cousin? Neighbour with a beard?"

+=+

"Surely the teacher won't notice I was late if he doesn't see me come in!" Claire narrated sarcastically.

+=+

"I'm sorry, Scrump!" Mary wailed, as Lilo ran back to retrieve the doll she'd angrily thrown aside.

+=+

"Let me illuminate to you the precarious situation in which you have found yourself. I am the one they call when things go wrong. And things have indeed gone wrong."

"As a cook, that kitchen horrifies me," said Jim.

+=+

"If you promise not to fight anymore, I promise not to yell at you – except on special occasions."

"Tuesdays and bank holidays would be good."

The entire group cracked up.

"How does kid Lilo's age even know what a bank holiday is?" said Claire. "I don't even know what a bank holiday is!"

"Maybe she saw it printed on a calendar?" said Toby.

+=+

A raindrop fell on Stitch's head. He fired his ray gun into the sky. It started raining, hard.

"Oh, no, I broke the sky!" Darci cried.

+=+

"Does it have to be this dog?"

"He survived getting hit by a truck, how much more sturdy and not-gonna-die do you want?" asked Jim.

"Yes. He's good. I can tell."

+=+

"I'm sorry I bit you. And pulled your hair. And punched you in the face."

Mary nudged Claire. "Remind you of anyone?"

Like sunflowers, everyone else popped up and turned towards them.

Claire blushed. "We got into a fight in first grade and for like two days we decided we didn't want to be friends anymore, then our moms made us say sorry."

"He will be irresistibly drawn to large cities, where he will back up sewers, reverse street signs, and steal everyone's left shoe."

"It's weird they get in trouble for everything but this," commented Enrique. "Human grown ups might not believe a dog stole a trike, but wouldn't they think Lilo did it? She's fought the other kid before."

"It's nice to live on an island with no large cities."

+=+

"It's not an angel, Lilo, I don't even think it's a dog!"

"Isn't that the rolling thing Draal can do?" said Toby.

"Yeah, more or less," said Jim. "I mean, I don't think Draal bites his feet – but maybe that's the trick."

"At least with those stick legs you've got," said Enrique. He curled into a ball and rolled in a circle around the group. "Face it, you're out of proportion for this move."

+=+

"626 was designed to be a monster. But now, there is nothing to destroy. You see, I never gave him a greater purpose. What must it be like, to have nothing? Not even memories to visit, in the middle of the night?"

"Now, this next bit I don't care for," said Jim. "The Ugly Duckling is a messed-up story."

"What've you got against The Ugly Duckling?" asked Mary.

"The blatant segregationist propaganda? 'A swan will never fit in with ducks and everyone is better off sticking with their own kind'. You don't even have to read it as a race metaphor. Between that and The Little Mermaid, I thought for while that Hans Christian Anderson was a Changeling writing cautionary tales about why we shouldn't get attached to humans."

"… Was he?" asked Claire.

"Probably not. I couldn't find any real evidence and the rest of his work doesn't match the pattern."

"Counterpoint," said Darci. "The Ugly Duckling is pro-integration. Everyone thought he was an ugly duckling because they didn't know what swans look like. If he'd grown up with ducks and swans around, they could've judged him for what he was instead of what he couldn't measure up to, and he might've had a happy childhood instead of only finding a community that accepted him as an adult."

Jim considered this, and nodded. "I guess I can see that, too."

+=+

"Heard you lost your job."

"Well, uh, actually, I just quit. That job. Because, you know, the hours are just not conducive to the challenges of raising a child –"

"Nani, no!" Jim begged. "I know almost nothing about Social Services but I'm pretty sure choosing to leave your only source of income looks worse to them than just losing it!"

"Thus far you have been adrift in the sheltered harbour of my patience; but I cannot ignore you being jobless. Do I make myself clear?"

"Perfectly."

"And next time I see this dog, I expect it to be a model citizen. Capiche?"

"Uh … yes?"

"New job. Model citizen. Good day."

+=+

"So, we saw Cobra on the beach after all the tourists got scared off … D'you think he was just standing there watching them the whole time?" Mary wondered out loud after the surfing sequence.

+=+

"Until we meet again …"

Lilo was about to tell Stitch about her parents. Without thinking, Jim grabbed the remote – on the coffee table, next to the amulet – to fast forward.

"What are you doing?" Darci cried. "This is one of the big emotional turning points of the film!"

Jim paused it. "Sorry. Uh … Tobes and I usually skip this scene."

"I think I can handle it," Toby assured Jim. To the girls and Enrique, he explained, "My parents died in a storm when I was two. A cruise ship, not a car accident. I got kind of upset the first time we watched this as kids, and, we got in the habit fast forwarding this part. I think I'm okay with it now."

"You're sure?" asked Jim.

"I'm sure."

"Okay …" He rewound to the point where he'd started fast forwarding.

"That's us before. It was rainy, and they went for a drive. What happened to yours?"

Jim watched Toby more than the movie for the next few minutes.

"I'll remember you, though. I remember everyone that leaves."

"Do you remember them?" Claire asked quietly.

"Only the stuff Nana tells me." Toby shrugged, and readjusted the cushions he'd propped up his arms on. "I've seen lots of pictures. A couple home movies."

+=+

"Don't run. Don't make me shoot you. You were expensive. Yes, yes, that's it, come quietly."

"I'm … waiting."

"For what?"

"Family."

"Ah. You don't have one. I made you."

"Maybe … I could –"

"You were built to destroy. You can never belong."

Jim blinked fast to keep the tears back. He sniffed, and pulled the blankets more tightly around him.

+=+

"Okay, talk! I know you had something to do with this, now where's Lilo? Talk! I know you can."

"Claire?" said Mary. "You okay?"

Jim looked over. Claire's jaw was clenched, and her hands were tight on the blanket, and her eyes were huge and fixed on the screen, and she was shaking.

"Ah … maybe the little sib getting snatched by otherworldly forces wasn't the best movie choice," Enrique said. He reached out like he was about to go to Claire, then pulled back his hand and hunkered down where he was.

"LILO! She's a little girl this big, she has black hair and brown eyes, and she hangs around with that THING!"

"I'm. Fine," Claire insisted.

"You're sure?"

"We can just fast forward."

"I said I'm fine!"

"Okay …"

Mary and Darci each scooted their blanket and cushion piles closer to Claire's, bracketing her on either side. Jim tactfully retreated to the Nuñezes kitchen to microwave a few more bags of popcorn. Enrique went with him. They could still hear the TV.

"What? After all you put me through, you expect me to help you just like that? Just like that?!"

"Ih."

"Fine."

"Fine? You're doing what he says?"

"Ah, he is very persuasive."

"Is it normal to feel bad for her?" Enrique asked.

"I think so? It's an awkward situation for both of you." Jim selected the white cheddar flavour. "But it's not like there's an alternative. You're not a polymorph. And really, the only reason she's upset is because she found out."

The Nuñezes had the same microwave as the Lakes. Jim didn't find the popcorn setting especially useful for this brand of popcorn – it tended to burn a third of the kernels– so he used the timer instead.

"I never apologized to you for that, did I?" Jim asked.

"It wasn't all your fault."

"Still, I'm sorry for my part in getting you caught."

The Changelings got back to the living room in time to see the unfortunate tourist lose his ice cream for the third time.

+=+

"Does Stitch have to go in the ship?"

"Yes."

"Can Stitch say goodbye?"

"… Yes."

Like he always did during this scene, Jim cried. He let himself do it this time.

+=+

"Wait, how is Little Mermaid a cautionary tale?" asked Enrique during the credits. The camera panned over a photo of Stitch reading to a flock of ducklings. "For getting attached, I mean. I thought the moral of that one was to control yer temper and be careful who you made deals with?"

"Sure, the Disney version," said Jim. "They adapted it to make a more dramatic, less depressing story. And give the characters names. In the older version, the sea witch is actually a neutral character. The terms of the mermaid's transformation are that she's traded her tongue for legs, but walking on land hurts, and she'll become fully human if the prince marries her, but if he marries anybody else, she'll die."

"That doesn't sound neutral."

"Wait for it. The prince gets engaged to a human princess, so the mermaid's older sisters trade their hair to the sea witch for a magic knife and a loophole; if the little mermaid kills the prince before the wedding, she can turn back into a mermaid and survive."

"Kay, I see it now."

"Except she doesn't go through with the kill, so she dies, and because she wasn't really human, she doesn't have a proper soul, so her spirit's not allowed to go to Heaven."

"… Whoa."

"I know, right?"

"I mean," Mary commented, "not murdering somebody is kind of a low bar for moral decency. It's not as if the prince owed her anything just because she was attracted to him."

"No, no, whether the prince deserved to die or not is irrelevant," said Jim. "The point is that the mermaid had a chance to, objectively, trade one life for another, and because she was attached to the particular person she'd have to kill, she didn't prioritize her own survival, and therefore suffered."

"Wouldn't the guilt of murder have caused suffering anyway?" Toby pointed out.

"Not if she wasn't attached," Jim insisted. How were they not getting this? "If she could've just cut the throat of any random human, she'd've been fine. The moral of the story is that caring about people causes pain. That's what makes it depressing."

"Do you like any fairy tales?" asked Darci.

"Sure. Just not most of Anderson's work."

"What should we watch next?" said Claire hospitably. "If we're on a 'sister movies' theme, I've got Frozen."

"Isn't that one also based on an Anderson fairy tale?" said Mary.

"Not really," said Jim. "The Snow Queen was more 'inspiration' than 'source material'. Elsa never kidnaps anyone, and they left out the broken enchanted mirror. Plus it's fun to see all the different ways humans think trolls are like."

"We also have the Trolls movie," said Claire. "I haven't watched it yet. My dad got it for Mom's birthday because she used to collect the dolls."

"I haven't seen that one yet, either," Darci commented.

"Should we?" said Mary. "Any other votes?"

"I'm game for whatever," said Toby. "This one's a musical, right? Those are always fun."

Jim squirmed.

He hadn't watched this movie despite his curiosity, after an online clip of the opening had explained the premise. Getting eaten alive was his greatest fear. Did he want to watch a movie about trolls narrowly avoiding being eaten? Did he want to explain why he didn't want to watch it?

While he debated, the movie got put in.

"Once upon a time, in a happy forest, in the happiest tree, lived the happiest creatures the world has ever known: the trolls. They loved nothing more than to sing, and dance, and hug, and dance and hug and sing and dance and sing and hug –"

Enrique started laughing.

Oh, shit, Jim hadn't warned him.

"Uh, Enrique –"

"Ssh! This is ridiculous. I mean, the huggy bit's kind of like you, but the rest of it – ha!"

"But then one day, the trolls were discovered by – a Bergen!"

"The trolls are gonna –"

"Ji-im! Spoilers!" Toby hissed.

"They were the most miserable creatures in all the land."

Jim grabbed Enrique and covered his eyes. The smaller Changeling yelped and squirmed. Jim switched forms so his fingers wouldn't bleed from the clawing.

Enrique got his eyes uncovered just in time to see the Bergen flick a troll into its mouth.

The onscreen troll's exclamation of "Oh my god!" was drowned out by Enrique's much more lurid cursing.

"What the –?" The girls and Toby all turned to stare. Claire pointed at Enrique accusingly. "I knew that didn't mean 'I'm sorry'!"

"The hell kinda movie is this?! Why would you watch this?!" He twisted to look at Jim, who let go of him rather than risk yanking his scruff by accident. "You knew?!"

"I saw a bit of it on the internet when it first came out. That's why I froze up when Claire suggested it."

That … that was the wrong thing to say. Enrique rounded on Claire. A techno-rock cover of In The Hall Of The Mountain King boomed from the movie soundtrack.

"Why in FUCK'S NAME would you think we'd WANT to watch trolls get EATEN? Is this some kind of threat?"

"How the fuck would it be a threat?" Claire shot back, stealing some cushions from Mary to prop herself up taller without getting out of her blanket cocoon.

"Most Changelings –" Jim started to say.

"DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I'VE ALMOST BEEN EATEN?" Enrique roared. "I DON'T! CAUSE IT'S A LOT!"

"We've all had close calls," Jim finished. "Nyarlagroths, Hellheetis, goblins if you catch them in the wrong mood, Gruesomes if you're already hurt, Stalklings, and it's a … popular threat from Gumm-Gumms."

"You forgot the sloorbeasts," said Enrique bitterly.

"Nobody's gotten lichen patches that bad." At least, they hadn't when Jim got out. "Have they?"

"Still counts."

"Uh, excuse me." Toby raised his hand. "I think I speak for us all when I say, what?"

"The Darklands are a hostile environment with predators and scavengers," explained Jim. "That's the other reason we slept in groups."

"Bigger targets, but we could have lookouts."

"Okay, that's its own kind of horrifying, but I was more reacting to the cannibalism?"

"Changelings don't count as real trolls," Enrique said sarcastically. "We're Impure."

He left out the part where they'd eaten their own dead. Jim didn't add it.

(It wasn't like they'd hunted each other for food. Sometimes a Changeling just died, somehow, in a way that didn't get them eaten by something else, and … well, food was scarce in the Darklands. They couldn't afford to be picky.

It also paid to keep watch over the sentry posts. Gunmar occasionally used the Decimaar Blade to post a sentry and then forgot to order them to rest and eat. Once they died, the average adult Gumm-Gumm was a meal for twenty Changelings, easily, if they could get to the body before the Gruesomes did.)

"Okay, we're switching to Frozen." Mary made the executive decision. "Wait," she said, while exchanging the disks. "If Changelings aren't trolls, how does Jim's adoption work?"

Because of course this was the perfect moment to tell Enrique about that, right in the middle of a squabble with his adopted sister.

"For one thing, most of Trollmarket still thinks I'm human." Jim switched back to human shape to illustrate the point.

"You got adopted?"

"AAARRRGGHH and Blinky thought I should have legal standing in Trollmarket outside of my job."

Enrique stared at him. Green diamond-shaped ears were pinned back. Buggy, slit-pupil eyes were wide and hurt.

"You get everything," he grumbled. "Two nicknames, and the goblins liked you, and you could always find food, and here you're the boss's favourite even when you're a traitor, and your human family still likes you, and now you get a troll family too? S'not fair."

"Hey, the goblins liked you, too." Jim was fully aware that wasn't much comfort compared to all the rest of it. "They gave you your nickname, remember?"

"They gave you one, too."

"Yeah, but you got yours first."

They probably weren't supposed to hear Darci when she muttered, "I feel like we're missing a lot of context."

"Shit," Claire muttered back. "Not Enrique told me a bit of the name part. They don't remember their names from before they were Changelings, and they don't get real names until they have Familiars, so they use nicknames instead. From each other or from goblins, he said."

"They don't get names?" Darci's voice went squeaky at the end of that.

"We're trying to come up with something other than 'Enrique' for him."

"You're trying," Enrique corrected. Darci squeaked again.

"Can we maybe circle back to the cannibalism thing?" said Toby. "That feels like the kind of trauma that should get unpacked at some point."

"I would rather leave it packed," said Jim.

"The way you blurted it out like that feels like you need to talk about it."

"Not all psychology is Freudian, Tobes."

"Do your parents still have baby name books from when they were picking Enrique's name?" Mary asked Claire. "Real Enrique, I mean."

"They didn't use one. He was named after our abuelo."

"Okay, so what about your other grandfather? What was his name?"

"Jose María." Defensively, "It's gender neutral in Spanish."

On the television screen, the movie menu finished another loop and started again.

"I tried spelling my name like it sounds, en are ee kay, but Claire said it spelled 'Nrek'. You get why I couldn't use that."

Jim laughed.

"What's funny?" asked Toby. "Is that an insult or something?"

"No, it's goblin, in English it means 'bottle'," Jim translated. "Or possibly 'container of food'." The only bottles he's seen them use held formula for the Familiars, and the word hadn't come up on the surface, so the distinction was unclear. "It's either a silly name or a really morbid one."

"Aaand we're back to the cannibalism."

"No we are not!"

"Na na na heyana, Hahiyaha naha …"

Either somebody had decided to start the movie, or the DVD had that feature where it automatically began playing if nothing was selected after a few loops of the menu.

The conversation went in circles a couple more times, then faded out.

+=+

"And who's the funky-looking donkey over there?"

"That's Sven."

"Uh-huh; and who's the reindeer?"

"… Sven."

"Oh, they're – ? Oh! Okay! Makes things easier for me."

"~Riot~," said Enrique.

"Huh?"

"My nickname. Before. It meant 'riot'."

What are you doing? Jim wanted to demand. Was Enrique just – just giving up on a real name?

"You can call me that for now. Till we work out a for-real one. Better than 'Not Enrique'."

Jim stuffed some burnt popcorn kernels into his mouth to keep from protesting. He couldn't undermine Enrique's – Riot's – chosen name, right in front of a bunch of humans, when he'd been arguing with them about how rude that was for weeks now.

"Oh. Okay." Claire half-smiled. "Riot."

Jim shut his eyes to hide the flaring glow.

+=+

Previous Chapter (Angor Rot gets treated much better, and more sensibly, than in canon, and is correspondingly less vengeful)

Table of Contents 

Next Chapter (Featuring either Otto or Gatto)

A quick thank you to Taycin on AO3 for providing some name-gender context when this chapter first went up.

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Sarah Ellen Parsons

Sarah Ellen Parsons has 18 X-Files stories at Gossamer and 19 at AO3. If you want high quality fic with interesting characters, go read her stories. Some of my favorites of her fics are The Crouching Thing and My Constant Touchstone Who Makes Me A Whole Person (which are two very different stories!). Big thanks to Sarah Ellen for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

With today's binge-watching culture, I'm not at all surprised. You can watch a bunch of eps and then seek out fic that is where you are in the series.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

I took away a writer's group Yes, Virginia, that is still together.  Mostly as friends, but whenever I write something, or someone else writes something, it's the first place we all run for machete beta. I have betad SO MANY novels.

We have a number of folks who are published writers since then and our time in X-Files fic brought us lifelong friendships IRL and made us all better at our craft. The majority of those folks were better writers than I am. And I make my living as a writer in my day-job.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

I belonged to a couple of the largest lists and posted there and bitched about the show on usenet with everyone else.  We had our own Yahoo group for beta.  We all had crappy GeoCities websites that we programmed the HTML for ourselves and hooked through various fandom link circles to get traffic to our stories.  But the main method of distribution was the lists.

Fun fact, I found a free page counter thing that I used at work one time through fandom. So fandom pays off in skillz.

Even without social media, we managed to get our stories in front of readers who would enjoy them. Where there's a will, there's always someone ready to step up and find a way.

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

Again, I have lifelong friends IRL that I got solely from fanfiction. That's the best takeaway.

Fandom disappointed me because it, like everything else, is ruined by people's egos, backstabbing, and petty people who get in positions of power and then use those positions to punch down or dictate. I was young when I was writing X-Files and I still had hope that people would rise to their better natures, so I got involved in various futile efforts to try to make people behave the way I wanted them to behave, I guess. I did a lot of public bitching that didn't serve me or my friends well. I now put that effort into politics, where it does actual good.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

X-files was made for me. It combined science fiction, mystery, horror.  I love all of those genres. Plus there was Scully. No matter how sexist that writer's room was, Scully was awesome. But you kept seeing bad writing. Even in the heyday seasons, like Season 3, there were really terrible eps that made you want to fix things.

I'm a lifelong speculative fiction fan and a published feminist science fiction author. I actually was published before I fell down the fic hole. I got involved in fanfic due to getting my fantasy novel turned down from every major publisher for being "too dark". And I needed to get readers to see my stuff to prove to myself that I wasn't terrible at writing. I got a ton of feedback and it was like market research to see what people wanted to read.

My time in fanfiction made me 100% a better writer than I was.

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I went to the X-Files Expo to see if I could make contact with someone from Harper Collins because the tie-in novels sucked so hard.  I got rejected with my pitch as I didn't have a literary agent.

Around that time, a pal who I watched X-Files with IRL was looking for a free X-files wallpaper for her work computer when she found the website where fans in Pennsylvania had fic archived. She read some and wrote to me - "you need to see this, and you can do better."  So I started reading and was.... I probably CAN do better. So I wrote The Batman Plot. And made two friends I'm still friends with with that one story.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

Nonexistent.  I couldn't even watch the latest season and I saw only 2 of season one of whatever that was before I gave up. I have never watched the second movie.

X-files is my first fandom bad ex-husband. I loved it SO MUCH, but it betrayed me.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

I was deep into Harry Potter for a while, but I didn't end up publishing anything in it. All my stories were novel-length and I was writing so much for work, I never completed anything. I called Snape/Lily when Prisoner of Azkaban was published and got Jossed by Rowling in one of my big ideas. (This is bad fandom ex-husband 2. JKR will never get a dime of money from me again because of her hateful stance on transfolk. I have RL friends who are trans and NO.)

I wrote fic in Supernatural. It was the obvious next thing after X-Files. However, the misogyny and bringing in all the Angel/Devil Christofascist stuff lost me. The ep where they declared all other religions other than Christianity as invalid and killed a Hindu god made me stop watching for good. I know enough Christofascists IRL that I can't tolerate it in my fiction. (Bad fandom ex-husband 3)

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

This list is far too long to actually make.  But characters I spent time writing about include: Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Co. (I wrote three unpublished Star Trek novels before I found online fandom). King Arthur and Morgan Le Fay, Sherlock Holmes (I wrote a Sherlock Holmes play after seeing "Crucifer of Blood" and entered it in a national competition, where I got very nice comments back.), Mulder, Scully and Krycek, Rowling's Hermione and Snape (like him or not, its masterful characterization), Dean and Sam Winchester, John Winchester and Bobby Singer.  I wrote one comedy story starring Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  A couple of Roswell stories under a different name. Catwoman and Batman. I have some unpublished Avengers fanfic lying around as I'm an OG Marvel fan with a massive comic collection.

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

I was on a business trip a few years ago and FX had a marathon and I watched part of it when I was in my hotel room. Early seasons are comforting, but I don't go back there now.

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

I don't read X-Files fic anymore. I read a tiny bit of Star Wars after the second movie because Rian Johnson had it right. Now I don't care. I love Mandalorian, but am content to watch.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

Too many to count.  All of YV. Which reminds me, I need to go update our entry at Fanlore. I promised Punk I'd do it a while back.  I need to at least get everyone linked.  Right now it's only Punk and Sab.

But it was a ton of us.  Marasmus, Maria Nicole, Cofax, CazQ, M. Sebasky, Livia Balaban, Kelly Keil, Wen, Ropobop, Jess Mabe, JET, fialka, and a bunch of others that I can't remember their fic names any more, just their real names because I know them all IRL. I need to go back and look up their fic names and link them up there.

In addition to my little group of pals, I loved reading Mustang Sally and Rivka T, Rachel Anton - I keep trying to find her to encourage her to write romance if she's not doing it already, but no dice, Dasha K., Anjou, there were so many great ones, but their names have slipped my mind in the past 20 years.

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

I'm most known for Prone, and I'm proud of that story for all kinds of reasons, but I think my very best is The Crouching Thing.

I mostly didn't publish anything I didn't think was good and hadn't been machete betaed within an inch of its life, but I'm not sure much of the angsty romance stuff holds up as well. I think it worked when the show was still ON and we were all in that emotional headspace, but probably not now.

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

Funny you ask. I am currently reworking a plot idea I had for an X-Files fic into a contemporary M/M novel, which I will publish under a different pen-name. The plot is the idea I had for X-Files, the characters are very, very different other than one is uptight and the other more easy-going. But no more Mulder and Scully.

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

I have been making my living as a writer for 25 years. I write the word count equivalent of 5 Tolkein novels a year, just for my day-job.  I am turning back to original fiction, which is where I was before X-Files.  I'm working on the M/M thing, a high fantasy thing, a low fantasy historical thing and a bunch of M/F Regency romances as I get time and energy.  I publish Fantasy and SF under my real name. Romance has pen names as you don't want that getting back to your workplace, either.

SEP is fic only and here she will stay.

Where do you get ideas for stories?

I have too many ideas to count.  I try to write them down when they come, so I won't forget. At least the outline of the idea. Often a scene. I've been like this my entire life. I started writing novels seriously at 15. I wrote a 500 plus page one about Morgan Le Fay during breaks in high school because "Mists of Avalon" pissed me off so bad as I'd read the original source material and that was a Wicca recruitment polemic.

What's the story behind your pen name?

Sarah Ellen was my great-grandma, Parsons was her grandma's last name.

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

Half my friends ARE fic friends. Most of my friends know as does my brother, who thinks writing for free is dumb. This is universally agreed on by non-fic friends who know. My mother still doesn't know about the fic. Just the "real" writing.  I write under a pen name to keep it away from my job and my published work.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

My X-files stuff is up on Gossamer mostly. I'm trying to get the stories all moved to AO3 for all the genres. I'm working on this now.  SEP is really not a living thing anymore, but there was a time when she was more me than me.

If you want to find my "real" non-fic writing, write to me at se_parsons at yahoo dot com and I will point you at it.

And PLEASE someone, hunt down Rachel Anton and get her writing something we all can BUY.  Where are my old Krycek bitches at?  Do any of you know where she is? [Lilydale note: I’ve tried contacting Rachel Anton for this Old School X project but have not had luck. I would love to find her too!]

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

The community I loved has mostly moved on, but I think we left a legacy of solid work crafted out of our love for the show.  Find a living community you love for a show you love.  There are great people out there creating and get involved.  It will be worth it.

(Posted by Lilydale on December 15, 2020)

[firelord-frowny]

kinda re: that last post, 

I totally get that In This Day And Age, it’s difficult to believe that a bigot’s mind could be changed about anything at all, but it does happen! 

Case in point: kids from ~conservative~ families who enter college as annoying ass racist lil pissbaby wimps, and graduate as radical antifas lmao. 

I had a good pal in college that went through that transformation omg. One of the first conversations I ever had with her included a whiny lil tirade about how she ~hates reverse racism~ and ~black people think they’re entitled to everything~. A year later, she was often the first person to speak up in defense of a person of color any time somebody said some Racist Ass Shit. I remember her whining about Romney having lost to Obama. For the next election, she was volunteering for Bernie Sanders’ campaign. 

and not that this bit has anything at ALL to do with her character, because it doesn’t, but when i met her, she described herself as a straight, cis*, christian woman. She wore long skirts, and kept her hair super long. A couple years later, she’d shaved her head, come out as ace, and i don’t recall exactly how she described her gender experience, but i’m pretty sure she did express being something other than cis, and that she wasn’t picky about pronouns. And I think she maintained a belief in a god, but expressed that she wasn’t necessarily committed to practicing christianity in any special or public way. 

Obviouslyyyyy the fact that she turned out to be Not Straight and Not Cis Not Entirely Christian is not at all indicative of her having become a better person. Like. I’m not saying that she came to all these realizations as a result of no longer being bigoted. What I am saying is that being in an environment that taught her to open her mind a lil bit gave her the freedom and confidence to start to understand herself in a context other than the narrow one she’d been brought up with. 

And like, i am SO SURE that she wouldn’t have experienced all those changes of heart if she hadn’t suddenly been thrust into a social circle filled with black people and gay people and and people who spoke openly about ~progressive~ ideals, and almost more importantly, people who had FUN together. There was always so much laughter among everyone. Everyone was always excited for everyone else when someone had something Good happen in their life. Everyone was always saying something kind to someone else - gosh, you’re so pretty. wow, your recital was amazing. you’re so smart, thanks for helping me with my project. blah blah blah. 

She was having more fun with these people than she had with the sad, boring bigots she’d been closest with before, and I don’t think she would have changed her mind about things so rapidly and drastically if that hadn’t been the case. 

[quaintqueer]

I don't know what you think about labels, maybe you are the kind of person who watches shows like Marie Kondo where they organise people's houses and put sticky labels on everything so that you can easily identify the contents. Maybe you're the kind of person who does not like to be labelled or stereotyped. Maybe you prefer to be just yourself.

I have had a very complex relationship with labels and identity. You could say that I started off on the wrong foot. My mother went to a Baptist church on Sunday morning and a Charismatic/Pentecostal hands-in-the-air, shouting and screaming, spiritual warfare kind of church on Sunday night. And my dad had his Holy Communion as a kid and then went to mass on Easter and Christmas.  So to begin with my labels were numerous and incongruent which did cause some issues for younger Zoe.

And I want to share with you about where God has led me through the understanding of this topic. I am not entirely sure where to start and I'm not sure how vague to be here but let's just say that at least the draft will be an explicit and partly chronological one.

12 year old Zoe I went to church most Sundays with her family and she was very very lucky to have a wonderful Christian friends in her life and at this point the label attached to her as a daughter was the unproblematic child and at school she was the sweet and friendly member of the God Squad or Singing Christians depending on how you asked. But those were the kind of labels that existed around that time.

What happens though to 12 year old Zoe is that she falls madly and instantaneously in love with her best friend. And almost immediately she thinks ‘am I in love with this girl? that must make me gay.’ And being a part of the circles that I was in a fairly conservative Christian family and a fairly conservative Christian School with Christian friends in that Christian school, I said ‘absolutely not. I don't want to have to deal with that.’ I was never hateful towards gay people in general I just thought I just didn't want to deal with it myself. My mum and I had had conversations about it when the plebiscite happened, and whenever we spoke about it, it was very much about ‘the gay people’ as opposed to anyone we knew or loved, let alone a Christian person, and so this whole gay thing wasn’t really thought about. Ao a few times over the next 2 or 3 years so I would ask, ‘am I in love with this girl’ And I always concluded ‘no no no you can't be in love cos you're not gay’.

By the time I’m about 14, I’ve been awoken to all different kinds of social justice movements, I took sociology, I’m going to save the world. THe labels I proudly wear are things like left wing, passionate, an ally to many different communities, in particular the lgbtq+ community.

Zoe at one point goes ‘frick frack, I'm definitely in love with this girl’. and because of the way that this world really loves labels, this was completely synonymous in my mind with being gay. My first response was probably because I'm bisexual so now that is an importand confusing label Zoë is wearing. I have somewhat fond somewhat mortifying memories of sitting on the Shinkansen, the bullet train, from Tokyo to Kyoto next to my dad doing every single ‘Am I gay’ quiz I could find online. Throughout this trip to Japan, I’m really testing the waters and every single younger woman I saw I was like ‘Is she cute? Am I attracted to her? Would I kiss her?’ and so that experience made me very nervous because I had still grown up with the mindset that if people were gay it was ok but they weren't Christian. And I was a Christian, so I just ignored it really. And this turned into a time of me hypersexualising sll of the boys that I had ever thought I had a crush on. I can quite confidently say that I didn't actually have a crush on many of them, I just thought that that was something that I should do. So there was a lot of ignoring this feeling.

We then reach year 10, 2020, a glorious year. In the first Lockdown, I finally caved and downloaded Tik Tok. The thing about Tik Tok is that it comes with its own world of labels, and I really would enjoy the kinds of conversations about what side of Tik Tok you are on. I loved that your For You Page automatically gave you certain labels to wear as a Tik Tok user, and I loved that those applied to real life. I quite quickly ended up on gay Tik Tok, among other things. I was also very firmly on Black Lives Matter Tik Tok, on disablrf Tik Tok, on Indigenous Tik Tok, so on and so forth. But much of my content was about the lgbtq community and this opened a ahole can of worms. I, at this time, carried a lot of shame for my attraction to women. For a bit of a backstory, I had been so severely heartbroken by this girl - not by her own intentional actions, I think that she was never going to feel about me the way that I felt about her and that was not her fault - but I was so seriously heartbroken that not only did I hold this moral shame but also this like emotional shame of my attraction to women. I felt like it was not a good thing morally and it didn't feel good emotionally because I had to still been really hurt about this girl and I have never really gotten over that. So for the first time on gay Tik Tok, I saw queerness and same-sex attraction as a positive thing not only in terms of ‘hey look these are women loving woman relationships that are working well’ but also ‘whether or not you're dating someone, queer identity is good for you and it's fun to talk about’. And as a type 4 on the enneagram, I love to feel special - not to say that I fabricated these feelings or that any queer person is queer for attention - but I think a big part of me felt validated or special because of my feelings and my queeness. It was like a new club that I could join. And so the labels that 15 year old Zoe wears largely consisted of queer. We had it dropped bisexual a little bit because at this point I was not sure if I like men at all and so we identified as queer or sapphic or bi or lesbian or gay - many of these words along with the left wing, Pro Black-lives-matter, pro-feminism, pro-lgbtq+, anti-colonialist anti-capitalist etc. etc. And I don't want to demonize any of those things - they are not at all negative things, I'm just painting a picture of the different labels that I wore.

Through out starting to come out to my friends and existing for longer periods of time not only on gay Tik Tok but now really searching all through the Internet for more LGBTQ+ identity - as I tried to confirm my traction for women, as I tried to decide about my attraction to men, about what label I should wear, and what it's like being in the LGBTQ+ community different, spaces where we interact, different identities and labels and experiences of queerness. So I really tied myself to this identity and it is I think so much because of the way the world sees labels as I said and so my first response was ‘well if I like girls I must be gay and if I'm gay I must identify that way and that has to be the most important thing about me’ because all the people I was seeing online really loved being gay. They were proud of their identity in their queeness. In the world as much as I think that we like to think we’ve got this ‘your sexuality or your gender identity doesn't matter. Gay and straight and bi and pan and whoever you are, we’re all human’, I think it often the world does like to draw those lines on both sides. Within queer communities there was - obviously ironically and satirically - this heterophobia honestly. (I'm joking!) But there was a real pride in this identity of whichever specific label you wear as well as the wider lgbtq plus label which led me to believe my sexuality was who I was. And that proved really quite awkward because I knew that my church and my family and many of my Christian friends believed that same sex marriage and romance was sinful. Because of the strong connection between my identity and my sexuality, if my sexuality was sinful, that meant that I was inherently and completely sinful and I didn't like that. It wasn't a fun feeling. After all of the years of learning about God’s gift of grace to us, kind of I lost in the crevices of my mind and whenever I thought about God I was met with feelings of shame and fear and dread and resentment sometimes even anger and I grew to be so despairing.

Eventually I tried the various progressive Christianity movements that teach that ‘God doesn't actually say the being gay is a sin, the Bible is pro queerness and don't even worry about it, God made you exactly the way that you are and he loves you the way that you are, go forth and have that lesbian relationship that you so desperately want’. But that never really sat right with me. It brought up other questions of ‘well if the current translation of the Bible says things like marriage is between a man and a woman, God made man and woman, any sex outside of marriage is sinful, or even the parts that say that ‘homosexuality is sinful, or man lying with man in certain translations, is sinful what happened to that part of the Bible?’ And of course I heard the response about how at the Bible was written by man and not by God and that it is fragile and can be manipulated and basically King James ruined the whole Bible when he wrote that translation and you don't have to listen to it. But that really didn't work for me. If that part of the Bible had been mistranslated how could I know that the rest of the Bible hadn't been mistranslated? If words like homosexuality weren't in the original text and they had been added there or mistranslated how could I understand the words like grace and love and hope and patience and kindness and peace and righteousness and holiness and justice? What if they were mistranslated? What if the whole Gospel was not how it was written in the Bible because the Bible was man-made? Pretty immediatelyI decided I couldn’t really understand a Christianity where homosexuality is not a sin because Christianity is written in the Bible and the Bible says that quite clearly. I believe that the Bible is directly the Word of God, that it is perfect, that the way that it is translated - obviously different translations vary - but that it is right from God’s mouth so imediately was like I can't believe in it Christianity where homosexuality is not a sin and so I've got to pick Christian or Gay.

And I didn’t want to choose Christian because I had this point has grown quite fond of being gay and I mean, I was truly just attracted to women, right, like I wanted a girlfriend and so I tried really hard to ignore God. I was still going to church, twice or three times a week and all that, and I could not shake the existence of God. I knew God existed. I knew that He created the world, that He was good and that they was the thing called sin that separated us from him. I knew that sin led to death. I knew that He had sent His Son to bridge the gap between himself and sinners. I knew that Son was Jesus and that He died on the cross and he rose again and I knew that if you believed in him you would spend eternity with God which was a really good thing. I could not shake those feelings, all those beliefs, and I absolutely praise God for that. I'm so beyond grateful that God did not leave me, even when I hated him and resented him and felt so much anger towards him. Praise Jesus!

All this left me thinking, well some people could go to heaven, but God hates me because of my feelings. He does not want me part of His kingdom if I'm gay. I can't ever go to heaven because I'm a sinner, and sinners don’t go to heaven. I truly don't know where all my years of learning about the grace of God had gone. This led me to a really distressed position, probably one of the lowest ever my mental health had been. I was just not coping and I ended up being kind of forced to tell my mum. I don't really want to say too much on this part of the story but by the middle-ish end of year 10 I ended up coming out to my mum and she told my dad, ‘cause I refused to do it myself, and then I got a therapist. Finally, now that my mum knew, I could ask her what I had so desperately wante to ask her - if she could please buy me some books about being gay and Christian. And so she did. And I slowly but surely started to read them, I started to read my Bible more and I started to really search for what it meant to have faith trust in God’s grace and not in your own work, not in your own actions or thoughts or words. The first book I got in particular was really hard to read it was based more on specific Theology and not on personal experience and I needed that foundation in what God really said because I had just had conversations with my mum and she had reminded me ‘God is real and he loves you and he sent his son to die for you and that is an option for you as much as it is for anyone else, your queerness does not separate you from Christ's death and resurrection’. There is a wonderful bible verse that became very important to me at this time. Romans 8, the very end of the chapter, says ‘for I'm convinced that neither death not life neither Angels not Demons need of a present or the future and or any Powers neither height nor depth nor anything else in All Creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our lord.’ So with this in mind, I decided that I could trust God and now I just needed to learn how. so I worked away through different books, through different parts of the Bible, praying really hard, searching online and asking really hard questions to some really awesome Christian women in my life, and asking God to reveal to me exactly what he thought about me and about queerness and so eventually we get to the present moment. I by no means know everything that I wish I knew, but now I can say that I wholly trust God with my next life - I trust that he has the power and the strength and the holiness to overcome even my sin which sometimes feels like the biggest there is. and I trust him with this life - that life with him is so much better than any lesbian affair I could ever experience.

I want to personally apologize to any one who the church or the world has ever made believe that they are somehow exempt from God’s love because of who they are or what they've done or how they’ve felt. That is false. There is no one that does not sin, no one that is not inherently separated from God. And there is no one who is too far from Jesus' power to be saved from that sin. God is bigger than your sin, I promise you.

I want to take this time to mourn for the lives lost and the joy and peace forfeited because of the way people who claim to know God treat queer people. I'm sorry if you have been made to feel less than because of the church. In the process of overcoming of guilt and shame that I have felt over the year, one more verse that I found really important. 1 John 1 says that ‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.’

So for me, I don't identify with my sexuality. I don't want to say that I'm straight now, that's not really true. but my sexuality is not what makes me who I am. I am a person fearfully and wonderfully made by God and I am a daughter of God in Christ. I am not ashamed of my feelings. I do think that it is worth mentioning that an attraction or a desire or an impulse is not the same as a sin. The Bible tells us that Jesus himself was tempted in every way and the Bible also tells us that Jesus is blameless and never sinned. And so I think it's worth the clarification that same-sex attraction or anything like that is not sinful itself and also that being gay is never worse than anyone else's sin, and it is never ever bigger than God.

I just want you all to know that there is nothing that you have done that makes you exempt from God’s love for you, to know that he is trustworthy, that the Bible is trustworthy, and I encourage you that your value is inherent as a person made in God’s image and that with Jesus, you can have identity in his son alone. When he sees you, he sees the goodness and perfection of Jesus if you believe in him.

[found--family]

‘Supernatural’ season 15, episode 15 screener secrets: We’re ‘Highway to Heaven’-ing this bitch

[everything is from this Hypable article] 

This week on Supernatural, Amara returns and are angels solving people crimes now? Hypable previewed Supernatural season 15, episode 15 “Gimme Shelter,” so read on to find out more.

After a sweet and fun return to ease us back into the world of Supernatural last week, things are heating up pretty dramatically – I knew there wouldn’t be much more time for messing around.

“Gimme Shelter” sees Supernatural dip its feet into what the Winchesters currently believe is their big plan – eliminating Chuck by also taking down Amara, resulting in what they believe will be a cosmic-being-free balanced world. But first, they have to find her. Sam and Dean get a pretty good lead on her location, which results in a very interesting conversation between Amara and the boys – especially with her most favoritest Dean, of course.

Meanwhile, Castiel is persuaded into taking Jack to investigate a nearby case in Missouri – which all three adults suspect is probably the work of a human criminal – for the sake of humoring Jack and keeping him both busy and supervised. On the way home, they have a very interesting conversation of their own.

Spoiler Warning: This article contains generalized spoilers for Supernatural season 15 episode 15, “Gimme Shelter.” If you do not wish to be spoiled at all, do not read this article in advance of the airdate.

The official synopsis for Supernatural season 15, episode 15 reads:

MATT COHEN DIRECTS — Castiel (Misha Collins) and Jack (Alexander Calvert) work a case involving members of a local church. Meanwhile, Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) go off in search of Amara (guest star Emily Swallow). Matt Cohen directed the episode written by Davy Perez (#1515). Original airdate 10/15/2020.

If you want to know what to expect from this week’s Supernatural, here’s 10 teasers plus 15 single word clues from our advance viewing of Supernatural season 15, episode 15 “Gimme Shelter.”

‘Supernatural’ season 15, [10] episode 15 screener secrets 

1️⃣ During the filming of this episode (27 January – 5 February) Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles both spent much of the week at home with their families in Austin, a detail which was made clear on their and their wives’ public social media accounts – possibly the result of scheduled time off as they’ve mentioned occasionally requesting? The result is that the episode is weighted much more towards Cas, Jack and the murder investigation they’re chasing than towards Sam and Dean, but on the flip side, the Sam and Dean arc is more crucial to the long game of the show, so what it lacks in minutes, it makes up for in impact. 

2️⃣ However, the episode still begins and ends in a grounded family group way, at home in the Bunker – one of those “we know we should be doing this together but there are Reasons we have to split up” situations. This detail, in my opinion, really speaks to the motivation of the creative team towards honoring the four leads as parts of a whole – in earlier days, this kind of episode would have been two entirely non-touching threads. This one is, if not a tapestry, at very least a braid – tied up together at both ends, and intertwined in the middle.

3️⃣ You might have seen pictures or ominous trailer footage of Castiel and Jack digging a hole at the crossroads. We all know what that means! However, don’t worry. They simply want to talk – and the demon they summon has some really interesting – and dare I say positive? – news about the state of Hell under Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Rowena. Let’s just say the demon is actually pretty friendly… and extremely bored.

4️⃣ The two main guest stars on Cas and Jack’s side of the episode are both actors who have been briefly featured on the show before, in a couple of pretty famous episodes – one from season 2 and one from season 5. I don’t think there’s meant to be any meta or Easter Egg element to this, just the usual Vancouver casting industry cycle (see the ‘Weren’t You In Another Episode‘ reference page on the SuperWiki) but one of them is one of those cute “I appeared on Supernatural as a child and now I’m here as an adult” situations, and the other, well… the original character’s very name has become the stuff of Supernatural legend, and if I were in charge of this episode I would have put the actor in a particular piece of footwear and made sure we got a shot of it, just for kicks.

5️⃣ Castiel steps into a prayer circle when the church group members are meant to give a testimony – presumably of their journey so far and their relationship with faith. That’s what Cas chooses to share, at least – in a non-specific, humanized way – and fans of the character will be moved to hear the ways he verbalizes his own growth.

6️⃣ Speaking of growth, some of Dean’s is spelled out for him in the most miraculous way by Amara. After Sam and Dean meet up with her and have a conversation about Chuck that’s ultimately a bit of a non-starter, Dean returns to ask her another, more personal question. Her response gave me legitimate chills. It’s a very weighty mic drop and the combination of the level of impact and the level of clarity (it’s entirely airtight, no room for interpretation) feels like the culmination of all the self-actualization work the show has been doing on Dean in the last four years. (I wish I could tell you Sam got a big special moment like this in the episode, but he doesn’t. Amara’s return was always going to be Dean’s thing.) Amara’s speech to Dean… it doesn’t feel isolated, like the idea of it was invented just for this episode. It feels more like concrete evidence of what the show has been trying to prove for ages. And the funny thing is, Amara is the anti-Chuck, right, and all season, we’ve learned about the version of the story Chuck thinks is good, and we’ve been told to root against that. Chuck’s version of Supernatural isn’t how the writers really feel. But I think Amara’s might be. Dean has obviously struggled to see what she tells him, all in one piece, but here it is – this was the point, laid out on the table, from the entity behind the curtain – both onscreen and off. Amara knew what she was doing, and so did the writers. This was always, always the point.

7️⃣ Even before this massive scene, Amara’s return is just great. Emily Swallow does such an incredible job with this character – she really is the anti-Chuck even without the whole writer comparison. Swallow imbues this character with such an incredible peace and stillness in comparison to Chuck’s histrionics – this was true in the way she spoke and behaved even in season 11, but this Amara also feels kindness and patience and tolerance. She radiates power, even when she’s also slightly goofy. There’s no fight, there’s no antagonism, but the boys in her presence are like little fish in a vast ocean – they quickly realise they have no real control in this conversation. The way that we leave her indicates she’ll be back and has more to say or do, and what she shared during her reunion with Sam and Dean makes me really curious about the role she’s due to play in the show’s endgame.

8️⃣ I’m not very religious but I really like the version of a church group or ‘faith-based community,’ as they say, featured in “Gimme Shelter.” Supernatural has a shaky history in terms of how the show portrays people in-universe who believe. Sometimes they’re treated like a joke, or stupid, or dangerous, or hypocrites, but occasionally civilian acts of faith are shown as great and powerful things, even in a world where we know that what they believe in isn’t strictly accurate. That concept became an even bigger question mark for me when we got the reveal that Judeo-Christian God is not only absent, but our actual villain. However, this was a really nice look at why faith can still be a framework for a good way of life – loving thy neighbor – for some people, no matter the truth about Chuck. The episode also features a callback to writer Davy Perez’ very first Supernatural episode “American Nightmare” in terms of the way that some people have weaponized faith and religion to the detriment and harm of others or even themselves, but this factor does not negate the positive point mentioned above.

9️⃣ Supernatural alum and newly minted director Matt Cohen really got the full old-school Supernatural episode experience when it comes to leaning into the spooky horror element. The murderous case-of-the week featured in this episode is heavy and lingering on the gore and even contains a little bit of a jump scare, so view responsibly.

🔟 So, um, you know that line, in this week’s teaser trailer? The line that a lot of people are freaking out about because it seems to pertain to something important that we know about Cas’ fate that Dean and Sam aren’t aware of? Yeah, it is 100% absolutely not about that at all. It is about something super important, but it’s not that. It’s also the last line of the episode, but trust me – it’s not a cliffhanger and it’s not a red herring and it’s not a twist. The information is gleaned within the episode and you’ll know exactly what Cas is telling Dean about after seeing it – narratively, that’s the reason it isn’t in the episode, because the show clearly assumes you’ll get the picture and can skip a rehash of information. But what you were probably expecting – maybe even hoping for – it’s not that. You’re gonna have to hang on for that one.

Finally, have 15 random yet significant words from this week’s episode without any context whatsoever: Gaia, Ronald, mother, pierogies, cats, philosophy, target, blind, permission, lockdown, Kool-aid, buffet, gift, trial, choice.

‘Supernatural’ airs Thursday at 8/7c on The CW

[numbaoneflaya]

Jilly infodump

Jilly is 22 at the start of Btd. Her early childhood was entirely sheltered as her parents didn't want her out of the house or interacting with people that often due to her beastkin nature. Her parents were devout, fundamentalist christians who were afraid she was marked by the devil.  Like, not allowed to read harry potter kind of christian. Before they had her they had many miscarriages trying to conceive, and then Jilly was born with ears and a tail. To add salt on the wound in order for her to learn to hide the ears/tail they had to research the family history and find the books that taught magic for her to do so. After her birth when she was around 5 years old they had another child, but it died shortly after it was born and her parents never really got over the grief, instead blaming their misfortune on Jilly. Her dad was a functioning alcoholic after this and her mother hated him, they hated each other but remained married as they didn't believe in divorce.  She grew up homeschooled until around fifth grade when she had learned to have full control over her ears/tail popping up, her only interactions with other kids before that point being at church every Sunday or in passing. (Before this point if her family had company over and they were afraid of her ruining things for them, they would send her to the basement to wait until they left). She spent a lot of time alone and playing with her stuffed animals, which she had a lot of and which kept her company. (she still has them all) She ended up having a lot of trouble making friends as she was unsocialized and overzealous at the possibility of friendship, often coming on strong. She was even more sensitive as a kid than she is now and would cry easily at taunting, leading to more of it. This continued until around 7th grade when other children became more physically violent in their bullying, and eventually while being jumped behind the school she snapped and fought back against her attackers, biting two of their arms hard enough to break skin and need stitches and beating another one so hard she had to go to the hospital. After this was one of the only times her parents ever physically beat her (or touched her at all) and she was expelled and enrolled in a different school immediately. At the new school she mainly kept to herself and was left alone for the most part until highschool, where she transferred again and vowed to herself to be “more normal” and to make friends. (she spent the year in 8th grade doing nothing but studying ppl and how normal ppl interact hghdfhh so she could use it in high school)

High School was where things started looking up! She learned to control her enthusiasm for friendship for the most part, and was able to spend more hours at school doing extracurricular activities and away from home. Her grades were mediocre as always though, and she still had trouble with becoming overexcited, such as when she tried out for wrestling and almost bit a girl's neck. She did team sports like volleyball and soccer that gave her a large social group, as well as joining the arts club. She also met Reymas, who sometimes goes as Goth, and the two became fast friends over being weirdos. Immediately after finishing highschool she moved out from her parents and cut off all contact, moving into a shitty apartment and getting a job as a barista. Due to her now controlled friendly and enthusiastic nature, she has no problem making friends and has a wide circle, even people from highschool. She needs to see people almost every day, preferably all day as she hates being alone. She likes to live with roommates, but the fear of her beastkin nature being found out when she's too relaxed at home prevents that. She has little to no romantic experience due to thinking when people come onto her they're making fun of her/ setting her up for a punchline like they did in middle school. Even if she does like someone, shel easily become flustered/embarrassed and looks for a fast exit. She's afraid that if she were to sleep with someone her ears/tail/more beast side would come out as it does when she masterbates, so she's resigned herself to a life without a partner. 

Despite the distance from her family and trying to come to terms with herself, Shes still ashamed and embarrassed of her beastkin nature and is terrified of people seeing her for what she is. Her parents tried to be “good parents” and for the most part ignored her, but when drunk or angry would state things like “how can you expect anyone to love you the way you are” “its your fault your brothers dead” and “the devil is inside you and you've been sent here to punish us”. So, shes still kind of dealing with that shit. Prone to letting people use her/be mean to her as she feels sorry for her existence and believes letting that happen is the least she can do as an apology, and that she deserves it. Also why she gets along well with most everyone, because she can take any kind of abuse still be kind to them/caring. 

Animalistic/ferret type behaviors she exhibits is the following; When excited and composed, she will do a full body wiggle. If more excited, she might jump in place or do jumps around the room. If more so, and not composed/restrained, shell do the weasel war dance and do a mad dash/leaps around the room. Likes to wrestle as play and roll around on the floor, but is afraid of accidentally hurting someone if she gets too playful. Bites/nibbles/ licks as a form of affection, sometimes drawing blood. Has stashes of stolen items around the house- klepto. She cant stop herself from stealing things, especially small and shiny items. Needs to chew on things especially when focussed, has ruined multiple pencils and pens. Very physically affectionate, loves hugs and (subconsciously) rubbing her scent on the people she cares about. Needs to eat a lot of meat to fulfill her diet, cant eat too many grains or she gets a stomach ache.  Can only sleep well when in a pile of bodyheat, if not people she improvises and builds a huge nest of body pillows, heated blankets, weighted blankets and stuffed animals. 

Terrible with directions, relies entirely on google maps to survive. Banned from pretty much every claires shop for shoplifting. Terrified of werewolves as a kid. Hunts bugs around the apartment for fun and then catches them to let them go outside.  Bubblebath enthusiast.