#authorial intent is... complicated

[eri-pl]

Yes, and yes, whether it's Elwing or Feanorians (Yes they were wronger. Irrelevant) even if it's, of all people, Eol! Do not belittle or hate people for having a blorbo. Or for having a moral opinion, yes, even about the Silmarils and their ownership. And you don't hijack pro-blorbo posts to spread negativity. Even if it is Eol. (Yes, I should do less of the "but the book" in Doriath discourse posts, and more idk own posts about things that are in the book)

And even if it's Elrond, don't belittle or hate people for criticizing a blorbo. (I never seen anyone criticize Elrond tbh)

It's one thing to say "this is not in the book, because" or "this logic has a fault because" and other to say "you are stupid, insufferable, sexist, communist, whatever-ist".

Yea I'm still learning that.

It does get fuzzy though because sometimes criticizing/supporting the blorbo is done by generally criticizing/supporting certain behaviors and behaviors are real. People do them. And sometimes supporting a blorbo can read as supporting behaviors that are unsupportable, even if it's actually assuming the blorbo didn't do them.

But anyway, yes, don't call real people nasty names and don't be a jerk.

And also, nobody can be expected to remember all the Silm facts! I used to believe that Thingol wanted to wed Luthien to Celegorm. this book is very complicated. Or that Mim attacked Turin first. I did get the vague "people are so dumb and hateful" call-out for both and that hurt.

Do not assume bad faith, please.

cannot believe i have to say this, but if you are being rude or insulting towards other fans in your fandom because they committed the apparently atrocious sin of *checks notes* having different opinions (yes, even negative or insulting ones!!) on fictional characters, you really need to reevaluate your behavior. your fictional blorbos cannot be hurt by people having a bad take and seeing a bad take does not mean that you have carte blanche to call other fans stupid or make fun of their interpretations. your fellow fans, unlike your blorbos, are real people and absolutely can be hurt by your behavior.

[fondcrimes]

it doesn’t rly matter to me whether or not autistic laios is canon. I’m the reader I also bring/create meaning to the story thank you barthes

[atoriv-art]

Just wanted to say that I love you, and I love your art . Please continue the series of obkk as sasukes divorce parents. That gives me life every time you post it.

hahaha thank you so much!! and it's one of my favorite naruto things so dw they'll be on my brain for a good while hehe

[heartgold]

I think a lot about the way polydactyly is described in umineko ep1 because of the emphasis on the surgery to remove the extra digit often being done in early infancy (therefore without consent), with the intent of making the person "normal" while they grow up not even knowing about it...

of course this hints at sayo having her extra toe removed to hide her relation to kinzo, but I can't help but think about how it's specifically described in a way that evokes infant genital mutilation, especially considering sayo's backstory. all of her character reads like an allegory for intersex experiences imo, which also adds to her trans narrative. a major source of her suffering lies in how her gender struggles were complicated further by the reveal that her body was operated on without her knowledge, which led to sexual dysfunction and infertility.

the narration talks about the polydactyly surgery and reiterates the topic of bodily autonomy (already a big topic in umineko's first episode with the discussion of reproductive commodification of women's bodies) by mentioning how infants can be operated on to "fix" a part of their bodies to fit the idea of what "normal bodies" are like. the parallel to the mutilation of intersex bodies is very obvious to me. in sayo's case it was done as treatment for physical injuries rather than a literal intersex condition, but the narrative centering the violation of her autonomy persists with how she has her body altered and is denied the truth, having never had any means to cope with the inherent trauma of it all because the priority of genji&co was always to cover up anything that could implicate kinzo. she gets everything on her birth records falsified and she is intentionally kept in the dark about her own life. her entire personhood is erased. again drawing parallels to intersex experiences, doctors and parents will lie about it your entire life if they can get away with it. it's not uncommon to only find out you were operated on and/or forced on hrt as an adult!

even umineko's overarching theme about the nuances of truth vs magic can be read as an intersex narrative... it's a common experience to find out you were being denied your truth and made to live a lie "for your own sake". that truth may be unrecoverable and kept from you forever and all you can do is grieve it. your body is made into a catbox. I don't want to get too personal but some parts of confessions were chilling to read because of how similar they were to my experiences as an intersex person and I had never seen these very specific things portrayed anywhere. of course I can't claim to know the authorial intent, but it hit hard even as an allegory.

intersex and trans struggles aren't 1:1 the same but they have a lot of overlap, especially in regards to bodily autonomy, medical abuse and the gender assignment of bodies upholding a strict binary. trans people are denied transition while intersex people are forced through it, so a character like sayo who portrays that intersection of being both with such care is very precious. her struggles are strongly rooted in transmisogyny, intersexism, class and family, all which had her systemically disempowered, dehumanized and stripped of autonomy and agency.

her actions are a desperate gambit to gain some control over her own life, to be in charge of the narrative even if it's through selfdestruction. the horrors in umineko converge into the theme of systemic powerlessness and denial of autonomy. to be made into a piece. all of it combined makes up the multilayered meaning of furniture.

[ckret2]

Wait okay in The Book of Bill, Bill’s putting in all these pages himself while he’s in the theraprism, right? So… how could he have gotten his hands on the lost journal pages in there? I’ve seen people point out certain inconsistencies in them (Ford being drawn with a hair streak even though it’s supposed to take place earlier, etc.) What are your thoughts?

My theory is that either somehow he got his hands on the pages before his incarceration and stowed them in TBOB; or TBOB itself, being a magical book that can regenerate & "corrupt" other books & teleport around when you aren't looking, got hold of the journal and ripped the pages out itself.

I've seen all the "but Ford's drawn wrong" "but Ford never does Bill's handwriting like that" "but why weren't these pages present in the J3 we read after it was magically fully repaired" "but Ford was supposed to meet Bill in J2" chatter suggesting that maybe the pages aren't legit, and honestly? I think the explanation for all of these issues is "Alex last worked on J3 like eight years before TBOB and he & the artists were more concerned with beefing up Ford's relationships with Bill and Fiddleford than they were with little details like that." This is a situation where the doylist explanation is much simpler and a lot more likely than a watsonian complicated forgery scheme.

So that's my serious "what I think happened in canon" explanation for all that.

Separately, my own headcanon:

Personally I've theorized for ages that the journals weren't written chronologically (because if Ford fully filled J1 and J2 before starting J3, why did he just so happen to have blank two-page spreads in J1 & J2 on which he could write the portal blueprints, and why did Stan find SOME portal instructions in J1?), so my own headcanon is that the J3 we've read is indeed complete with all pages, and these pages are actually taken out of Journal 2. There might even be a few pages out of J1. Bill advertised them as "missing Journal 3 pages" because he knew The Reader Of TBOB is a GF fan who has more of an emotional connection to J3 than 1 and 2. The idea that he was filling the journals non-chronologically explains why these pages also cover events that happened during J3; which journal Ford was writing in on any day randomly bounced between journals.

This isn't an "I think this might have been the authorial intent" headcanon, this is an "I think the author accidentally introduced some inconsistencies so this is how I'm privately justifying them" headcanon.

[the-south-north]

dumbledore's character is not intended to be villanous. and my interpretation of him is mostly benevolent. i generally don't like using his mistakes (and unintentional plot holes) to paint an evil mastermind persona. the harry potter universe is /magic/ and /not the real world/, which means that the limits of what's actually possible are more determined less by the worldbuilding and more by what's necessary for the plot development to happen. harry was left with an abusive muggle family not necessarily because the blood magic explanation fits seamlessly into magical mechanics or because dumbledore intended to manipulate harry, but because the author wanted the main character to come from an abusive household and wanted to introduce harry and the audience to magic at the same time. same goes for dumbledore's not saving sirius from azkaban. harry plot-wise isn't supposed to have good familial support before the weasleys. (although for this one, i think its consistent with the worldbuilding. cause sirius has no evidence to clear his name, he doesn't think he deserves freedom anyway, dumbledore is suspicious but doesn't think sirius is innocent, and dumbledore might not have sufficient influence+evidence to free sirius). in essence, i think that in a lot of cases, using <what dumbledore *didn't* do> to judge his character is much less effective than considering <what he actually did>. because what he <didn't do> is kinda limitless and less meaningful because wizard and plot. however fandom doesn't work like that. using textual evidence, plot holes, etc. that don't align with authorial intent is a lot of the fun. villainous/extra dubious ethics dumbledore can go hard (although i'm a little picky about it). it just happens that i personally like dumbledore (he's a fun guy with interesting flaws) so i find it a disservice to my interpretation of his character (well-intentioned but morally complicated) to make him a pure villain.

[novlr]

How do you make readers see that the characters you are writing about have a platonic relationship not a romantic one without writing he's a father figure to her or someone asking the question ‘why you two are not together?’ To which they reply something which implies they have a platonic relationship. Like how to show without saying or writing particular words?

This is an excellent question with many layers. I’ve addressed elsewhere how to write long-established loving relationships where I explored romantic vs companionate love. Let’s dig deeper into emotional intimacy, which I see as the basis for both platonic and romantic relationships. But first, let’s take a detour into authorial intent.

Authorial intent

I think every writer has experienced that moment when a reader latches onto something in the work – a relationship, a plot point, a world building thread – and runs off in a direction the author did not intend. Witness the wild and prolific world of fanfic.

I take it as a compliment that people connect with my work and expand on it in their own imaginations. I admit to sometimes being puzzled by where they go with it. Recognizing this happens can save you a lot of headaches.

That obviously platonic relationship you wrote? There will be readers who will, in their own headcanon, make it romantic. Not what you wanted, and it can be frustrating, especially if you are trying to explore platonic relationships. My advice is to shake it off and don’t worry about it. You can’t control how others relate to your work or what speaks to them. 

With that out of the way, let’s talk about ways to clearly signal which type of relationship it is and how to avoid signaling that you really intend for it to be romantic at some point in the future.

Platonic vs romantic relationships

Start by thinking of the various platonic relationships in your life and that you see around you. Observe people in coffee shops, parks, restaurants. Can you tell by watching which people are in romantic relationships and which are good friends? What are the differences you see between friendships and romantic relationships?

Look at personal space, eye contact, nicknames, the patterns of speech used, and how they touch or don’t touch one another. This also needs to be looked at through the lens of what is appropriate for the given culture. Now think about best friends. This is a very common platonic relationship. What does that look like?

It’s easy to see how the two types of relationships can be confused. Both are often lifelong and carry a lot of emotional intimacy. What secrets does your best friend know about you? Who do you go to when you need to solve a problem? To further complicate it, many people consider their romantic partner to be their best friend. Think of it as a Venn diagram. There is a lot of overlap between platonic and romantic relationships. 

Show vs tell 

So how does an author signal its platonic and not romantic? You can, of course, just tell the reader that X is Y’s best friend and there is no romantic attraction. Does the reader believe you? Let’s look at a few ways you can show that is the case. 

Are either of them in a romantic relationship? Have them discuss their lovers past and present. 

A corollary to the above – have one act as the other’s wingman in a social situation.

How are you describing physical contact between the two? How does a platonic hug differ from a romantic one? Do they link arms when walking? How is that different from how they would do so with a lover? 

Give them more of a sibling vibe, and think about how siblings treat each other. 

How do your characters feel about romance in general? Is one or the other asexual? 

Emotional intimacy

Whatever you do, don’t shy away from writing about emotional intimacy. Have your characters share their problems, feelings, and secrets. How do they help one another or get in one another’s way? How do they joke with each other? Then find ways of showing how they do that differently in a romantic relationship. You can also do that with secondary characters in your work who are in a romantic relationship. That contrast will help make your point that it’s platonic. 

Finally, it is absolutely ok if you don’t want to write about romantic relationships at all or you are writing an asexual character who would never have a romantic relationship. You can still do the compare-and-contrast to background characters or social expectations. A quick line here and there will also cover it. Asexual characters can express how they just don’t feel attraction or are disgusted by romance or certain types of physical contact. You can have someone ask, “Is this your boyfriend/girlfriend?” and have your character respond. It can be an opportunity to show how they imagine that scenario.

[seaemberthesecond]

PLEASE tell me all about your textual support for Aurora/Declan, i am LISTENING 👀🙏🏻

This is heinously late and I'm so sorry for that 😭 but this is one of my FAVOURITE things to think about.

Aurora is such an interesting character to me, particularly in relation to Declan. For all that Ronan spends all of TRC furious that Declan has denied Aurora personhood ("She's nothing without Dad") and trying to keep her awake, it's actually through Declan's eyes that she really comes alive. Ronan's version of his mother is more one-dimensional than Declan's, ironically enough, even though he's the one who supposedly 'loves her more.' It's Declan who's spent his life grappling with the philosophical implications of her dreamt-ness and her replacement of his actual mother (which, in a stunning parenting move by Niall, only he seems to remember) and as a result, his feelings toward her are considerably more complicated than his brothers' and he's the only one who really seems to think deeply about her.

The mystery Aurora is shrouded in for Declan turns her into almost this... sinister figure in his mind. It's like - Niall is this known entity for Declan right? He doesn't think of him in nearly the same lionizing light Ronan does, because he actually knew Niall. He doesn't need to create a mythology around him the way Ronan has. His "hatred" for Niall is not only comparitively straightforward, it's self-aware. He knows exactly what his grievances with his father are and he knows that he doesn't even really hate him.

But with Aurora, he skirts around the thought of her. He can't even look his complicated feelings for her head-on. She's inscrutable to him, and that's kind of terrifying in a psych-thriller kind of way.

There's this unease that he associates with her in the text, that's just not there when he thinks about Niall. He's constantly second-guessing himself when it comes to Aurora re: how much did she know, how real she was etc. In Greywaren, there's this part where he's thinking about when he was sick as a child. And it's fascinating to me because there's this implication there that he didn't feel safe in the house with Aurora until Niall came back. He only relaxes and goes to sleep when Niall comes home. And it adds to this general malaise that Declan associates with Aurora.

I've talked before about how the secrets Declan is forced to keep are an allegory of sexual abuse, and in that light it's kind of damning when you consider that in the Lynch household, the arbiter of secrets is Aurora, not Niall. Throughout the Declan Christmas short, it's Aurora who's reinforcing the importance of secrets, who makes him help her hide them. She's the one who tells Declan that he has to keep Matthew's origin a secret. And in MI, it's Aurora who first tells Ronan that he needs to hide his dreaming and never show his dreams to anyone. So if we're looking at the text through the lens of allegory-for-csa, Aurora's position in the household becomes much more sinister because a lot of the harm that's been done to the kids and particularly Declan is attributable directly to her.

And then there's the fact that all the Ashleys' looked like her - there's something Freudian going on there for sure.

tl;dr while the textual evidence is slim lol it is there if you wanna see it and I am looking with a magnifying glass. Was any of this done with authorial intent? Probably not, but who cares?

And this is where stuff diverts from the text itself and veers more into my spin on things, but everything about Aurora/Declan becomes insanely compelling to me when you think about it in relation to Mor. Mor is the hole inside Aurora. Imagine you're a young woman who was molested her whole life by a family member and now you're out-of-touch with your own emotions and you have this kid and you think you love him with this man and you think you love him too. But you know you're fucking them up, so you and your husband dream a version of you that's perfect. She's the perfect wife and the perfect mother and you've sanded down all the edges and sharp, spiky parts that make you you because you think that's the version of yourself your family deserves and then you leave. But you can't dream anything without putting your pain inside it. So you have this hollow half-woman walking around with a pain inside her she doesn't know how she got and a life she doesn't remember and the only person who seems to have any answers is this kid that she think is her own but is he really? And in her attempt to feel the shape of the hole in her she re-enacts your trauma on your kid.

I am EATING GLASS. The cycles are CYCLING. NO ONE talk to me.

[ilions-end]

like man, i genuinely WISH i believed the iliad and odyssey was composed by this one singular amazing bard and i could have one of those homer busts on my shelf and look at it for inspiration like "homer is my GUY, shoutout to a real one" and that i was convinced that with enough work we could finally recreate the poems "like homer wrote them"

normies will ask me an innocent question about the author of a poem that means a lot to me and i don't enjoy complicating their lives with going into the homeric question and oral traditions and the mystery of when and how these were written down and how i see no reason to believe that there WASN'T at some point a really amazing bard named homer but the ancients loved attributing a LOT of works to that guy and personally i actually don't think the iliad and the odyssey as we know them were shaped by the same people at their crucial developmental stages but nonetheless there are some brilliant linguistic and narrative touches that speak to very strong and precise authorial intents

so instead i'm gonna start nodding my head and going "yep, homer's awesome! you should read the iliad"

[comikadraws]

Was the curse of hatred actually a real thing? or did danzo just demonize the uchiha;s anger? idk, being murderously angry or just angry in general is a reasonable and human response to oppression and genocide.

The "Curse of Hatred" Analysis

An interesting question. The Curse of Hatred looks dumb at first glance but there are also many misconceptions surrounding it.

Since it is such a hot mess to begin with, I will try to focus mostly on the in-universe canon and lore rather than making it even more complicated by bringing in too much real-world logic and criticizing Kishimoto.

There's a bunch of rambling in the tags though.

Kishimoto's Intentions

Whenever we talk about the "Curse of Hatred" the fandom will usually apply terms such as "racism", "bigotry" and "pseudoscience" - particularly in reference to Tobirama.

Again, I don't want to bring too much irl logic into this but I feel like we need to make a clear distinction between intention and interpretation over here. "[insert character] was a racist" and "the Uchiha were justified" is a valid interpretation of the story. But at the same time, I doubt that this was ever intended by Kishimoto.

I have talked about this at length in another post of mine, in which I analyzed Kishimoto's most likely intent and how exactly this information is relevant to us with a look at authorial intent in fiction. But the TL;DR version is that Japan is not exactly very sensitized to themes of racism and the "Curse of Hatred" is never framed as racist propaganda but exposition only. The lore also lines up with Kishimoto's personal views on how grudges are responsible for war (instead of corruption or racism) and the Uchiha's curse might be a metaphor for that.

In other words, the Curse of Hatred is real in canon. Even if it's a massive red flag and deserves to be criticized.

What Is The "Curse of Hatred" Even?

I have to admit, it's been a while since the last time I watched Naruto from start to finish, so I had to use the sources listed by the wiki rather than relying on my own findings and I might be biased. Because of that, I'd prefer everybody to regard my findings as headcanon or interpretation (especially further toward the end) rather than undisputed fact.

As far as I remember, the exact wording "Curse of Hatred" is only ever used by Obito. While not using the same wording, the curse is also referenced by Itachi, Hagoromo, and Tobirama who each have their own understanding of it. Unfortunately, we have no idea where exactly this wording or concept originated and we have no idea what exactly causes the Curse of Hatred that Obito refers to.

Hiruzen, Koharu, Homura, and even Danzo, while potentially influenced by Tobirama's teachings, do not reference the Curse of Hatred at all, at least not in relation to the Uchiha Clan itself.

Now here's the first one of my findings: The Curse of Hatred is supposed to be some sort of involuntary biological or cultural inclination causing Uchihas to become consumed by hatred but it is also something voluntary - a Nindo. While the former could be considered a "curse" in the traditional sense, the latter is definitely not.

For the Nindo, it is supposed to be some sort of antithesis to the Will of Fire. Because of that, it is not limited to the Uchiha but, according to Tobirama and Obito, closely associated. As explained later on in this post, most Uchihas do not follow this Nindo.

Core aspects of the Curse of Hatred as a Nindo:

Valuing a precious few above the many

Directing your hatred at those who took away your precious few

Growing stronger from those feelings of hatred (for the Uchiha, reflected in the form of the Sharingan)

A Biological Inclination?

Now back to Tobirama's theory, due to the narrative framing, we will assume his words to be truthful for the sake of this analysis. However, I will provide links to other people's posts delving into the fantasy racism discussion.

Tobirama is racist and his theories cannot be trusted.

Tobirama is not racist and there is validity to his theories.

I myself do not completely agree with either of these, but they might be interesting reads for you. If you do not agree with either of them, please keep it to yourself and do not bother the original creators.

Tobirama's theory goes as follows:

The Uchiha feel love and hate more strongly than other individuals

The strength of the Sharingan and the Uchihas' hatred are correlated

In a fit of hatred, odds are an Uchiha will commit evil

It is nowhere mentioned that the Uchiha are more likely to feel hate - only that their hatred is worse than the average person's and puts them at risk of being swayed by hateful ideologies.

A Cultural Inclination?

Aside from Tobirama's theory, multiple characters comment on the historical origin behind the Curse of Hatred.

We are talking, of course, about Indra. Obito explains that Indra's values and his hatred (particularly what later became the Nindo of the Curse of Hatred) were passed down to his descendants - the Uchiha clan. Tobirama's exposition implies the same thing.

Tobirama states that there "used to be a thought that [...] the basis of the Uchiha clan's strength was the power of their jutsu". It is very similar to Hagorormo's description of his son.

If this is correct, that would mean that the importance placed on powerful jutsu by the Uchiha Clan does inadvertently promote hatred due to the close correlation between hatred and the Sharingan.

But then again, in the story, it is shown that many Uchiha were not particularly fond of perpetuating hate and it is also implied that to avoid hatred, they sealed their emotions away. My interpretation is that they recognized the pain that hate could cause and then took steps to avoid it.

The Reincarnation Cycle

Sticking with Indra, another explanation that is frequently brought up is Indra's and Ashura's reincarnation cycle, which has also been described as curse-like or haunting and neverending. A fate seemingly set in stone.

There is not much more to say, other than that this theory suggests that Indra's reincarnates are just naturally inclined towards lusting for power.

The True Origin

Now, here's another thing that's constantly being overlooked. Aside from Obito's exposition in chapter 462 on the Curse of Hatred Nindo, Tobirama's exposition in chapter 619 on the Uchiha's tendency to follow said Nindo, and even Hagoromo's exposition on the reincarnation cycle in chapter 670, we get a vital piece of exposition in chapter 681.

Ladies, gentlemen, and anything in between. May I introduce to you...

...the real Curse of Hatred.

Or at the very least what I believe is the real reason why the "Curse of Hatred" exists in the world of Naruto.

From the very beginning, Zetsu approached Indra to take advantage of his hatred and turn it into a tool for his own purposes. He then did that again and again. He focused on the Uchiha in particular - Either because of the previously mentioned reasons (i.e. the Uchiha / incarnates have a tendency to become obsessed with hatred and power) or because the Uchiha were otherwise easy to take advantage of / manipulate (through Hagoromo's stone tablet that was left in the Uchihas' possession, an ill reputation thanks to Indra's / their ancestors' actions, etc).

In order to achieve his goal (awakening a Rinnegan), he had to somehow combine both Indra's and Ashura's power. It is implied that for this purpose, he instigated, perpetuated, and escalated wars and conflicts between Senju and Uchiha by pitting their reincarnates against each other. But unlike the wars he caused, Zetsu went unnoticed by the history books. Basically, he kept haunting the clans like a curse.

And without a doubt, had Zetsu never been there, 99% of the Uchihas' problems would not exist - regardless of what ideals, genes, or history the Uchiha hold. Indra's declaration of war, centuries of conflict, Madara's defection, Obito losing Rin, the Kyubi attack, the Uchiha massacre, Sasuke's defection, the 4th Great Shinobi War. All of these were directly caused by Zetsu or set off by a resulting chain reaction.

You could even think this further. Assuming the Uchiha clan really came across as "cursed", perhaps Tobirama's, Obito's, Hagoromo's and everybody else's explanations were just desperate attempts to make sense of anything. They didn't know that Zetsu was pulling the strings, so perhaps they tried to explain the Uchiha Clan's history in some other way. One that made sense without that missing variable.

What is actually going on here is, of course, uncertain. There are basically no definitive explanations on the matter and right now it looks like all of the above could be true and at the same time none.

[writing-for-life]

Hi my dear, I hope you're doing well.

I've been thinking about TLOS (SPOILERS)

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and about Morpheus' "relationship" with Iris. I was shocked for a moment, but then I was like "ok".

What was it like writing this? Where did you get this idea from? It's a bit risky, but it's also amazing haha. Was it always Iris or did you think of other gods/creatures for this?

Haha, of course it’s risky, that’s how I roll 🤣

So in case people haven’t read The Light of Stars and don’t want any spoilers, this is the exit sign…

But first of all, I’ll give you Pierre Narcisse Guérin:

I mean, how could you not? 🤣

So that painting was somewhat of an inspiration. Morpheus and Iris have a short history, but they were never an item (who knows with Greek gods though, right? 😉).

Where to start? The easiest way in is probably authorial intent. I needed some hook to make Morpheus believe that Thalia was special in some way. Well, to him she is anyway, but as in, “Why can she transcend certain rules?” Of course everyone who read it until the end knows that nothing is quite as it seems, but that revelation comes fairly late, and up until then, we do believe this is a possibility. And that’s a way in, because if he has a past with Iris, it’ll of course make him think.

Then, I obviously very heavily played on Psyche in the Underworld before you-know-what happens. There are many parallels, many Easter Eggs peppered all over the story that people might only recognise in hindsight, or only if they know their Greek mythology fairly well and recognise the references to Aphrodite’s tests, but Thalia’s path is not unlike that of Psyche (and the butterfly references are also because of that of course). I can’t possibly pick out every reference now because I’d recount the whole novel, but there are many.

Now, what does Psyche have to do with Iris?

Eros fell in love with Psyche, that was obviously the whole reason for her eventually falling asleep (the Stygian sleep was brought on by opening Persephone’s box, and I just took the liberty to spin enough yarn to say that Hypnos/Morpheus/Dream has to be involved in that. Because—sleep 🤣). And generally, Eros is assumed to be the son of Aphrodite. BUT there are a few retellings that make him the son of Iris and Zephyros. And how utterly terrible would it be if

a) Iris had a child that she fears might not be Zephyros’ but Morpheus’? And she she then gave the boy away to Aphrodite to bring him up as her own so Zephyros wouldn’t find out?

b) That child was Eros, who later fell in love with Psyche, and Morpheus played a part in them nearly not getting together (all’s well that ends well of course) without knowing he nearly ruined the love life of his potential son (which is totally something that would happen, he’s just not very good with his kids 🙈).

c) Millenia later, Dream’s own mother uses this to play a slightly twisted game.

d) That c) was exacerbated by the fact that Iris had a twin called Arke who sided with the titans during the titanomachy and hence lost her wings. And I just turned her into Dusk, Night’s handmaiden. Bold move, don’t care, my fic, because it made sense for the premise 🤣

When I wrote TLoS, I probably already had plot bunnies for a The Pillars of Creation (the sequel) without intending to ever write it (that has obviously changed). Suffice it to say, and as people will probably expect from me 🙈, nothing is quite as it seems, and there will be many twists and turns, but it’s a good side plot for the bigger issues at hand.

That probably all sounds super complicated and like blasphemy for Greek mythology lovers, but the Greeks retconned their own gods and their stories so many times that I felt no shame to make it work for me. I just love playing around with Greek mythology, and it made a lot of sense if we assumed that some Greek gods were really aspects of the Endless. And that people only believed they were gods like [Hypnos/Thanatos/Teleute, Nyx etc] while others gods were truly separate beings.

And even without that background, the story still worked. I hope 🙈🤣

Because quite frankly: There’s also something that hearkens back to Eros and Psyche in Morpheus and Thalia themselves, and how their story ends (for now). In more than one way. IYKNYK 🖤

@morpheusbaby3 ask answered

[essektheylyss]

The debate of fate versus free will is a fraught philosophical question in general, but often in fiction it is discarded in analysis altogether to simplify the discussion of authorial intent. The game system in a TTRPG like Dungeons & Dragons, however, introduces an element of randomness via dice rolls that brings this debate back to the forefront, complicating analysis of destiny and choice in a genre of which these themes are a hallmark, creating tensions between the guiding hand of intent and the entropic aspect of mechanical gameplay. As such, introducing the divine entity known as the Luxon and the arcane field of dunamancy, which focuses upon the manipulation of entropy and fate, allows Exandria as a setting to attempt to ease tensions between and more actively examine these elements by acting as a narrative agent of the game master themself. In this essay I will

[denimbex1986]

'Is Tom Ripley gay? For nearly 70 years, the answer has bedeviled readers of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley, the story of a diffident but ambitious young man who slides into and then brutally ends the life of a wealthy American expatriate, as well as the four sequels she produced fitfully over the following 36 years. It has challenged the directors — French, British, German, Italian, Canadian, American — who have tried to bring Ripley to the screen, including in the latest adaptation by Steven Zaillian, now on Netflix. And it appears even to have flummoxed Ripley’s creator, a lesbian with a complicated relationship to queer sexuality. In a 1988 interview, shortly before she undertook writing the final installment of the series, Ripley Under Water, Highsmith seemed determined to dismiss the possibility. “I don’t think Ripley is gay,” she said — “adamantly,” in the characterization of her interviewer. “He appreciates good looks in other men, that’s true. But he’s married in later books. I’m not saying he’s very strong in the sex department. But he makes it in bed with his wife.”

The question isn’t a minor one. Ripley’s killing of Dickie Greenleaf — the most complicated, and because it’s so murkily motivated, the most deeply rattling of the many murders the character eventually commits — has always felt intertwined with his sexuality. Does Tom kill Dickie because he wants to be Dickie, because he wants what Dickie has, because he loves Dickie, because he knows what Dickie thinks of him, or because he can’t bear the fact that Dickie doesn’t love him? Ordinarily, I’m not a big fan of completely ignoring authorial intent, and I’m inclined to let novelists have the last word on factual information about their own creations. But Highsmith, a cantankerous alcoholic misanthrope who was long past her best days when she made that statement, may have forgotten, or wanted to disown, her own initial portrait of Tom Ripley, which is — especially considering the time in which it was written — perfumed with unmistakable implication.

Consider the case that Highsmith puts forward in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Tom, a single man, lives a hand-to-mouth existence in New York with a male roommate who is, ahem, a window dresser. Before that, he lived with an older man with some money and a controlling streak, a sugar daddy he contemptuously describes as “an old maid”; Tom still has the key to his apartment. Most of his social circle — the names he tosses around when introducing himself to Dickie — are gay men. The aunt who raised him, he bitterly recalls, once said of him, “Sissy! He’s a sissy from the ground up. Just like his father!” Tom, who compulsively rehearses his public interactions and just as compulsively relives his public humiliations, recalls a particularly stinging moment when he was shamed by a friend for a practiced line he liked to use repeatedly at parties: “I can’t make up my mind whether I like men or women, so I’m thinking of giving them both up.” It has “always been good for a laugh, the way he delivered it,” he thinks, while admitting to himself that “there was a lot of truth in it.” Fortunately, Tom has another go-to party trick. Still nurturing vague fantasies of becoming an actor, he knows how to delight a small room with a set of monologues he’s contrived. All of his signature characters are, by the way, women.

This was an extremely specific set of ornamentations for a male character in 1955, a time when homosexuality was beginning to show up with some frequency in novels but almost always as a central problem, menace, or tragedy rather than an incidental characteristic. And it culminates in a gruesome scene that Zaillian’s Ripley replicates to the last detail in the second of its eight episodes: The moment when Dickie, the louche playboy whose luxe permanent-vacation life in the Italian coastal town of Atrani with his girlfriend, Marge, has been infiltrated by Tom, discovers Tom alone in his bedroom, imitating him while dressed in his clothes. It is, in both Highsmith’s and Zaillian’s tellings, as mortifying for Tom as being caught in drag, because essentially it is drag but drag without exaggeration or wit, drag that is simply suffused with a desire either to become or to possess the object of one’s envy and adoration. It repulses Dickie, who takes it as a sexual threat and warns Tom, “I’m not queer,” then adds, lashingly, “Marge thinks you are.” In the novel, Tom reacts by going pale. He hotly denies it but not before feeling faint. “Nobody had ever said it outright to him,” Highsmith writes, “not in this way.” Not a single gay reader in the mid-1950s would have failed to recognize this as the dread of being found out, quickly disguised as the indignity of being misunderstood.

And it seemed to frighten Highsmith herself. In the second novel, Ripley Under Ground, published 15 years later, she backed away from her conception of Tom, leaping several years forward and turning him into a soigné country gentleman living a placid, idyllic life in France with an oblivious wife. None of the sequels approach the cold, challenging terror of the first novel — a challenge that has been met in different ways, each appropriate to their era, by the three filmmakers who have taken on The Talented Mr. Ripley. Zaillian’s ice-cold, diamond-hard Ripley just happens to be the first to deliver a full and uncompromising depiction of one of the most unnerving characters in American crime fiction.

The first Ripley adaptation, René Clément’s French-language drama Purple Noon, is much beloved for its sun-saturated atmosphere of endless indolence and for the tone of alienated ennui that anticipated much of the decade to come; the movie was also a showcase for its Ripley, the preposterously sexy, maddeningly aloof Alain Delon. And therein lies the problem: A Ripley who is preposterously sexy is not a Ripley who has ever had to deal with soul-deep humiliation, and a Ripley who is maddeningly aloof is not going to be able to worm his way into anyone’s life. Purple Noon is not especially willing (or able — it was released in 1960) to explore Ripley’s possible homosexuality. Though the movie itself suggests that no man or woman could fail to find him alluring, what we get with Delon is, in a way, a less complex character type, a gorgeous and magnetic smooth criminal who, as if even France had to succumb to the hoariest dictates of the Hollywood Production Code, gets the punishment due to him by the closing credits. It’s delectable daylit noir, but nothing unsettling lingers.

Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, released in 1999, is far better; it couldn’t be more different from the current Ripley, but it’s a legitimate reading that proves that Highsmith’s novel is complex and elastic enough to accommodate wildly varying interpretations. A committed Matt Damon makes a startlingly fine Tom Ripley, ingratiating and appealing but always just slightly inept or needy or wrong; Jude Law — peak Jude Law — is such an effortless golden boy that he manages the necessary task of making Damon’s Tom seem a bit dim and dull; and acting-era Gwyneth Paltrow is a spirited and touchingly vulnerable Marge.

Minghella grapples with Tom’s sexual orientation in an intelligently progressive-circa-1999 way; he assumes that Highsmith would have made Tom overtly gay if the culture of 1955 had allowed it, and he runs all the way with the idea. He gives us a Tom Ripley who is clearly, if not in love with Dickie, wildly destabilized by his attraction to him. And in a giant departure from the novel, he elevates a character Highsmith had barely developed, Peter Smith-Kingsley (played by Jack Davenport) into a major one, a man with whom we’re given to understand that Ripley, with two murders behind him and now embarking on a comfortable and well-funded European life, has fallen in love. It doesn’t end well for either of them. A heartsick Tom eventually kills Peter, too, rather than risk discovery — it’s his third murder, one more than in the novel — and we’re meant to take this as the tragedy of his life: That, having come into the one identity that could have made him truly happy (gay man), he will always have to subsume it to the identity he chose in order to get there (murderer). This is nowhere that Highsmith ever would have gone — and that’s fine, since all of these movies are not transcriptions but interpretations. It’s as if Minghella, wandering around inside the palace of the novel, decided to open doors Highsmith had left closed to see what might be behind them. The result is the most touching and sympathetic of Ripleys — and, as a result, far from the most frightening.

Zaillian is not especially interested in courting our sympathy. Working with the magnificent cinematographer Robert Elswit, who makes every black-and-white shot a stunning, tense, precise duel between light and shadow, he turns coastal Italy not into an azure utopia but into a daunting vertical maze, alternately paradise, purgatory, and inferno, in which Tom Ripley is forever struggling; no matter where he turns, he always seems to be at the bottom of yet another flight of stairs.

It’s part of the genius of this Ripley — and a measure of how deeply Zaillian has absorbed the book — that the biggest departures he makes from Highsmith somehow manage to bring his work closer to her scariest implications. There are a number of minor changes, but I want to talk about the big ones, the most striking of which is the aging of both Tom and Dickie. In the novel, they’re both clearly in their 20s — Tom is a young striver patching together an existence as a minor scam artist who steals mail and impersonates a collection agent, bilking guileless suckers out of just enough odd sums for him to get by, and Dickie is a rich man’s son whose father worries that he has extended his post-college jaunt to Europe well past its sowing-wild-oats expiration date. Those plot points all remain in place in the miniseries, but Andrew Scott, who plays Ripley, is 47, and Johnny Flynn, who plays Dickie, is 41; onscreen, they register, respectively, as about 40 and 35.

This changes everything we think we know about the characters from the first moments of episode one. As we watch Ripley in New York, dourly plying his miserable, penny-ante con from a tiny, barren shoe-box apartment that barely has room for a bed as wide as a prison cot (this is not a place to which Ripley has ever brought guests), we learn a lot: This Ripley is not a struggler but a loser. He’s been at this a very long time, and this is as far as he’s gotten. We can see, in an early scene set in a bank, that he’s wearily familiar with almost getting caught. If he ever had dreams, he probably buried them years earlier. And Dickie, as a golden boy, is pretty tarnished himself — he isn’t a wild young man but an already-past-his-prime disappointment, a dilettante living off of Daddy’s money while dabbling in painting (he’s not good at it) and stringing along a girlfriend who’s stuck on him but probably, in her heart, knows he isn’t likely to amount to much.

Making Tom older also allows Zaillian to mount a persuasive argument about his sexuality that hews closely to Highsmith’s vision (if not to her subsequent denial). If the Ripley of 1999 was gay, the Ripley of 2024 is something else: queer, in both the newest and the oldest senses of the word. Scott’s impeccable performance finds a thousand shades of moon-faced blankness in Ripley’s sociopathy, and Elswit’s endlessly inventive lighting of his minimal expressions, his small, ambivalent mouth and high, smooth forehead, often makes him look slightly uncanny, like a Daniel Clowes or Charles Burns drawing. Scott’s Ripley is a man who has to practice every vocal intonation, every smile or quizzical look, every interaction. If he ever had any sexual desire, he seems to have doused it long ago. “Is he queer? I don’t know,” Marge writes in a letter to Dickie (actually to Tom, now impersonating his murder victim). “I don’t think he’s normal enough to have any kind of sex life.” This, too, is from the novel, almost word for word, and Zaillian uses it as a north star. The Ripley he and Scott give us is indeed queer — he’s off, amiss, not quite right, and Marge knows it. (In the novel, she adds, “All right, he may not be queer [meaning gay]. He’s just a nothing, which is worse.”) Ripley’s possible asexuality — or more accurately, his revulsion at any kind of expressed sexuality — makes his killing of Dickie even more horrific because it robs us of lust as a possible explanation. This is the first adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley I’ve seen in which even Ripley may not know why he murders Dickie.

When I heard that Zaillian (who both wrote and directed all of the episodes) was working on a Ripley adaptation, I wondered if he might replace sexual identity, the great unequalizer of 1999, with economic inequity, a more of-the-moment choice. Minghella’s version played with the idea; every person and object and room and vista Damon’s Ripley encountered was so lush and beautiful and gleaming that it became, in some scenes, the story of a man driven mad by having his nose pressed up against the glass that separated him from a world of privilege (and from the people in that world who were openly contemptuous of his gaucheries). Zaillian doesn’t do that — a lucky thing, since the heavily Ripley-influenced film Saltburn played with those very tropes recently and effectively. Whether intentional or not, one side effect of his decision to shoot Ripley in black and white is that it slightly tamps down any temptation to turn Italy into an occasion for wealth porn and in turn to make Tom an eat-the-rich surrogate. This Italy looks gorgeous in its own way, but it’s also a world in which even the most beautiful treasures appear threatened by encroaching dampness or decay or rot. Zaillian gives us a Ripley who wants Dickie’s life of money and nice things and art (though what he’s thinking when he stares at all those Caravaggios is anybody’s guess). But he resists the temptation to make Dickie and Marge disdainful about Tom’s poverty, or mean to the servants, or anything that might make his killing more palatable. This Tom is not a class warrior any more than he’s a victim of the closet or anything else that would make him more explicable in contemporary terms. He’s his own thing — a universe of one.

Anyway, sexuality gives any Ripley adapter more to toy with than money does, and the way Zaillian uses it also plays effectively into another of his intuitive leaps — his decision to present Dickie’s friend and Tom’s instant nemesis Freddie Miles not as an obnoxious loudmouth pest (in Minghella’s movie, he was played superbly by a loutish Philip Seymour Hoffman) but as a frosty, sexually ambiguous, gender-fluid-before-it-was-a-term threat to Tom’s stability, excellently portrayed by Eliot Sumner (Sting’s kid), a nonbinary actor who brings perceptive to-the-manor-born disdain to Freddie’s interactions with Tom. They loathe each other on sight: Freddie instantly clocks Tom as a pathetic poser and possible closet case, and Tom, seeing in Freddie a man who seems to wear androgyny with entitlement and no self-consciousness, registers him as a danger, someone who can see too much, too clearly. This leads, of course, to murder and to a grisly flourish in the scene in which Tom, attempting to get rid of Freddie’s body, walks his upright corpse, his bloodied head hidden under a hat, along a street at night, pretending he’s holding up a drunken friend. When someone approaches, Tom, needing to make his possible alibi work, turns away, slamming his own body into Freddie’s up against a wall and kissing him passionately on the lips. That’s not in Highsmith’s novel, but I imagine it would have gotten at least a dry smile out of her; in Ripley’s eight hours, this necrophiliac interlude is Tom’s sole sexual interaction.

No adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley would work without a couple of macabre jokes like that, and Zaillian serves up some zesty ones, including an appearance by John Malkovich, the reigning king/queen of sexual ambiguity (and himself a past Ripley, in 2002’s Ripley’s Game), nodding to Tom’s future by playing a character who doesn’t show up until book two. He also gives us a witty final twist that suggests that Ripley may not even make it to that sequel, one that reminds us how fragile and easily upended his whole scheme has been. Because Ripley, in this conception, is no mastermind; Zaillian’s most daring and thoughtful move may have been the excision of the word “talented” from the title. In the course of the show, we see him toy with being an editor, a writer (all those letters!), a painter, an art appreciator, and a wealthy man, often convincingly — but always as an impersonation. He gives us a Tom who is fiercely determined but so drained of human affect when he’s not being watched that we come to realize that his only real skill is a knack for concentrating on one thing to the exclusion of everything else. What we watch him get away with may be the first thing in his life he’s really good at (and the last moment of the show suggests that really good may not be good enough). This is not a Tom with a brilliant plan but a Tom who just barely gets away with it, a Tom who can never relax.

Tom’s sexuality is ultimately an enigma that Zaillian chooses to leave unsolved — as it remains at the end of the novel. Highsmith’s decision to turn Tom into a roguish heterosexual with a taste for art fraud before the start of the second novel has never felt entirely persuasive, and it’s clearly a resolution in which Zaillian couldn’t be less interested. Toward the end of Ripley, Tom is asked by a detective to describe the kind of man Dickie was. He transforms Dickie’s suspicion about his queerness into a new narrative, telling the private investigator that Dickie was in love with him: “I told him I found him pathetic and that I wanted nothing more to do with him.” But it’s the crushing verdict he delivers just before that line that will stay with me, a moment in which Tom, almost in a reverie, might well be describing himself: “Everything about him was an act. He knew he was supremely untalented.” In the end, Scott and Zaillian give us a Ripley for an era in which evil is so often meted out by human automatons with even tempers and bland self-justification: He is methodical, ordinary, mild, and terrifying.'

[meteorstricken]

Here is a direct translation of an FFXVI scene at Origin I have no small number of grievances with in its English localization, as it sends a very...cruel...message about whether a person's suffering is valid. The localization and the direct translation are both shown. (Credit is in the screenshot.)

The result is radically different on a philosophical level. The original JP intent was clearly to send a message about overcoming dire human weakness through unity, whereas the EN localization goes completely off the rails with what feels like nothing but chest-pounding toxic positivity. It also contradicts several elements of what the story has clearly shown to the contrary--Ultima did suffer, horribly and for ages, but handled it poorly when unexpected complications arose in his designs for survival.

In a way, I'm relieved. I don't have to be particularly angry with Clive as a character anymore, because the English version fails to preserve authorial intent for this part. Maehiro did nothing wrong. Some dumbfucks at SE NA need to pry their heads out of their asses, though. Strength through unity is not an inaccessible message to a western audience, and we sure as hell don't need absolutist chest-pounding brutality in our good guys.

[mofffun]

The elephant in the room: Rita's Gender

In manga ch12 and ep38, Rita is referred to with female pronouns. ch12 has a little girl call Rita お姉ちゃん (big sister) and ep38 has Minnogan call them 彼女 (she/her). This is canon text.

My argument proposed Rita does not bother correcting people who misgender them. Because their time is too valuable for that. Not that they don't mind, merely as King, they are above letting mere words hurt them.

In the manga, Rita certainly reacts more strongly to being told 'you look like a bad guy' than interested in picking a fight with a little girl. The girl first called to both of them and only Morfonia answered.

For ep38, there's no denial Idol Rita is dressed feminine so naturally Minnogan is led to think that way. Rita has no cause to oppose them or risk breaking their cover and lose his trust. To equate, another major villain, Kamejim, also identify Rita as male in considering them for Himeno's spouse.

My personal interpretation is, as opposed to a troubled age, Rita simply instinctively sacrificed everything personal in name of neutrality, for duty and country, including their gender. It's not like they identify as one thing or another, it's they don't identify with anything but King of Gokkan. Regardless of gender, it does not affect their competence to perform the duty of a sovereign. On a character level, it's more fitting for this person to identify as gender neutral, but I also don't think gender is a big part of their identity.

It's still a meaningful step we receive in Rita a messy but strong female character, it's just the difference how big the step is to have them also represent non-binary/trans people. It is the doylist symbolism they hold, and the authorial intention that I cannot put down.

I looked up "rita gender" on jp tweet and I get the impression they don't think today's episode is firm enough even for those who wished for it to confrim Rita is a girl. And their viewpoints is varied too, Rita's gender can also be "undisclosed" or "(just) Rita". So I feel better there. I overreacted.

All intents and purposes I might just be wishful thinking and they decided on making Rita a girl the moment Yuzuki was cast. Mah, it's been a good 37 weeks.

In the end, Rita's setting is "undisclosed gender". Truthfully I never expected Toei to keep a 37-episode streak, not only never referred to them with female pronouns, to making them more neutral in Chapter 2's styling, and even gave us episode 36.

Say, what about the occassional offscreen use of "she"? In their position, what would you ask Yuzuki/mass media to refer to Rita without official confirmation? The audition criteria are never made known to even Yuzuki herself now we're nearing the show's end. It's understandable she took to the character as the same gender as herself. The production crew doesn't share everything with the cast. Practically, gender issues is, not a safe topic to say the least, Yuzuki's own awareness, and whether higher-ups allow her to say anything about it, is another story. Again, businesses have no obligation to endanger their profit. Pretend Toei has the guts to come out and say Rita is non-binary from the beginning (which they kinda did sneakily), they will be accused of political correctness and using Rita as a gimmick, let alone the PTA complaints. If they stay silent, the same group is gonna say they are cowards. Why not just focus on making a good show and a popular/profitable character?

Under all that, lies the practical factors of Janpese grammar and where Janpanese society stands among conservative to progressive. It's a very complicated issue with histories to consider and I'm surely not the best person to ask as a non-native. But I guess the gist is, it's still not mainstream, so the media stick to the existent language when the official sources never said otherwise.

Another point is, I don't think too much people have the concept of "tiered canon" or "proximity to sources". I'm talking about throwing out EVERY website/interview, just looking at the show, there has been no concrete evidence what gender Rita is. While episodic costumes are feminine, the script consistently refers to them with neutral/masculine language. So you can make an argument for both sides really.

So I would like to end by parroting this excellent argument: may I remind you that cross-dressing is also a sentai tradition?

[preservationofnormalcy]

I have a question about werewolves/lycanthropy that started before I read the story (just based on the poster.) The story kind of touches on my question, but I'll ask it anyway for clarity.

So, the poster frames lycanthropy as a thing you Do Not Want to have. Is there some resentment toward this attitude by werewolves (or however you would call those people in-story)? Or do they agree/not mind?

Essentially, do werewolves in general think of lycanthropy as something they live with but would not want others to experience, or as a part of their personhood that shouldn't be shamed/dreaded etc.?

Sorry if I'm reading too much into this. I know these are fictional people. I also know that the answer, if there is one, is probably "It's complicated." Groups of people think differently about their own status. I myself am autistic and projecting a bit haha. (Autistic person vs. person with autism, werewolf vs. person with lycanthropy.)

I'm just curious about the intent of the author and what (if any) real world subjects your interpretation of lycanthropy is based on (eg. Herpes, as mentioned in the story.)

Thanks for tolerating my overthinking!

-Nick

I adore that someone thought about my writing for more than a moment, so I am happy to get any ask about it.

In-universe, it is the Office’s official position that abnormality of any kind is to be controlled and moderated, if not eliminated. As we saw in the Psychotronics program, that had exceptions based on imperial needs and wants. Over the near-century of its existence, it’s softened its position on already-existing abnormality among non-staff, as Jethro alluded to. Among staff, avoiding things like lycanthropy if you don’t already have it is standard, and so vaccinations and boosters are required. The posters say that because it’s the Office policy.

Among the abnormal population, it’s probably true that while people with lycanthropy do consider it part of their personhood, many of them understand the downsides enough to accept medical assistance in controlling the condition and spread. There are as you mentioned different opinions on it, but many afflicted people are warmed up to people like Jethro even if they aren’t too hot on the Office itself. It helps that Jethro is himself a man with lycanthropy.

However, both the average lycan and Office personnel understand that there’s a difference between assisting with the negative aspects of a specific condition and attempting to eradicate it, which was Office policy in the past. Eradicating a condition can be only a small step from eradicating a people.

On a level of authorial intent, I am careful not to draw a direct comparison between specific real life people groups and werewolves/lycanthropes. That’s been done in recent memory and I don’t think it turned out well for anyone. But I think I do draw some allusions to crimes and oppression the United States has perpetrated against different groups of people - not to make a statement about the people, but about the historic sins of America.