#bad decision. Tower of Babel.

[pokeberry5]

i'm not really sure what the main thrust of this post is, but this yj98 arc has been haunting me literally since I read it months ago, so I've put together a brief(ish) overview of the salient points and the questions it's left me with

aka

that time young justice was sent to a literal intergalactic war front

aka

young justice has even more complex ptsd than you probably thought!!

yj98 #35

the premise is that there's a global war against imperiex, spearheaded by president (blech) luthor. as minors, they can't be drafted into it

(i hunted around and apparently Our Worlds at War, with Imperiex as the big bad, is the broader context, which i didn't feel like reading for this)

instead, they're going to be attached to a "sort of super medical unit" called the "paradocs"

the way they're persuaded to accept their role (instead of?? fighting on the front lines?? jeez kon) is to conceive of themselves as saving active-combat superheroes for their children they're leaving at home (creating an implicit distinction between those children and themselves, which i find sad)

yj is specifically a "search and rescue team"

with a civilian cissie king-jones as their qualified emergency medical technician (so her public persona is an olympic champion, actress, and volunteer veteran of an intergalactic war???)

is cissie the only one performing medical services then? do any of the others pick anything up from her, if these missions last long enough? (do tim and cissie bond as the only non-powered people they know going into a space war?)

yj98 #36

they've run "a couple" successful missions behind enemy lines: what does this mean for the duration of this role?

(i'm not sure if reading Our Worlds at War would help determine how long this all lasted, but if someone who has read it has answers, i'd love to know)

also, were they in space the whole time or going back in between? (i also really really want to know what batman thinks of his protégé being part of a space war. related, did cassie tell her mom??)

---

Superboy Vol 4 #91: War Letters gives some context to this

(kon putting on a brave face!!)

but also:

even as paramedics they were participating in active combat, fighting off scavengers

the lack of specifics, the mention of the fact that he's met "a lot of interesting cats in the field," and of "things" he's seen—there's a sense that he's seen a lot but not enough yet for it to no longer be shocking. or, that what they're seeing is so savage that it never ceases to be shocking.

this also implies that they've met and rescued a slew of people from across the universe. does yj have intergalactic connections? do random alien soldiers remember this small group of earth children that saved them?

this panel also shows kon (and likely the rest of them) amidst recovering jl members. what does the broader jl think of this group of kids in an acknowledged war zone, seeing them beaten down like this? (it's unclear whether kon actually went and rescued kyle rayner here or is just helping him around the medical area, but there must be some sort of lasting impression from this)

they get diverged from their rescue mission and end up on apokolips

bart experiences death when one of his "scouts" is killed—this has a lasting impression on him (addressed later) and kon blames himself, since it was his decision to chase after steel that landed them here. do the two of them ever talk about this? (they don't in yj at least)

---

yj98 #36 contd.

kon's accusation shows that this arc happened right after the drama between batman and the jla during tower of babel (the secret contingency plan drama)

and after batman's betrayal of tim's identity to spoiler (rip tim being betrayed on multiple fronts)

(tim putting on a strong front :'))

i find it interesting that tim considers his state "a world of grays" in contrast to kon's "black and white" attitude. balancing a multitude of considerations is a "world of grays?" anyway, tim staring death in the face and admitting he's scared :')

and then tim gets to watch lil lobo die (he does technically come back but!) and says explicitly that another part of innocence he didn't know he had died with lobo. this can't be his first time witnessing a death given gotham's everything, so is it because this is the first time he's watched a comrade die (and so brutally too)?

yj98 #37

and then! we get extended(?) mental torture on apokolips, enough to drive to tim to attempted homicide (both in the dream world and out of it)

(he was made to watch kon and cassie get murdered brutally in front of him jsyk)

and once he's out:

(does this ever haunt tim? that he almost broke batman's one rule? also parallels with dick beating the joker to death later on tim's behalf)

yj98 #38

the fallout:

we see that after experiencing his scout's death on apokolips, bart's been left with a fear of death strong enough to get him to leave yj (i don't actually know how this gets resolved?? it must happen in his solo bc he just sort of reappears a few mini arcs later...)

("i quit for a bunch of reasons ... but not a single one of them had to do with being afraid i'd get killed," cissie you're sooooo well-adjusted. she doesn't think bart's valid rip)

this is the moment where tim quits yj because he can't deal with their lack of trust (oof) and because“i don’t need the grief of young justice,” referring to everything else going on in tim's life (batman betraying his identity to spoiler)

(he'll lose them later on anyway—does it haunt him that he came back?)

(it's sweet that kon has someone he feels he can talk to and ask advice from)

i'm not sure if tim ever gets that apology

tldr: i kind of want one or more of yj to end up as a paramedic

[trekkele]

what are some things about the execution of zur en arh that you especially liked? seeing different takes from the norm is so refreshing 👀😊

Ok sure let's hope I don't misremember things like last time

1. Seeing one of Bruces contingency plans fail. NO HEAR ME OUT. Things like tower of babel aren't Bruce's plans failing, they're the plans being used in the wrong way. As a contingency plan, Zur failed because he was meant to keep Batman in line, instead he became be worst parts of Batman without any of Bruce to temper him. And it was impossible to fix it without drastic action - technically Bruce killed a part of himself to kill Zur.

2. A very clear picture of how bad Bruce withouts his humanity could get.

3. The sort of slow building horror of "what the fuck is he doing" "wait why is he doing that" "oh my god is that really Bruce?? It is???" "how long has he been like this?" "How did we miss this?" "It wasn't him but it was but who is he now" and obviously, "how long has this been going on and how did we miss this"

4. Ties back to 1 but CONSEQUENCES. FOR. STRESS. you cannot convince me Zur didn't get a hold that deep because Bruce hasn't taken a fuckin seat in like two years. It's been thing after thing and he hasn't taken a break yet and the universe basically said "ok sit down brain parasites be upon ye"

5. The batkids took very little bullshit from Zur-Bruce actually. Like yeah there's some iffy moments here and there but mostly they were ready to throw down

6. Damian being the hopeful one. I know people hate his writing in this run, I love how he's such a little daddy's boy he was convinced the whole time that something was deeply wrong. And he was right!! It's such a nice change i think.

7. They resolved the clone storyline within the run with no chance of (this particular) baby Bruce coming back. I expect some fanfics to keep him tho.

8. Maybe I said this already but Zur being recognizable as Bruce. The absolute worst parts of him that none of them want to see, but they all, deep down, expected him to be capable of.

9. Another part that I know other people didn't like but Jason insisting on being the one in the Lazarus suit, and Bruce accepting his decisions as a capable adult/vigilante

10. Bruce reaching out for help, accepting what was offered instead of insisting they play it his way, and taking responsibility and apologizing for what he/Zur had done. Like, the entire run emphasized that Bruce landed in this mess by isolating himself and insisting things be done his way, so the ending being him reaching out and asking for help is perfect

These are all my opinions! There are a lot parts of this run that could have been better, but I think that's down to opinion and preference and also space. But I do prefer shorter storylines that are contained to a single title so I'll accept the mediocre if I have to.

[life-observed]

Grand Diversifying Theory by Ran Prieur

In the Tower of Babel myth, humans become too proud and try to build a tower to heaven, and what stops them is they all start speaking different languages. The myth is a few thousand years old, but a few thousand years older still is the actual human behavior of becoming too proud and sticking ourselves into a social structure that seeks to dominate and destroy life on earth and crush autonomy under a rigid central order. As in the myth, we can stop this by diversifying, by breaking down our individual and collective single-mindedness.

Tightly ordered systems come apart in at least two ways, which are not just different but opposite. One way is that we all start fighting each other. This is both unpleasant and unsustainable, because the fight must have a winner, and then we're all standardized and controlled again under that winner. The other way is that we learn to love diversity, and the more we can love the more we can have.

This is not about "religion vs. science," because we are all religious and we are all scientific. That is, we all make fundamental assumptions that are not subject to proof or disproof, and we have all chosen specific ways of turning experience into mental models. That is my intentionally broad definition of a science: a style of filtering and arranging experience into mental models.

Any choice of such a style is loaded with values and motives. It's a dirty choice that must be made. I'm not suggesting that we avoid it, but that we notice it. I don't want us to destroy our religions and sciences, but to destroy their boundaries and learn to step outside them, to practice awareness of our assumptions and styles, so that we can become meta-religious, and multi-scientific.

Suppose I say that there are reports of living creatures found encased in rocks split open by miners. One was a toad that survived; another was a small pterodactyl-like creature that gasped a few breaths and died. Suppose I say that there are many reports, unknown to each other, of cities seen in the clouds, strange and fully detailed, or that there are tens of thousands of reports of strange lights in the sky.

I present no argument for the validity of these reports. My point is, when you read about them, what is your habitual reaction? Probably it's to think of explanations that protect your existing mental models: The toad was behind the rock, not inside it. The cloud cities are reflections from atmospheric temperature inversions. UFO's are the star Sirius, which twinkles in different colors when it's low in the sky. Rains of fishes were sucked up by a tornado over water, monster sightings are hallucinations, and so on. But we don't have to think this way.

When I read these reports, my reaction is "Cool! Where can I read more? How can I use this stuff to break out of my present reality and into new ones?" Imagine you're in a stone-walled structure and you hear a report of a crack in the wall. What do you do? If you feel you're besieged in a fortress, you will go try to seal it up. If you feel you're locked in a prison, you will go try to open it wider. If you feel you're a keeper of slaves, you'll go try to seal it up. These are emotional decisions, or political decisions.

What we call "science," I call one kind of science, one grounded in the emotion of fear, and the political need to maintain stability. To be fair, so was the science it replaced, medieval Christian theology. And that science was worse in that it was more resistant to direct sense experience overturning established mental models.

But in other ways, medieval Christian theology was not as bad. I call our present science Cartesian science, after one of its founders, Rene Descartes, who got the idea from a non-ordinary experience in which an "angel" told him that the way to conquer nature is through number and measure. This is no different from JHVH telling Moses that the way to conquer other religions is by prohibiting graven images: It's a suggestion, of esoteric origin, to arrange experience in a specific way to cause a specific deep change in human mental models and human behavior.

Our descendants will marvel, not that Descartes saw an angel, but that he was so twisted that he consciously wanted to conquer nature. And his idea worked: Cartesian science, by focusing strictly on the measurable and quantifiable, calls forth the enormous power of machines, while excluding emotions and values -- except the emotion of taking pleasure in turning things into numbers, and the value of wanting numbers to be better.

So if you "love" the forest, that's worth nothing compared to even one of the millions of board feet of lumber we can produce by cutting down that forest. And if I prefer a hand-driven tool to a motorized tool that applies 20 times as many angular foot-pounds per second, but I have trouble putting my preference into words, let alone into numbers, my sentiments are dismissed. And if you'd rather live in a world where people make things at home, by hand, at their own pace, than a world where factories full of numb micromanaged laborers crank out 100 times as many things, all identical and built to commanded written specifications, then you are romanticizing an impossible and inferior past -- if possibility and quality are defined in exclusively Cartesian terms. And if, after a few years of this, some people feel that the whole world is somehow terribly wrong, then they're being ungrateful and irrational, because the numbers just keep getting better.

The word "rational" is confusing. Sometimes it means careful precise thinking, and sometimes it means exclusively Cartesian thinking. The hidden message is that these two things are positively related, and they can be, but they don't have to be, and sometimes they are negatively related, as I'm showing here by using precise thinking to break down the Cartesian world view.

Fixation on number and measure is only the beginning. Cartesian science includes only experience that stays the same across place, time, culture, and perspective: If an experiment comes out differently in different places and times, or for different people, it is excluded; if an experience cannot be made uniform among observers, it is excluded. Cartesian science demands that experience be controllable and predictable, and that we, the experiencing perspectives, be perfectly interchangeable. So it focuses our attention in to the small part of our world where experience is controllable and predictable and uniform, and it builds technologies that create more such worlds, like a TV show that ten million people see all the same, instead of seeing their ten million varied lives.

Cartesian science is totalitarian: It commands that there be only one mental model, which all people must hold in their heads. It permits competing theories, but they are in a death match. They may not make peace and go on perpetually using different models. Sooner or later they must fight it out until there is only one theory, which everyone will then hold identically.

Cartesian science favors matter over mind. We're all so deep in this one that few of us have thought to question it. Even UFO enthusiasts, who like to think they're on the fringe, are always looking for "physical proof," because they take for granted the Cartesian doctrine that the material is worth more than the mental. This is related to the totalitarianism and uniformity: Mental experience, especially of something like the UFO phenomenon, varies widely, and cannot be produced at will in the laboratory or even in the field. But a physical artifact will stay the same through place, time, and culture. Every human being who looks at it and touches it will see and feel the same thing. So it is literally a blunt object to force everyone in the world to see it your way, to make your mental model the god-emperor.

Finally, Cartesian science is conservative, although, to its credit, it is less conservative than the sciences that came before it, just as it is more conservative than the sciences that might follow it. Conservative scientists feel disturbed by anomalies and fringe theories, because they have an emotional aversion to leaving multiple paths open, and a stark horror of permitting a non-dominant path to proceed and diverge. They love the feeling of closure, of a sealed-off world where everything is perfectly understood. The arch-exclusionist Carl Sagan expressed this attitude with the dictum that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," a deceptive phrase because it slips between two meanings of "extraordinary": What he is saying is that claims that are not politically established require a greater quantity of evidence. It's like having an election where every vote for the incumbent counts twice.

All these customs are arbitrary, but not accidental. That is, they could all easily go other ways, but they go the way they do because of effects on human society that serve some deeper motivation. And the most obvious effect has been to turn us into a bunch of machine-like servants of an earth-paving beast.

But it's not over yet, and as they say, never show a fool a thing half-finished. Maybe we needed Cartesian science to break us out of sky father worship, and maybe we will continue to need it for that purpose in the more backward parts of civilization. And in the places where it has been most dominant, the desire to move beyond it has been strongest, so maybe it's not a trap but a painful step in the human journey. Even when we transcend it, I don't want to eliminate it. It's given us some wonderful things, like computer games and fuzz guitar and glow-in-the-dark stuff. And it's only beginning to play with creating new animals, and taking us to new states of consciousness. Maybe in the future it will drive an underground subculture of dangerous machines. We need a bit of the dark side. Let's keep it around.

But beside it, and beyond it, we can make a thousand other paths. So one feature of Cartesian science, its totalitarianism, I utterly reject. In our new meta-science, the first custom will be: multiple contradictory sciences all going at once, all at least tolerating each other and if possible collaborating. I'll get to the second custom at the end.

So if we have sciences that focus on the quantifiable, we can have others that exclude the quantifiable. We can have one that explores the subtlety of emotion the way physicists now explore the atom, so in addition to naming invisible particles, we will have many words for different kinds of wistfulness, or happiness, or consciousness.

If we have conservative sciences, we can have many more that are thirsting for newness, so that an established theory requires more evidence and a strange new theory requires less. And where we now feel the need for only one theory, we will feel the need for many. So in cosmology we can have not only the big bang theory and a few dynamic steady state theories, but the theory that stars are projections on a big shell, and the theory that the earth is flat and when you seem to circumnavigate it you are traveling on an infinite tiled surface of slightly different alternate earths, and the theory that what we see through telescopes is mostly determined by our beliefs. And all these theories will mingle happily, even within the same person, with no thought that they should "resolve" their differences any more than we now think the whole world should watch only one TV show.

We can have sciences that focus on the rarest and most variable mental experience, and reject physical "evidence" because of its homogenizing effect. If bigfoot hunters bring back a dead creature, we lose interest -- it's just another vulgar matter-animal. But as long as the phenomenon leaves only sightings and ambiguous footprints, it's fascinating! Where does this experience come from? Where does it lead? We don't lose interest but gain interest when we find out that lake creatures just like the Loch Ness monster have been sighted in bodies of water only a few feet deep: This is not just a surviving plesiosaur -- this is something good.

Telepathy, precognition, psychedelic trips, abduction experiences, astral projection, fairies -- bring them on! And if they can ever be controlled in the laboratory, or completely explained, we'll throw them in the dustbin to be scavenged by the matterheads. We will no longer seek to know our world like we know a fact, but to know it like we know a person, not to explain phenomena but to have relationships with them.

But if we have all these different visions, won't all but one of them be wrong, because there is only one true world, independent of our awareness, which our models seek to match ever more closely? That assumption is allied to totalitarian metaphysics, and I reject it. And secretly, so do the metaphysical totalitarians -- the self-declared "skeptics" who apply their skepticism only to non-dominant theories. If they really believed their models were being drawn by an unalterable end point, they would be confident that the false theories would come to nothing, and ignore them. Their powerful desire to attack competing belief systems proves their secret fear that beliefs create reality.

Now it starts to get tricky. What is this reality and how can beliefs create it? To go any further, I think we need to drop our concepts of "real" and "delusion" and "objective" and "subjective," to cast off that whole style of thinking and try putting everything in terms of experience and mental models. So if you see purple and I see blue, we no longer worry about what color it "is." You see purple and I see blue, and there you have it! You see the little gray gnomes and I don't. What a wonderful world!

When we talk about "real" we are confusing several different things. One of them, the will to feel the comfort of absolute, universal, closed mental models, is a mistake. But other meanings of "real" still need to be talked about, only more precisely.

One of them is potential experience, like what we will find inside the box if we open it, or especially what we will find outside the box. If I say that this world is an illusion, and in the real world we're in vats with computer cables feeding this vision to our brains, what I mean is that we have the potential experience of shifting our perspectives to a world that contains and fully explains this one.

Overlapping this is the idea of an experiential dead end. If I go see The Matrix, and I say it's a movie and not real, I mean that it is contained and fully explained by this world, but I also mean that I can come out of it only by the way I went in. I can't go see The Matrix in 2003 and come out of a different screening on Mars in 2035. Or if I'm playing a computer game, I can't break away permanently into a physical universe just like that game. The only experience available to me is what's programmed into the game, and to come to my senses sitting in a chair staring at a monitor.

So a stronger meaning of "real" is necessary experience: If we say this world is illusion and another world is real, we could mean that we have to pass through that world to get anywhere, that everything else is a dead end. (Not that dead ends are wrong. They can be fun and even valuable, like going into a cave to bring back a treasure, or like a book that leads you to transform or transcend the world that contains it.)

But why is certain experience necessary? Who decides? This leads to a more profound and difficult meaning of "real": shared. The subject of other beings and other perspectives is too deep for this essay, but it's right in my path, so I'm going to go down into it a little ways and try to pick my way across it.

You could believe that you alone are aware, and imagining the entire universe. But instead you choose to believe that others are aware in the same way you are, and are sharing roughly the same experience. We all need to share our experience with others. We can each have a good time veering off alone into our personal dream worlds, but sooner or later we must rejoin others, and we often choose a terrible shared world over a pleasant world that we experience alone.

But who are these "others"? They are not just other humans beside us. They are also inside us and around us. Your awareness of reading this essay is only a small part of your wider awareness of yourself as a human, with your name, living your life. Move your attention to your body... and now to your financial balance... and now back to intellectual awareness of these ideas: You have moved between different beings, or different aspects of a larger being. You're acknowledging this multiple self when you talk about what "a part of me wants" or "being nice to myself." And if you can forget a broader self in a narrower self, it's a good bet that the larger "you" is itself a small part of a still larger being of which "you" are scarcely aware.

This is important because of my core assumption that awareness is fundamental, that matter and space and time are epiphenomena of mind. It follows that mind can do anything it wants. The way I see it, which is hinted at by advanced physics, transcendent experience, and persistent investigation of the unexplained, is that a practically infinite variety of experience and modes of awareness are already there, always available; and our brains, our languages, our sciences, are merely filters, "creating" one reality by excluding all others.

But why create reality at all? If exclusiveness is bad, then let's take the filters off and merge with the infinite everything -- beyond identity, beyond perspective, beyond time!

I respect this position, but mine is more conservative. I'm looking for a mode of being much more rigid and narrow than dissolving in the universal, but much more slippery and trippy than just being more open-minded humans, and I think we can do it. I think we're already on our way. The New Age people are on the right track with their saying "You create your own reality," but they're using three confusing words: you, your, and own. Because "you" are merged with countless other you's, we have to agree on our reality, to the extent that we want to stay together.

This is why so many varieties of experience seem to actively, intelligently evade proof, because we are intelligent and only some of us have agreed to enter the worlds of these experiences. And an early step toward deeper diversity is to respectfully permit others to experience realities that you choose not to experience. You don't say their worlds are not real, and they don't try to force you to see what they see. Alternate-world peace!

But if we want to stay together, wouldn't this diversification of reality break us apart? Not necessarily. As I said at the beginning, there are at least two ways to diversify, or to reconcile our needs for complexity and change with our need to share experience; and they both begin with diverging paths of reality-filtering.

In one way, the person serves the path, and we each focus in to one view, and share experience only with others who see it exactly the same way. Factions of believers forget their wider selves, and see the survival and dominance of their one model as the meaning of life. Then all the models fight it out and destroy or consume each other until there is only one. Then this one will be broken by the need for complexity and change, and if it's broken in the same way, the awful cycle repeats.

In the other way, the many paths serve the person. So that's the second custom of our new meta-science: We each become a broader consciousness that can balance many models, or pass in and out of many worlds previously seen as absolute. As they say, if a fish described its environment, the last thing it would say would be water; but we can be like a water creature who becomes aware of water and not-water, and learns to move in land and air. Or we can be like an obsessed game-player who suddenly remembers the world outside the game, or like a prisoner in a one-windowed cell who breaks out into a mansion with many windows, or like someone in a dark room with a radio, who thought one station was the whole universe, but now learns to twist the dial.

[joyfulabundantlife]

Bad Decisions

Have you ever made a decision and regretted it later?  Oh yes, I sure have!  Oh, that I would put my trust in the best counsellor, the Word of God!  When I consult God's Word first and rely upon Him to help me make the right decisions in life, how much be

Have you ever made a decision and regretted it later?  Oh yes, I sure have!  Oh, that I would put my trust in the best counsellor, the Word of God!  When I consult God’s Word first and rely upon Him to help me make the right decisions in life, how much better off I will be!  Some Very Bad Decisions – Genesis 11:1-4 When the people started building the tower of Babel they were making decisions…

[sbbreflections]

GENESIS

PART 2 - Because when I started this series, I thought I would only be choosing a segment rather than speaking on the book at large - which is how I handled every book since. So here is the second post on Genesis, for the sake of integrity.

1b. Genesis

The first reflection of Genesis centered around the story of Cain and Abel, but this broad book of the beginnings of time covers much, much more than a message about giving God our best and avoiding hatred to the point of murder...

For instance, we also about the creation of the world. God spoke and all things came to be.

We also learn about Obedience. When Adam and Eve obeyed the Lord, they were joyful and childlike - lacking any pain, shame or worry. But when they chose to follow the voice of the enemy - to see the world and gain knowledge that The Lord deliberately told them to keep away from - they became susceptible to evil in the flesh, essentially dooming mankind to sin. It appears to have been an irrevocable decision - that we would have to experience the world and all of it's torture because of this decision made so long ago. Even wiping out the entire human race would not keep us from reverting to bad behaviors - because we had become exposed to too much already.

For a long time, the human part of me had not been able to let go of the simple question: "why would The Lord make this tree of knowledge of good and evil accessible to them?" to which Holy Spirit seemed to respond "because He granted them freedom under ONE RULE, yet He also gave them freewill." They had a choice, and they chose to disobey their creator.

Sidenote(s): Now, I will reiterate that I am an infant and I know little to nothing in terms of what/why/how/when/where the Lord makes His decisions. I have gotten in the habit of acceptance rather than upset because these are obviously things we were never meant to experience, let alone understand. But since we're here... We should at least be grateful for the Word, and in this day, for Jesus Christ, and attempt to make better choices than our ancestors. No matter the generation, we lose access to God's glory when we choose to follow the world's way and/or the enemy's voice over what The Lord has told us so plainly. For instance: later, when The Lord introduces The Covenant to his chosen people (the Israelites) through Moses, He said they would be covered by his grace as long as they did not break it. He was (is) a very forgiving God, for as they broke the covenant time and again, he would always come back to save them when they came to him in earnest. And while the circumstances are much different now, the same effect applies. If I understand at least this part correctly, eternal life/paradise is accessible to EVERYONE under one condition: faith in Christ.

So boom. Adam and Eve sin. Their eldest child murders his younger brother, who'd found favor with the lord. And a third son is born - his name is Seth.

Years and generations later, The Lord is upset and completely over the dealings of fresh, fleshy humans. They are despicable. And so the Lord plans the great flood and instructs Noah to build the Ark. The hallmark lesson from Noah's story is not only that he and his family were obedient to God's message - despite how crazy he must have seemed at the time - and therefore blessed with the opportunity to "be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 9:1-4) but also that of the way we should honor our parents. Noah curses his son's lineage because when Ham could have chosen to quietly take care of his father, he chose to dishonor him by exploiting his nakedness. This was the curse of the Canaanites (Genesis 9:18-27), the clans of people who would be in opposition to God's Chosen people down the line.

The Tower of Babel is addressed here (Genesis 11:1-9) as well as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. During this destruction, we learn that Lot's wife is another one who doesn't listen and she turns into a pillar of salt. Then, his daughters get Lot drunk and become pregnant with his children - Moab and Ben-ammi - the ancestors of the Moabites and Ammonites (Genesis 19:1-38). (FYI, Lot is a nephew of Abraham's.)

The final major message I will share is (some of) the story of Abraham. He was first called "Abram" and his wife Sarah was first called "Sarai".

"The Lord had said to Abram, "Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father's family, and go to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to many others. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt. All the families on earth will be blessed through you." - Genesis 12:1-3 (NLT)

Abraham was counted as righteous because of his faith. He'd asked God what good were all the Lord's blessings when he didn't even have a son, to which the Lord responded that Abraham would have as many descendants as there were stars in the sky (Genesis 15:2-6).

Now, Sarah had done some weird things in the interim, but The Lord most certainly kept his promise and Sarah became pregnant in her old age, bearing Abraham's second son about 14 years after Ishmael (born to Sarah's Egyptian servant Hagar). She was 91 and Abraham was 100. Her son was named Issac (which means "one who laughs or rejoices). Abraham's faith would be tested in a way most would not pass - but he was faithful, so he did everything the Lord had commanded, and was blessed even more for it. Jacob later married Rebekah and fathered Jacob, who was later called Israel.

The Lord also presented the responsibility of circumcision upon Abraham and all of his male descendants (and his servants) as a new term of His covenant - a mark of everlasting covenant (Genesis 17:9-14). He obeyed; clearly, circumcision is still a very regular practice today.

And that's all folks... Wow. Genesis is quite a book. If you've never read it I highly recommend that you do because I still only covered a fraction of the details.

Next is Exodus.

[theblogofruth]

"The Rust." Introduction to the Book of Ruth.

The Book of Ruth which was written around the time of the Birth of Christ around 5 BCE follows the Shoftim. Unlike the much larger work, Ruth which means "the associate vision, the friend" contains only four chapters and drills into a much more concise number of topics.

The close association suggests a sure logic within the entire Tanakh we must become intimate with. Observe, from the etymology:

"Most broadly, the root רעע (ra'a') describes compartmentalization: to break some continuum apart into separated elements. Human minds are designed to be nodes of a much greater network of exchange, and must continuously interact to maintain a liquidity of wisdom — hence the noun רע (rea'), meaning friend or companion (and hence too the story of the Tower of Babel).

All wealth requires liquidity and that requires units of economy to go around. This explains why "evil" — רע, ra', evil — is not the opposite of "good" but instrumental to it: hence the perfect Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the heart of perfect Paradise. Despite popular misconceptions, in the Bible, all רע (rea') comes from God (Isaiah 45:7) and has a specific and wonderful function in any naturally evolving system.

Verb רעה (ra'a I) means to pasture or feed and the participle רעה (ra'a) means shepherd. Nouns רעי (re'i) and מרעה (mir'eh) mean pasture. Noun מרעית (mar'it) means pasturage.

Verb רעה (ra'a II) means to associate with. Nouns רע (rea'), רעה (re'eh) and מרע (merea') mean friend, associate or "neighbor". Nouns רעיה (ra'ya), רעה (re'a) and רעות (re'ut) describe a female attendant, mate or friend.

There may or not be an unused verb רעה (ra'a III) or else the following belong to the previous: noun רע (rea'), aim or purpose; nouns רעות (re'ut) and רעיון (ra'yon), longing or striving.

Verb רוע (rua') means to produce a sudden burst of sound. Nouns רע (rea') and תרועה (teru'a) describe a collective rallying cry, a war cry."

The name Ruth has a Value in Gematria of 388, ג‎חח‎‎, lol, "the henhouse, the chickencoop."

Hens do not lay eggs without the presence of a rooster to keep them ovulating. Hens will not lay eggs without a rooster in the vicinity. The analogy of the Jewish people is their current condition is a henhouse but they are not laying eggs because anticipation of the Mashiach while it is making them all wet, is not producing any new eggs.

The idea that binds the etymology and the Gematria is simple: Israel needs a new best friend.

This forum will follow the process called a Midrash, "an investigation" involving the four ways to read a Torah text:

The Torah can be read in four ways, which are represented by the Hebrew acronym PaRDeS, meaning "orchard":

Peshat: The plain and simple meaning of the words

Remez: The subtle meaning that is only hinted at

Drash: The derived meaning, the scholarly meaning

Sod: The hidden or secret meaning, the mystical meaning.

The Book of Ruth begins with five verses called a Hand, meaning they are designed to prepare a simple Jewish man to become a prince or a princess of Israel, AKA one of its roosters.

The Torah introduces one type, called an Abimelek, "the one who makes decisions", Ruth names another kind called an Elimelek "aggressive".

In Vayera, Abimelech tries to liaise with Sarah "the Senate" and coopt the government. Abrahman, "father of compassion" intervenes and sends him home. After the encounter, God blesses Abimelech with many offspring. The King must not be allowed to take over Sarah without Abraham. The King adapts to this ideal and things work out just fine

They do not work for Elimelech who dies but bears children. The children, Mahlon and Kilion marry Moabite women, one of whom is Ruth. In general, Moabites, "traditionalists" are frowned upon, but it depends on the "footing". If the tradition fosters violence and superstition it is bad. If it is progressive and leads to an end to violence, poverty, and ignorance, obviously it is a tradition we want to keep:

"The interrogative pronoun מה (ma) asks "what?" Its counterpart מי (mi) asks "who?" The latter pronoun is spelled the same as the construct-plural form of מים (mayim) and thus also means "waters of ...". Its opposite, namely dry land, signifies certainty and mental footing. A similar particle מו (mo) combines with the usual prefixes to form poetic equivalents of these particles."

Our character Ruth must obviously represent one of the traditions that should last:

Naomi Loses Her Husband and Sons

1 In the days when the judges ruled,[a] there was a famine in the land. So a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. 

2 The man’s name was Elimelek, his wife’s name was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there.

3 Now Elimelek, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. 

4 They married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth. After they had lived there about ten years, 

5 both Mahlon and Kilion also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband.

The Values in Gematria are:

v. 1: In the days when the judges ruled,[a] there was a famine in the land. Judges who rule during a famine, a time when the meaning of the Torah has been lost have their work cut out for them. Shoftim are the principals that define the Jewish Self. If Israel is not defining them for Jewish people then the identity is either blurred or lost altogether.

God sends a "a man from Bethlehem in Judah" "the House of Bread, the House of War, filled with God's Glory", his wife and two sons. This is the magic formula for the creation of Israel by the parents of Jacob and Esau.

It is of vital importance to recognize God sent a man and not a goat or a cow or an eagle to do the job of ending the famine in Moab, a loss of Jewish identity within the traditions of Israel. All of this is because, as the Shoftim stated, there was no King of Israel and no prospects. The Book of Ruth is therefore a treatise as to how to make the best of it.

The Number is 13816, yagha, "the gathering of the brotherhood in God's Name." It can also mean a gathering of locusts, which is what we are trying to avoid:

The root גוה (gwh) isn't used as a verb in the Bible so we don't know what it means. But its emphasis lies on corporeity, whether individual or collective:

The masculine noun גו (gaw), meaning back (the body part - Isaiah 38:17, Proverbs 10:13).

The masculine noun גו (gew), meaning midst (Job 30:5). This word appears to be an Aramaism.

The feminine noun גוה (gewa), also meaning back (Job 20:25 only).

The feminine noun גויה (gewiya), denoting the whole body, whether alive (human: Genesis 47:18; angelic Ezekiel 1:11) or dead (human: 1 Samuel 31:10; lion: Judges 14:8).

The masculine noun גוי (goy) meaning people or nation (Genesis 10:5, Deuteronomy 4:6). This word in singular form may also be used for Israel (Exodus 19:6) or even tribes (Genesis 48:19). The plural of this word, גוים (goyim, or גוי, meaning goyim of, which is spelled the same as the singular) denotes "the nations," that is, all peoples other than Israel. Once or twice in the Bible, this word denotes non-human "nations": beasts (Zephaniah 2:14) and perhaps locusts, although that's debatable (Joel 1:6).

v. 2:  The man’s name was Elimelek, his wife’s name was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there.

Elimelek= "aggressive king."

Naomi= "delightful."

Mahlon= "rusty, filthy."

The verb חלל (halal) means to pierce. Adjective חלל (halal) means (fatally) pierced. Noun חלה (halla) denotes a kind of donut. Noun חלון (hallon) describes a deliberate hole in a wall for ventilation and illumination. Noun חליל (halil) denotes a holed musical instrument like a flute or pipe, and the denominative verb חלל (halal) means to play the pipe. Noun מחלה (mehilla) appears to refer to a kind of geological depression or hollow comparable to a cave.

Special or fancy items were typically not damaged in any way, and piercing or otherwise compromising or altering items demonstrated their commonness or profaneness. Noun חל (hol) means profaneness or commonness. Adjective חלל (halal) and noun חלילה (halila) both mean profaned. The noun תחלה (tehilla) means beginning or first, which seems to argue that a whole new thing can only be brought about when an old way or old situation (no matter how highly regarded) is pierced and profaned.

Verb חלה (hala) means to be skewered in the sense of to be weak, sick or wounded. Noun חלי (holi) means wound or sickness. Noun מחלה (mahaleh) means disease.

Perhaps a whole other verb חלה (hala) means to appease or entreat, although entreating and piercing may be considered similar actions. Noun מחלת (mahalath) is a kind of song, perhaps a piercing, entreating affair, or perhaps some profane ditty, a song about common things, or perhaps even a song that was typically meant to be altered or build upon or expanded at any artist's discretion.

Perhaps a whole third verb חלה (hala) may have spoken of adorning, although most adorning was obviously achieved by piercing holes in things to hang them up. Prior to the invention of glue, items such as beads and brooches were attached by merit of strings and bores. Nouns חלי (hali) and חליה (helya) refers to ornaments and jewelry.

Similar to the first of the verbs חלה (hala), verb חלא (hala') means to be sick or diseased. Plural noun תחלאים (tahalu'im) means sickness(es) or disease(s).

Perhaps a whole other verb חלא (hala') may have meant to defile. It's not used in the Bible but it would explain the noun חלאה (hel'a), rust or filth.

Kilion= "shutup, limit yourself, attain to perfection."

"The root כלל (kll) deals with limits, and particularly the limit on growth or progression. This limit may be incurred by interment or incarceration, but it may also mark the asymptotic quality of perfection or completion.

Verb כלא (kala') means to shut in or shut up. Nouns כלא (kele'), כלוא (klw') and כליא (keli) mean imprisonment. Noun מכלה (mikla), means enclosure or fold. Verb כול (kul) means to contain or cause to contain.

Verb כלה (kala) denotes the bringing to a completion of some process, and that usually but not always in a negative sense. Noun כלה (kala) mostly describes complete destruction or complete annihilation.

Adjective כלה (kaleh) describes a failing with desire and noun כליון (killayon) means either a failing or pining of the eyes or annihilation.

Noun מכלה (mikla) means completeness (and is identical to the word meaning enclosure or fold). The noun תכלה (tikla) means perfection. Noun תכלית (taklit) means end or completeness.

The very common noun כלי (keli) describes any kind of article that (possibly) took a while to make but is now finished, or a vessel that was designed to hold some finished product; a holding pot.

Verb כלל (kalal) means to complete or make perfect. The very common noun כל (kol) means all or the whole. Adjective כליל (kalil) means entire or whole. Nouns מכלול (miklol) and מכלל (miklal) mean perfection. Noun מכלל (maklul) describes something made perfect.

The noun כלה (kalla) means bride or daughter-in-law, and noun כלולה (kelula) means espousal, which obviously reflects the Bible's expectation that humanity's ultimate perfection makes her a Bride to the Creator."

These persons were Ephrathites, "oxheads, donkeys" unruly but capable of great things:

"Verb פרה (para) means to bear fruit or be fruitful. Noun פרי (peri) means fruit in its broadest sense. Noun פר (par) means young bull and פרה (para) means young heifer. Note that the first letter א (aleph) is believed to denote an ox-head, while its name derives from the verb אלף (aleph), to learn or to produce thousands. The second letter, ב (beth) is also the word for house (or temple or stable). The familiar word "alphabet," therefore literally means "stable of bulls" or "house of divisions" or "temple of fruitful learning".

Noun פרא (para') is a word for wild donkey. The young bovines were probably known as fruits-of-the-herd, but donkeys in the Bible mostly symbolize lone wanderings and humility.

Noun פור (pur) means lot (hence the feast called Purim). Noun פורה (pura) denotes a winepress and פרור (parur) a cooking pot."

The Number is 12836, יבח‎גו‎, "will choose."

As we are seeing one chooses to be retarded like Franklin "grape ape" Graham and his flock of retards, opposite those in King's College, for example.

The decision to be enlightened is the wisest one ever makes, even if it takes all of one's life to achieve it. The alternative is to rust and this is a sure way to hell in the afterlife.

v. 3: Now Elimelek, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. The Number is 5381, הגחא‎, "the ghee", "the civil defense."

A ghee is based on what kind of defense is being mounted by society which is based on what kind of field it is defending. Republicans for example believe in a civil defense strategy for a crop of tyranny. As a rule they are more successful because they are more aggressive than their opponents. Enter Elimelek, a man who will do anything to protect his evil ways.

The opposite of that kind of ghee is what we need. The etymology suggests we go so far as to revolt and kill them all and give the world a proper chance to rescue itself from their vile torment:

"Our word also denotes the foundation of man's stance, poise and stride (MATTHEW 15:35, JOHN 8:8, ACTS 9:4), and is as such a metaphor for knowledge and certainty (see our article on πιστις, pistis, meaning faith, or "the dry land of the mind").

Note that quite often the various applications of our word in English make for quite diverse possible interpretations of Scriptures. Did, in MATTHEW 5:5, Jesus says that the meek would inherit the earth (as stewards of God's creation) or the land (as appreciated client state of the Romans)?

The Great Jewish Revolt that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD was really the violent culmination of a period of remarkably meek protest that had begun well before Jesus' birth. Did Jesus, likewise, deny that he had come to bring peace on earth or just the occupied territories (MATTHEW 10:34)?"

The Republican Party has admitted to playing a role in October 7. They have to pay for this with their lives, all of them.

v. 4: They, the rusty and rebellious, married Orpah and Ruth. They lived there for ten years, meaning they retaught the Ten Decrees to the world.

Orpah= submission.

The verb ערף ('arap) means to drip or drop. Noun עריף ('arip) means cloud and ערפל ('arapel) describes a heavy cloud mass.

The noun ערף ('orep) means neck. It possibly derives from a whole other, unrelated verb of unknown meaning, but it may also be that underneath all these words hides a core meaning of to droop. This latter noun is used nearly solely in expressions that are based on the hanging of one's head (in submission, fear or stubbornness). The denominative verb ערף ('arap) literally means to neck but in practice it describes the breaking of one's neck.

Ruth= Justice through friendship.

The Number is 5835, החגה‎, "turn the wheel towards the Holiday."

v. 5: Rust and ignorance died.

The Number is 5235, הב‎גה‎, bega,"in the moment."

= climb to the top of the mountain and attain to Ha Shem.

[kirbydots]

7, 13 , 18

Link to the ask game!

7. One DC death you’d like to make permanent — or alternatively, one you’d erase so it never happened?

Oo, this is a tough one. I don’t think I have an answer here.

13. Is it okay to make detailed contingency plans to take down your teammates? (see: Tower of Babel and a million other storylines) Why or why not?

This is a question I wasn’t expecting to get so fast, but it’s a very interesting one. I grew up with Justice League: Doom, the adaptation of Tower of Babel where Vandal Savage uses Batman’s contingency plans to torture and nearly kill the League, and I have several parts of the movie’s script memorized because of how often I watched it as a kid.

I have memories of reading Tower of Babel, but it’s not something I know as well as the film adaptation, so I might be crossing wires here.

Personally, I think contingency plans being in place isn’t bad in and of itself— people get mind controlled, evil clones, evil alternate universe selves, villains with the same power sets, all of those are something to worry about and there needs to be a plan in place other than “hope we can beat the crap out of them fast enough.”

However, I think the way Batman goes about it is… deeply concerning, and is a manifestation of his chief character flaws— namely, his paranoia and need for control, exacerbated in the aftermath of Sue Dibny’s rape and the alteration of his own mind.

His actions directly led to the League’s members going through some truly horrific things (severe hydrophobia, epileptic seizures, perpetually burning alive) and him storing these plans in the Batcave — a place that has been broken into multiple times — is a phenomenally poor security decision. If memory serves, Bruce was in a horrible mental state, which complicates the situation further.

Too long, didn’t read: contingency plans aren’t inherently a bad thing, but Bruce went about it horribly wrong, though he only came to the conclusions that he did after some horrifying events.

18. Favorite corner of DC I cruelly neglected with this ask game?

Either Fourth World or the magic side.

[marmota-b]

Your "controversial opinions" are all things I picked from the narrative myself and had no idea they might be controversial...

I have no idea if Tolkien consciously made the colonialist connection or not, but there's no question in my mind that the Noldor wanting to go to Middle Earth to rule their own kingdoms was never supposed to be perceived as a good idea to begin with. It's part of their pride before fall narrative, their equivalent to building the Tower of Babel. It became something of a necessary evil against Morgoth, but it wasn't a good idea on its own, and Ëol is supposed to be correct on that count exactly to point out later in the story that, you know, it wasn't a good idea to begin with. Thingol is supposed to be justified in his mistrust. There are, in my opinion, moments like that scattered throughout the book reminding the reader that this isn't a simple tale of good vs evil, it's an epic tragic saga where everyone is flawed and bad decisions lead to unforeseen bad consequences.

And also everything is tainted by Morgoth's evil to the extent that no matter what decisions people make, no matter how justified they are, things go wrong. Someone makes a perfectly justified decision but the wrong person is in the wrong place at the wrong time and suddenly there's another tragedy. Life is a bit random like that and it can get really demoralising. That's basically The Silmarillion's whole shtick, and I always read it through those lens.

Also I would argue this reading - that the Noldor weren't supposed to lord it over other elves in Middle Earth to begin with - is supported by Galadriel's character development in Lord of the Rings, where she finally accepts giving up all that and returning home to Valinor. By that point she's ruling her realm less because she wants to be queen and more because she's one of the few people left with the power and experience.

as someone who has read your fics a lot (big fan hiiiii) and your tags (they're like easter eggs), i am now so curious about your controversial opinions and takes that piss you off because, i mean, i don't want to make a big deal out of it, but you seem to change your opinion on certain characters now hehehe

hi anon! thank you for reading my fics and the nonstop rambling in my tags, haha. i hope you have fun with them! i'm going to assume this is about the silm fandom because i've been rolling out the tolkien posts lately. i couldn't possibly go into all my controversial opinions or all the takes that i hate in one post, but since you're asking i'll give three of each. i'm gonna stick with things i haven't talked much about on this blog, because there are lots of opinions and takes (i.e. blaming thingol/b&l/dior/elwing for the kinslayings, claiming elrond and elros think of maedhros and maglor as their Real Parents, etc.) that i've already made my thoughts on abundantly clear, lol

controversial opinion #1: i don't think tolkien intended this to be the case, but the noldor have uncomfortably colonial overtones in their expressed intentions for middle-earth: 'long he spoke, and ever he urged the noldor to follow him and by their own prowess to win freedom and great realms in the lands of the east' / 'the words of feanor concerning middle-earth had kindled in her heart, for she yearned to see the wide unguarded lands and to rule there a realm at her own will. of like mind with galadriel was fingon fingolfin's son, being moved also by feanor's words, [...] and with fingon stood as they ever did angrod and aegnor, sons of finarfin.' these are finwe's family, his son and his grandchildren. there is no way they aren't aware that elves already inhabit beleriand, yet they express zero consideration for what said elves' opinions might be on their sudden arrival and claiming of the land. it is... a Bad Look

controversial opinion #2: according to the narrative, the sons of feanor lost their right to the silmarils. regardless of who agrees or disagrees, that's what the text posits. the silmarils burned morgoth. they didn't burn beren, didn't burn luthien, didn't burn dior, didn't burn elwing, didn't burn earendil, and didn't burn eonwe. they burned maedhros and maglor

controversial opinion #3: eol is not unreasonable for his low opinion of the noldor. eol is unreasonable for almost everything else about him -- he attempted filicide, is at best a creepy stalker and at worst a rapist (aredhel was not "wholly unwilling"... wdym tolkien explain tolkien what do you mean she was not wholly unwilling), and he accidentally murders his own wife while trying to murder his son. like wow, pick a way to be a terrible person. these quotes though -- "all this land is the land of the teleri, and i will not deal nor have my son deal with the slayers of our kin, the invaders and usurpers of our homes" / "no right have you or any of your kin in this land to seize realms or to set bounds, either here or there." -- he's not wrong about the highlighted portions and he has every right to dislike the noldor for the points he brings up. (though he is wrong for believing the noldor are at fault for morgoth, since morgoth would have come knocking with or without them.)

okay now on to the takes that piss me off!

stupid take #1: that thingol and doriath were bigoted assholes that turn away refugees for not letting aredhel pass through. this was not a very nice thing for them to do, obviously, but equating it with a case of refusing refugees is ridiculous. to begin with, the iathrim and the noldor (save maybe for the nargothrondim, whose king -- finrod -- has a respectful relationship with thingol) do not have the best relations with each other, which is hardly just doriath's fault. then aredhel, one of the noldo whom the iathrim have tensions with, wants to travel through their kingdom to visit her cousin, another one of the noldo whom the iathrim have tensions with. (the worst tensions with, in fact, as thingol is markedly, and rightfully, more disdainful towards the sons of feanor in particular.) why is it so unreasonable that this would not go over well? the iathrim didn't force her to go the way she did either; in fact they explicitly warn her that that road is "the speediest way," but that it is "perilous". she had other options and she decided to go with the one that was reportedly dangerous. and on top of it all, aredhel is not in the same dire situation as actual refugees. turgon would have given her ample supplies for the journey since he was already so remiss to her leaving in the first place, plus he gives her "three lords of his household" as guards/companions. how come this instance, which is not a case that concerns refugees, is treated by some people as sure evidence of thingol's isolationism and "racism" towards the noldor, while an explicit instance where he does accept actual -- noldorin!! -- refugees is swept under the rug? oh wait i know. because this fandom loves making doriath into this discriminatory, uniquely nationalist kingdom that it canonically is not. if you want isolationism, gondolin is right there

stupid take #2: that luthien's victories over sauron and morgoth are proof that she's a mary sue. tolkien calling her "luthien the mere maiden" is annoying, but more accurate than the complaints about her being op. she doesn't even fight either of them. with sauron he jumps at her and radiates so much Hatred that she faints, but she manages to cover his eyes with her cloak and make him sleepy for a moment. huan takes the opportunity to jump in and they start fighting. with morgoth, her disguise doesn't work on him. instead she uses his arrogance and lust to her advantage, bides her time, then seizes the opportunity to put him to sleep with her cloak. and when he stirs, she and beren run for their lives in terror! when people say luthien winning against sauron and morgoth is plot armor, what they really mean is that their faves don't have the guts she has to go up against extreme odds and the brains to effectively use what she has going for her to her greatest benefit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

stupid take #3: that luthien cast an enchantment on celegorm to make him lust after her. or even anything adjacent like luthien's maia blood enchanted celegorm though she wasn't doing it intentionally. not even going to bother debunking this kind of thing because it's a genuinely braindead take that reeks of misogyny, victim-blaming, and desperate whitewashing. fuck all the way off

i get the feeling you're talking about the sons of feanor on that part about changing my opinion on certain characters? which you'd be right about, the fandom has majorly turned me off from them. they used to be nearly the center of my interest in the silmarillion and its events, and now, while i still like them as they are in the story, i barely look at fandom content of them because the apologism is extreme and ridiculous. also funnily enough, my ranking of the individuals within the blanket of "the feanorians" has shuffled a lot too. maedhros and maglor used to be my favorite, now i've had enough maedhros and maglor to last me... maybe not a lifetime, but a good long while. (i dipped out of the tolkien fandom about two/three years ago, which was the time i got tired of m&m content. to this day i'm still tired of them.) and celegorm, the piece of shit that he is, used to be among my least favorite and now somehow shot his way up to my favorite <3 he's ambitious. he's charismatic. he's impulsive and arrogant. he's a wreck. he's funny. he's the absolute worst. love him

[my-bated-breath]

Closing Thoughts on Vincenzo

No one asked, but here you go.

I watched the last two episodes of Vincenzo yesterday, but even in the midst of my viewing experience I was able to synthesis and analyze what I was enjoying and not-enjoying, what worked and what didn’t work (for me), so that itself says something about how immersive it was. Of course, Vincenzo is a great show — the action is sharp and satisfying, the schemes are elaborate and spectacular, the humor is cracky yet genuine, and the characters are so, so lovable. And I loved the romance side plot, because yes, I am weak. Still, the last 2-4 episodes strained some of that, and this is my take on why I felt not exactly disappointed, but underwhelmed in the final stretch. I’m also including what I did like at the very end, as that makes sense with how I’m structuring this kind-of-analysis.

spoilers below

Tension, Stakes, and Pay-off

The tension in Vincenzo has been ramped up ever since the death of Vincenzo’s mother, loudly and painfully declaring in that moment that “this is not a game” (contrary to Vincenzo telling Hanseok in jail that he’s toying with him). This leads to a chilling confrontation between Vincenzo and the antagonists while also uniting the residents of Geumga in all-out, unapologetic war. And there is no more game of chess — just one of cat and mouse, with Vincenzo descending upon his prey.

Hence, Vincenzo is noticeably less soft, and he strikes Babel with the steel of his resolve. His schemes feel much more sinister than mischievous as they had been before; he is ending this, once and for all. So, how does the show amp up the tension and stakes from there?

Well, it’s all in what I said before. The tension is teased out in Vincenzo stealing everything Hanseok has ever treasured and then taunting/threatening him in prison, and then with the Babel villains descending into chaos and desperation. The stakes, however, are less noticeable, because Vincenzo is kind of obviously winning. The stakes have already been established with Vincenzo’s mother, then paid off with her death, and then paid off even more with Vincenzo mercilessly seizing the upper hand.

That’s why I feel like Myunghee and Hanseo’s death just... happened. Because it’s been 3 whole episodes since Vincenzo has founded this new resolve, that sort of dragged out follow-up loses its thrill and gratification. They’ve been defeated now, completely and totally. But so what? They’ve been on the losing end for more than 3 hours of screen time now, and even their last resort of a counterattack didn’t hold much narrative weight (which is something I’ll get to later). Their deaths are not boring to say the least — I saw a post that said something similar to “Myunghee, a woman who danced to the music of others’ pain, died dancing to her own” and “Hanseo, a man with no heart, has a hole drilled into that empty cavity.”

But their deaths also happen very isolated from everyone else, not just physically, but emotionally as well. It’s almost as if Vincenzo’s clapping his hands and saying, “Let’s wrap this up now, I’m getting a little tired.” And while I wouldn’t say their deaths are unnecessarily cruel, given everything they’ve done, I don’t think Vincenzo does this in response to anything particularly substantial. Is this for his mother’s death? For Chayoung’s injury? For everyone else? Well, maybe, but it sure didn’t feel like he was contemplating that during or after torturing them. If I put the Vincenzo from the beginning of the show there in those two scenes vs Vincenzo from the end of the show, post character development and all, I think the only difference would be that beginning-of-the-show Vincenzo would still be unfamiliar with Babel’s crimes and see this as a waste of time.

A sort of side note: Now, one of the strong points of this show is its use of comedy in its otherwise very serious schemes (I still thinking about episodes 8 and 15 all the time). But with the impending climax and increasingly serious tone, there was no comedy to make said-serious schemes as engaging to watch. So now unable to rely on one of its greatest strengths, the show must rely on emotional impact. Or similarly: narrative weight.

Narrative Weight

In episodes 19-20, Chayoung is shot, Hanseo dies, and Chulwook is stabbed (and you think he’s going to die but he doesn’t). Who said there was no emotional impact in these episodes again?!

Oh right. Me.

Beyond Hong Yuchan and Oh Gyeongja’s death, injuries and fatalities suffered from our protagonists’ side don’t really have that many consequences. You can argue the consequences of Hanseo dying is that we’re all very sad, but both we and the characters are barely given a moment to grieve before we have to move on. What does Hanseo die for? He dies as an abuse victim just beginning to break out of the cycle he was trapped in, and that itself isn’t necessary a bad narrative choice, and he dies as a warrior in this Mafia vs Conglomerate war, but what does he die for? If it’s for Vincenzo and Chayoung to live, they pretty much get lucky with Hanseo running out of bullets. If it is to show that he had changed, and that this tied into some greater theme of redemption, then his death really isn’t really given enough thought for it to resonate well. I would’ve loved to see Vincenzo reflecting on Hanseo learning to trust and love again, despite all the mistakes he made in the past, and how that influences his own decision to embrace his version of villainous justice. But no. This is something I only thought of after reading a few Vincenzo posts and trying to justify my own moral for the show.

Don’t forget that Chulwook almost dies too. Like I genuinely believed he was dead, shed a tear for the daughter he would never meet, and then the show went like, “Guess what? Psyche!”

I’m not very fond of that injury/pseud-death-but-not-really.

And now we have Chayoung, the person who Vincenzo is the closest to. Don’t get me wrong, I amso weak for her never giving into Hanseo and asking for death over Vinceno getting hurt, for guarding Vincenzo from the bullet, for Vincenzo’s shocked and empty eyes, for Chayoung’s glazed gaze, for him desperately and powerlessly hugging her tightly because that’s all he can do for her now. Afterwards, she’s in the hospital, her shoulder is recuperating, and there’s a nice Chayenzo parallel to episode 4 when Chayoung was waiting by Vinny’s hospital bed. But afterwards afterwards? She’s just in the hospital. Sidelined from the climax.

Vincenzo told her, “I will finish this, for you.” That could’ve worked, because we could’ve seen Chayoung emotionally or spiritually with us during the climax and Myunghee and Hanseo’s deaths. But like I mentioned earlier, it really didn’t feel that way. Ultimately, the narrative tells us that Chayoung’s injury just means she can’t strain herself for a couple of days, despite initially delivering it so dramatically and emotionally.

As one of my friends said while we were discussing this episode: Vincenzo is the titular character, but Chayoung has so much to care for too. Her father died because of Babel, and she said, “We should share the danger.” Instead, we got a decentish-but-slightly-underwhelming scene where she is driven to see Vincenzo off. Okay then.

Characters

Speaking of, Chayoung receives much of the short-end of the character development stick in the last 4 episodes. I found this to be acceptable in episodes 17-18, and she does have that moment where she looked uncertain and nauseated at the death of the “hunting dogs” before shoving down her misgivings, clinging onto a facade of strength as she says “this is what I wanted.” Also, even though it wasn’t episode 14, I wasn’t complaining about the Chayenzo moments either.

But still, this is the second most important protagonist in the narrative and nothing about her really changes in these last few episodes. Nor does she experience catharsis alongside Vincenzo, emotionally or otherwise. There had been some buildup about whether or not Chayoung can swallow the cruel path that she has chosen, but if she’s not even the given the chance to make her own decision on said cruel path, that’s just wasted set up.

(I know that during the Babel Tower party-fiasco Vincenzo told Chayoung that he originally wanted her to push the button that’ll kill one of the hunting dogs, but then decided against it upon seeing Chayoung’s wavering face, but like. Narratively, if she was the one to press it, and then we had some follow-up character arc about her coming to terms with her decision... Oh, we could’ve had it all.)

Another thing I want to point out is that Chayoung has been a foil to Vincenzo in that she represents the happiness, love, and innocence now unattainable to him. (This is just his view, by the way, since Chayoung isn’t exactly innocent herself, which he could’ve seen if the show had only taken this direction.) That is to say, Vinceno’s most interesting character moments are drawn out of him by Chayoung: In his apartment, when they are under the ceiling-stars, and she asks him whether he has ever killed anyone. On the rooftop, when they decide that Hanseok must lose everything before he dies, and he promises to her that he’ll stay in Korea to see things through to the end, in direct contrast to himself at the beginning of the show. In the highway pass, when she embraces him after a gunfight, the closest he’s ever grazed past death. When they drink makgeolli together and he tells her about what her father wanted to say to her. When they sit together by the riverside and she tells him that his mother would have been proud of him.

One of my favorite parts of episodes 11-12 during the gun fight is just how emotionally present Chayoung is, despite not wielding a gun herself, or even being anywhere near the action. I’m not sure if I’m getting this right, but I think this is the first time Vincenzo had killed people on screen, so to see Chayoung embrace him so tearfully afterwards almost felt like he was being reminded of his humanity. And this also shows that Chayoung, despite saying that she would feel distant towards Vincenzo if he did have blood on his hands, loves him closely, so closely it hurts.

We think about Vincenzo, what it means to be a consigliere, and his distorted flashbacks of flesh and blood and killing and losing himself, and that teddy bear, slowly panning out to a child, staring at him in fear. We think about how is it possible for him to love again? Can he even know what love is?

Then Chayoung appears, a woman whose very presence unraveled the mystery that is Vincenzo. But the moment that Chayoung’s development was stunted, that was the moment Vincenzo lost his foil, and we, the audience, lost the ability to see how his past, present, and future reconcile.

Themes: Loving in Sin

In episode 20, Vincenzo and the monks have a conversation about whether he was worthy of love or not before being told that he was Vaisravana — and though he could never be accepted by Buddha, he would be appreciated at times, and he would have his own role to play too. I like this conversation a lot in concept. In execution, it would’ve left much weightier an impact if only we had seen Vincenzo’s journey to reconcile his villainy and humanity play out more, if we had a glimpse into the moral conflict warring in his mind. The last time the drama showed that to us — not told it to us — was with the death of Vincenzo’s mother.

I would add more, really, but I feel like my review up until here says everything I want it to. In my opinion, there was no real epiphany that Vincenzo reached upon hearing those words from the monk because he hadn’t reflected on it enough for there to properly be one. And the ending to Vincenzo and Chayoung’s romance would’ve felt a lot better if it was Vincenzo choosing to love her despite his fear of himself, despite his belief that he could only hurt people. (Also that ending monologue wouldn’t have felt so tacked-on, like, oh wait this is supposed to have a theme right? Here, this is vaguely related, right?)

Because a lot of this emotional potential was not quite met, I think the finale also had to resort to some cheaper ways to make us feel for the romance, such as Chayoung rushing to see Vincenzo off and Vincenzo leaving the diplomacy-relations party early (he very poetically disappears while walking behind this sculpture, but I thought it was hilarious that if the shot didn’t get cut off there in another 2 seconds we could’ve seen him walking out of where that sculpture thing blocked him lol).

Overall though, I’m pretty happy with the romance’s ending, at least conceptually. The way they incorporated the story of cow herder and weaver girl and the bridge of pigeons (not magpies!) that will allow them to see each other again every year was so bittersweet, and as someone familiar with this myth, it made me very nostalgic. Also, I do think it works better with Vincenzo’s themes that he would be apart from Chayoung in some way. They each have their own lives to lead, but although they met by coincidence, they’ll remain by each other’s sides by intention. He is a villain, and so is she, but villains love tenaciously.

[pickmeforjesus]

All 66 Books of the Bible in Easy, One-Sentence Summaries 1/2

1. Genesis

Genesis answers two big questions: “How did God’s relationship with the world begin?” and “Where did the nation of Israel come from?”

Author: Traditionally Moses, but the stories are much older.

Fun fact: Most of the famous Bible stories you’ve heard about are probably found in the book of Genesis. This is where the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, the Tower of Babel, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob’s ladder, and Joseph’s coat of many colors are recorded.

2. Exodus

God saves Israel from slavery in Egypt, and then enters into a special relationship with them.

Author: Traditionally Moses

3. Leviticus

God gives Israel instructions for how to worship Him.

Author: traditionally Moses

4. Numbers

Israel fails to trust and obey God, and wanders in the wilderness for 40 years.

Author: Traditionally Moses

5. Deuteronomy

Moses gives Israel instructions (in some ways, a recap of the laws in Exodus–Numbers) for how to love and obey God in the Promised Land.

Author: Traditionally Moses

6. Joshua

Joshua (Israel’s new leader) leads Israel to conquer the Promised land, then parcels out territories to the twelve tribes of Israel.

Author: Nobody knows

Fun fact: You’ve probably heard of a few fantastic stories from this book (the Battle of Jericho and the day the sun stood still), but most of the action happens in the first half of this book. The last half is pretty much all about divvying up the real estate.

7. Judges

Israel enters a cycle of turning from God, falling captive to oppressive nations, calling out to God, and being rescued by leaders God sends their way (called “judges”).

Author: Nobody knows

8. Ruth

Two widows lose everything, and find hope in Israel—which leads to the birth of the future King David.

Author: Nobody knows

9. 1 Samuel

Israel demands a king, who turns out to be quite a disappointment.

Author: Nobody knows

10. 2 Samuel

David, a man after God’s own heart, becomes king of Israel.

Author: Nobody knows

11. 1 Kings

The kingdom of Israel has a time of peace and prosperity under King Solomon, but afterward splits, and the two lines of kings turn away from God.

Author: Nobody knows

12. 2 Kings

Both kingdoms ignore God and his prophets, until they both fall captive to other world empires.

Author: Nobody knows

13. 1 Chronicles

This is a brief history of Israel from Adam to David, culminating with David commissioning the temple of God in Jerusalem.

Author: Traditionally Ezra

14. 2 Chronicles

David’s son Solomon builds the temple, but after centuries of rejecting God, the Babylonians take the southern Israelites captive and destroy the temple.

Author: Traditionally Ezra

15. Ezra

The Israelites rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, and a scribe named Ezra teaches the people to once again obey God’s laws.

Author: Ezra

16. Nehemiah

The city of Jerusalem is in bad shape, so Nehemiah rebuilds the wall around the city.

Author: Nehemiah

17. Esther

Someone hatches a genocidal plot to bring about Israel’s extinction, and Esther must face the emperor to ask for help.

Author: Nobody knows

Books of Poetry in the Old Testament

18. Job

Satan attacks a righteous man named Job, and Job and his friends argue about why terrible things are happening to him.

Author: Nobody knows

19. Psalms

A collection of 150 songs that Israel sang to God (and to each other)—kind of like a hymnal for the ancient Israelites.

Author: So many authors—meet them all here!

20. Proverbs

A collection of sayings written to help people make wise decisions that bring about justice.

Author: Solomon and other wise men

21. Ecclesiastes

A philosophical exploration of the meaning of life—with a surprisingly nihilistic tone for the Bible.

Author: Traditionally Solomon

22. Song of Solomon (Song of Songs)

A love song (or collection of love songs) celebrating love, desire, and marriage.

Author: Traditionally Solomon (but it could have been written about Solomon, or in the style of Solomon)

Books of prophecy in the Old Testament

23. Isaiah

God sends the prophet Isaiah to warn Israel of future judgment—but also to tell them about a coming king and servant who will “bear the sins of many.”

Author: Isaiah (and maybe some of his followers)

24. Jeremiah

God sends a prophet to warn Israel about the coming Babylonian captivity, but the people don’t take the news very well.

Author: Jeremiah

25. Lamentations

A collection of dirges lamenting the fall of Jerusalem after the Babylonian attacks.

Author: Traditionally Jeremiah

26. Ezekiel

God chooses a man to speak for Him to Israel, to tell them the error of their ways and teach them justice: Ezekiel.

Author: Ezekiel

27. Daniel

Daniel becomes a high-ranking wise man in the Babylonian and Persian empires, and has prophetic visions concerning Israel’s future.

Author: Daniel (with other contributors)

28. Hosea

Hosea is told to marry a prostitute who leaves him, and he must bring her back: a picture of God’s relationship with Israel.

Author: Hosea

29. Joel

God sends a plague of locusts to Judge Israel, but his judgment on the surrounding nations is coming, too.

Author: Joel

30. Amos

A shepherd named Amos preaches against the injustice of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

Author: Amos

31. Obadiah

Obadiah warns the neighboring nation of Edom that they will be judged for plundering Jerusalem.

Author: Obadiah

32. Jonah

A disobedient prophet runs from God, is swallowed by a great fish, and then preaches God’s message to the city of Nineveh.

Author: Traditionally Jonah

33. Micah

Micah confronts the leaders of Israel and Judah regarding their injustice, and prophecies that one day the Lord himself will rule in perfect justice.

Author: Micah

34. Nahum

Nahum foretells of God’s judgment on Nineveh, the capital of Assyria.

Author: Nahum

35. Habakkuk

Habakkuk pleads with God to stop the injustice and violence in Judah, but is surprised to find that God will use the even more violent Babylonians to do so.

Author: Habakkuk

36. Zephaniah

God warns that he will judge Israel and the surrounding nations, but also that he will restore them in peace and justice.

Author: Zephaniah

37. Haggai

The people have abandoned the work of restoring God’s temple in Jerusalem, and so Haggai takes them to task.

Author: Haggai

38. Zechariah

The prophet Zechariah calls Israel to return to God, and records prophetic visions that show what’s happening behind the scenes.

39. Malachi

God has been faithful to Israel, but they continue to live disconnected from him—so God sends Malachi to call them out.

source

[fancyfade]

Well I got super impatient and decided to post a day early. If you do click on and read CW: Child abuse. The tone isn’t like depressing the whole way through, I’m not interested in pointless grief, but it starts pretty heavy

For the preview have this bit I am glad I got an excuse to use finally (wrote it before this fanfic had to find a place to work it in I think it works really well here)

Father and all his people always found the most stifling, condescending, worst possible way to think about Damian. They wanted to protect him, but only half the time – only if they could imagine him as a sad, tiny child, helpless and afraid. They didn't know what to do with the other half – they didn't know what to do with him when he was fighting or behaving unacceptably or being always too too much. They couldn't decide whether they see him as a victim or a villain, and while neither would be ideal, he'd prefer the latter. A villain has power and agency, and he can't help but thinking of a victim as someone who's been stripped of both.

keep reading

Writing decisions (These will be LONG AS FUCK)

So there are two major moments from the 2009 B&R run I wanted in my fic at least that happen in the same plotline. I'm breaking it into two moments in different plotlines for the below reasons:

The first moment is when Damian both explicitly rejects Talia's offer to go back to being an assassin and chooses to stay being Robin

and then after the dumb slade part of that plot, there's the second moment, where he asks Talia to love him as he is, not as she wants him to be.

I feel the important things here are Damian explicitly rejecting being a supervillain and then Damian wishing he could be treated different by one of his parents (his primary caregiver up until he was 10 years old here in my verse, but in new earth canon she did not meet him until he was 9). Since Morrison, obviously Talia was the one Damian would both reject for supervillainry and ask for parental approval of, but I'm obviously having Ra's represent the more supervillainy side of things here.

This is also important why Damian knows that the letter was a lie before this plot could happen, because when he rejects Ra's he's doing it 100 percent with the knowledge that his dad didn't want him (from his POV) and he doesn't have another patriarchal figure of approval. He's just rejecting Ra's because Ra's is cruel to him and wrong, not because he has a better option waiting.

The other important moment in canon (Damian expressing dissatisfaction with how he is treated by Talia) will obviously have to change significantly in my fic but I do want him to have some type of interaction with her where he explains how he wants ot be treated

For canon basis of Damian and Ra's' interactions:

We have pretty scant Damian and Ra's interactions in canon mostly what I can think of are sort of Resurrection of Ra's Al Ghul, the flashbacks in Teen Titans Rebirth (first six issues), and the weird Shadow/Batman comic.

The consistent theme seems to be that Damian exists for Ra's, not as a person. In RRAG Ra's refers to Damian as “it” and is surprised/offended that he does not immediately acquiesce to being a backup body, in Teen Titan's flashbacks Damian's oath is “I am yours” - that he belongs to his grandfather – and ra's calls him the greatest weapon in his arsenal or smthing, and in shadow/batman ra's continuously tries to impress upon damian that damian only exists because ra's allows him to/ at ra's' mercy.

(Yes the “ You're recalcitrant. Emotional.” dialogue is straight from Batman Bad Blood Talia, but when Talia is being villain balled she often comes across as woman-scorned version of Ra's so I don't feel bad stealing it and giving him that dialogue)

Anyway so needless to say its toxic as hell.

Ra's is also portrayed as generally using his family for his own means/ being very controlling/possessive – like in Batman Chronicles #8 he thinks (in his internal monologue) that he will never allow Talia to be free and that he needs her especially to continue his lineage and not be alone. He also kidnaps her when she leaves him in the early 2ks plot after tower of babel.

Miscellaneous decisions not based on those interactions:

the guard was based off of the dude who Ravi called the hand of ra's in robin: son of batman. I assumed they might have slightly different dynamics with Tali and Damian than the other leaguers because they call Talia by her first name, which seemed to not be what the other leaguers did. I'll be real they don't flesh out the league members who don't have names a ton, I had to do a lot of guessing.

I feel like even though Damian's upbringing in the League of Shadows was abusive as hell, he'd still miss where he grew up, especially the parts that were just like... day to day stuff and not fighting (Granted he still did obviously miss some of the way they did fighting interactions too).

I actually googled some geography to try to describe the place the Cradle was in because in the comics I don't think they gave us a location (besides that the last city they were at was Baghdad) and then the scenery did not give us much detail. I wanted to be able to describe the scenery a bit and not just say “um, it looked like a desert” (it looked... vaguely deserty in the comics?) especially since it would be significant to Damian. And I didn't want to just go with whatever preconceived notions I had.

I had Ra's make the fetus that may eventually become heretic here because I feel like if we're going with the RRAG backup body theme that might be a reasonable justification for Ra's cloning him (it was so unclear what Talia's motives for making Heretic were in the comic)

anyway SUPER Long but i'm really proud of this scene and Damian's confrontation with Ra's so I hope you all enjoyed it

[the-wardens-torch]

Just the rest of my thoughts on the EW storyline, presented with as much rhyme and reason as a box of greasy car parts at a swap meet.

The lady of the light was Hydaelyn - that’s it? JUST Hydaelyn? I know that’s like saying “Jesus?  What else ya got?“ but I honestly thought they were going to go in a different direction since they hyped her in some of the trailer/teaser media. Also, why did she want to fight us so many times?!  Mo-oo-om, quit it!

The whole akasa/dynamis thing didn’t really work for me. They said dynamis wasn’t like aether, but it was employed in the exact same way - it was just “reach out your hand and hope real hard” as opposed to “reach out your hand and focus your aether.” And it seems like there’s a lot of overlap?

The rest of the Telephoroi towers just… fucking off and vanishing from the story so fast left me scratching my head. Y’shtola saying there was a person’s limb (Varis?) at the core of the tower was such a deliciously ghoulish detail that could have created some fascinating story beats. And all they did with it was disposable dungeon boss Anima? Personally I hoped they were building the Giant of Babel.

What Alisaie said to Zenos in Garlemald was great and I love her even more for it. I also love the fact that Zenos listened - a little self-awareness in a villain goes a long way.

I liked the Garlemald part of the storyline in general for the most part… cheap radio primal-shielding gimmick aside. Everything about is just felt very… real? Especially the behavior of the Garlean civilians. We shame the Garleans for their arrogance in assuming they know what’s best for everyone, but isn’t swooping in and expecting to be treated like saviors just as arrogant?  

Being in a random Imperial’s body for That One Quest was disorienting, uncomfortable and certainly NOT fun, but it was just a little brilliant from a storytelling perspective and I will defend it.  

I hope we see Jullus again. Also Nidhana and Matsya.

The Loporrit humming sound effect and the bestways burrows battle music sound like they were lifted directly from the old SNES sound files for FF4 and I love that so much.

Elpis… Ehhh I said I liked Hermes and Meteion and I stand by it, but making Elpis into a whole zone you can revisit and buy stuff in and farm FATEs in seemed like a bad decision that cost it a great deal of its initial impact.

Hythlodaeus is my favorite Ancient.  Unambitious, flippant and slighty irritating, but at complete peace with himself and usually the smartest person in the room despite not acting like it.

I still don’t quiiiiiite get Hydaelyn’s justification for the Sundering. Was it just that she didn’t want any more Ancients sacrificing themselves to summon ever more powerful deities?  Or was it because she knew that sundered souls would be less susceptible to dynamis? Both?  Neither?

The Scions sacrificing themselves one by one at Ultima Thule before the final raid was basically just doing trust falls with the WoL at the company team-building retreat. If it had been just one “death,” it might have had some weight to it, but after Estinien did it, I just figured everyone else was going to, and it wasn’t as shocking or heartbreaking as the game seemed to think it was.

I’m not sure I like Zenos turning into Shinryu deus ex machina, but I guess Krile needed someone to deliver the little return/reset button thing?  I didn’t even know Zenos could still channel Shinryu and it was more of a “what?” for me than anything else.

Not sure how I feel about Zodiark’s end. It felt unsatisfying, but resolving the Hydaelyn/Zodiark story came with three expansions worth of baggage and I’m not sure what else they could have done that would have been better.

[tervacious]

I’m a free speech purist, and this brilliant review and crash course in recent history, is a really good example of why.  Excerpts:

Glasser is best known for his leadership of the ACLU after the organization’s much-pilloried decision to represent neo-Nazis who wanted to march in a suburb of Chicago called Skokie, Illinois. The shorthand outlines of that episode are known on Twitter, but the deeply thought-out reasons for the ACLU’s actions back then belong to a pre-Internet era.

The film was produced and co-directed by Nico Perrino, Vice-President of Communications for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a modern speech rights advocacy group. Perrino is 31. He met Glasser at the funeral of former Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, and didn’t know who he was. Once he got to know the former ACLU icon, he realized that his story was “completely lost on my generation,” but also increasingly relevant, for reasons that become clear minutes into the film.

The 1978 case was horrifying on its face. Skokie was home to thousands of Jews, including many survivors of the Holocaust, to whom the mere idea of Nazis walking past their door evoked not only the terrors of the camps, but the shame and regret of inaction as Hitler’s party ascended in Germany. That was a time when many Jews elected to just pull the shades down as Nazis marched past, in the hopes that they would eventually go away.

What monster could agitate, in the courts, to bring about a repeat of such a scene? If ever there was a moment when speech could be “harm,” rubbing salt in the wounds of camp survivors, who’d spent decades convincing themselves that this leafy suburb in the American midwest was a safe haven, had to qualify.

Mighty Ira traces the reasoning of people like Glasser and ACLU attorneys like David Goldberger, as they connect their decision to defend Nazi leader Frank Collin in Skokie to their years of advocacy in the sixties for black civil rights workers in the South. You couldn’t have one without the other, they argue. “If you give the government the power to stop the right-wing marching in the street,” Glasser says, “they will acquire the power to decide who they think is dangerous enough to stop.”

Glasser doesn’t hide behind technicalities, either, noting that the myriad tricks localities in and around Chicago used to make the speech debate appear to have moved into the private arena, amounted to the same First Amendment obstruction. Requiring that marchers post a $350,000 liability insurance bond, when no private insurer would grant it, was equally a violation. “Those insurance bond requirements had been a classic mechanism by which white Southern towns used to ban civil rights demonstrations,” Glasser said.

Ultimately, the ACLU argued that Skokie was a Tower-of-Babel moment for American law. If you grant the village of Skokie the right to ban hate speech, or require insurance bonds, or prevent anyone in a military uniform from marching, the constitutional edifice comes down and every town in the country will soon be making its own rules. Next thing you know, Forsyth County, Georgia, might be banning Hosea Williams from marching on Martin Luther King Day. “Do you want every little town to decide which speech is permitted?” Glasser asked.

Glasser won the argument then, narrowly, overcoming significant opposition within his own organization. Once he won in court, the Nazi leader Collin decided not to march in Skokie, and was eventually humiliated first by a giant counter-demonstration in Chicago, then by a child molestation charge that landed him in prison.

The episode ended up looking like a powerful affirmation of constitutional principle, helping explain why Robert Kennedy — as Glasser notes, “hardly a man of the left… a guy who had worked for Joe McCarthy and wiretapped people” — had urged Glasser to join the ACLU in the first place. The organization held a unique place in American society, Kennedy told him, dedicated to neither right nor left, but to defending the “root ideas” that held us together...

...Mighty Ira goes shows scenes from Charlottesville and the death of Heather Heyer, which serves as the obvious bookend tale to Skokie. The two narratives are eerily similar. The locals awaiting the arrival of white nationalists in 2017 make exactly the same declarations the Skokie residents made, about how “we’re not going to have it here.”

That Charlottesville ended in bloodshed while Skokie did not is blamed on bad policing, the one moment in the movie where Glasser seems to be copping out. The reality is that Skokie could have and probably would have ended in much the same way, had Collin chosen to march. The more honest answer to the question of why Glasser chose the path he did isn’t so much that it’s the safest or most effective in preventing violence (although in the long run, I think that’s true also), but that democracy is messy, and all the other options are worse.

We hear Heather Heyer’s mother make this exact argument, saying, when asked if those white nationalists should have the right to speak again, “I do, and that’s not a popular opinion.” She adds, “I think once we take away the right to free speech, we may never get it back. My big concern is… who makes the decision, what speech is allowable and what is not?”

In the age of Trump, huge portions of the Democratic electorate are willing to take their chances on that front. As Mighty Ira goes to great pains to point out, minorities and the poor tended to have an easier time understanding the ACLU’s Skokie decision, because the history of the wealthy using restrictive power against labor, communists, and civil rights activists is so long. As a result, they tend to grasp that they’ll eventually be targets of speech rollbacks.

Skokie gets thrown around a lot to justify censorship and how bad the ACLU is (the ACLU is bad, just not for that reason), but most people don’t even know what the hell happened.  I love seeing it told here, because seriously, citing the Skokie case as an example of free speech run amok is and always has been specious at best.

I’m not a liberal, I’m a Radical Feminist, but that said there was a time when liberalism was something you could work with, when you could act in solidarity with liberal causes, and those folks of that type are now so few and far between it’s depressing.  Watching women who are ostensibly radical attack “the Left”, align with rightwingers, and uphold modern “liberalism” which honestly is just conservatism with extra steps, is even more depressing and I wish those of you who do that shit would stop it.  That so many of you don’t even know what you’re doing is somehow even worse than the few of you who think you can strange-bedfellow yourself and your various concerns into relevance.

[kaesaaurelia]

deals and contracts and paperwork fiddle-faddle

For @whumptober2020 day 11: Psych 101 (specifically "defiance," although this turned out to be much less “one person defies their captor” than I intended it to be and more “one person inspires another’s defiance.”)

Continues on from day four, wherein Aziraphale met up with a distraught coworker, waited for Crawly at the base of the Tower of Babel, and then it fell on him, day five, wherein Aziraphale did his best to help the citizens of Babylon, and was caught by demons for his trouble, and day eight, wherein Aziraphale found brief and unexpected camaraderie among the prisoners of Hell.

Background Aziraphale/f!Crawly, although this is mostly Aziraphale having a dialogue with an OC who’s trying (slightly) to sell him on a deal with the Devil.

When somebody finally came for Aziraphale, though, it wasn't Crawly.  It was Nisroc, with a gaggle of Legions.  "Hey, buddy, how's it going?" she asked brightly.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.  He'd been planning to have an argument with Crawly about whether she'd betrayed him, and found himself very disappointed she wasn't here, but Nisroc had betrayed Heaven, so Aziraphale was determined to pick a fight with her instead.

"Ugh," she said, rolling her eyes.  "So, turns out Michael is a huge bitch?  Like, I guess God had to sign off on it all but I'm sure She would have been fine with it if She had the real story, Michael probably --"

"What are you doing here in front of my cell?" Aziraphale cut in.  "Can you get me out of here?"

"Hmm, well, yes and no?" said Nisroc.  "Satan's authorized me to give you his proposal, and if you accept it, you can get you out of here."

"But you're not even a demon yet!" said Aziraphale.  "Are you?"  He squinted at her.  She didn't look like a demon, but maybe it was subtle.

"Nope," she said.  "He's too busy fixing everyone's languages to remake me, all he did was give me Hell's new standard common language.  Turns out I'm the only person we know can talk to you already, so..."  She said something incomprehensible to the Legions, one of whom presented her with a clay tablet.  "Okay, so, just so you know the stakes of this?  Good news is, my whole status isn't gonna be affected by whether I can get you to do this, so no pressure there.  Bad news is, I think they might kill you if you don't?  So, probably a lot of pressure overall!  Sorry about that," she said.

Aziraphale sighed.  "What exactly is the deal?  Do they want me to become a demon?"

"Pretty much, yeah," said Nisroc.  "I guess some other demon was talking about what a great asset you'd be?  Slimy or something, I don't know, Satan trusts whoever they are."

His heart sank.  Crawly had betrayed him, hadn't she?  He might as well stop pretending it was at all likely that she hadn't.  "Crawly," he said.

"Yeah, something like that," Nisroc said.  She skimmed the tablet.  "You won't get to keep your name, unfortunately -- but honestly, probably more trouble than it's worth if you're not pregnant?  Like, that was why I did that whole --"  She waved vaguely upwards.  "-- y'know, that thing.  Also, apparently you have no control over what kind of animal stuff you end up with, just generally?  I am so worried.  Like what if Satan turns me into a slug or something?  That would ruin my whole aesthetic."  She looked at Aziraphale.  "Sorry, don't want to make you worry, I'm sure you'll be fine on that count.  You'd make a great slug."

Aziraphale gritted his teeth.  "Is there anything I actually get out of this supposed deal?" he asked.

"You get to live," said Nisroc.  "If you want more you can probably negotiate up?  But also Satan's a huge asshole so I super wouldn't bother if I was you.  I did and it's still a really shitty deal."

"Why did you take it, then?" he asked.

"My options are pretty limited these days," said Nisroc.  "Being powerless but unchanging and immortal, doomed to walk the Earth forever, accepted neither by Heaven nor Hell was not cutting it.  Especially since being pregnant literally forever is worse than Hell.  Or, I think it is?  God, I hope it is," she said, sighing.

"Ah," said Aziraphale.  "So -- you actually are --"

"Yeah, like I said, Michael got really mad," said Nisroc.  "Although actually I think Raphael snitched on me?  Which I would not have expected out of him.  Don't trust that fucker."

"I... didn't think anybody did?" Aziraphale said.  There had been a big scandal a while back, where it had become obvious that Raphael's blueprints for primates and Gabriel's blueprints for humans were awfully similar, enough so that somebody had obviously been copying.  Officially, no conclusion had ever been reached; unofficially, though, Raphael had been pushed out of all the important decision-making and shuffled off to the perpetually understaffed Recorporation Office.

"Well, good for them," said Nisroc.  "So, uh, what do you say?  You gonna take the offer?

"You make it sound so appealing," said Aziraphale, “how could I possibly say no?”

"Yeah, no, I get that it sucks," said Nisroc.  "Listen, do you know anyone else down here you could bribe?"  Aziraphale looked pointedly at the Legions.  "Oh, don't worry about them, they don't understand me," she said.  "Isn't that right?" she asked them.  "You are all very cute, but kinda stupid!  It's great!"  They smiled confusedly at her, and Aziraphale was satisfied that they didn't understand her.

"Why can't you help me, then?" he asked.

"Oh, no, I don't think I should.  Everything's a little..."  She made a gesture representing the shakiness of the situation.  "Like, if it was just me I'd totally help, but I'm kinda scheming for two here?"

"Ah," said Aziraphale.  He was still so terribly uncomfortable with the idea of... of reproducing like that with humans.  Still, he tried to dredge up some of the etiquette he had learned for dealing with new parents.  "Is it a boy or a girl?" he asked.

"Probably," said Nisroc, shrugging.  "I just want it to be okay.  I'm sure God would have understood if I could have explained.  It's creation, that's Her jam."  She began to cry again, and tearfully turned to the Legions, giving them some instruction Aziraphale didn't understand.  They looked very sympathetic, and scurried off.  Nisroc wiped the tears from her eyes quickly.  "Sorry," she said.  "I just -- I really don't wanna be a demon, what if I don't even want my kid after all of this?  What if I'm a totally different person?"

Aziraphale felt terrible for her then.  "Is that what happens?" he asked.  What had Crawly been like, before she had become this?  He couldn't really imagine her as a better person -- not that she was particularly good, and not that badness was fundamental to her personality, but... he didn't really like the idea of a Better Crawly.  Unless maybe it was a Crawly who hadn't got him stuck here.

"I don't know," said Nisroc.  "That's what everyone says happens?  That you stop being able to love, and, and you can't be nice, and stuff like that."

"Oh, I don't think that's all true," said Aziraphale, surprising himself slightly.  He'd thought he was just saying it to be comforting, but he did believe it.  Crawly could be kind, whether she'd betrayed Aziraphale or not.  "I think you'll still be yourself," he said.  "Just... different."

"I really hope so," she said, blinking back more tears.  "But -- but just in case I don't..."  With some difficulty, she dug a little hole in the dirt with her toe.  Then she showed Aziraphale the key she had.  "You're gonna say no, right?"

"Well..."  Aziraphale didn't want to be a demon.  Hell was a miserable place, and Crawly seemed to avoid it as best she could.  It wouldn't suit Aziraphale at all.

"You should say no," she said.  "If you have any way of getting out of here.  I bet you could bribe someone easy enough.  It's a shitty job."  She lifted something over her head and Aziraphale realized she'd been wearing a key on a chain around her neck.  "This goes to the cell.  I don't want them to connect this to me, so I'm not gonna give this to you, I know you'll bolt -- but if you can get someone to give it to you later when I have an alibi?  Go for it," she said.  Then she dropped the key in the hole and scuffed dirt over it.  "God, I'm so tired," she said.

"You probably shouldn't have done that," Aziraphale said, eyeing the patch of dirt.

"I probably shouldn't have, yeah," she said, sadly.  "But what if I stop being a good person when Satan remakes me?  What if I never really did anything good at all and this is my last opportunity?"

"I think if Satan could make you a worse person against your will, he wouldn't bother with all the deals and contracts and paperwork fiddle-faddle," Aziraphale said.

"Well, I hope you're right," said Nisroc.  "Ah.  Looks like my pals are coming back," she said, glancing off to her left, and indeed, the cadre of Legions were stumbling towards her, all of them at once bearing aloft a small scrap of cloth, which they argued over before one of them successfully handed it to her.  She dabbed at her tears with it, and gave them a grateful smile.  "I'll tell him you're thinking about it but you need more time.  A little while longer in here should convince you, right?"

"Perhaps," said Aziraphale, doing his best not to look at the spot where the key was buried.

"Good luck," she said, and she walked off, dabbing her eyes with the cloth and talking to the Legions in nonsense words.

[next part]

[alkarinque]

nirvana in fire finale thoughts (FULL of finale spoilers):

i fucking KNEW lin shu was talking out of his ass in those earnest "of course i want to live look how much i want to live" speeches but i'm still a sucker i guess because i genuinely did not foresee "actively launching himself away from his loved ones into Death by Glorious Battle”.

BUT the final lin shu/lin chen conversation did work for me; i really liked the transition from "i gotta fight it's the only way to save the kingdom" into just totally unvarnished "all i want is to be 13-years-ago lin shu again"

and given the choice between envisioning a way forward and clinging desperately to who he used to be, "DOUBLES DOWN on clinging" as the crowning bad decision on lin shu’s bad decisions tower of babel is not something i'm opposed to! .... i just wish he had to look jingyan in the eye while making it? or that nihuang was, a LITTLE less graciously understanding...... or just that lin shu had to use his actual words to tell the actual truth to either of them, JUST ONCE, EVEN.

and the [everyone in court thinks fondly and with restrained sorrow upon lin shu, WORLDS BIGGEST DICKBAG, set to tremulous strings] happy ending falls a little flat for me...... i think in my ideal world jingyan & nihuang get together once a month post-canon to get absolutely shitfaced and then one of them goes "what an asshole" and the other one goes "god i KNOW right" and then they pass out & afterward avoid eye contact with each other for three weeks

um. i don’t know where i’m going with this. everyone should be more resentful towards lin shu. or like, the tragedy should be that lin shu bought HIS heart’s desire at the cost of the happiness of everyone around him..... which, it IS, but. the tragedy is that lin shu’s heart’s desire is just, so stupid.

[bigskydreaming]

IMO, realistically Dick would have been the first one to reach out to Jason upon hearing he was back, for the exact same reasons he took a chance on Damian as Robin (which Bruce very likely wouldn’t have), and he took a chance on trusting Raven and forming the new Teen Titans to stop Trigon after the Justice League had already turned her away because demon energies mumble mumble, and look I’m just saying - 

Dick Grayson is the guy who takes chances on people. Who gives them the benefit of the doubt. Who risks big for even the possibility of having his faith in people justified.

The only reason he didn’t do that with Jason, and help ease the way towards Jason reconciling with the family...

IS BECAUSE DC SPENT YEARS ACTIVELY NOT WANTING JASON RECONCILED WITH THE FAMILY.

Keeping Jason at odds with the rest of the Batfamily was absolutely a CHOICE DC made, deliberately and consciously. So like....instead of looking to shitty interactions that make EVERYONE involved look out of character, to use as inspiration for Dick and Jason’s interactions in fics that otherwise are more than happy to disregard canon anyway.....

I’m just saying, instead of writing Dick as backing up Bruce’s caution and disapproval towards Jason, what if instead you look to the very very very well established pattern of Dick trusting and being close with people his father definitely doesn’t approve of and is wary of, like....idk, pretty much all the Titans at one point or another, plus a bunch of the Outsiders, plus the considerable number of criminals and antiheroes he’s managed to make nice with over the years, and like...tbh, off the top of my head, the only person I can think of who both Bruce and Dick don’t like that much is Ollie? LMAO. That’s it. And in Dick’s case, that probably has a lot to do with the fact that Ollie’s never been a huge fan of his either.

*Shrugs* Anywho, have Dick and Jason at odds after the latter’s return if you wanna write them that way, I mean, whatever, but this guy who is all stiff and uncomfortable and judgmental around Jason with no other reasoning given that like, Bruce doesn’t trust him or approve and thus neither does Dick, like....what???

(And yeah, I know he was written that way in Brothers in Blood, but again - see the bit where DC didn’t WANT Jason getting along with the family, and also....Jason showed up in town in Dick’s costume and started getting Dick a reputation of murdering people, and Dick happens to care quite a bit about how he’s seen as a vigilante, given that he’s always put a ton of effort into being approachable and such, and then Jason started poking directly at Dick’s still fairly recent and HUGE scab aka his feeling responsible for Blockbuster’s death....like, there are plenty of reasons why in that particular story arc, Dick wasn’t falling over himself to be like welcome home little brother who had a million and one opportunities to approach me and THIS is the way you chose to do it. And like...none of them have anything to do with Bruce).

But like, bottom line....behind the scenes decisions always play a huge role in these things....and make no mistake, originally DC brought Jason back to be a Batfamily antagonist. That was their Big Idea there. He wasn’t intended to occupy the angry Robin niche, DC wanted someone to fill the ‘fallen from grace’ Robin niche....until they eventually realized no most people wanted Jason as a good guy or at least antihero and not pitted against his family and they took advantage of the reboot to do that.

Like there’s a reason that Brothers in Blood and Outsiders were pretty much the ONLY time Jason and Dick interacted after his return up until Battle for the Cowl, and that’s because the majority of Nightwing writers didn’t WANT to use Jason when it meant having to have him and Dick dramatically at odds with no chance of anything other than that.

Like....the very specific reason that people writing Dick just mindlessly backing up Bruce’s stance towards Jason in fics with no dissent, like the reason this drives me up a wall isn’t even actually because of my uh...well documented opinion that they were closer before Jason’s death than is usually assumed. No, like even without that, that characterization for Dick completely fails to take into account that for a good twenty years, Dick was DELIBERATELY characterized as the guy who took chances on the very people Bruce wouldn’t.

That Bruce himself was characterized as saying the thing that he was most proud of Nightwing for and why he felt he’d become a better version of what he’d always wanted Batman to be, is because Dick had never lost his ability to trust in people even after being let down....because his trust was never based in naïveté but was rather a conscious CHOICE not to let the reasons he’d been given not to trust people actually take away his determination to have his faith in them proven RIGHT.

While DC was leaning into all the stories that highlighted Batman as paranoid and untrusting like The Tower of Babel with his contingencies against all the Justice League and Brother Eye and stuff, for a good fifteen years before Jason’s return....throughout all that time they were intentionally writing Dick as being the polar opposite of Bruce in that SPECIFIC regard. Like, for decades Dick was the guy DC wrote all the other characters turning to when they wanted to COMPLAIN about Bruce’s trust issues or refusal to give someone or something a shot. It legitimately just does not make much sense to simply position him as Bruce’s unquestioning number two in all matters Jason when in most every other matter Dick is the first one to be written challenging Bruce’s decisions.

So many of you guys have spent years writing Dick as the real problem child, unreasonably stubborn and likely to pick a fight with Bruce at the drop of a hat (PARTICULARLY people who write about Bruce and Jason in his years as Robin)....how come THAT characterization only seems to disappear the second Bruce is like “welp, Jason is bad now forever, oh well” huh? And only then for once Dick is like sounds about right to me boss! Like....hmm. Nothing about that seems convenient to anyone?

Like if you’re going to keep one thing in mind about Dick’s character, how about instead of his temper or flightiness or cheery jokes or chipperness or unreasonable stubbornness like....what if instead people focused on a core characteristic like how even as far back as The Judas Contract, one of the Titans’ most iconic and definitive stories....

the Titans only beat Deathstroke after he infiltrated them using Terra as his mole and literally all of them were captured except for Dick....because Dick didn’t have to rescue the others all on his own.

He did it with Joey’s help.

Because pretty much right after the reveal that Terra was a traitor who was working for Slade for as long as they’d known her....Dick chose to take a chance on trusting a complete stranger, with the story then validating his decision to believe the best of this new person instead of compounding the idea they never should have trusted Terra by having Joey turn on them too.

And the fact that the very first new person Dick chose to trust after Terra’s betrayal was Slade’s very own son....that wasn’t a coincidence. That wasn’t dramatic irony.

That was the POINT.

And this core characteristic of Dick’s has been held up time after time after time....so why can’t something like THAT be treated as defining and indicative of him as all these other fanon flaws and attributes that are usually based on a mere handful of panels or issues and then blown wildly out of proportion? How come he can spend so much time being characterized in fics as hot tempered and likely to go off about anything when most of the examples to back that up have to deliberately be pulled from stories of brainwashing or where he’s for other reasons still acting OUT of character by the canon example’s own admission...while characteristics that entire iconic story arcs have HINGED upon go not only unacknowledged....but completely flipped?

You tell me.