#cloudbower

[withallthatisleftofmyheart]

Green Shoots and Ashen Earth

I've just published the first chapter of my Adar fic on ao3! More to follow very soon. This chapter is mostly set up but stay tuned for bickering, miscommunication, hugs, tears, trees and smut.

Thank you to cloudbower for beta-reading 🖤

Here are a couple quotes to pique your interest, the first with its angst, the second with its cattiness:

"Tears were not weakness, they were a measure of just how much of himself he had succeeded in retaining, despite centuries of torture, torment and isolation."

"At least when he had taken prisoners, he had made it abundantly clear that they were, in fact, prisoners."

[vaporwary]

Gimme uhhh Angbang, Beefleaf, and whoever the fuck you ship with SexPal (only the silliest sounding ships)

Angbang:

sometimes when an eldritch chaos god and the angel in charge of clockwork are sooo fucking obsessed with each other..... and I live by that.

Beefleaf:

Third Most Powerful Ghost In The World Gets Dragged On Stupid Gender Adventures By His Worst Enemy's Dumbass Younger Sibling. and the roleswap AUs? delicious.

aaand I chose Palamedes/Pyrrha:

Pyrrha told him that he was going to make someone a really annoying wife someday and he took that as a challenge. sometimes a family can be a 10000 yr old war criminal in her best friend's body; the president of the library planet borrowing HIS best friend's body; the librarian's best friend; the best friend's two knives; and a girl who is simultaneously ~13.8 billion yrs old, 10k yrs old, 18 yrs old, and 6 months old :')

[i-dont-wanna-be-here-so-why]

Cloudbow

[designers-teaparty]

Does EQ stand for "encephalization quotient"????

Let me be honest, I had to google what encephalization means and while that's an interesting theory, I don't know, it could also just mean emotional quotient? Since dude's bad at reading the air it would fit?

[peihoeming]

I would love to hear your thoughts on Zhao Yunlan's abrupt hair change midseason from forward-comb to middle part 🤔🤔🤔

Personally, despite the foward-comb being more book accurate and looking adorable, I really liked the middle parting style. I’ve been told by the person that introduced me to Guardian that in china girls part their hair when they have someone and so that was Guardian’s team way to subtly tell us that his relationship with Shen Wei changed and moved to the next step. (Even the wiki points out the hair style change with a wink so I’d assume it has some truth to it)

Let’s see what happened in the book around episode 14 when Zhao Yunlan changes hairstyle...oh yeah it’s when Zhao Yunlan’s flirting actually worked and he got in bed with Shen Wei...only for Shen Wei to black out  before anything could happen because he was drunk and Zhao Yunlan freaking out because Shen Wei doesn’t have a pulse. (THEN he remembers he suspects/knows Shen Wei is the ghost slayer and that him not having a pulse IS normal.) (Also don’t ask me to check what is happening in the drama, it’s all a blur)

Checks out with the timeline ;)

[bitterfrosts]

Imagine how much more awkward things would be if they have that sort of discussion beforehand. meanwhile wen ning is RIGHT THERE he can hear you both. Zombies still have ears you guys.

[vincentvangodot]

cloudbower replied to your post “Apropos of not much except for a reblog and a recent purchase: I know...”

LITERALLY PLEASE, I know anti-heroes are in but you gotta remember who wrote the damn thing, there is no reason in the entire world that Milton would actually make Satan sympathetic!! please read, please actually follow all the ridiculous shit Satan says in context. I hate sounding like an evangelist more than ANYTHING but these are characters in an epic poem and I'm just advocating literacy. If you think Satan is the secret antihero of PL you have been BAMBOOZLED

I knooooow. I still have Whiteside’s podcasts about Miltonic similes and honestly I want to shove them at so many people. There’s a reason I have “Better to reign in Hell” word-filtered to “I don’t understand Milton”, because I guess reading on until “vaunting aloud but wracked with deep despair” is just a few lines too many to pay attention to! I actually ended up yelling at a class in college about this, I feel very strongly.

(I got a fancy copy of PL recently and the intro talks about how Pullman drew on Milton’s portrayal of Satan in his books, and... yeah he sure did draw on his surface-level interpretation of that, huh?)

The intro also quotes Blake saying, of Milton, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Which will never EVER stop baffling me, because Blake wrote the Songs of Innocence and Experience to prove the EXACT same thing Milton was doing with his portrayal of Satan! That fancy language and rhyme schemes are the trappings of a fallen world, and if we were still in the Garden we would be satisfied with AABB and simplistic 1-1 comparisons rather than metaphors!

I will yell all day and you know this. We have the same context here. I just... I get so MAD. You don’t have to have any particular beliefs or lack thereof about G-d and Satan to accept that the author of this poem had a specific intent in mind, it is foolish to ignore that!

[withallthatisleftofmyheart]

Chapter 5: New Leaves and Shattered Hearts

Arondir facilitates an ecotherapy session for Adar and Galadriel. Elrond makes dinner for Adar and Galadriel. Basically, our favourite chaotic/traumatised duo get looked after.

Featuring:

No smut

Lots of emotions

Arondir's greenhouse

Trees, loads of trees

Galadriel's cursed bachelor pad

Thank you so much cloudbower for beta reading 🖤

[lesliekane1]

So grateful or these spectacular shows #lucky #rainbowclouds #pinkclouds #sunset #chicagoskies #sunrise_and_sunsets #lakemichigan #spectacular_sky #lakemichiganlove #highriseliving #lakeandsky #edgewaterchicago #sky_marvels #sky_brilliance #ihavethisthingwithpink #sky_perfection #cloudlovers #cloudsofinstagram #pastelsky #rainbowclouds #cloudbow #leslielovessunrise #lesliekane1 https://www.instagram.com/p/CC2KzVEj7gk/?igshid=13xomvlilvywu

[tjlambuilihotshots]

View this post on Instagram

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Thurs. 7/9/2020 Westhampton Beach NY: #Cloudbow southeast of Moriches Inlet over Atlantic Ocean #LongIsland #SaltLife #clouds #Stormhour @matthammernews12 @stormhour @newsday @cloudappsoc @jimcantore @news12li @samanthaaugeri @nws @cloudappsociety @richhoffmanweather @realsaltlife @thefishermanmag #fishermanmagazine #LongIsland #TheMotherShip #weather #weird #odd #abnormal #sealife #boating #atsea #ontheocean #onthewater (at Westhampton Beach, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CCcB-KMnvBz/?igshid=1h1mbuqsm6pju

[galaxies-of-apple-trees]

Too beautiful ☁️🌕☁️ #fullmoon #moonbow #cloudbow #nightsky https://www.instagram.com/p/B6ALzBeA80W/?igshid=zbwssq9zn3bh

[fresherbrine]

by Michael C. Neff

[wigmund]

From Astronomy Picture of the Day; June 13, 2018:

Red Cloudbow over Delaware Michael C. Neff (Neffworks Artography)

What kind of rainbow is this? In this case, no rain was involved -- what is pictured is actually a red cloudbow. The unusual sky arc was spotted last month during sunset in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, USA. When the photographer realized that what he was seeing was extraordinary, he captured it with the only camera available -- a cell phone. Clouds are made of water droplets, and in a cloudbow a cloud-droplet group reflects back light from the bright Sun (or Moon) on the opposite side of the sky. Similar phenomena include fogbows and airplane glories. Here, the red color was caused by atmospheric air preferentially scattering away blue light -- which simultaneously makes most of the sky appear blue. A careful inspection reveals a supernumery bow just inside the outermost arc, a bow caused by quantum diffraction.

[designers-teaparty]

@cloudbower the shoes are from the suit Lost in Mist and the bows on top are from Ace Attorney! (both of them minor suits from hell events)

[bitterfrosts]

My initial thought was daffodils for the rebirth/new beginning symbolism, but though they were an ancient introduction, they aren’t native to China so that’s on the backburner unless I can find better ones.

[vincentvangodot]

cloudbower replied to your post “cloudbower replied to your post “Apropos of not much except for a...”

Sometimes I wish PL was like more allegorical and they changed some names so people wouldn't confuse their religious beliefs with some characters from a poem who are based on mythological figures. Literally please dont let your christianity headcanons get in the way of basic literacy

Christianity headcanons!! That is exactly it!! People are so wrought up in their opinions of Biblical characters that they put that bias onto the PL characters, even though Milton was BLATANTLY writing fanfiction and nearly an AU at that.

That really is the crux of it, I think, is that people are unwilling to engage with the poem on its own turf rather than letting their views of Christianity stand in for literary analysis. Which, as ever: have whatever dang opinion you want on Christianity, but this isn’t a foundational text, it has a known author and a very different context.