#cruel religion

[stardustpinkart]

"Repeat your lessons girl".

Poor Luz. If Belos caught her, I could imagine a number of Esmeralda Frollo situations. Didja know in the original book Esmeralda was only 14 for one thing? We know Belos/Phillip is a monster, he has no heart, and even still hes obsessed with saving her. During there battle just before the Collector appears he implores her to see sense.

I honestly wouldent put it past him to be obessed with her. The guy is CRAZY, religious fanatics are often two faced and cruel, and many of them harm children and women. Even NOW you get child brides in places like AMERICA, not to mention abuse covered up by the church. Females are second class citizens at best, the are to be submissive to men, that men are the head of women just as god is the head of the church. In Phillip's timeline she would be considered a woman also. Then theres fanfics which have Phillip see her as a gift from god, a beautiful reward for doing the lords work. In the Bioling Isles I suppose he would say its the "Titans Will" that she be his empress, much like christian fanatics, now and hundreds of years ago, would say to justify his vile actions. Some may question it, but, if thats what the Titan wills, it must be a good thing?

I can imagine she would be utterly horrified at the notion.

[midnightsslut]

religion is one of the most prominent recurring themes on the album, and it has been present in some capacity for quite a few records now. taylor previously compared love to religion: her saving grace, her belief system, and a fated divine intervention (false god, cornelia street, and cruel summer are the best examples of this). ‘sacred new beginnings that became my religion’ and ‘we’d still worship this love even if it’s a false god’ are two of the defining statements about her philosophy on the lover album.

taylor doesn’t want to leave all of that behind on ttpd, at least not at the beginning. the first supernatural force she mentions is the spaceship on down bad, which she compares to a skylight of freedom in the epilogue. *something* has finally come to save her from her life of suffering. she doesn’t care if it’s a force of good at first; if anything, she’s just fine being taken away by aliens. she views this man as her destiny. it isn’t until guilty as sin? that taylor starts to ponder the moral implications of what she’s doing. is she guilty as sin for wanting to leave her previous religion and relationship behind? she comes to the conclusion that, even if she rolls the stone away and gets resurrected/redeemed, she cannot avoid the fallout. she is okay with the thought of having to wait, as long as both lovers vow to be together forever, just as she once did with someone else in false god. ‘I choose you and me religiously’ finishes the bridge of the song in a direct callback to cornelia street.

the next mention of religion has murkier imagery. she claims that she does not need the Lord’s help to save this man. she sees the halo that he has, and she can fix him herself. now that she feels free of her prior cage, she isn’t looking for divine intervention anymore. she wants control. she is their route to salvation.

when the relationship falls apart, she retreats back into the position of a believer rather than a divine figure. she compares him to a Holy Ghost who promised to save her and take her to heaven. instead, she is in hell in every sense of the word: she’s down bad and feels guilty for digging up the grave. he was a jehovah’s witness who promised that she could break free of the cage imposed by love without changing her religion altogether; she would’ve just had to switch denominations. she could still have a marriage and kids! she could still have a blue tortured poet! the man was different, but not the dreams they had together. the story of the first part of the album ends here. her faith has been broken, and she has only found any semblance of sanity by refusing to mention these belief systems altogether.

side b/the anthology blends the christian imagery of side a with goddesses, sorcerers, and prophecies. she bargains with these powers to let her have the future she wants (the prophecy). she doesn’t sound like someone believing in salvation. if anything, she feels cursed. she decides that the concept of divinely ordained timing will never work in certain relationships (‘the goddess of timing once found us beguiling / she said she was trying / peter, was she lying?’). this disdain extends onto her perception of other people’s faith (‘bet they never spared a prayer for my soul’). she does position herself as a prophet in cassandra, but even then, she admits that the role has hurt her. perhaps the pain in thank you aimee was meant to be, or perhaps she was just strong enough to build a legacy in spite of it, boulder by boulder. is she a martyr? does she want to be? or did she save herself?

the only real love song on this half of the album makes no mention of fate or any divine forces. it wasn’t meant to be. it’s not a supernatural invisible string or lightning in a bottle. she is just in love.

the album ends with the manuscript, which revisits an old story of a defining, formative heartbreak. as she sings ‘at last, she knew what the agony had been for’ while describing the legacy of her writing, she seems to revert to thinking about the purpose of trauma. the only exception is that, in this case, she is the one who found meaning in her pain by turning it into a manuscript. writing is her belief system now, and she proselytizes by telling her stories and thus giving up the manuscript.

ultimately, her belief in destiny has chewed her up and spat her out. she so desperately clung to her existing belief systems that she was fooled by a conman, which left her feeling cursed. religion is supposed to be with someone even in their darkest moments, but the album explains that taylor often felt abandoned. the only constant in her life was, well, herself. she’ll be okay, but her pen will be her saving grace.

[hauntedbythenarrative]

The darkness said, You die whether you risk anything or not. I emptied ashes from my pockets. I crawled to feel the stones cut my knees, God's foot on my throat. The dream said, Follow me. The angel said, You're here.

Yellowjackets (2021-)//Andrei Tarkovsky//If I Believe You, The 1975//Agamemnon, Aeschylus//“dear thanatos, [it wasn’t a dream…],” come the slumberless to the land of nod, Traci Brimhall

[cigarettefawn]

because you’re young

you’re wild

you’re free

you dancing circles around me

you’re fucking crazy

[c-hrona]

Pietà

[clockworkbee]

Them: So what's all this hype around The Folk of The Air? It's just another YA enemies-to-lovers, urban fantasy series.

Me:

[anghraine]

[For context, I'm an agnostic lesbian raised Mormon with some scattered Catholic influences from summers with my bio dad and his family. I have buckets of religious trauma and associations as a very predictable result, though not everything was terrible.]

So I was waiting for my best friend and his girlfriend to get home from dinner with my BFF's mother—this is the first time his girlfriend, who was a close friend of mine before meeting him, had met his family. Ash had gone downstairs to change and wipe off her make-up when someone knocked insistently at our door.

The doorknob is a bit persnickety so I rushed to let in my BFF, only to find myself facing down an unexpected but very familiar sight: young male Mormon missionaries.

me: Oh ... hi. missionaries: Good evening, ma'am. Would you like to hear news about Jesus? me: Um, I'm not—I'm a member, actually. I was raised in the Church. missionaries: Really? me: Yes :) I was the pianist for the primary in our old ward for years :) missionaries: Oh, what ward was that? me: St Helens. I didn't really go when I was in grad school and I just graduated. missionaries: Ahh, I see. Well, if you want to go back, [directions to the local church]. me: Thank you. missionaries, after a very awkward pause: Do you need any help with anything? me: Oh, we're... [*resists the urge to point out that the other household members who just happened to be absent are a Jewish atheist socialist, a devoutly Muslim bisexual post-colonial scholar, and an Exvangelical trans woman still processing her rage, and none of them would have the slightest desire to get help from Mormons*] We're good, really. My parents are the ones who would need help from the Church, I think, and they live over in [town], so their closest ward is actually the one in [other town] and they can reach out to them. Thanks, though :) missionaries: We could just leave our number with you in case you ever needed anything. me [very conscious of the temptation to call on the Church when a crisis strikes and I desperately need help, and how trapped and shitty I feel afterwards]: That's really nice, but I think we're fine. There are several of us here. I hope you have a good night, though! :)

[evesetchings]

More doodle of Dream Eater! My space riders oc! Who is surprisingly fun to draw!

I’m gonna take this opportunity to turn this fun couple of shitposts into a lore dump about them and their relationships with other characters, okay? Okay.

So as said in my last few posts about this guy, Dream Eater is a being whose sole motivation is its own survival. Anything else, including the lives and well being of their fellow members, is secondary. Despite this, Dream Eater is still one of the highest ranking members of the cult, being able to communicate directly to the prototype, probably because it lets him keep a close eye on Dream Eater’s behavior, and because their powers not only let them go on covert manipulation missions to make conquering planets easier, but also because it lets them inhabit the bodies of fellow cultists and report directly back to the prototype. It also has the wonderful advantage of making cultists more careful with what they say or do, because who knows if one of your fellow members has a brain sucking monster watching you. Dream eater itself couldn’t care less about the grunts of the cult, viewing them as disposable meat shields or cheap hosts, (they still need to eat after all) but with more powerful members, Dream Eater turns into the biggest ass kisser imaginable, both to lower the risk of being murdered by them, but also because it gives them a powerful ally. After all, the tougher the partner, the longer they can distract the threat.

Their relationship with the space riders is pretty bad on principle, but Catnap holds a special place of loathing in his heart for Dream Eater, as their first encounter being when they were sent on a mission to “gently persuade” (read: gaslight and manipulate) into joining the cult of his own free will. It didn’t work of course, but Catnap has reviled them ever since and Dream Eater themselves isn’t to fond of the either for making him lose some favor with the Prototype for their failure.

(also despite being a MASSIVE coward, Dream Eater isn’t much of a slouch when physically fighting. Those claws aren’t just for show and being able to shove yourself down an enemy’s throat gives you pretty good access to their vital organs)

This au belongs to @onyxonline, check out their stuff!

[gingermintpepper]

Hi!! I don't know if you remember me, but I'm the person you explained the Castalia thing to a few days ago. I've been following you for a while now, but I just managed to go through your blog well and proper, and I'm here to express both my gratitude for the amount of info and links you've shared (I did NOT know about the hepatoscopy and haruspicy, and I'm about to go down a lengthy rabbit hole) and my horror at once again being given a new hyperfixation (I didn't imagine wanting to read about liver-divination help).

Also, also, are you the author of Exeunt Phoebus Apollo on AO3 because that was the fic that sent me on this greek mythology spree, and it's so good I got obsessed with Apollo, and he's everywhere around me now. Thank you for writing it!

AAAAAA THIS IS SO SWEET?? THANK YOU!! I do remember you and hey man, I'm always happy to help <33

I'm so glad to recruit someone else to my hepatoscopy group because it is a long and storied tradition with many many different types of study and schools of thought dating all the way back to the Sumerians! It's an extremely underrated bit of study when it comes to sketching portraits of divination and prophecy when it comes to adaptations of imaginings of greek myth works - similar to bird augury (which was such a widespread skill that most people had some level of understanding of the basics of what the omens of common birds meant the way people now can look at the clouds over head and know if it'll rain and when approximately that rain'll happen).

It's a great and common misunderstanding that things like prophecy and magic were these fantastic elements that had no tangible features to their practices and while there's nothing wrong with interpreting things as more fantastical for the sake of coolness or aesthetic, I personally think these elements are interesting enough to be worth looking into and portraying!

Also yes, I did write Exeunt 😳I'm very very honoured that you enjoyed my work so much and I'm even more grateful that it could let you see the Apollo in everything 💖 Thank you for reading it!!

[ace-and-the-rpg-horrors]

can people be normal about Muslims for two seconds oh my God

tell me why obvious and casual stereotyping is unacceptable until it comes to us

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

[stargleam-star]

In Star, everyone keeps referring to Splashtail as crazy. Buuut idk how I feel about that descriptor. Especially because its mentioned a lot. I'm probably just reading into it too much lol

[vigilskept]

gnashing my teeth thinking about how veilguard talks about the gods only as a joke when they could've gone somewhere truly crazy.... you're so right.

Yeah... you get it. It's just such a missed opportunity!

I don't even mind the jokey tone they use a lot of the time, because we all joke about things we struggle to understand/cope with.

Except Veilguard refuses to let you even try to broach the subject beyond that surface level. In fact, when it does let you engage with it at all, it manages to make things even less nuanced!

I'm just going to talk about Bellara's quest here since it's the most directly linked with the elven gods, and it's already a lot. Fundamentally, her companion quest is asking us two things:

Should elves be blamed for the actions of the Evanuris?

Should they preserve any of their past at all?

The first one is absurd to even begin with. It's not even a good or interesting take on the (very christian!) question: "Are we responsible for the sins of our ancestors?"

The Evanuris are not the ancestors of modern elves. Dalish religion implies that modern elves descend from those who the rebels never freed from slavery to the Evanuris.

This setup is already awful without looking at any of the parallels Bioware has (intentionally) drawn between the elves of Thedas and Jewish/Indigenous people. I have to put the rest of this under the cut because I genuinely don't think it can be shortened without making it sound flippant. In the context of the coding of the elves, the theological/social implications of all of this are so much worse.

TLDR: the indigenous/jewish coding of the elves makes bioware's treatment of elven religion in veilguard thoughtless at best, cruel at worst. they did not have to write themselves into this corner. there was a way of handling this lore reveal without the implication of elven religion (again, jewish/indigenous coded) being obsolete

So, the religion of the Dalish was part of their enslavement. It's the belief they were forced into by the cruel gods they are still devoted to. That's already pretty bad. How could it get worse, you might wonder?

Whether Bioware deviated from their initial inspirations for the elves or not, the implications for these lore reveals in light of those parallels are particularly cruel. Those two core questions in Bellara's quest? Yeah. Those have both been levied against the oppressed groups that Bioware chose to draw inspiration from. Both historically and presently. To justify atrocities against them.

And to be clear, Bioware does not deviate from or subvert the usual indigeous and jewish-coding of the elves in their writing here. If anything, they end up actively endorsing a very significant element of antisemitic and anti-indigenous sentiment.

Indigenous-Coding

Advocates of colonisation have always justified it by arguing they were 'saving' groups of people who were stuck in the past. They had been ‘left in the dark’ through ignorance of Christianity. In the more secular sense, this was framed as Europeans having journeyed through history to reach enlightenment, while the rest of the world was still in an ‘uncivilized’ state.

Christianity and progress had to be brought to these people to save their souls and bring them into the future with everyone else. Their Gods? There were only two possible ways to frame those. Either they were not real at all, or they were evil. Either way, they were obsolete.

In the Americas, these arguments were still used when corralling indigenous children into residential schools or tearing them from communities through the adoption system. Governments pushed the idea that they had to be forced to assimilate because they were 'backward' in their practices and beliefs.

In the settler-colonial state Canada, where Bioware is based, it's still common enough to hear people justify all of this as having been done "for their own good." Even those who admit that the ways colonization was perpetuated were cruel will still try to defend it by telling you, "it was bad, but their ancestors weren't saints either."

Sounding painfully familiar yet? A little uncomfortable in the context of Bellara's questline?

Jewish-Coding

Since the dawn of Christian Church, Jewish people have had a very fraught place in Christian theology. Christianity claims that that the coming of the messiah in the person of Jesus Christ makes the religion of Judaism obsolete. Christians believed the obvious answer to this problem was that Jewish people should convert.

When many did not, they were labeled as ignorant, obstinate, stuck in the past. They were so focused on their history that they couldn't see the truth which had been revealed in the present. There’s a significant legacy of this idea in Christian artwork with depictions of Synagoga blindfolded next to the clear eyed Ecclesia. You still hear echoes of this sentiment in antisemitic language today.

As for the nature of the Jewish God... there is some deviation here. For some Christians, He is God the Father, and He is good. For others — and this idea has been around from early Christianity till now — He is the Creator of the material world, but He is evil.

There are innumerable variations of Christian gnosticism that probably wouldn't be productive to get into on a Dragon Age Blog. What I need to underline here though, is that the idea of the Old Testament God as the devil/the demiurge/fundamentally evil, has been used to justify atrocity towards Jewish people for over a thousand years.

Should elves be blamed then? For the sundering of the Titans? For the Veil? For the Blight? For the evils of this world, created by their Gods?

Implications for Veilguard

Not only is religion in Dragon Age: The Veilguard often devoid of nuance or ignored outright, when the game does engage with it at all, it does so in a way that quite literally draws on these incredibly harmful antisemitic and anti-indigenous sentiments that have been (and still are) used to perpetuate real harm.

To be clear, I don't think the writing here intends to endorse the idea that elves should be blamed for any of what's going on. Bellara's anxieties are being projected onto her people as a whole while she grapples with what this all means for her, I get that. In fact, you could be generous and read some of this as a critique of this particular kind of anti-indigenous/jewish bigotry.

However, I don't think that absolves the writers of any of the implications they've created by confirming that the elven pantheon did exist and was canonically evil.

Elements of Dalish/elven culture might be preserved after all this, but the conclusion the game railroads you into is that their religion is obsolete. Just like Judaism. Just like the many Indigenous religions around the world. Except in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, it’s no longer just the bigotry of outsiders claiming that to be the case. It’s now the objective truth of the setting.

Going forward, the elves of Thedas can keep their culture, but they can’t practice their religion. If they continued to practice, they would be framed the way the Venatori are: evil and stuck in the past. This really can’t be overstated: this is the exact rhetoric that has justified centuries of violence and oppression of Jewish and Indigenous people. This rhetoric is still around and still weaponized.

It’s so cruel to create an in world ‘lineage’ that draws so heavily from their cultures and histories, then validate the rhetoric that has been used to hurt them. At best, it’s thoughtless. But as a company based in a settler-colonial state, this is something they should’ve put thought into, given that they chose to code their elves and Jewish and Indigenous. That was their responsibility, actually.

What gets me about all this is that they actually didn't need to force that conclusion at all. They could have kept the Evanuris as cruel tyrants without demonising the Creators and their worship at the same time.

The Evanuris weren't always Gods. They weren't even always rulers.

In Trespasser, when asked how they became Gods, Solas tells Lavellan that they did so slowly. That it started with a war. That fear bred a desire for simplicity. For right and wrong. For chains of command. That generals became respected elders, then kings, and finally gods.

Veilguard confirms all of this. The addition it makes is that before all this, the first elves were spirits who made their bodies out of the Titans. This all occurred over the course of thousands of years.

None of this needs to be retconned in order to allow for a respectful yet nuanced portrayal of religion!

TLDR pt2: bioware, u could’ve avoided literally ALL of this by making the evanuris part of a priestly class who seized power after the war with the titans. it wouldn’t even have undermined ur lore! u could’ve kept dalish religion alive! u could’ve implied complex political dynamics for your ancient elves without even having to write it! why didn’t you even try?

Trying to Fix This Mess

Say the elves took their bodies from the Titans and settled the lands of Thedas. Say the Titans even allowed this for a time. The dwarves were made from their own bodies after all.

Yet the elves didn't have the same connection with the Titans as the dwarves did. They had no stone-sense, so they couldn't understand the Titans' song.

Generations down the line, some of them took too much from the Titans. More than they were willing to give. That was when the Titans lashed out, making the earth tremble so that all the elves had built crumbled beneath them.

And what if the firstborn among the elves had taken up priesthood to guide the younger ones. They were closer to spirits than the elves that were born into this world, and so the younger ones looked to them for guidance. Maybe they were the ones who were trusted to reach out to the more powerful of the spirits who chosen stay in the Fade, their old kin who preferred to keep their distance from the physical world to preserve the essence of what they were. The spirits of Justice, of Benevolence, of Craft. Those who the elven people paid homage to, and trusted to preserve them in turn.

So when everything seemed to fall apart, the elves turned to their Keepers, their priests, and asked of them what they ought to do. How could they make the earth stop shaking? What would they have to do to be at peace again?

Whatever the spirits themselves may have responded, many of the Keepers (among them the Evanuris) took up arms and chose war. They saw it could be won so they fought, sundering Titans from their dreams and stilling the land.

And yet there was no peace.

Some Keepers sought to hold on to their power as generals, and wanted to wage war on new shores to keep it. Some Keepers thought they had already gone too far, claiming they had acted without the guidance of the spirits who hadn't wanted war.

These Keepers could've caused chaos and endless bloodshed, so the Evanuris formed their alliance to suppress the others. Likely, they thought they were doing so for the benefit of all the elven people. More war meant more death, and it was needless now that the land was still. And even if what they did to the Titans was wrong, it was done and they could not fix it. Better to silence those who meant to stir up fear among the people.

The Evanuris fought until they were the last faction left, naming the few holdouts the Forgotten Ones. They were praised for bringing peace to Elvhenan, and trusting in their guidance their people crowned them as rulers.

Yet some dissent always remained. None of them were infallible. They were no longer spirits, they hadn't been for thousands of years. They were now more accustomed to command than to priesthood after all that war. They had drawn on the power they had stolen from the Titans to gain the advantage over their enemies, and the corruption of the Blight was starting creep in, ever-so-slowly.

Maybe some of the people, unhappy with their rule, started to voice the thought that was expressed by their rival Keepers once more: that the Evanuris had grown distant from the spirits. That Elgar'nan didn't serve Justice anymore. That Mythal had strayed from Benevolence.

So Evanuris took the mantle of godhood for themselves. It was only for peace and stability.

It would be too dangerous if anyone could claim they were deviating from the will of the spirits, so they would claim they were those great spirits. Elgar'nan was Justice, Mythal was Benevolence. They would use their rule only for the benefit of the people, not abuse their power.

And there you go. None of what I've written above can't be neatly incorporated into the existing lore of Veilguard. It leaves the elves of Thedas precisely where they started in Dragon Age: Origins. Distant from their ancient Gods, trying to pick up the pieces of their forgotten past.

[gaytobymeres]

he's so sweet

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

.

[winter-came]

It's nearly a year, just 12 months, since I fully gave my life to Jesus Christ and God. And while I could write a whole essay (and I might eventually) on how my life changed, I wanna say something else right now.

What I often see in the present day (yes, among christians themselves too), is God spoken of as an indifferent, if not downright narcissistic terrifying, entity.

And I am seriously sad over that. It feels like God of The Old Testament. Whom, in my opinion, was deeply misinterpreted and therefore He sent us Jesus.

He demands, the most important commandments, that we have faith in Him and we love eachother. Why are we acting He wants so terribly much of us?

Maybe we should stop looking at God as this demanding ruler, some big brother watching and waiting for us to stumble so he can condemn us. Maybe stop looking at him as an indifferent and harsh father figure you have to whip your back for, someone you have to scrape your knees to the bone for.

Maybe we should start looking at him as an artist, as creator, as a loving father. We are made in his image right? That's repeated often throughout the word.

Humans are, in their core, artists and creators. Fond of joy and beauty and kindness. Look at what humans created. All the cathedrals, castles, bridges, all the paintings and statues. All so thought through, detailed, beautiful and complex. Why then is it so hard to believe the beautiful world we live in was created by God?

Look at the trees, why do leaves have edges? Why does grass smell? Why is sunset thousands shades and not once exactly the same? Why are all stones of different size and shape and color? What tyrant would care for such details? And what artist wouldn't?

Maybe stop saying God doesn't have empathy, that he deserted us, that he is a stranger to beauty and joy. When each day is crafted and new. God loves us, He waits for us. He wants us to come back to him. And once you do? You won't remember how harsh life was before. I know what I am talking about.

If just 1% of your soul is willing to meet Him, he will lead you into the light and you will never look back. And I pray for everybody to experience the change and the revival I have had through Jesus Christ.

The world is beautiful. God is good and gracious. You're never far too away and too damaged to not be welcomed back by Him.