#his dark materials spoilers

[cinematv]

HIS DARK MATERIALS 3.06 | The Abyss

[where-our-stories-start]

[leehallfae]

his dark materials (2019–2022) s03 e05 “no way out” // “come home with me (reprise),” hadestown - anaïs mitchell // “way down hadestown ii,” hadestown nytw // “a gathering storm,” hadestown // “if it’s true,” hadestown // “wait for me (reprise),” hadestown // “our lady of the underground,” hadestown // s03 e06 “the abyss”

[not-so-mundane-after-all]

[thasminlove]

His Dark Materials series 3 showed Queer love to be at the core of the beauty, creativity, imagination, & fabric of the universe(s), with both Baruch & Balthamos & Mary’s stories demonstrating this.

In this Ted Talk I will…

[lailedcat]

shoutout to mary malone his dark materials, a character I imprinted on as a wee unaware queer child in the west of ireland, and shoutout to the show creators who made her a queer woman from the west of ireland. thank you.

[ultimate-tragic-couples-showdown]

Round 2a - Poll 4

Merlin & Arthur (Merlin BBC) vs Lyra Belacqua & William Parry (His Dark Materials)

[fire-lord-katara]

Metatron didn't tank the Blasphemy Couple and was sent to super hell

[forsooth-verily]

Lee's shit eating grin as Will Parry and Roger Parsons argue over who's the bigger Lyra stan

[our-future-is-up-to-us-2]

I Am Not Ok

This is a post about the TV show/book series His Dark Materials. Mostly about the TV show at the moment, all things considered. 

I just finished watching the finale, and I am a fucking mess. A complete, fucking mess. 

I usually don’t cry over much. I read the books, and I knew that everything was going to happen. The daemon separation, the Land of The Dead, Mary Malone and the mulefa, Lyra and Will’s kisses, Baruch and Balthamos, everything.

All of it. I told myself it was going to be emotional, I told myself they would ruin me, and they did. Every detail from the bench itself and the positioning, to Will opening the window and breaking the knife, reflecting on Lyra and taking snippets from the past episodes, having Marisa and Asriel die for the sake of their daughter, all their motives surmounting to such a thing. 

Asriel deserved to die. Marisa didn’t, in my eyes. The show creators had spent their time, very well-spent time building up each individual character, Marisa as my specific example right now. She was manipulative and heartless within the first season, powerful and controlling in the second, and understanding in the third. She understood her weakness, her downfall. The suppressed love of her daughter. She wallowed and grieved over it, and yet she still used her powers for good. 

Now to talk about the goodness of such an adaptation. Yes, there were variations from the books, in particular, Jopari/John Parry’s death in Season 2.  I was distraught at the time. How could they take Lee’s death, word for word, emotion for emotion from the books, and mess up John Parry’s so much?! I believe that this was for plot’s sake, and the audience’s sake. Those who read the books would be bitter (myself), and those who hadn’t would likely be confused by a sudden story of unrequited love between John Parry the shaman and a witch. But they made up for it, big time. The creators took the symbolism of the bench to bittersweet, valuable and heart wrenching extremes. They took the symbolism of glances and subtle touch to build into the most romantic swell on TV that I’ve ever watched. They took the themes of storytelling, power, religion, love, and enhanced them all within this high fantasy world, cultivating different dynamics, making each element of the story worth it in its own way. 

And a thought occurred. Will is the Knife Bearer. Knife. Bearer. With a show based around books that involved a central theme of Adam and Eve and religion, the knife acts as a burden, a cross he must bear, per se, because Will and Lyra will forever be together. Their love changed the present, but they alone cannot change the past. He bore the power of the knife, passed every test, and broke it by the end, once and for all. A loss of power. A loss of the overwhelming grief and burden of thinking of Lyra, desperate not to fall back into temptation and cutting a window again... 

Everything about this show has moved me, changed me for the better. 

So, thank you His Dark Materials. Thank you for being an ongoing fantasy, a relevant, moving story, with a wonderful adaptation that will live on. 

“Tell them stories,” Lyra said to the ghosts of the Land of The Dead. 

“Tell them stories,” Atal told Mary, unaware of her status as the serpent.  

The story has been, and will continue to be told. Forever, I’d like to hope.

[ray-theoretical-trucker]

im reading "his dark materials" by philip pullman rn and i almost finished the second book(the subtle knife) and im so mad at it and sad about it cause lee scoresby is one of my favorite characters in there

if u know u know cause spoilers

but i really wanted to rant cause 😭😠😭

[sophiemars]

I finally watched season three of His Dark Materials and oh wow...

I had already read (and re read) the books when I was younger, and then again when the show was announced, so I knew this would be a super emotional series, specially the finale. But I started crying in the end of episode 4 and then literally never stopped? Like from the moment Lyra leaves Pan behind, Marisa and her daemon, Roger and Lee crossing over, Marisa and Asriel jumping to the Abyss with Metatron and then finally the entire duration of episode 8 and Lyra and Will's goodbye??? I am an emotional wreck right now... Fuck Philip Pullman, and I mean it as the sincerest compliment

[monsieurenjlolras]

I forgot about the part of Amber Spyglass where the kids find the half-eaten but still living senile decrepit body of god and then watch him die

[liskantope]

I just finished rereading Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, the first book of which I'd read quite a few times over the years (it was always and still is my favorite) and the third book of which I had probably never read a second time, after reading it for the first time as a teenager. I had little to no recollection of a lot of major plot events in book 3, in fact, and felt like I was reading some parts of it for the first time. All in all, I found the third book to be better, less of a slog, and less unmanageably over-ambitious in its scope than my impression had been when I had most recently read it half my life ago. In fact, while I'm not uncritical of many aspects of the book, I was pleasantly surprised by how well it tied together the whole trilogy, both in terms of character arcs and the established physics of Pullman's universe (or parallel universes).

One thing that's more striking to me now about the third book, though, is how in several ways it's a little ambiguous whether Pullman is retconning something rather than revealing a new layer to the plot or a character's motivations that he had deliberately hidden in the first book.

[A major book 1 spoiler and mild book 3 spoilers below.]

One example of this, which I think was most likely deliberately planned, is Asriel appearing at the end of book 1 to be on the Church's side in wanting to exterminate Dust (at a climactic moment in which he is revealed to be ruthless if not downright evil in other ways, and is locked in a sweet embrace with our main villain Marisa Coulter), and then in book 3, by which time it's been clear for a good while that Asriel is plotting against not only the Church but God himself, Asriel explains to Marisa that he was only pretending to want to get rid of Dust because he thought she'd "prefer a lie".

Another example, that I've wondered about ever since I first read the trilogy, is the fact that it's stated early in book 1 that Lyra is prophesized to commit some great betrayal that will have profound consequences, and with the twist at the end of that book, I (and probably most other first-time readers?) assumed that betrayal to be her unknowingly leading her best friend Roger to his doom. But then it's explicitly stated in book 3 that the betrayal is her choice to leave her dæmon behind at the entrance of the Land of the Dead. I can accept that this makes more sense in some ways (it was an action taken in the light of full knowledge, unlike what she did to Roger), but it kind of makes less sense in other ways (Will did the same thing along with her, even if he didn't have an external dæmon), and I enjoyed explaining it through the book 1 twist a lot more.

A third example, where I feel much more sure that Pullman just changed his mind, began with a scene in book 1 when Lyra is visiting Dr. Lanselius and is given a quick task to do outside, and while she's gone Lanselius discusses a devastating prophecy about her with the Gypsy characters that are in the room, emphasizing that all will be ruined if Lyra knows anything about the prophesy. A similar sort of scene happens later in the book, when Lyra is asleep in the balloon and Lee Scoresby has such a discussion with Serafina Pekkala. And in both of those scenes, I was kind of rolling my eyes and thinking, "If it's crucial to the fate of the world that Lyra not know her destiny, they're being awfully incautious here, given that Lyra could be just outside of the room or only pretending to be asleep." And then, as it happens -- now remember, I knew book 1 fairly well but had forgotten even many of the major plot events of book 3 let alone most of the dialogs -- in the chapter "No Way Out" of book 3, Lyra reveals that in fact she was standing outside the door during the Lanselius scene and so overheard part of the prophesy, and this is used to guide her motivations. This certainly vindicates my kneejerk reaction of thinking the characters were acting very recklessly in that scene, but the interesting question is, had it occurred to the author that they were acting recklessly, and at the time of writing book 1 did he have in mind that Lyra was in fact secretly outside the room listening?

[lucimiir]

Crying because when Marisa Coulter made her final choice of goodness and love after a lifetime of self hate, her monkey wasn’t even with her

[ultimate-tragic-couples-showdown]

Revival Round - Poll 11

Mia Fey & Diego Armando (Ace Attorney) vs Lyra Belacqua & William Parry (His Dark Materials) vs Moebius N & Moebius M (Xenoblade Chronicles 3)