#i can’t draw all the problematic characters so i chose the top 8 instead

[pybownies]

I Lie to Myself Parody Part 2

A sequel to the silly fancomics I did back then (I Lie to Myself Part 1 https://www.tumblr.com/pybownies/697530852667752448/i-lie-to-myself-parody)

[arcanalogue]

So an odd thing happened to me several times now and i do not believe in coincidences. When i have asked the cards a question, i had a certain card in my mind that could answer it. I haven’t thought about, but it was more like an intuitive answer: it just popped out in my mind. When i have picked the card, the exact same card i have thought about came out! What can it mean??

The Querent goes on to write: “I even asked the cards one time what card could describe them the best and The Hermit came in my mind and when i picked the card it was The Hermit… it’s odd, my significator card is 8 Strength and they chose to be 9 The Hermit… Anyway this thing happened to basic spreads too. Many times… Thank you so for your time and knowledge!“

[I keep forgetting there’s a character limit on inbox questions. If you need more space to ask your question, email me at arcanalogue@gmail.com, I’ll make sure the whole thing gets posted!]

Hi Querent! Congrats on discovering your very own Spooky Tarot Mystery! I’m glad to hear you are vibing with your deck to this extent. 

First and foremost, what it means is that your practice has evolved. When we’re first setting out, we encounter all kinds of readings and card-drawings that seem strangely loaded, and we rarely have an inkling of what they mean – or can be certain they mean anything at all. 

As one’s practice advances, their relationship with the cards becomes more like… well, any relationship, really! There is a kind of dance to it, in which you’re reaching out into the unknown in order to have these conversations, and sometimes you can feel something reaching back. 

But what is it? And can we trust it? Is it safe? Is it real, or are we like Narcissus, being seduced by our own reflection?

Questions like these are why I tend to describe the source as divined wisdom as “the unknown,” instead of attributing it to a specific entity or deity. People are welcome to draw their own conclusions, but as a teacher I think this is the most responsible answer, as well as the most honest. 

I’ll never forget my own first Spooky Tarot Mystery, though I’ll spare you the details. Suffice to say I did the same thing you did: I reached out to a tarot teacher/practitioner whose opinion I trusted and asked whether they thought it meant anything significant. 

The answer I got was a bit more gruff, along the lines of “Don’t be silly, that’s preposterous!” At the time I found the vehemence of that response sort of hilariously inappropriate, but I have to admit that it broke the spell of mystery that had been winding me in its tentacles, and allowed me to laugh at myself.

And that brings me to the other part of my answer: past a certain level of attainment in the Spooky Arts, you have to continually include these kinds checks and balances. You need to be able to remain sensitive enough to vibe with the spooky and numinous, but you also have to be able to stand outside that experience and appreciate how absurd and potentially meaningless it is to anyone but us.

This is how we maintain our tether to the human world, planting our flag at the crossroads of intersecting realities, keeping ourselves accessible to others walking the same path. As readers, I think this it’s extremely important to protect this faculty of our wisdom. 

It’s not just for others – the secrets you uncover as a mystical explorer give you all the tools and incentive you need to crawl MILES up your own ass, perhaps never to return. With alarming speed, everything you read, see, feel, or think begins to seem like THE ULTIMATE TRUTH manifesting before you, pointing toward an ultimate reality, a purity of practice, as well as one true understanding of the universe. 

I can’t tell you how many magicians, artists, witches, and religious types I’ve watched this happen to. Some of them drift back down to earth eventually, especially in the face of hardships resulting from these delusions, which can be indistinguishable from (or aggravated by) mental illness. Others need their attainments be real SO BADLY that they just never come back down, and they end up surrounding themselves with the kind of folks who’ll buy into them unquestioningly, usually in exchange for mutual support in their own preposterous delusions. 

I try to stay clear of judgment in such cases. This is just one kind of path humans tread, one kind of story, but it’s not the one for me, and I’d prefer not to encourage these tendencies in others. 

There may come a time in your life when you can dwell with the numinous 24/7, when that umbilicus anchoring you to Earth finally snaps and falls away on its own. As a teacher, I don’t think anything good can come from hastening that process, and it’s problematic that we end up aggrandizing those whose awareness sets them the furthest apart from earthly consensual reality, who can no longer meaningfully connect with others. 

Because you have to be able to connect with someone in order to serve them, otherwise you just end up expecting everyone to serve you.  

This is why holy people occupy the top and the bottom of that spectrum I created a while back that helps gauge the usefulness of uncanny advice. Everyone wants to find the fastest, most authentic, most direct path to this level of attainment, to harness these powers (or at least appear to) as early in life as possible. Their reasons may be completely altruistic: they want to alleviate suffering, help others find peace, cure themselves of dysfunction, face death with no fears. Or perhaps they feel like an outsider in this world, and are looking for a sense of peace and acceptance in the vast unknown.

Well, the unknown isn’t an inherently dangerous place, but nor is it inherently safe. So when you’re exploring the back-alleys of your own consciousness, or cultivating practices that help you peek behind the veil that hangs between worlds, you have to build in the kinds of protections and fail-safes that keep you from falling further down the rabbit-hole than you’re altogether ready for. 

Along the way, we are thrown nuggets that really do serve a purpose for others, as well as ourselves. The fact that The Hermit came up in a question asking the deck about its own nature is fascinating to me, Querent. I’m glad that spark of wisdom managed to leap all the way over to me, by way of your question. 

There’s a fascinating precedent for asking the oracle questions about itself. Carl Jung once famously performed an I Ching reading asking the oracle to reveal itself to him in a similar way, and the reply was really interesting  – it’s included in the edition of the I Ching that he wrote an introduction for). 

The Hermit embodies the very idea of lifelong spiritual practice, in a way that underscores the importance of sharing wisdom, leaving markers for other aspirants to follow – “For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

That quote from the Book of Matthew kicks off the chapter about The Hermit in a book called Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. The author (who published the book anonymously) has this to say about our lantern-swinging hero:  

“For it is the venerable and mysterious Hermit who was master of the most intimate and most cherished dreams of my youth, as moreover he is the master of dreams for all youth in every country, who are enamoured by the call to seek the narrow gate and the hard way to the Divine.”

Everything the Hermit symbolizes, we work toward in our relationship with the cards. We pursue the unknown, and wherever we find ourselves, we put up a lantern that lets others know how far we made it. Thus, even the most dedicated Hermit never becomes absorbed enough in his own Spooky Mysteries to become truly solipsistic. Nor does he mistake his tiny light for that of The Sun. He is simply one data point – one Hermit out of many, all of whom set out on their own journeys, reaching vastly different conclusions. 

Ultimately, your mind is the only tool you have to work with, Querent. By engaging with the unknown, you sharpen it. Whatever you do with that keen edge remains entirely up to you – no one else can help you tend it… or protect you from it. 

Meanwhile, whatever sparks may be struck in the process of that sharpening, I hope you’ll keep sharing them with querents of your own, and with the rest of us. 

Thanks for your question!

Have a tarot reading request or tarot-related question for Arcanalogue? Ask here. Tips accepted (but not required) via Venmo, @arcanalogue. Or support my Patreon? I’d love that.

[scorpio-karma]

Did Delena Sink The Vampire Diaries’ Ratings?

So I watched Vampire Diaries from the very beginning in 2009 all the until the finale last month and though I had been with show that long I’d still call myself  a casual viewer – there are quite a few episodes I willfully decided not to watch, all of which are in season 5 – but anyways over the years I’ve noticed how much the viewership dropped dramatically, and I wanted to know just how much and which season was the worst. So I looked up the rating for each seasons did some math and here’s what I found. 

Disclaimer: The conclusions I draw from the numbers are my opinions, and not to be taken as fact. I’m being as objective as I can be but bias is there whether I want it there or not.    

So to determine the worst season the usual route is the simplistic view and see which season had the lowest overall ratings. Now I did the math myself based on the numbers from Wikipedia because the some of the season averages made no mathematical sense (season seven′s average was at 1.49 when not a single episode that season had a rating that high) – I checked the numbers three times to make sure I was right. Also because the numbers are from Wikipedia they’re only the US ratings.

So according to that approach season six, seven, and eight are the worst seasons which isn’t surprising since with most shows the rating gradually drop – but are those seasons actually the worst? No, because you can’t satisfy an audience you’ve already lost – meaning only the people that watched the season can determine it’s quality. So using purely the numbers the best way to determine the worst seasons was to look at how many viewers were lost between each season and assess how well each season kept it’s audience within the season – basically the one that drove the most people away.

So with that in mind I looked at the amount of viewers lost between one season to the next. Instead of just looking at the raw numbers I took the percent as I felt that it would more accurately represent how much was lost because using percents would determine how much of their existing audience they lost.

So the reason why I’m looking at the numbers lost between each season is because I’m going off the logic that the season before determines how many viewers will or in this case will not come back for the next season. According to the numbers the worst performing seasons are five, six and four. Why didn’t people want to come back for the next season? 

It’s commonly viewed among most people that TVD had a drop in quality. Most people say season 1-3 or 1-4 were there best seasons with the quality dropping in seasons four and five which the numbers support and I can see why. For me personally I noticed the drop in season three, but it was minor and the show continued that trajectory into season four which led to them basically jumping off the cliff in season five – their gas leak year. That explains why seasons five and four lost the audience going on to the next, but what about season six?

This is probably more of a personal opinion, but season six was a step up from season 5 and mildly more entertaining than season four. It’s the season that brought me and a lot of people I know back to the series, but still wasn’t enough to bring the show back to it’s former status – why? Well, the lead actress, Nina Dobrev, left the show at the end of the season. There are a lot of people who’s hearts weren’t into watching after Elena was gone (despite how much they complained about her), so a lot of people didn’t continue onto season seven. Also, though the quality had gone up just not that much – the better quality was mostly dependent on a brand new character, Kai, and character development for a main character who should have had that kind of development years ago, Bonnie, and by the end of that season the brand new character was gone and that character development was up in the air whether it was going to stay. On top of that there were still the same problematic elements in storytelling from season five in season six there was just something more to latch on to. There wasn’t really much to hang onto going into the next season besides the Heretics (rip-off Originals) and not enough was known about them to make them an exciting plot line to follow into the next season. Bottom line was that it was low expectations for season seven that didn’t have much to do with how well season six did as a season.  

What about the ratings within the season?

I did that by calculating the percentage of viewers lost from the premiere to finale each season.

Season five lost the most amount of viewers within the season and just after that are season four and season one. Season one can easily be attributed to the show just starting to get regular viewers, but what’s season four’s excuse? Also you’s note that season 8 didn’t lose any viewers from the premiere to the finale they gained 17.35% more, but that’s because of the series finale – more people tuning in for the final episode to say their official goodbyes to the show even though they stopped watching years ago.

What was going on during these seasons (4 & 5)?

Damon and Elena had finally officially gotten together much to some shippers enjoyment, but a lot of others dismay and that shows in the ratings. There are a lot of vocal Delena shippers, but they’re just that – vocal – they nowhere near represent the entire fan base. But what made this ship a nightmare was the way their relationship was written. They were the on and off again couple that put Ross and Rachel to shame in terms of annoyance – they would be happy for a short sex filled time and then something that should be inconsequential would happen and they’d start the “I’m not good for you” “I don’t care about that”obstacle and break up then Damon kills someone, Elena forgives him and they do that all over again. Every time I think about their relationship in this specific season I hear Phoebe from Friends in my head singing “and lather, rinse, repeat, and lather, rinse, repeat, and lather rinse repeat” on a reoccurring loop never to get to the “as needed” portion of the song because that’s all they do and their relationship is as arbitrary as that song. They ruined everything that could have been good about that ship within those two seasons and I’m not just saying that because it’s a personal opinion – there are a lot of former Delena shippers that hate them as much as I do because of what we had to endure from their relationship season five. However, a simple ship getting together shouldn’t cause such a drop in viewership because there are a lot viewers that were flexible or indifferent as to who the main character ended up with and there’s more to a show than ships, especially one ship.

Fan Pandering: Any show you watch will have things in there that aren’t there specifically for the plot, but for fans to enjoy. When show do this it’s usually something of no real consequence and TVD so far had been doing this, but season four and five had the largest amount of retcons, characters that should have stayed dead coming back to life, and too much focus on the romantic subplot of the main ship and most of that was mainly due to vocal fans which again don’t represent the majority and because of that fan pandering became alienating to the point that these things were only enjoyable to the fans that they were pandering to and in some cases not even them. However why was this so alienating?

Convoluted Plot Lines: TVD has always had convoluted plots each seasons, but they were ones people could still follow. Seasons four and five have things so complicated years later the writers are still having issues explaining things. The Travelers – what even? Oh and don’t get me started on doppelgangers – before they were mildly confusing, but after season 4 they were incomprehensible. Anyways, the plot got so convoluted that the only things you could follow with accuracy was the fan pandering making that pretty much the entire show and if the number say anything it’s that viewers didn’t appreciate it and jumped ship, many to never come back again except in fanfiction.

So there was a lot going on in seasons four and five and most of it not good – sure it’s teen show on the CW with a ridiculous name, but it wasn’t until then they they officially started living up to that ridiculousness that was set in before the show even started.

Overall which season was the worst?

Season 5.

While I personally would actually say season eight based on the series finale alone, season five consistently had the worst writing – so much so that I’m pretty sure if you jumbled the episodes it would make the same amount of sense – and lost the most viewers both within the season and going on to the next. 

Did Delena Sink their ratings?

I personally think yes. Season five not only is the most prominent season for Delena, most of the issues in that season are because everyone of those fan services and convoluted plot lines revolved around them. They were inescapable to the point that you couldn’t ignore them in favor of focusing on other characters, so people chose not to watch at all.

Am I 100% Right?

No. I could be make a correlation as inaccurate as ice cream causes murder, but I honestly think that there was too much of a coincidence between the loss of viewership and Delena.