#ignore the black water

[eon-become-instant]

I really wish Fellow Travelers (a show centred around a romance between two men who are both played by gay actors, with a production crew composed of primarily queer artists, based on a book written by a gay author and which gives much insight into the lives of queer people during key moments in queer history/politics) was getting a similar amount of buzz as Red, White and Royal Blue.

But nope, y'all are sleeping on this series so hard and it's a real shame.

[ariiiiih]

About <辜(Gu/Guilty)> (a TGCF AD song)

The last two versions of 辜 are really great, so I wanna share some thoughts and provide some supplementary materials.

The first one in episode 17 is a ballad version. As Xintong (新桐, TGCF AD’s music monitor) said in her webio, “[it’s] to unfold and highlight He Xuan’s mood from his perspective.”

This version is sorrowful but soft, and the lalala childish humming at the end, which sounds like a nursery rhyme, gives this song a sense of purity and innocence. In the blackwater arc, which consists of horror, anger, hatred, and despair, this feeling never appeared. Then, why use this song, this feeling to express HX?

The song was like out of the story, just like the feelings that HX never directly expressed. Actually, the warmest and touching scene in this story, from the RoEW to the end of revenge, was told in the first extra of TGCF----HX’s family, who gave XL a bowl of Yuanxiao and wished he would reunite with his family:

“Do you not have the money?” the owner asked. Still stricken, Xie Lian couldn’t reply, but the owner simply said, “Forget it. I’ll give it to you for free, considering how tragic you look. I'll be packing up once you’re done, so hurry home. Today is Yuanxiao, the day for family reunions!” …

The little girl was biting on her spoon with her head tilted. “When is gege coming home? I wanna wait until he’s back before digging in.” “He’s so late,” the owner chimed in. “Coming home so late on Yuanxiao; how outrageous!” “He’s working hard. He’Il be home soon,” the old woman chided. “Don’t scold him when he comes back. Miao-er! Miao-er, stop working. I feel awful always needing you to help out. Come here, and let’s eat together.” “Not at all!” the young woman replied. She cleaned the last table before sitting down with them to share yuanxiao. They seemed to be waiting for another member of the family to join them, and the four of them chatted and laughed all the while.

And the tragedy of this family in TGCF AD, when HX’s sister said “Gege, let's be brother and sister in the next life” and when his father told him “Son, father’s going with your mother,” was heartbreaking.

So, this ballad version of 辜, from He Xuan’s perspective, was like He Xuan remembering his family, his life, and all the happiness and suffers in it; it was like He Xuan looking back to the path that he had walked so far over hundreds of years and the three lifetimes of man, god, and ghost; and lamenting the people who had been involved in this fate-switching incident, the lives of those who had died innocently and tragically. Humming is a primitive expression of feelings, compassionate and pure like a god, while the mourning for those low-level, insignificant mortals shows the idea that gods should not love only abstract humans, but real people.

As an avenger, it's easy to think of HX's anger and hatred. But when they are stripped away, we can find that deep in his heart, the feeling and reason of his revenge that we easily overlook, is the pure love between him and his family, the warmest and the most joyful past. This love may seem ordinary, less splendor than other ghost kings’ beliefs or the relationship with Shi brothers, but it is this love that supported him to resolutely carry out an extremely long and lonely revenge that no one has ever done. Even though he would never rest and would suffer forever and he knew it, some people were worth doing that for.

That’s why I like this version. It reminded me of “true voyage is return”. The character of He Xuan is very complex but easily flattened and stereotyped because his inner self and his inward exploration are hidden, and this song shows the neglected side of He Xuan, a more human and even divine side.

The last version in episode 18 is an omniscient perspective (I haven’t seen the translation yet, so I tried to do it by myself, sorry if it sounds weird in English).

运数又何为 命中误

What fate has done,

A mistake in life.

似这般无妄劫 怎可渡

Like this undeserved trial,

How can it be passed?

一个是琳琅材 一个是凡间骨

One is a precious jade,

The other an ordinary bone.

偏谁得奇缘 放醉入仙府

Yet, who is destined

To stumble into the immortal realm.

做仙的眼无珠 做鬼的有恨难诉

The god has eyes but blind,

The ghost harbors hatred but hard to tell.

骨肉终消散 尝尽悲与苦

Flesh and blood dissipated,

Sorrow and Pain tasted.

这欠命的已还命 赎命的却无人赎

The one who owed a life has paid,

The one who atoned remains unredeemed.

问去去来来谁赢输

Ask who wins and who loses.

叹尘归尘来土归土

Sign, as ashes return to ashes,

And dust to dust.

This song has the style of Dream of the Red Chamber (the greatest classical novel in Chinese literature). Here are the songs in this novel, where you could find some similarities.

Vain Longing: One is an immortal flower of fairyland, The other fair flawless jade, And were it not predestined, Why should they meet again in this existence? Yet, if predestined, Why does their love come to nothing? One sighs to no purpose, The other yearns in vain, One is the moon reflected in the water, The other but a flower in the mirror. How many tears can well from her eyes? Can they flow on from autumn till winter, From spring till summer?

The Birds into the Wood have Flown: The office jack’s career is blighted, The rich man’s fortune now all vanished, The kind with life have been requited, The cruel exemplarily punished; The one who owed a life is dead, The tears one owed have all been shed. Wrongs suffered have the wrongs done expiated; The couplings and the sundering were fated. Untimely death sin in some past life shows, But only luck a blest old age bestows. The disillusioned to their convents fly, The still deluded miserably die. Like birds who, having fed, to the woods repair, They leave the landscape desolate and bare.

Also, in the Bloody Fire Social of AD, the first time we heard Scholar He (*in ancient China we called a scholar ‘Sheng’, that’s where He Sheng came, not He Xuan’s another name), the verse that artist sang also shared a similarity with a song from Dream of the Red Chamber.

(Bloody Fire Social):

世人皆说贺生好

All men long to be He Sheng

功名利禄少不了

With riches and rank that all aspire;

如今贺家在何方？

The kind family of He, where are they now?

荒冢一堆草没了

Their graves are a mass of briars.

All Good Things Must End (first part): All men long to be immortals Yet to riches and rank each aspires; The great ones of old, where are they now? Their graves are a mass of briars.

An interesting coincidence is that “All Good Things Must End” is the opening verse of Dream of the Red Chamber, while “The Birds into the Wood have Flown” is the closing verse of Dream of the Red Chamber. And the two similar songs in the blackwater arc are told from He Sheng's life to the end of He Xuan's revenge, which I personally like as a literary homage.

[imadhatt3r]

I can't stop thinking about Koujaku's name and sparrow motif...

So his name means "red sparrow"; And I'd imagine that he was most likely named by his mother. I don't think his father had much of a presence in his early life, and besides, I feel like a violent yakuza leader would want his son to have a more "powerful" sounding name. So it was probably his mom's choice.

I feel like she must've loved sparrows if she named her son after them. I can see her going out to parks and gardens just to see them, and taking older Koujaku with her to feed them too. They were always so cute and cheerful, so they always managed to lift her spirits whenever she was worried about her pregnancy, her partner, or future in general, so she decided to name her son after them, because she wanted him to lead life with the same qualities she saw in these birds: She wanted him to be joyful, resiliant, adaptable, and always surrounded by loving and like-minded people (since sparrows live in large groups). He was her little birdie since birth... 😭

I think that Koujaku grew fond of sparrows too, through seeing how much his mother loved them. Maybe that's why he wears a kimono with sparrows and picked Beni (a sparrow) as his AllMate. I can see him putting out a small bowl with grains on his windowstill to get some sparrows to come, like he used to do with his mom when they went to feed them, but with mixed results (sometimes they come and sometimes they don't).

Aoba picks up on it too; Whenever he's out doing deliveries and he spots a flock of sparrows foraging in a patch of grass or drinking and bathing out of a puddle, he takes a photo on his coil and sends it over to Koujaku, usually with some silly caption he comes up with on the spot. He absent-mindedly picks up any sparrow-themed knicknacks to give to Koujaku, all of which are deeply treasured and loved- if they're something like post-it notes, there's a guarantee that they'll never be used, and they will be lovingly stored in a drawer untill the end of times. Aoba actually bought an extra set of post-it notes and a pen with a sparrow-themed topper to keep at his desk at Hum-Drum.

This is more of a sidenote, but I always imagined Koujaku's mother as a rather short and frail woman, probably a bit shorter than Aoba, so the height difference between them now would be really big. I guess I was just touched by the image of Koujaku's mom cradling his head in her hands to have him look at her as she wipes away his tears with her thumbs... Her birdie's all grown up, but he'll always remain her little sparrow...

[h-chrysotrichus]

i dont feel like taking a better picture of this bc i just spent nearly two hours getting stressed over my gold pens starting to dry out and making the ink a fucking nightmare to deal with 👍 made this to put in a cute little frame on my Law shelf, if i feel less tired by then maybe i'll take a nicer picture once it dries and i can frame it.

[writeshite]

Hii! Hope you're doing well, i was wondering if i could request some namor x male reader stuff, it could be anything really i dont have anything in mind, so yea thats it!

"Namor..." you warn, a laugh caught in your throat; you shriek when his hands tickle your sides, swatting them away just as quick. "I'm trying to work."

"If it was important, you'd have locked the doors before I got here," he teases, scooping you in his arms again, "since you did not..." he grins.

You hold his chin gently, preventing him from kissing you, "I am trying to compile dangerous archaic principles." You jostle his head with every word, "you, my darling, have been distracting me these past few days, and are not helping."

"Hmm, so what you're saying is I'm sexy?" he asks, you go to respond, but he's quick to dive in for a kiss, dipping you ever so slightly to get you to swoon, which like yesterday, causes you to abandon your work for later and fall into bed with him again.

[pop-roxs]

remembering that one time i was playing vrc w adrienne, maddy, n a few others and adrienne just pulls this whammy outta nowhere(we were playing together for like the longest time)

[abyssalpriest]

On the term: Veil of Ignorance (aka "the best way to go steal things is to walk out of the store like everyone else")

Lev gave me the term, or more so he used it quite a few times in front of me and I may or may not have picked up the same definition as he has in my head, but my definition still gets a job done. You may have seen me use it, and I'll explain the concept here, but it boils down to: The utilising and redirecting of the distance - ignorance - between you and other people's mind in order to "veil" or hide something true, mostly the self.

Lev hides in plain sight, uses the veil of ignorance, which is effectively "They don't know to look for me, they don't have the eyes to feel my energy, they don't have the knowledge to put two (my energy) and two (understanding of who that energy belongs to) together, therefore I can just sit among them and they won't know." The veil is that unknowing, unwillingness to learn, and overall, as I said, distance between his mind and the onlookers'. It's a philosophy behind a lot of his appearances where he just shows up and presumes - rightly - that no one is going to click that it's him. The ignorance is used to veil him like fabric would veil his face, where someone veiled can walk past family without even being recognised because ignorance shields recognition.

The concept extends outside this, it's complicated, but boils down to the fact that there's distance between your mind and others as said. Others don't feel your anxiety at being caught, they don't hear your thoughts, they don't know you're trying to hide something... But trying to hide something draws attention - hence, you use ignorance, not obvious forms of concealing, to be the concealment.

If you want to be open about your spiritual self online but don't want harassment, take advantage of the fact that they're ignorant of the importance of you declaring who you are - and find ways to invoke the ignorance. Your rare spiritual posts on a fandom blog draw attention, ignorance comes when you post about the same topic all the time but slip in those spiritual details you wanted hidden casually, and a little less explicitly than you may want. They just blur into the rest of the posting, no one knows which details are ones you dont want reacted to. And remember, your blog is one of many they follow. If someone's not informed that a post you're making is telling truths about you then they will treat it like one in a hoard of thousands of posts, something they may or may not read given it's just, to them, a post. If you want to be obviously x spiritual species but not have attention drawn, do it, and know you're veiled by the fact that no one knew to look out for you.

... And obviously extrapolate this to things outside of tumblr, e.g. your face as a customer is one of many the server sees in a day, they won't know you're anxious about having just cut your hair from long to short because you realised you're trans masc if you don't highlight your anxiety with it. Move with the crowd, move behind ignorance, they are ignorant to your reality until you let them into it. I'm just talking about posts for... a reason...

The key does boil down to the fact that you have to know that if they have the skills to know, they will know, so stay in ignorance. The idea itself is key in my work, where I don't care to announce to the world my relationship with Lev for example, but you will know if you can sense it. i can't hide it from you, but if you are at the skill level to know who we are you will be at the skill level to know its truths - basically... Ignorant people tend (tend, "ignorance" here is a neutral word, it's a quality we all have) to be aggressive when you tell them something they can't prove themselves, or when the truth is on a topic they just emotionally hate... naturally, thats human and indeed being-nature. But the amount of issues that come up when you walk into a room, like in Lev's case, and say "Im Leviathan, hi." The most insecure (speaking neutrally still, we are all insecure in some respects) people, the people with the least grip on their own ability to dissect truth from fiction, are naturally going to be the most scared and the most reactive. We all are like that in certain topics, because insecurity happens in all the areas we don't know much in, so when it comes to topics like spiritual existence, facts of who you are when you're someone powerful, and so on, the best thing you can do is not give the laypeople a reason to start sniffing out details in things that are going to scare them.

Diviners, oracles, (other) gods, professionals, people with keen clear senses, and other people with authority on matters you're veiling will be able to dig through your concealments, but they're less likely to start trouble if not through self-security and confidence in their ability to dissect the world, then certainly when they see and feel and know what you're hiding is a truth they can't fight... So the veil of ignorance not working so much on them is fine at the end of the day if you're strong enough to not have to veil completely, but you can always employ multiple types of concealment.

At the end of the day, it's just a low-energy - therefore very efficient - way of veiling and making yourself invisible. You want distance from yourself and others? You dont want everyone to see you face? Take advantage of the fact that no one is close to you and able to see you until you do the work to let them in, and work with that ignorance and make it work for you.

Why bother planning a heist to steal a cheeseburger at gunpoint from the clerk when you could just take it from the table of someone who went to the bathroom? Bad example obviously, that's nasty lmfao but stealing is the part in our society where we understand - even if we would never ever steal or agree with stealing - that "acting natural" is key to high odds of getting away with it, and the veil of ignorance is similar to that. Similar, but not quite the same, the difference being that the veil of ignorance being employed is not about changing your behaviour, its about being aware of whats around you and the ways in which people will presume you're not doing something they give a shit about paying attention to. It's being uninteresting so that people are uninterested in you. It's less like acting natural with the cheeseburger, and more like coming to a place where roads are being worked on and not acting natural IE wearing a high-vis vest you never would wear otherwise so you can take the traffic cones on to your truck and steal them. Where is the ignorance in others with regards to you? Play there, write there, be there. Put your work everywhere, dance in the day and night, but when the clouds pass over the moon thats when you pull out the moves you dont want anyone to see. You, to the audience, are just dancing, and the obscured movements under cloud cover are presumed to be... just dancing.

Do what you want, but don't drag others into it, and you'll find that the distance between you and others shows you that you werent as involved in their lives and brains as you thought. They're not scanning your posts for every instance you showed your secret kins or whatever, and the people that are doing that are going to look like they see something no one else does.

There's a variety of things used in it - a variety of different types of "ignorance". For me, people thinking I'm crazy and "just" psychotic is reworked into the veil. That's ignorance about who i am and what i can do, and means I can just straight up post "crazy"-seeming things about what i do and am and have people laugh me off. Problem solved. My demon and angel kin years? If I were still in them, I could find myself in the centre of huge arguments about how calling myself a demon or angel means i think im an authority and a this and a that when Im just minding my own business, but if they just think Im crazy? Sucks to be them, they'll never know, they're lost to this part of life because they refuse to find it. Likewise to accusations of insanity, accusations of being a novice when you actually have more skill, being incorrect and unable to see the truth, and so on can be reworked into the veil of ignorance. People's misinformed, malformed, negatively-intended, insulting, ignorant ways of viewing you are gaps between you and them and they are ways in which people will misunderstand you and stop caring about you. Make them do it on purpose.

And im not going to post here at the end about how this shouldn't be used for bad things, or you should take criticism instead of saying its ignorance, because honestly... That misreading of my post is the ignorance in question. I say one thing, you see what you want to see, thanks for the perfect example if you were going to say it. People will always have distance between their mind's projected idea of me and the real me, which means the real me can swim away under the surface while you argue with a projected reflection you think is the fish under the water.

[rakeshouseparty]

Good morning rake gang i had a real weird dream and it involved rake!

[deathfavor]

@deiscension said: "3, 2, 1…" but reversed! a peck on the cheek for ming-xiong. no her breath doesn't smell like wine, that's just her naturally sweet aura.

Send "3,2,1..." for a new years kiss from my muse

Another year should not be so significant to the gods. He Xuan has learned rather quickly that the gods take any opportunity to celebrate with food and wine and stories that they can get. It's all rather tedious and He Xuan has made it a fact that 'Ming Yi' rarely pays visits to the Heavenly Realm. He does, albeit silently, thank the Lord Rain Master for already have a reputation. It was easy to follow the footsteps, and many gods murmured that it was not so surprising that the Earth Master, with his love for architecture, was likely to be introverted and rarely in attendance. He Xuan is grateful too that this reputation fits and he does not always have to play god.

But with Shi Qingxuan's persistent insistence in the communication array over the weeks leading up to the event, He Xuan reluctantly agrees that he, Ming Yi, shall be in attendance for the first new year celebration.

Which explains how he is here, quietly sipping at his cup of wine while chatter erupts around him. But in the chaos, he is a pillar of calm composure. ( And this time, he is not feasting though it is offered. Like the low tide, the waves of his hunger have retreated and left him feeling numbed. He waves away the question with saying he'd been eating when he was called and no longer was hungry. He's begrudgingly accepted a few bites despite how his stomach twisted in displeasure. )

There's a new buzz in the air, and it draws a pause from the ghost king god. More often than not, he keeps to himself this time of the year. On occasion he might spend it in Ghost City. He does not spend it around so many though. His eyes flick towards the goddesses that flock around Pei Ming like animals to a treat, and then to the other gods and goddesses who either seem enthusiastic about it, or give such an ominous aura of displeasure that not even the drunkest person dare approach.

10...9...8..7...

How inane of them. He Xuan finds himself neglecting the attention to the rest of the countdown as he watches Shi Qingxuan scoot over to his side. He lifts a brow but does nothing to stop her.

3...2...1!

Much to the king's surprise, He Xuan finds Shi Qingxuan leaning forward and pressing a chaste kiss to the warm skin of his cheek. ( It would not, however, be warm, if he had not already perfected the act of seeming living - including warmth. ) He blinks in surprise, fingertips raising to brush over where her lips had grazed his skin.

He clears his throat after a moment, adverting his eyes. " Happy New Year. " He manages to push the words past his lips.

[butcharyastark]

i have witnessed a lot of bad ships and a lot of cringe ships but very few inspire the same feeling of cringehorrorjudgement as whatevers going on with silver/thomas hamilton in black sails ao3

[mthevlamister]

“Snacks to keep you full” fuck off instagram

I know how to do that. Stop trying to fuck me over

[fur-sure-suits]

I HAVE ENERGY!!!! AND MOTIVATION!!!!

So I sewed all the unicorn pattern parts SEPARATELY and now I have to see the sewn-together pieces together!

[hungry-hobbits]

kinda sucks that there's so much bigoted controversy over the new little mermaid movie just for it to also look pretty bad effects wise

[crescentmp3]

my ocs are very contrasting with each other

[stressfulsloth]

ohhhhhhhhh Hell

[firestorm09890]

ball-and-stick model of a molecule