#is it the past? is it the future? is it some sort of alternate reality? who knows! | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

reductionisms · 6 months ago

Text

circle, line

A circle and a line look different, right?

What about now?

Time in gintama is a useless subject. Unfortunately, it is also a prerequisite to the gintama-human ontology. Thus, with a heavy heart, I look at lines, loops, and other unlikely time-mechanics in order to construct a gintama time for the gintama-human.

Throughout this pseudoscientific inquiry, I locate gintama time– which I eventually call [time], for lack of better notation– in my thematic abuse of two mathematical concepts: irrationality and uncountable infinity. To give away the end, [time] is an uncountable infinity born in irrationality. Which, even to its own creator, makes little sense.

Finally, this is my defense of the gintama time loop. Why? Well, I like loops and loop-like things, and, after all, we want good things to last, to repeat. So this turns out to be a love letter to algebraic topology. Sorry time loop fiction.

Onto more interesting things.

preliminary time notes

To think about time in gintama, I bracket [real world time] from [the narrative structure of gintama, which follows a time] and [time as characters in gintama experience it, i.e. personal time]. The latter two time-categories reflect [real world time] because gintama is written by an author, who, by virtue of existing, lives in [real world time]. That is, while narrative is fun because you can play with reality to make something new (e.g., time loop, time travel, non-chronological narratives in general), creation still requires building blocks, which are ultimately some sort of known assumption, that inevitably require some understanding of actual Time.

All this to say I look at [narrative time] and [personal time] through philosophies about [real world time], which themselves are not especially real; in other words, my methodology is kind of shit.

the situation– personal time

Otae announces the whole of gintama in chapter one.

This is gintama’s genetic code.

To speak of time here is to note a few things:

1. amanto possess advanced technology;

2. humans are forced to throw away their physical swords;

3. the sword of the soul.

The sword is a tool*; later chapters tell us that it “carries the soul”. So the sword represents, or, rather, is, something irreplaceable to humanity, that relates to the soul and personhood. This much is corroborated by the plot cycle.

With contrast to the sword, time appears impersonal. We conceive of time, at least scientifically, as the movement between past to present, present to future, stretching infinitely before and after, where our existence does not matter to its flow.

But would “time” exist without anyone to observe it?

Alternatively, how can “time” be experienced as time– as a movement– without anything to measure it?

The human must “create” “time”, if only because it would not be “time” without a person to observe and call it as such. What this person perceives, they conceptualize as movement (measurement); and thus there must be a prior position to reference, or, in the least, a default– a memory.

So “time” requires the present to be given by a prior; that is, for “time” to be experienced, the human who observes it needs already given into a past. The past itself (“knowledge” of the histories that make us who we are, “knowledge” of the tools that allow us to intend various things)– i.e., its inherent “given-ness” to us– depends upon it outliving those who live it. Thus various contexts, with their technologies, arts, and writing (though these are not really separable), function also to contain the essential past-as-memory for those who use and engage with them.

Alright, great, but what does this have to do with the dick-and-balls manga? Nothing, really, except for everything. The amanto (with futuristic technology, in futuristic contexts**) force humans to give up their swords. It would be ridiculous to talk about what the “sword” means here. Suffice to say that it carries (an assumed) cultural-historical weight, an (idealized) memory. We would expect that its dispossession disrupts temporality. And it does– hence the “time loop”.

People love to talk about cyclical time in gintama. It is the same situations, over and over again; that no one ages, injuries heal by the next chapter, and, more than serial-typical regressions, that there is a sense that things won’t work, that important change won’t last, that life “just gets worse and worse”. Time as lasting change– or what we like to call “linear time”– doesn’t feel like it exists.

To return to chapter one. Here the central conflict is not actually between amanto and human; it is between Shinpachi and Otae. Their dying father tells them that even if they give up their physical swords (memory, past), they are not to lose the sword in their soul (?unknown). Sword-less Shinpachi resents him. Rather than “cling to the past”, he tries to adapt to the “linear time” of the amanto: he works in modern food service, gives up on the dojo, and, most importantly, opposes Otae.

What does Otae do? We might expect her to inverse Shinpachi, that is, to “embrace” cyclicality, which would be to give up. She doesn’t. Otae tries to adjust, to make a living and survive, but, unlike her brother, she does so also to protect the “thing she can never take back”. This, as Shinpachi points out, is ridiculous, unrealistic, and makes no sense. And yet it is Otae who is thematically vindicated in the end.

From the first chapter, then, we can construct a sense of [personal time (to the characters)]. Again, for change to exist, there must be a prior form; that is, a certain sort of time is what makes change (technological, political, situational advancement) possible. Further, the self is involved in the process of time. Thus when the self is not whole (lacks the sword), time, and thereby change, becomes cyclical. So “time”, to the amanto, advances, because they can work with their external “selves” (technology, worlds, knowledge-memory) to “make change”. But time, to humanity, loops back on itself, is stopped, because humanity is bereft of its self and can only return to the starting point.

We notice that humans still live in a world where time progresses– where time goes on without them. There is a split between the time of the self and the time of the world. Shinpachi decides to do away with memory and join the world-time, the “linear time”, that is, the time of futuristic technology and change; but his sister, who goes along with this and drags the past with her, does much better.

For a more thorough application of this thought, please rewatch the monkey hunter arc.

*It is also (obviously) a dick. **This reveals some connection between the concepts of “tool”, “context”, and time. Though I say so inverse-facetiously, since nothing about gintama can be taken as if it were serious.

time loop– narrative time

So what about infinity?

Personal time is not infinity. In a first sense, it simply is not infinite– characters die. In a second sense, even considering that memory can be (haphazardly) preserved beyond a lifetime, especially in a story, humanity as a whole is finite– there comes a point, eventually, where no one is left to do the remembering. And in a third sense, personal time is still a string of pasts that were once presents, into futures that will be presents; though this finite string might divide into an infinite number of presents, its divisibility renders it still essentially patterned, which is to say that it is not really “infinity”– it is still mathematically countable.

I mentioned a dysfunction of personal time into cyclical (“un-change-able”) personal time. This is associated with sword-less-ness, equivalently memory-loss, equivalently not being a whole self. The fun of stories is that “character” can be projected into the structure of the story itself; it would make sense for cyclical personal time to have some correspondence to, or at least effect on, narrative time, that is, narrative structure.

At this point I should be more general about the time loop.

The time loop is thought to stand opposed to “linear time” in the stagnation-change, lack-presence, circle(hole)-line([censored]) dichotomy. Specifically, the time loop is opposed to “linear time” in the sense that nothing (usually) changes in a time loop. Or, more exactly, change is slow, nothing gets “better” in any real sense. Again, only where time flows “linearly" can we build off of what is prior, can we intend and achieve a future, can we change for the better (or so we assume). Thus the time loop carries a sort of moral condemnation in its very structure— a karmic debt, if you will.

Characters in plots get thrown into time loops because something has gone wrong. Whether or not they are the direct cause, the character must “figure something out”, “learn a lesson”, that is, address the problem that created the time loop, which will almost always be related to a step within the story of their self-development, in order to escape it. The point of the story is to escape it. This is just how stories go.

Then the gintama narrative “time loop” is barely a time loop. It repeats itself, sure, and no one ages, but that’s because no one should age in a wsj serial and sorachi tried to be funny about it. Still, some lingering sense of futility, or maybe just the sheer repetition of the same event for 16 years of serialization, weighs on anyone who reads it. This kind of feels like time loop fiction; there should be a point to the plot cycles. What are they trying to force Gintoki to do, to show us in his character? What are they aiming for, what is driving the “time loop” in the first place?

Takasugi is driving the time loop.

(More specifically, Takasugi’s crushed eye-ball (soul), his eyelid; inaccessible past (memory), is driving the time loop.)

Another clarification. Personal time is time as experienced by the person; it is pure interiority. Thus, while the world moves on– personal time is time as movement– the person may not.

For the person to move on, they must be able to make change, that is, from a prior form, give birth to the next form. This is because only the person can observe, know, and experience “time”, which itself is a movement (a change in position) from past to present, present to future, that is defined by the person. So change and time-as-movement, within personal time, look synonymous.

Further, movement in personal time requires the given past– the memory, from before me, passed down to me by people and places and things and contexts that I outlive– to be held by me, to be part of the “I”, and thus for my bodily self and my non-embodied self to generate personal time together. In gintama, I locate “memory” as the sword. But gintama’s sword is also part of the Self; so personal time in which the Self can move is only born out of a whole self. Equivalently, personal time is not the Self, but it is intimately related to a change that can only be wrought by the Self, which is to say, both my body and my given memory are necessary to the movement of personal time.

In any case, “gin-tama” is about Gin-toki, and, quite literally, his soul, so we would suspect that narrative time is a projection of Gintoki’s personal time. But narrative time cycles weirdly, and Gintoki still has his sword. Alternatively: if Gintoki was not already a Self, that is, if he had to learn some lesson to become a Self through the time loop, how could he have saved any of the endless roster of villains that conveyor-belts around him? So maybe Gintoki holds his sword without remembering– except that he doesn’t, and the story makes this clear (“I haven’t lost a single thing”). He does, however, seem to possess a slightly different personal time. He and his sword remind antagonists of what they’ve forgotten, and these antagonists sometimes move forward with him into the next cycle. In other words, there is some sort of movement, a change, in the narrative, in the structure, associated with each loop.

But cycles stay cycles, up to a very particular moment.

At which point I revert to the most obvious advantage of narrative time: it interacts with the readers. Gintoki “is” a Self (in the sense that an electron is both a wave and a particle), who carries his sword, who remembers, who hasn’t lost a single thing. Yet the time around him repeats the same events, over and over again. Why? Well, in part for the above: every gintama villain needs to learn the same lesson. But every gintama villain is also Gintoki, and even if he remembers, we don’t. To risk being redundant, we, as readers, have no idea what actually happened to him until chapter 519, when it is fished (unwillingly, I think) out of Takasugi’s eyelid.

Then narrative time functions in several senses. It relates to Gintoki’s personal time, but indirectly; more generally it looks like a projection of the Losers’ personal times, where a Loser is one who has lost their sword. Still every Loser is also Gintoki, and every lost sword is lost memory, and even if Gintoki hasn’t forgotten anything– and even if Gintoki carries his past, his sword, with him– we, the readers, don’t. Surely enough, historical time in gintama only begins after chapter 519. The revelation must precede it.

So the gintama time loop is driven forward by whatever it takes for this memory to be revealed. Each iteration brings us closer, but there is no lesson for Gintoki to learn that would speed this up; the heart of it is that he is waiting, he has to wait, for memory to return, for his past to come back to him, and this past is exactly Takasugi.

Why? Takasugi is the past (his eye, his eyelid, is the past); his eye is therefore Gintoki’s sword, the sword of the soul we need for time to move on. But 10 years jump before Takasugi can make the approach, and even then only from behind. Worse, it takes hundreds more chapters for him to work up the resolve to face Gintoki head on. So if Gintoki somehow constrains the world to cyclical time, equally so does Takasugi.

In short, narrative time cannot move until Takasugi’s eye becomes Gintoki’s sword. Thus half of the loop is about Gintoki always standing up again, always waiting for Takasugi to face him, and the other half of the loop, that is, its motivation, is about Takasugi working up the guts, or whatever he does throughout the series, to finally come at Gintoki* face to face. Yes, I’m equating circles and lines, which is silly. But I did this in the beginning anyways. Rewatch the final.

So why does this matter? Readers well-versed in gintama sword theo-ontology may recognize that the sword which is memory is identical to the sword of the human. This is partly because I’ve defined personal time to require the whole Self (the human) to move, which itself requires both the sword-as-memory and its human wielder. It is also because I’ve equated Takasugi to memory instead of treating him like a character (sorry Takasugi). Nevertheless, creation of the human sword (the memory-sword) is now essential to creating time, and creating time is now equivalent to completing the Self, that is, to becoming “human”. Put another way, Shouyou isn’t killed until Gintoki kills him in 519.

More specifically, Gintoki killing Shouyou undoubtedly completes (undoes) his humanity**. It is also the only way for anyone in gintama to have a future, because it creates, gives birth, to time, the time of the series. Further, its revelation births time in the present just as its actuality births time in the past: the Gintoki who swings his human sword, who cries, in Takasugi’s eye, is the one who swings it at him now. Gintama doesn’t actually timeskip until Gintoki kills Utsuro in silver soul.

Then the movement of time, both personal and narrative, requires three things:

1. a memory-sword (the human sword) (the sword of the soul);

2. a human to wield it;

3. and a decision on how to swing

I have discussed one and two to exhaustion. Now we turn to three.

*Gintoki is always Takasugi, in every case. The inverse holds as well. **It also completes Shouyou’s, but that is for later.

in defense of the time loop

Birthing time looks like an escape from the time loop.

This is where the division between time, self, and change becomes essential. Why does the time loop, in many treatments, depress its readers? For the same reason that any tragedy is depressing: fate, un-change-ability, specifically, un-change-ability of things we want to change.

The time loop is a “literalization” of tragedy. The person trapped in the time loop, at best, loses the ability to determine their future, accomplish their projects, do what they want and have it last, that is, to find lasting (exterior) meaning (this is all exterior). At worst, this person carries their incapacity into a loop that is the same tragedy, over and over again, which they are helpless to prevent or change in any way.

This setup is not exclusive to the time loop– other variations could be immortality, reincarnation, oracles, endless linear eternity, et cetera. In every instance, though, the tragedy is that people cannot change the things that matter. And while the time loop usually removes external change to provoke internal change in its protagonist, gintama characters also struggle with the impossibility of changing themselves.

More generally, though, real time isn’t actually cyclical or linear. We move through time, changing form, towards our death– and so the common thought of time is “linear time”, which is really about “linear change” and an inability to “go back”. But time is only known to us, only countable, because of its cyclicality. There are 60 seconds to a minute; 60 minutes to an hour; 24 hours to the day; and then this repeats the next minute, the next hour, the next day; and then the next month, and then the next season, and then the next year; and then it repeats all over again. Time is only measurable, knowable, existent to us because it repeats. If it wasn’t known beforehand, how could we measure the present, the future, against it? And for it to be knowable, it has to be familiar; and for it to be familiar, we must have encountered it before; and here is the inherent repetition– we can’t stop the cyclicality or flow of time anymore than we can avoid our deaths. Real time makes possible our “change” just as it is unchangeable, just as its existence is conditioned on unchangeability.

Gintama is a story, and story time works differently than real time, so maybe in the story we can separate “linear time” (change-ability) from “cyclical time”, from “time loop” (un-change-ability). Even still, what happens after you escape a time loop? Equivalently, what happens after you escape the tragedy? In the usual time loop– at least the usual time loop in our minds– the loop is escaped into linear time, or, more appropriately, it is escaped into the time where linear change is possible. But why is “linear time” the happy ending? Even granted that it exists (which is questionable), what makes linearity better than repetition, that is, why do people love “linear change”?

The Joui 4 lived “linear time” during the war. They fought enemies, and won. They progressed towards something, and believed in it, too; they were the main characters of a power-scaling, battle-shounen manga. And yet, their linear time ended, or more accurately, was never “linear”. Shouyou’s death, if anything, only proved the inherent impossibility of their shounen dreams. So narrative time twists into defeatist cycles, and Takasugi is doomed forever to repeat, and this is probably more accurate to the condition of the actual world they inhabit, because, most importantly, time was always like this, linear change as linear time never existed.

But again, the tragedy was never about the time loop. From its inception, the tragedy has always been about intentionality versus ruination, “I” as capable actor versus “I” as acted upon, and the utter inability of anyone to change any of this. We want out of the time loop because we can’t do anything; we want out because we can’t act out of ourselves to make external change in any way that lasts. Ultimately, we want out of the time loop because we discover that our intentionality actually means jackshit. The world does what I don’t want it to, and traps me in this; I cannot act, and yet it acts on me. My despair at the exterior world which rivets me to itself quickly translates to despair in, at, my self. I can’t make change, so what does being [x person] matter, so this is my fault, so there’s no point in changing myself, so I can’t change myself in any way that matters, because even if I do everything right, there’s no meaningful effect on the world that holds me captive, et cetera. Thus everyone wants out of the tragedy, the time loop.

Including gintama villains, who usually try to get out of it by killing themselves. This never works.

The time loop is tragic because it makes its inhabitants absolutely passive to it and acts on them eternally. The gintama cast is supposedly full of “losers”; its villain of the week, while beating Gintoki, calls him a masterless dog, a ghost, the one who lost, along with the rest of the samurai, et cetera; and the loser here is inherently passive against a winning actor. Nevermind that Gintoki never fought for the Romantic Japan that lost to the amanto– his loss is even more infinite for the narrowness of its scope.

And yet, you’re not supposed to kill yourself.

Escaping the time loop– or, more generally, the tragedy– never guarantees linear time, because we always have to end the book on the happily ever after. So what really happens after you escape the time loop– is linear time actually a relief? Either things start going wrong, which isn’t the linear time ideal, or you achieve every dream, you make possible every impossibility, and come to the end of the infinite series by continuing on within it infinitely. Is that really “happy”?

Alternatively: the cycles of narrative time drive towards the birth of a new time. But the tragedy of the cycles is intentionality/ruination, and the cycles can’t be escaped into their “opposite”. Gintoki, a human, with a human sword, kills Shouyou, and thereby brought forth a new time. And yet, this new time was still cyclical.

Then what’s the solution– killing yourself? Takasugi, repetition Personified, asks this to Gintoki the entire series. Why won’t you stay down?, [Why are you crying?], [Why can’t I comfort you?], Why keep living in this world? Villainy aside, he does have a point– if you look carefully, living in the gintama world is incredibly, incredibly stupid.

Gintoki says: no matter how many times I fall, no matter how many times I fight the same fight over and over again, no matter if it never ends, I will always stand up.

This is the height of stupidity.

[time]

So narrative cycles aim at the revelation of Gintoki’s memory, which would identify sword with eye, tool with wielder, that is, complete the “human”, and thereby give birth to a new (non-linear) time.

Here we get to mathematical infinity.

Mathematical infinity is not a number, or even properly a concept. It’s more like a sign at the edge of a cliff that says, there’s a cliff here, here’s the end of the world– except that this sign also signifies whatever, and everything, that might lie beyond the cliff, which cannot really be called “essence”, or even be said to exist in the first place. In other words, infinity is a marker for a point of no return, that in of itself is nothing.

Some things are said to be “infinite”. Usually, these are patterns. A line is infinite, as is a parabola; but these infinities are predictable, that is, countable, because patterns are rules. Their comprehensibility allows us to treat them like fancy numbers.

Conversely, some functions decompose into situations that are entirely ungraspable. This edge of knowledge, where it devolves into paradox and nonsense, looks like uncountable infinity.

Uncountable infinity is the infinity whose name itself means nothing. It signifies to something that is, by axiom, impossible impossibility, ungraspable. When infinity “interacts” with the mathematical world– or, rather, when we push far enough to reach it– we come to paradox, chaos, and unintelligibility. Certainly, science could advance sufficiently to reconcile the mysteries of particle physics; but the fun of mathematical concepts is that you can define them in any way you like, even if they’re fake. And uncountable infinity is, by my definition, the “thing” that is always uncountable.

So gintama narrative cycles aim at something, while those in cyclical personal times suffer for them. Cycles, better, change-less-ness, correspond to sword-less-ness, to lack of memory, and historical time only “restarts” when Takasugi brings us the past. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

This doesn’t mean our new time won’t be cyclical.

In the end, “time” is associated with sense of Self. This is an unavoidable relation, because time is a human word, in a human language, that describes what is ultimately only known to us as human experience. But “Self” is (itself) a problematic concept. After all, what determines one’s Self? Relatedly, who, and/or what, and/or where, and/or why, gets to possess Selves at all?

Within concepts of Self is often embedded an instinct towards differentiation. The (western philosophical) impulse is to originate this difference in agency: that is, through my free determination of my Will, my Projects, my Actions, and et cetera, I differentiate “I” from “other” and thereby constitute Me. Needless to say, concepts of “agency” are inextricably linked to “change”. Thus, in this particular conception, “time” is bound to “Self”, is bound to “agency”, is bound to “change”, and to invoke any one is to invoke the other three.

Here, “knowing” (as agency) finds itself imperiled. That is, though the “unknowable” would strip agents of acting-ability, “knowing” would also consign existence, life, the universe, et cetera, to determinism. In both cases, “(un)-knowledge” renders the agent passive. Thus someone might long for an unknowable magic in order to undo determinism, just as they might long for the knowledge to successfully determine their life; yet the one who longs for agency could find agency a disappointment, a not-agency. Equally, if the time loop embodies both desires before they collapse into paradox (I can continue into the unknown future if I escape; something is tying me down, my knowledge is insufficient to escape), “linear time” does so as well.

But now we return to infinity, to irrationality, to uncountability, in short, to paradox. The bulk of the previous 5000 words has been to determine that the dichotomy is false. To be straight, knowing and not knowing, agent and non-agent, the linear and the cyclical, are not separable from each other. Their binary is an illusion, and the suggestion of one carries within it the absence of the other; they are synonymous at the exact and every moment they are not. Clearly, this is not not-knowing, and not knowing, and not not-either of them at the same time. I call this uncountable infinity, the mathematically irrational.

The mathematically irrational is paradox. Consider: we can graph, and look at, certain functions, and yet never grasp their value (put x(sin(1/x)) into desmos). Similarly, we know exactly what “pi” is– the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter– and we can define it, use it, find it in every instance. And yet, pi is an irrational number, because its decimals trail off into uncountable infinity. Knowing and not-knowing, united in the same action: irrationality is knowing in not-knowing, not-knowing in knowing, and also neither.

I will be ridiculous and find this paradox in gintama. I want to claim, in the first place, that the self never generated time at all; in the second, that this is never irreducible to agent/acted, knowing/unknown; and in the third, that time is generated by [time]. To do so, we must investigate the moment of its birth, in 519.

the cliff—519

Tools, given memory, etc., together with the persons who hold them, produce an actor-self, a time of possible change (a “linear” time). It is in 519 that Takasugi finally faces the camera.

Now Gintoki grasps the sword (memory, Takasugi). This should give us “linear” time.

But 519 is not so willing. Where we hope for capable agency, we find none. Instead linear/cyclical, active/passive, presence/distance, collapse into irrationality.

Take the archetypical moment. To Takasugi’s why, Gintoki says he’ll stand up. Specifically, he says, too bad– I (you) won’t fall.

Standing up is what Gintoki (a person, with a sword) does. It is how he defeats each suicidal villain, kills Shouyou, and kills Shouyou and Takasugi all over again. This is what the “time loop” would require of him.

Gintama antagonists, those paragons of rationality, tell us that it is irrational.

Otae is also irrational. Her irrationality doesn’t fix anything (⇔escape cyclical time, make change), and she knows so herself– “If I’ll suffer either way, I’d rather suffer protecting it.” 518 chapters later, Gintoki says: “I won’t fall until you [Takasugi] fall, until you stop, no matter how many times it takes, I’ll stand up again… even if I have to walk over my teacher’s corpse, even if I have to walk over your corpse, I’ll protect his disciple, our companion, Shoka Sonjuku’s Takasugi Shinsuke, his soul.”

So Gintoki stand(ing)s up until something– until Takasugi stops, until time is born– in order to protect Takasugi’s soul. This might look like an “end” to the cycle, but it doesn’t feel like one. “Even if I have to walk over your corpse”?

Alternatively, “saving” Takasugi should be the change that the cycles want to make, that would break them in any normal work of time loop fiction. It is “agency” (capable action, material change) at its purest. But Gintoki says he will stand up and kill Takasugi and stand up again. No matter how many times the same thing repeats, no matter if time never moves on, no matter if he is forced to kill the very person he’s trying to protect, Gintoki will stand up. How could Gintoki possibly care about escaping any cycle, when he is the one “perpetuating it”?

So gintama is not actually about escaping the time loop, which is the rational thing to do. Gintama is about, do you have the strength to keep living in the time loop, even if it never ends?, or, do you have the strength to kill your teacher and your friend, and lose everything all over again?, or, do you have the strength to eternally suffer for the thing that can never be taken back? In short: forget the capable actor– gintama is about being foolish, and irrational, and embracing the time loop by standing up.

If we look to chapter one, [standing up] is [protecting the thing that can’t be taken back]. Neither can be appropriately confined to cyclical or linear time. Otae says she’ll suffer either way, and Gintoki says he stands up to protect what Shouyou held precious, Takasugi’s soul.

Otae protects a thing that cannot be taken back. This is the past. Gintoki acts for– and this is also a protecting– the past. Takasugi is, in a literal sense, pierced by this past every moment of his life.

The past that we can recover, that we can fully integrate into ourselves, is the past that can be used to generate the future in “time”. Thus “accepting” the past “to move on” – accepting, making entirely part of oneself, making entirely interior – because only then can the past become knowable, comprehensible, and usable. The person must accept their past to change things, i.e., to make linear time. Time, change, and agency coincide.

Yet Otae’s past “cannot be taken back”. Certainly, even the accepted past cannot be “returned” to. But Otae’s past is the past that pierces Takasugi’s eye– that is, the past whose “revelation”, whose self-same existence, drives the completion/generation of gintama time itself.

So this is the past that “cannot be taken back”, in more than the literal sense. Takasugi is scandalized by its distance, even as he dies satisfied; Gintoki, ever-silent, still loses his composure at its provocation, is emptied by it, cries in 519 (in all of gintama), in 703. It is a past that refuses total use or incorporation; instead it acts on those who carry it, even after person is reconciled to sword (to its memory).

Its paradox in position. Though “the past” is always present (“I haven’t lost anything”, “how long will you keep looking at that crushed eye of yours”), it is simultaneously kept from us by an irreparable distance. Distance, of course, suggests space, which itself suggests a space that is surpassable. But this distance is not spatial– it is temporal. Gintoki carries the past, yet never reveals it to anyone, much less to us; in the end it is Takasugi who has to do the revealing, and even then only after 500 chapters. Further, its revelation actually increases the distance. We grow used to our proximity to Gintoki’s “point of view”, to our role, through him, as protagonist of the story; and here his defining moment is told not through his eyes, but through the eyes of the distant antagonist, whose breaking point is the discovery of the distance between him and Gintoki. Gintoki is reflected– more, revealed to have always been– across a distance that is unsurpassable.

This distance is equally time, because Takasugi and Gintoki were separated always, and only, by “the 10 years”. Takasugi comes to Edo– there is nothing stopping him, spatially, no physical restriction or meaningful law imposed, from making the approach– and yet he cannot make it. Or so we assume. We only know its universal separation axiom: 10 years, a distance between two points that could never be overcome or recuperated.

So the past is across an unsurpassable distance. In this sense, it cannot be taken back. It is simultaneously carried in, pierces, Takasugi’s eye, who struggles because he cannot reconcile it to himself. Just as it is always with him– “every time I look, the beast…”– it is also the one thing he cannot bear to see (your crying face). Though its revelation is necessary to New time, it is also what sent time into irregularity in the first place. And though it is irreparably distant, it pierces every moment of the present, which is to say: it degrades time, it makes things weird.

Its paradox in times. The cliff is pre-originary to everything by narrative position. Gintama narrative cycles press towards its revelation as first dilemma. It is before even the corpse field, before anything else. It drives each time Gintoki swings his sword and reenacts it. The very first moment that Shouyou finds Gintoki, is predated, predicated upon, generated, made possible by, the fact that Gintoki kills him with his sword.

From this past, Gintoki is (in the verb sense). It is ahead of him (in 519) and behind him (before 1). For its sake he “acts” towards a “change” (stands up) that he knows is impossible (“if I have to walk over even your corpse”*). In other words, for sake of this past, Gintoki lives as if he belongs to a “linear” time, even as he knows he doesn’t. The past brings forth itself again.

Finally, its paradox in agency. What is burned onto Takasugi’s eyelid is a single moment he cannot recover or recuperate. Instead, this moment acts on him, it pierces him, against his will. This sort of past is not an empty concept, that could be filled with any given circumstance. Takasugi is tortured because the content matters– because what happens on the cliff that day, matters.

The cliff is not what Takasugi, Gintoki, Shouyou, or anyone else, wanted. Worse, it is not what they fought for: Takasugi to save Shouyou, Gintoki to protect Shouyou’s disciples (in an act that he knows will destroy them), Shouyou to protect his children. Instead Takasugi is stripped of agency, and the eye that would acquire it; in the present he acts on everything because he is, in every moment, acted on. Equally, just as Shouyou tries to protect his students, he destroys them, and Gintoki, who is forced (acted on) to choose (acts on) between two wrongs, two denials of his self** (of linearity), that is, two losses, is the classic agent paradox most of all.

So the past cannot be taken back, and this not only in the sense that no one can return to it. The past cannot be taken back as a memory, nor can it be incorporated as part of the self, nor can it function as the essential memory that projects forward normal time, even as it is known at every single moment. It cannot be domesticated.

Gintoki killing Shouyou, and crying, is unacceptable. It is distance itself, just as it is proximity; it is simultaneously known (Takasugi sees it), unknown (no one can reconcile it), and neither (we still move on). It should not have happened. It is irrationality itself.

And yet, by virtue of being “a past”, in its relation to the present, in its position as driving force of the time of the entire series, it still is time. The human, with the human sword, who cuts off someone’s head, is [time] itself.

Clearly, this is something outside of normal time. The question becomes, who needs to be killed, and where, and why?

The one who gives birth to a future.

*–and he does.

**“No need. They’ll never hold a sword again.”

the future

That Gintoki kills Shouyou is essential.

The start of gintama’s “historical timeline” is the corpse field. Here the time that Gintoki sits in carries a heavy sense of eternity. The moment where Shouyou finds him could be forever; historical time is out of place.

What breaks this time is very particular. It is not that person and sword = human = time in the automatic sense, because Gintoki, who holds a successful sword (“before meeting you, I never lost to an adult”), remains inhuman. Rather, Shouyou, a human (to Gintoki), must give his sword to Gintoki for time to start. This is also what makes Gintoki human. Gintoki, the human, had to be given his humanity– and thereby time– by someone else.

Equivalently, it is not enough for gintama’s [being human] that the right person holds the right sword. Only a human can progress time, that is, give birth to the future, but reconciling self to past, sword to eye, escaping the time loop, is insufficient. That Shouyou finds Gintoki is predicated by the cliff; sword can only become eye through the cliff’s revelation (and the cliff happens concurrently); self and past are reconciled only after Gintoki kills Takasugi; and the Shimura dojo is restored only once the Shimura siblings kill their mentor. It isn’t enough just to hold the sword– you have to actually swing it.

This swing must be something irrational, because everything else is just the natural extension of a person with a sword (it is the person and the sword). Further, the person must make the swing themselves. For it to be a swing they make, they need to choose it. So the swing is a decision made in irrationality.

Swinging a sword at– beheading someone— who is clearly the irrational choice. What goes against the logic of the world, of time, of all the meaning you sought after? Gintoki fought to protect Shouyou’s disciples; but Takasugi tells us that he wanted to save Shouyou more than anyone. Narrative logic says that Shouyou’s disciples should die to save him, and the logic of their linear time– their humanities and their swords– is to rescue Shouyou and progress into the future. Gintoki swings against everything. And cries.

Gintoki stands up, is irrational, for the past that can never be taken back. This past completes his humanity (person, sword, swing) in the moment that it ruins it (he cries). Gintoki kills the one before him(先生) to make them the one behind (into the past); which itself is a loop, is a cycle, but also a line. It is a [being human] that gives birth to an irrational time.

Gintoki kills Shouyou even though it changes nothing. How does this birth time? “Time” comes out of a self, but Gintoki loses his self; “time” is what renders change possible, but Gintoki cannot “save” Shouyou or Takasugi. Certainly Gintoki knows this, and kills Shouyou in spite of it. But how does this bring forth a future at all?

Gintoki does kill Shouyou for something, for some reason, and this is concretely the survival (into the future) of Shouyou’s disciples. Abstractly, though the purpose is less clear– “even if I have to walk over your corpse” – it is still what drives (is the purpose of) every instance that Gintoki, or anyone, stands up.

Gintoki’s purpose is Shouyou’s purpose, and Shouyou dies to give birth to the “future” (a future that is born in irrationality). So when Utsuro comes to kill him, Shouyou sees also Gintoki, and smiles. Sakamoto calls this “hope”.

We are told that Shouyou gives birth to hope– his students– almost as if to invoke the analogy. Shouyou’s disciples– his “children” – are him, because he gave birth to them, and they are not him, because they have a futurity beyond his imagination. Equally, this future is knowable, because the child is you, and time repeats, just as it is not, because the child is not you, and you will not be there to see it. This is the substance of “hope”.

With regards to the structure of his world, his time, and perhaps even his own humanity, Gintoki makes the irrational choice: he stands up. But to stand up is actually for, to give birth to, the uncountable future. Sakamoto tells us that Gintoki “gives birth” to this future in every shounen-bond he ever makes. And here is the paradox, something more generative than irrational dilemma– Gintoki’s “descendants” inherit his soul to be in ways unimaginable to him.

This future pierces every moment, and in the same moment it escapes. Take that Shouyou knows, and cannot know, what his disciples will be. Their possibility is imaginable, in the sense that he can delineate it– “I hope you all find your own bushidous” – but it is also uncountably infinite, because your child is not you and not beholden to your patterns. Equivalently, Otae’s happy memories end when her father dies, but she still keeps the sword of her soul, this unspeakable thing, that past, and it is her purpose in standing up.

Gintoki, with the sword he has been given by a human, kills Shouyou. This gives birth to an uncountable future– uncountable because it is born in irrationality, beyond the possibilities and expectations of pattern, either linear or cyclic– that is an uncountable infinity, and this is [time]. [time] drives, again, pierces, every second of all of time, and in the same moment it escapes. It is also irreparably beyond the one who births it. This is why gintama had to end.

So the human is constituted in the moment of death (⇔the moment of irrational swing), which is to release the future— [time]. In the same moment, humanity, and [time], escapes. But the moment of constitution (⇔ [time]) is what births the next instance of being human, that is, the rest of time.

In the moment before Gintoki’s irrational swing, each [time] was truly infinite. Here possibility is as unthinkable as Gintoki’s heart; there is no better way I can describe this than an uncountable infinity. Gintoki did what he should have (not) (not) have done. Neither he, nor Shouyou, nor Takasugi, Katsura, Oboro, or anyone, could have imagined any possibility for the future that was to come. In its sheer impossibility, this was infinity: the past that cannot be taken back.

But the past that cannot be taken back is also the sword of the soul. By definition, this generates an impossible impossibility, that slips away as soon as it is born; and as the uncountable, that is, the mother of all irrationality, and also its child, [time] has little to say about lines or circles, aside from that they are essentially the same. So gintama never cared about time loops or not: all that matters is if you follow [time] by standing up.

When Gintoki recovers his sword (Takasugi’s eye, Takasugi), he does so amidst a wreckage that looks like pine trees, as Takasugi (the one who finally stood before him, who now will stand behind) dies in his arms. Here, we find that the “cycle” repeats: Gintoki stands up, and the sun rises.

This is the dawn of a new, impossible day.

I don’t think that’s so bad.

#4 months later. i cant articulate the suffering this has brought me. anyways. happy 5 years since 703 LOL #goose tag #gintama

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cozy-the-overlord · 6 days ago

Text

Memory

Summary: Returning to her old master's side for the first time since she left the Order, Ahsoka reflects on her past.

Word Count: 4,592

A/N: I don't usually write for clone wars (despite it being my longest running hyperfixation to date) but it's my sister's birthday and she's been begging me to write a fic for her for years so I thought I'd make that happen for her. Everyone say "happy birthday JJ!!"

Thank you so much for reading!!

Warnings: None

~~my taglist is all for Loki fics so I'm not putting it here but if you do want to be tagged on any potential future clone wars fics please let me know!!~~

Read it on Ao3!

Ahsoka knew she shouldn’t be excited.

It was hard to describe the feelings churning in her chest as the Mandalorian ship docked in the hanger. It must have read like dread to Bo-Katan, who patted her shoulder as they first passed into Republic airspace.

“Don’t worry. Hopefully, we won’t be here long.”

Ahsoka swallowed, nodded. She couldn’t blame the Mandalorian. There was a sense of dread building within her the closer they came to disembarking, even if it wasn’t the kind her companion expected. Just seeing the Jedi cruiser when they came out of hyperspace had brought a lump to her throat. The thought of who was waiting for her on that ship made even tighter. And so she had to keep herself cold, keep herself focused on the task at hand, shut down the longing that rose in her chest the moment she saw how her old master lit up when he said her name. She was here on a mission, not to visit or reminisce. Certainly not to return.

She just missed it so much.

Ahsoka felt guilty for missing it. This was something she had chosen – she could have gone back after everything. That’s what everyone had expected, what everyone had wanted. It was her decision to walk away, a necessary decision, and she couldn’t let herself regret that now. Besides, there had to be something morally reprehensible about pining for times of war, right? It wasn’t the suffering she craved – no, she had seen enough death to haunt her nightmares until the day she herself succumbed to it. Ahsoka didn’t want to go back to that.

But … she missed them. Her time with the Martez sisters, kind as they may have been, had only made the gaping hole in her chest feel emptier. She missed her friends. She missed sitting in the mess hall with the clones and listening to their stories, missed the thrill of excitement when they turned to her and let her tell them her own – they must have been so amused by her, this fourteen-year-old girl trying to live up to their war stories with her tales of training at the Jedi temple. But it was an affectionate sort of amusement. They saw her as a little sister even as she grew to outrank them in experience as well as position, and she found their paternalist nature bothered her less and less as it grew tempered with mutual respect.

She missed Master Kenobi, his ever-assured composure and his droll humor, the way his brow would quirk when he was holding back a laugh. It was funny – he wasn’t her master, and yet he had always been around, ready with an instruction or a quip or some word of wisdom. She got the feeling at times that he saw her just as much as his padawan as Anakin’s, although he was careful never to overstep his authority. Sometimes Ahsoka used to consider an alternate reality, where she had been apprenticed to him as he had expected when she stepped off that shuttle on Christophsis, how things might have played out differently. For as much as she admired Obi-Wan Kenobi, as much as she cared for him, she somehow struggled to imagine a world where she fit well alongside him as his student. And she wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

“You’re reckless, little one. You never would have made it as Obi-Wan’s padawan.”

Oh, Anakin.

His name had been legend amongst her youngling class, even more so than his master. He was just so cool – not like the stuffy masters clogging the council chambers, no, Anakin Skywalker was young, and he walked through the halls in black robes you could see from all the way across the Temple, and he was fascinating. A Jedi so renown for his military prowess that he rarely had the chance to return to the Temple after one battle ended before another began, whose success rate was as high as his casualties were low. He destroyed a Trade Federation battleship all by himself at nine years old, the first time he ever set foot in a starfighter cockpit. He dueled Count Dooku at the Battle of Geonosis as a padawan and survived with only a missing hand. When Ahsoka had learned that he was to be her master, she had been thrilled.

Of course, it hadn’t gone quite how she expected. Anakin learned that he was receiving a padawan only when she showed up at his proverbial doorstep, and they barely had any time to process this turn of events before the Clone Wars came roaring behind at her heels. The whole thing was rather whiplash-inducing – Ahsoka had gone from being the top of her class, living off a perpetual feast of praise for her form, her reflexes, her ingenuity, to being an unwanted annoyance that couldn’t seem to do anything right. She was as resilient as she was enthusiastic, but after the fiasco at the shield generator Anakin’s frustration was really beginning to weigh down on her.

And then he said it.

“… but you might make it as mine.”

The years would prove them to be a well-matched pair, albeit an unconventional one. They bickered more than was likely appropriate of a master and apprentice, but when it came moments of battle the two of them were of one mind. With such an unconventional Jedi as her teacher, Ahsoka found herself learning all sorts of things that she had never dreamed of while in Temple classrooms, experiences that often involved sneaking behind the council’s back to do so. After all, Rex told her once with a wry smile, there was nothing General Skywalker enjoyed more than disobeying a direct order. And for all his feigned irritation, it became clear early on even to her that Anakin cared for her more than he ever would be willing to admit.

It was the overprotectiveness. Especially in the beginning, Anakin was constantly fretting about her safety, pulling her in from situations she was certain she could handle, keeping her off of missions he deemed too dangerous. It used to bother her so much. How could it not? If he trusted her abilities – trusted her – to take care of herself, surely he wouldn’t be so scared to let her put his training to the test? Because he was scared, she came to realize. It took a while to recognize it for what it was, but his fear was a palpable thing, something that pulsated through the Force like a frantic beating heart any time she took a risk in front of him. And boy, did she take risks in front of him.

There was one time, early on, when they had been tasked with retrieving an important ship log from a drifting separatist vessel. It wasn’t long after boarding that they were able to determine why the ship had been abandoned: the reactor core was leaking, and the bridge was slowly filling with contaminated gas. Rex said that the mission was a bust – there was no way to safely retrieve the information they had come for, and no way of knowing that it was even worth the risk. After a bit, Anakin had been inclined to agree, but Ahsoka couldn’t stomach the idea of returning to the cruiser without what they had come so far for. The vents were small enough for her to fit through, and copying the log shouldn’t take too long, and besides, Ahsoka was adept at holding her breath …

She was grinning when she emerged from the vent once more, datastick in hand and only slightly dizzy, but Anakin had been practically seething.

“What were you thinking?” He snapped, forcing her to sit against the wall the way one might an unruly child. “No – sit down. You’re staying right there until Kix has checked you out.”

“But I got the data—”

“You could have been killed.” He grabbed the datastick from her with his mechanical hand, and for a moment Ahsoka almost expected him to crush it between his fingers. Instead, he only held it before her face. “This is not worth that.”

She scowled. She had just saved the mission and of course, all the thanks she gets is a lecture. “You risk your life all the time – I don’t know why you get mad at me when I do it!”

“I take necessary risks,” he retorted. “Nothing about this was necessary.”

“But—”

“No. I’m not arguing with you on this, Ahsoka.” His tone was firm. The conversation was over.

Yes, he was scared. It was strange to realize that – fear was perhaps the most un-Jedi-like emotion one could possess. Didn’t Master Yoda always say that fear was the path to the Dark Side? But Ahsoka had always known her master was a peculiar Jedi, and more often than not his peculiarities played to his strengths. He feared loss of life, and so he saw to it that lives were not lost. It was a dangerous game. Life and death is so often beyond anyone’s control, and she knew Anakin struggled with that reality. Sometimes he panicked. Sometimes he lost control.

There was that time on Mortis …

Ahsoka didn’t remember much of Mortis, and practically none at all of her time spent in the clutches of the force-wielder they called The Son – it all seemed to fade together into some sort of blurry nightmare the moment she opened her eyes once more on the shuttle. But she remembered that. She remembered dragging herself up off the ground, coughing the stale air out of her lungs as her vision swam behind her eyes. And Anakin was there. She couldn’t even see him, really, but she felt him next to her, watching over her … and then he was holding her.

He laughed a bit awkwardly when he pulled away, tried to play it off like everything was normal and nothing had happened – hey, Snips – and they never spoke about it again. But Ahsoka remembered it. Her master had never hugged her before, and never did again. Jedi tended to shy away from that sort of physical embrace in general – it was too emotional, too irrational, a sign of attachment. Ahsoka rather thought he hadn’t even meant to do it. Something had come over him and he just grabbed her as tightly as he could.

Take it easy on him, Obi-Wan would tell her weeks later, when Ahsoka was stewing about another new mission Anakin had decided was too dangerous to include her. He watched you die. He’s not going to forget that any time soon.

So quickly did the moment pass that she hadn’t even thought to hug him back.

She regretted that sometimes.

In retrospect, there was an irony in how frantic he became whenever he felt she was in any sort of danger when compared to his training methods. Ahsoka couldn’t imagine what the council might have said if they knew Anakin was regularly ordering his men to fire stun shots at his padawan until she missed a deflection and landed unconscious on the hanger floor. But the more you thought about it, the more it went hand-in-hand.

“I want you to be prepared for anything,” Anakin had told her. “I want to know you could survive anything.” Overpreparation, due to overprotection. It made sense.

Though it hadn’t seemed fair to her at first – how did this prepare her for anything? She could pass the droid tests with flying colors. When would she ever need to fight the clones? (there was the true irony – Ahsoka never could have foreseen the frenzied chase through the sewers of Coruscant). It felt as though her master was setting her up to fail.

But as she got older, as she learned to foresee the shots before they were fired, as she found herself going longer and longer – five minutes before she got hit with a blast, then ten, then twenty, then half an hour, until Anakin was calling the exercise over before she ever ended up on the floor – only then did she realize that he was doing the opposite. She learned to think on her feet, to pay attention to all things at once without ever losing focus, to stay calm and collected and in control no matter what it was she was facing.

It especially came in handy in the moments when Ahsoka found herself responsible for more than just herself. Jinx and O-Mer on the Trandoshan Island Four, for one, or Lux and his team of Onderon rebels. Or the younglings on the Gathering test. Just the thought of that series of events gave Ahsoka a headache, even though it had all turned out alright in the end. All in all, she had been pretty pleased with how she had handled Hondo’s sudden unprovoked attack, even if it had gone horribly wrong in the last seconds of their escape. Finding herself overpowered and handcuffed on a drunken pirate’s ship was certainly not her brightest moment, but oh well. They had all made it out in the end.

“I haven’t spoken to Anakin,” Obi-Wan told her once she and the younglings were safely aboard the cruiser. It was a calm, quiet statement, an offhand remark that almost masked the seriousness beneath it.

Ahsoka nodded, matching his faux unconcern. “Good. Best not to worry him.”

They stood there nodding together on the bridge, as if they weren’t both acutely aware that a worried Anakin might have resulted in a Republic invasion of Florrum instead of the Separatists.

Of course, he had to find out eventually, and when he did Ahsoka could sense him fuming all the way from the hanger as he stormed up to meet them.

“You just let him go?” he snapped at Obi-Wan. “He attacked and boarded a non-military vessel, tried to kill six children to steal their kyber crystals, and held a Jedi commander captive for several rotations and you just let him fly off into the sunset?”

“Grievous destroyed his base, Master. He lost his stronghold and most of his men. He’s not going to bother us again anytime soon.” Ahsoka hoped she sounded appropriately soothing. She had told Anakin that Hondo had planned to ransom her to the Separatists to collect a Jedi bounty, which riled him up enough as it was. That was fine. He didn’t need to know about the private buyer looking for a female Jedi. Quite honestly, Ahsoka would’ve been happy if she never had to think about that ever again – she didn’t need Anakin using it as a reason to hunt the pirate across the galaxy and beat him to a bloody pulp.

“Besides, we have more pressing matters to attend to,” said Obi-Wan, ever the face of logic. “Ahsoka is fine, Anakin. The younglings are safe. We must move forward.”

Her master grunted, still scowling, but relenting all the same. It was later, as they headed for their quarters, that he brought it up again.

“How did you end up on their ship in the first place?”

“I had the younglings reroute power to the engines to break the boarding tube.” Ahsoka smirked. “Sucked Hondo and all his men back to his ship. I just got caught up in it.”

Anakin raised his eyebrows, considering the strategy. “Impressive. You came up with that on the spot?”

Her smirk widened. “Yep.” Her master was never one for superfluous praise – whenever he complimented her actions, she knew he was truly impressed. It never failed to fill her with pride.

Of course, he always managed to find something meriting improvement.

“You should have waited until you were in a sealed chamber, though,” he said. “That suction could have killed you even without the pirates.”

“Well, that was the plan.” Ahsoka huffed. “There were … complications.”

He snorted. “Isn’t there always?” They turned the corner of the hall, nodding in acknowledgment at the brief salutes from passing clones. General, Commander.

After a bit, Anakin cleared his throat. “Well, we’re heading to Coruscant for a bit, so hopefully you’ll get a bit of a break before we’re back in the Outer Rim.” He glanced at her for only a moment before turning forward once more. “I’ve had enough of loaning you out to others.”

Ahsoka grinned to herself. Oh Anakin, never one to share. “Sounds good to me.”

It wasn’t often that Anakin “loaned her out” so to speak – there were precious few who he seemed to trust with her. Obi-Wan of course was an exception, and Rex, and Senator Amidala (although Ahsoka always got the impression that he was more trusting her with the senator, rather than the other way around), but even then, he’d get noticeably grumpy when he had to send her off on a mission that he himself was not a part of. But Ahsoka knew his moodiness was a compliment, deep down. Even if he didn’t want to part with her, he trusted her abilities enough that he couldn’t think of a reason to keep her behind.

“You and Master Skywalker are very close,” Barriss had commented once, while they were both on a rare break from battle at the temple.

The way she said it – like it was a bad thing, like there was something wrong with it – made Ahsoka frown.

“I suppose,” she said, hoping that the prickliness in her chest didn’t appear in her voice. “But aren’t all masters supposed to be close with their padawans?” The bond between a Jedi teacher and his apprentice is strong, Cad Bane had sneered down at her. Although even Ahsoka had to admit that she wasn’t sure how many other Jedi would have chosen the life of their padawan over that of thousands of innocent children …

She chose not to think about it.

Barriss only hummed. “I suppose so …” She didn’t look up.

Ahsoka felt bad for Barriss, which was funny because she was pretty sure Barriss felt bad for her. Barriss was uncomfortable around Anakin – she never would admit it out loud, but Ahsoka could tell. And she understood, to a point. Barriss found comfort in etiquette and decorum, in following the rules and sticking to the plan, the kind of thing that would make Anakin spontaneously combust. And Anakin’s methods … certainly differed from Master Luminara’s, that was certain. Barriss was horrified when Ahsoka mentioned how she trained with the clones, so much so that she never brought it up with anyone else ever again.

But Ahsoka felt bad for her. Luminara might never send her padawan into a throng of armed soldiers to fend off blaster shots until she succumbed to a stun blast, but that was the problem, wasn’t it? Anakin did what he did because he wanted her to survive. She knew that better than anything else, and everyone else did too. Luminara herself admitted it, on Geonosis, after the weak signal Ahsoka had frantically hotwired meters and meters beneath the smoking debris brought Anakin digging his way down to the both of them.

“Your master never gave up on you.”

Of course he didn’t. Anakin believed in her, would always do everything he could to find her safely, made sure that she would be able to make it out herself when he couldn’t. But there was the unspoken admission in there as well, and she was certain Barriss heard it, had known it from the beginning. Because while Ahsoka held her breath and flicked the wires of her commlink against the power cell, Barriss sat back, her face a mask of stone, and waited for the air to run out.

Sometimes Ahsoka wondered how things might have been different if they had switched – if Barriss had found herself Anakin’s padawan, and Ahsoka Luminara’s. Would Barriss still abandon the Order if her master did not abandon her first? Would Ahsoka do so instead? She supposed she already did, in a way.

She felt guilty for leaving. She didn’t regret it, necessarily – she couldn’t have stayed after that, after everything. Ahsoka had made her decision before she walked into the council chambers that afternoon, but nothing they said made her question it. If the weight of the situation hadn’t been so overwhelming, she might have laughed – the only Jedi who ever apologized to her was Anakin, the only Jedi in the room who had nothing to apologize for.

But that was what made her feel guilty – the fact that he apologized to her, the way he smiled so warmly at her as he held out her silka beads, how he seemed so certain, so excited that things would finally return to as they were. And the way he went running after her – she had known he would. Some part of her had hoped she’d make it out of the temple before he caught her, because she was afraid he’d talk her out of it. She almost couldn’t look at him.

“What about me? I believed in you, I stood by you!”

That’s what hurt. Knowing that he didn’t understand – that he’d never truly understand, no matter how much he insisted that he did – that he’d never be able to accept that it wasn’t about him and that there was nothing more he could have done to keep her … that hurt. It’s not about you, Anakin, but he’d never be able to see it. He was the reason she almost stayed, but he’d only ever remember that she walked away.

“The Jedi Order is your life. You can’t just throw it away like this. Ahsoka, you are making a mistake.”

“Maybe. But I have to sort this out on my own. Without the council, and without you.”

He trained her to survive, with or without him. She just didn’t think he considered that she’d ever choose to be without him.

…

The meeting with her old masters didn’t go as smoothly as she had hoped. Realistically, Ahsoka had known it would be unlikely that she’d be able to convince Obi-Wan to drop everything and invade a neutral system, even if it was in the name of catching Maul. But Anakin was always ready for a fight, and both of them knew the danger of leaving Maul in a position of unchecked power throughout the galaxy. Ahsoka had thought that maybe they’d be open to it. But as expected, Obi-Wan had been resistant, and Anakin’s interests seemed to lay more in reconnecting than with business. And then of course Bo-Katan got upset and antagonistic with them, which Obi-Wan deescalated with his typical polite composure but which certainly did not help their case.

She was also caught off guard by how much Anakin and the clones had prepared for her. Just hearing the same old greetings as they walked through the halls – General, Commander – was overwhelming. The 501st’s repainted helmets with her facial markings left her absolutely speechless. Ahsoka had expected the men to be bitter upon her return – surely, they’d be hurt, that she had abandoned them at a point of the war when they needed her help most. She hadn’t been prepared for how eager they were to have her return.

It was a problem. She almost wished they hated her. As it was, it only served to further weaken her resolve. It made her wish to stay even more.

And then of course there was Anakin, who was as excited as a puppy the moment she stepped off the gangway. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he had planned all this specifically to coax her back for good – or perhaps he had convinced himself she was back for good already, and this was his welcoming home party. Either way, the ache in her heart only grew when he pulled out the box with her old lightsaber hilts, retrieved from the pits of Coruscant and polished shiny as new. How long must he have searched to recover them? How long must he have worked to restore them? How many hours had he spent with them, that their blades shifted from green to his shade of blue? The probable answers brought tears to her eyes. Ahsoka plucked them from the box and it felt like coming home. His smile welcomed her back.

“That’s what friends are for.”

But just when it seemed that the invasion of Maul’s Mandalore would be approved, word came in that Coruscant was under attack. The Chancellor was in danger. The fleet was to be dispatched immediately. Ahsoka nearly saw red.

But Anakin stepped in – it was odd, seeing him take up the role as mediator, but it suited him more than one would expect. His suggestion of splitting the 501st, promoting Rex to Commander and sending them with Ahsoka to Mandalore, was acceptable enough to Obi-Wan.

“You capture Maul, I’ll take care of Grievous – with any luck, this will all be over soon.”

“Master Kenobi always said there was no such thing as luck.”

She could hear the smirk dripping into his voice. “Good thing I taught you otherwise.”

Ahsoka watched as he walked away, the lump in her throat growing stronger with every step he took. Why did she feel on the brink of tears? It was almost over – in a few rotations, they’d be sitting together exchanging stories over lunch like old friends. Anakin was capable. He’d have the Coruscant situation wrapped up in a neat little bow quicker than one could blink. She’d be seeing him again. Of course she would.

Why then, did she suddenly feel so scared?

“Anakin!”

Ahsoka didn’t really have a reason for calling him back – she just needed him to stop, don’t walk away, if only so she could see his face again. When he did turn back to look at her, brows raised quizzically, she felt almost frozen.

She thought of Mortis, how surprising that had been, how wrong it was for a Jedi to lose control of their emotions like that.

But I’m no Jedi.

Anakin wasn’t expecting it. She felt his confusion in the air as she rushed to close the gap between them, felt him stiffen when she threw her arms around his shoulders. She had to move fast, after all – fast enough to keep herself from overthinking her way out of acting. Once she had though, time seemed to slow to a halt.

Anakin softened far before she did on Mortis. It was only a millisecond before she felt his hands snake around her back, pressing her as tightly to his chest as she did him. Perhaps he had been waiting for this, hoping for it, since she stepped on to the cruiser. He rested his chin on the crown of her head, nestled in the valley between her montrals. That felt nice. Holding him, being held by him – that felt nice too. Ahsoka didn’t want to let go.

Eventually she had to – although her master seemed even more reluctant than she to relinquish his grip. He studied her when they had stepped away from each other, a gentle sort of concern etched across his features.

“You alright, Snips?” he asked softly.

Ahsoka nodded. Swallowed. Found her words. “Good luck out there.”

He exhaled, an amused huff. “You too,” he said, with a gentle pat against her arm. “See you in a bit.”

Ahsoka watched as he left, that ever-present Anakin jaunt in his step as he hurried off down the halls. She wasn’t sure what she was worried about. They’d see each other again.

Some things never changed.

#star wars the clone wars #the clone wars #ahsoka tano #anakin skywalker #hurt/comfort #canon compliant #but at the end it does turn into a minor #fix it fic #cozy writes #memory

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snowbellewells · 5 months ago

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Self Promo Sunday: "Sky's Canvas"

This little future Swan-Jones-Mills family fic envisioning them during their happy beginning post-s6 would probably have been well suited to Father's Day last week, but I didn't think of it until too late. I hope it will still be enjoyable this week too. It's a part of my one shot collection on AO3 or ff.net (if you'd prefer to read it either of those places instead) I hope you have fun picturing this alternate idea of what might have happened - and I'd love to hear what you think!

Notes: I toyed with the idea for this one for quite some time. The prompt elements that I have used are: a museum, the phrase “it was just a joke”, and also some small art facts – mostly about the particular museum itself (which is real). I have also put in a CS daughter (my personal head canon imagined one, Morgan Ruth Jones, whom I have written about before), and a college aged Henry. So, this is set somewhere in an alternative post-season 6 reality, where Henry stays in the Land Without Magic to seek his story, and also to be close enough to visit his family often, and for them to return the favor…)

by: @snowbellewells

The bubbly, nonstop chatter of her four-year-old little girl, which has cheerfully been filling Emma Swan’s ears for the past hour and a half, suddenly stills, immediately grabbing her attention and setting off an interior maternal alarm. She turns to seek out Morgan Ruth Jones – her little pirate princess – wondering if her daughter has yet again managed to sneak away from them and find herself in some sort of trouble.

Luckily, Emma doesn’t have to look far before she hears a chortling trill of baby laughter and locates her toddler with the disheveled head of dark, ringlet curls and twinkling, mischievous eyes – an aquamarine mix of her own green gaze and her father’s ocean blue – standing before a huge oil painting of a Spanish galleon rocking precariously on the stormy main and looking up at her father with fixed adoration. “Really, Papa?” Emma hears Morgan chirp, practically bouncing on the balls of her little feet as she tugs anxiously at his hook in eagerness to hear his answer. “Was it a storm that big you sailed ‘Roger’ through when you went to save Henwy in Neverland?!”

Emma is just chuckling wryly at the changes which have transpired in her life to give her a little girl more interested in daring adventures, ancient naval ships, and sword fighting than frilly dresses or dolls and makeup, even as her husband raises his eyes just enough to smirk at her knowingly over Morgan’s head, when another voice, youthful, warm, and settling into its masculine, adult timbre, answers Morgan’s question from over her shoulder, announcing Henry’s arrival to join them. “It was bigger, Pipsqueak,” he confirms jovially, pausing briefly to wrap a wiry arm around his mom in a quick side-hug before continuing to the side of his younger half-sister, kneeling to her level and adding with a gleam in his eye, “A mermaid summoned it to drown them all.”

“Hen-wy!!” Morgan squeals with glee; the painting, and even her papa’s beloved ship, forgotten as she flings herself into her brother’s arms with enough force to nearly bowl him over, causing Henry to chuckle as he catches her close to his chest.

“Hey Munchkin,” he greets affectionately, standing to his full height again – now even with his stepdad’s – still holding Morgan, her arms wrapped around his neck so tightly that Emma has to wonder if she’s ever going to let go. Turning to include his mom and his surrogate father in his next statement, Henry adds. “It’s great to see you all. Things must be quiet in Storybrooke, if you’re still going to stay all weekend.”

Here he arcs an eyebrow in curious bemusement, a trait Emma realizes all too well that he has picked up from her dashing scoundrel of a husband and probably uses to equally charming effect on all the girls he meets in his freshman courses at Bowdoin College. It is clear he has settled easily into the small arts school in Brunswick, Maine, just under a two hours’ drive from them, and that the campus atmosphere and freeing anonymity and normalcy he has there must be agreeing with him. Emma wants to snort in disbelieving laughter at his jest, though well aware that he knows better than to ever think his hometown would go completely, boringly normal. Instead, she shakes her head resignedly, merely giving her grown son a playfully long-suffering sigh. “You know how it is,” she shrugs, “never a dull moment. But – if you don’t count the dwarves coming to blows at Granny’s the other morning because Tom Clark accidentally sat in Leroy’s spot at the counter and got his flu germs on Leroy’s plate of bacon and eggs…”

“Which I do count,” Killian interrupts smoothly, winking at his adopted son. “I am the one who risked infection from the virus in forestalling their skirmish.”

Emma rolls her eyes at her deputy husband’s interruption and mutters “drama queen” under her breath, which Henry and Morgan both clearly hear and snicker at before she continues, “Otherwise it’s been as quiet as it ever gets. No deathly dangerous villains or curses meant to tear us apart and wipe our memories blank.”

“Yet…” Killian adds on needlessly, an ominous tone in his voice acknowledging the fact that they all know it’s only a matter of time before some new threat is wreaking havoc again. Their sleepy little town might seem like a place lost in time and space, but it is still a veritable magnet for trouble, and none of them can deny it.

Killian, however, waggles his brows playfully after his foreboding aside, making Henry shake his own head at his stepfather. It had seemed a rather grim pronouncement for the reformed pirate – more like his mom, really.

Morgan grins widely back at her father, nodding in gleeful agreement, her gap-toothed smile showing where she has lost a fair few of her baby teeth recently. “Yeah…yet!” she exclaims, not fully understanding the concern behind the sentiment, but always ready – as is her entire extended family – for action and excitement.

Emma shakes her head in humored exasperation at her two “children” – wondering, as she often does, how someone who has seen and experienced as much as Killian, who has witnessed some of the worst humanity had to offer and suffered at their hands, who has lived so long and weathered such crushing heartbreak and hate, can still easily find such simple, child-like joy in the littlest things. “Really, guys?” she questions, looking to her college student son for more mature support. “Can’t we just enjoy things being normal for once?”

“Aye, of course, my Love,” Killian replies deftly. “ ‘Twas merely a joke,” he adds, leaning over to brush a quick kiss to her brow that makes Morgan giggle, hide her face in Henry’s shoulder, and cry out, “Eww, they’re kissing again!” in a frank, tickling whisper against her older sibling’s skin.

“Just a joke is right,” Henry declares, motioning them forward to venture on into the rest of the Bowdoin College Museum and toward the particular exhibit he wants them to see. The collection was an 1811 bequest from a wealthy benefactor to the school and was one of the earliest college art collections in the country, as Henry had enthusiastically told her over the phone some weeks ago when his project had commenced. His Maritime History class had done a cross-curriculum partnership with the arts department to put together a student exhibit of research and mixed media in the college’s museum, and Henry has been quite secretive about his entry, even if insistent that they needed to see it in person. “Like anyone could be around you lot for long and think you were normal!” he scoffs.

“Ha ha,” his mother laughs drolly, bumping into his side with her shoulder in playful retribution as they move ahead side-by-side, with Killian, who is now holding a wriggling Morgan once again, following closely behind. However, once the jostling ceases, Emma grasps her nearly-grown son’s hand in hers for a moment, stunned anew at how much he has changed from the little boy who had found her in Boston all those years ago, and led her into the very life she has now. Squeezing tightly with emotion welling up in her throat, she wishes he could truly understand how much she loves him.

“Missed you too, Mom,” Henry murmurs softly, pressing her fingers back with his own wrapped around them. It is more than enough and makes her heart flutter in gladness.

Once Henry leads them through a few different rooms and several intriguing displays, he slows when they reach a large, somewhat circular room with a high, arched ceiling, and then turns to them with a mysterious smile on his face and clear anticipation in his big, brown eyes, just as they have always held, even at ten years old.

At first glance, this particular exhibit, this room in itself, seems empty. Looking around with faces equally full of curiosity and confusion, Killian, Emma, and Morgan end up staring back at Henry expectantly until Killian finally speaks up, “Begging your pardon, Lad, but I’m afraid I am not quite certain what you wish for us to see.”

Henry gives a nod of acknowledgement, rather knowingly pleased, and making Emma smirk to herself with a mother’s satisfaction at seeing her son so confidently happy and in his element. ‘He’s definitely got something up his sleeve,’ she thinks affectionately, admittedly finding herself anxious to see what his surprise might be. She knows that Henry has been loving this course all term – not to mention how thrilled her husband had been at the news – and that the long term practicum research projects are being showcased here throughout the entire month of April. Emma can only conclude that her son’s hard work has paid off in a way he’s proud of, and he must believe wholeheartedly that they will be too.

All Henry says is, “I take it you’re ready then?” and at Killian’s nod and Morgan’s “Yes, yes, YES, Henwy!!” exclamation, while she hops up and down exuberantly, he switches off the lights and presses a previously unnoticed button next to the light switch.

Immediately, the light and airy sound of some sort of flute or piccolo trickles through the quiet air of the room, a gently evocative melody with a lingering, haunted quality to its tone, enhanced by the sound echoing beneath of waves washing gently against the hull of some easily floating ship or back and forth over the shore of some deserted bay. Even as the sounds which are familiar and comforting to his tiny family audience wrap around them, small pinpricks of light appear just like stars in the night sky out on the ocean, sparking to life on the walls around them and the high ceiling overhead. It is a constellation spread out just for them in breathtaking majesty. Then, the Author begins to narrate his newest story…

Listening to Henry’s words, Emma feels her breath catch just a bit in both awe and emotion, glancing quickly over at her husband and daughter, before either of them realizes they are being observed. Morgan’s green eyes are wide and sparkling with interest and excitement, her mouth an open “o” as she looks above her, dazzled at what would appear for all the world to be the stars and constellations in the night sky brought indoors and spread out for their entertainment. Killian is silent and still, so much so that Emma knows – as few others would – just how valiantly he is battling some strong emotion…how very touched he is. Emma was never as great a student of the star charts and navigational astronomy as her sailor would have loved to make her, but Henry ate it right up, and she would bet her battered and beloved old VW that Henry has recreated some particular display that holds an extra meaning for he and his stepdad alone.

Shaking herself slightly to bring her focus back to earth and her attention back to the words of Henry’s presentation once more, she hears her son’s voice – soothing, engaging, and reeling her into the adventurous stories behind the scattered specks of light arrayed above them and their meaning and guidance to generations of sailors making their ways on a wide and pathless sea.

“The Cygnus,” Killian mouths silently beside her, appearing genuinely awestruck as he takes his gaze just momentarily from Henry’s representative “sky” to look in the eyes of the young man he has for years now cared for and loved like a son; a sincere gaze of fond understanding passing between them that brings a film of unshed tears to Emma’s vision that she has to rapidly blink away. In fact, soundless though it may be, she catches Killian’s comment only because she is so focused on her husband and his emotional reaction to this gift Henry has given all of them – but her pirate in particular. Emma senses that Killian knows it in this moment and holds tightly to his fingers twined with hers while practically beaming at her son, wondering again how she ever got lucky enough that the two most important people in her world would love each other as much as they each love her.

Morgan reaches over from Killian’s arms to pat her mother’s cheeks as Henry concludes his tale and turns the lights back up. “Don’t cry, Mama,” Morgan coos sweetly. “Henwy’s story was happy in the end. The Swan leads the sailor to his home.”

Emma smiles shakily at her daughter, and then the rest of her family with their looks of understanding. “I know, Baby,” Emma murmurs softly, still brushing away the evidence, but with her smile growing broader all the while. “Don’t worry. These are happy tears.”

Tagging a few who might enjoy: @jennjenn615 @searchingwardrobes @kmomof4 @jrob64 @apiratewhopines

@whimsicallyenchantedrose @laschatzi @stahlop @teamhook @revanmeetra87 @winterbaby89

@spartanguard @therooksshiningknight @tiganasummertree @optomisticgirl @xsajx @bluewildcatfanatic

@xarandomdreamx @booksteaandtoomuchtv @anmylica @jonesfandomfanatic @motherkatereloyshipper @branlovestowrite

@linda8084 @lfh1226-linda @the-darkdragonfly @elizabeethan @donteattheappleshook @let-it-raines @ineffablecolors

#self promo sunday #cs future family fluff #canon divergent cs ff post s6 #sky's canvas #cs one shot #cs famiily fluff #captain cobra feels #cs baby: morgan ruth jones

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keepsmagnetoaway · 30 days ago

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Uncanny X-Men 142 (February 1981)

Chris Claremont/John Byrne

Hey look! The title finally officially changed to Uncanny X-Men! It's been on the cover for years but this is the first time this book is technically called this! Oh right also this is one of the raddest and best known X-Men covers of all time. It's fucking sick as hell. Also I have a bunch of stuff to talk about here so strap in, there's a big ol' update on this project at the end. But first...EVERYBODY DIES!

As with the last issue, I was struck re-reading this one by just how little of it actually happens in the dystopian future. It's just enough to terrify and to remain the most impactful part of this series, and subsequently it was the part that was widely copied and then done to death, but here again it's actually mostly just small, chilling glimpses like this one.

And, of course, this one.

And this one.

These panels are incredible - brutal, artful, still shocking today. But much of this issue is the "modern-day" fight with Mystique and co inside various committee rooms in Washington, and while it's not bad it's also kind of whatever, and you keep wanting to get back to these bits. It's also, eventually and despite all the X-Men deaths in the future, a story with a "happy" ending, of course: the dark timeline is, sort of, averted, and Kitty has saved the world.

This really is a hell of a story, but it's kind of impossible to tell now. Time travel, alternate futures, shock deaths, wild dystopias - this was all more or less brand new to comics at the time, a fully formed new direction, and Days of Future Past justly became a huge success because of it.

But - and I know you know this - in the end that was probably a pity, because subsequently other writers (on X-Men and other properties) went hogwild with the idea, piling bleakness up on bleakness and alternate reality upon alternate reality until none of it made any sense or had any impact. This also then of course ended up setting the tone for many, many superhero movies as well, and again that too got run into the ground pretty fast. On this blog, I'm trying to read these stories as I come to them, and on those terms Days of Future Past is a triumph, but I can't totally pretend that I don't know what comes after.

Speaking of what comes after, though... As you know, I'm using the brilliant Krushing Krisis reading guide for this blog. When I started it, I obviously did so with what that guide calls "Era 1", the actual beginning of the X-Men. I've now just finished what it defines as "Era 2", which covered the revival of the series and ends here with the end of Days of Future Past, on the brink of various other X-titles launching as the gang became truly huge in the 80s.

But...when I started with "Era 1", although that made sense, I was skipping what the guide calls "Era 0", the mishmash of comics retroactively set before the 1963 debit. There's no very obvious time to read these, of course, but I've decided to go back and do it now, before we really get into the 80s: at this point most of the foundations have been laid, so it's time to go back and look at the...foundations of the foundations? I guess? The stuff retroactively inserted under the foundations, like a basement extension? Whatever. It'll be an interesting selection of prequels, heavily featuring Wolverine but also some other stuff, and there's not that much of it, after which I'll come back to where I left off here and we'll get to the departure of John Byrne, the launch of New Mutants, all that juicy stuff.

Also, as I write this - a couple of weeks before it posts, I guess - I've been getting a really nice spike in interactions, comments etc., and it's been a delight. I'm so glad people are enjoying this, and please do subscribe, repost, yell at me in the comments about how I'm being unfair to your favourite issue, and so on.

Onward! To the (future) past!

#x men comics #an xmen a day #xmen #uncanny xmen #days of future past

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yuseirra · 1 month ago

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It's been so long since I read the series... but I suddenly remembered about "Abide in the Wind" so I read the last few chapters and I'm getting enormous flashbacks, that was such a memorable piece and it still looks as beautiful as I remember-

spoilers for the ENTIRE PIECE AND PLOTLINE: So, a godly figure(dragon) falls in love with a human being. But she's so selfless and always gives up on her being and dies in every timeline. He couldn't bear to accept that, so he tries to bring forth a reality where she lives to be the truth but that is never possible, and he grows flawed and insane in the process. He starts to bring misery through collecting souls to replenish his energy to reattempt on rewriting the timelines, and the world starts getting destroyed. The entire world wants him gone, the flawed god and disaster that he's become.

The girl he loved and wished to bring back comes to recognize this in one timeline she's come across, and she's chosen as the successor, to become the next dragon(godly being) that should kill and replace him. But then she decides that she... despite her very selfless nature, started to have a single want. She wants him too.

So she decides to give up her past, present and future as a god to bring him back, and the laws of that world gets rewritten, she saves him and they get to be together with everything that's happened... becoming a past that lasts only as an alternate reality. Everyone lives happily in a rewritten world she brought, she forgets that she was once a god but he remembers

I... haha.. I'm getting really REALLY similar vibes with them in regard to hikaai rn I am not sure if this is a good comparison but,

That godly being started out very empty and prone to change. He was so pure and innocent, unknowing of everything, and that girl he fell in love with became the single thing he wanted. He was like a blank piece of paper. He actually ruined her life unintentionally by entering it, because her life was so peaceful before he came along and everything started spiraling into madness after he did... but she never really blamed him for it.

Anyhow, that girl doesn't respect her own life while she immensely cares for other beings. She kept dying because she disregarded herself. He realized it'd happen in every timeline, so in desperation and despair, he started trying to change fate- in which ultimately resulted in destroying himself to the core. As far as becoming a natural disaster.

What he goes through really feels similar to what Hikaru's going through after Ai's death, the difference is that... Abide in the Wind is pure fantasy. The dragon, he actively tries to collect souls to use as a source of power to reverse his beloved death and hundreds of thousands fall into misery in the process, the whole world starts collapsing into havoc.. well, what Hikaru may be kind of similar in essence you know. He started out to be this really, sweet and kindred soul but he utterly starts breaking down into insanity after the only person he loved winds up dead (and he believes that's his fault too;). He can't bear the fact that she doesn't exist anymore, so he starts coming up with some sort of reasoning to bring her closer to him (I am not sure if he thought that up on his own because it's so bizarre) and if what the songs are implying are accurate of what he's been doing, he's actually BEEN collecting some sort of "light"; I think that may have to do with people with the star eyes. So.. yeah. He could've been making some sort of sacrifices out of desperation too(goodness...) If he were to be a god.. -_- I wonder if he could have done the same thing to bring Ai back?; I wonder... he used to be so soft though!!!!! I wouldn't have cared about him this much if he wasn't like that, he's just.. broken apart...;

well, the dragon got saved. His beloved came to save him and give him back his life.

Idk about Kamiki. But I see how these sorts of stories.. never fail to get me intrigued.

wanting to reverse fate/being unable to accept loss and wishing the dead back, that's a theme that's explored a lot in fiction. It can't happen in real life, but like what they say in the piece itself as it begins, onk IS fiction.

What I can sense is that the character is suffering so bad and he's been so alone!!;; The songs and the plotline keep screaming that to me so it really bothers me, it just keeps grabbing my attention because this was a character that didn't deserve what's happened to him. Maybe he does now, but it's just horrible to be a witness of the types of emotional pains he's been going through, with it never being properly tended to even once. I don't even know if we're supposed to/ allowed to pity him because everything is still vague, so is he responsible for harming Ai or not, I am 99.9% positive he ISN'T, but the manga still just doesn't tell us that in a solid sense and leaves us hanging right, so it's so frustrating to wait. I'm sure they want to do something about this character and that's why it's been saved till last, but they better make it good and satisfying enough. I'm not asking for so much, I'm not even sure if he can be "saved" in a proper sense because he already lost the one single thing he loved more than his life. I just; want him to be addressed and explained properly, this guy has himself a story, but he never gets to tell his own tale. Because Aqua hates him and decides he must die. Everyone besides Ai doesn't want him. Not a single soul helped him when he needed it as a child except Ai, that's so unfair because he was a good one. It's just.. not a happy thing to watch. He can rot in hell if he deserves it??? But I want to know what happened!! They'll show it to us. It's just that I'm not in the future yet so I can't make anything out of it in the present. I actually have an idea where this will eventually head, I just don't have the patience because I feel things. They talk about pain and when that happens, you can't help but being stressed, right!

The final chapters of Abide in the Wind was beautiful, it's very colorful and memorable, and the writing for it was exemplar and poetic!! I definitely can say that's one of the pieces that influenced me as an artist... If you like stories where characters who share a bond eventually end up saving each other's fate, it may be worth a read! Reana is still one of my fav female protagonists, she's...so selfless. And that ties very strongly with how things play out in the story, it's why she was chosen in more ways than one.

#webtoon #hikaai #oshi no ko spoilers #abide in the wind #oshi no theories #that comic looks REALLY beautiful.. ;v;...#I read it when I was a lot younger #and I feel like I can better appreciate it even now...there are some scenes from it that's simply engraved into my head

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ndbookstudy · 1 year ago

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practising the power of now, eckhart tolle, pg. 36-39

letting go of psychological time.

Learn to use time in the practical aspects of your life - we may call this "clock time" - but immediately return to present-moment awareness when those practical matters have been dealt with. In this way, there will be no buildup of "psychological time," which is identification with the past and continuous compulsive projection into the future.

If you set yourself a goal and work toward it, you are using clock time. You are aware of where you want to go, but you honor and give your fullest attention to the step that you are taking at this moment. If you then become excessively focused on the goal, perhaps because you are seeking happiness, fulfillment, or a more complete sense of self in it, the Now is no longer honored. It becomes reduced to a mere stepping-stone to the future, with no intrinsic value. Clock time then turns into psychological time. Your life's journey is no longer an adventure, just an obsessive need to arrive, to attain, to "make it." You no longer see or smell the flowers by the wayside either, nor are you aware of the beauty and the miracle of life that unfolds all around you when you are present in the Now.

Are you always trying to get somewhere other than where you are? Is most of your doing just a means to an end? Is fulfillment always just around the corner or confined to short-lived pleasures, such as sex, food, drink, drugs, or thrills and excitement? Are you always focused on becoming, achieving, and attaining, or alternatively chasing some new thrill or pleasure? Do you believe that if you acquire more things you will become more fulfilled, good enough, or psychologically complete? Are you waiting for a man or woman to give meaning to your life?

In the normal, mind-identified or unenlightened state of consciousness, the power and infinite creative potential that lie concealed in the Now are completely obscured by psychological time. Your life then loses its vibrancy, its freshness, its sense of wonder. The old patterns of thought, emotion, behavior, reaction, and desire are acted out in endless repeat performances, a script in your mind that gives you an identity of sorts but distorts or covers up the reality of the Now.

The mind then creates an obsession with the future as an escape from the unsatisfactory present. What you perceive as future is an intrinsic part of your state of consciousness now. If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future - which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now.

If it is the quality of your consciousness at this moment that determines the future, then what is it that determines the quality of your consciousness? Your degree of presence. So the only place where true change can occur and where the past can be dissolved is the Now. You may find it hard to recognize that time is the cause of your suffering or your problems. You believe that they are caused by specific situations in your life, and seen from a conventional viewpoint, this is true.

But until you have dealt with the basic problem-making dysfunction of the mind - its attachment to past and future and denial of the Now - problems are actually interchangeable.

If all your problems or perceived causes of suffering or unhappiness were miraculously removed for you today, but you had not become more present, more conscious, you would soon find yourself with a similar set of problems or causes of suffering, like a shadow that follows you wherever you go.

Ultimately, there is only one problem: the time-bound mind itself. There is no salvation in time. You cannot be free in the future. PRESENCE IS THE KEY to freedom, so you can only be free now.

#eckhart tolle #imp #nondualism #non dualism #time

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a-very-fond-farewell · 3 months ago

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(*chanting*) tag game. tag game. taggame. tagayme. tageim. [...]

You’re starring in a movie with the last person saved in your camera roll and the last song you listened to is the title. Who/what is it?

tagged by the sweet @fismoll7secinv : hi dear :D I’ll jump on the 1-year delay fun with this one xD ahah

(since I don’t have music saved in my device I’ll go with the last song on spotify that I listened to)

this would be the picture of the last person/entity saved (since it’s the same model, I’ll put both for variety), while the song would be: MAGICIAN, by Lexie Liu.

coincidentally, the lovely subject of the picture(s) is one of the many inspirations I collected (in terms of styling and vibes) to create an OC of mine, named Bang Soo Ah for a fic I’m working on. so I guess I’ll stick with that name for my co-star in this scenario! moreover, the song MAGICIAN has a beautiful, truly stunning MV to match with fantastic visuals and medieval/esoteric themes, which means it’s time-traveling hours babeyy!!

in this alternate reality, BSA does not belong to the universe I originally set her life in, but comes from 200 years in the future and accidentally stumbled in the right geographical landscape (Europe) but absolutely wrong timeline, so of course I have to help her getting back on track so she can go study the Middle Ages to her heart’s content!

but lo and behold, the only reason she messed up the calculations to get so far back in time is because someone too powerful for her own good had intercepted her intentions from the past and hijacked her journey, so she would stop in the 21st century instead. this leads to timelines to bleed and a Knight is sent to hunt the time-traveler down before she can reach her destination.

in this scenario i would try to keep her safe by disguising her at my place and give her some clothes to look less suspicious, but she still leaves some sort of magical trace wherever she goes, one that the enchanted knight can sense from miles away.

I’ll tag (but only if you have time, if not.. I tagged you so you could snoop into my business eheh): @thepointlessmasterpiece , @amethystina , @shhhsoftnwet , @nevolos

[please don’t reblog, but you can reply in the comments if you’d like! :D see u peeps!]

#tag game #lovely mutuals #sneaky niki #niki answers

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seerofaspects · 5 months ago

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Seer of Space

The Seer of Space is an aspect I hold quite close to myself as it's always been the associated aspect with myself and a character of mine who originally started off as a self insert but has evolved over time into being her own thing. I wanted to kind of go into the Seer of Space a little bit and actually give my thoughts about this aspect. The Seer class is the understanding class and the Seer understands from others, they are then able to translate their understanding so others are able to utilize that information in a tactical sense. There is also an association of having alternative timeline versions of the Seer communicate with them in some capacity, so they can literarily use themselves from other realities in order to grab hold of information. The personality traits of the Seer tend to be a bit all over the place, but the Seer tends to have confidence in themselves over their aspect but the more the understanding about their aspect, the more they realize they haven't even cracked the surface of understanding. They tend to be blunt with difficult to read personalities, which may make them come off as being hard to approach. The Space aspect revolves around creation, creativity, and of course the literal aspect of space and matter itself. There is hinted to be themes of isolation for the space player as well. The space player also gets visions of the future and past thanks to the clouds in skia. They are also essential to frog breeding in Skia. The Seer of Space is going to be able to gather understanding from others relating to the aspect of space, recontextualize it, and then have others be able to have an understanding of the space aspect. I want to give a few example of Seer of Space abilities here. The first is having a session where pretty much every player is in the dark of their surroundings, almost like they are playing the game with the map feature turned off. The Seer of Space however, is able to see where everyone is on the map and is able to coordinate others in her session and provide assistance in where they are going. Another example, if we are using alternative timelines, we can have the Seer of Space having visions of not the session that they are in but other sessions, seeing what they are doing and what they are not doing. In the session I made for my OC, there were multiple ongoing sessions that were 'competing' against one another, so having abilities which allow her to spy into other sessions was very important for that and one of the reasons why she ended up being the Seer of Space. I even mix things up to where the clouds she sees in Skia are not of her session but still provide super valuable information to her. I almost like the idea of the Seer of Space not getting feedback from their past selves but rather other sessions all together. Since Space is the counter to Time, it felt like it would be a bit fun to change how this interaction works a little bit. Another simple example I can think of for the Seer is sort of gathering insight on creative and innovative processes from other sources and being able to give an understanding of how people create certain things. The Seer could look at a piece of artwork made by someone else, come up with a tutorial on how to do what they did, and share that with others. It could be artwork, a special computer, a weapon, etc, etc.

#Seer #Space #Aspect #Class #Classpect #Seer of Space #Homestuck

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samueldelany · 8 months ago

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For Ytasha Womack, the Afrofuture Is Now

The writer and filmmaker discusses the blend of theoretical cosmology and Black culture in Chicago’s newest planetarium show.

Ytasha Womack, a screenwriter on “Niyah and the Multiverse,” currently playing at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, is the author of numerous works including “Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration."

By Katrina Miller, New York Times, March 16, 2024.

On Feb. 17, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago unveiled a new sky show called “Niyah and the Multiverse,” a blend of theoretical cosmology, Black culture and imagination. And as with many things Afrofuturistic, Ytasha Womack’s fingerprints are all over it.

Ms. Womack, who writes both about the genre and from within it, has curated Afrofuturism events across the country — including Carnegie Hall’s citywide festival — and her work is currently featured in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Afrofuturism is perhaps most popularly on display in the “Black Panther” films, which immerse viewers in an alternate reality of diverse, technologically advanced African tribes untouched by the forces of colonialism. (In 2023, Ms. Womack published “Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration,” Marvel’s reference book examining the films’ influences.)

But examples of the genre include the science fiction writer Octavia Butler, the Star Trek character Nyota Uhura and the cyborgian songs of Janelle Monáe. Some even envision the immortality of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cells were taken without consent for what became revolutionary breakthroughs in medicine, as an Afrofuturist parable.

Ms. Womack was one of the scriptwriters for “Niyah and the Multiverse.” She spoke with The New York Times about what Afrofuturism means to her, the process of weaving the genre’s themes with core concepts in physics and how the show aims to inspire. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How do you define Afrofuturism?

Afrofuturism is a way of thinking about the future, with alternate realities based on perspectives of the African diaspora. It integrates imagination, liberation, technology and mysticism.

Imagination is important because it is liberating. People have used imagination to transform their circumstances, to move from one reality to another. They’ve used it as a way to escape. When you are in challenging environments, you’re not socialized to imagine. And so to claim your imagination — to embrace it — can be a way of elevating your consciousness.

What makes Afrofuturism different from other futuristic takes is that it has a nonlinear perspective of time. So the future, past and present can very much be one. And that’s a concept expressed in quantum physics, when you think about these other kinds of realities.

Those alternate realities could be philosophical cosmologies, or they could be scientifically explained worlds. How we explain them runs the gamut, depending on what your basis for knowledge is.

Which Afrofuturist works have influenced you?

I think about Parliament-Funkadelic, a popular music collective of the 1970s. As a kid, their album covers were in my basement. A lot of artists during that era — Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Earth, Wind & Fire, Labelle — had these very epic, Afrofuturistic album covers, but Parliament-Funkadelic sticks out. There’s one depicting Star Child, the alter ego of George Clinton, the lead musical artist, emerging from a spaceship. That sort of space-tastic imagery was abounding for me as a kid.

“The Wiz,” a reimagining of “The Wizard of Oz,” was on all the time in my house growing up. It had this fabulosity to it — a heightened dream world that reflected 1970s New York. You had the Twin Towers in Emerald City, the empty lots Dorothy walked through with all the trash, the Wicked Witch running a fashion sweatshop, representing the garment district. The film took an urban landscape and made it fabulous, tying in this theme of Dorothy coming into her own through her journey.

Those are images that had a very strong impact on me. As I matured, I got into house music and dance, and began to see relationships between rhythm, movement, space and time. It’s not always something I can give language to, but it’s certainly become a basis for how I talk about metaphysics, in a physical kind of way.

What inspired your team to create “Niyah and the Multiverse”?

We wanted to tell a story about a young girl named Niyah, who wants to be a scientist and who is figuring out who she is — not just on Earth, but also in the universe.

Niyah looks for insight from her grandparents, who explain some of the symbolism of the African artwork in her home. She thinks about concepts she has learned from her science teacher. And she even meets her future self, who is a theoretical astrophysicist. Together, the two explore some of the more popular multiverse theories that scientists are looking at today.

Which theories are those?

Niyah learns about the many-worlds theory, which is this idea that all of your choices evolve into different universes. The choices you make create new paths, essentially creating multiple existences of yourself.

She learns about bubble theory, which says that after our Big Bang, more universes sort of bubbled off, each with their own laws of physics. Niyah also explores the idea of shadow matter, in which particles get reassembled as similar entities in mirror universes.

So there’s this parallel between Niyah learning about the multiverse and also exploring her own identity through her ancestral heritage.

Right. Because both of these are paths of meaning, different ways of understanding who we are. Afrofuturists tend to think in a way that is accepting of a lot of different realities anyway, so it was a pretty seamless experience to weave the physics and other aspects of the genre together. There’s already this intergenerational, or interdimensional, element to the conversation and the art that comes out of it.

The show is presented in the planetarium dome, which has a 360-degree screen, so it’s very immersive. Stepping into the space and watching the show feels like an interdimensional experience of its own.

The first audience to see it had a very emotional response. Some people were crying. There were Black women in the audience saying they always wanted to see this kind of imagery, that they had wanted to be scientists at one point in time. Others were deeply touched by the vibrancy of the show, of how it was able to bring these multiverse theories to life.

It’s impressive that these physics concepts, which can be difficult for people to understand or relate to, are made so accessible with examples that are not only imaginative but very rooted in Black culture.

Right. And it wasn’t difficult for us to do that, because as Afrofuturists, we operate in that space. It’s just about mirroring a way of being that we have always been immersed in.

I think “Niyah and the Multiverse” expresses that we all have different relationships to space and time. We are all looking to understand who we are, where we come from and where we can go in this broader space-time trajectory.

And maybe for some, the show normalizes the idea that there are kids who are Black who dream and are curious about the world. That curiosity can take them in the direction of becoming an artist, or becoming a scientist.

What challenges did you face in tackling the multiverse?

In trying to write some elements of the story, we had to push our own imagination to come up with what a universe might look like if you’re not using the laws of physics that exist in this one. Like, what does it mean to have your particles reassembled into something else? Sometimes we’d come up with ideas for different worlds, and our science consultants would say that already exists.

For me, this shows the beauty of bridging art and science. Artists can give visuals and narratives to ideas that scientists come up with. Or it could happen the other way around: Artists imagine something, and scientists think about what might be needed to support a universe that looks that way.

Image

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mcgnagallsarmy · 2 years ago

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Spuffy style Reading Challenge - #20: A Fic A Week

So this is gonna be a looong list, be prepared!

A Fic With More Than 200k Words

West of the Moon, East of the Sun by KnifeEdge [NC-17]

I keep having the strangest dream. Every night it's the same thing: a dark room, a big bed, and a silent vampire that I can feel, but not see. I'd be wigged, except it's just a dream, right? It'll be a cold day in hell before I ever willingly sleep with a vampire again...

Fic You Haven’t Read by Author You Love

Seven by Holly [NC-17]

It's been months since Willow almost ended the world, and a tense summer has turned into an ominous fall in Sunnydale. Spike is back from wherever and acting weirder than usual, a new threat is rising that—for once—doesn't seem to stem from the hellmouth, and Buffy has no idea who to trust or what to believe. She also doesn’t have the luxury of time to figure it out. Some things never change.

Popular Fic in 2021:

You Learn by bramcrackers [Adult Only]

When Buffy learns about Angel’s history with Drusilla, she can’t ignore how he seems to keep everything about his past to himself unless forced. How can she love someone she doesn’t even know? A trip to a local mage later, she’s plunged headfirst into Angel’s entire sordid history in a series of visions. And dealing with all of that would have been a hell of a lot easier if Spike hadn’t somehow been pulled into it, happy to add the color commentary.

You Can Read in a Day

Fool me Once by Miss Marisol [NC-17]

Some weeks after Something Blue: When Tara helps Buffy find out the horrible truth - that Willow (with Xander's approval) has been dosing her with love potions, so that she thinks she loves Riley- she is furious. She is going to get her revenge on Willow and Xander in the most hurtful way she can think of – by dating someone they desperately wanted her to stay away from...

Fic About a Difficult Topic

Blip by Holly [R]

She lives a life where everything is chosen for her. But not this.

Recommended by a Friend

Hung Up by kats_meow [NC-17]

What if instead of fast food Buffy got a job as a phone sex worker at a new establishment in Sunnydale?

Fic That Will Make You Cry

Future Perfect by Sigyn [R]

“I only show the truth,” the creature said. “The truth of the future. How you feel about it is all your own.” “What future?” Buffy demanded. “What are you talking about?” The demon smiled. “You’ll see soon enough.”

Fic Published in 2012

Who We Used To Be by sweetprincipale [Adult Only]

A short Spuffy, just a small scene from a life that should have been given a second chance. Set after Angel S. five, acting as if no comic series or novels occurred. Consider this an alternate universe, it'll be easier.

Fic Published in 2022

Something Blue's Clues by cawthraven [PG-13]

Willow is just fed up with the way Buffy and Spike act around each other. What are they, five?

A Genre You Don’t Usually Read - POV

A Small Boat on the Ocean by sandy_s [PG-13]

Buffy and Spike are settled in New Orleans and decide to start a family in a realistic way (as realistic as you can get in Buffyverse). Post-NFA, Buffy POV.

Based on a Children’s Classic

Little Red Riding Hood & The Big Bad Wolf by Twinkles [R]

A fairy-tale, of sorts. Response to a challenge by hcconn: Buffy gets her little red riding hood costume at Ethan's instead of the Victorian dress.

Banner With Your Favorite Color

Dreamscape by Holly [NC-17]

While her nights are occupied fighting evil, her dreams are haunted by a devastatingly sexy if not totally evil vampire. But how thin is the line between dreams and reality? More importantly: how thin does she want it to be?

Young Adult Fiction

Golden Hour by kennedynoelle [R]

Spike never came to Sunnydale during the first few seasons. The first time Buffy sees him is during The Harsh Light of Day, sunbathing on campus adorned with the Gem of Amara. Oh no, she thinks, the pit of her stomach dropping and sending tinglies all over, he's hot. They start dating, Buffy unaware that her new boyfriend is a member of the undead. Of course, she has to find out eventually...

First Story in a Trilogy

Wrong Place, Perfect Time by MaggieLaFey [NC-17]

Buffy, a successful lawyer, and William, an excellent detective, are sneaking into the LA Archives and Records Center at the last minute on Halloween day. They’re also both on the phone, and don’t notice that the elevator they’re stepping into might have a few problems. Will they get to know each other once they get stuck inside, or will they be at each other’s throats sooner than William can say “pet” and Buffy can say “sexist jerk”?

Second Story in a Trilogy

Nemesis by Holly [NC-17]

Book II of the Yellow Brick Road series. While trying to cope with mixed feelings and brewing resentment over the fact that Spike screwed her and vanished, Buffy finds herself increasingly suspicious about Faith's close relationship with Angel. Just as things can't get any more confusing, a blond vampire she was sure she would never see again decides that it's time.

Third Story in a Trilogy

Intimate by Holly [R]

He was mesmerized by her heartbeat.

Dystopian Fic

The Footprints Left Behind by Willow91 [NC-17]

In the wake of an unknown attack on the American Frontier and the subsequent loss of contact with the friends they still had stateside, Buffy and Xander sneak into the country and begin a long, dangerous journey to find old friends and the source of the near apocalypse before it spreads throughout the rest of the world.

Award-Winning Fic

Not Dead by Herself [NC-17]

Soon after her resurrection, Buffy gets turned. Spike tries to help her adjust.

Set in the Decade Before You Were Born

A Different Kind of Hell by OffYourBird [NC-17]

Jumping through Glory's tower portal, Buffy and Spike find themselves in a hell dimension they never expected. One that looks suspiciously like 1880's London. Will they find a way back home? Will the truth behind William the Bloody at last make itself known? Will Buffy ever stop butchering the Queen's English? Join them and find out. Starts off at the end of "The Gift."

Historical Fiction From A Favorite Time Period

The Darkling by OffYourBird [NC-17]

When Buffy’s quest to get Spike returned to her is fulfilled in an unexpected way, she finds herself in a complicated relationship with an intrigued master vampire who isn’t the man she loves, but who might be someday… if she can convince him to step out of the dark.

Classic You’ve Never Read

Charms of the Clarion by Eurydice [NC-17]

When the Council approaches Buffy with an offer she can't refuse, she finds herself in another world, with Spike as her necessary partner. Set early Season 5.

A Fic That Will Keep You Up All Night

Almost Paradise by Holly [NC-17]

When presented with the opportunity to magically alter the world she lives in, Buffy knows there are a lot of very good reasons why she shouldn't seize it, but figures things can't get worse. She's wrong.