#it was a perfect candidate

[tooquirkytolose]

Dark Magicks

[thebaldursmouthgazette]

I’m sure Dumat being defeated the same year andraste was born means nothing

I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that andrastes mother was part of a tribe who helped the grey wardens fight and defeat dumat the same year she was born, meaning that she could have been a fetus affected by the taint in the proximity of a dying arch demon

And the fact that nobody knows which grey warden killed dumat, as seven wardens died from injuries from his death throes, and therefore we cannot actually identify a warden who absorbed his soul, means nothing

And I’m sure it is a complete coincidence that andraste had dreams and visions of the being later referred to as the maker her whole life, and behaved strangely, talking about hearing lost voices and seeing strange auras. That absolutely doesn’t sound like anyone else we know

[sariphantom]

Rise April 2024 Days 1, 2, and 3: Trick, Fashion, and Crossover

Technically... Usagi counts as crossover, considering he's from a different show.

[ceilidhtransing]

If you hear Republicans speak to other Republicans, you'll hear a lot of them say that they really don't like Trump for whatever reason (many of them aren't fans of the felony convictions, his personal manner, his business dealings, his family life, or whatever else) but that they'll still be voting for him because he'll get them closer to what they ultimately want. They're pragmatic; they don't demand purity in their candidate. They recognise him as their strategic choice so they'll set aside the issues they have with him and vote as a bloc. That's what makes them effective at getting their way. That's how they win elections.

And boy I wish we had more of that attitude on the left. Imagine what we could get done.

[littleeyesofpallas]

So, there's some neat context to this, albeit it some of this is also just my weird connecting dots between other subjects, but hear me out...

Tsukumogami[付喪神]: "Tool Gods." (keeping in mind that the Japanese concept of "kami" really isn't specifically analogous to ""Gods"" in the Western sense, so much as they're just the broad concept of "spirts" in which the most powerful kami are the equivalents of gods.) are a fun staple of Japanese folklore that fall under a fairly broad umbrella of what constitutes Shinto belief/ and cosmology. They are spirits manifested in discarded tools, or just generally manmade objects: umbrellas, paper doors, lanterns, hair combs, hand mirrors, broken plates, etc… In some cases it's supposed to be when an object that reaches 100 years old that it develops a spirit, but in others it's specific to objects that have strong emotion attached to/invested in them; in a sense, being "well loved."

On the one hand this falls very neatly into the understood category of "fetish objects" in the actual anthropologic sense (and not as a shorthand for a "sexual fetish") as it describes a specific object assigned spiritual significance and power; that has its own system of understanding and both spiritual and meta psychosocial functionality. But I actually find it more pertinent to relate it back to the psychological idea of Object Attachment, which explores the idea of creating a "relationship" between a person and an object, how it happens, why it happens, and the ways in which is parallels relationships between people, among other things…

An example that I always turn to is in the event that a kid loses or breaks something like a toy, or a balloon, and you tell them "it's okay we'll get you a new one" to which they are very likely to reply "but I don't want a new one, I want mine." That distinction between a personal possession vs a functionally identical substitute. We sort of handwave it as a kid thing, but no doubt we all have those things of sentimental value that we can't easily part with, as if we're afraid it would upset the thing, or as if it would be a betrayal.

So, naturally, in a society not predisposed to dismiss superstition or to seek explicitly scientific explanations, the feeling like you've lost a friend when you throw away the hair brush your mother gave you? The most readily available explanation is that, it feels like losing a friend because it is losing a friend; it has a spirit, it feels and gives love and loyalty like anything else, plain and simple. And certainly not every man made object has a spirit, but through constant use, reliance, investment and indeed a kind of "love" any object can obtain one.

(And in this same broader category of Shinto beliefs, some youkai or mononoke are things like grudges or "vengeful ghosts," which are not always ""ghosts"" in the Christian sense of a person's immortal soul and thus self left lingering after death, but the resentment itself divided from the person by their death. That is to say, when a person dies cursing someone, and that someone still feels uneasy and threatened by that person despite the logical understanding that they are dead and can't hurt htem, the rationalization of that sense of impending doom is to accept that the person is dead, but acknowledge that their grudge lives on, granted autonomy and a spirit of its own by virtue of it persistence --them being dead and them still wishing you ill are not mutually exclusive facts. So, just as love persists in an object that has outlived its uses, hate can persist in a grudge that outlives the person it came from)

So when they talk about Fullbring, even though it's left kind of vague and broad enough to encompass natural spirits like with Ginjo's walking on water example, there's a noticeable focus on the man made: clothes and accessories, toys and games, a book mark, a weapon, and even the general examples like asphalt and whiskey. So even if Ginjo's personality doesn't seem to gel with the idea of him ""loving"" his tools, he does rely on them in a working relationship; he trusts the road under his feet to take him where he needs to go, he is intimately familiar with the weapon he wields, and he appreciates a good malt of whiskey.

I think that perspective might help frame the idea of "love" as it relates to Fullbring. Or maybe I just come across like a gibbering madman, i can never really tell...

A small coda here pushing back on Riruka’s “love” theory…after all, when Ginjo was describing the Fullbring he said nothing about “love”, just that it was something “compatible” and that he’d learned to master.

So to take it back to the metaphor we’re establishing, it may not be attachment in the sense of “love” here, necessarily, but attachment in the sense of “identity”. What do you have that defines who you are? Or, is at least, symbolic of that?