#it’s about making our society inhabitable for us.

[talonabraxas]

“The fool is the precursor to the savior.” ― Carl Jung Atu 0 - The Fool Talon Abraxas Acting as an aggressive agent of dissolution, the fool breaks down the distinctions between folly and wisdom, life and art. When he is really successful, he breaks this barrier for us, his observers, as well, so that we too can inhabit for a moment a no man's land between the worlds of what is and what might be. He draws out our latent folly and, by our recognition of it, we are freed to follow the fool into a chaos of possible new beginnings. The genius of the fool, his ability to make us believe that he can divert the evil eye, draw us away from pain and outwit the intolerable tyranny of worldly circumstances is contingent upon his continual tendency to invert, dissolve and ever play the wild card. Like the final enigma of the tarot, he plays the part of the zero that can become any number at all. He is unnumbered and unplaced, his many-coloured costume symbolizing the multiple and incoherent influences to which he is subject. But he walks in the mountainous heights where one may not know what is going on in the world below yet receive glimpses of visions glittering beyond ordinary men's dreams. The fool as a prophet or seer is a soothsayer without a temple, a lunatic or, perhaps, an oracle. In the ancient Semitic and Celtic traditions they were often considered possessed men who used verbal arrows to do war against established and complacent forms. The Sha 'ir of Islam, the kahin 'ar arraf, all were believed inspired by jinns in ways similar to the Irish fill or the Teutonic thul. They were fauns who spoke as mouthpieces of the spirits and often appeared bumbling in their varying conditions, as did Parsifal, who was called the Pure Fool. During the Christian era mystics continued to speak and behave in ways often outside the understanding of society. As 'fools of god' they pursued their own peculiar path after the fashion of St. Paul before them. Inspired by the intense abandonment of worldly reason demonstrated by Francis of Assisi, Franciscans liked to call themselves Fools of the World (Mundi Moriones) and deliberately wore the pointed cap of the fool. Russian holy fools walked with heavy chains about their naked bodies from village to village, railing against every injustice. They sometimes froze and starved and often ridiculed the church but no one doubted that they were on fire with a love of God. In fact, the God-intoxicated individual has often been thought a fool by ordinary people because he does nothing to protect himself or further his own interests. Thus Prince Myshkin, Dostoievski's Idiot, was taken to be a fool by those around him simply because he was incapable of understanding their mixed motives. With the mystic fool, the higher mind can take possession precisely because the lower mind is inactive. With the psychic fool, glimpses of truth may often be revealed as he reacts to the changing forces whirling around him. But he is an erratic seer, a pawn capable of being possessed by any sort of entity as he revolves in his desperately madcap dance through life.

[chase-solidago]

Invasive Species and Xenophobia

Invasive species are complicated! People have a lot of feelings about them, positive and negative. Are plants that move "invaders" "colonizing", "immigrants", "citizens"? What does it mean to kill species that are from somewhere else? What if that species legitimately makes a poor neighbor and causes extinctions in other, native species? This complex, culturally-loaded issue is a foundational issue behind a lot of plant conservation and restoration.

This is a juicy and still actively disputed topic! The Guardian recently had a big article on colonialism in Botany, (tbh her views are dated and reductive, imo) and it’s come up again this week, to much hostility (cw: reddit). Yes, my region's native plant restoration came from literal nazis, but also, the impacts of some invasive species are real, not figments of a racist imagination. How do we balance these issues? What does ethical invasive management look like?

Since it’s such a juicy topic, I wanted to offer a few fun readings to share:

The Native Plant Enthusiasm: Ecological Panacea or Xenophobia?, Gert Gröning and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, 2004, Arnoldia.

THE CLASSIC 20th century German nazis and native plants paper. Made a huge splash when it came out, and you will still encounter people who paint all native plant stuff with this brush. Summary: yeah the nazis loved their native plants and used them as part of their conquering process. Also, the first prairie plantings ever, located in Chicago, were done by a racist probable-nazi for racist reasons, full stop. I’ll let him speak for himself: “The gardens that I created myself shall… be in harmony with their landscape environment and the racial characteristics of its inhabitants. They shall express the spirit of America and therefore shall be free of foreign character as far as possible… the Latin and the Oriental crept and creeps more and more over our land, coming from the South, which is settled by Latin people, and also from other centers of mixed masses of immigrants. The Germanic character of our race, of our cities and settlements was overgrown by foreign character. The Latin spirit has spoiled a lot and still spoils things every day.” - Jens Jensen

Botanical decolonization: rethinking native plants, Tomaz Mastnak, 2014, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Rather than viewing native plant plantings as an act of racially-pure occupation, Mastnak positions native plants in California as a decolonization of the sub/urban lawn. Uses a lot of quotations from 16th century English philosopher Francis Bacon, and is heavy on the philosophical musings.

From killing lists to healthy country: Aboriginal approaches to weed control in the Kimberley, Western Australia by Bach et al., 2019, Journal of Environmental Management.

This paper talks through some of the native vs invasive debate, and offers a different perspective on how to approach to plant invasive management based on cultural relations, rather than country of origin or behavior.

Beyond ‘Native V. Alien’: Critiques of the Native/alien Paradigm in the Anthropocene, and Their Implications, Charles R. Warren, 2021, Ethics, Policy, & Environment

DENSE but thorough, if you want to follow the entire history of the native/invasive debate, this has you covered. The most interesting stuff, in my opinion, is the discussion of invasive denialism, IE: the impasse of “You’re just being racist!” Vs “You know nothing about ecology!” I recommend the Discussion, which starts on page 13.

[simpforsolas]

Do you ever think about how In Hushed Whispers, we wake up in this dystopian future and our immediate goal is to use magic to find a way back to the world as we knew it? We came across companions who had lived and suffered in this timeline for a year; indeed, it was their reality. Yet while we could relate to them and have compassion for them, and seek to help and comfort them as best we could, when they died it wasn't heartbreaking because to us, they weren't real. To us, it was nothing more than a nightmare of a world that had manifested in the blink of an eye.

Do you ever think about how modern Thedas is no more real to Solas than the alternate, dystopian future was to us? He woke up after thousands of years to find an unrecognizable world filled with oppression and magical imbalance, where the elves he sought to liberate now inhabit the lowest position in society as either slaves, servants, or in poverty. It isn't simply that the world isn't valuable as it is. It's that the world does not feel real. The people in it are disconnected from the fade and so to him, they feel like tranquil. And yet despite this world seeming no more real than a bad dream, Solas still cares about the people in it. He always approves of taking time to help out strangers, and enjoys discussing with the other companions to learn their perspectives and even encourages them during particularly difficult times (such as Cassandra's loyalty crisis with the seekers or Iron Bull abandoning the Qun). He dislikes violence and decisions that take away peoples' freedom. Even though this world isn't fully real to him, he still feels compassion for the people living in it.

And if the inquisitor comes to see him as a true friend or, Maker forbid, falls in love with him, the illusion snaps. The present is no longer a nightmarish dream world. It is real, and the people in it are real. But... so is the world he came from. The memories of that time are still fresh, no more than a couple years in the past to him. They are closer to him than memories of the COVID pandemic are to us. He can surely still remember vividly the taste of foods long gone, the beauty of magic-imbued cities, and the vibrant life of a civilization that was never separated from the fade--which is the way the world was natural designed to be.

This beautiful world that has become lost to time, that exists only his memory, fell because of him. Only he has the power to fix what he broke. But how can he make that choice, when the once dystopian dreamworld becomes just as real as the world he feels duty-bound to restore?

[biowaredisasterbisexual]

One thing I found wonderful about Neve, aside from literally everything about her of course, was how she subverted our expectations about mages from Tevinter and provided an excellent and nuanced view into facets of how Tevinter’s class system works in practice.

In prior games, most of what we learn of Tevinter is hearsay from Southerners who aren’t fans. We are told by these sources little of true detail, other than broad explanations of the Imperium’s class system and that they are a mage oligarchy. Oh, and that the south think they’re all evil blood mages.

The times we’ve interacted with mages from Tevinter at all, they’ve come primarily from the Altus class, like Dorian. Those from another class were acknowledged in Inquisition, Calpernia being a good example, but largely if we were interacting with a Tevinter mage, they were an Altus citizen of the Imperium. These are the elites, right? They play an important role in Tevinter society - indeed Tevinter’s society is formed around them - but they really aren’t exemplars of it because although they wield a lot of power they are by far outnumbered by people from other classes.

Enter Neve. Not born into an Altus family, not born into a mage family at all, she grew up Soporati class and by all accounts not well off, until her magic showed up and she was elevated to Laetan class. Dorian tells us that part of how the Magisterium keeps the many, many non-Altus inhabitants of the Imperium in line is that there’s always that hope that a mage will be born in the family. It opens up the opportunity to join the Laetan class, opens up better marriage prospects, opens up jobs in the bureaucracy….

But the flip side of that, we learn through Neve, is that those Laetan mages who fulfill that hope for their family of being born with magic can be just as damaged by that elevation as they are benefitted by it. Being Laetan doesn’t make someone rich, it just means they might have access to certain jobs (ones Dorian scoffs at) they otherwise wouldn’t. And they can attend the Circles of Magi, which guarantees them an education. They’re still poor, sometimes, or maybe middle class bureaucrats, they’re still looked down on by Altus mages. Still denied meaningful access to that privileged class. But marginally better off than the Soporati. Neve’s relatives try to use her new status to their advantage, all the same, other than a single uncle she speaks well of.

Compare this to a Shadow Dragon Rook. The game tells us SD Rook is adopted into a military family. That means that, unless you headcanon one of their parents as a mage, the Mercar family are Soporati (Liberati and slaves cannot serve in the Imperium’s army). One relative of SD Rook is a high-ranking officer, though which relative is headcanon specific. In practical terms, speaking only financially, SD Rook likely grew up better off than Neve did. Even though she’s a mage and even if SD Rook isn’t. If Legate Mercar is Rook’s father, SD Rook was likely Significantly better off financially growing up.

Service in the Imperium’s army is one of the few stable, arguably decently paid jobs in the Imperium other than working in the civilian government (like the Templars) for Soporati. That’s its whole appeal.

So through Neve, we get insight into how the class system works in practice in this nation we’ve been taught over and over in prior games prioritizes and elevates mages. And what we’ve heard is…kind of true, in broad strokes. But it’s not the whole picture. She challenges a lot of what we thought we knew. And I think it’s awesome that through Neve we get to see that nuance.

* Now, I have…so much to say about how I personally conceive of the Imperium’s military and its pay, none of it canon although informed by it, because I am a nerd, but this is all just from in-game information.

[sokuuuu]

saw a post on my fyp a few hours ago that got me thinking about the game again. I've also been deep into Greek mythology so forgive me for somewhat combining two of my interests.

A common trope for characters who are gods or deities is their lack of humanity. They aren't bound by the confines of mortality, therefore they do not live by our rules. Our human concepts of community, society, and relationships are utterly beneath them because they exist in the scope of inevitable destruction. The mortal ones are the empathetic ones in the story of the gods, the victims who struggle to cling to our human desires beneath the whims of gods. Slay the Princess, however, subverts this expectation. In fact it turns it on its head by humanizing the deities and complicating the mortal man.

The Princess and Quiet are not people to the Narrator, and he makes that blatantly clear - they're constructs. Objects to be used to fulfill his desires. There's a fragile relationship between the three where the Narrator holds most of the powerful information over these characters' heads. He watches and observes their actions the way a "God" in the most general sense of a word would. In fact, he created the world the two inhabit. For the most part they're just living in it.

It's especially interesting to me that what the Narrator seeks is immortality. He fears death, a concept so meaningless to Quiet and the Princess. Their roles are so uniquely swapped. The powerful mortal man yearns for the strengths of the struggling, clueless gods.

As we expect from someone human - or at least, mortal in this world of this story - the Narrator is complicated. But the story doesn't derive the Princess and Quiet of their humanity either despite their larger roles. In fact, despite the two being two halves of the same larger concept, STP pours so much attention into making the two feel alive. Making their lives matter. We don't want to die even though we know how many chances we have. Each time we die, The Voice of The Hero fears the upcoming. In the mirror, facing the end, they are afraid. It's the closest these two unending beings can get to understanding the Narrator's fear of death.

They share our fears. Do they share our human desires?

The post that inspired me to ramble like this in the first place (I certainly wish I could find it) brought me back to this part of The Princess and The Dragon:

Although they aren't aware of the limits of their own existence, the Princess and Quiet know what they feel fulfilled when they are with each other. Even after everything. The Princess is angry at you in this chapter, both you and your voices, and yet she still wants that part of Quiet back. The part that makes her feel whole again. It's an obvious calling to their connection to each other in hindsight, as two parts of the same god. But they don't fit together anymore. They cannot fit together anymore as two separate entities. Part of their beings complete each other, but they are two separate beings created by the Narrator now. They can no longer be each other, but they know they belong with each other.

It's a... romantic way of thinking about it. We know soulmates, two souls destined for one another. They make each other complete despite their imperfections. Despite their existence as two separate organisms. They are not one in the same and yet they fit perfectly together. It's fantastical. It's unrealistic. It's a portrayal of love only imperfect beings like mortals can strive for. And yet the irony is that the two are anything but.

The Narrator even admits it to himself: he's wrong about Quiet and the Princess (although mostly Quiet in this instance, the same can certainly apply to her). They are not just gods. They are not just constructs. They are people. People with free will, with empathy, with desires, with longing. He's just like them, and we're just like him. The Narrator dwells on this boundary between life and death, mortal being and god, while we find these barriers so unimportant to us. The ending of Slay the Princess is about shedding the boundaries between ourself and the Princess and letting the two complete each other in a perfectly imperfect way. The very essence of mortality and humanity, displayed by two gods.

There's a beauty to imperfection.

[vintagegeekculture]

Menacing Minerals With Psychic Powers

Minerals. These days, it seems like everyone’s looking for them. But…what if...the inhabitants of the rock kingdom were not as inert as previously believed, and they started to acquire intelligence and psychic powers to menace mankind? In so doing, we would question our simplistic definitions of what constitutes life. These evil and possibly telepathic rocks would be the ultimate adversary for life as we know it, as they represent the replacement of life with unlife, a metaphor for our industrial society that replaces living forests and swamps with dead parking lots.

This science fiction element has its origin in the peculiar fixation of a bizarre but nonetheless influential man, J.H. Rosny, a pen name for two Belgian science fiction writer brothers who worked together. I sometimes address them in the singular and the plural as at times they worked together and other times as just one brother. The Rosnys believed that eventually, the final battle for existence, billions of years in the future, would be man against the future inheritors of the earth, incomprehensible inorganic rocks and minerals.

Rosny was very much a foundational cultural figure in science fiction in France and Belgium, though unlike Jules Verne, his contemporary, he is not too well known in the English speaking world. Like Olaf Stapledon or Asimov, he had a long view of human history, and he set his stories in one of two places: either the beginning of human history, like his stone age adventure story Quest for Fire (La Guerre du Feu in France) a novel about a time when men (or something like a man) killed for possession of fire, which he did not know how to make…or at the end of human history and life on earth, billions of years in the future when the sun burns out, in his Death of the Earth.

In between them, Rosny wrote Le Xipehuz in 1910, a novel set at the very beginning of civilization in Ancient Mesopotamia, where mankind is invaded by a race of genocidal sentient crystals known as the Xipehuz. Our hero is a thinker ahead of his time, an Assyrian Einstein, who represents an extraordinary rationalism and an early version of the scientific method in an otherwise primitive age. The first truly alien aliens in science fiction (predating the surreal landscapes of Stanley G. Weinbaum), the Xipehuz are crystalline minerals from space that are able to float, shoot something like a laser (and even use their laser to read markings left by others, like an optical scanner on a CD-ROM), the Xipehuz cannot be communicated with or reasoned with, and are scary in that they are a form of mineral life that is totally incomprehensible. The story never explains where the Xipehuz came from, their motives, or even tells us what they wanted. They slaughter humans but only out of cold indifference instead of sadism or passion.

Le Xipehuz (French for "The Xipehuz") is an alien invasion story set at the beginning of civilization, somewhere between the Neolithic and Mesopotamia. But Rosny’s second book to deal with malevolent minerals, the Death of the Earth, is set at the end of history, where the last few survivors of earth find they are running out of water, running out of food, as the very animal and plant kingdoms of life face their inevitable end, threatened by psychic minerals called the ferromagnetics. Like the Xipehuz, they are absolutely confounding and incomprehensible, cannot be communicated with. It’s not entirely clear if the ferromagnetics are even life as we understand the term, as they seem to confound simple definitions of what “life” is.

The worst part about the ferromagnetics is this: there’s a crushing inevitability to them. It seems these weird rocks, not life as we know it (plants, animals) are the true inheritors of the earth, who will continue when the last man’s eyes shut and the animal kingdom ends with him, replaced by inorganic matter. In that sense, they are a metaphor for the rock and earth of the tomb, the final conqueror.

The Rosny Brothers were the beginning but not the end of the story of evil minerals.

In 1957, a movie called “The Monolith Monsters” featured gigantic rocks that burst from the earth, threatening to spread over the entire earth and replace life itself.

In 1963, the Outer Limits episode "Corpus Earthling" was about geologists who discover a pair of pulsing, bizarre talking rocks that turn out to be attempting to conquer earth. The Outer Limits was the Twilight Zone's more science-heavy and plausible cousin, more like the magazine scifi of the era. The fact the rock invaders are unrecognized as any form of life is to their advantage, and they only are stopped when, after an accident, a human acquires the ability to spy on their telepathic communications. Note that yet again we find the minerals are telepathic by nature. The episode was based on a French novel, which is unsurprising because of the domination of the Rosnys over French language scifi.

The otherworldly control voice (done by "Nomad" actor Vic Perrin) ended the episode with this closing thought:

Two black crystalline rocks: unclassifiable. Objects on the border between the living and the nonliving. A reminder of the thin line that separates the animate from the inanimate. Something to ponder on. Something to stay the hand when it reaches out innocently for the whitened pebble, the veined stone, the dead unmoving rocks of our planet.

In 1966, J.G. Ballard wrote a fascinating story called the Crystal World, a novel about a strange crystallization process affecting the wild places. It is an alien invasion, but one of a very strange variety: the ecological invasion, where a biosphere is replaced by something cold, dead and unliving, with crystals enveloping living things like flies in amber, preserving them eternally. Ballard, even more than Rosny, start to see why people write about evil minerals and crystals: it represents the terror that life itself is overtaken by nonliving matter, the way parking lots replace wetlands. It's a predecessor to the ecological-based alien invasion story where ecosystems are replaced by something sinister and unrecognizable, and was a direct predecessor to David Gerrold's War Against the Cthorr novels, where a more aggressive alien ecosystem takes over earth's.

Not to be outdone, Frank Herbert, who put-putted around in the pulps for a good decade before he did that book, did the Green Brain, a malevolent uni-mind found in green minerals that have a kind of collective sentience, created by the resistance of the earth itself to human industry's total domination over life. It sounds like it's out of style with Frank Herbert's usual work, but it really isn't if you look under the hood. As an ecologist who's works (yes, including that one) were about ecological issues at a time that was beginning to be at the forefront of public consciousness, Herbert was fascinated by how nature was not controllable.

It's very interesting that all of the stories should come out around the same time, the late 50s-60s. In that time, the runoff from society was making entire areas unlivable. It must have felt like the unliving kingdom, toxic to living things, was replacing life itself, and so battles were phrased in terms of life vs. unlife itself, with man on the side of the plants and animals. In the event that ecological catastrophes increase due to man's greed and misrule, we may see our own earth become cold, crystalline and dead as the other barren all-rock worlds of our solar system - and then the evil rocks really will have won over life.

[lime-bloods]

Reading Roxy and Meenah as doppelgangers: a digression on manifestation theory

A brief introduction to manifestation

Manifestation theory sounds scary - the idea that the appearance of trolls and other fantastical creatures might double as insight into the psychological goings-on of our human protagonists is not one that necessarily comes intuitively to all readers. But as blogger azdoine succinctly put it: it's basically "just symbolism". Characters in a story symbolise something, and, understanding that Homestuck is chiefly about its human protagonists, it's logical to presume that the non-human elements symbolise things that are relevant to the protagonists' human experience.

mmmmalo has written at length about what he identifies as the signs linking Meenah to Roxy's inner psychodrama - the things that make Meenah an "esoteric mirror" or "doppelganger" of Roxy. For comprehensiveness' sake, I'm going to outline from scratch what I have identified to be the key signs, and to that end this post is going to discuss the topics of reproduction, reproductive coersion and miscarried pregnancy (with text-pertinent allusions to grooming and incestuous abuse).

One big happy family

Looks like a little girl's room. This all strikes you as a bit odd.

Hussie suggests only briefly in commentary that the young Roxy's (β) upbringing was at the hands of "a younger grandpa Harley" (Book 2, p. 106), but we needn't take their word for it; the scenery here speaks for itself. Roxy grew up in a dark green basement, trained from childhood to become an agent of Harley's goals, just as Damara (β) - and then by succession Meenah (β) - would be trained as English's agents. So, by analogy, Grandpa Harley is Lord English.

This is another point mmmmalo has (in)famously already made, but regardless of your thoughts on the particulars of that specific reading, the key clues pointing to English as a manifestation of the "Grandpa" character are still plain to see. When John says "the worst case scenario" would be "[facing] our grandfatherly paradox-dad as a last boss", he's explicitly referring to he and Jade's family patriarch, but he's also implicitly foreshadowing Lord English - a character who, in the maturity of 2024, we should now all be able to recognise is in one way everyone's grandfatherly paradox-dad. He represents the same upper echelon of paternalistic power on a cosmic scale that Jake (β) represents on a familial level.

Moving this along towards my point: essentially all of Acts 1-4's adult characters form part of this elaborate Nuclear Family Roleplay - a pantomime of the 'Suburban' setting Homestuck is founded upon. In the same way Jake being known as simply "Grandpa" symbolises his arch-patriarchal position, the reason Roxy is known only as MOM for the first five acts of the comic is because this is the archetypal, impersonal role she has been reduced down into. Her relationship with the character named DAD is a direct invocation of this - the two are essentially playing house, living out the gendered roles that have societally/cosmically been laid out for them. The comic's exposition coyly brushes over this, but a deeper look at Alternian culture gives us a much clearer vision of why 'MOM and DAD' make such an iconic matespritship: on Alternia there ARE no real family units, only procreation, and therefore matespritship is understood by the planet's inhabitants as a mere expression of "mating fondness". MOM and DAD make such a cute couple because they are exactly what their assigned titles depict them as - a breeding pair.

This is basically the crux of Roxy's arc right up to the very end of the comic; though Roxy's (Α) post-apocalyptic anxieties about the extinction of the human race bring these thoughts to the forefront, her struggle within the patriarchal structures of the household / society / reality itself has always been that she is only valued as a MOM - as a breeding machine.

The problem therein is that Roxy is seemingly incapable of having children.

The grieving mother

Within Sburb's scheme of universal childbirth, a "void session" is one that simply doesn't have the eggs required to bear fruit. So it's immediately easy to see why the Hero of Void would have similar trouble bringing a pregnancy to term. But certainly not for lack of trying!

Sorry, Jaspers [...] your final resting place is already a mockery. You should have decomposed years ago under a bed of petunias like a normal cat. Not given to a taxidermist and fitted with a tiny, custom-tailored suit, and then stuffed in a coffin built for infants.

When Rose was still very young, Jaspers was found dead. Roxy took the death of her CAT so hard that Rose found it difficult to take her grief seriously, interpreting the cat's elaborate mausoleum as a "structure erected with a spirit of scornful IRONY in response to [a] youthfully innocent request to hold a funeral for the animal." But more than any other, Rose and Roxy's relationship is one defined by miscommunication, and this assessment of Roxy's grief doesn't even seem to hold up to Rose's own recollection of events: later, we hear that the funeral service was something Roxy "insisted upon".

And thus begins probably Homestuck's most clear-cut example of a character's arc stretching across multiple iterations, because from this point - parallel to her neverending quest to settle down with a nice hubby and start a family - Roxy (both β and Α) becomes fixated on bringing back her baby - I mean CAT - only to produce failed mutant after failed mutant. These freaks of nature are not Jaspers, and by the laws of time travel dictating the lives of Paradox Clones they can never be Jaspers. The younger Roxy's first few attempts are literally stillborn; while she's eventually able to create what she calls "healthy felines", she still keeps those monsters locked in the basement they came from, for fear of upsetting her real CAT.

Even as over the course of her Sburb quest and her interactions with the new arrivals from the other session Roxy is seemingly able to address and even overcome some of this obsessive gnostalgia for the things she's lost, her apparent inability to bring to term resurfaces when she's made the reproductive object of another grieving mother.

The lamenting queen (or: the other mother)

Her Imperious Condescension is not so immediately recognisable as part of the family pantomime because the troll social structure doesn't use the same terminology we're familiar with, but she's always been there; just as Lord English is grandfather of grandfathers, Meenah is the family tree's literal grandmatriarch of grandmatriarchs, placed upon the Earth in the guise of Betty Crocker - archetypal nurturing housewife - so that her children's children might seed the events architected by her master. This kind of familial roleplay is exactly how English and Meenah's story is passed down to her descendants; Jake recalls that "the witch used to be married to a terrible man named english." Dirk is insistent, though, that this is a masking of the truth, and that English was only ever "her superior". And while it's true that we can't say for sure a young Meenah (β) slept in the same bed Damara grew up in, the fact that Meenah was only formally recruited after Damara's death should not be mistaken for suggesting that Meenah was not one of English's many daughters. She was "the Lo+rd's slave all alo+ng", even if implicitly.

ARANEA: Once she claimed the throne, she would have to serve for many thousands of years, until the next successor was ready.

For all the differences between Meenah and Roxy's cultures, slavery in the form of motherhood has always been the expectation of the female fuchsia caste, right from the very beginning of Meenah's arc - not as the empress of Alternia, but on Beforus, where the hemospectrum is reframed in far more familial terms:

ARANEA: The jo8 of each 8lood caste was to serve the needs of all those 8elow it. ARANEA: We were to use our progressively greater longevity and wisdom to help the lower castes learn and grow. To listen to them and try to provide whatever they were missing. Like a hierarchy of caretakers with increasing social responsi8ility.

Crucially, this is where Meenah and Roxy appear most to act as reflections but not carbon copies of each other; because where Roxy constantly strives to contort herself into this motherly, wifely role, Meenah perpetually runs from it. Saddled with the "incredi8le responsi8ility" of sitting atop Beforus' structure of care, Meenah "viewed the empress as a glorified slave" and fled to the moon, and even forced into ascendancy on Alternia she finds implicit ways to be absent from her children, spending her life flying further and further away from the planet where they're born and taking every opportunity to hand off any real political authority to clown rappers (a tendency reflected in her human heirs - the company is always passed on to the son and never the daughter).

But when Meenah finally returns home to find her children suddenly massacred by a galactic apocalypse, her arc begins to pull into line with Roxy's in earnest.

A fluffy twitching prison

TT: The rumors say it was her own "pet" who killed them.

From the moment of her dramatic introduction, Meenah's tragedy is that though she can extend life indefinitely, she cannot have back what she's lost, and this continues to be true as she attempts to resurrect her children on a new planet; attempt after attempt, her babies all die. Despite Gl'bgolyb's explicit death in the meteoric holocaust which claimed the rest of her family, the creature has inexplicably returned on the trolls' prospective new homeworld with the apparent sole purpose of making sure Meenah can't carry to term. We're left to our own devices to figure out just what's going on here.

Act 6 of Homestuck introduces Watchmen to its repertoire of intertexts through Jane's poster of cobalt beefcake MANHATTAN. Watchmen's Dr. Manhattan is an omnipotent world-shaping being who flees the responsibilities of Earth to settle on the planet Mars, iconically rendered in beautiful rosy hues by colourist John Higgins - when we hear the story of Meenah's refusal to the call of being Beforus' own god-empress, it's against the backdrop of a photograph of Mars literally hue-shifted pink (see fourth image), and images of Meenah's ship flying over a settlement on the red planet are included among the products advertised by Crockercorp. Far more explicitly, though: Watchmen originated the idea of using the screams of a psychic alien squid as political leverage, and that's why Gl'bgolyb has to be here for this part.

Alongside commenting on the political landscape of the 80s and the fascist undertones of the superhuman archetypes found in comic books, Watchmen pays particular attention to these characters' sexual eccentricities, and particularly their hangups with women. It stands to reason that of the latter closet homosexual Ozymandias' are the most severe, but they also become the most explicit: the artificial 'horrorterror' he uses to usher in his new world order is his fear of the female body made manifest. With its single clitoral eye and sphinctered mouth, the creature is unmistakeably yonic, and included in the horrific psychic imagery it broadcasts to instill fear into the Earth's population are nightmarish images of juvenile aliens chewing their way out of their mother's womb - the very same image trolls use to describe their disgust at human reproduction in The Homestuck Epilogues. Meenah's relationship to Gl'gboylb should be thought of the exact same way; one of the rare insights we receive into the adult Meenah's psyche is that she finds the process of giving birth "revolting", and it's for this reason she insists that humans procreate only through impersonal cloning. Gl'bgolyb reappears as Meenah's own manifestation: alienated from her own lusus after spending centuries literally running away from it, and traumatised by repeated miscarried attempts at reviving her race, she sees her own reproductive organs as nothing more than a hideous, baby-killing monster. It's no coincidence that when we see our single glimpse of the enigmatic emissary to the horrorterrors on Earth, it's with its tendrils wrapped around the throat of a symbolic depiction of the Genesis Frog (see above image) - the baby that grows in the womb of Skaia.

Breaking the cycle

By Act 6, the matriorb has already long been associated with failed and aborted pregnancies, having been rescued from the first mother it killed and taken into the care of Kanaya, who is then blasted through the abdomen just as it's destroyed, symbolically miscarrying through physical trauma. So when Roxy is tasked with finally bringing a dead baby back to life, it's a coalescence of multiple disparate threads.

(p. 6463)

Meenah unwittingly - or perhaps uncaringly - perpetuates a patriarchal cycle which has been repeating for eternity by selecting a younger, more fertile doppelganger to take over the role of mother, and locks Roxy in a dungeon with the intention of making her have the baby in her place. But, cycles being cycles and doppelgangers being doppelgangers, the same problem arises. Roxy can only create mutants.

When Roxy does ultimately overcome this, ending the comic with the culmination of this long, meandering motherhood arc, superficially it's because of time spent blitzing her Void chakras in the space outside of reality, and with the help of Calliope as a Muse. But in the time Roxy spends in the white nothingness, she's crucially able to take steps to end her own obsession with reviving the past - not just by burying a version of her own mother, who she spent so much time hoping to resurrect in sprite form, but also in sharing a tearful reunion with the literal ghost of her dead CAT. As with so much of Homestuck, the key to ending the suffering is breaking the self-perpetuating cycle that causes it; made literal, in this case, by Roxy's slaying of her dark mirror image using a sword known for splitting vinyl records - symbolically, for breaking the ever-turning circle of time. And in passing the matriorb off to Kanaya rather than letting Meenah have control of it, Roxy never actually brings this baby to term herself, either - at the end of the day, the minutiae of biology aren't really what motherhood is about:

ROXY: the way i see it is you shouldnt have needed to worry about makin the thing ROXY: i think it will be challenging enough like... ROXY: hatching it?? ROXY: and tending to all the stuff that comes next ROXY: isnt that basically being responsible for the preservation of an entire race of people?

Physically overcoming her demonic doppelganger isn't the end-all of Roxy's struggle with gendered expectation, either. Roxy's complicated relationship with their sex and their motherhood, introduced to us only indirectly through the relationship between Meenah and Gl'bgolyb, becomes central to their understanding and exploration of their own gender identity as they grow into adulthood. Anxieties about the inherent femininity of a childbearing body - the glorified slavery that is seemingly inherent to the cosmically-assigned role of the mother - give way to an understanding of the human body as "something altogether different [...] A flesh machine" with "a specific, practical purpose."

But I digress

The threads running between Roxy and Meenah exist along the types of lines most Homestuck readers will already be familiar with in some form. When two characters share a class, or an aspect, we expect that traits from one character can be used to analyse and further our understanding of the other. Manifestation theory simply asks that we look for even more subtle and non-literal connections between characters than these - a process which Andrew Hussie themself has identified in authorial commentary as part of what they call "persona alchemy". (Book 4, p. 151)

Roxy and Meenah's particular relationship, though, should also be thought of in terms of another phenomenon which is central to Homestuck's structure - escalation. Homestuck constantly reorders and transmutes the alchemical elements that compose one character into 'new' characters, but it also consistently stretches these fundamental concepts to their logical extremes. Just as a game that destroys planets works its way up to the destruction of universes, John striving to leave his house in Act 1 should be taken as the logical precursor to our heroes leaving reality itself in Act 7. The forces keeping these children in their houses - essentially the story's first ever antagonists - are their parents, and as we scale this story up to a cosmic level, we find that the cosmos is dictated by the same suburban family structures; by celestial GRANDPAs and MOMs, raising/grooming/training/neglecting entire worlds or even galactic empires at once.

By allowing us to meet not only the teen MOMs and BROs and NANNAs, but also the teen Lord Englishes and the teen Condesces, the scratch takes us in the opposite direction, reducing these faceless, larger-than-life figures into their smallest, weakest, most fundamentally human forms. And in some cases, as in Roxy's, this creates the opportunity for the child-form to confront and overcome the very darkest of their potential; by being the one to put Meenah down, Roxy not only liberates herself from her own expectations for what a mother has to be and do, but shatters the very cosmic image of MOM itself, breaking the mold that reality had set in stone for her entire sex - her entire caste.

[systlin]

ooooo summarize the one where tarl gets called bosk by a mean lady and it rewrites his brain chemistry

Oh, Telima! The Mean Domme! LMAO it's so funny.

So Tarl is boating down the Big Fuckass River to Port Kar where a dude he wants to meet up with lives. Port Kar is a notorious hive of scum and villainy but has far fewer Han Solos to shoot douchebags in the face unfortunately.

We get like, ten pages of Tarl talking about how longbows are good at killing people, because duh of course they are. However, for some fuckass reason Goreans usually consider it a low class and disgraceful weapon, and Tarl is considered weird for liking it. I will give Norm credit for Tarl, raised an Englishman, having a favorable view of the longbow even in a society that views them as dishonorable. Reluctantly. Anyway.

He's in the Vosk delta, which is a vast labyrinth of swamp mostly covered in a reed called Rence, which is used to make paper and also parts are edible. It's inhabited by Rence Growers, who are actually kinda cool?

They make like, floating boat towns, and hunt and fish the marshes, and they take in fled slaves sometimes and let them live as free women. Like. They kinda rock actually?

Instead of any actual plot for a bit, we get like twenty pages here of Norm outlining Rence, how it grows, how it's harvested, how things are made from it, ect ect. This completely derails the story for a jarring length of time, and it will not be the last time such a thing happens. Norm loves his annoying and dumb infodumps.

Anyway, Tarl is in their territory, and happens upon a free woman fishing in the marshes. He is, predictably, what he thinks is polite but from her POV is intrusive and annoying, and her village takes him captive.

THEN we get to the wild shit.

 

A Sorp is a turtle, btw. And legit this is like, one of the 3 reasonable dudes we get on Gor. Ho Hak you're a king love you bro.

Champion shit.

ANYWAY.

This, in the hands of a better writer, could have been the moment when Tarl realized that, oh, shit, yeah okay in this situation he will act just like the women he's enslaved before who complied rather than be beaten or killed. It could have been a watershed moment.

It will not be.

ANYWAY, Tarl is taken slave, and Telima absolutely rearranges his whole brain with ONE SINGLE NIGHT OF BEING A MEAN DOMME.

He will go by this name FOR THE ENTIRE NEXT THIRTY BOOKS LIKE GIRL JESUS CHRIST.

He's chasing this high for the entire rest of the series. He never gets over this. Like holy shit. Fuck.

Anyway so some Port Kar slavers raid the place and take some people captive, whatever, there's not actually any plot in this book it's just here to get Tarl topped and get him to Port Kar. He fights the knowledge that he can be enslaved like he's enslaved women this whole time, and again somehow manages to do no actual growth or introspection. It's really incredible.

The only thing of note here is that there is a dude named Clitus, which is inexpressibly funny to me. I bet no one can find him.

Tarl becomes a Captain of Port Kar by killing one of the other Captains. There's like, a war with Cos and Tyros, which are also naval powers, and we are supposed to root for Port Kar but honestly I do not give a single shit. It's mostly so that Norm can jerk himself off to pictures of Greek war galleys and Charlton Heston as Ben Hur, tbh.

How TF Tarl knows without trying how to captain a war galley, you ask? And is somehow so good at it that all the other captains are in awe? Well because he's a Speshul Boy, of course.

Of course Tarl wins the war and shit, it's pointless, I don't give a single shit about Port Kar vs Cos Vs Tyros and I want Tarl dead.

Anyway, Tarl hooks up with Samos, but not the way Tarl would really like. Stupid PK vs Kurii plot shit is droned on about for like fifty pages. It's all stupid, the end.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Fantasy Worldbuilding

Fantasy worldbuilding - the process of creating a fictional world replete with core characters, overlapping storylines, detailed settings, and fantastical elements that set the world apart from our own.

A clear, detailed fantasy world will help readers invest in the characters that inhabit it.

Essential Elements of a Fantasy World

The fantasy genre often contains elements of science fiction, magic, or imaginative creatures—but it’s more than just writing every fictional element you can think up. The world of your fantasy novel, video game, television show, or film has to make sense in order for the rest of its parts to work in harmony.

Magic: Decide if there is a magic system in place, then set the rules of it. What powers it? Is it a secret? Can anyone use it?

Geography: It may be helpful to create a fantasy map. Identify major landmasses and historic sites. How does the landscape impact the plot or the characters? What is the climate like? You can get as specific as identifying the indigenous flora and fauna, even if you don’t use those details. As a world-builder, you can include as much or as little in your process and final version as you like—as long as your story comes together in a way that makes sense for the audience.

Society: Figure out the inhabitants of your fantasy world. What language do they speak? What do they look like? Are they humanlike? Are they creaturelike? What sort of culture do they have? How have previous historical events impacted the way they live now?

History: While you don’t have to outline the beginning of your world’s history to the end, it’s useful to know of any key events like wars, plagues, political strife, extraterrestrial invasions, or anything else that had an effect on the way your world operates now.

Time: How does it flow in your world? Is there a calendar? Are there seasons? What affects the light and the darkness?

How to Create a Fantasy World

There are many avenues for writing fantasy worlds, and you can start with whichever aspect you like first:

Use real life as inspiration. That doesn’t mean taking people from existing ethnic groups and putting costumes on them—but observe how other cultures live, how they interact with their environments and each other. By incorporating real-life into your fantasy book, you can avoid falling into tropes and clichés, and create a richer template for your characters and plot to thrive in.

Define the setting. A good starting point when creating a fantasy story is the universe itself. Is this an imaginary world existing within our own world, like Black Panther’s Wakanda? Or is it its own entirely new world, like Narnia in C.S. Lewis’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia? Describe what the landscape looks like, what colors it contains, or how many suns and moons it has. Any details that can help make your fantasy world feel more like real-life in order to help ground it in something believable will make a difference in how your audience feels and experiences it.

Create inhabitants. A fantasy world has more than one type of inhabitant. They can be vastly different from one another, or only have subtle contrasts between them. For example, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the magical world setting of middle-earth has both Dwarves and Hobbits, which, despite both being the smaller races, contain many differences between them. They each have their own origins and backstories, temperaments, key aesthetics, daily life routines, and various other aspects that enrich and define the separate races. Inhabitants include the antagonists as well. Make them more than one-dimensional bad guys—give them a motivation that’s relevant to the world they live in.

Make magic. Implement your magic system, if there is one. Write its limits, along with its capabilities. For instance, in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, the magic in the world seemingly gets stronger when the main character Daenerys Targaryen brings about the birth of her dragons. Magic needs rules in order to function properly in your fantasy world, and while you don’t need to include a list of laws in your writing, the use of it must make them apparent.

Source ⚜ More: References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[red5cars]

We should talk more about naga gaz and scientist reader who thinks her cover is good as fuck because she’s managed to get reallyyy close to his nest but nu uh. Gaz knows and he’s highly entertained watching his darling mate slowly make her way willingly into his nest and arms 🙂‍↕️

-noona 💕💕

why yes beloved noona, we should talk more about him!

just like, imagine working at some sort of research center, specializing in the study of hybrids. while some might call them monstrosities, you and your team see them as the key to the future.

unfortunately, many of them see y'all as a nuisance. especially gaz.

he's been here about a month, yet retains the hostility he has since first arriving; hissing at the doctors, curling away into the trees, and constantly breaking stuff in his enclosure. he hasn't harmed any of the researches directly, but after he snapped a log in half with ease, everyone keeps there distance.

talk about letting him back out into the wild circulates across the building, his lack of cooperation threatening any progress. and you, little junior researcher, see an opportunity. think about it, you'll be respected amongst your peers, no longer a little assistant that gets ordered around. and they'll have another test subject.

nearly everyone is gone when you enter his enclosure, the lush greens a harsh contrast to the white hallways that make up the building. it would be a serene experience if you forgot about the apex predator that inhabited this place, watching, waiting for the right moment to strike.

"bit late to run some tests, doctor?"

a deep voice behind you makes you jump, finding gaz curled around some branch. you've only caught glimpses of him from behind the door, x-rays, and some shedded skin. none of it could compare to the beauty standing right in front of you.

his upper half is handsome, as if someone carved it from marble but what really caught your attention was his tail. the intricate pattern, shimmering despite the dim lights of the enclosure.

you almost forget that he could break your bones, too enamored by his appearance.

"i asked you a question," his comment snaps you out of it, the coldness of his words hitting you like a violent breeze.

"i-i'm not here to run any tests," you state, though gaz hardly seems convinced. if anything, he narrows his eyes, two little slits holding nothing but spite for you.

"really? then what are you here for, doctor?" it shakes you, the way he addresses your title with so much contempt. a title that isn't yours (yet), but who are you to tell him that?

"i.. i wanted to warn you. the other researchers are talking..” it's a miracle your voice stays leveled, hands trembling as you continue, "..that if you keep being uncooperative they'll throw you out."

the words hang in the air, gaz seeming to contemplate your words. rather than panic, he flashes a sharp grin, "well, that’s probably the best thing i’ve heard since i got here"

his response stuns you.

"b-but," you start, yet he already looks so disinterested, "you.. this could be bad! i mean you won't have the facilities resources or protection, and you’ve gotten so used to life here-"

"hey," he snaps, your lips closing together, "just because i'm kept in some lush prison does not make me your glorified pet," the reminder rings in your ears, embarassment warming your face.

"well, still," you say, "if they let you go it would just backtrack our research," not that anyone has managed to progress with gaz anyways, "you could advance society, lengthen lifespans, further evolution," his head perks up at that slightly.

"don't you want to be apart of that?"

his gaze hasn't softened, but at the very least his interest is piqued. you fail to realize how his eyes rove over you form, thinking about evolution.

gaz's lips curl into a grin, "well, now that you bring it up.." he begins to uncurl his tail, moving down the trunk, "you do have quite a convincing argument."

it's wrong to read it as such, but the way he glides down is nearly.. sensual. the smooth movements of his tail, his muscles flexing. as he finally makes his way to the ground, you're reminded of all the ways you two are different both in species and size.

“how about this, doctor," he's starts, moving closer towards you, "i'll be your cooperative little subject if you're the only one monitoring me." the deal makes your eyes widen. you, a simple researcher be in charge of him?

"well i-" you start, "i'm not too sure-"

"you seem a lot nicer than the others," he hums, a hand coming out to graze your face. it makes you shiver, the lack of warmth throwing you for a loop, "plus, being the sole scientist would have its perks, hm?"

a voice in your head tells you this is a bad idea, but it can hardly be heard by the applause and praise you'll get once you publish your findings, experiment with his genetics, re-define evolution.

"so what do you say, doctor?" he pulls you back in with the soft drone of his voice, deep brown eyes meeting yours, "do we have a deal?"

praise. recognition. progress.

"..yes."

——

the other researches are astounded that you, the little junior researcher they hired only months ago, managed to appeal to him. they all wonder how, but you tell them all will be revealed when you publish your studies.

if only they knew you were already conducting an experiment, the key to evolution tucked neatly into your womb.

[parasolladyansy]

I have a question about your LoZ AU.

LoZ as a series has a bit of a weird depiction of humans. Hylians are almost always portrayed with pointed ears, although humans with rounded ears do show up sometimes (notable example is Wind Waker, where it's an actual plot point). I know this is a weird question, but would Ingo's, and by extension Ansy's, round ears be a point of interest to the inhabitants of Hyrule? I don't remember if BotW or Totk ever mentioned any area outside of Hyrule, and since everyone there have pointed ears, no one would have any idea as to where those humans came from.

Also, if I remember correctly, I think that pointed ears are a sign of a connection to the goddess Hylia. And given the generally polytheistic society in (most) Zelda games, then that could be another odd thing about Ingo and Ansy.

At the very least, their round ears would be a very clear indicator that both of them are not from Hyrule.

I know this is a weird question, but for some reason this topic has always been an interesting one for me. Especially since I remember my first reaction to Totk Ganondorf being that he's the only character in Totk and Botw with round ears. (Me : yeah sure his character design looks cool and he looks swoll, but LOOK AT HIS EARS-)

Pardon me, a flood of Zelda lore just rushed into my head lol - I’ve been a Zelda fan EVEN LONGER than I’ve been a Pokémon fan.

Okay, so round ears, our isekai-ed friends in Hero of Bombs, & Ganondorf! (Lore dump ahead!)

It’s as you said - round ears have been a minor topic of interest in Hylian history, regardless of the timeline. I remember reading the booklet that came with A Link to the Past when I was little, about the creation of Hyrule & the Triforce. In there, they talked about how Hylians heard messages from the gods with their elven ears. One of the townsfolk in Ocarina of Time says the same thing.

Meanwhile, the earliest instance of round ears I can remember appearing is Ocarina of Time: ALL of the Gerudo (including OoT Ganondorf) had round ears - more on that in a bit. Another example came a little later in the Oracle games with the inhabitants of the other countries Oracle of Seasons / Ages Link visited (Holodrum & Labrynna), then again in Twilight Princess with the residents of Ordon Village (technically just outside Hyrule’s border).

(OoT Nabooru to the left, OoA Bippin & Blossom in the middle, & TP Colin to the right)

“Oh, okay. Gerudo & these folks from neighboring countries / villages just have round ears - easy!…Right?”

Until Breath of the Wild happened, reintroducing the Gerudo people after all these years with pointed ears like Hylians (not to mention different skin tones).

The Gerudo being an all female race (except for a male born every 100 years, often some incarnation of Ganondorf), they reproduce via men from other races (Hylian, Sheikah, etc). Stands to reason they would get traits from their fathers. Why, then, didn’t they have pointed ears back in OoT? Maybe round ears & darker skin used to be a stronger gene? I couldn’t tell you.

Why TotK Ganondorf has round ears might be an example of that gene coming back in the rarely born male, though honestly I just feel like they were just making a design choice to refer back to OoT Ganondorf, the very first depiction of him we saw in the games (though he was mentioned by name in A Link To the Past) as a love letter to us older fans.

(OoT Ganondorf to the left, TotK Ganondorf to the right)

I don’t think Nintendo wanted us to think too hard on it, or why some versions of Ganondorf actually does have pointed ears, even when it was the same Ganondorf (eg. OoT Ganondorf > WW Ganondorf / TP Ganondorf). All I know is that when ToTK Ganondorf stepped into the frame, my inner 10yo saw the villain from her nightmares (in the very best sense! 878)

As for Ingo & isekai-ed me (lol), the Hylians would probably just think of us as foreign visitors, maybe from Labyrnna / Holodrum. Link & probably some other key characters would know the truth, either by being told straight out, or intuition.

Side note: as Ingo muddles with his memories & ends up spending time with isekai-ed me, he wonders if we come from the same country / world (not quite, Ingo!)

—

(Editing to add maybe it was also a symbolic thing - pointed ears symbolizing communication with the divine, maybe it’s to say “he refuses to listen to heaven”? Who knows.)

[indigovigilance]

The Final Fifteen is about Terry Pratchett's Death

read on Ao3

The final fifteen is obviously a major plot point, and serves a role in a story that was written long before Terry Pratchett was ever diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. But the scene itself wasn’t written until just a few years ago, during the writing of Season 2. In fact, the scene came about during a park bench conversation between Neil Gaiman and John Finnemore.

Others have noted that the non-romantic kiss that signals the story moving into the third act is a Neil Gaiman staple. The function of such a kiss, from Gaiman’s perspective, is to communicate.

In 2023 we are seeing a lot of stories written by men, for men, about men who are best friends and discover that their friendship can go deeper than the norms of society would usually allow; that platonic and romantic love are not so far apart, and perhaps the better word for a relationship that can be described this way is intimacy.

Neil Gaiman has made it clear in interviews that his friendship with Terry Pratchett was deeply intimate. They began collaborating on what would become Good Omens in the 1980’s, endured a tumultuous experience together through the first publication, wherein Neil offered to martyr himself on behalf of Terry if the book failed, and then spent the better part of two decades touring the world, meeting the people who loved their work. Neil would even off-handedly remark that Terry’s fans were so cheerful, and Neil’s seemed like they were ready to kill themselves; wouldn’t it be nice if they got married? From the outside, it looks very much as if Terry was Aziraphale-coded, and Neil was Crowley-coded, working together in an unexpected partnership to make the world a little bit more tolerable for the humans inhabiting it. I am not conjecturing that Neil and Terry had romantic inclinations the way their fictional characters do, but I think it is fair to say that their opposites-attract intimacy became an important part of who each of them were.

In 2007 Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer’s. As the disease progressed, he began to lose himself, and knew that the person he used to be was slipping away. He wanted to end his life on his own terms, and die as himself, but England did not and still does not allow for voluntary euthanasia or assisted suicide. He advocated for the right to die but never achieved it, and ultimately succumbed to the disease in 2015. Neil Gaiman has spoken a lot on the topic of death, and one answer of his that resonated with me reads:

Mostly it feels terrible. It even feels terrible when it’s someone who has been in a lot of pain for a long time or has not really been there for a long time and you know that Death has in some ways been a blessing: suddenly you are mourning the whole person. 

It doesn’t get easier as you age. It gets stranger. The point where you realise how many people you used to know and like who aren’t there any longer, and you cannot talk to them or see them or laugh with them is painful in a way that I had never expected. The first time that someone you had a romantic relationship with dies and you realise that there had been moments both of you shared and now you are the sole custodian of those moments and one day you will be gone and they will be lost forever is peculiarly strange and hard. 

~~~

The entire show is seeded with references to Terry Pratchett, but the most important one is the one that’s missing. Neil Gaiman cameoed as a sleeping moviegoer in S1E4, but a long time ago, he and Terry had discussed cameoing as sushi restaurant-goers, because sushi was weirdly prominent in the book. That cameo would have been in S1E1. But when it came time to do it, Neil couldn’t. Not without Terry. 

Neil: I was gonna say our location is a Chinese restaurant we’d had turned into a sushi restaurant. So Terry and I, Terry Pratchett and I, had a standing… not even a standing joke, just a standing plan, that we were going to have sushi - there was going to be a scene in Good Omens where sushi was eaten and we were gonna be extras, we were gonna sit in the background, eating sushi while it was done. And I was so looking forward to this and, so I wrote this scene with it being sushi, even though Terry was gone, with that in mind and I thought: Oh, I’ll sit and I’ll eat lots of sushi as an extra, this will be my scene as an extra, I’ll just be in the background. And then, on the day, or a couple of days before, I realized that I couldn’t do it.

Douglas: You never told me this before either. I might have pushed you into doing it, had I known. I think you were right not to tell me.

Neil: I was keeping it to me self ‘cause I was always like: Oh, maybe I’ll be… this will be my cameo. And then I couldn’t. I was just so sad, ‘cause Terry wasn’t there. And it was probably the day that I missed Terry the most of all of the filming - it was just this one scene ‘cause it was written for Terry and all of the sushi meals we’d ever had and all of the strange way that sushi ran through Good Omens.

~~~

In the Final Fifteen, it is clear that Crowley and Aziraphale want to stay together. They love each other. They each know that the other loves them. There’s nothing that needs to be said, no convincing that their bond is true and real and precious.

But Aziraphale has to go to Heaven, and Crowley cannot follow him there.

I cannot speculate what it must have been like for Neil to endure losing a friend who, though I’m sure he desperately wanted to still be in his life, he also knew that life had become a burden to him, and grieved that Terry was not able to choose the time and manner of his departure from this Earth. This sort of complex grief, we fan-ficcers know, is the kind that is often best processed through story-telling. 

I think that what we see Crowley going through in the Final Fifteen, alongside its importance to the story arc of Good Omens overall, is Neil processing his grief at losing his friend Terry Pratchett, and even the kiss, that violent, terrible, awful kiss, was the symbolic representation of Neil saying goodbye.

[talonabraxas]

“The fool is the precursor to the savior.” ― Carl Jung

Atu 0 - The Fool Talon Abraxas

Acting as an aggressive agent of dissolution, the fool breaks down the distinctions between folly and wisdom, life and art. When he is really successful, he breaks this barrier for us, his observers, as well, so that we too can inhabit for a moment a no man's land between the worlds of what is and what might be. He draws out our latent folly and, by our recognition of it, we are freed to follow the fool into a chaos of possible new beginnings. The genius of the fool, his ability to make us believe that he can divert the evil eye, draw us away from pain and outwit the intolerable tyranny of worldly circumstances is contingent upon his continual tendency to invert, dissolve and ever play the wild card. Like the final enigma of the tarot, he plays the part of the zero that can become any number at all. He is unnumbered and unplaced, his many-coloured costume symbolizing the multiple and incoherent influences to which he is subject. But he walks in the mountainous heights where one may not know what is going on in the world below yet receive glimpses of visions glittering beyond ordinary men's dreams. The fool as a prophet or seer is a soothsayer without a temple, a lunatic or, perhaps, an oracle. In the ancient Semitic and Celtic traditions they were often considered possessed men who used verbal arrows to do war against established and complacent forms. The Sha 'ir of Islam, the kahin 'ar arraf, all were believed inspired by jinns in ways similar to the Irish fill or the Teutonic thul. They were fauns who spoke as mouthpieces of the spirits and often appeared bumbling in their varying conditions, as did Parsifal, who was called the Pure Fool. During the Christian era mystics continued to speak and behave in ways often outside the understanding of society. As 'fools of god' they pursued their own peculiar path after the fashion of St. Paul before them. Inspired by the intense abandonment of worldly reason demonstrated by Francis of Assisi, Franciscans liked to call themselves Fools of the World (Mundi Moriones) and deliberately wore the pointed cap of the fool. Russian holy fools walked with heavy chains about their naked bodies from village to village, railing against every injustice. They sometimes froze and starved and often ridiculed the church but no one doubted that they were on fire with a love of God. In fact, the God-intoxicated individual has often been thought a fool by ordinary people because he does nothing to protect himself or further his own interests. Thus Prince Myshkin, Dostoievski's Idiot, was taken to be a fool by those around him simply because he was incapable of understanding their mixed motives. With the mystic fool, the higher mind can take possession precisely because the lower mind is inactive. With the psychic fool, glimpses of truth may often be revealed as he reacts to the changing forces whirling around him. But he is an erratic seer, a pawn capable of being possessed by any sort of entity as he revolves in his desperately madcap dance through life.

The aura of mysticism adhered to even the psychic fool, however, and it is significant that only when belief in the divinity associated with kings began to break down did the fool cease to have a deeper raison d'être in society. As men increasingly sought dignity and respectability in worldly contexts instead of a place in cosmic law, the fool became lost in the comedian, the harlequin of the stage and the clown of folk fairs and circuses. This was a great loss to the world, for together the king and the fool had represented solar and lunar dynasties or races among men. However imperfectly, the king had ruled as the sun rules the solar system and the fool had acted as his fluctuating check against over-concretization. Like the tarot Fool whose tunic bears the crescent moon, the king's idiot ever moved towards the edge of chaos, dragging with him a court otherwise too complacent, too prone to blind and self-serving rationalizations. The solar king symbolizing Manas in the world had, from the time of Rama, fallen from the heights of manasic righteousness into increasingly lower manasic blindness, but the true and natural fool never possessed such worldly reason. Informed either by mystical visions, madness or possessing spirits, he looked on the machinations of the lower mind as though through a window from the outside. He leavened the lump of man-made order, which always threatened to get too hard, and acted as a living link between men and gods. In Shakespeare's King Lear the fool's role seems to exist to emphasize one strange and tragic instance where the positions of the fool and the king are reversed. The king, in his foolishness, acts to dissolve the order of things by turning over his kingdom to his daughters and placing himself in the position of their childlike dependant. This act of folly unleashes powerful forces of good and evil which pour forth in exaggerated form through the important characters in the play. Lear's fool, being a man devoid of worldly wisdom, has the wisdom to see how the worldly are fools. In response to his master's ill-conceived action, he jokes and sings his silly songs and tries, in his grief, to expose the nature of the folly. The great evil expressed through two of the king's daughters results from the inversion whereby they both embrace the adage "Evil be thou my Good." Embracing this, reason cannot reach them. It cannot prove them wrong in itself. This perverse assertion that love and fellow-feeling are foolish can only be reinverted by the fool, who says, "Folly (love) be thou my wisdom." The breaking of blood ties and the denial of love are so abnormal as to suggest a great convulsion of the natural order of things, and when Lear finally becomes aware of the inhumanness of Goneril's heart, his wits begin to lose their bearings. As his madness sets in, his sympathy and vision expand, inspiring his fool to comment, "Thou woulds't make a good fool." And, indeed, having hit the bottom, having lost his place in society as well as everything else, he has become the fool. He comes to see clearly that "When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools."

The fool is the unbinder of man's slavery to the lower mind and the creator of freedom, but it is unwise to try prematurely to play his part. Lear seems to have indulged a whimsical but also egotistical fancy in thinking that he understood the consequences he was about to reap from his grandiose gesture. Far from understanding the true character of those around him, he had equally little understanding of himself or his responsibility in the world. By playing the fool, he was catapulted into madness rather than into a state of visionary wisdom. In dissolving his kingship, he cut away the raft of manasic control which could have seen him safely to the other side of chaos and onto the shore of true spiritual perception. He had plunged himself into the state of the most pathetic and witlessly dependent of fools. In a similar manner, the disciple who struggles along the path towards spiritual enlightenment encounters the same dangerous possible miscalculation. Though in essence a king possessing the germ of divinely endowed intelligence, such a seeker may fail to realize the importance of engendering within himself the rule of the true philosopher. He may free himself from the limitations of worldly identity and position only to cast himself into a turbulent psychic sea. The old myth of Zeus and the philosopher can, if properly interpreted, assist an aspirant to avoid such a pitfall. For the philosopher who had wished to be made a fool among fools was a truly wise man and had the wits to realize that he could shed his wisdom upon his fellow mortals best disguised as a fool.

Who knows how many wise men there are amongst us who pass thus disguised! How many souls have chosen in this or in past lives to forfeit respectability and position in order to work out some line of deeper truth while appearing the simpleton to others? Can we distinguish them from the witless fools whose appearance they share? Along the sidewalks and country lanes of the world walk legions of fools lacking in divine madness. Dull, with confusion swamping their minds, they are prey to cunning spirits or the grief of uncomprehended loss. Perhaps lives ago, perhaps even more recently, they abdicated their crown of manasic responsibility and tried to play the child, the freebooter, the unwise fool. These are not the truth-tellers nor do they have the ability to deflect or neutralize the evil eye. The only dissolution they accomplish is wreaked upon the feeble order of their own minds, which skitter and threaten to break away entirely from their souls. The mystic Fool of God sees them upon the stage of life and knows them for what they are. He sees too the other fools, the buffoon playing at playing the fool, the priest playing at truth, the king playing at God. He sees, and yet he too is a fool, self-chosen in some life. For he knows his foolishness and is willing to abandon all concern for the opinions of men in order to become a better vehicle of his higher vision, his divine madness. He is a fool but also a philosopher-king. He is in control and yet pierces and dissolves the facades of control imprisoning the lower mind. He is chaos threatening the lower orders and sweeping like a peal of compassionate laughter through the hearts of weary humanity. Oh welcome him, the seer, the unexpected visionary with matted locks or fool's cap! Welcome him when he comes!

[steelthroat]

I think Cybertronian atheism should work differently than ours like:

"It's not that primus doesn't exist, I just don't think of him as a god just because he's a creator and created me"

Like yk. He's there, he's a giant robot, he's the planet the Cybertronians inhabit... this doesn't have to mean something on a spiritual level for everyone.

Like i imagine the discourse in theology boards being like "when people say "oh look Primus created us all" okay but maybe we could do it too... WE ACTUALLY DO IT TOO DOES IT MAKE mechs in cold constructed factories GODS?"

Idk. Like i think that the fact that primus exists as a planet and giant Cybertronian/Cybertron is a hard one to miss, maybe there may be some skeptics sure, but few of them.

I think it would actually be interesting arguing about whether his will is something to keep in mind or not when talking about politics or society and that also bleeds into "primacy/no primacy" discourse.

And also i imagine there may be some Unicronian cults out there etcetera? Peopel arguing about his figure as a mythological or historical one? Hrrrrrrnnnn

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Existence Value: Why All of Nature is Important Whether We Can Use it or Not

I spend a lot of time around other nature nerds. We’re a bunch of people from varying backgrounds, places, and generations who all find a deep well of inspiration within the natural world. We’re the sort of people who will happily spend all day outside enjoying seeing wildlife and their habitats without any sort of secondary goal like fishing, foraging, etc. (though some of us engage in those activities, too.) We don’t just fall in love with the places we’ve been, either, but wild locales that we’ve only ever seen in pictures, or heard of from others. We are curators of existence value.

Existence value is exactly what it sounds like–something is considered important and worthwhile simply because it is. It’s at odds with how a lot of folks here in the United States view our “natural resources.” It’s also telling that that is the term most often used to refer collectively to anything that is not a human being, something we have created, or a species we have domesticated, and I have run into many people in my lifetime for whom the only value nature has is what money can be extracted from it. Timber, minerals, water, meat (wild and domestic), mushrooms, and more–for some, these are the sole reasons nature exists, especially if they can be sold for profit. When questioning how deeply imbalanced and harmful our extractive processes have become, I’ve often been told “Well, that’s just the way it is,” as if we shall be forever frozen in the mid-20th century with no opportunity to reimagine industry, technology, or uses thereof.

Moreover, we often assign positive or negative value to a being or place based on whether it directly benefits us or not. Look at how many people want to see deer and elk numbers skyrocket so that they have more to hunt, while advocating for going back to the days when people shot every gray wolf they came across. Barry Holstun Lopez’ classic Of Wolves and Men is just one of several in-depth looks at how deeply ingrained that hatred of the “big bad wolf” is in western mindsets, simply because wolves inconveniently prey on livestock and compete with us for dwindling areas of wild land and the wild game that sustained both species’ ancestors for many millennia. “Good” species are those that give us things; “bad” species are those that refuse to be so complacent.

Even the modern conservation movement often has to appeal to people’s selfishness in order to get us to care about nature. Look at how often we have to argue that a species of rare plant is worth saving because it might have a compound in it we could use for medicine. Think about how we’ve had to explain that we need biodiverse ecosystems, healthy soil, and clean water and air because of the ecosystem services they provide us. We measure the value of trees in dollars based on how they can mitigate air pollution and anthropogenic climate change. It’s frankly depressing how many people won’t understand a problem until we put things in terms of their own self-interest and make it personal. (I see that less as an individual failing, and more our society’s failure to teach empathy and emotional skills in general, but that’s a post for another time.)

Existence value flies in the face of all of those presumptions. It says that a wild animal, or a fungus, or a landscape, is worth preserving simply because it is there, and that is good enough. It argues that the white-tailed deer and the gray wolf are equally valuable regardless of what we think of them or get from them, in part because both are keystone species that have massive positive impacts on the ecosystems they are a part of, and their loss is ecologically devastating.

But even those species whose ecological impact isn’t quite so wide-ranging are still considered to have existence value. And we don’t have to have personally interacted with a place or its natural inhabitants in order to understand their existence value, either. I may never get to visit the Maasai Mara in Kenya, but I wish to see it as protected and cared for as places I visit regularly, like Willapa National Wildlife Refuge. And there are countless other places, whose names I may never know and which may be no larger than a fraction of an acre, that are important in their own right.

I would like more people (in western societies in particular) to be considering this concept of existence value. What happens when we detangle non-human nature from the automatic value judgements we place on it according to our own biases? When we question why we hold certain values, where those values came from, and the motivations of those who handed them to us in the first place, it makes it easier to see the complicated messes beneath the simple, shiny veneer of “Well, that’s just the way it is.”

And then we get to that most dangerous of realizations: it doesn’t have to be this way. It can be different, and better, taking the best of what we’ve accomplished over the years and creating better solutions for the worst of what we’ve done. In the words of Rebecca Buck–aka Tank Girl–“We can be wonderful. We can be magnificent. We can turn this shit around.”

Let’s be clear: rethinking is just the first step. We can’t just uproot ourselves from our current, deeply entrenched technological, social, and environmental situation and instantly create a new way of doing things. Societal change takes time; it takes generations. This is how we got into that situation, and it’s how we’re going to climb out of it and hopefully into something better. Sometimes the best we can do is celebrate small, incremental victories–but that’s better than nothing at all.

Nor can we just ignore the immensely disproportionate impact that has been made on indigenous and other disadvantaged communities by our society (even in some cases where we’ve actually been trying to fix the problems we’ve created.) It does no good to accept nature’s inherent value on its own terms if we do not also extend that acceptance throughout our own society, and to our entire species as a whole.

But I think ruminating on this concept of existence value is a good first step toward breaking ourselves out first and foremost. And then we go from there.

Did you enjoy this post? Consider taking one of my online foraging and natural history classes or hiring me for a guided nature tour, checking out my other articles, or picking up a paperback or ebook I’ve written! You can even buy me a coffee here!

[superectojazzmage]

X-Men works best, I feel, when writers understand on at least some level that it's really basically a cyberpunk/biopunk horror story that just happens to also be a superhero comic.

X-Men is the story of the world entering a new epoch where any random person on the street might randomly get superpowers - ranging everywhere from green hair to mind control - simply because they happened to win(?) a genetic lottery as part of a cosmic process programmed into humanity in ancient times by ineffable star gods. All around you are people who are ostensibly still people, but are also inhuman entities with alien powers who are gradually developing their own subculture that tells them they are the future dominant species destined to replace mankind. Many of them are just normal folks... but just as many see you the same way ancient homo sapiens saw neanderthals.

X-Men is the story of fear and hatred rising in the hearts of men in the face of that new epoch. Corrupt humans and mutants alike use bigotry and xenophobia to divide the two peoples, pushing them into a war not just for politics, but for evolution and the planet themselves. Mankind begins altering themselves and building machines of death to keep up with the mutants, in the process creating a third race of humanity; transhumans and robots, that in time come to be no different from the mutants, superpowered monsters of society's own making that see the humans as flatscan wastes of genes at best, oppressors to be destroyed at worst.

X-Men is the story of humanity fighting amidst themselves in their senseless darwinistic war while their world tumbles through a swirling universe of terrifying eldritch threats. Out in the stars and spiritual dimensions are alien empires once like us now advanced beyond comprehension, legions of magical wonders and nightmares in equal measure, lovecraftian machine hive minds that eat planets, demons that feast on our sin, cosmic entities that have as much in common with us as we do ants.

And above it all, X-Men is the story of how recognizing each other's humanity, of embracing love instead of hate, may be the only thing that ensures even a hope of survival in the face of the unimaginable, mind-breaking horror of a world entering a new era whether it's inhabitants like it or not... or perhaps, the only thing that decides whether or not we deserve to survive.

The best X-Men writers are the ones who recognize this. Chris Claremont, Johnathan Hickman, Grant Morrison, Kieron Gillen, etc.. The writers who recognize that there's something profoundly and utterly, existentially TERRIFYING about what the series really boils down to (a self-defeating war between mechanical and genetic evolution with normals caught in the middle that may be the extinction of all three races) and reflect that in the aesthetics and tone by emphasizing a cyberpunkish vibe.

Emphasizing that this is a world where people - willingly or not - alter their bodies like mechanics alter cars and any random person you see on the street might be a mutant or Sentinel or something that can kill you with a look, and that random person is probably hiding from something even worse that wants to kill them just for being born.