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caltropspress · 9 months ago

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Earl Sweatshirt: A Geography of Grief and Growth

I made myself the poet of the world. The white man had found a poetry in which there was nothing poetic….I had soon to change my tune.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

I suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know what is stated in its entirety, that we do not need to “master” or conquer the narrative as a whole, that we may know in fragments.

—bell hooks, “Teaching New Worlds/New Words” (1994)

Breakin’ ’em down to micro-fragments.

—Saafir, “Battle Drill” (1994)

What is asked of me is not to ascend but to descend.

—Robert Bly (1990)

Earl Sweatshirt’s arc, swerving and dervishy, isn’t difficult to see, as we’ve witnessed it with him—we’re either interlocutors or interlopers, both with questionable motives. So when Earl looks back on school daze, as he does on “OD,” we look back with him (though ours is often an imperial gaze [HOW COULD IT NOT BE?]). We tee-hee and titter as we hear that “somebody tooted in the student commons,” tooted being the most puerile word for gas he could have chosen. An array of scatological options were ignored. It’s a deliberate gesture toward juvenilia. He doesn’t want his expression to be too mature, ha. He wants to welcome you to the romper room, ha. Remaining a kid until the moment he expires, apparently. So he sets the adolescent scene: the student commons. “The bell rang,” and the accused student was spared the prolonged opprobrium. In about four seconds, the student will begin to post. He “went home and argued in the comments,” channeling his embarrassment elsewhere, talking shit (shit) on the internet behind the safety and quasi-anonymity of a screen—an odd facade. He can walk right up to your avi and diss you. That’s his philosophy. The public humiliation replaced with a private self-possession. The discomfort of the crowd exchanged for the solace of solitude.

2. DID AN ANGEL SPEAK?

The sonics of “tooted” and “student” are twee, giggle-inducing. We laugh along with the concatenation of m and n phonemes [somebody | student | commons | rang | went | home | then | in | comments]. The near-homophonous commons and comments scan hysterical. With “OD,” it’s easy to confuse adolescence with adulthood. That “somebody” committed this social transgression seems defensive. Maybe it was him—the subject, Earl, Thebe—seeing as how the rest of the song is delivered in the first-person. Embrace the Age of Immaturity. Channel the Fat Boys: Darren Robinson’s flatulent beatbox. Place it beside the disorderly lyrics that Bobbito spits: “I write my own shit from finish to start, / Diminish the heart, / I eat a knish and then I fart.” Like the Cenobites, Earl kicks a dope verse, and only that. “I keep my sentences short,” he says on “EAST.” Beauty is brevity, brevity beauty. A “brevity pack,” as Earl has referred to the Feet of Clay songs. He strives to be live ’cause he got no choice. He runs his own business like James Joyce. In A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man, a similar flatus incident unravels. At Clongowes Wood College (Stephen Dedalus’s Coral Reef Academy), a “stout student who stood below…on the steps” by the name of Goggins “farted briefly.” Sonically, the sentence shares much with Earl’s opening line. Dixon asks, in a “soft voice,” “Did an angel speak?” But the others react with bellicosity and name-calling (stinkpot; flamingest dirty devil). Goggins doesn’t retreat home; he simply asks, “It did no one any harm, did it?” You still bet that you can harm me, but you don’t alarm me, Goggins might say another way, reprising Del the Funky Homosapien, echoplexing Masta Ace.

Earl “watched the doppler move,” the wavelength shift—the siren song of the “toot,” something insidious—or maybe it’s just the tremors we’re feeling. Woop, woop: that’s the sound of the beast, KRS would say. The frequency shivers. The shift, the movéd doppler, means Earl is immediately older, he’s the child who “get[s] introduced to violence,” even if he acknowledges the line was inspired by his nephew on a playground in South Africa, experiencing apartheid reincarnate as a whiteboy cuts him in line for the slide. Cranly, bullying Goggins, “shove[s] him violently down the steps.” The doppler moves. It slides into violence—like the violence visited upon the MOVE compound located at 6221 Osage Avenue in Philly in 1985. Gradations of black/white. ELUCID mentions the “gray on [his] face showing age” on his Osage (2016) project. Isn’t it strange—how the youngins can turn cold, hoarfrosty, in an instant? The grayscale cover to ELUCID’s tape is graced by a photograph of Birdie Africa, the sole child survivor of the siege. The bone fragments of the MOVE children have since been used in anthropology courses at UPenn and Princeton—case studies. It’s a good trope. Fascinating stuff.

4. TRYIN’ TO TRANSFORM YOU BOYS TO MEN LIKE DAYCARE

When JuJu of the Beatnuts asked, You want pain?, he wasn’t referencing the dramatical-traumatical pain Earl negotiates—JuJu’s question posed a ruffneck and ruffian pain on “Watch Out Now.” Somewhere closer to Marcy, where Jay-Z’s streets was watching. Earl clocks minutes, anaphoric with what he watches (I watched the doppler… / I watched a child…), much like Dylan’s portentous hard rain in which he saw endless racialized visions: “I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it”; “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’”; “I saw a white ladder all covered with water.” For Earl, the ladder is a slide. The saw is watched. Witnesses all.

In “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” bell hooks writes that she “came to theory because [she] was hurting”: “I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.” hooks says that she “came to theory young, when [she] was still a child,” citing Terry Eagleton who argues that “[c]hildren make the best theorists.” Children, Eagleton insists, possess “a wondering estrangement.” No wonder, then, that “since a jit” Earl has found no use in “giving up.” He rather make it make sense.

I beat you to the point. Having gained experience, there’s nothing you can tell Earl that he doesn’t already know, that he hasn’t already seen. He’s seen enough, had enough. He doesn’t await the mob’s pursuit; he places the noose on himself, he RE: DEFines it within his own lexicon. His noose, therefore, “is golden.” He’s a young youth, rockin’ the gold [noose], DEATHWORLD goose. He speaks with criminal slang, with a split tongue like ELUCID. Where ELUCID was “true and living, actual—no dull axes, owner of all heads,” Earl is “true and living, lonesome,” with no skulls to keep him company. He has to square up with the “pugilistic moments” on his own.

7. I AM OLDER THAN I ONCE WAS AND YOUNGER THAN I’LL BE

I’m thinking of “The Pugilist at Rest” (1991) by Thom Jones, whose epileptic protag describes a “grainy black-and-white photograph” of the bronze statue called The Pugilist at Rest. The pugilist, with a pocketful of mumbles, has “slanted, drooping brows that bespeak torn nerves” and a forehead “piled with scar tissue.” Torn nerves and scar tissue—sounds like the physical manifestations of grief. And, yes, Earl has grieved, and he continues to grieve—as listeners, we’re accustomed to his grief pedigree, as per Ka. In the past, Earl was “panicking a lot”—he just “want[ed] [his] time and [his] mind intact.” That’s a cold fact.

The narrator of “The Pugilist at Rest” readies himself for a cingulotomy—a psychosurgical procedure that will “cauterize a small spot in a nerve bundle in [his] brain.” In other words, he wants to keep his mind intact. The neurosurgeon promises the operation will lift “the heaviness of a heart blackened by sin,” which is what convinces the narrator to agree to it. Good grief, he thinks, he’s been reaping what he sowed. He “can’t go on like this,” barely living “with a deadening sense of languor,” a phrase which calls to mind Earl’s lethargic, slugabed flow. Feeling insane in the membrane, like he’s a Soul Assassinated, exploring the depths beneath his whooligan behaviors. 376 was a brothel. “Good and evil are only illusions,” Jones writes. In anticipation of the surgery, the protag considers the worst-case [so what, so what] scenario: “If they fuck up the operation, I hope I get to keep my dogs somehow.”

8. MOURNING & MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLIA

Grief carries its own antidote along with it.

—Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798)

“Grief is the door to feeling,” Robert Bly says. But Earl, on “Grief,” told us he “ain’t been outside in a minute”—and that minute, whether we’re speaking with criminal slang like Nas on “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” or not, is an eternity. Earl hadn’t crossed that threshold, hadn’t kicked in that door. MIKE would realize it much later on “No Curse Lifted (rivers of love),” how you “had to walk through the grief,” even if it “was the worst feeling.” In 2015, though, Earl found these passageways distorted. Like the undulating photograph on the cover of his first mixtape. Like the blur-obscured selfie on the cover of Some Rap Songs. Like the static-scrambled cover of I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. Earl’s dealt in fragmentary confuzzled noise for a full career. He’s been standing on the corner, red burnt, moving down alien lanes paved by GBV, greenthinking to himself. It ain’t hard to tell that Earl “don’t act hard” and yet is a “hard act to follow.” The density or opacity of his exterior notwithstanding, grief don’t come easy. “As men,” Bly says, “we’re taught not to feel pain and grief as children.” So Earl spits somnolent, numb-tongued and slack-jawed. Like he said on “Cold Summers”: muffle my pain and muzzle my brain up.

“I’ve been alone in my shit for the longest,” he spit on “Grief,” and in work as recent as “Vin Skully,” he’s still figuring out “how to stay afloat in a bottomless pit.” Bly says that “we receive something from our father by standing close to him—something moves over that can’t be described in material terms.” Bly speaks of being in a “conspiracy with his mother” from early on. Earl finds himself “thinking ’bout [his] grandmama” while he wallows and lies in a bottle. “Grief” catalogs all the things his mama taught him. Earl’s work, of late, is autodestructive. He peels away and pastes back haphazardly. He vibes with this Bly shit: “If you can deny something so fundamental as grief in the whole family, you can deny anything. And then how can you write poetry if you’re involved in that much denial?”

Bly goes on to quote Alice Miller, the psychoanalyst who gave us The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979): “When you were young, you needed something you did not receive, and you will never receive it. And the proper attitude is mourning.” Mourning is the proper attitude, not blame—mourning. Mourning makes its way through moaning and mumbling—Earl’s current intonation. On “Grief,” he “cut the grass off the surface [and] pray[s] the lawnmower blade catch the back of a serpent.” Philip Larkin’s poem “The Mower” (1979) leans more literal: “The mower stalled, twice; I found / A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, / Killed. It had been in the long grass.” Larkin’s speaker genuflects before the innocent critter, recalling how he “fed it, once.” Now, he mourns how he has “mauled its unobtrusive world, / Unmendably. Burial was no help.” Earl, of course, is less forgiving of the serpents in the grass. They’re threats, not friends. Still, a void opens up when the mower—(and let’s not forget the lawnmower is a modernized scythe)—does its mowing. Grief is the door to feeling, and on the other side:

Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

9. NOBODY KNOW WHO MADE THIS WELL, FOR IT WAS HERE WHEN I WAS BORN

“Come get to know me at my innermost…”

Riveting, Earl raps. Earl raps are riveting. We fix to the flow—riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s. We’re invited to know Earl, to become familiar, and his “innermost” is a constant vacillation between optimism and [afro]pessimism. The sudden switches—these switches on bitches like fixed with hydraulics—establish what Danny Schwartz, writing for Rolling Stone, called an “uneven terrain.”

Earl’s “family business [is] anguished,” and that’s recognizable. We’ve known Earl (on “Chum”) with the “pendulum swinging slow” and low. He holed up, hostage-like, in his “heart’s bottomless pit.” Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) brand of captivity. “I was sick,” that narrator says, “—sick unto death with that long agony.” Something tells me there should be an exclamation point there (SICK!). Earl Sweatshirt was down, down, down. “I was in the fucking pits for like 10 months post my pops dying,” he said in an interview. The Spanish Inquisition ain’t shit.

But for these countless downs, “OD” tracks the ups like naloxone in the nasal membrane. “Now I need atonement,” Earl notes—he makes a case for reparations. He “sets the goal[s]” like some motivational speaker. If “half [his] wings is broken,” he can “spread the other for [his] brodie OD.” Somewhat circumspect as he’s “tiptoeing,” yet the approach is laden with “too much love.” Even when his “sister showed in a rut,” he’s joining arms with her and “getting over, sending up.” That rut she walks—like Eudora Welty’s worn path (1941)—is a path through the pinewoods, and she’s suddenly Phoenix Jackson. “She was very old and small,” Welty writes, and she moves “with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock.” Even with her pentium processing and pendulum low, she swings back up—the rise of her namesake. She screams phoenix, her feathers and flames are one skin. “Living in the moment,” Earl raps, and his craft is bars. “You been corrupt”—and, sure, who hasn’t?—but you recover with “some ginabot.” Welty’s Old Phoenix surveys a spring “silently flowing through a hollow log.” She bends and drinks and says, “Sweet gum makes the water sweet.” It’s the equivalent to Earl putting “shilajit in his sippy cup,” which is “healing cuts revealingly.” And, yes, from a “sippy cup,” so we’re back to toddling around again (“Since a jit,” he says). “I can’t give enough,” Earl raps, his last winding-sheet made of nard and myrrh.

10.

We crouch and teeter, caterwauling along the ledges, for we’ve got these clumsy feet of clay. This is the intended effect[/defect]; this is the rubble of what Earl calls the “crumbling empire.” This is us feeling the violent vibes of the “death throes” he speaks of. Why would we expect anything to resemble traditional song or rhyme structure when the earth quakes, civilization trembles, and Earl’s dungeon shakes? His chains have fallen off. The tenor is tremors. He’s living the trife life—hell on earth—but still living. Earl’s done trying to not look down—he embraces an outer appearance which scans dour; he deliberately gazes into the pit, inviting the vertigo, for it “haunts the whole of existence,” as Fanon says. But Frank B. Wilderson III promises a “vengeance of vertigo.”

11.

Gallons of rubbing alcohol flow through the strip, and Earl’s lips. He’s “refilling the pump”—his heart, yeah—but with a sawed-off shotgun, hand-on-the-pump posture. There’s “no concealing it,” not even with a concealed carry permit. He brandishes right back at “the enemy up in arms bearing snubs.” The mood swings; been down so long it looks like up to him. The turns require tourniquets. This is some Battle of Dak To torture—somewhere between Retaliation and the Heavenly Divine. Emotional turmoil seems violent by design, and Earl’s “memory [is] really leaking blood.” Fear not, the blood is “congealing, stuck.” Like Havoc says, “The Mobb rollin’ thicker.” Prodigy cites it, too: “This ain’t rap—it’s bloodsport.” But Earl has known that all along—he’s been “mobbin’ deep as ’96 Havoc and Prodigy did” since 2013.

12.

HipHopDX’s Kevin Cortez referred to listeners having to “sift through the muddle” in order to appreciate the bars, but where muddle suggests a disorderly conduct, a kaos network, Earl’s style, more appropriately, models. The woozy, wavy, and inner-conflict-war-torn vocals model an abstraction that anticipates the listener’s loyalty. This is what I’ve got, brief and cryptic as the gesture may be, the model says. Writing for NME, Dhruva Balram described Earl’s lyrics as “slurred,” but slurry is the form.

13.

If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side…

—Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2005)

So if we’re giving ourselves over to the woozes and waves, we’ll just as well find ourselves lost. Let’s go—like those tourist books run by students—and let’s wander eastward. Follow our napkin-scrawled directions and disorientations to a somewhere elsewhere. Let’s go east for a second, for a spell, on a lark, in the dark (word to AKAI SOLO). Earl’s bloodwork contains “pieces of slums”—or more aptly, [sLUms]. He’s hand-to-hand with that Jungle Boy MIKE, but also the god Mike Davis. “[T]he cities of the future,” Davis wrote, would be “constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood.” Just the same as an Earl Sweatshirt verse is built—under the tutelage and overstanding-sharing, symbiotically, with MIKE. Davis says our cities aren’t “cities of light soaring toward heaven,” but a world that “squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.” Smells like somebody tooted in the student commons. Smells like a slum village, something we’ve smelled before—possibly coming straight from the slums of Shaolin.

14. ACID EASTERNS

Earl trekked to the East and squinted into “one beacon in the dust weaving”—like Clint Eastwood arriving out of the hazy horizon ether of High Plains Drifter (1973). But Earl is heading to the East, blackwards. And though Brother J claimed you can’t define what’s direct from the East, Jeru told us on The Sun Rises in the East that you can’t stop the prophet either. So on “EAST,” Earl traverses a tricky terrain—it’s tricky, tricky, tricky because it’s an acid western landscape: an acid eastern.

The path isn’t direct or linear—it zigs and zags like rolling papers, and stimulates the same. “Double back when you got it made,” Earl says at the start of his journey “EAST.�� The objective is to talk sense condensed into the form of a poem like Special Ed once did on “I Got It Made.” Instead, Earl’s poems—his L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems—skew [non]sense, go form[less], and vaporize rather than condense. Lyn Hejinian in cinnamon Timbs: “constant change figures / the time we sense.” The narrative is hallucinogenic (note: “how the story careen against the bars”). Earl’s bindle contains “thirty racks and weed [with] no fat in the collard greens.” That’s how he gets funky on the mic like an old batch. That’s how he gets sincerity on the mic: “Off top it’s me—no cap, / I don’t bottle things.” That buck that bought a bottle could’ve struck the lotto, maybe. But Earl’s “canteen was full of the poison [he] need[s].” He gets where he’s going like El Topo, bereft. The “trip was long and steep”—that being an acid trip—so let me see you try to ride a horse into the chasms of the canyon.

“EAST” is a death meditation, a grand duel between Dantean and Donneian lyric voices [he damn-near well should’ve double-tracked the vocals]. In a 2015 interview with SPIN, Earl is asked about the worst thing he did that year, to which he replies: “Umm…acid?” He elaborates: “I took it at a time when I really didn’t need to be taking acid. I had like a fucking existential crisis at, like, four in the morning. But it was tight. We reeled it back.” Jodorowsky called El Topo (1970) an “eastern” in that it “incorporat[ed] ancient eastern wisdom in the materiality of American cowboys.” For Earl, it’s more a rhinestone cowboy—he holds the cold one like he holds an old gun (as evidenced in the “EAST” music video). DOOM was no stranger to grief, of course, and the rumors persist regarding the bad acid that precipitated Subroc’s early demise (“Bad Acid” also being the original title for “December 24”).

Estranged Earl, alienated—a high plains drifter (not Clint Eastwood, though) who rechristens a town “Hell” through a baptism of blood. Like the Beastie Boys’ version, Earl pulls out a pair of pliers and pulls a bullet out of his chest. He pulls through, true and living. “I’m long distance from my girl,” Mike D raps, so he’s “talking on the cellular,” but Earl is more alienated than that—beyond racking up roaming charges, immersed in dead zones. He “lost [his] phone and consequently all the feelings [he] caught for [his] GF.” Relationships can’t be sustained in these bleak and barren locations. All the blood has been drained from the ruddy faces—sanguine scenery. In his essay “On the Acid Western,” Jonathan Rosenbaum discusses how the subgenre “refuses to respect or valorize bloodshed.” Memory really leaking blood. Congealing. Stuck. To paraphrase Rosenbaum, Earl’s acid eastern “formulat[es] a chilling, savage frontier poetry to justify [his] hallucinated agenda—a view at once clear-eyed and visionary, exalted and laconic, moral and unsentimental, witty and beautiful, frightening and placid.” Earl’s “innocence was lost in the East,” and obsessives speculate whether this refers to Samoa or New York City—how far east we going? Countless spirit-questers pit-stopping at ashrams, searching for that Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal guide.

“I wait a beat,” Earl says. His canteen stays filled, auto-replenishes. His “cognitive dissonance shattered” and the “necessary venom restored.” Jodorowsky reportedly once taped snakes to his chest for an experimental theater performance. As if it matters if you think it matters anymore. Or, as ELUCID says, “Words mean things but don’t have to.” Acids and bases. Occident and Orient. Western and Eastern. Up is down.

15. NOTHING LIKE US EVER WAS

Earl’s “EAST” accordion beat—or whatever Orkes Gambus Al Fata instrumentation is at work—is more madcap than madvillainous. In my head is Erick Sermon, though, speaking about how “the flow slow…like a jazz player, or someone on the accordion” on “Knick Knack Patty Wack.” But I’m less concerned with the flow of air through bellows—compressing and expanding—than I am with Earl’s rendering of wind. (Somebody tooted.)

“Let the dead be dead,” Carl Sandburg says at stanza’s end in “Four Preludes on the Playthings of the Wind” (1920). Later, he reports, “The only singers now are crows crying.” And so Earl, a lonesome crow, reminds us—and himself—that “the wind get the ashes in the end” on “December 24.” The whining, wheezing consonance of /-nd/ in “wind” and “end” manages to evoke both the wind itself and the circularity of life. The bar whooshes and whips until we’re at our end, the terminus. That circularity, that full circle: ashes to ashes. “We are the greatest city,” Sandburg repeats, “the greatest nation: / nothing like us ever was.”

Global winds be blowin’—[Of the Soul]—and so billy woods cites that same line on “Haarlem”: “Thebe said the wind get the ashes in the end, bruv.” Check the configuration of the rhime:

The wind | gets | the ashes | in | the end {birth} {life} {death}

Even that get does work—whether it’s the violence of Death Grips’ “get got”; Too $hort threatening you to “get in where you fit in”; or the satirical sadism of Keenen Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. The wind wins out—it gets what it wants. On “EAST,” the wind—infinitely personified—“whispered to [Earl], ‘Ain’t it hard?’” It ain’t hard to tell that it is. How about some hardcore? Yeah, we like it raw like M.O.P. But those burns yield ashes. In Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” (1989), she struggles with the words she uses, knowing “[t]his is the oppressor’s language / yet [she] needs to talk to you.” I know it hurts to burn, she writes, but writing is no less ardent. “The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning.”

Let me bring it back to Robert Bly. “In the ancient times,” Bly says, “the movement for the men was downward—a descent into grief. It’s referred to in the fairytale as ‘the time of ashes.’” Ashes, he explains, is the “code word for the ‘out of it’ time.”

We know what it is like to take ashes in our hands. How light they are! The fingertips experience them as a kind of powder… Ashes, we note, find their way into the whorls of our fingertips, cling there, make the whorls more noticeable, more visible, more clear to us. We can take our own fingerprints with ashes.

Ashes, then, aren’t simply for the wind’s taking—ashes are for us, are necessary for us to transcend the grief the boys, the men, and the man-child experience. Bly points to the various cultures that have used ashes in initiation rites: “Ashes Time is a time set aside for the death of that ego-bound boy.” Ready to give up, so you seek the Old Earth. The elders cover your face—even your whole body—with ashes “to make [you] the color of dead people and to remind [you] of the inner death about to come.” Consider Earl’s ashen white face produced in the negative imagery of the “Grief” music video.” “The word ashes contains in it a dark feeling for death,” Bly says. “Ashes when put on the face whiten as death does.”

Earl Sweatshirt is a far cry from knocking blunt ashes into caskets.

16.

Feet of clay, hands of light…

—Moor Mother and billy woods, “Furies” (2020)

For Cheryl I. Harris, Earl’s mother, the feet of clay refer to a vulnerability we all possess no matter how formidable we may appear to become. Earl invokes the King of Babylon’s dream, a dream of an idol “meant to represent all the empires of the world,” echoing Sandburg’s imperious “greatest nation.” Earl believes “we at the feet of clay right now…We posted up live from burning Rome.” Imagine the ash pile. So Earl is here, ostensibly, to turn the disco into something dismal—how Mtume becomes “MTOMB” with its entombed sonics, as if he’s rapping from within a wall, the victim of some Poe immurement.

17.

“I remember woods,” Earl raps on “OD.” “I remember Endom when he wasn’t remembering much, / I remember love healing the ruptures.” I remember is also the refrain and title of Joe Brainard’s poem-memoir, a term which aptly describes much of Earl’s recent output. Brainard’s memories bum-rush into the present:

I remember a dream I used to have a lot of a beautiful red and yellow and black snake in bright green grass. I remember painting “I HATE TED BERRIGAN” in big black letters all over my white wall. I remember liver.

If Earl recalls love “healing the ruptures,” then he also likely recalls Fanon: It is essential to convey to the black man that an attitude of rupture has never saved anyone. But Fanon also speaks of young Black men “maintain[ing] their alterity. Alterity of rupture, of conflict, of battle.” Earl, “feeling rushed, grew up quick.” He echoes Biggie, who “grew up a fucking screw-up,” and Raekwon, who “grew up on the crime side” (though Earl’s mama taught him, as we know from “Grief,” how to avoid the pigs, persecution, and prosecution). Eyes on the clock, Earl acknowledges this “trip around the sun” is his “25th,” so “give it up”—his survival alone deserving of a standing [on the corner] ovation. He celebrates life with “gin and rum.” Again, notably not gin and juice—murder was never the case. The only death is the inner death, the death of the ego-bound boy, that Bly describes. Earl’s gin is the drink of be[gin]ning, of genesis (“Light them Phillies up then…”), of Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, when I was dead-broke, man… “We wasn’t supposed to be alive,” Earl says, yet here he stands.

18. RUMINANT

Stare at the Feet of Clay album cover—an evocation of folkloric imagery: a Grimm forest with gnarled tree branches—and the enchanted, diabolic goat lying in wait. Earl’s parasocial following speculate G.O.A.T., of course, but I’m more inclined to mythopoeic possibilities. The Feet of Clay goat glares like Baphomet but frolics like a faun over fractured beats. “OD,” Earl has stated, “brought [him] up out of [his] little wreck”—a wreck of wracked nerves. Adrienne Rich encourages “diving into the wreck” (1973).

I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power.

Earl’s right there with her, submerged and blacking out, but still surviving: Really leaking blood, but refilling the pump.

In her essay “Teaching New Worlds/New Words,” bell hooks invokes Rich’s struggle to navigate the “oppressor’s language.” For hooks, as a Black writer, managing that is even more difficult and historical. “I think now of the grief of displaced ‘homeless’ Africans, forced to inhabit a world where they saw folks like themselves, inhabiting the same skin, the same condition, but who had no shared language to talk with one another, who needed ‘the oppressor’s language.’” hooks explains how Black folks have “remade that language so that it would speak beyond the boundaries of conquest and domination.”

Earl Sweatshirt, especially in his later work, has “altered [and] transformed” English, just as “enslaved Black people took broken bits of English and made of them a counter-language.” The emotional wreckage is also a linguistic heap of fragments—micro-fragments, if we’ve learned anything from Saafir. Earl, in the tradition of his ancestors, “put[s] together [his] words in such a way that the colonizer ha[s] to rethink the meaning of the English language.” “The grammatical construction of sentences in these songs” by Earl, just as by the spirituals of hundreds of years prior, “reflect[s] the broken, ruptured world of the slave.” That crumbling empire Earl mentions was faulted by feet of clay.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2019, sharing a dais with his mother, Cherly I. Harris, Earl spoke to this lineage directly: “Rap music is slave music—the modern-day iteration of it. Slave communication had to be encrypted. You got a code.” He shifted: “If I know what I’m saying…I can teach it to you.” On Feet of Clay, Earl is teaching to transgress. “I’m cracking my own code,” he says to an audience member during the Q&A, “how it comes out garbled…,” and then he trails off, as if making a deliberate effort to keep his answer cryptic.

hooks always saw language as “a site of resistance.” This included the incorrect usage and placement of words—she called such practices a “rebellion.” Weaponizing syntax. hooks recognized rap music as a continuation of this fight—the latest [sound]clash, hip-hop artists as rebels without a pause—while still acknowledging the collateral damage it might cause.

Rap music has become one of the spaces where black vernacular speech is used in a manner that invites dominant mainstream culture to listen—to hear—and, to some extent, be transformed. However, one of the risks of this attempt at cultural translation is that it will trivialize black vernacular speech. When young white kids imitate this speech in ways that suggest it is the speech of those who are stupid or who are only interested in entertaining or being funny, then the subversive power of this speech is undermined.

Or, as Earl once said on “Chum,” “Too Black for the white kids and too white for the Blacks,” an axiom he’s come to loathe. Perhaps Fanon had the better bar on this subject: “The white man had the anguished feeling that I was escaping from him and that I was taking something with me. He went through my pockets. He thrust probes into the least circumvolution of my brain. Everywhere he found only the obvious. So it was obvious that I had a secret.”

Despite the pitfalls (and, yeah, the pit is bottomless), Earl’s words play [wordplay] a part in retraining minds, all while exorcizing his own demons through a steady diet of ashes and fractures. hooks promises us that “in the patient act of listening to another tongue we may subvert that culture of capitalist frenzy and consumption that demands all desire must be satisfied immediately.” Through his embrace of a language that indulges in passion and cerebral coding, Earl “heal[s] the splitting of mind and body” so common within Western metaphysical thought. Earl Sweatshirt speaks “words that do more than simply mirror or address the dominant reality”; he builds blips into a reality that is worth the rewind.

Images: Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1995 (screenshot) | Teen at 1990s computer photograph, Unknown (c. 1996) | James Joyce, Age 2, Unknown | ELUCID, Osage album cover (2016), photo by Michael Mally, Philadelphia Inquirer | The Boxer at Rest, bronze statue, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome, Italy (330-50 BC) | Alphonse Legros, The Pit and the Pendulum, second Plate (1861) | High Plains Drifter, dir. Clint Eastwood, 1973 (screenshot) | Subroc on an Apple IIc, Unknown (c. 1987) | Earl Sweatshirt, “Grief” music video, 2015 (screenshot) | Arthur Rackham, The Water of Life, Grimms Fairy Tales (1916) | Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1995 (screenshot)

#earl sweatshirt #underground hip hop #rap #backwoodz studioz #elucid #billy woods #moor mother

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thrawns-backrest · 1 year ago

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doodle and wip dump! descriptions and headcanons under the cut

Thurfian and Chiss OC (yet to be introduced). I really wanted to draw these two as I imagined them with similarly elongated face shapes and needed to work out the differences in their features. really happy with how Thurfian's hair ornament turned out. I imagine traditional Aristocra hairstyles as long and flowy while the military has more practical cuts

my funky little man and his outfits! love the thigh length cape so much. the final one is what I imagine him to wear at his new position in the Ascendancy (as per my fic). these are actually simple low level bureaucrat robes, the Syndics have even more elaborate outfits. I also imagine the waist tie knot to have additional status/occupation meaning

Ba'kif progress wip. just the base sketch with some colors thrown in for now. I want to finish his portrait ala Ronan style so fingers crossed we get there. this is what I imagine as a service dress uniform, as opposed to full dress where he would be wearing his full chains. these smaller chains are kind of like medal ribbon bars, for a more practical style

and finally someone mentioned Ronan with shorter hair and I couldn't resist. and the sketch that started it all next to it (first time I drew my man). I think I prefer him with his curls, it says more civilian which is what he is essentially, with that obligatory slicked back quality for some pomp. That said, I do imagine younger Ronan with a short style like this and it's neat that he actually looks younger here.

#thrawn #thrawn ascendancy #thrawn trilogy #thrawn treason #thurfian #chiss oc #brierly ronan #ba'kif #thrawn books #my art

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the-colourful-witch · 3 months ago

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Hi there I was wondering, when you started doing the Harry Potter character design series that you do in your blog, which characters did you start with and how did you decide what characters to do next and how the art project would develop?

Hiya! What a fun question, I'm glad you asked :)

Start of the Project

It started about a year ago. I was pretty art-blocked after graduating from art school. I was by myself during the summer holiday (or rather, the start of a black void that is creating your own art career, holidays are for students...). I was tired and enjoying some much-needed time off when I doodled this little punk girly on my iPad... She had pink hair and funky outfits and I thought: this is Tonks! So I posted the sketch on Tumblr. I don't even know why. I never posted sketches before, it was just an impulse.

The funny thing is, I posted (HP) stuff on Tumblr before but never really did anything with it. I had done a few Marauders portraits the winter before but that didn't prompt me to do more. It wasn't until I posted Tonks and I got some enthusiastic reactions that I thought to create more. It sparked enthusiasm in me; I wanted to explore more of these outfit sketches for HP characters. This is fun! So I did Hermione next, then Harry, then Ron. And on and on. Soon, I was taking requests and thought; 'People seem to really enjoy this! Who'd have thought my doodles turned into this?!'

After about two months, I decided to illustrate every HP character in the books (minus a few extremely obscure ones.. maybe when I get the motivation..). It will probably take a while, but after one year I've done... (takes a moment to count) 45 of them! There are so many more, so it will take a few years to get through them all, I think. Not to mention, all the other illustrations I do, too. The Triwizard portraits were fun! As well as the Weasley family portrait, the Gryffindor Quidditch team... I have a lot more stuff planned :) So, long story short: I'm going to continue for a long long time because there are too many characters to get through and I can't wait to share them all with you! How do I choose which characters to do next? That depends. Sometimes I take a request because I can't choose myself. And other times, I'm planning a few characters in a row. Like, I started with the Gryffindors in Harry's year. Dean, Seamus, Lavender and Parvati... Then a series of Slytherins, a series of Marauders. A series of Teachers, Triwizard Champions, etc. I recently did a series of every Weasley family member and finished that off with a portrait. The same with the Gryffindor Quidditch team; first all the individual characters and then a group illustration. I like doing it like that, it feels organised :)

Future Plans

As for future plans... I'm so thrilled about my plans. I feel like a child on their birthday :) I started the Owl Post Club last month, through Patreon, where I send my patrons a postcard with a Wizarding World illustration every month. I just sent off the first card and the feeling was unbelievable. I received messages that the cards arrived and they were so happy and I'm just beyond excited. I'm hoping to expand my Patreon with more fun projects like this soon. I would like for people to be able to have physical artwork and I'm working on making that possible. The Owl Post Club is just the beginning. Link to the Owl Post Club:

I hope this answered your question(s) :) I'm happy to answer more if you have any.

Magical wishes, Fleur

#askmeanything #askme #harrypotteruniverse #illustration #illustrator #hogwarts #characterdesign #gryffindor #characterdesignsheets #harrypotterdesign #characterart #harrypotterart #wizardingworldillustration #wizardingworld #wizardingworldofharrypotter #hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry #harrypotter #goldentrio

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thenixkat · 11 months ago

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i was going to refrain from it for awhile but since folks ruined my whole funky flow twice now I might as well.

Someone remind me around 5:30/6 pm whenever i actually get back home from work to elaborate on shit cause I do have shit to say on

Low facial diversity

Slavery

Fatphobia

Pasty bitch overload

In Dungeon Meshi

Cause like while I really do like Dungeon Meshi that doesn't mean I didn't notice shit

#Nix meows #Dungeon Meshi #dunmeshi criticism

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pocketfullofpearlies · 4 months ago

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RISE OF RED: A TALE OF HEADS AND HEARTS

(Descendants: Rise of Red Fanfiction/Re-imagining)

Chapter 1

''You know Red, this is the best idea you've had in a long time, '' Cheshire Cat said, his grin even wider than usual. ''I mean ruining your mum's portrait a night before Hearts and Heads Fest is insane. I love it!''

Red stood back, admiring her handiwork.

''I feel like it needs something, don't you?'' She asked, stroking her chin with her hand and staining it bright red.

She bent down and picked one of the guards she had shrunk.

The tiny guard kicked and yelled, brandishing his sword.

''Tsk, tsk. You'd think that after years of training and the Queen's strict regime, the Royal Guards would know not to accept a random package of shrinking cookies they receive in the middle of the night.''

The guard yelled even louder, almost loud enough to be audible.

''Then again, I shouldn't blame you; you're all half card anyway,'' she mused. ''Still, what do you think is missing? I've licked up almost all my red licking paint, but I have an array of ostrich feathers and peacock glitter left.''

The guard wriggled out of her hold and poked her with his tiny sword.

Red gasped. ''I've got it!''

She dug in her bag, feeling past the family of rabbits and the pot roast in there for a pack of playing cards.

''I never leave home without them,'' she said proudly, flipping them in and around her hands.

The queen cards separated themselves from the rest and Red blew them onto the portrait.

Then she dipped her brush back into the licking paint and spread a slash of colour all over the cards, giving them all funky hairdos and moustaches.

''Purrrrfection, wouldn't you say, Chesh?''

''Um, Red, how strong were those shrinking cookies you gave the guards?''

Red looked around at the guards at her feet who were gradually increasing in size and groaned.

''Gotta bounce, guys,'' she said, taking out her pogo as she stuffed all her supplies back into her bag.

She balanced on the device and it started bouncing automatically, taking her away from the Royal Courtyard and Into the castle.

''Told you not to use those WonderTube tutorials,'' Cheshire tutted.

''Oh hush you,'' Red said, getting off the pogo.

''As you wish, your Redness,'' he replied, grinning as he faded away.

Red folded up the pogo and licked the remaining licking paint off of her hands.

She had landed in the H wing of the castle, but her room was all the way in the R wing.

''Might as well make a stop in the kitchen,'' she said to herself.

She started skipping along, and had made it all the way to the A wing when the Queen Alert on her skirt went off and lights suddenly turned on.

''Uh oh...''

''Redwina Scarlet Heartlynn Vermilion Rouge-Redding!''

Of course she's up working right now!

Red shook out her hair and tied her bag around her waist to form another skirt.

''Mum! You're still up.''

The Queen of Hearts looked down from her work throne at her daughter suspiciously.

She was dressed in a light red sleeping gown, her long red locks wrapped around red curlers and what could either be a strawberry or blood mask smeared on her face.

''Now just where are you coming from looking like what a Jabberwocky wouldn't want for dinner?'' she asked, her voice clipping through the air and snipping at Red's confidence.

''I was talking a walk in the rose garden, Mum.''

''Past the curfew? The general curfew I placed on everyone? Including those guards I'm going to behead for letting you go out?''

''Great! More people you're going to behead tomorrow; how fun.''

''Considering you're going to be conducting some of those beheadings, you should think it's fun.''

''Awesome!'' Red said, attempting to sound excited. ''Is that why you're still up?''

''Yes, if you must know. Tomorrow has to be perfect.''

''Right, right, yeah. But, uh, mum I was thinking-''

''-Well that's a ticket to ruin-,'' The Queen mumbled

''-What if we don't make Hearts and Heads Fest about general, widespread decapitations and turn it into more of a celebration?''

The Queen stiffened and glared at Red.

''O-or not? Forget it. I don't know what I was saying.''

Red shifted uncomfortably as her mother went back to work.

''I'm gonna head up to my room now. Goodnight.''

The Queen gave a very posh grunt and waved her off without a second glance.

Red sped off to her room and slammed the door behind her in relief.

With a sigh, she plopped on her bed.

Cheshire appeared as she lay down, an even more mischievous grin on his face.

''You could've at least told me she was up, Chesh,'' Red told him.

''I could've, but I chose not to. It's more fun that way. ''

Suddenly, Red's speaking mirror started beeping.

''Oohhh...lover boy's calling,'' Cheshire teased before disappearing again

Red rolled her eyes, then got up to sit at her vanity table, tapping the mirror three times.

On the third tap, her reflection dissolved, revealing the person who had beeped her in the first place.

''Hey,Maddox!''

''Don't 'hey, Maddox' me, Princess,'' Maddox Hatter said, giving Red a stern look. ''I know what you did.''

He took of his hat, briefly exposing his silky white curls, and pulled out a piping hot kettle.

Bringing out an elegant, hand painted teacup, he poured the hot, purplish liquid into it.

''Where's the mouse?'' Red asked as he stirred his tea.

''Asleep. Like you should've been instead of turning your mother's portrait into your personal sketchpad.''

Red groaned. ''Come on, Maddox. I play pranks like this all the time.''

''I know, but tomorrow's super important. It's not the kind of day to risk upsetting the Queen.''

Maddox sipped his tea and observed Red's forlorn expression.

''Look, Red,'' he said gently. ''I know tomorrow is going to be hard, but-''

''-Hard?'' Red interjected. ''Hard? Mads, your dad's tests and homework assignments are hard; trying to find an unpainted white rose in mother's garden is hard. But tomorrow I'm going to have to order someone's death! I can't do that!''

Tears filled her eyes and began rolling down her cheeks softly.

Red wiped them away, licking her fingers.

Wonderlanders' tears tasted like sugar, and on the rare occasion Red shed any, she made sure to take advantage of it.

Maddox sighed, setting down his teacup. ''I'm sorry, Princess. I wish there was something I could do.''

A lightbulb went off in Red's head, and she snatched the corresponding one floating mid-air and threw it away.

''Maybe there is,'' she said, her eyes shining with uncried tears and mischief.

''Oh no. You have your trouble face on.''

''What if you bring me that time machine thingy you've been working on. You said it's ready, right?''

''Not possible, Princess.''

Red pouted. ''Why not?''

''Well,my dad would disown me and I'd have to join The White Rabbit Gang. And, oh let's see; you could alter time as we know it putting us all in grave, grave, very grave, extremely grave -did I mention grave?- danger!'' he said, mouthing an extra 'grave' at the end.

''Okay, okay, I get it,'' Red relented, rolling her eyes. ''I'm just fed up with this. I wish I could go back and stop this stupid festival from ever existing. And I really, really wish I could leave Wonderland and see more of the world.''

''Don't worry, Princess. In time, at least one of those wishes will come true.''

''Yeah, sure.''

Red yawned and rubbed at her eyes.

''Being a vandal sure is exhausting,'' she mumbled.

Maddox laughed at how cute she looked, only for his laughter to turn into a yawn as well.

''I'm gonna turn in now, Princess. Goodnight.''

''Nighty night, Mads,'' Red said tiredly, tapping the mirror thrice to end their call.

After washing her face of paint and tears, she slipped into a pair of heart patterned pyjamas and hopped under the covers.

''Off with the lights,'' she said, making the lights turn off automatically.

She turned and twisted for minutes before falling into a tumultuous sleep, her mind fixed on nothing but the thought that by this time tomorrow, she'd have blood on her hands.

Chapter 2:

https://www.tumblr.com/pocketfullofpearlies/757338583424172032/rise-of-red-a-tale-of-heads-and-hearts?source=share

#disney descendants #fanfiction #fanfic #descendants #rise of red #descendants: the rise of red #popular #trending #movies #disney plus #disney princess #ever after high #queen of hearts #descendants 4 #disney's descendants #princess red #alice in wonderland #mad hatter #looking glass

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basil-l3af · 6 months ago

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Casey’s profiling portrait is so interesting to me because that’s not the real Casey, it’s the fictional version of him.

His character model in the real world is pretty formal; neat slicked back hair, the vest, his shirt properly buttoned, and his tie in place and not having any funky patterns. but his counterpart in the dark place is the exact opposite of this. he’s not well put-together and is far less professional

It’s also a nice little easter egg when he gets possessed (i guess that’s the right word) by scratch and he loses the tie, his outfit resembles scratch’s American Nightmare look!!!

ANYWAYS, so with those changes being noted, the portrait used when you profile Casey resembles the fictional one more than the real one:

All the physical characteristics of fictional Casey are displayed here, but why????

Is it to symbolize how much of his life has been influenced by Alan’s writings? Because not only did he have to deal with the Cult of the Word and their weird messages towards him, but Alan’s echos (unknowingly) peering into Casey’s own life and taking inspiration from it. I’m so curious as to if major events in his life, like his divorce, was caused by Alan and his writing. not only that, but the utter resemblance he has to Sam Lake (duh, but in the games he’s the actor for the Alex Casey movies).

it’s just weird to me that it’s Saga who perceives him as that, since she’s unaffected by the dark presences.

i just wanted to share my thoughts on this cause it’s driving me insane. i’m not sure about the broader implications of it, other than how much of real Casey was affected Alan, but i’m hoping more is explained in the DLCs that come out soon!!!

#alan wake 2 #alex casey #i’m sorry if this makes no sense #alan wake #saga anderson #sam lake #remedyverse #remedy entertainment

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tiny-vermin · 8 months ago

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I want to know more about the m9 artist au!! I remember reading a post or two about it a billion years ago (and would love to read them again) 💜

hi jess!!!! thank u for being interested hehe :")

so ever since i drew that lil thing of essek painting a frank stella inspired painting (or even before), ive been thinking of what kinds of art each of the m9 would do. essek ofc is inspired by a minimalist show that i went to here, all the big names from that movement were shown, but those really dark, sinkhole-like paintings are speaking to me. another artwork of boxes made of mirrors also seems like the thing he would do too

there's a kiln here that we visited which was huge, and surrounding it were artists' studios and some other ceramic sellers, i imagine the clay family having a place like this in the middle of nowhere amongst the trees, and caleb would do his work there

anyways because at heart im a shadowgast luver its centred around them,, they meet at an artist residency or something like that and its an incredibly slow burn that involves talking and not-talking and looking and not-looking. in the end i am but a simple wong kar wai fan so. that kinda vibes would definitely influence this, i would describe it as a quiet burning i guess?? time skipy and words that are not said

i think im gonna rant a bit more about their different mediums and styles so i'll keep it under the cut

i think caleb sculpts figures and portraits, but in a sad, kathe kollwitz charcoal vibe. maybe some funky looking animals, perhaps some pots and vases to look at the pretty glazes. he's interested in using fire to burn texture into different mediums, like ive seen it being used on shellac to make a really cool net of ink looking structure.. but yknow, just seeing the aftermath of glazed ceramic from the kiln is enough, and probably better for him to keep his distance anyways

the clay family produces most of the ceramic to sell, vases, pots, plates, cups, teapots, yknow just a whole array. and its really colourful too, depicting every family members different style. i think caduceus would do some matte glazes with a lot of different colours, theyre all a little wonky but theyre better off that way anyways. he does some really mean ink calligraphy and painting though

jester definitely does,, everything, whatever her heart desires kinda thang. she makes pastel textile installations and lighthearted cute paintings, but theyre always so contemplative and soothing. she gets m9 a lot of work cus her mom has connections, etc etc. i really love the idea of jester creating works that talk about the female body and femininity (definitely not projecting no)

beau is a printmaker and photographer who's really experimental, she loves cyanotypes and printing flowers (for yasha), idk she seems like she would put fabric and rocks into the washing machine to see what would happen. u would probably catch her in someone elses studio learning about what they do or in the library learning about what old people did

veth works in a museum as a curator, getting beau to help her sometimes with gathering artworks and artists etc. she probably organises community art projects for kids and public art installations. her house is full of m9's artworks and various other artists shes worked with.

yasha does bouquets as her post-retirement part time job, prior to that no one really knows what she did ("she probably murdered a bunch of people and is now hiding from the government"). fjord draws comics for fun but is also not a job for him, molly is a question mark for me. but these guys probably wont be in it as much anyways

im still not sure what format i wanna do this in, im actually having fun just writing it in my notebook now (digital does not facilitate the creative juices) but i do want to do some visuals like fake movie stills or storyboards. maybe they will work together well???? dunno. working on the other shadowgasty thing im doing made me realise how much easier it is to draw when there's a script already there, so im writing the script for myself

im definitely not as practiced in writing as i am in drawing, but idk im just gonna have some fun and see where that takes me, meanwhile try not to feel too bad that its fanart HAHA (very bad habit)

edit: i just saw my previous thoughts on beau being an art journalist, but i kinda like this better.. but maybe she can do both muah

#working tag for this ->#the kiln #honestly if u had any tips for writing #i'd love to hear..#i was insulted once on my writing and never wrote again HADHSFHF #oh and also emo smoking #that is somethng i want to draw more of

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akirakirxaa · 2 months ago

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some anon input/questions then! what job would the zenos cousin have? since zenos is a samurai/reaper?? machinist?? gunbreaker?? lots more if he's like, more hyur than garlean!

does he have access to magic?? the echo?? what would varis think of his existence??

(Zenos is 26! maybe hed be 23? big cain and abel energy tbh. Zenos is Cain ofc.)

Hello anon!

You know, I haven't decided on his job yet. I've got a friend rooting for Machinist, gunbreaker could be funky, but then I was also thinking dual wielding a la viper could be fun. I think I might be leaning Machinist though just so I can give him the gun Emet uses to shoot G'raha. 👀

He can use magic! He is hyuran enough to be able to manipulate magic but it IS harder for him to do so because of his Garlean heritage, so he'll never be a true spell slinger. He's much better at using magic as a supplement to other physical fighting styles (such as how Gunbreaker imbues its ammo).

He has the echo and he has his own echo ability (on top of the canon visions of course), soul sight! Like most echo abilities, he can't control when it happens, so everything might be fine one minute and the next everyone looks like a different colored glowstick. He doesn't really know what what it is he's seeing until he gets a chance to meet Emet and talk about it.

Varis I don't think knows about him to start with. His ancestor was taken away when they were a baby, before Varis was even alive, and the rumor spread that the baby died to protect them and Noelle. Of course, once Varis sees his face for the first time there's no doubt, not with a face that matches all the portraits of his grandsire in the palace. He is irritated, thinks he is a bit of a stain on the family tree for being half-race, but mostly no more bothered than he is by a non-Galvus WoL. Zenos though I believe would be absolutely fascinated (maybe even slightly more than normal); not just a 'friend' he can 'connect' with but family?

Also I cannot believe I accidentally created a Cain and Abel dynamic roflmao.

And as a treat for everyone, I created him last night in gpose!

I'm still trying to settle on a name but I think he's wonderful. :3

#ffxiv #oc: naevius yae galvus #i don't know if I mentioned previously that ive decided he gets his own wolverse #because this origin for a wol is just fascinating to me #thanks for the ask!#warrior of light #garlean oc

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m0rninglatte · 7 months ago

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Monster from Epic and Icarus analysis because the thoughts do be real

“How did suffering become so endless?”

- Icarus thinking it should have been done by now, but it's not. It's still going

“Do I need to change?”

…

Moving on.

“I'm surrounded by the souls of those I've lost”

- Icarus talking about Aurelius, Enderian, *Centross*, Momboo, etc.

- The idea of everyone who has died is a sacrifice, and they will be brought back, but also Icarus ability to not grieve properly because of it

"What if the greatest threat we'll find across the sea, is me?

- Icarus wondering if they are failing and they are going to slip up to the point everything crashes because they made one wrong move.

“What if I'm the monster? What if i'm in the wrong”

- I like to think this line as Icarus beginning to think of each reset and all the "antagonistic" acts they've done and thinking if they are and have always been a monster because they in their own eyes can't seem to do anything to help people as they just end up hurting someone.

“What if i'm the problem that’s been hiding all along”

- Icarus in “Lady of the world” talking about how corruption has always been there, how whatever they did then was always there they just pushed it back of their mind until corruption made it the forefront of their mind.

“What if i'm the one who killed you”

- Icarus debating if it was Quixis that killed Momboo or themselves.

“What if I’ve been far too kind to foes but a monster to ourselves”

- Foes = Fable, ourselves = everyone else minus the co-workers

- Although Icarus currently wants to fix everything and stay with Fable, i like to see this as Icarus debating if they are on the right side.

The Polyphemus section is Centross, mainly the Violet Reaper

“Or does he end my men, to avenge his friend”

- S1 funeral.

-“Avenge his friend” is a line you could annotate “friend” to be Enderian

- If you wanted to, you could almost switch into "...,to serve his goddess"

The Circe section is Enderian

"When the witch turns men to pigs, to protect her nymphs"

- Corruption of Ominus Bane

- You could see this line in my opinion as either to protect her realm or to prove her point about Overworlders and how they are the same, for example, resorting to violent outcomes

The Poseidon section is Fable

- This section is a mix of things, I can see mixes of Fable during the war and Fable currently, and Icarus is like thinking of the similarities and differences between Fable and himself.

The Odysseus section about him during the Trojan War is Icarus and the Wack

“Does a soldier use a wooden horse to kill sleeping Trojans cause he is vile”

- Icarus using the wack to kill Momboo

"Or does he throw away his remorse and save more lives with guile"

- Icarus querying if he should just throw away his regret for any actions he has done and attempt to help people through sly and cunning intelligence (literally the definition of guile)

The section after the Odysseus section is Icarus wondering if they should just become the monster to everyone else but not the co-workers and yk Fable

“I lost my best friend, I lost my mentor, my mom, 500 men gone…”

- Best Friend is Centross.

- Mentor is a funky one because i could see it be switched into my brother, but at the same time, you could keep it as mentor and annotate it to be Quixis

- Mom is Isla -> "Like King like Prince" : Icarus finding her portrait and realising Fable hasn't told them where she is and that he can't remember her aswell as Rae

- 500 men gone = the people and gods who have died and or been husked

“I must get to see Penelope and Telemachus”

A) remove the context of the names, no wife, no son, none of that

B) This could be annotated into two different ways but i can mainly see it as Momboo and Centross and Icarus’ hope with all this they can come back

“I’ll go where Poseidon wont reach us”

- Poseidon could be annotated into Enderian, but one that I think works well is the faction, mainly Ocie.

“And if got to drop another infant from a wall in an instant so we all don't die”

- Icarus being like if i have to kill another person, fuck it, whatever it is I need to do to prove myself or help in anyway.

The end section with Odysseus choosing to become the monster I could see as Icarus state of mind of their not meant to be helping people as all they have done is hurt people, so that's what their meant to do, it's what they were ment to do from the beginning, so they will.

Thoughts and feelings go bonkers and bit of aaah and bit of RA

#I'm never done an analysis type post so this was a ride-#is this just the ground structure and my thought process of the animatic?#maybe whose to say #fsmp #fsmpblr #fable smp #fable smp icarus #icarus morningstar #i could sit here and code more of monster to other character aswell as the other songs in the saga but nah maybe one day i will maybe not

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phoebepheebsphibs · 2 months ago

Text

.Dead asleeP.

Title: Chapter 2: REM Prompt: You were peacefully sleeping when you suddenly wake up to the sound of a heart monitor steadily beeping somewhere nearby, and realize you are in the med-bay with no memory of what happened prior to this. // After watching movies with your siblings all night and passing out in the tv room, you wake up to find that you're alone. What happened? Fandom: ROTTMNT Word Count: 4,339 Author: PhoebePheebsPhibs Rating: Gen Characters: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, & Raphael (disembodied voices), Señor Hueso Warning: Derealization, nightmare-ish stuff (Leo is stuck in a dream) Summary: Leo finds himself in a new setting with no memory of what happened prior. Notes: No Beta, We Die Like Gram-Gram! More chapters to follow (4 more, to be exact)

@shr00mi3writefight @tmnt-write-fight @that-0n3-shr00mi3

Posted to AO3 <-

Leo had been walking forever (15 seconds). He wasn't sure where the voices were leading him. He wasn’t sure where the light would end up. But it was warm and kind and... uh... light-y?

"Lighty?"

"What did he say?"

"He said 'lighty'."

"That's not a word."

"I know it's not a word, he said --"

"Is he okay? He looks kinda... funky."

Leo moaned sleepily as he pressed forwards.

"Can you guys hear all my thoughts?

"Not all of them. Only the ones that are like dialogue."

"Dialogue?"

"Y'know, where you feel like you're talking to yourself."

"So you... you heard all that stuff."

"Yeah, pretty much."

"How come I can't always hear you?"

Silence.

"Hello?"

More silence.

"Uh, weird voice people? Hellooooooo? Where did you go?"

Leo felt more and more sleepy as he walked. He was so tired... he should have stayed in bed.

"No! Don't go back there, don't fall back asleep again --"

"Mikey! You can't just --"

"Guys, I think we're losing him!"

"Why... why can't I hear..."

Leo's legs turned to jelly. He started to topple over. He... he wanted to sleep... he can't... stay.... awake.....

The light started to dither away from him. He couldn’t make out what the voices were saying, screaming over one another. But it was all muffled, diluted. Like trying to hear someone who's miles away while you have noise-cancelling headphones on. He wondered if they could still hear him. Leo tumbled.

Into a wall.

Through the wall.

Leo gasped in shock as he landed on a cobblestone floor. He wasn't tired anymore, but confused. He couldn't remember how he'd gotten there. Or where 'there' was! He pushed himself off the floor and took a gander around. There were tables with autumn-coloured plaid covers, candles lit everywhere for ambiance, glowing blue mushrooms in the corners of the rafters and climbing up the brick walls. Pictures and portraits hung everywhere, of old customers and patrons, and a few famous Yokai that Leo had never heard of before. There were Yokai and mutants all over the place, some sitting and eating, some wearing nice uniforms and delivering orders. Leo knew this place, this was Run-of-the-Mill Pizzeria! Señor Hueso's place!

Speaking of him, the old bone man came out from the crowd, a huge grin on his face as he greeted Leo.

"Ah, Pepino! So good to see you again! But, eh, why are you on the floor?"

Leo was hoping he would look past that. It was embarrassing, especially since he had no real answer. Leo had a feeling all his embarrassments would be brought to light somehow. It made him anxious. But Hueso needed an answer.

"I, uh... fell," Leo offered.

"I see. Well, don't just lie around like a pescado deshuesado! Come come, have a seat, order something! Anything for my favourite customer!"

"I'm your favourite??" Leo asked with a grin. "I mean, of course I would be! After all, I come here the most, I even worked a shift for you that one time, I... You mean it?"

Señor Hueso laughed, as though the answer should be obvious. Leo revelled in the thought that someone favoured him. There was a pang of sadness. Not Leo's, but someone else's. Leo could feel the emotions radiating off some poor soul hidden in the restaurant. He glanced around, but nobody was paying him any attention whatsoever. So why did he feel someone else's sadness? And... why were they sad for Leo? It wasn't a jealous sad, like they wished they could be the favourite. It felt more like they were sad that Leo wanted to be the favourite. And they felt bad for him. A quick pang of guilt stung in his chest. That was all Leo, though, not some eavesdropping-ghost. Guilty that he'd made someone feel so sad for his sake, and... guilty that they saw that moment, saw his desperation. But it faded quickly, like ice in a flame. Hueso guided Leo to one of the best seats in the house and sat him down, petting him on the head affectionately as a menu was placed in Leo's hands.

"You can order whatever you like! On the house!"

"On the -- huh? What for??"

"Why, for saving the city of course! And the world, too!"

"I did what?" Leo questioned.

Hueso's expression faltered for a moment before his smile came back. He looked like he'd just been caught revealing some secret.

"I will go get your drink!" he said cheerilly, before strutting away quickly.

Leo's brow furrowed. That was odd. Maybe... he was referring to the Shredder's banishment? Yeah... yeah, that must be it! Funny, not a lot of people (or even Yokai/Mutants, for that matter) had heard about that. But then again, Big Mama was a big help in that, and he wouldn't put it past her to take whatever publicity she could get for herself. Oh well. Leo had saved the city so many times by this point, he could mean anything! But saving the world? Even though the Shredder was a huge threat, it didn't honestly feel 'world-ending' at the time. City-ending, sure. If he had made it out of NYC, then maaaaybe it would have been a world-ending thing. Maybe Leo was just overthinking it. He should think about what pizza to get instead. Oooh, hawaiian!

"IF YOU GET HAWAIIAN, LEO, I SWEAR TO PIZZA SUPREME --!"

Leo jumped. His knees slammed the bottom of the table, rattling the items on top. He glanced around in terror.

"W-who said that??"

No answer.

"Come on, I know someone just yelled at me! Who's there?!"

"Pepino, are you alright?"

Leo jumped again when Señor Hueso suddenly appeared in front of him without warning, gently placing a glass of soda on the table. Leonardo's eyes darted around the restaurant anxiously. No one was watching his strange episode. No one seemed to notice. No one seemed to care. Everyone was just... there. Like NPCs.

"Uh... y-yeah, I'm fine. I'm good," he stuttered.

"Have you found something to order?" Hueso asked, pulling out a notepad and pen.

"Um... H-Hawaiian?"

Leo felt a deep and insulted rage radiating towards him.

"I-I mean not Hawaiian! Definitely NOT Hawaiian!" he retracted, scrambling to look over the menu again. "I'll take pepperoni instead! With onions!"

"Wonderful choice, hijo," Hueso nodd, taking the menu. "I'll be right back."

Leo started shaking. Was he losing his mind? It felt like it. He kept hearing voices, kept feeling emotions that he knew were not his own. He felt weirdly omnipotent, yet powerless. The patrons seated around him started watching him. Why now?! Why were they only watching him now, when he was alone and scared?! Leo started to hyperventilate. He... he needed to calm down. This wasn't as scary a situation as he was making it out to be! He just woke up in a random place with no memory of how he'd gotten there or what had happened prior, and started randomly hearing things and... and... Okay, maybe it was a little weirder than usual. Had someone placed some kind of curse on him? Was that what it was?

The weirdest part was that he felt like someone was trying to get his attention. He kept glancing over his shoulder. Everyone was staring at him now, but that wasn't it. They were different. Empty. Someone wanted to talk to him, get him to hear them, see them, feel them. He could sense their desperation, he could catch vague whispers of his name, he could feel their gaze on him.

"...Hello?" he whimpered. "Who's there? I know you're there, where are you??"

No one said anything. But he could feel the pull getting stronger.

"...I can't hear you, y'know. But I know that you're there."

He felt their disappointment.

"What do you want from me?"

He felt... shock. Confusion. They didn't want anything from him. He felt compassion, kindness, generosity, worry, love. Who were these ghosts?

Hueso arrived with a full pepperoni and onion pizza, and dropped it off with a flourish. Leo's mouth watered as he reached forward to grab a slice. He opened his mouth, bit into the cheese and --

He couldn't taste it. Why couldn't he taste it? Leo pulled the slice out of his mouth and stared at it. It looked delicious. It smelled -- it, it smelled.... like nothing. He couldn't smell it. There was an emptiness to it. He grabbed the drink and gulped it down. There was no taste, no fizz, no carbonation or flavour. Just a texture of liquid in his mouth and down his throat. He couldn't even tell if it was cold or not.

"...it's not real..."

Leo glanced around.

"...Was that you, ghost?"

"You can hear me now?"

"I... I can hear you," Leo swallowed nervously. "What did you mean, it isn't real?"

"Nothing you see is real, Leo. That's what we've been trying to tell you."

"Who's 'we'?"

"Mikey, Raph, and me."

"What?"

"I said, Mikey --"

"He can't hear our names, Dee."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. Maybe the same reason why he can't recognize our voices."

"Recognize -- Wait, do I know you?" Leo asked anxiously.

"...Yeah. You know us, Leo."

"Well, who are you guys??"

"We're your --"

"Pepino!"

Leo yiped, his head snapped back to see Hueso staring at him.

"Pepino, you haven't touched your food! Is something wrong?"

"I-I... I..."

"He isn't real," one of the ghosts whispered. "He's here to keep you trapped."

"Trap...?" Leo whimpered.

"¿Disculpe?" Hueso asked, head tilting in confusion. "Did you say 'trap'? What trap?"

"I, uh, was just -- thinking out loud!" Leo covered up. "Yeah! I was... thinking about... traps?"

"Do you mean the laberinto de muerte?" Hueso asks.

"Yeah! Yeah, that!" Leo chuckles nervously. "I was just... reminiscing about it... I thought maybe I could bring my brothers here to try again?"

"Why, when you're already on the wall?" Hueso chuckled.

"Yeah, the wall of cheaters and losers. But I wanna try --"

"Losers? No no no no, uno azul! YOU are on the wall of champions."

"I'm WHAT?" Leo asked with shock.

Señor Hueso motioned for him to come to the hall of champions and pulled out a picture frame the wall. Inside the frame, a heroic and muscular Leo was standing in the center of a maze, posed like an action hero with a pizza pie in one hand and his trusted odachi in the other.

"...When did this happen?" Leo questioned, aghast that he'd already completed the maze. And that they'd let him try again after what happened last time.

"A few weeks ago, do you not remember?"

Leo did remember. Strange, how he could only think of it now. But a vision of him trouncing mystic baddies in a minotaur maze shaped like a pizza just simply popped into his head without warning.

"Oh. I remember that... I did that alone?"

"Sí, Pepino!"

"...Where were my brothers? Why didn't they go with me?"

"Why would they?"

Leo's heart sank.

"Did... did I just come alone that day, or did they watch, or..."

"They didn't want to do it with you," Hueso repeated, soft frustration in his tone, as though he was tired of explaining this.

"But why?" Leo asked, almost on the verge of tears. "I know I can be kind of... I-I know the last time we did it together, I lied and might have been a jerk, but --"

"Pepino, maybe you should just enjoy your meal?" Hueso tried, placing a hand on Leo's shoulder as he led him back to the table. "You look tired."

Leo was tired. His eyes felt heavy all over again.

"No, no, no! Don't give in again! Don't fall for it, Leo!"

Leo stopped.

"We --Your brothers care about you! They would never leave you like that!"

"Yeah! They'd kick butt with you whenever! Don't let this stupid fake-world fool you!!"

Leo felt Hueso try to pull him along.

"Pepino? Are you coming? Your food's getting cold!"

"You can't believe what you see! It isn't really there!"

"Pepino, come on!" Hueso pulled harder. "You have to sit down!"

"Please, fight back! Don't give in to his lies!"

"...Are you lying to me, Hueso?" Leo asked.

"What? Lying?? Estar como una cabra, you are acting crazy!" the skeleton man laughed. "You must be hungrier than you realize. Come with me, and we'll have a great meal --"

"I don't want to eat," Leo snapped, wrenching his arm free from the bone man's grip. "I want to see my brothers. I want to talk to them. Why didn't they go with me? Why couldn't I remember beating the maze? Why can't I taste anything??"

Leo's head felt dizzy, his heart pounded as he looked around the restaurant. It was starting to shift, it looked a lot scarier than before. The candles were blowing out, the Yokai around them were slowly looking more and more demonic and terrifying. Even Hueso himself started looking like a Halloween Haunted House decoration.

"It... it isn't real," Leo whispered, gasping for air. "None of this... What is this place? Where am I?!"

Hueso reached a bony claw out for Leo, his voice garbled and distorted as he tried one last time to reconcile with him.

"̷̜̠̀͗C̴͓̱̃̏o̸͚̚m̸̻̹͂͠ḙ̵̦͗͒ ̴͎̀ẁ̶̢̯i̷͇̣̎t̴̳̎̋h̸̪̿͝ ̶̞̰̓m̶͙̈́͆ĕ̵̗̾,̵̹̳͒ ̶̪͊L̵̝̎͘e̴͉̪͂o̸̘̔͠ṉ̸́ä̴̳̟́͠ř̴̨̛d̷͎̅͐o̵̘̖̊̚,̶͍̀"̶͎̇͘ Hueso enticed. "̶̼̰̽S̴��̈́̓t̵̞̰̅́a̷̫͖̾͗ý̴̘͖ ̸̖͊w̷̡̻̅ĩ̸̖̟ẗ̶͚h̵̳̾̒ ̸̛̠̉u̶͔̎š̶͖̲͌.̶̨̉̇ͅ"̶̢̠̄

Leo reeled back and started running. He had to escape this place! He rushed down the hall of champions and leapt over the red velvet rope that separated the restaurant from the maze entrance. He threw the door open and darted into the maze.

The entrance vanished with a fizzle and a spark. Leo kept running.

"Where is he going?"

"I don't know!"

"Well, can we help him get out, or what??"

"What say you, Michael?"

"Um... I think we have to lead him through certain levels to get him back."

"Levels? Like a video game?" Leo asked.

"You can still hear us?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Well, the last time you went into a new place you lost your memory of us and how you'd gotten there."

"I did?? When did that happen?"

"Never mind. Mikey, what did you mean by 'levels'?"

"Well, Barry said that with spells used for situations like this, you have to gradually wake the person up. That means going through different dreams in turns, like levels. We'll probably notice when this one ends and the next one starts."

"Who said?" Leo asked, turning a right past an aisle of flaming spikes.

"Barry...?"

"Wait, I kind of heard that one!" Leo exclaimed. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means you must be getting better!" the voice cheered. "You must be waking up!"

"Waking up?" Leo asked, skidding to a halt. "What does that mean? Am... am I asleep?"

It grew awkwardly, uncomfortably silent.

"...You didn't know? Leo, you've been asleep for a week."

"What did you say?"

"I said you have been in a coma since the invasion --"

"He can't hear you, Mikey."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. He... maybe he's blocking it out?"

"Blocking us out? So... so he's doing it on purpose?"

"Doing what on purpose?"

"I don't know. But maybe... we should not bring it up yet. Until he's ready to hear it."

"Hear what?" Leo asked, looking up as if he might see the ghosts floating about him. "What am I not ready for?"

"It's... hard to explain. But for whatever reason, you can't physically hear us mention our names, or who we are, or why we're here."

"Is that part of the trap?"

"The huh?"

"You said that there was a trap in Run-of-the-Mill. Is whatever's keeping you from telling me these things part of that trap? Are you trapped, too?"

The voices were quiet, whispering amongst themselves.

"...You might actually be on to something there. The... 'thing' that's trying to keep you here may be fighting against us."

"Why?"

"...I don't know, Leo. But we're gonna do whatever we can to save you."

"S-save me? Like... Like I could die?"

"Maybe not 'die'. But you are trapped here."

"We want to help get you out!"

"Oh. Phew!" Leo exhaled loudly, laughing with concern. "For a minute there, I thought that maybe my life was at stake or something! Ha!"

The voices chuckled nervously with him, as Leo continued to escape the maze...

#rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #rottmnt #rottmnt leo #ao3 #archive of our own #tmnt write fight #write fight #fanfiction #fanfic

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