#mourning and melancholy

[life-imitates-art-far-more]

Domenico Fetti (c. 1589-1623) "Magdalene in Meditation" (1618) Oil on canvas Baroque

[mysterious-secret-garden]

Traugott Hermann Rüdisühli - Burnt Offering At The Cypress Grove, 1900.

[floralhellscapedatv]

i am probably forgetting/overlooking heinous amounts of obscure lore with this but hear me out...

[Spoilers Ahead]

theoretically it should be possible for at least half the Veilguard to be some flavor of immortal by the end of the game. behold, my list:

Emmrich - Fairly obvious example if you choose the Lich route. We are not talking about the choice itself here, this post ain't about that, this is a "if, then" bullet point.

Harding - There's actual dialogue/party banter that speculates on whether or not Harding is immortal after merging with the Titan Shade. Can't really say if it's true or not, but it could be! Call it a non-zero chance.

Lucanis - This is my first real Hear Me Out example, but listen. Listen. As far as we know spirits/demons don't die natural deaths. So what's the deal with abominations? We don't have a lot of examples and Lucanis and Spite are particularly unique what with the whole Lucanis not being a mage thing, but... I'm going to call this another non-zero chance. We just don't know what the biological effects of Spite are on Lucanis. We do know that spirits can inhabit corpses, so there's some more morbid speculation to be done there but I won't be doing it here. Anyway I think it would be really funny if Mr. "Why Would You Want To Be Immortal?"/"Everything Dies" was little a immortal, as a treat. (For me, the treat is for me, Lucanis would hate it.)

Rook - Specifically for elf Rooks, sorry other Rooks. Listen, it's a major lore fact/plot point that elves in DA used to be immortal. The Veil cutting off their connection to the Fade also cut them off from their immortality, this is one of the reasons Solas feels he owes it to them to tear it down. And then Mr. Dread Wolf Immortal Elven God himself does a tiny bit of blood magic specifically to link himself to Rook so he can do dream projections in their head. After which Rook proceeds to spend months living in the Fade itself, plus running around the Crossroads shedding blood everywhere doing a bunch of fighting. What I'm saying is there are multiple reasons to assume that an elf Rook could be considered as re-connected to the Fade, so theoretically it's possible they have elven immortality and just don't know it. Maybe Solas didn't realize that'd be a potential side-effect, maybe he didn't consider it relevant to mention with everything else going on, maybe he thinks it's funnier to let them find out on their own, or maybe he just straight up forgot to tell them, who knows! All I know is that this sounds like a perfectly plausible consequence of Solas' questionable choices to me.

Based on that last point i do think there are (admittedly much weaker) cases to be made for Bellara and Davrin to also possibly have re-linked to the Fade and unlocked elven immortality, but I think an elf Rook being confirmed to have been linked via blood magic to an immortal elven "god" is more compelling evidence.

do i think all of this is canon? no, probably not. do i think there's enough wiggle room to come up with fun scenarios, headcanons, and AUs? yes, that's what i'm here for.

[shadowedaiartistry]

The Mourning Veil

[queering-ecology]

Chap 12. Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands (part 3, final)

Queer Ecologies

‘what it might mean to inhabit the natural world having been transformed by the experience of its loss’?

‘[the queer artist's] natures are not saved wildernesses; they are wrecks, barrens, cutovers, nuclear power plants: unlikely refuges and impossible gardens. But they are also sites for extraordinary reflection on life, beauty, and community’ (344)

AIDS and Other Clear-Cuts

The artist (Jan Zita Grover’s North Enough) writes about moving from San Francisco, where she has worked as a personal caregiver to many individuals who were dying, and died of, AIDS, eventually to the woods of Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota hoping for ‘a geographic cure’ to her burnout and grief. (344)

‘in their persistence [grief, mourning], generate a form of imagination—an awareness of the persistence of loss—that allows her to conceive of the natural world around her in ways that challenge the logic of commodity substitution characterizing contemporary relations of nature consumption” (344)

“The north woods did not provide me with a geographic cure. But they did something much finer. Instead of ready-made solutions, they offered me an unanticipated challenge, a spiritual discipline: to appreciate them, I needed to learn how to see their scars, defacement, and artificiality and then beyond those to their strengths—their historicity, the difficult beauties that underlay their deformity.  AIDS, I believe, prepared me to perform these imaginative feats. In learning to know and love the north woods, not as they are fancied but as they are, I discovered the lessons that AIDS had taught me and became grateful for them” (344)

Rather than the landscape of her dreams, the land looks more like a candidate for reclamation. Through Grover’s research we learn that the region is one that been ‘systematically abused: logged several times, drained, subjected to failed attempts at agriculture, depleted, abandoned, eroded, invaded, neglected.”

Jack pines are predominant in the region; tenacious, ‘the first conifers to reestablish themselves after a fire” (16), in their own way remarkable even as they are useless for lumber, short lived, and not at all the sorts of trees about which adjectives like ‘breathtaking’ circulate” (345) they are a loud testament to the violence that has generated them.

“the diminishment of this landscape mortified and disciplined me. Its scars will outlast me, bearing witness for decades beyond my death to the damage done here” (20) But still: the love emerges, painfully, gradually, intimately. (345)

She experiences the landscape in terms of loss and change, rather than idyll and replacement. It is all personal; it is all about developing a way of making meaning that recognizes the singularities of the past and takes responsibility for the future in the midst of intimate devastation. (345)

‘Environmental hubris’—fly fishing, the introduction of non-native fish to the river, changing temperatures of rivers caused by logging and diversion; specific policies, politics, and technologies that have had effects on the rivers, the fish, and the other species throughout the river and the north woods (356)

A refusal to demonize the ‘invasive’ species; Grover herself is ‘invasive’ both culturally and personally (white settlers and big city imports) thus her ethical claim is not for purity but for an active and thoughtful remembering of historical violences in the midst of ongoing necessity of movement and change (346)

Seek relationships with Clear-cuts and landfills in order to bring to the foreground the massive weight of human devastation of the natural world; “a discerning eye can see how unstewarded most of this land has been. The charm lies in finding ways to love with such loss and pull from it what beauties remain” (81) (347)

“she does not romanticize the dying even as she might mourn their loss to the world; instead [through Grover] we witness each loss as particular, irrevocable, and concrete: she is their witness” (347)

Can we learn to see these landscapes as creation as well as destruction?

Rather than mourn the loss of the pristine, she carefully cultivates an attitude of appreciation of what lies before her, beyond the aesthetic wilderness to the intricate details of human interactions with the species and landscapes of the region. In this manner she comes to be able to find the beauty in, for example, landfills and clearcuts; far from naivete or technophilia, this ability is grounded in a commitment to recognizing the simultaneity of death and life in these landscapes, the glut of aspen-loving birds in the clear-cut, the swallows, turkey vultures, and bald eagles near the landfill.

--

It is necessary to face our fear and pain; we have to make room in our relationships with the natural world, queer and otherwise, for the recognition that that is what we might be feeling in the first place (355)

[emmriches]

emmrich’s personal choice quest holds a weight to it that i really feel like the others didn’t or tried and couldn’t

[aqua-regia009]

The Paling Crest by Mournful Congregation From The Exuviae of Gods - Part II (2023) Doom metal - from Australia

Artwork by Karmazid

[thedeadthree]

𝖆𝖒𝖆𝖛𝖊𝖙 𝖆𝖊𝖗𝖆𝖘𝖚𝖒𝖊 -`. 𝔟𝔤𝔦𝔦𝔦. 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔪𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔫𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔩𝔬𝔯𝔡 𝔬𝔣 𝔰𝔦𝔩𝔳𝔢𝔯𝔶𝔪𝔬𝔬𝔫.

MOON HALF ELF. FIGHTER. ELDRITCH KNIGHT. WIZARD. NECROMANCER. NOBLE. ❦ 𝔰𝔥����𝔡𝔬𝔴𝔥𝔢𝔞𝔯𝔱.

[raspberrycreamandfear667]

[farmlesbians]

imagine ur girl dumps you in 1955 and chet baker drops this

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real

The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.

Judith Butler - Undoing Gender. Routledge; (16 Sept. 2004)

[umbrellajam]

why is it that tossing broccoli with olive oil, salt, and pepper and popping it into the air fryer turns it into the most crackaliciously delicious roasted vegetable of all time, that I can munch an entire plate of like it's so much popcorn and still want more

but attempting the same thing with carrots just gets you. blegh.

[mysterious-secret-garden]

Lionello Balestrieri (1872-1958).

[cosmicseashanty]

The morning breaks, The day returns, but nevermore Returns the traveller to the shore

[wangxianficrecs]

The Moon Reflected Upon Two Springs by Rubberduckieassassin

The Moon Reflected Upon Two Springs

by Rubberduckieassassin

M, 2k, Wen Ning

Summary: In many ways, this part of Wen Ning’s existence has felt like winter. Winter is the most Yin of all the seasons. It is a time of stillness and quiet reflection. Remembering how to ‘live’ again as best he could.

Kay's comments: A bittersweet look into Wen Ning's life post-canon, he mourning his family and teaching Sizhui about them, while making a home for himself.

Excerpt: One of the walls of his home was decorated with many wooden plaques with names. Most of them were names of his family members that had been murdered in the burial mounds. Others had died during the war or predated the war. No one was around any more to remember their memories aside from Wen Ning. There is a cenotaph that Wen Ning had made residing in the demon-slaughtering cave of the burial mounds where all the ashes he collected of his family were laid to rest. Where hundreds of bones are buried underneath the desolate earth. Sizhui, over time, was learning their names and stories. At times Wen Ning felt sorrow that these name plaques and stories would be the only impressions that Sizhui would have of his Wen family.

post-canon, wen ning centric, wen ning needs a hug, fierce corpse wen ning, gusu lan juniors dynamics, good kid lan sizhui, good kid lan jingyi, adorable juniors, burial mounds settlement days, wen remnants, emotional hurt/comfort, grief/mourning, five stages of grief, melancholy, bittersweet, building a home, family feels, @rubberduckieassassin

~*~

(Please REBLOG as a signal boost for this hard-working author if you like – or think others might like – this story.)