#my brain went 'why not christian god too?'

[thrassisfras]

Shifting my conception of God from "must worship or be punished" to "teacher" or "archetype" has made it a lot easier to talk about him and...I dunno, I guess have a kind of relationship with the concept of god that doesn't hurt?

[aughtpunk]

i need to know the aunt and uncle furry story immediately please and thank you and i love your user

Okay so

First you need to know about my Aunt and Uncle. They are the most right wing, Trump voting, God fearing Christian people in my family. Yet growing up they were also on the chill side. Like they had no problem with their kids playing Dungeons and Dragons and they would read fantasy novels no problem. They were always good at staying hip with technology, too. This isn't really related to the story but I really wanted to paint a picture of these two.

Anyway so a few years back I'm at a family BBQ at their house, eating a hamburger I've stolen off the grill before it was cooked into a hockey Puck, talking to my cousins when my Aunt and Uncle walk up to me and ask me what a furry is.

Folks, that was the day I learned my fear reflex is freeze, because I was frozen on the spot. After what felt like an eternity of my brain working out what just happened I did my niece duty and explain to them what furries are. Their expressions only grew curious asi did so, which worried me as I thought oh no, they're going to want more details.

Instead they explained to me why they asked. It turned out that they was a furry meet up in their small town at the fire station. Usually it was pretty hush-hush and on the downlow but that year a very large multi-person fight broke out and the police were called to break it up and arrest people still in their fur suits. It made bit of a commotion in their small town to say the least.

Now what gets me about this was the thought process my Aunt and Uncle went through when they heard this news and were confused over what furries were.

Did they, technologically minded people, look online for the answer? Thankfully no.

Did they ask any of their own children? Also no.

Did they no doubt look at each other and say "You know who knows what a furry isand will tell us? Our niece!"

And they were correct.

[andrewuttaro]

What the Holy Rosary tells us about worshipping God

Honesty is the best policy. To be very honest: I felt like the Holy Rosary was something only Grandmas do until I was a full-blown adult. My grandma prayed the Rosary, but my family was only anecdotally religious growing up, so the practice was never something I learned in any great depth. That is not to mention even as a child I realized it required a level of repetition, and therefore focus, which I would scarcely possess until adulthood.

Something changed in college as I went on service trips and retreats. While I had also done both those things in my High School Youth Ministry there was a whole different vibe to that in college. In college everyone is there by their own free will, no parents dropped them off threateningly, at worst someone was dragged on retreat by a friend. But there was more to it than that. Some of these trips exposed me to religious for the first time, that is Nuns, Monks, and even an odd oblate here or there.

To be exposed to people who prayed as if it wasn’t a chore allowed me to move outside my previous, very exclusively conversational way of praying. Conversational prayer isn’t inferior, I still do that daily as well, but rote, that is recited or scripted prayer, hit me differently as a college student. Allow me to be frank: I had now realized my very hyperactive, autistic brain, had found a use for repetitive prayer. The “calming of the monkey mind” as the Buddha put it.

Seventy years ago the Rosary was the undisputed centerpiece of Catholic devotional life. This was in no small part because Catholics did not have the Mass in their native languages before the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). That meant that if you wanted to be pious or feel closer to God at Mass before communion then you probably wanted to have some kind of prayer routine. That generation had the Rosary at the center of their devotional life as a result. My own grandmother gave me her mother’s Rosary which dates back to this period (forgive me for showing it off in the thumbnail). October has the Rosary as its monthly Catholic devotion.

Perhaps such a widely known devotion, easily still the most recognizable, distinctly Catholic devotion in our culture, needs a month of focus just to remember what it’s all about. I say that because even when I first picked up praying the rosary in college it didn’t stick, and I have never approached daily rosary reciting like the hardcore folks do. Nonetheless the practice has grown on me more than anything else in the intervening years.

The Rosary is so rich in the mystery of the faith that it reorients you to what faith is in the first place and why we worship the God we do at all. Put another way, the Rosary tells us something about how we ought to worship God. Yes, on the surface its repetition does wonders for the hyperactive mind; but the deeper you go the more you encounter the life-giving stuff the story of our faith is made of. Mystery is one word to use for this, the word that I think gets the point across better in English is peace. Just as mystery is an opportunity for faith, so too is the Rosary an opportunity for deep, spiritual peace.

A brief history of praying unceasingly

Long before anyone knew what a Rosary is there was the fundamental Christian call to “pray without ceasing” (1st Thessalonians 5:17). Echoing the practice of Jesus who frequently both prayed communally with his apostles and privately when he withdrew from them; this is taken as something of a command of the New Testament if not an overarching theme of the whole bible for a holy life (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2742-2745). How this call to unceasing prayer has been answered is an interesting prism through which to view the history of the Church.

You could say prayer was the unceasing practice of the Church as early as the first Christian communities in the book of Acts who persisted in breaking bread and praying together (Acts 2:42). The breaking of the bread was the Mass, and the praying together certainly involved rote prayers in addition to conversational prayer. These practices undoubtedly involved recounting their articles of faith in Jesus Christ and making petitions and intercessions in prayer. While further systematization would come, prayer was this constant practice of faithful Christians from the start.

The great third century scholar Origen equated the fundamental call of prayer to action when he wrote: “He ‘prays without ceasing’ who unites prayer to works and good works to prayer. Only in this way can we consider as realizable the principle of praying without ceasing.” As monasticism developed, first in the Near East and later in Western Europe, the call was answered with the classic eight fixed times a day when psalms, scriptures and other prayers were recited. The formalization of the Canonical Hours, better known as the Liturgy of the Hours or simply the Breviary today, occurred sometime in the early middle ages.

Think of the breviary as a daily devotional book with a little bit of everything prayed multiple times daily. This would be, theoretically at least, the constant prayer of the whole Church for a time. But the Church is a big place with a lot of different people and vocations.

By the sixteenth century revisions to the breviary were needed. As with the Mass and other liturgies, clerics will tell you many rote devotions grab onto the regular prayers of the church like barnacles onto the hull of a ship. Things had gotten unwieldly. Many priests, those who are mandated by their ordination to pray the Breviary, had fallen out of the practice which had long been their answer to the fundamental call. Though the Council of Trent successfully reformed the breviary to the point it was not changed significantly again until the 1960s, there were other prayer practices that were growing throughout the history of the Church.

Call it the Holy Spirit, there were always common ways to pray unceasingly. The Breviary had long been inaccessible to the illiterate masses. Knotted prayer ropes date back to the first centuries of the faith. The monks of the east, also known as the Desert Fathers, would use them to keep track of praying the 150 Psalms or just the Jesus Prayer (More on that gem later). Such rote, repetitive prayer styles evolved and changed based on who was praying them where and for what purpose. By the thirteenth century there existed a folk practice of praying 50-150 Ave Marias (AKA Hail Marys). It was here when St. Dominic comes into the picture.

In the year 1208, Dominic was praying and experienced a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the story goes. In this vision Dominic is given the Holy Rosary as a way to pray the central mysteries of the life of Jesus Christ as if with Mary herself. We Catholics see Mary as the central figure of the Communion of Saints which means we can think of her as something like the greatest pray-er out there, our greatest intercessor before God’s throne. It is like calling her the captain of the all-star team in a way. If the Saints are good at praying than she is their Great One. I have at least three other articles at this point about the Blessed Mother so by all means learn more and draw nearer to our Sacred Mommy.

Anyway, the Holy Rosary became the central devotion of the Order of Preachers (Dominican Order of Priests) which St. Dominic founded. The devotion was widespread by the end of the century and became exceedingly commonplace to the point that in 1569 Pope St Pius V (p. 1566-1572) made it an official devotion of the Church. At that point it had grown so popular that there were secondary and tertiary devotions built around the Rosary like Our Lady of Victory which commemorated a naval victory over an Ottoman fleet. It is difficult to call to mind a prayer technique outside of those explicitly spelled out in the New Testament that have reached the level of universal adoption the Rosary has.

Pope Leo XIII (p. 1878-1903) probably put the simple grandeur of it best when he said the rosary is how devotees accompany Mary in her contemplation of Christ. The more you think about Mary’s relationship with her son the more that affects you. Pope St. Leo XIII was the pontiff who instituted the custom of praying the rosary daily during the month of October. At that point in history this would have been like telling people to spend at least an hour a day on their cell phone to we moderns. People already did it quite a bit.

The Rosary historically had three sets of five mysteries: the Joyful, Sorrowful, and glorious. However in 2002, Pope St. John Paul II added a fourth set, the Luminous or Mysteries of Light, after St. George Franco Preca’s 1957 reflections adding five more mysteries of the faith taken from the life of Jesus Christ. The Rosary had now firmly become the people’s unceasing prayer of the Church to the Clergy’s breviary. I don’t think it is unfair to say the Rosary has eclipsed the Breviary, even among clergy.

Crash Course Holy Rosary

If there is any barrier to entry with the Rosary beyond merely knowing the prayers and the patience to pray them all, it is just learning how to let rote prayer open your heart. That little quote from the Buddha mentioned earlier about calming our monkey minds really provided me with an epiphany, my ah-ha moment, about rote prayer. The Rosary’s repetition helps you enter into a spiritually open mental state. Even if your mind can wander while praying the prayers themselves, the mysteries along the way demand your contemplation.

There are simply too many of those mysteries to discuss each in depth and still keep this article within the length of a blog post. Most Christians will recognize 75% of the mysteries of the Rosary right off the bat. Catholics should be able to recall 100% of them if their religious education was worth its salt. I thought a broad overview of the Rosary itself would be appropriate to frame what this all means for how we worship God if we are to be serious about our devotions and relationship with God as a whole.

You start with the sign of the cross and say the Apostles Creed. This is where I often incorporate some kind of dedication: who I am dedicating this Rosary to or what intercession, what I am praying to God for, as I pray the whole Rosary to follow. After that the practice Rosary, or mini-Rosary as I like to call it starts, that is a tour of the repetitive prayers used in each decade, or ten Hail Mary grouping, but only five prayers long minus any specific mystery.

I just made that sound way more complicated than it is. The practice Rosary is an Our Father followed by three Hail Marys capped off with a Glory Be: the shortened version of each decade of the rest of the Rosary. Its simple really.

Now we arrive at the first bead with a mystery attached to it. More on which mysteries to pray on what days in a little bit. After you recite the mystery you’ll be contemplating during the ensuing decade of Hail Marys and perhaps contemplating what fruit this mystery might provide you or some other attached devotion, you then pray an Our Father before the ten Hail Marys of the decade, one Hail Mary for each bead. After completing a decade you pray a Glory Be and boom, you’re at the next big bead where you recite the next mystery. This cycle repeats itself until you go through all five mysteries at which point you have a closing prayer, usually a Hail Holy Queen, at the three-way intersection of the Rosary.

There is an exceptionally devoted practice of praying all the Rosary mysteries at once in a 20-decade rosary. You rarely see this outside the confines of a religious convent or monastery. If you ever come across a 20-decade rosary you might do a double take because it really does look like a factory error.

Depending on the Church season different sets of mysteries are prayed each day. However the traditional schedule is Joyful Mysteries on Monday and Saturday, Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday and Friday, Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday and Sunday, and the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday. If you get in the habit of praying the Rosary I recommend being very flexible with this schedule.

My general rule is also that I pray the Sorrowful Mysteries more frequently during the Lenten season and the Glorious and Luminous Mysteries more frequently during the Easter season. I almost never pray the Rosary without some kind of complementary reading on each mystery as I go, it helps remind me the importance of what I am reflecting on as I pray each decade.

Finally, here are those mysteries I have talked up so much. Again, even a lapsed Christian will recognize most of these. See how many you know off the top of your head as we go through these:

Joyful Mysteries:

The Annunciation (Mary is told she’s going to give birth to Jesus)

The Visitation

The Nativity

The Presentation (Jesus’ dedication as an infant)

Finding Jesus in the Temple

Luminous Mysteries:

Baptism of Jesus

Wedding at Cana

Proclaiming the Kingdom (The Apostles sent two by two)

The Transfiguration

The Institution of the Eucharist (Last Supper)

Sorrowful Mysteries:

The Agony in the Garden

The Scourging at the Pillar

The Crowning with Thorns

Jesus carries the Cross

The Crucifixion

Glorious Mysteries:

The Resurrection

The Ascension

The Descent of the Holy Spirit (Pentecost)

The Assumption of Mary (into heaven)

The Coronation of Mary

What the Rosary tells us about worshipping God

Beyond the spiritual openness to God the Rosary can help us establish in our prayer lives, there is something deeper rote prayer practices like this tell us about who and why we worship the way we do. There comes a point in everyone’s spiritual growth as a Christian, or at least there should come a point, when the whole pursuit of religious faith stops being about us as individuals and starts to flow outward. That is outward horizontally to others in service and outward vertically to God in worship.

I could talk all the livelong day about the value of service, it is how the foundation of my faith was built over Service Camps and by way of several Vincentian Priests, but when we’re talking about the Rosary I think its insightful to look to worship. What do we mean when we claim to worship God? What is worship all about, particularly for us modern people, so predisposed to independence and righteous skepticism?

There was an interesting thing I uncovered while brushing up on my Rosary facts for this article. Apparently in some high-liturgy Lutheran circles, Lutherans correct me if I’m wrong, the Rosary is prayed without any Hail Marys. Instead the Jesus Prayer is said in place of the 53 Hail Marys in your average Rosary. This is called a Lutheran Rosary apparently. I found this very interesting, and not just for the normal sectarian reasons.

I found that so interesting because the Jesus Prayer substituting into the Rosary really drives home the point about what the worship element is all about in this. The Jesus Prayer is super easy, I can say it for you before this paragraph is done… Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. That’s it. That’s the whole prayer. There is simplicity there obviously; but stop and take in the humility and the orientation toward God it imposes in just a handful of words.

If one is to believe in God they must also believe they are not God. The Mosaic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) share an understanding of God as ��the being which no greater being can be thought of” (St. Anslem of Canterbury) or in more philosophical terms: the four-A God who is all-knowing (omniscient), all-powerful (omnipotent), all-present (omnipresent), and all-loving (omnibenevolent). If such a being does exist, and they have created us with free will to choose for or against them as it would seem they have, that God is indeed all-loving because… well wow, think about that. Such a God is worthy of worship even if you contemplate him/her on a very brief, cursory level like that.

To be very blunt, none of us weary humans fit that bill. We are not God and if that God exists we ought to worship him as such. Frankly, if you have read this far into an article about praying the Rosary I would imagine you already believe God exists. If not, well then wow, thank you for spending this much time on my blog.

Humility before God is the right orientation of worship and all meaningful prayer.

Back to the Jesus Prayer: this ancient prayer is the distillation of that right orientation towards God. If we are to seriously worship God we have to take seriously his godliness and our humanity and the profound blessedness that relationship implies. If God wants a relationship with we human beings that alone is such an incredible blessing worthy of the response of worship. To then take the Christian step to say God was incarnate in Jesus Christ and committed the ultimate act of atoning solidarity with us should bring us to our knees just by believing in such a truth.

The Jesus Prayer orients us toward God properly, and that is why I think the Lutherans really did create something nice there with their version of the Rosary even if I feel somewhat slighted for my divine mother by it. The Rosary, Lutheran or Catholic, provides us with a unique combination of centering repetitive prayer and contemplative belief material to then pray over. In both motions of the Rosary then we find something of a blueprint for how to worship God.

One: clear the chaos of our mind and lives, casting aside what drives us away from being with God via repetition and practice. Two: once open to God’s action in ourselves and in humanity, dive into the sacred mysteries of his action which he has already done for us. Simplified even more we can consider these two steps a simple two-word cycle between conversion and transformation.

Knowing is one thing; believing, loving, and following God is another. To believe, love, and follow God we must be constantly converted out of old and or sinful ways of doing and living into what Jesus Christ has for us: transformation. Conversion is the movement of the heart, the willfulness, to a new way of doing things while the transformation is the work of actually changing. God helps with that, don’t worry.

Fun translation fact I always love to drop in during this discussion is the biblical command to repent. In English the word repent sounds very scolding and possessive. In the original Greek for repent, metanoia, the word is much closer to something like changing your thinking or changing your mind. For we fiercely independent and educated moderns that might be a little bit more palatable. Have the humility to change your mind and embrace God’s Will. If knowing that helps you worship God any more than before than I’ve more than done my job with this article even if you never pray a Rosary.

If nothing else worshipping God is a part of my life I would never want to give up. It is not an intellectual effort for me; though sometimes I must choose faith over the flatly logical choice just because real world relationships are built on faith more than they are built on facts. If my wife asked me if I was faithful to her on a business trip she really only has faith to go on. What I say in response is a mystery to have faith in or not. She could go to lengths to investigate my behavior on said business trip, but would that not defeat the purpose of the faith of the relationship? Can real, tangible love exist without such a foundation of faith?

For me there is a certain kind of joy in worshipping God every time I go to Mass or give him his due in prayer. It is not unlike the joy I feel at a family gathering or when I see my wife after a long trip away from her. Worship practiced in the context of relationship, particularly after some time with it, really becomes a thankful joy. The “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:45-46) to use biblical analogy. That is the peace I think of when I think of praying the Holy Rosary.

My favorite late night comedian Stephen Colbert put his belief in God in terms of thankfulness as well asking: “If I didn’t believe in God where would all the thankfulness go?” St. John Chrysostom puts the finer point on that same idea: “Prayer is the place of refuge for every worry, a foundation for cheerfulness, a source of constant happiness, a protection against sadness.” That is a place of peace. That is what the Rosary is good at.

That is a prayerfulness worth unceasingly doing. I might try to pray the Rosary daily for the first time this month but even if I am unsuccessful the joyful thing the Rosary does will still be there for me whenever I pick it up. I understand now, after years of maturing, what its spiritual usefulness really is. I now understand how monks and nuns otherwise occupied with far more interesting life pursuits are so enthusiastic and dedicated to their prayer, their rosary praying, than what was apparent to me as a younger man. The joy of the Rosary is the love and faith of God rightly worshipped.

Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. Share this article! I am in the swing of writing on a monthly basis now and would love to hear your input. Did you really read all that about the Holy Rosary to not have something to say about it?

[safetycar-restart]

Cat!max who couldn’t help his natural reaction to being around his dad, because even though he seems to believe that how he was treated when he was young was good for him, some part of his brain knew that it hurt when he got hit or yelled at, and so naturally sometimes he couldn’t help it, his subconscious reaction to his dad coming close to him was for his ears to go flat agains his head and for him to hiss, an angry growl coming out of his throat. This naturally always lead to a really angry Jos, and that never went well for max (not sure if you’re comfortable talking about it, but we know if Jos got that angry he WOULD get physical. He’s literally been arrested for domestic abuse).

So with his new Dom, the Dom who actually treats him right, he’s naturally wary. He hasn’t been treated well in the past, but maybe some part of him could tell that you were better so the hissing, growling, none of that happened? Which was maybe part of the reason why max could tell that some part of him trusted you. But then one day he comes home from dinner with his dad, and he’s clearly upset and angry and traumatised, and when his Dom tries to reach out to comfort him, he can’t help it. Because every time he’s near his father or Jos scolds him or yells at him, he just feels like that little kitten again who just wanted his dad to approve of what he did and just wanted a hug. So when his son reaches for him, max freezes, anger written all over his face, and lets out an angry hiss, his lightly tan cat ears pressed flat back against his head, an angry yowl escaping him. And then the moment she recoils, because what else is she going to do, max realises what he just did and he throws himself onto his knees and wraps his arms around her legs and begs for her to punish him. To spank him, edge him, put his cock in a cage, anything. He’ll take any kind of punishment to make up for what he just did.

And I can’t think of the rest of this I’m sorry, it was just floating around my head. I have therapy in an hour and I’m still in bed lol.

-💍

Holy fucking shit I ADORE this. We need to talk more about the hybrid!au in general, but cat!max? Oh my god I love it. This is incredible. 10/10. I also made this a mix of the hybrid and d/s au, since you mentioned Doms, so this is now tagged as the 'hybrid d/s au and I would LOVE for us to discuss this au more.

Over time, his dad just accepted that max was a hissy cat hybrid and worked around it, assuming that max's reaction was ridiculous and meant nothing. Max would still hiss and flatten his ears, even swiping at his dad when he came too close but his dad just stopped reacting to it, laughing it off and completely ignoring that the behaviour was a result of max feeling unsafe.

I also think that maybe max is almost ashamed of this behaviour? He believes that his dad's treatment of him was fair, that it was how he got to where he is. But despite this belief, he still hissed and swiped at his dad when he came too close or spoke too harshly. It felt like max's own body was betraying him, working against him.

And of course his dad always doubled down on this, telling max that in order to succeed, he needed to suppress all his cat hybrid instincts and be 'normal'. So his very natural reactions to feeling unsafe became something he was ashamed of, maybe even punished for.

He had the exact same reactions to his previous dom, but that person was basically the same as his dad in his eyes.

He fully expects the same struggles with the new dom christian forced on him, but that never happens. You never make him feel unsafe? And maybe you even encourage his cat hybrid instincts, letting him play and getting him scratching posts and scratching him behind the ears.

Needless to say, his instincts LOVE you. He has never felt so safe and so secure.

(Sidenote: maybe you helping him accept his cat side makes his reactions to his dad even worse? Because he gets used to not suppressing his instincts)

I definitely agree that the first time it happens with you, it's after a dinner with his dad. Maybe you even told him not to go to the dinner and he disobeyed you, going anyway. You're waiting for him when he gets back, and he's absolutely traumatised, but he's also even more scared when he sees you because he knows he directly disobeyed you.

Max is an even worse state than you expected, and your immediate priority was obviously comforting him and making sure he was okay before you even thought about the punishment. Max doesn't know this though, and so when you reach for him he hisses and swipes at you, ears pinned back.

You step away of course, raising your hands to try and show him that you mean no harm and giving him some space.

Max freezes, not believing what he just did. He couldn't believe he just did that to you.

Immediately he's begging for forgiveness, telling you he'll take whatever punishment you want him to, that he will make this better, that he promises you he will never do it again.

Your heart just breaks for him, because that reaction was clearly one he didnt do on purpose and he was clearly feeling threatened. You should be the one apologising to him, because you were the one who made him feel unsafe.

And maybe that's the way to handle it?

You start apologising to him, promising him that you will never make him feel that way again.

And Max, poor sweet max who loves you so so much, immediately says that it wasn't your fault, that you were only trying to help him and you didn't mean to make him react that way. He stops himself mid sentence, realising what you just did and whining before throwing himself in your arms.

He's so upset and confused and he doesn't know what to believe anymore, but he knows he loves you and for now, that's enough.

[koco-coko]

Silent Night, Holy Night - Jean x Vincent, Ikemen Vampire Fic

-> Jean and Vincent spend their first Christmas together, starting with Midnight Mass.

Tags/Warnings: Romantic Fluff, Religious (Catholic) Discussions and Themes, Christmas Fic, Mistletoe Kisses

Word Count: 1,523

A/N <--> I wrote this in the span of 3 hours and in a car. These two have taken over my brain please help

I think they might like this: @natimiles @weirdwriter69 @azulashengrottospiano (if anyone wants to be added/taken off the list let me know)

Midnight Mass had ended a few hours ago. A few others stayed behind with Jean, but at this time of night, Jean was the only one left. Maybe a priest or two wandered by, a nun tended to the dusty floor for a few minutes, then all was silent. A priest with electric green eyes stared at him for a while, but retreated into the cathedral halls after enough examination with a deep chuckle.

Jean could stare at the crucifix for hours on end, only interrupted by the need to fiddle with the rosary in his hands. He’d already been through it three times, but a fourth never hurt. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…

The heavy wooden doors creaked open once more, shutting softly seconds later. Jean ignored it, beading through the rosary at a breakneck pace. Then the light and careful steps reached him and there was a soft thump from the old pew when another sat down next to him.

Jean turned to his head, only to find Vincent with him. He smiled softly, though by his tense position, he was a bit nervous about being in such a holy place. Especially considering their relationship. 

Jean often wondered the same thing, but he had to repent somehow. Avoiding judgment only showed true guilt, and Jean already had enough of that on his shoulders. He looked Vincent over a few times before he leaned back onto the seat. “Is everything all right?” Jean whispered, glancing back to make sure all were gone. In such a large and empty hall, even murmurs echoed.

“You said you’d be back an hour ago,” Vincent said, scooting a bit closer, “So I came to check on you. Are you alright, sunshine?”

Sunshine? Jean’s heart went aflutter. That name sounded like a hymn for the angels, too pure to be fit for him. “I suppose,” Jean uttered slowly. 

It was a strange time for Jean. A time to celebrate the Lord, to enjoy the spoils of life and give to the poor… In the past, Jean would stay in his room most of the time, but he’d make donations to the Church with profits made from his shop. Everything else seemed frivolous to him, and the happiness floating about the air missed him completely. He was unworthy of such joy and peace. 

Vincent’s eyes thinned and his smile was pained. “You know, I was a pastor once.”

Jean almost chuckled. It was hard to tell, but Vincent had grown accustomed to the signs. “Truly?” he asked.

Vincent hummed, delighted to tell his story. “Yeah. I was a Christian, and when I was twenty-five I tried to be a preacher for a while,” he said, only to glance away nervously, “I gave up on that pretty quickly. I didn’t even show up to any Bible studies, and I got dismissed soon after.”

“Why’s that?” Jean asked calmly. After being revived, he learned to not be so critical of others and their religious choices. He wasn’t one to judge– love thy neighbor, after all. 

“Not sure. I guess I just didn’t feel a connection anymore, and it wouldn’t be right to preach what I don’t believe,” Vincent explained, resting his arms and head on the pew in front of him. “I liked painting better.”

Jean hummed in response and silence fell over them. God had strange ways of guiding his children on the right path. Often cruel, coldhearted, but ultimately for the better. Of course, now Jean had no path to follow, except the one paved by himself and his sins. There was a deep horror in being separated from the great beyond, separated with all normal functions of life…

But with Vincent here, things felt slightly normal. In the stability and mundanity came comfort. In Vincent came the yearning for more light in his life, without any guilt.

“Merry Christmas,” Vincent whispered sleepily. He grinned drowsily. “Yay.”

“Yay?” Jean asked, his eyebrow raised.

“I got to be the first person to say it to you. I’ve been wanting to do that all year,” Vincent said, digging his head into a more comfortable spot in his arms.

Jean didn’t even realize the faint pink blush growing on his cheek, let alone the soft curve of his lips. How light his chest felt when he saw the innocent wants of his lover. His impulses won over him and in a swift motion, he laid his cape over Vincent’s shoulders. He heard the painter sigh happily, his eyes beginning to close as colored light streamed from the stained glass windows.

“Merry Christmas,” Jean replied, before placing a delicate kiss on his temples. He didn’t mind if he had to carry his lover home. It was dark enough that nobody would see the two, and he was strong enough to make it back to the mansion in one piece. The real question was whether a piggyback ride would be more comfortable than bridal style for the sleepy painter.

Suddenly, Vincent groaned. Jean’s face instantly twisted in concern. He placed his hand on Vincent's back lightly. “Did I do something wrong?”

The sleepy painter grumbled in Dutch, before opening tired eyes. A frown on Vincent’s face made Jean’s heart implode on itself. It wasn’t right! Before Jean could speak, Vincent spoke in a language Jean could understand. Mostly. How late was it? How long did Jean force his boyfriend to stay up? Guilt ate Jean while Grogginess consumed Vincent.

“Ik was bijna vergeten…” Vincent started, moving to sit up, only to fail. Instead, his hand raised above Jean’s head.

He only had to catch a glimpse of green and red to know what it was. He’d seen it all around town, but he never knew what it meant. All he knew was that Arthur often carried it with him to the pub during the holidays. “When two people are under a mistletoe, it’s tradition to kiss each other. I was gonna wait until we got home, but I don’t–” Vincent yawned again, “Ik weet niet of ik zo lang op kan blijven…”

The words and accent were lost on Jean, despite how adorable it was to hear his language of origin. He didn’t need to know the words, though. He knew all he needed to. Vincent and himself were under a mistletoe, and tradition was a time honored thing. The stained glass portrait of the Virgin Mary would understand.

Before Vincent could make another move, Jean took it upon himself, as any knight (in shining armor, at least to Vincent) would do. Jean’s hand wrapped around the back of his head, his other tilting the painter’s chin up just slightly and pushed their lips into each other.

Vincent had to push down a grin. Oh, Jean… He was the true angel here. Even now he was making sure Vincent didn’t have to lift a finger, despite the fact he was holding a mistletoe above their heads. His other arm moved on its own, slowly and gently removing Jean’s eyepatch. The soldier shivered when the cold air hit the other half of his face, but no discomfort came from the fact it was revealed. It was Vincent, after all. He found beauty in everything, and it was starting to rub off on Jean.

It was a short kiss, but Vincent could taste the restrained passion on Jean’s lips. He was always shy about receiving affection, but couldn’t help but pour his passionate soul into each and every display of love he gave. Vincent’s heart swelled at the thought.

“I guess, I’ll say it again,” Vincent said, his face flushed, “Merry Christmas.”

Jean giggled softly, barely audible even to Vincent, whose nose was currently touching his. “And to you as well, mon ange. May I ask you a question?”

Vincent put his head back in his crossed arms, though after such a loving kiss, he was much more awake. “Of course, sunshine.”

“Where did you get this?” Jean asked, holding Vincent’s wrist and bringing the painter’s hand into both of their sights. The red and green plant was intertwined within his fingers.

“You’ll laugh when I tell you,” Vincent chuckled. “When I said I was waiting for you to come home, Arthur took it out of his pocket and gave it to me. He said something like: ‘Make sure you give’em a real Christmas miracle…’ or something like that.”

Jean blinked for a moment. Of course it was Arthur, but… Arthur of all people? Never in a million years did he think Arthur would want any hand in Vincent’s romantic affairs. 

Well, now that he said that, Arthur absolutely would.

“He gave me a wink, too. I think he was trying to be dirty or something.”

Ah, there it was. Jean sighed.

Vincent then chuckled at Jean’s obvious dismay at Arthur’s actions. “He had good intentions,” he said, a slight pause in-between his words. A yawn came to him once again. Jean watched his lover’s sleepiness with loving eyes. Vincent could only reciprocate for a moment, before sleep came to embrace him. “... But I think I like this ending more.”

[clonerightsagenda]

I was going to save this for one of my podcast girls week entries, but I wrote it out and then thought, why sit on it, so here is today's ladies night content before I go on a walk: Alien zombie Alana Maxwell is an underutilized concept and here's why.

She'd be cool with it. Maxwell works with AI who are ported between containers without that changing who they are, so she's primed to view her mind and memories being rebooted in a new container similarly. I don't think she'd have any identity crises. Also, her dad was a preacher, she's not on good terms with her family, and she tried to ditch the holiday party, which makes me guess she's ex-Christian. How better to spite your Christian parents than coming back from the dead in a distinctly non-God honoring way? This could generate some interesting conflict with Lovelace, who is significantly less cool with it and might be annoyed and dismayed to see someone else taking alien resurrection in stride. Bonus points considering I hc Lovelace as being raised Catholic and the soul question being an additional level of identity angst that Maxwell immediately dismisses.

The aliens have motive. It's clear that watching through their surrogates' eyes doesn't mean they understand what they see. Once Lovelace gets back to Earth, they might want help with context. They seem to have grasped that humans don't like multiple copies of a person running around, and of the others they have on file, they dislike Kepler and Cutter, and Rachel and Riemann were there when Cutter killed one of their meatsuits, so Maxwell seems like the one they'd have the least aversion to. Then she would immediately try to talk them into roadtripping to see things in person, which is how we can get all the other interactions I'm describing.

The aliens have opportunity. It's not stated what the crew did with Maxwell's body, but the likely options are either tossing her into the star or freezing her on the station, which later went into the star. Lovelace was frozen (albeit alive) when she got scanned, and Word of God is that the Dear Listeners are perfectly capable of creating a functioning surrogate from a corpse. If you don't want to go that angle, almost everyone got hit by multiple rounds of stellar activity in "Persuasion". However, the corpse angle creates an opening for...

Fun body horror. I am a 'came back wrong' enjoyer and think it would be very good if the aliens got their scanned corpse up and running but didn't fuss too much about the cosmetic stuff. Maxwell's skin is colder than it ought to be. She has a gnarly scar on her forehead. Neither of these bother her much, but she's not a fan of the tingling neuropathy left over from tissue damage or the brain fog from the bullet that went through her head. (A fun parallel to the issue she first helped Hera with. Hera is now in the brain damage club with Doug, Miranda, and Maxwell. She hates this.) She can fun-terrorize Jacobi with perma-cold hands and real-terrorize Minkowski by making her look at the hole in her head. She's honestly over it but it's still funny to watch her squirm.

The Hera thing. Hera was furious with Maxwell immediately after the mutiny, and although her opinions softened near the end of the show, I think she'd be furious again if Maxwell actually showed up. She embraced non-human solidarity with Lovelace and now here's Maxwell. What is she supposed to do, have non-human solidarity with her too?? Did Maxwell become an alien to spite her??? The nerve. I got the impression that Maxwell saw her actions during the mutiny as for Hera's own good - better than deleting her, right? - just as she was willing to ignore Hera's wishes and erase her memories in Memoria. She'd probably insist on that if they had a chance to argue about it, and I could see Hera throwing the restraining bolt incident in her face. ("If you're so comfortable putting something into people's brains to make them more useful to you, I'm sure you won't mind hearing how Jacobi got that scar on the back of his neck.") Could be juicy, is my point.

Meanwhile, Jacobi: Of course this is my very good friend Maxwell back from the dead. Yes this has implications for the version of myself I listened to die screaming. No I'm not going to unpack that.

Finally, I think it's a missed opportunity that Pryce and Maxwell never got to meet. I suspect pre-mutiny Maxwell would want to believe she was ethically better than Pryce while pre-finale Pryce would see Maxwell as a bleeding heart amateur, but after all that? I think they'd still get each other's hackles up, but there's room for some interesting interaction, especially as I think Miranda's memories would start trickling back after a while, and immortal alien surrogate Maxwell is basically her white whale. Miranda trying to navigate social niceties enough to determine an acceptable way to ask someone for tissue samples. Maxwell might be willing to swap some for custody over a few of Pryce’s experimental AIs.

In conclusion, while I enjoy postcanon scenarios dissecting people's trauma, I think it's fun if while everyone else is grappling with the Horrors, Maxwell is also there enjoying herself. *commercial voice* Add an alien Maxwell to YOUR postcanon today.

[liesmyth]

This post started out as a tag ramble (& became longer than the actual post as per usual) after seeing @mayasaura‘s tags in this post about the origins of Kiriona Gaia’s name. Especially the part about Kiriona’s first name:

#also yeah kiriona is her given name spelled using the phonetics of Te Reo #which I'm mentioning bc which language it is specifically is somewhat important #given that it's the language of John's people #that he likely never learned to speak fluently due to the colonial governement's attempt to exterminate it #so thematically that's rather signifigant #she's the only other person he's allowing to share in the legacy of his lost home #(lost because he blew it to kingdom come but lets not bicker and argue over who killed who)

I think a lot about the implications of names in the Nine House following a very specific theme (ancient Greek, Latin, and Biblical first names, Latin-inspired arithmonic House names) but John gave his daughter the name Kiriona. This is very interesting to me, especially in light of what those tags say re: John being Māori but most likely not speaking the language of his people due to colonialism. We don’t have the full picture yet, but a lot of what we know points to John choosing to preserve some of the ~foundational mythology~ of western civilization when shaping his empire. A colonizing Empire, though we really don’t know if “space colonization” was John’s plan for the Houses all along or if he decided it later. (Also an Empire that’s in large % made up of descendants of historically colonized people so there’s that too). At the same time, John shares his own cultural heritage with his daughter – and his daughter only, as if it’s something to be kept between the two of them and better forgotten at large.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this and I’m sure a lot of the implications are going over my head, but I think the initial cultural mould of the Houses tells us something about John as a product of a society that valued one specific area of cultural history above all others, and John internalizing that to the extent that he reverted to those stories and those myths when he was looking for civilization building blocks. And then he went and turned to the language of his people when naming his newfound daughter. Maybe it’s a public vs. personal sphere thing, maybe he wants to wear a different hat as a long-lost father than he does as the God-Emperor, or maybe it’s just that by the time he finds out he has a daughter he’s over the whole ‘Classics names’ thing and sort of regretting those initial choices.

fwiw, John probably wasn’t very coherent in the early days (maybe early years?) so who knows if he actually put any planning into what he did. As a scientist he probably had a lot of Latin engraved in his brain so why not use that? Sounds very smart. But, also, the fact that our scientific classification is based on Latin is itself a product of western supremacy and so on so forth. It’s a tautology: I’m God now and I guess God likes ancient Greek and biblical themes as filtered down to us through the lenses of Western Christianity. Why? Because that’s what God does. I guess.

(Also: compare all of this with the Blood of Eden naming system where they chose random bits of human culture to preserve. Not those deemed worthwhile by the elites, just… random bits. Shakespeare but also an Eminem song and a verse of an anthem in an indigenous language. That last one especially is Curious and tbh it’s the only detail giving me pause from jumping 100% to the very obvious conclusion that BoE was founded by the descendants of the FTL ships just because of who was on those ships and what cultural resources they would’ve brought along. But that’s a whole different speculation.) 

[lucienne-thee-librarian]

Rose Walker and John Dee: Narrative Foils

Okay this has been percolating in my brain for awhile and I have to shout about it. So. These two characters...Rose and John Dee. Couldn't seem more different on the surface, right? One's a young American black woman, vs older British-raised white guy who's lived all over the world, one painted as a major villain, the other a main protagonist of multiple episodes of the first season. But if you look beyond that, I think these two are, deliberately or not, perfect parallels to each other for their similarities as much as their differences.

First: let's list the similarities:

Difficult childhoods. John Dee's father was...literally absent and that is almost certainly a good thing. But his mother kept moving around to survive, changing her identity. She may have done what she felt she had to do but as a result John was left with no sense of stability and a Very Big Thing about people lying because he feels his mother has lied to him all his life. Rose, conversely, had a father...part of the time. But just by the fearful way Miranda Walker talked about her husband in one scene, trying to prevent Rose from confronting him over taking Jed (but not Rose...which, SERIOUSLY who does that, this man was not a good father, I like how much this one little scene implies) away with him...you get the distinct impression she lived in fear of her soon-to-be-ex-husband's anger. So Rose had a father who was...not good and lost her brother years ago and the pair disappeared before she and her mother could find out what happened. When the show starts her mother is dead too, much like Ethel Cripps died when she went to see him. So both Rose and John had childhoods centered around absent or unreliable fathers and the traumatic loss of their mothers.

Both were given access to great power over the world of dreams, critically: when they were infants and could not possibly know, much less agree to what they were inheriting. John Dee ended up in that hospital in the first place for misusing the ruby that Ethel stole from Roderick Burgess. Rose Walker was literally born a vortex due to inheriting it from her great-grandmother thanks to Desire's interference.

Both end up being chased down by Dream.

Now, the two end up in completely opposite places. But why? What's the difference?

When John Dee gets the ruby, immediately he begins killing his way out and across the country until he reaches the diner. On some level, he wants freedom and that's understandable after a lifetime of being locked up. But he clearly is very skilled at using the ruby which he even modified, and his first and immediate act upon getting the ruby back was to kill every single guard in his way. He didn't try to find another option, he immediately defaulted to the most violent way out. He almost killed Rosemary, though in the end he decided against it, but only because she helped him and didn't lie.

And then when he got to the diner, he spent an entire day and night toying with a bunch of random people until he got bored and let them kill each other.

Unquestionably some part of John was influenced by the ruby, the more the closer it was to him. We don't know exactly how much, we'll probably never know. But it is...alarming, to say the least, how he immediately and repeatedly begins to act not just after having it awhile, but after two seconds of getting it back.

John has traveled and seen the world long before he got locked up. But despite all the opportunities for education and experience he could've had, his worldview has no room for any shades of grey. To him, all lies are equally bad as the lies his mother told him, and all equally as bad as each other. It reminds me a lot of the evangelical Christian idea of "sin-levelling" where all sins are equally reprehensible in God's eyes so nobody is worse than the other - but also, no one better. If you have a "sinful" thought or make one mistake, you're just as worthy of damnation as the worst, most violent people.

Now leaving aside how that's actually treated in these churches in practice (which. LOL all sins are equal. Sure they are) that's obviously a little...fucked? The idea that actually, thinking hateful thoughts is as bad as murder, is as bad as stealing is as bad as...lust?? Gossip? Is both failig to recognize serious harms, and the difference between that and much more minor things one can do to others, or between all that and straight up thoughtcrime. It creates an inflated sense of harm for things that don't really deserve to be treated or even thought of in the same boat with atrocities and violence.

John Dee is if someone took a look at that sort of moral thinking and went "cool system you got there; what if I hijacked it and made it all about lying?"

His worldview is strictly black and white, no room for human error or understanding past a certain point. To him, if you tell a lie, no matter your intentions or the effect of your actions, it's all the same.

Meanwhile Rose has been used without her knowing it, by both Desire and in a way, Dream himself. He knows what her fate must be but for a mixture of motives, mainly mercy but also the knowledge that she could help him find the Corinthian, he spares her.

And his doing so and not telling her her ultimate fate, was the entire reason the Corinthian was able to slip in and find her in the first place. He shows up with Jed, after Rose has tried and failed to get the foster care system to actually let her make contact with her brother or do more than the bare minimum to investigate his well-being. So honestly, no wonder she trusted him at first! He saved her brother! Her brother seems to like him so he must be fine!

Rose has spent this entire season, her entire life, at the mercy of others, trying to carve out her own destiny. But she never uses her powers to deliberately hurt others- any harm she causes is either by complete accident or in attempts meant to defend her own life or her brother.

When she was a child she had no power to save Jed; for some reason we're not told the court sided with her father and allowed Jed to be taken separately, and then the man effectively custodially kidnapped his own son before dying himself and Jed was lost to the system of another state. Rose loses her mother later to some illness, and her friend Judy to John Dee's megalomania. And when she's finally an adult, she tries to find Jed but is flatly denied not only a chance at custody but even to know where he is - at least at first. And this whole time, the vortex she carried in her blood has been hanging over her head as a silent ticking time bomb. Her days are numbered, she will soon, eventually, become a living weapon to blend all the minds of all the dreamers of that world and eventually, the whole universe together into one cancerous magical sea of madness - and the only way to prevent this, we think, is for Dream to kill her. Her fate was sealed the moment she was born and the moment Dream was freed and the vortex awoken. All this was set in motion via Desire, someone much older and infinitely more powerful than herself.

So it would be more than understandable for someone in her situation to snap a little upon learning the truth. Honestly it's kind of amazing to me that she believed Dream when he finally did tell her everything, given he'd put off doing this until the very last minute because of his own reluctance to kill her.

And yet, when Rose finally learns the truth and her fate, she ultimately offers to take the fall, freely. She sees what the activated vortex does to the minds of everyone around her - first revealing everyone's most secret fears and fantasies and then pulling them into the whirlpool of her own power. And she refuses to let that happen. She values her own life in a way most of us would, in a totally understandable and sympathetic way. But unlike John Dee, she also values other people, even when they disappoint her. Hal blatantly tells her he doesn't care about the place they all live in half as much as the chance for success, but she still cares for him. The world is full of people, some of whom have hurt her or hindered her quest to find Jed but she doesn't seek revenge.

John sees the failures of humanity and its dark side and decides that those sins are worth condemnation through the power of his ruby, and assumes he is a worthy judge. Rose hears she could destroy the world and decides that no, the world is worth saving even if that means she has to die, much as she doesn't want or deserve to.

John Dee is, without even realizing it himself, a perfect mirror himself of the potential selfishness and cruelty humans can inflict on each other in the name of "I'm just all about honesty" "knowing what's best for you better than you do" and "fuck you, got mine". Rose is a mirror of humanity at its best - someone with dignity and a sense of morals who doesn't appreciate being lied to or used, and not a doormat - her first instinct is to fight for her life and her brother's - and she's also selfless and caring even for people she doesn't know, even for people who Dee would've argued weren't even worth saving.

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

Suckers, Morons, and Other Types of

Trump Supporters

Stephen Jay Morris

6/2/2024

©Scientific morality.

            America may be the greatest country in the world, but its patriots are the dumbest people in the universe! What did P.T. Barnum say? “No man ever went broke overestimating the ignorance of the American Public.” Trump may be the first canonized patron saint of the Protestant Church. He became the first convicted felon, former president in the history of the USA; and what do his supporters do? Send him money! Lots of money!! One of them posted on X that he’d canceled his vacation and sent the money to Trump to help fight his legal battles. Five thousand dollars!

            Then there is the religious factor—the docile followers of Christianity in small town America. The pastor behind the pulpit, the direct line from God, that his flock believes, unquestionably, everything he says. The pastor who gets visited from God, every night, and receives instructions directly from Him. If you dare to question his word, you are a demon from hell trying to sabotage the word of God! Would that be me? I am from hell, otherwise known as East Hollywood. Nah!

            People who are brainwashed, particularly those in cults, have minds impervious to truth. You can show them factual evidence, photos, recordings, documents, and they still don’t believe that which is real. What can you do about it? Not much. Truth be known, Trump donated millions to the White protestant church with the proviso, “Tell them God sent me.” His suckers believed it, hook, line, and sinker! I’ve said it a million times before: that is why conservatives are anti-public education. They’d rather your children sit in a Christian classroom, watching Prager U videos; that or adhere to home schooling. Yeah, that is a rich concept. Having stupid parents teaching their naive children to be ignorant, like they are! Keep them stupid, Jesus! That’s the stuff! What is so hilarious is that Trump tells them, right to their faces, that they are idiots. And they think he’s correct! This is the relationship between the oppressors and the oppressed. The oppressor metes out punishment while the meek assumes masochistic pleasure from the master’s whip. Deep down, however, they don’t enjoy getting whipped; they are conditioned to be masochistic. When you substitute normal sex with violence, you get one decadent, fucked up society!

            Now, this thing that progressives and liberals are whining about, losing our Democracy to Fascists, I beg the question: Did we ever have democracy? Ask the Native Americans. Ask the former slaves. Ask the women who were told to shut up. Ask the workers who got shot by anti-union thugs while picketing their factory. Ask the victims of Gay bashing. Ask millions of victims. Fuck you! America did have its victims.

            Now, my main message here is: I am from the far, extreme, fringe, hard core left. Some pea brain righties think that equates to communists. That shows what ignoramuses they all are! As an anarchist, I ask: do you really think that we, on the extreme left, would cry ugly on the chance that Trump gets elected? On the contrary, we would celebrate by smoking pounds of weed! You just don’t get it! The sad fact is that Trump had four fucking years to establish a fascist state. Did he? Hell, no! Will he succeed next time around? No. Never. He is too stupid to conceive of the essence of a fascist state, let alone create one. He is a slave to his overblown ego. He would never garner the support of the U.S. military or the American people to actualize it.

            If you don’t vote for Biden, the lesser of the two evils, then fascism will certainly be worse under Trump. Biden fascism will be a moderate fascism. But go ahead, vote for a third-party candidate, or vote for Trump. See what happens.

            Now something unforeseen could occur before election day. One objective factor for your consideration is that average life expectancy for a man is 72 to 74 years. Both candidates are way past that range. There is that. Then, there is the mid-east crisis. That could devolve into the Third World War. And let’s not forget the Climate Crisis, which is rapidly escalating as you read this. Tornadoes could wipe out Texas, a flood could bury Florida beneath the sea. Let’s not ignore the possibility of assassinations, or a viral pandemic, either of which may cancel the election.

Hopefully nothing catastrophic will happen and all will proceed as normal. Biden gets re-elected and then dies of natural causes during his term; Vice President Kamala Harris becomes the first woman to become president.

So, over the next few months, enjoy life. Go on vacation instead of giving your hard-earned vacation money to a candidate.

[glitchbirds]

started watching the his dark materials tv adaptation earlier this week- something that i had meant to do back in 2019 when it began and never quite got around to. started s3 yesterday so i should get the remaining 7 episodes under my belt within the next few days genuinely it is fascinating to watch an adaptation of a series that i read only once, when i was ten years old, but which left such a profound impression on me that i have consistently cycled back to it for years and years (esp when its such a complex, sprawling fantasy world-or several worlds, really- that its adapting)

as ive mentioned Several times over the years- maybe not on this particular account though-, i was gifted an omnibus copy of all three books in one by my older brother, either for christmas or my birthday i cant remember, sometime before the 2007 movie came out (meaning i had to have been 10 at the absolute oldest when i started reading them, though maybe 11 by the time i finished?). i also very clearly remember The Controversy surrounding them among christians, mainly because of a few comments by classmates but more importantly because my (fourth grade, iirc?) teacher pulled me out of class one day to tell me the book i was reading was sinful and atheist and against god and etc (which made me cry very hard </3 even though she told me i could still read it. this was back when my dad still took me to (catholic) church on a semi-regular basis to appease my grandmother as well as sunday school (run by my older cousins) and at least a year or so before i started to develop a modicum of critical thought towards deep south church teachings. i was petrified of the idea of going to hell and scared to do anything whatsoever to jeopardize my chances) (this did not stop me from reading the book however, because i enjoyed it too much. but i also have a clear memory of reading the book every chance i got w/o paying much attention to what was happening around me and one day realizing that i was reading it while at church service and mentally freaking out that i was doing something sacrilegious and trying to force myself to stop reading. i think i spent about 10 minutes bored out of my mind before i, internally apologetic, went back to reading) luckily my parents seemed unaware or unphased by the fearmongering- i assume my mother never noticed, or this was before she started to become insane from fox news poisoning; my dad i think brought it up briefly because of a flyer he saw but wasnt overly worried about it- because i saw the movie in theaters (i liked it ok; have never seen it since, i want to now though) and also acquired the ds game (tbh i enjoyed it despite it being tie-in garbage and me being v bad at video games as a kid; i never managed to beat it though) and later the wii game (bad </3 never got far into it)

Anywayyyy. again i have never since reread any of the books or read any of the other novellas and the like philip pullman has written set in the same world, though im itching to do that now; and ofc while ive skimmed through wiki articles and the like to refresh my memory on things, my memory of most of the plot points in the books are heavily based on My Perspective As A Ten Year Old Child. i remember the first book the best, a decent amount of subtle knife, and can only recall a few specifics of amber spyglass, and its only now while revisiting the world by watching the tv show that im getting a proper, more well-rounded view of the symbolism and messaging and Authorial Intent(tm) behind the series, because of course a lot of this shit flew right over my stupid little child brain as a kid. once i got to the third book i started to understand, vaguely, why my teacher didnt want me reading this book and why there was a backlash against the movie, but a lot of things that are obvious to me now (and would have been obvious if i read the series just a few years later, really) just did not compute for a 10 y/o. which ofc does not mean that i think its a Bad thing i read them that young but all of ^ that turns watching this series into a mix of "oh i remember that" "oh i know whats coming up" "oh my god i forgot that this is from HDM, this has influenced so many creative projects over the years w/o me even realizing it" "oh they skipped over it but i know in the books there was a scene here that i loved and that has stuck with me forever" "i dont remember this from the books but it extrapolates perfectly from what i remember about these characters" "oh my god was the symbolism here really that obvious and i still didnt pick up on it" etc etc etc ANYWAYYYY. my actual review of the tv series so far: -season 1 in particular is sorely lacking in how it portrays daemons and it made me increasingly sad. daemons were without a doubt my favorite thing from these books and one of my favorite things in a work of fantasy Ever to the point where over the years i have Repeatedly decided to sit down and spend a ridiculous amount of time painstakingly plotting out what daemon i think (x) character from (x) piece of media i enjoy, would have. many of which are still committed to memory. i fucking love daemons as a concept and i wish this shit was public domain so any piece of fiction i write could utilize them forever. i get budget issues exist or w/e but whyyyy would you adapt a series where every character in a world would have a cgi animal with them at all times if you couldnt actually show those cgi animals in more than a handful of scenes per episode and only for (some) major characters and only if they had a speaking role in that scene and also occasionally just have them teleport instead of showing them walking from one room to the next and also crowd shots are fucking barren. its like watching a live action pkmn tv show where pokemon are onscreen for a combined 5-10 minutes out of 60 minute episodes. s2 is a bit better about it but it also spends significantly more time in other worlds where daemons arent visible so ig its easier to budget in more daemons in scenes that take place in lyras world. no idea about s3 yet though ofc the mulefa are coming so We'll See how they handle the cg there

-i do think the cg animal animation looks good though. like its not "i believe there is an actual snow leopard in the room" photorealism but not only is that something i do not particularly care about, i think daemons looking a little unreal is actually perfect. they are physical manifestation of human souls and are in-universe immediately distinguishable from identical animals of the same species... it works

-s2 in general is a significant improvement on s1 not just in the daemons but in the overall pacing and character exploration imo; which is surprising considering its the season cut short from covid lockdown; and also a bit sad since, again, most of what i remember is from the first book and thus many of my fondest memories of the books were things that were either skimmed over in the first season or cut out entirely </3 ALAS.

-iorek and iofurs fight didnt go as hard as it shouldve </3 they didnt even show iorek ripping iofur's jaw off... he was killed in the blurry bg behind lyra. how are you gonna let the 2007 pg-13 movie kick more ass at talking armored polar bears fighting to the death

-am i crazy or is the alethiometer just not used much in the tv series compared to the book... maybe the movie+games clouded my memory, or maybe its the fact that in the show there's rarely any elaboration as to what the symbols could mean or which symbols lyra is using for her questions/what she's interpreting. almost every scene of it being used blurs together and i wouldnt be shocked if some show-only fans think its a stupid plot device with no rhyme or reason behind the symbols, when imo i think you can at least roughly intuit many of the meanings, though obviously not to the extent that a reader could interpret full accurate sentences

-some really really strong casting for like 99% of the roles in this show, i love most of the changes theyve made from the books wrt to casting decisions, my only significant gripe is of course. why did you have to do lee scorseby like that. i loved lee a lot. i remembered him so fondly. why'd you have to give lin manuel miranda that one. just absolutely devastating to me personally (though the choice to have andrew scott as will's father was v funny to me because lin manuel miranda and moriarty from bbc sherlock hanging out together for a huge chunk of s2 has to have appealed massively to a very particular subset of tumblrina)

-again i read these books when i was 10 so the concept of "characters can be bad people but also really well written and enjoyable to spectate" hadnt really settled in my mind yet so i really have no idea if this fully applies to the book version of her but oh my godddd i love mrs coulter in this series. yes she kidnaps children and rips their souls apart from them yes she drugs her own daughter and holds her captive yes she murders people indiscriminately without remorse etc. and she rules <3

-similarly the changes theyve made to the golden monkey are Fascinating...

-i loved lyra and pan with my whole heart when i was her age and it is really :,) to now be fully an adult and see her again. waughh. i love how almost everyone she meets loves her too (i will not stand for ppl watering it down to found family fanfiction tropes. but She Is So Loved.)

-i think its cool that boreal went from being a fairly minor character in the books to one of the main antagonists for a hot minute. he was fun :)

-i dont remember having strong feelings about mary malone as a kid but i really like her here. i havent gotten to this point in the show yet but im aware they tweaked her backstory to make her a lesbian as well, which is just delightful to me

-will's relationship w/ his mother and particularly the way the book describes her mental illness from will's perspective was so, So important to me as a kid and the thing i remembered best from subtle knife, and i wish the show had dwelled on it a liiiittle more? in particular, the bit where will thinks about when he first realized something was up and his mother wasnt just playing a "game" with him and was actually terrified of a nonexistent threat, when he was seven and they were shopping for groceries, and how he realized then and there that he needed to take care of her and protect her- that stuck w/ me very strongly as a kid and i wish the show had found a way for will to talk about it with lyra, there were a couple points where i thought he was going to bring it up. maybe this season??

fun fact i started writing this post at like 10 last night. i gotta put a stop this rn

[aguineapigcouldntdothis]

tw me talking abt the time i died (i lived binch)

here's my death story for ppl curious abt it! i dont recommend trying this. ive died and been resuscitated and looking back it was a terrifying experience but in the moment the dying was the most peaceful part of it.

i was alcohol poisoned to high hell and realized i took it too far that time. the last thought i remember was "aw fuck this is embarassing". i blacked out and felt like i was slowly falling/floating for an indefinite amount of time.

i didnt really think or feel anything besides that it was just a nice peaceful sensation. no thoughts no pain just floating for a bit. then nothing idk how long nothing went on for i was not aware of shit or fuck. i know there was a gap in time but im not aware of whatever the fuck happened then

stuff started to come back and i was in christian heaven and i was pissed because im jewish. i found god and some angel and i yelled at them for fucking up so badly and putting me in this minimalistic shitscape and then a door materialized which i walked out of. i do not know if i was actually still dead for this part but probably not it most likely was a dream in the seconds before i woke up. i dont know why my brain interpreted death like that.

then i got resuscitated and it was fucking horrible and painful absolutely excruciating. imagine waking up from the deepest sleep ever now multiply that by 100 and add a ton of pain and confusion and nausea onto it and that's basically it. i couldn't put together actual thoughts besides "HOLY SHIT PUT ME BACK". i briefly thought that christian god got mad at me bitching and walking out and sent me to a hell ive never believed in. i wanted to return to the abyss.

eventually i realized that i was brought back to the land of the living and then i had a miserable fuckin time. ive never ever been sicker than the day after i died and that's saying a lot. oh and i also had an out of body experience which is the reason i stopped drinking that's another story tho!

hope u enjoyed my death story good luck for when u die! hope u dont have to do it twice!

[intheholler]

I’m so sorry I’m so late

Tw for church and sa and some god hate

My parents are divorced and that’s important for this. One day, on summer holidays, (I think I was twelve, maybe thirteen, I don’t know, my brain is wants me to forgot) I was spending holiday’s at my father house. I borrowed my mum’s phone for the holiday because she didn’t use it anymore and had cool games there.

But one day somone called the phone. And I picked up. It was old man, like my parents, maybe a bit older. He said that he’s friend with my parents and if I’m the little Ellie that he used to carry. I’m saying that I’m sorry that I don’t know him. My father overheard and took the phone and started talking with him. Yes, he was really my parents friend and I was the little Ellie he used to carry when I was a newborn.

And yes, he thought he was gonna call my mother because for some twisted reason he remembered that she existed. Long story short, at the end of the summer my mum and him were dating.

He had two daughters, first a year older and the second seven years younger than me.

And that’s when things went downhill. We stared living with them in the blink of an eye in my brain but I’m pretty sure that it took some time.

He was a religious man. We knew about that. But we didn’t know how he used to beat and manipulate his ex wifes ‘in the name of god’

Soon I was brought to church because as he said, I was uncontrollable and a brat. And he already manipulated my mum so it was very easy for him to do so. He genuinely believed that if he asks a god for forgiveness that god will forgive him. He was praying every night like ‘Father look at this wild child, so rebellious, she never listens to anyone and forgive for saying this, but she’s a brat, please give me the strength to handle her.’

I mean he’s right, I’m a little fight starter and I like to piss people off and I’m autistic so god doesn’t make sense to me and I was thirteen so I was literally like a Young Sheldon and his fact checking. I was questing the Bible just to make them mad and also bcs those things they were saying were in contrary with the Bible to me.

So I was called a Satan child for questioning the Bible, I was walking the wrong path and I was eaten by the darkness.

Once his youngest daughter accidentally misspelled some world and she ended saying that she has a girlfriend instead of boyfriend. They laughed it off but said to not ever be gay. So I said ‘What’s wrong with it?’. It was followed by screaming, even my mum’s, and he screamed the Bible out for me. Dragged me to church the next day and I had to listen to made up stories about how homosexuality is a sin and that I’m old enough to understand it. Then they all prayed for me so I would find my way back to light and god.

Maybe that’s the reason why he told me that I need his hands on my body, to cleanse me from sins and darkness. (I hope y’all know what this means) No, he never used a god to be a bad guy, he’s fucking crazy, has a god complex and does believe that he has some sort of power. I remember how he threw the Tv out of the window because it was the devil’s work.

Or maybe that’s something I want to believe.

It ended up with them breaking up because he said I’m way too much eaten by devil that prayers can’t save me. He used my mum, manipulated her, took her money and brain away and then left us on a street.

I’m wondering if he realises what he did. If he really uses a god to apologize his sins manipulative behavior and if he’s like all aware of it or if he really has a god complex and some psychosis and doesn’t realise any of it.

But he says that he’s a good person because he’s only following God’s words.

Anyway; since that I found the whole Christianity stupid. Because why this kid at church, maybe 4, cried to us that if he’s gonna pray maybe god will forgive him his sins? He’s a kid! Four years old! What kind of sins a kid can have?! And what kind of kind and lovely god is this shit man if he’s letting some assholes like them doing this a kid and make kids believe that they’re bad humans?

I still don’t understand what kind of gaslighting abusive faith is this but maybe im way too autistic to understand it.

Please don’t try to explain the god to me or tell me how Christianity is good, anyone who feels like they need to explain it to me, I don’t give a shit anymore and I hope y’all understand why. Also im very much stubborn and once I make my opinion you can’t change it.

Also once we left I outed myself to my mum, she almost dragged me back to church, she didn’t, but that didn’t stop her from telling me how sinful I am for MONTHS like mf never got tired of running her mouth

The religious lesbian

(anon: i'm so glad you popped back up. i just saw your question, and i wanted to assure you it was absolutely nothing you did wrong. i hope i didn't lead you to think that.

i overthink everything and it was incredibly personal, so i wasn't terribly sure if you wanted it posted publicly or not, as my invitation to share your story came with the assurance that it could remain private if you wanted.

i still have it sitting in my asks actually because i didn't know how to reach you to double check for your permission to share it!)

thank you for sharing such an intimate and difficult part of yourself. presenting without comment as not to overshadow your story <3 but i do want to say, at the very least, you deserve so much more than you got.

[spotsupstuff]

With your meta approach that void fluid should never have been harnessed in the first place, how do your iterators feel about their existences, which rely on it? Do any of them wish to be a part of the Cycle, how many of them wish none of them were ever built? Maybe this question is presumptuous in which case apologies

"meta" sdjklgsdjlgksmclkdsgjk that sure is a one way to call my daring decision to introduce that idea into the world

with the Sparrows' Dad question answered i suppose these questions have been sort of answered, but- no Iterator believes the Void Fluid should've never been found or used. the notion of it sounds silly at best, offensive and idiotic at worst. that whole thought is rooted in some low circles were they manage to still believe in the original religions or manage to cling on to their traditions. the Void stuff is, to a degree, a solid standing point of the Global Religion which is what the Iterators are meant to exclusively work with. anything outside of it is considered nonsense. it's basically like asking one of those toxic Christian people to consider accepting a piece of Hinduism into their faith or smth. it's unthinkable, even though the pagan religions and the Global Religion have a lot of stuff in common as a result of the spiritual being tangible thing to a degree of it being science

like Euros' whole religious journey is one to behold, because it has no business existing cuz of this divide of ideas

he starts off with a really religious colony that looks up to him as an actual god, with the Houses and his first Mechanic cementing this idea of him being a real proper holy being into his mind. then Sparrows comes by and by being so casual and nonchalant about everything she starts making him doubt his status. then she tells him she's a pagan and he ridicules it. one day she complains about her noodles being cold and "Man, would it be cool to have godly powers and just warm this stuff up with snap of fingers" and Euros, with a puffed up chest, exclaims he can do it right there and then

but Iterators don't have any heating stuff in their puppet chambers. so instead he accidentally brain blasts it while he tries to figure out how to use the gravity control in his chamber to generate some heat for this stuff. Sparrows mourns her splattered-all-over-the-place food while he has an existential crisis because yes. he really couldn't warm a single bowl of noodles up. a God would be able to. he isn't a God despite almost a century of people telling him he is

he doesn't tell Sparrows about how fucked up he is over this, just keeps it to himself to ponder while he keeps absorbing the already known information on the Big Question. Sparrows brings a wheel flower with herself one day and well, they are both a lil bit of children on the inside so they fool around with it, Sparrows takes a lil bit of it even though Euros doesn't know how to guide a first timer through such an experience and it ends with her crying her eyes out because it was just too much. she says she will never do this again. he takes an issue with this, because he's worried. he brings it up to her- "don't write it all off so fatally *please,* you know if you don't work on yourself spiritually- who knows what you will end up reincarnated as? that is a path to suffering." and she gets sorta angry with him and tells him that she doesn't care for that. his life mission and she flat out says that. not to be Mean, he knows she respects why he's here, she's simply talking about herself. only herself. "even if you find the solution to the Great Problem, *i* won't be taking it. i don't care for it." is what she essentially communicates with it

and that fucks him up even Further, because at this point they've been dating each other for around 5 or 6 years. he loves her endlessly. he knows she loves him endlessly too (she's already made that trip to Zephyr... went through her first deaths without comfort for the sake of His family that despises her. he doesn't doubt her love for him). but Still. if he does what he is made for, stopping these repeating deaths- which he started to think of as doing for Her sake, after she came back to him from Zephyr all emotional worn out n destroyed because of her deaths- she will not care for it personally

so what is he doing here. he's not a God, if he succeeds in the purpose of his life it won't hold much meaning for the most important person from the people he's doing this for... what is any of this for. what is he for. he's so infinitely smart and he Does Not Know

so one day he asks Sparrows to teach him how to pray. and worship. in her own religion that is supposed to be more or less banned to him by context, the one she doesn't really care to faithfully follow herself

she shows him how to after getting over her surprised and uncertainty (as an Iterator he's not. supposed to indulge the pagan stuff This much. as a man-made "God", he isn't supposed to worship a different God). he asks about stuff and she tries her best to explain from what she does know. then redirects him to her farm district to try looking for more information there, since she's kind of dumb in this stuff

he learns more and comes to the conclusion about the Void and how it would've been better if it was left alone all by himself. would've been better if he and his family never existed. he ponders it a while and then decides to just shrug about it and keep it to himself. no point agonizing about woulds and shoulds. he just has to keep living his life as the best person he can be

so that's the thoughts on that of the only Iterator who ever touched on it

and none of them wish to be a part of the cycle. the cycle Sucks compared to what they have going on (strange immortality and almost complete invincibility). for the most part they are quite content being as they are- giant cuboids in the sky made up of millions of little dudes. only Euros, again, ever ends up wishing he could just Leave himself and one day just die. just like any other victim of the cabin fever

[mlobsters]

supernatural s12e7 rock never dies (w. robert berens)

still kind of boggling that they went with rick springfield for this recurring incarnation of lucifer. funny getting closer to current times - like hey 2016/7 wasn't all that long ago. trying to shift brain to tech and references and such.

SAM So I've been trying to dig up info on the British Men of Letters, keeping an eye out for cases, and you've been goofing off with a game that went out of style five years ago?

LOL see i thought words with friends was popular then, but i never played it. guess we're just ignoring the very obvious lucifer letters in dean's letter tray thingy

DEAN You still living out an '80s buddy comedy with Crowley? CASTIEL Unfortunately.

that horrifying forced smile made me laugh so hard i choked

dear lord the cheesy 80s-esque sitcom music and the cliche montage of LA-ish things i am not optimistic about this -_- dean's ranting about LA but he had fun when they were there 10 years ago? he enjoyed being a PA, he banged the actress he liked on the way out. apparently grumpy old man now

also rolling my eyes per always about insisting dean has this really narrow taste in music with the added annoyance of him being an asshole about sam liking something else. they had the one episode (10x12) where dean admitted to liking taylor swift's shake it off after being de-aged and hearing it. i thought he had a little personal growth moment 😔

i'm glad they had sam push back on dean being an ass and in a way where it's not a fight, sammy just figures out a way to force dean to bend the knee and listen to the vince music with the unimpeachable logic that it's research. and he's so pleased with himself

DEAN Hey. You consider switching up your duds there? Bit stiff for this town. SAM He could be an agent or something. DEAN Yeah, maybe a third-tier agent. CASTIEL At least I don't look like a lumberjack.

okay that made me laugh. they're both so grumpy and cas really went in with a good snarky tone. and dean, doing the harsh but fair face

admire crowley's ability to find a way to have a good time regardless of the circumstances

s12e7 / a different world (1987-1993) kadeem hardison as dwayne wayne

my god another blast from the past, so many good actors on that show!

i'm making a slightly more distressed version of sam's face right now

well hey dean's drinking the vegetable water, maybe he'll be enjoying the vince music by the end too. you can do it, dean

CASTIEL Well, the only way you'll clear that crowd without drawing fire is if he's otherwise engaged. DEAN Engaged in what, Cass? Killing you? SAM Cass, you'll last...three minutes tops. CASTIEL Then I'll buy you three minutes. CROWLEY Make it four. What? I help.

wonder what he's up to

funny how the v-neck makes an otherwise not that far outside the realm of what dean might wear outfit very much outside the realm

LUCIFER!VINCE Because it's fun. Because I can. And because being Lucifer? So much Judeo-Christian baggage. But Vince? He's famous. Everybody loves him.

look at our sam being apparently stronger than lucifer's telekenesis on the doors which doesn't make much sense but it's a striking vaguely jesus-y visual so let's go i guess

DEAN Why are you doing this? LUCIFER!VINCE Why? SAM You and God made up. You forgave him. What would he think? LUCIFER!VINCE I'm not especially interested in his opinion. Dear old Dad, he finally apologized for abandoning me. And what's the very next thing he does? [Voice breaks] He ditches me. [Laughs] And you, too, by the way. And rides off into the sunset with Auntie Amara. He needed my help, and he'd say anything to get it. His words, your words, they mean nothing. Don't you get it? This is all meaningless. Heaven, Hell, this world. If it ever meant anything, that moment is past. Nothing down here but a bunch of hopeless distraction addicts, so filled with emptiness, so desperate to fill up the void… they don't mind being served another stale rerun of a rerun of a rerun. You know what my plan is? I don't have one. I'm just gonna keep on smashing Daddy's already broken toys and make you watch.

i am so confused. lucifer's upset over god abandoning him, and he's hurt by... sam and dean? what. have i already forgotten how they left things with him? there was never any chumminess, was there? i don't think this is the lucifer that i know

sam looks pretty with this backdrop but i started laughing when these horns came in to be some i dunno, rousing of spirits, call to arms on the lucifer hunt! "and we will stop him! we will. it's what we do, man" *sam stares off mournfully in the distance* cue the sad cellos

in the wiki

When Castiel calls Dean, his name appears on Dean's phone spelled as "Cass," thus re-igniting the age-old argument: is it Cas or Cass?.

i mean, in the script it's cass. when metatron was typing, it was cass. the captions say cass. the only people who use cas are fandom?? if we're talking english, cas would be pronounced more like kaz. anyway. i don't see how this is an argument. my personal (probably unpopular) opinion is fandom preference of not using the more feminine spelling (shortened cassandra etc)

well now that i read the linked cas or cass, looks like my points stand

(on twitter) Robbie Thompson: why is Castiel’s nickname spelled Cass not Cas? again: for science Eric Kripke: I think “Cass” just looks cooler on the page. And “Cas” might sound like “Caz.” But that’s just my opinion. Now get back to work.

thank you, eric, for the pronunciation note. somewhat vindicated 🤪

[leanbeefpattysimp3]

Get to know Solomon Orochi, my Baki OC, better with these 20 Questions!

1.) What is your character’s name?

Her name is Solomon Orochi

2.) How old is your character?

She’s 19 years old, going on 20

3.) What would somebody see at first glance? (i.e. height, weight, skin color, eye color, hair color, physique, race, and visible equipment)

She’s quite tall and covered in scars from fighting, she’s very stocky shoulders and hips, broad muscular physique besides her waist. Her skin color is light ivory and she has grayish-blue eyes. Her hair is dark brown and is styled into a short wolf cut with the short hairs around her face bleached platinum blonde. She is half American and half Ossetian. Whenever she’s not fighting or dressed up, she wears compression sleeves on her knees.

4.) What additional attributes would be noticed upon meeting the character (i.e. Speech, mannerisms)?

Depends on language she’s speaking and who she’s speaking to, she’s more closed off and to herself when she speaks Japanese, but with English she’s more open and expressive. She really uses her hands while talking, and when she gets worked up while talking she shakes her hands like if there were water on them. She’s also a nose thinker, so when she’s thinking while she’s talking she’ll subconsciously touch the sides and bridge of her nose. She also makes clicking noises with her tongue subconsciously because of a brain injury she got when she was a newborn (her biological mother wasn’t a good person let’s put it that way.)

5.) Where was your character born? Where were you raised? By who?

She was born and raised in Japan by her adopted parents, Doppo and Natsue Orochi.

6.) Who are your parents? Are they alive? What do they do for a living?

Her biological father was the famous American master and practitioner of Shōrin-ryū karate, and heavyweight kickboxing champion, Joseph Henry Lewis. Her mother was an unknown Ossetian who went by the name Aslan. They are both deceased after her mother slaughtered her father and then herself when Solomon was 2 months old. Her adopted father is the founder of Shinshinkai karate and her adopted mother has no occupation.

7.) Do you have any other family or friends?

She has an adopted brother named Katsumi Orochi.

8.) What is your character's marital status? Kids?

She is currently single with no children.

9.) What is your character's alignment?

Chaotic-Good

10.) What is your character's moral code?

She mostly just follows the 10 commandments because she’s a follower of Christ like her biological father was, however she is not Christian nor religious. When she was going through Joseph’s belongings she found all of his old prayer journals and saw everything he wrote about Solomon before and shortly after she was born, which influenced her to become a better person, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have faults here and there. She will actually harm and kill people when it comes to protecting others, including children. When it comes to children, she’ll kill and go to hell and back for them, even if she doesn’t know them. Children have a special place in her heart, they’re naive and fragile and precious little beings, she wants to protect them from the world.

11.) Does your character have goals?

Her biggest goal is to make Doppo, Natsue, and Joseph proud of her for how much she’s accomplished throughout her life.

12.) Is your character religious?

She is a follower of God and Christ from the Bible, but she doesn’t associate herself with Christianity nor religion.

13.) What are your character's personal beliefs?

She believes that karma is real and is a bitch to anyone that is a bitch and that some people are too good for the world and that’s why they pass away earlier than most.

14.) Does your character have any personality quirks (i.e. anti-social, arrogant, optimistic, paranoid)?

Hard working, Dedicated, Supportive, Passionate, Charismatic, Playful, Selfless, Active, Blunt, Impulsive, Curious, Intense, Unusual, Chaotic, Unpredictable.

15.) Why does your character adventure?

(No clue how to answer this.)

16.) How does your character view his/her role as an adventurer?

(No clue about this one either, I think this may have been a DND character OC thing lol)

17.) Does your character have any distinguishing marks (birth-marks, scars, deformities)?

She has scars all over from fights, the most prominent ones are the one on her jaw which is the only one on her face, the two on each of her knees, the one across her stomach, and the one going all the way down her back on her spine. Genetics wise, some of her teeth are canines instead of regular ones, some are side by side, others scattered, inconsistent.

18.) How does your character get along with others?

She gets along with others well, she puts herself out there to get to know others and introduce herself. Overtime she watches how you are as a person which dictates if she keeps you around in her life or not.

19.) Is there anything that your character hates?

People who hurt kids, microfiber, the paper that people wrap jewelry with so it doesn’t get tarnished, and Yujiro Hanma.

20.) Is there anything that your character fears?

Losing her family, and those big ass iguanas and monitor lizards.

[teecupangel]

So it's obvious that God doesn't really exist but what if there's hell? But hell's more like hazbin hotel/helluva boss type of hell so all the assassins and templars just pile there or something so even in death they still have this war going on and they just keep coming back no matter how many times they die

Me seeing this ask preview while still half-asleep:

My brain apparently thinking we’re uneducated indios from the 1600s: O dios mio! Don’t let the friars hear you or you’ll be whipped!

Well, that woke me up. Thanks, nonny XD

Alright, let’s be clear, this is about how there is no non-Isu creator god in Assassin’s Creed… that we know of.

However…

If we take into consideration that, whenever someone talks about an omnipowerful god, they’re usually talking about the Judeo-Christian God, we do have an idea of which Isu this god is meant to represent in AC lore.

The Templars (historically made up of Christian knights and created by a Christian king) use the phrase “May the Father of Understanding Guide Us” a lot.

Now, the Father of Understanding we usually know is Tinia but the Capitoline Triad is more or less a title that get used frequently by the Isus, usually to talk about three specific Isu scientists that accomplished something great (and this gives the whole “Holy Trinity” a different connotation in AC Lore)

Another Capitoline Triad was in charge of Project Anthropos which created the humans. Among them is the Father of Understanding “Yaldabaoth”.

Now, you might be wondering: why are we picking Yaldabaoth and not the other two Isus?

Because all three of them are different names taken by the Demiurge, said to be the ‘god’ that created humanity but also limited their knowledge. (There’s the whole ‘Yaldabaoth is not the true god but a false god’ or ‘Yaldabaoth is the god of the old testament’ and other more ‘origins’ for Yaldabaoth so here, have a wiki link if you’d like to know more). Yaldabaoth is, in my experience, the most commonly used name among the three. Also, Father of Understanding of the Templars being Yaldabaoth would make more sense than picking the Sacred Voice or the Mother of Wisdom.

So, in the Lucifer (TV series) x AC crossover idea, I proposed Yaldabaoth as being a different Isu from the Judeo-Christian God to amp up the Isu drama but, for this one, we’ll just assume that Yaldabaoth is the basis of the Judeo-Christian God (because it’s a bit funny that the Templars would be ‘worshipping’ one called ‘false’)

Annnyywaaayy, your idea is there is a ‘hell’ and I think you don’t mean the whole Underworld-Elysium type of setup as the one in the Atlantis DLC of Odyssey.

I feel like the idea of ‘hell’ would work well to my idea of how Desmond is Zagreus’ Sage.

Not the premise itself but the idea of the Afterlife program:

What if the initial idea of the Afterlife is that humans were not meant to reproduce, that they were meant to die and then be revived in a younger body with all their memories intact, making it faster for them to return to work. Elysium houses the data of the exemplary slaves, the best of the crop. The others go to the other parts of the Afterlife (with Tartarus being the part where the data of the ‘defects’ go so they won’t be loaded again).

It was only a bit later that the Isus realized it takes too many resources to keep creating bodies based on human data (DNA) so the next batch of humans could reproduce.

Now, in this context, Tartarus would be the ‘hell’ and, what if, in this setup, the actions of both the Assassins and the Templars would count them as ‘defects’ because they certainly go against what the Isus think humans should be with their desire for free-will or total control (in the hands of humans, bah!).

And, you say eternal war?

Okay.

So I’m going to tip my hand here, those who read my fics last year would know last year, August had the highest fic post count mainly because:

A lot of shit went down in August in AC lore… mostly deaths. (Arno’s bday, Clay’s death, Juno’s death, Umar’s death, (most importantly) Altaïr’s death, etc)

My birthday is in August and I tend to do a Birthday special whenever I’m active which is really just “post more than usual on my birthday!”

I’m explaining this because I actually have an AC fic idea based on the premise of Xenoblade 3’s eternal war which I am hoping I would be able to write this August and this ask gives me the chance to talk about it. XD

So the idea was, there would be two main factions that kept on fighting one another, locked in an eternal war. Their entire life, all they know is that they’re meant to live for one year (yeah, not ten years, one year) then they will either die on the battlefield or they would be given the chance to meet their mentor and be ‘initiated’. But for them to live up to their final week, their cube must not be empty and the only way to fill it even just a little is by either killing enemy soldiers or letting the cube absorb important artifacts of their enemies. Both factions mainly used three-person cells but there are rumors of four-person spec ops teams.

So the plot was meant to start with a POV from Arno’s team which is composed of him, Evie, and Jacob. They get a mission to find some kind of artifact and they get sidetracked because they’re attacked by an enemy cell composed of Bayek, Eivor, and Kassandra who are presumably after the same artifact.

Their fight gets broken up by a comet-like thing crashing down near them and they assumed it’s the artifact they were after so they raced to get there first. When they get there, the artifact looked like… a pod?

Figures clad in robes and masks appeared all of a sudden with one of them stepping forward to say, “Do not be rash, father. It doesn’t have to end this way. Return what is rightfully ours and I will ensure that the Grand Masters’ punishment will be light.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.” A man’s voice comes out from underneath the pod and it opens to reveal some kind of small cockpit. A man with dirty blond hair stepped out of the pod together with what seemed to be some kind of coffin following him by floating behind him.

He touches the coffin just as the masked man says, “Father, don’t-!”

They hear a hissing sound as air leaves the coffin as it slowly opens, revealing a sleeping young man. The young man gasped awake and grabbed his right hand tightly, coughing painfully. The blond man turned to face him and asked, “Do you remember who you are? Desmond?”

“Who…” The man called Desmond stared at him for a moment before he said, “I know you…”

“My name is Edward Ken-”

Bang!

Desmond’s eyes widened as blood splattered on his face and Edward fell on him before sliding down.

The masked man lowered the pistol he had fired as he said, “I had hoped it did not come to this, father.”

Desmond’s eyes widened as he recognized the voice.

“Haytham?”

(Yeah, I’m ending it there. I mean… I have more notes that includes what the fuck is actually going on but I guess this ask has been hijacked into a sneak peek on what you guys might get in August)