#nihilism cw

[housefinches]

i love bootlegs! i love piracy! i love knockoffs!! capitalism is going to kill everything i might as well have a bit of fun beforehand

[in-sufficientdata]

hot tip for the disabled: no one will take you seriously unless you LARP being (formerly) abled!!

unless you're fat. then you should just die.

[suturaura]

[thoughtsafterdark]

Changeling

Years ago

When I fell I love with the shake of a head

The sweep of a fringe across honey eyes

With hard edges and cutting comments

With earnestness and sincerity

Trembling, pouting lips

And everything in between

When the thought of going to bed with strangers unnerved me

I was so in love with the unwavering notion of love

I thought there must be something wrong with me

When I was 13 I had a letterbox of loves, real and imagined, made from long sighs and airy thoughts

and I would take them out, carefully, blow off the dust and cobwebs at birthdays and holidays

Dance with ghouls under the green and red and blue Christmas lights

The hazy mouldy smog of the artificial tree made my throat itch, triggered asthma attacks

A 1970s astigmatic capitalist daydream

Our reflections mirrored on baubles in the dark of Christmas Eve

And I lived there between branches

Polypropylene leaves digging into my skin

And I would whisper in their ears

Exchange love notes by the nativity scene

Who needed friends when I had

Tempero parietal epilepsy

And a rich internal life

(Autism diagnosis pending)

Sometimes I think

Whatever happened to her

To that wild, wide eyed, unsettling little changeling

The one who would watch the washing machine for hours

Hypnotised by the universes trapped in soap bubble films

They warp and change divide and split. Mitose. Evolve. Is this what it is to play god. We are closer to him in those years. Half formed clay golems with chubby, pawing fingers, muddy hair and drooling eyes.

If I were to crawl into his lap

Do you think he would hug me close like my father never did

I remember mornings

On the way to school

Stomach in knots

I remember French toast smothered in buttery creaminess. Bottled sunshine. Red berries popping on my tongue. Bursts of blood red flesh against retainers. An autumnal afternoon wrapped in a nauseous morning haze. Palms drenched in sweat.

I remember mud and dirt on knees, under fingernails. The feel of butterfly wing powder on my fingers.  Digging through mud, playing with ants. I used to pluck out their legs one by one, and watch as the others tore it apart.

I remember the hypnotic lick of flames against midnight skies, paper towns and cardboard dollhouse burning to ashes in the wind. I used to imagine the screams.

Don't you think fire is so poetic. Some glitch in the matrix. As alive as a dead thing can be. Heat and light, ionised air, a chain reaction that spreads and jumps from one thing to another? Destroys in its wake. The cancer of the dead world, with its own nefarious self replicating agenda. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, heat death made sentient. Saltatory conduction and Conway's game of life (or death)

Do you suppose with enough time it could learn to think? Do you believe if it could it would scream?

She's been locked in her cell for too long. I'm so so tired and the mask is melting.

I used to think I was good at reading people. At empathising. Now I wonder was it just her. Playing with puzzles, matching faces to appropriate responses.

I can feel her waking up, with her wide fae eyes, her long pointed ears. The better to see you with my dear. Better to quirk a head to the side and hear you with my dear. Unhinge her jaw and swallow you whole. Feel my spine crack, bones rearrange, muscles twist. The crunch of food plunging down my throat. My scales contracting around the bolus, accommodating, slithering.

They say hate and love are two sides to the same coin and I am inclined to agree. I thought I knew hate, and then you came. Like a storm that left me desolate and full of rage. I can feel the bitterness and fury sharpening itself in my gut every time I hear your voice. The blade melting, forging. The voice driving me insane. To best you, leave you in the dust. I am so so bone tired.

Sometimes I wonder

If I should love my hourglass body more

There are moments when I envy men

But never as much as now

Nothing drives my dysphoria like

Wanting to gauge out your eyes with my fingers

And fuck your empty eye sockets while you scream

Feel the supraorbital notch against my pelvis

Revel in the wet, garish squelch

I think you've gone braindead but that's alright

That's what my fingers buried in your nape are for

There is blood everywhere, god so much blood.

And here you had us all thinking you couldn't bleed

(Shut up

You all know

If I were a man

Writing about a woman

Pinning her down

Rearranging her insides

You would clap and ooh and ahh

Such a tortured soul, aching for release

Slaps on the back and salutations

"Tell us Stanley! Oh did you know since you were

a fucked up little boy pulling on Pigtails

That your self-indulgent gore pornography would revolutionise the medium of film?")

My momma used to say, clutching at her bloated belly

that she would love any baby

As long as it was happy and healthy

And! As long as it wasn't mentally...deficient. She would laugh then. How could she have a baby like that.

Some say I'm a genius mommy

I was the best in my class

But why do I feel like

I should tell you I'm sorry

I really did try

But mommy I'm so tired

I want to go to sleep

My bones are sick of trying

And the redcaps in the Earth are calling to me

They're so hungry momma

And so am I

I hope you find your real daughter mommy

Hope she has your eyes

I hope you get to love her mommy

Just not the way you loved me

[kabukiaku]

Commission for @anamelessfool of a scene with Nihil and his boys for their upcoming fic!! Thank you so much for commissioning me, I love your writing so much <3!!

bonus terzo sketches just for you. ;)

your headcanon on the infernal eye--OOOh man so GOOD.

[countmothra]

“Secondo is the most lesbian coded papa!”

“Terzo is the most lesbian coded papa!”

“Copia is the most lesbian coded papa!”

You’re all WRONG!!

It’s Primo.

My proof?

Only a DYKE could be this weird about religion. Source? Myself, a dyke that’s weird about religion. He definitely knows too much about the Bible despite never having picked it up.

[eatingfireflies]

I want to talk about this thing

And I have a proposal:

The name of Dr Ratio's warp event is connected to this and, incidentally, Aventurine

Disclaimer: 1) I'm not normal or rational about Dr Ratio. 2) The conclusion is supported only by the English translation as far as I know. 3) Maybe the conclusion is a bit of a leap but I'm serious about everything else.

Let's go!

The conversation Aventurine and Acheron had towards the end is probably up there with End of Evangelion for me in terms of comforting. There's something comforting about Acheron's Nihility because there's still a drop of colour in there and she thinks it's enough. It's the kind of emptiness that accepts anything and don't we all need a little black hole to chuck all our worries into? 🥲

Before the 'grand finale', Aventurine says that sleep is a rehearsal of death. After his death, Acheron agrees and adds that we sleep in order to prepare for the real thing.

And then Aventurine asks her a question:

And Acheron's answer is: this isn't true and Aventurine knows this himself. We don't get born to die. There's no reason for being born, just like there is no meaning in life.

(There's only chance. In stories, things happen for a reason but life isn't story-shaped.)

So: there is no meaning in life. But the way we live our lives gives meaning to our deaths.

Then she tells him to look at his pocket because his friend has already given him the answer.

And I was like 'Finally !! I've been waiting for this reveal!' because what can be said at this moment that could help Aventurine?

There are 2 phases in his plan:

1) Prove that death is possible in the dreamland. Since all the visitors in Penacony are protected by Harmony, this is pretty hard to do but not impossible. We know other people have done it before. Aventurine uses Acheron the emanator of Nihility to cut through the Harmony protection and finish him off.

And Aventurine wins his wager! But the plan doesn’t end there.

2) Move forward to the Real Penacony somehow and investigate the truth about the Watchmaker. And then figure out how to come back. Which honestly sounds like a tall order, but what else can Aventurine do?

Well, he can stop at phase 1.

Acheron says that the conclusion of phase 1 is a win-win situation for the IPC, which is true. Aventurine's death will give the IPC a reason to investigate Penacony and the Family. We know Jade and the others aren't even allowed to go into the dreamscape, but with the death of the IPC envoy, they'll have the right to make some demands from the Family.

If Aventurine stops here, he still would have won.

We know from his conversation with his future self that he's tired and ready to stop. He wants to come home and be with his family.

Aventurine is pretty much a mess: he's a child blessed by Gaiathra Triclops, which gives him godly luck. This luck has prevented him from dying countless times before (even the times when he was actually fine with it). He wants to die but also he's terrified of... dying?

Truly embodying the 'Why is it so hard to die, so impossible to live?'* vibe.

(*From Tanith Lee's The Secret Books of Paradys 1, if you're interested)

Or maybe more accurately, he's terrified of losing everything just like he did in Sigonia. You can look at it in 2 ways: without Mama Fenge's blessing, Kakavasha would have died with the rest of the Avgin. Or Kakavasha's luck came at the expense of literally everything he holds dear.

With Acheron's help, he has finally achieved the death his own luck has been protecting him from. So why should he move forward?

Well, let's see what Acheron meant when she said Aventurine's friend has the answer.

And I... have no idea.

The underlying message here is easy enough to understand: Acheron has already answered Aventurine's question. He can move forward and keep living because that's what will give his eventual death more meaning. But hearing this from Acheron is a bit of a cold comfort: she accepts everything and also views everything impartially.

Ratio's note is a reminder to Aventurine that someone in the waking world is personally invested in Aventurine's well-being. Not because of what Aventurine can do for the IPC (as a consultant, I assume Ratio gets paid whether Aventurine succeeds or not, but also Aventurine has already succeeded with Phase 1).

And not because Ratio gets anything out of it... well, the Stellaron files maybe? But he already has that. Or whatever it is he went to Penacony for, because the two of them are being cagey about it.

Whatever it is, Ratio has already gotten what he wanted. This note is an extra then, something that he gave Aventurine because he wanted to.

I'll come back to what I think he meant, but I need to talk about the Jp translation (sorry I know I should check the original Cn instead but I don't know Cn at all 😭 it's hard enough for me to catch the nuance in Jp let alone a language I can't parse at all), because the word used is different and this is why I'm unsure.

Post by a Jp user about Ratio's note. I can't post a screencap because there's no more space 🥹 But here's the text:

「処方箋」

夢の中で不可能なのは「死」ぬことではなく、「熟睡」することだ。 生きろ。幸運を祈る。

In this note, Ratio uses 熟睡 (jukusui), which means deep sleep. This is deep uninterrupted sleep, the kind that you wake up from feeling refreshed. Or the kind that you have when you take sleep meds. Or the kind that you have when you're contented with your life and not burdened with ambition or anxieties or curiosity.

I don't know.

We know that it's possible to sleep in the dreamscape because Ratio wakes Aventurine up in the beginning of the quest. At the very least, he seemed to be dreaming so I assume he was asleep? And they seem to be in the dreamscape because there's an origami bird tail behind him... except Dr Blues also appears in reality so maybe we can't rule anything out just yet.

I'm not 100% sure what Ratio means about 熟睡. But what about 'Dormancy'?

This is easier. The disclaimer here is I'm not a big fan of the English translation in general (especially the way Dr Ratio was translated in English) but I'll let myself have this.

Dormancy is (thank you wiki) a period in an organism's life cycle when growth, development, and (in animals) physical activity are temporarily stopped. It's also connected to 'deep sleep'. Hey, we're getting somewhere!

Basically, hibernation. Ratio seems to be confirming what we already know: the dream is falling apart because everything in the universe will succumb to Nihility in the end. Maybe the dream was created to preserve a memory (just like how the IPC was preserving Chadwick's memory in Penacony), but the dream is also starting to crumble.

Maybe this isn't the most comforting thing to tell Aventurine, but it does confirm what he probably already suspected (about the truth behind Penacony) and it also tells him that change is constant. Moving forward means he could potentially get out of a situation he doesn't like.

And he does move forward. He tells his past self that there will come a time in the future when he'll come home to his family, but not now. For now he can keep changing and making his own meaning.

Dr Ratio's warp banner is called Panta rhei. 'Everything flows', which says that things are always in a state of flux (change). For example, you can't step into the same river twice because the water is moving and is constantly getting replaced (thanks again, wiki). This is the same about humans: we are always changing both physically and mentally. We both are and are not (wiki again).

Doesn’t it sound like what he said in his doctor's prescription?

[skele-bunny]

I've escaped containment again

Murder ghoul rainy pretty please? /Silly

By The Water. (CW) Rain/Swiss

CW - Death, Light Gore, Gore in Genitals, Vagina Dentata (Teeth Vagina)

Tags: Murder Ghouls, Sexual Content, Seduction for Death, Mute!Rain, Trans!Rain, Tentacle Dick, Rain has weird anatomy

Characters: Rain, Random Named Sibling of Sin, Swiss

(Divider by @ wrathofrats !)

When you have nothing better to do, the first thing the body tends to do is wander. Sibling Ali wasn't spared from that boredom. Looking down as they kicked a rock along the gravel path leading to the gardens, anger still festered from their previous punishment from earlier. Ignoring a summons led to detention, the sixth time this week for them. Ali's feet led them to their own accord, hands stuffed into their pockets and trying to ease themselves.

The path led three ways once exiting the garden. The graveyard, the forest, or the lake; Ali going to the lake as the kicking of rocks had suddenly become more interesting when water was involved. Leaning down, Ali had begun to skip rocks near the shoreline, no thoughts playing in their mind as they opted for their distraction. About the sixth rock in, Ali's attention had diverted as something on the other side surfaced, but only for a brief moment before dipping down again.

Curiosity had gotten the best of them, slowly walking around. It wasn't uncommon for water ghouls to be found lurking underneath, if anything, it was recommended to leave the moment one was spotted. Advised to never enter alone unless other ghouls or siblings were present as they were listed as silent killers. As Ali finally got to the other dock, that same flashed resurfaced fully to the wood above, a hand combing through dark hair. Ali was breathless as they admired fins down the ghouls back that practically reflected the light into their eyes. Their foot scraped the gravel again, making the ghoul to turn around instantly before covering their unmasked face.

"A-Ah! I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to... Ya know... Walk over to you while you were— Uhm..." Ali trailed off, starting to slowly walk backwards only to stop as the ghoul slowly turned around again.

Hands still covered their face but an eye, full of confusion. This sibling wasn't... Scared? Ali got the question quickly, now rubbing their wrist with nervousness.

"No, I don't mind... If anything, I think it's stupid they make you all be masked twenty-four-seven." They shrugged. "Besides you're swimming so it wouldn't make sense to wear one."

They watched with a soft blush as the ghoul slowly lowered their hands, giving a small smile before turning fully. Their blush had quickly deepened and spread, staring at the ghoul presented before them. Their face was rounded yet still sharp, black and wavy hair reaching their shoulders, white scales littered underneath soft blue eyes that seemed to speak despite their lips never parting. Curious, just as much as Ali was.

The ghoul turned their shoulders, Ali clutching their pants leg tightly as the water ghoul's perked breasts came into view. They had sat in a way to purposely extenuate their chest, tail still in the water that swayed back and forth. Angelic was the only thing Ali could think to describe it.

A tap to the dock got Ali to look, seeing the ghoul patting the spot next to them. An invitation.

Once more, Ali's feet moved on their own accord, slowly taking off their shoes and socks once they got near—sitting on the edge and letting their feet graze the water below. The ghoul purred, smile still soft as they looked over the human with just as much admiration Ali had. They let out a small roll of their tongue, commonly known as a 'trill' Ali had been taught it was called.

"Sorry, I just..." They swallowed hard. "You're really pretty... I'm normally more put-together than this. I've never seen one of you beneath the masks before."

Shoulders bouncing, the ghoul began to silently laugh, and in return their chest bounced which caused Ali's eyes to flicker down before returning back up. The ghoul leaned over some, hand lifting to slowly caress down Ali's face, claw delicate as it tapped at a mole.

With their hand fully cupping Ali's cheek, they held eye contact with shaking breaths. They stared at one another before a gentle pull began, Ali leaning over until their breaths mixed and a gap was closed. Now, Ali knew ghouls were sexual creatures and it was perfectly fine to consummate with them, but it was still their first time even being alone with one. They pulled back, covering their lips and giggling nervously.

Once again there was that smile, Ali hesitantly giving one back before feeling a different type of pull—internal—to lean forwards again but not kiss. Just barely grazing. The ghoul was pressed against their arm, eyes going down to their chest again.

Ali admired what sat next to them, breasts moving in time with breathing, a belly button piercing just before skin turned to scales. There was even a small slit that opened some, a single drop of slick making it's way out and over the ghoul's side. Ali watched as their hand was grabbed and placed delicately on the slit, the ghoul making a rubbing motion before letting go—the sibling still making the motion and looking with awe as the slit opened more and their fingers sank inside.

Their other hand was grabbed and moved to the closest perked breast, groping as if it was second nature. The ghoul leaned into view again and their lips became intertwined, Ali working both their hands in almost a sync with their mouth. They could feel the ghoul's hands touch their waist, body shivering and slick protruding more from their slit.

Was this how water ghouls mated? A slit in their tails? Ali curled their fingers up and watched the ghoul tremble more, hands gripping tighter as their hips twitched upwards.

Tongue pushing in, Ali opened their mouth for the water they still didn't have the name of, feeling them laying down and Ali following—legs going over the ghoul's waist as a hand went down their pants as well. Wet fingers went over equally wet folds, Ali trembling beneath their touch and starting to rock their own hips downwards. The hand on their waist tightening as their tail hit against the water, showing their ever increasing excitement.

Circling Ali's twitching nub, the ghoul let out another trill as their tongue retracted, breathing heavier before lifting their head to kiss again. Ali quickened their fingers in the ghoul's slit, watching and feeling them become more slick and twitch further up. This was serenity and everything Ali could ever think of as the ghoul moved from their mouth to kiss down their neck. For a moment, Ali had wanted to laugh at the advisories.

Wanted to.

As the ghoul got to their jugular and trilled louder as they orgasmed, teeth had sank in immediately, and before Ali could even make a noise their bodies had rolled into the water right next to them. From above, clothes could be seen drifting to the surface along with red liquid staining against soft blue of the water.

It was only two hours since Rain had left out, Swiss waving over the couch as they heard the den door close and wet footsteps follow. The multi hummed, turning from his video game as Rain leaned over the side for a kiss. Instantly, Swiss' eyes contracted to slits, pulling back after a second to whistle.

"Well hello to you, too. Giving poor, little, helpless me some leftovers like a baby bird?" He teased, quickly glancing to pause his game before watching Rain come around the couch to sit on his lap.

His white button up was soaked, showing his chest and even a bruise forming on his stomach. He brought his hands up, "Maybe. Beelzebub knows you can't fish to save your life."

"Ohh, you're so mean to me!" Swiss laughed, leaning forwards for another kiss.

Rain purred, bringing his claws up to gently comb through Swiss' afro, sighing as his mouth went to his neck to lick in his gills. He held Swiss there as his body welcomed the true pleasure rather than the fake he had been giving all day.

"Bet they didn't touch you right, did they baby?" The multi mumbled between his sucks, hands reaching under to grope Rain's ass.

A groan came from the water, letting Swiss pull back so they could sign again—frustration showing.

"Out of all three of them, not one got my clit out. That's how terrible they are."

Swiss flopped the wet ghoul onto the couch, not caring as Mountain would whine at the soaked cushions since Rain hadn't dried off. "My poor princess... Gotta fix that, yeah?"

Rain nodded eagerly, letting Swiss unbutton his shorts and pull down, whistling again and starting to laugh. Besides being commando, Rain's teeth had made itself known while still closed tightly but a finger poked out, making him hum as he touched over the exposed bone. Swiss gently scratched at Rain's taint and watched the teeth slowly open, grabbing the finger out—admiring the pink nail polish he'd recommend to Sunshine later—and putting it in his own mouth. Rain rolled his eyes but face still flushed in embarrassment as he hadn't even noticed the part still inside him.

Once the teeth had completely covered back in, Swiss spread Rain's fold with his thumb, dragging up and rubbing at another tiny hole.

"See," Swiss adjusted the finger in his mouth before biting down to break the bone, talking with his mouth full. "They can't even get your clit out... But I can get our lovely lady out."

As if simply being mentioned was a summon, Rain's tentacle lifted out of the hole, wrapping around Swiss' hand and sucking on his palm. The multi looked up to see Rain's head tilted back, trying to catch his breath as the relief he desperately needed filled had finally started. Swiss stroked his tentacle, leaning down to suck at a nipple poking out from the shirt, feeling Rain's legs go around his hips and pull him close.

Popping up once more before he delved back down, Swiss groaned. "Don't you worry. I've got you, princess. Gonna put em' all to shame for you."

A loud trill came from the couch as Swiss squeezed his hand and closed his teeth around Rain's nipple.

[krscblw]

there's a sting in the way you kiss me

based on adoration by stephen sinding

[loverducky]

on a completely different note. silas’ question about if you torture yourself in selfships made me think of my isekai mahito selfship again because that is almost completely a pure horror world for me lmao

cause like i’ve got two separate ones, right? one where i’m a civilian who can see curses but doesn’t know about the sorcerer world, and then mahito inserts himself into my apartment and we go pretty domestic from there (he’s like a feral cat i try to tame)

but the isekai one is specifically like. i die in a brutal car accident. i wake up in a hospital and i can’t understand anyone and there’s no record of me anywhere. i don’t know what to do, don’t know where to go, and there’s also monsters crawling everywhere that no one seems to be able to see. i’m left to find a support system on my own and get sucked into getou’s cult instead, and then when it’s kenjaku’s turn he takes note of me and offers me to mahito as a new chew toy/test subject, except the isekai process has taken something else from me, my soul. and so mahito takes a heavy interest in this singular person that breaks his theory of how people and curses work to see how much misery they can take (spoiler: so much. but i’m determined to live, both for the sake of living itself and out of spite.)

it’s terrible and brutal and painful for me there and it’s so fun to think about LMAO

[anumori]

True beauty of the world

[mar64ds]

i love undertale/deltarune i'm so happy to be alive to experience these games

[loveatfirstsightbracket]

Why you should vote for each of them below:

One of the most popular music videos shows the backstory of the characters, who are the matriarch and patriarch of the fictional version of the Satanic Church for which Ghost serves as something of a "worship band" - despite apparently being strangers to each other, immediately upon catching each other's eyes, Sister & Nihil are physically drawn to each other and not only become the Main Characters of the dance party they're attending, but shortly thereafter become further entangled in a ritual meant to raise Nihil up to his proper role as the Antichrist-like leader of the Satanic Church that Sister serves as a high-ranking member of. But, of course, don't take my word for it, when you can watch it unfold here!!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gr63DiEUxw

-- @imperatorium, on Nihilperator

We all know the tragedy and we all are obsessed with it. So you know why you need to vote for the love story. Why do you need to vote for it as an example for 'love at first sight'? Well, just because of this conversation:

HERMES: You wanna talk to her? ORPHEUS: Yes! HERMES: Go on. Orpheus? ORPHEUS: Yes? HERMES: Don't come on too strong.

ORPHEUS: Come home with me. EURYDICE: Who are you? ORPHEUS: The man who's gonna marry you. I'm Orpheus. EURYDICE: Is he always like this? HERMES: Yes.

And one song later, she's just as smitten <3

-- anon, on Orpheus/Eurydice

[scribeofmorpheus]

These Designs, I Declare of Kings

In response to the days which seem to demand of me a scream, yet I feel as though I have no right to use my mouth, for much of what is said is often too soft to be heard over every other scream at the assembly plant where further woes are welded unto man.

N.B: Long Essay, existentialism and just an exorcism on the frustrations of current political, media and social climates--I had so much to say but didn't know where to put it or why it was all centred around my disappointment and non-surprise surrounding news of Sandman's alleged plagiarism, hand-in-hand with the release of the Vulture article by Lila Shapiro on Gaiman, so I have placed this text here.

With everything that has happened in the world over since I wrote the first chapter of this story (a story I very much used as an exorcism of old pains and festering wounds), I never expected to wake up to a morning where this reality we now live in is not only real but lived-in.

It is 2025, a new year, and it does not hold a chalice full of promise as we toast. As I sit and read over what I had once been inspired to write, I am lost in the lines of the passages below. A triquetra. A triptych. These three paragraphs, which feel grossly too prescient, almost mockingly so, haunt me:

“Strife justified the need for order. Order bestowed righteous power. And prosperity would always call that power into question. For one could always desire more once they had the privilege of sitting still for long enough. That desire would increase tenfold if the seat was a throne. If people prospered, it never simply meant prosperity. To a king, it meant benevolence, a right to rule. For military generals, it meant a restless army. For young children, it meant a coming war for conquest, lest they be spoiled in the eyes of their parents. And for the scions of the end of peace, it either meant a turn to totalitarianism or a fall of an empire. Morpheus was no exception to this, as his past would prove. He, too, was a product of the design of kings.”  – of human thought, Chapter 10.

Sandman was a life-line for me when I could not find any rhyme or reason to the depths of my despair, for the trials that seemed unending and further crueller no matter how many sunrises I missed or how many full moons I was shied from behind heavy curtains and a tired body.

I have since learned to fit inside my body again. I have learned to wake before the sun so I might know of beauty while it is rare upon the sky, and I look to stars at night because I work late hours, often returning home in the silent cold of midnight. The cruelty of fate has subsided somewhat, and I no longer feel as though each occurrence in my life is a trial waiting to break me. But I unfortunately do feel like a scion of the end of peace.

Am I to inherit nought but conflict?

Palestine. Congo. Sudan. Ukraine. The women of Iran. The women of Korea. The women of the States. The ecological warfare our industrial complex is waging over Antarctica, the Amazon, the oceans.

From the seats of those sat in power, the winds blow in dangerous directions, and history threatens to remain a cautionary tale no longer, rather it deigns to return as a gale from the cold north wind, as if Boreas—violent in his temper as he kicks down doors and shatters homes.

In the midst of all this turmoil, someone falls. It is truly sad that many built a home in the illusions of the houses he constructed from paper and fiction. Once, one of them was a warm place from which to weather a terrible, ongoing storm. Now, I am left woefully unsurprised (as is the way of the current climate, it seems), but worse yet, I harbour disappointment.

It is wearisome, being accustomed to disappointment.

The foul taste that remains after reading the Gaiman article refuses to relent. I should be outraged, but outrage was one of the first emotions to burn during the last year of inconsolable loss and continuous protest for so many causes dear to me. I am disturbed by the news and I am also left in a weird trance—it’s as if I lay on my back as the ocean currents carry me out into the depthless sea; I know I should kick my feet and try to swim to shore, but that requires I risk drowning from the effort, so instead I wait… I wait for a bell to ring in my head or a siren to summon me with her call.

My aimlessness is contextually tied to the crossroads ahead; I struggle with the ethics of supporting the new season (which has now been re-tweaked to appear as a dénouement to the oeuvre that is Dream’s endless story). People unaffiliated with Gaiman, good people, creative people who must face the reality of working in a time where the human element is so easily dismissed or replaced by the machine remnant—a time where the craft of costume design is never appreciated for the countless stitches used, the fabrics sourced, the buttons sewn; a time where the make-up departments are rarely praised for their hours spent bending over a face to make it ready for the role it is meant to play; a time where everything is left to the overworked offices of ‘post-production’—must now let go of something that was most likely adapted, acted, costumed and composed from a place of passion, creativity and admiration. To not support it is to prove to media corporations that the people do not yearn for such craftmanship and niche stylistic choices, that they do not appreciate such risks in art—a horrendous take-away that doomed Dead Boy Detectives.

Yet to support its release would be to support, in some monetary fashion or another, a man who has abused the power given unto him by fame and celebrity, power diluted to the public eye by the kinder façade he projected for so many years. I mourn for what Terry Pratchett would have thought had he lived to see this reality unfold. It used to be, that the most one had to fear was the proving of the axiom “Never meet your heroes”—for they are seldom as they appear in your mind’s eye. Now, we are left on a junction that seems to lead down two avenues: “Never admire another person” or “Burn to the end of your wick, till there is little fight left in you to care for even the smallest things that could marvel and awe.” Perhaps reductionist, but everything feels like the better of two bad choices lately.  

Right this moment, I am left to think about domino effects and the structure of experience. Everything is connected, a chain of catalytic reactions in the energy cycle affects the grass and then transfers to the very foods we eat. Our carbon returns to the soil and feeds the growths of spring. One act can affect someone you will never meet. The fall of a supposed hero figure at every turn sours the ideology of there ever being one in the first place.

It feels almost as though I have lived two lives in one instance of time. I have lived long enough to see that choosing to appoint someone much better-off than ourselves as a hero is a future grievance in the making. Whether it is the fact you will turn aspiration to hounding self-disappointment when you do not make the same strides as your hero’s or whether those you held up as personal heroes turn to bad apple seeds in the pit of your stomach, burning like acid with each strenuous swallow as you come to terms with disappointment, yet again, it is practically fool-proofed that the inevitable resolution of hero-worship is the chipping away of you. Yet the need for heroes is older than the written word. We crave a better story than our own, in the hopes that we might achieve that better ending we so desire.

If we cannot turn to people, who do we turn to? The answer was traditionally: fiction. Yet people have lost the nuance of appreciating a character written within the narrative bounds of their respective genres—equating them for literal representations of real-world problems rather than as fictional allusions or mediums of metaphor, exaggeration, hyperbole or criticism. So, then, if the fictional is still not a safe space to cultivate heroes, what then? And even worse, what happens when the fictional hero is virtuous but the creator is not? How does one enjoy fruit from a spoiled tree?

Structuralist and post-structuralist media critic Roland Barthes championed an area of thought known as The Death of the Author. Wherein, he postulated that the intention of a piece of media need not solely rely on the context of the author’s life and experiences, but that there was equal power to be found in the reader making that piece of media their own (sans authorial intent). Though the “explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us,” it is also plausible to state that “a text is made of multiple writings [for which the Author is merely the mixer of unoriginal text into their own envisioned final product], drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” (Barthes, 1968).

There is a thin line to balance whereabouts the fictional hero can remain untainted by the spoiled tree from which it fruited (especially when called to question when said tree began to spoil—was this thing you love made before, after or during the spoling stages? Is the rot imbued or still mycelial in its size?), but this school of thinking must not be consumed to ignorance either.

Anything in excess is rarely constructive for the soul.

I personally prefer Foucault’s ruminations on authorship, in which he seems to “call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author. It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure.” But I dare not bore you further with another French philosopher’s essays. I will, however, point to a great notion he poses to culture, which is to hold in the back of your mind an awareness for the point at which “we began to recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes.” (What is an Author?, Foucault, 1969).

There are so many layers to being human. Always has been. But I keep coming back to ‘Power’ when drafting this text: Power has never been more corrupting than it is right now. Power is at the root of all injustices. Power monopolised or hoarded under corporatised capitalist consumerism is as close to the notion of “king-making” as our generation will get.

Western media is so enveloped in the inevitable mythic portent of “absolute power corrupting”, one must question if this notion should be adopted universally given the uneven distribution of power historically (it has categorically belonged westward). Though it is not lost on me that our structures of power are the result of the society we’ve built, the history we’ve endured and the rulership we’ve been subjected to since the first scramble for dominion, this doesn’t mean that things are always doomed to churn for the worse, it simply means there is are unaddressed flaws lingering in the small works of this large frieze that depicts our earthly experiences.

King-making used to be of the Epics and the Classics in literature; slay a dragon and best a trial, you who are pure of heart or strong of might can so too be a ruler of lands wide. Then it was of the Romance; of French-Anglo royal courts and their commissioned stories to paint the champions of these adventures as kings anointed by purest blood and guided by the Hand of God, i.e. destiny. Then it was Regency-specific; lands and title deeds and wealth from the colonial conquest; naval power, and inter-marriage and the sanctity of the church’s approval.

Currently, what kings by blood that remain are but showpieces of the distant past.

However, those who believe themselves powerful enough to have been of kings had they lived in the past, are the ones I refer to in the vein of recipients of the pageantry of king-making culture in a society without need for kings. The issue of continuous, systematic, blatant abuse of power arises when there are far too many people with enough power of a kind to govern a country if they so wished—enough wealth and draw to be callous, endangering; or else enough social credibility to be ‘unstained’ in the eyes of the public—but not enough personal tribulations or grounding moral constraints to keep them from succumbing to the cruelty of boredom. If you are left wanting for nothing, it is likely you will begin to push the envelope a little further each time until you lose track of the grounding line.

Toni Morrison surmised the phenomenon of Power’s transformative qualities better than I. Within the context of the settlers who voyaged to settled the New World, she explained their paradigm shift from powerless to the allowance of a new raiment of self, within power structures they could construct for themselves, as thus: “Power—control of one’s own destiny—would replace the powerlessness felt before the gates of class, caste and cunning persecution. One could move from discipline and punishment to disciplining and punishing; from being socially ostracized to becoming an arbiter of social rank.” (The Source of Self-Regard, Morrison, pp.145)

To no surprise, I say “king-making” as an affront. It isn't in reference to the ideal of kings we carry over unto fiction imbued with nostalgia or romanticism, it is more in line with the failings of kings and the systems they were indebted to.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin

Whenever there is a revolution, those in the finest silk will not tear from their garments a thread of weave to stop the bleeding of a child that lay quiet in the dark under-belly of their empires. Yet, more often than not, when condemned, these very silk-wearers will cry the greatest injustice has been done unto them even when it is not an injustice but the mere act of questioning their position in the ecology of the world.

We are always told that we are supposedly born equal under the sun, yet never are we guaranteed equity to not burn under its harsh onslaught.  

We live in an age of misinformation and the dizzying simultaneity of unreality. The sterilisation of all that might cause thought found to be too discomforting is shrinking the oceans of thought we are allowed to enter. It is all dichotomous now. A bifurcated system—two-party governance, right and wrong, the marketable and unmarketable, rich and poor (for which the middle-class is shrinking considerably, while the bracket for rich is growing further unattainable unless you are like a King of the Grail: blessed by inheritance by blood in terms of destined wealth).

The need for the Righteous Rule of Kings is an antiquated one, yet “king-making” is the closest analogy I can string together right now. Too many people with power, fame, charisma and the fortunes of could-have-been-kings have overextended their reach, assaulted the notions of privacy and consent, pillaged the resources of all, distorted truths and orchestrated smear campaigns, bending the arc of the truth’s story to their favour. There is too much dissonance and noise, we are in a short-lived cycle of attention, we forget outrages that should be the cornerstone foundations of movements. But we are also louder than ever before, with a voice that can cry through algorithms, videos, and entire bandwidths of data.

Yet the kings still hold too much power.

Politicians that tell you what you can and cannot be within the very mechanisms of your body. Celebrities that garner eyes like moths to flame, speaking untruths like dogma and then beguiling or threatening those around them simply because they feel ‘untouchable’. Beyond reproach. Too well-respected to dare fear the small voices of names you would not recognise when credits roll or curtains draw. It is not only consent of the body that is tarnished, but that of the mind. Machines take and take from you to build their own scaffolding of bones, their sense of the world and how it is to be human are stolen from your epithets papered over the web. Machines never so much as asked for consent as they scraped every brush stroke of immense patience and dedication, trivialising every ache in the wrist or hungry night spent without sweetness, yet they benefit from making ‘authorless’ creations as a result. These regurgitations are not authorless because a machine made it, but are authorless because the many voices it took from have been superimposed and overlapped to the point that all discursive elements used by the machine to learn, “would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur.” (Foucault, 1969).

Even in this newly forming Machine Era, the kings (those who own these machines) profit still.

I miss the era of fore-kings which we bring to life with grandeur in the essence of a contemporary chivalric tale. Of those heroes in fiction who became kings out of service and not wealth in a time of disparity or might in a time of war.

“Just Kings” like Edmund Pevensie, a redeemed brother-betrayer by naïveté; a lamb-led-astray by rare kindness and even rarer sweetness found in the simplicity of Turkish Delight—a triviality we only now view as trivial because the story so oft is not remembered for its harsh reality: after extended time exposed to WWII food rationing, would you not take the sharing of sweetness to mean an act of kindness? Edmund was one of the first fictional characters in my youth who imbued me with hope—for even flawed and dejected by the lack of a caring figure, he was not self-centred so as to be blind to his mistakes, and he became a Just King when given the room to grow out of the shadow of his failings.  

Similarly, purer of virtue yet not a stranger to self-doubt, there is the King of Isildur’s Heir: one who would rule benevolently, in kindness, and in direct opposition to the fear of what is possibly inherited—that the corruption which poisoned his forefathers would mark him as an unfit ruler, susceptible despite his strength in character.

Even Kings of the “Grail” have a veneer about them when viewed through hindsight, albeit one must be aware it is a story repurposed by church and court from smallfolk hero of Welsh legend to embody the Roman-obsessed figure of a golden-haired, lion-shielded king wrapped in the Judaic-Christian prophetic saviour’s purpose. A king used by the ruling class to emphasise the merit of power-by-blood as ordained by god—where the powerless people are given tales of champions of divine marking to assert the courtiers' positions in a more uncertain, war-torn map of Europe. This king’s appeal is not in Arthur himself, but in the Gawains, Yvains, Lancelots and the Ladies of the Lake that surround this legend. Knights who struggle with their very chivalric values, witches who overcome the evil sorceress's fate and grant the king with the object of benevolence he needs to secure his place in the story (the sword, a quest, a love). Few know this outright, but it is called the Vulgate Cycle in academia, more commonly: the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. For the importance lies not with Arthur alone. The story, in fact, ends not after the death of Arthur, but with the final moments in Lancelot and Guinevere’s stories. King though Arthur was, his legend is only made that of a king’s because of his knights and the famed, scandalous tale of non-chivalric love between Lancelot and Guinevere, never without.

Those kings stated above were granted their titles only after they proved themselves in the eyes of the people—or else in the eyes of those in close proximity to “relatability”.  

No, the facets of power that aspire to be kings today are poisoned by the hedonistic ego of the “king-making” sickness: those who believe themselves worthy of walking in the footsteps of such characters, yet who coincidentally are never aware of their mishandling of power when used for the subjugation of others to their whims, or the trifling of others’ misfortunes when balanced against their fortunes, or when executing fear tactics against those unable to say “No!”.  Lest us not forget the threats used against those who do have the courage to say “No!”.  Disconcerting again, is that if they truly do believe themselves the rightful recipients to such power, then they fancy themselves above the throne of kings (which usually can be deposed by the people). It is thus that they now place themselves on a pedestal polished for gods instead. Untouchables. So irrefutably correct in their politics and notions of what is true that they would rather bend the world around them than allow the world to change their understandings of it.

Perhaps this was all one avoidable tangent and I could have simply not written this out, but I am in excess and must put my frustrations somewhere. I had hoped to revisit Sublime Sovereignty as Enter: the Sublime had originally been titled. I had hoped to revisit the Dreaming by rereading the comics and retreading Dream’s story. I still can, and could, but it seems disingenuous—like an act of attributing triviality to all that is circulating in the ethos of this piece of media. There are satellites strung in its orbit, and an egregious mishandling of power and breaking of trust has occurred for someone who was vulnerable and in close proximity to Gaiman. And it is not an isolated incident.

But even this grim reality does not dampen the idea that Morpheus stands for (as a concept, through mythology, through varying names and religions, to this very transformative fiction story based on another author's contemporary re-imaging of the God of Dreams, and I include Tanith Lee’s Azhrarn from TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH in this): Dreams are powerful.

Dreaming was how I escaped. I could lucid dream from as far back as I can remember. I could build kingdoms in my head. I could picture them so vibrantly. Then, to meet an Endless that was the personification of that limitlessness of creative power, and to see he was heartbroken, driven by the whims of self-importance at times, repentant, stubborn, strange… there was my anchor in the stars, I thought. And I had grown to love the beauty of the dark in doing so. Sandman was not safe literature. It provoked and it gave voice to what we assumed, before the current allegations of Gaiman’s misuse of power, to be feminist representation of the women wronged, an un-shied lens that cast light on so much injustice—like Calliope. Only now to learn there may be something more sinister in the framing, in the suffering, in the similarities. Calliope’s story is her own creature now, it was from the moment it was published and a woman somewhere read it and felt a form of denied catharsis given back to her the moment Dream curses Richard Madoc to incomprehensible insanity.

Whenever I see Caravaggio’s Medusa, in horror and decapitated, I always question why a gorgon (a victim of the callousness of gods) need be slain for being cursed outside of her own power? Then I think of the juxtaposition between Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes and that of Artemisia Gentileschi’s rendition (to which the title is changed from the impersonal “Beheading” to the very emotive action of “Slaying”) in Caravaggio’s style.

Summary from Wikipedia: In the story, Judith, a beautiful widow, is able to enter the tent of Holofernes because of his desire for her. Holofernes was an Assyrian general who was about to destroy Judith's home, the city of Bethulia. Overcome with drink, he passes out and is decapitated by Judith; his head is taken away in a basket (often depicted as being carried by an elderly female servant).

Caravaggio's Judith is ‘fairer’, youthful, a mix of confused and afraid, almost unwilling but eyes too darkened to not be at least partially responsible (though perhaps under a geas of the ‘old crone’ architype behind her). Gentileschi's Judith is steely, filled with conviction, and full of dark rage—both Judith and her maid partake in the act, in solidarity.

I am enthralled each time by the sudden-returning re-realisation of these two paintings existing in the same time frame. So similar. One inspired by the other. One painter taught in the style of the other. One remembered far longer in the breadth of history, while the other remained in the demimonde fringes—understated unless you know to seek her out. Though sharing a common root, the paintings diverged in result due to authorial experience, and this enforces a feminist reading by default. One Judith is a vehicle of the story, moved along despite her reluctance. The other Judith is the story. She makes the choice. She carries out the act. She regains her agency.

Agency. I suppose that is the root of this text. Of how parts of your agency can be taken from you in ways you least expect them to.

Perhaps the Calliope of Sandman’s story is Caravaggio’s, there is yet room for a Calliope in Gentileschi’s style. There is room to retain agency, to brutishly reclaim it if need be. Not all action must be conformist and appeasing. Express anger and hurt.

Do not be gentled by this unrighteous age we are coming to terms with being our inheritance.

I am writing this, I suppose, as a way of not being complacent through simple disavowing, through dichotomous drawing of lines or the silent closing of doors. This essay, and final chapter closer on this series that I am still proud of, for it had been a labour of love and self-preservation through art, is a way of retaining my agency while also trying to contextualise the chaos that isn’t simply linked to this one thing, but is a result of many things piled-on high.

I suppose all this exhaustive matter written down here is merely the evidence from which to use as a temporal marker: to mark when the straw broke the camel’s back, for use of poor metaphor.

To be docile is to be easily governable. For the use of a horrendous analogy: to be docile is to let your agency to an agent outside of yourself, these agents (be they of chaos, trauma, misinformation, hopelessness, disappointment, fatigue, strain, depression, hyper-capitalism, loneliness) they can take from you whatever you are not vigilant at maintaining—and it is getting increasingly easier to keep your eye off every detaching part of yourself. Which is why you must keep as many parts of yourself resistant, kinetic, ungovernable when denied the assurances of a satisfactory milieu.

To be ungovernable is to be an anarchist. Anarchy is not about destruction or vandalism or style, but about resisting against being made amenable, docile, without the need to rage for autonomy to have the inheritance of things the world rightfully offers you without need for compensation.

Take everything contained here within these words as a form of anarchy: my truth and discontentment with the current age we are in—of my frustrations with the impermanence of everything except the damage we render unto the earth and the collective psyche of the generations here and to come, of so much unresolved injustice.

If you must take one thing away from this eclectic collection of thoughts, take this:

“Keep dreaming of the kind of future generations of people would have built cathedrals for, then realise that is you!”

[suddenly-carrying-pokemon]

You know something? You might all be right.

Maybe Project Exclusion is horrible and should be stopped. Maybe the Foundation should be too.

Maybe I should just stay miserable and restless, away from my work, forced to think about my insecurities and worries. At least that way I might stop hurting people.

That's the whole problem, isn't it? I don't know this world, you don't know mine. We're all... unknowable. Maybe we're all wrong. Maybe it doesn't matter.

I'm too old for this kind of thinking. But I can't stop. What do I do

[agent4o4]

Murder. Murder. Murder. Murder. Murder.

Has a fucking panic attack about the whole Dragoneer situation

I'm so scared

Is this my fate?

It's not worth it living in this fucking dystopian nightmare it never will be