#or even ontologically possible

[togglessymposium]

I feel like theodicy is the place that (post-Plato? post-Zoroaster?) Abrahamic religions tend to really fail as systems of thought.

Like, spiritualism in general tends to be unpersuasive as a question of fact- there's simply no real empirical support for it, even though the construction itself is often powerfully evocative and beautiful. But the matter of evil in Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, etc. is something else, a place where this subset of religious doctrines just has visible and painful problems on its own merits. It's not just that I don't accept the factual claims- it's that the arguments don't add up at all. Theodicy is the crux where you have to fundamentally choose between doctrinal fidelity and the pursuit of truth, because it's where the doctrine is facially, deductively inconsistent and wrong.

At the end of the day, you just can't propose a flawless and omnipotent designer of the cosmos while simultaneously making evil a centerpiece of your analysis. You can be Manichean, and have evil arise from not-God or from some limit God has. You can assert that evil doesn't exist, though that can be tricky: Plato's evil-as-absence thing was largely unsuccessful as an attempt, both because positive evils like pain are regular features of human experience, and because pure deprivation as an ontology of evil still doesn't solve the theodicy problem. But what you cannot do is assert that the foundation of the cosmos is a perfect and all powerful entity incapable of error, and also that evil exists. The toddler's hand is well and truly caught in the cookie jar.

Most forms of modern Christianity and Mormonism try to use free will to thread the needle; mainstream Islam I think is a bit more Leibnizean, though it still leans hard on human culpability. But you can't actually do this! The claim, of course, is to say that the setting of the cosmos is perfectly good, that human volition itself is also perfectly good, but that volition has the special quality of sometimes (though not intrinsically) producing evil, which we all then have to deal with. But there's nothing in free will that actually makes it a suitable solution to this problem. The deity is necessarily extratemporal, and in that frame, volition lacks the special properties it would need to hold this weight; when you can flip to the end of the book any time you like, there's no such thing as indeterminism. Every human choice has one and exactly one result, just as with any other domain of reality; free will, like gravity and electromagnetism, is a process with wholly knowable outcomes. Hence, 'free will' is (in the context of monotheism) a purely linguistic construction that means only 'the consequences of this process are not God's fault.' It has no properties other than the shift in culpability itself, no proposed mechanism or relationship to other phenomena, no inherent virtues that can be explained in terms of any moral system. It's an entirely circular argument, a way to credit God for very tall apple trees but blame somebody else for the invention of applesauce.

[noirshitsuji]

i watched rivals this week and among the many things I liked about it is how much of a genuinely good sympathy bait-and-switch it does with david tennant's character. like, the show starts and tony baddingham seems almost like an underdog in this rivalry with this born tory aristocrat. tony is someone who, yeah, married into wealth with a purpose, but also actively worked for the level of status he enjoys, and is down in the dumps now and trying to stay afloat.

and then the new year's confrontation with cameron happens. that was the tipping point for me, but even outside of it, slowly but surely we were shown just how much he says things he only means until his interests or his ego are on the line, because tony is a man made entirely out of class envy in a way few people are, and that's the core of every single evil - and I do mean evil - thing he does. from daysee to his award speech, every single thing he does starts to reek of it, and you realise that rupert was right in his insult way back in episode 1.

special shoutout as well to the final 2-3 episodes. they are brilliant in keeping tony's real intentions and feelings about cameron obscure and questionable, and then you see his face when he watches back the tape from the garden party, her and rupert and chemistry, and you think 'oh, maybe there is something here'. and then he's shouting at her and it's not about her breaking his heart, it's about rupert taking her as if she's another trophy, another rug he's managed to pull out from under tony's feet, and you understand that there's no saving him, because his rivalry isn't even with rupert - it's with the concept of rupert.

his relationship with monica is also fascinating to me and i hope we get more of that next season. they're both just in-and-of-themselves such a good class study, though of course the entire show does that, but both of these are their separate posts.

[longagoitwastuesday]

ngl it sort of pisses me off the way adults regard Gojo in Jujutsu Kaisen at times. Which could be a very interesting and poignant point in a good way if well written, but as it is it becomes mainly just frustrating and sad in a negative way.

Nanami saying Gojo never cared about anything or anyone other than himself crashes interestingly with Kusakabe saying the whole situation was just all his fault because he refused to kill Itadori. The students are very aware of those aspects of Gojo's personality, but overall they seem to regard him with way more kindness and fondness even when at their rudest, not truly coinciding with either Nanami's or Kusakabe's views.

[psycherprince]

third hot take of the day is that yes "boycott fatigue" is. yikes. but we're not doing anyone any favors by pretending large boycotts don't take any effort whatsoever. like we talk abt "invisible labor" in the household when talking abt feminism, which is the cognitive load of knowing what has to get done even if the tasks are divided, and having to keep track of who is doing what (wrt childcare) and the preferences of your family when cooking/grocery shopping/etc. Other ppl have explained this better than me but the point is. It does take cognitive effort to keep track of what you can and can't buy, and which companies own what, etc etc.

We can acknowledge that yeah it does take effort and yeah it can be annoying that you have to make some kind of change, but also still maintain that complaining abt that right now is insanely tactless and irrelevant. Like yeah you DO have to remind yourself not to buy sabra hummus or the starbucks brand creamer or whatever but like there's a genocide yknow get some perspective

[if-you-built-yourself-a-myth]

I agree, the rocks are very representative of Louis’s mental state, in parallel to the conversation he and Armand have at the end of the book. Armand has a vested interest in removing Louis from those memories (and says so, when he assures Daniel that Louis could remove the rocks from his feet whenever he wants), because Armand needs Louis to provide the love and happiness that will fulfill Armand in this new era. Louis chooses to keep the rocks, symbolically trapping himself in that Parisian coffin.

To continue on that, I’ve seen Louis’s lack of colored clothing used as evidence that Armand controls what he wears. However, from what we’ve seen in San Fran, it does appear that Louis picks his own clothing since being with Armand (and they both wear color in that sequence). I think it’s more likely that the lack of color in Dubai demonstrates dissatisfaction/lack of love in their relationship rather than being a literal manifestation of Armand’s selfishness. In the book, their conversation reaches a point where Armand admits he wanted Louis to connect him once more with passion and humanity, whereas Louis needed Armand’s unrepentant vampirism and vampiric knowledge to quell his own guilt. They’ve met in a middle space where neither can get what they wanted from the other, and I think that prison-cell design of their penthouse is meant to make that idea symbolically evident.

Obviously, Armand and Louis’s relationship is toxic and based on Armand’s selfish desire. I do think, though, that pieces of set design have been characterized as Armand’s abuse when they were meant to be symbolic nods toward characters’ mental states. It does not particularly serve the writers to make Armand a worse abuser than he is in the books, especially if they want to go the Devil’s Minion route in upcoming seasons.

Wait a minute, are people under the impression that the grounding meditation rocks were Armand's idea?

Sure, the magnolia tree was Armand's (implied through dialogue and bc it's gone once Armand leaves) but Armand clearly doesn't like Louis keeping the coffin rocks in his feet, so why would he suggest such a tangible reminder of that specific trauma?

Also, in the VERY LAST SCENE of S2, we see that not only did the rock pit survive Louis's redecoration, but he's still doing the barefoot meditation thing.

The rocks are Louis's, not Armand's!

[psychotrenny]

People really love to cynically abuse that whole "old dead white men" line don't they. Like there is a very genuine issue with how various systems of oppression (racism, misogyny etc.) mean that thinkers from privileged backgrounds got a disproportionate amount of attention and praise compared to those from a more marginalised position, with the theoretically contributions of the latter getting frequently mis-attributed or outright ignored. It doesn't mean that the contributions from said privileged thinkers are all inherently worthless on that basis alone.

Like it's a classic example of the way that liberals take structural critiques and turn them into a matter of personal morality. "Overrepresentation of privileged thinkers is bad" gets turned into "Privileged thinkers are all bad people". And it always gets used in the most cynical way possible. You hardly ever see this line used on thorough reactionaries like Nietzsche. It's mainly used to denounce progressive thinkers who, whatever flaws they had and bigotries they were unable to escape, still made innumerable contributions to the causes of liberation and laid the groundwork that was later developed and expanded by marginalised theoreticians. Like people should definitely read more Ho Chi Minh and Amilcar Cabral and Angela Davis, but that doesn't diminish the value of Marx and Lenin.

As important as it is to remind people of the contributions that marginalised people all over the world have made to Marxism (if only because even many Marxists themselves fail to appreciate this*), using it counter the whole "dead white guys" gotcha misses the point of why it's such a stupid thing to say. Because that line is a critique of a system, and it loses all power and meaning when removed from that context applied on the level of individuals. Bigotry is a dialectical structure and not a metaphysical condition; possessing privilege matters in terms of interaction with the broader world not as an ontological fact of your existence. Individuals do matter to some extent, but mainly in terms of how they fit into broader systems and not how systems fit around individuals. You need to realise all this if you want to get anywhere. This individualist bullshit only works as a tool for personal gratification and flagellation; it's masturbatory in the worst possible way

*even if you consciously support an ideology of anti-bigotry, it takes discipline and vigilance to properly unlearn all the biases instilled by life under Imperialist Capitalism and not everyone is successful at applying this

[bimboficationblues]

Do you have any underrated recommendations for feminist texts? Books, articles, even blog posts and the like

very broad category and I’m not sure what counts as underrated so just have an assortment of things I have found interesting over the years, these are all fairly easy to search for and/or SciHub though I'll try to add links when I can.

Ellen Willis, “Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism.” This is the perspective of a radical feminist (one of the founders of Redstockings alongside Firestone), reflecting on the movement’s shape as of ‘84, in which she identifies and criticizes its ‘cultural feminist’ pivot, as well as the problems within the radical feminist political movement that made that pivot possible, if not inevitable. Hits pretty hard these days, kind of my go-to in terms of articulating why a “radical feminism (TM)" sans transphobia isn’t worth fighting for.

Iris Marion Young, "Throwing Like a Girl." Really transcendent work of feminist phenomenology exploring how women's bodily comportment is governed by certain socially constructed imperatives, with an interesting critique/corrective of Beauvoir.

Lydia Sargent (editor), Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the “Unhappy Marriage.” This is a collection of essays by prominent scholars about the relationship of patriarchy and capitalism or of feminism and Marxism/socialism, including Lise Vogel and Iris Young, starting with a Hartmann paper that is considered foundational to this question. A good supplemental or alternative would be the first two chapters of Cinzia Arruzza, Dangerous Liaisons.

Heather Berg, "Reproductivism and Refusal." A critique of the veneration of "feminized" and "reproductive" work and how this operates under the rule of capital.

Kirstin Munro, "Unproductive Workers and State Repression." Discussion of how certain forms of "unproductive" and feminized work, especially those employed by the state or state-backed institutions (nurses, social workers, teachers), participate in the reproduction of the capitalist totality.

Katie Cruz, “The Work of Sex Work.” One of the more robust treatments of this issue, and does a good job of avoiding the Scylla of libertarian contractarianism and the Charybdis of MacKinnonite liberalism.

Margot Canaday, The Straight State. History of the development of the American administrative state's treatment of homosexuality and how this became a major object of statecraft in the twentieth century.

Perhaps you already are familiar, it’s very beloved in some spheres, but Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” is deeply moving.

I have also generally enjoyed the bodies of work of Kathi Weeks (anti-work feminism), Dorothy Roberts (racecraft and its relationship with misogyny), Sara Ahmed (affect theory and feminist ethics/phenomenology), Talia Mae Bettcher and Sally Haslanger (both social ontology of gender), and Florence Ashley (transfeminist legal analysis).

[demontobee]

Good Omens is queering TV/storytelling - part 1: GAZE

I would argue that part of why Good Omens is so refreshingly queer is because it does not cater to the male gaze (which centers around the preferences - aesthetic, romantic, sexual, visual, logical, emotional, political ... - of mainly white men in positions of power):

no oversexualization of groups or types of people: Women or characters that could be read as female presenting are not overly sexualized. In fact, some of them are shown to be grimy, slimy and not sexual at all. All of them are real characters and not just cardboard-cutout on-screen versions of male misogynistic fantasies. They portray real people with real people problems. They are human, or exempt from our categories when portraying angels or demons. There are no overly sexualized bodies in general (as has so far also often been the case with young gay men, PoC, etc.), no fetishization of power imbalances, and not exclusively youthful depiction of love and desire.

sex or sexual behavior is not shown directly (yet): All imagery and symbolism of sex and sexuality is used not to entice the audience but is very intimately played out between characters, which makes it almost uncomfortable to watch (e.g., Aziraphale being tempted to eat meat, Crowley watching Aziraphale eat, the whole gun imagery).

flaunting heteronormativity: Throughout GO but especially GO2, there is very little depiction of heterosexual/romantic couples; most couples are very diverse and no one is making a fuss about it. There is no fetishization of bodies or identities. Just people (and angels and demons) being their beautiful selves (or trying to).

age: Even though Neil Gaiman explained that Crowley and Aziraphale are middle-aged because the actors are, I think it is also queering the idea of romance, love and desire existing mainly within youthful contexts. Male gaze has taught us that young people falling and being in love is what we have to want to see, and any depiction of love that involves people being not exactly young anymore is either part of a fetishized power imbalance (often with an older dude using his power to prey on younger folx) or presents us with marital problems, loss of desire, etc. – all with undertones of decay and patronizing sympathy. Here, however, we get a beautifully crafted, slow-burn, and somehow super realistic love story that centers around beings older than time and presenting as humans in their 50s figuring out how to deal with love. It makes them both innocent and experienced, in a way that is refreshing and heartbreaking and unusual and real.

does not (exclusively) center around romantic/sexual love: I don’t know if this is a gaze point exactly but I feel like male gaze and resulting expectations of what a love story should look like are heavily responsible for our preoccupation with romantic/sexual love in fiction – the “boy gets girl” type of story. And even though, technically, GO seems to focus on a romantic love story in the end, it is also possible to read this relationship but also the whole show as centering around a kind of love that goes beyond the narrow confines of our conditioned boxed-in thinking. It seems to depict a love of humanity and the world and the universe and just the ineffability of existence as a whole.

disability as beautiful and innate to existence: Disability is represented amongst angels by the extremely cool Saraqael and by diversely disabled unnamed angels in the Job minisode. Representation of disability is obviously super important in its own right, but is also queers what we perceive as aesthetically and ontologically "normal". Male gaze teaches us that youth and (physical and mental) health are the desirable standard and everything else is to be seen as a deviance, a mistake. By including disability among the angels, beings that have existed before time and space, the show clearly states that disability is a beautiful and innate part of existence.

gender is optional/obsolete: Characters like Crowley, Muriel and others really undermine the (visual and aesthetic) boundaries of gender and the black-and-white thinking about gender that informs male gaze. Characters cannot be identfied simply as (binary) men or women anymore just by looking at them or by interpreting their personalities or behaviors. Most characters in GO, and especially the more genderqueer ones, display a balance of feminine and masculine traits as well as indiosyncracies that dissolve the gender binary.

Feel free to add your own thoughts on this in the comments or tags!

[the-littlest-goblin]

As I’ve alluded to, I think a lot of the failures of c3 can be traced to the fundamental gap that, in a plot where so much revolved around “”the gods”” CR never answers the question:

What the fuck is a god?

Others have made excellent points in how we talk about epic fantasy and the difficulties in fully receiving a world where gods definitively exist. What's interesting to me is that, if you really want to get deep into the philosophical weeds (and I always do), then what does it actually mean when we say "gods exist" in Critical Role?

Disclaimer: this isn't exactly as comprehensive as I would like but what I hoped to articulate in one meta post is more like 2-5 thesis proposals in a trench coat, and I still want the catharsis of yeeting my thoughts into the void so I can finally take a nap. I tried to limit the academia of it all but there's still plenty of jargon, and also a bibliography because I like to show my work. ��

Short version: Godhood/divinity is a semantic lacuna in the CR's worldbuilding. That's not a bad thing, in fact it's kind of necessary. The problem arises when the plot makes gods and godhood a central problem without resolving or even acknowledging the barriers to understanding those concepts, thus leading to hours of dialogue, plot beats, and a supposedly climactic resolution which all amount to nonsense if you look too closely.

As anyone who’s so much as dipped a toe into philosophy will tell you, you gotta define your usage of terms or the discussion is DOA. On all levels of CR text, words like "god"/"the gods"/"divine"/"deity"/etc. are used interchangeably in so many contexts, and the meaning of those terms is only accessible via contextual implication, and the deducible meanings in so many of those contexts directly contradict each other. C3 especially reveals a dissonance between how the mytho-cultural text approaches divinity compared to the contours drawn by the mechanico-ontological text.1

The former in Exandria refers to "the gods" in terms of the Pantheon, a definite collection of individual entities. These otherworldly beings of Tengar, a realm of pure possibility. But "god" is also a rank within D&D's cosmic taxonomy—a rank to which, in Exandria, other entities can rise via the Rites of Ascension. The Matron is a god same as the others; Tharizdun is part of the pantheon but separate, not of Tengar. Maybe a "god," maybe not?

In the mytho-cultural role "the gods" play in Exandria, their being-qua-being is positioned as necessarily plurally defined and unknowable, but nevertheless possessed of immense "cosmic power" befitting their role in the Creation myth and ongoing worship. It makes perfect sense that the in-world mythology is (intentionally) plural and contradictory. However, as others have pointed out,* Exandria's socio-political and cultural worldbuilding vis a vis religion are (less intentionally, I would imagine) rather underbaked, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of what the gods (and religion) mean for the cultural part of mytho-cultural. 

Now let’s get into the latter. Because CR isn't just a narrative—it's a ludonarrative, and the game mechanics have huge ontological implications.1 

In the mechanico-ontological sphere, the gods are positioned as sort of exceptions to the rule, by which I mean, like, we don't get stat blocks for deities. Which again, on its own, makes perfect sense! D&D focalizes the PCs, and so on the purely mechanical level, gods/the divine are subordinate, acting only through proxies. This is necessary for the game-narrative D&D supports. Giving god-level power explicit stats would be a catch-22:

first, it would severely demystify "cosmic power"—to define is to limit, after all. Not doing so can imply an ontology where gods are not confined by mechanics—their powers go beyond, their powers are not only unwritten but unwriteable.

secondly, if the rulebooks were to even attempt codifying mechanical abilities on par with the semantic associations of “god-level” power, then it would be very difficult to maintain either the PCs focal role as agents of the narrative or a fairly balanced game, much less both. We saw this play out in Downfall—the point of the mechanics in the final battle outlined the huge disparity between mortals and gods.

Speaking of Downfall—as well as their mechanic and mythic existences, the gods also exist on the narrative level as characters. As such, we must necessarily consider questions of agency and consciousness in qualifying their existence, but fuck if that isn’t a messy question on the one layer, let alone putting it in the contexts of these shifting, intersecting layers.2 Keeping it brief though, the gods’ narrative agency is subject to similar issues as their mechanical powers.**

Being an exception to the rules of mechanico-ontological existence only holds together so long as divinity remains separate from everything governed by mechanics when mobilized in a narrative. I'm not trying to nitpick—Matt's "NPCs are not governed by the same rules as PCs" MO isn't automatically world-logic breaking, and there's a degree of pedantry on that front that is simply unsportsmanlike. But the problem in c3 specifically is that the plot focalizes the gods and divinity as a construct in such a way that invites—demands even—closer inspection. And the coherence between the structural layers of the narrative breaks down quite quickly under this scrutiny.

It's not like c3 brought this theme out of nowhere. Disproving that there is any essential divide between gods and mortals defines the zeitgeist of the Age of Arcanum. The Matron’s ascension proves that, however the difference is defined, the state of being one or the other is traversable. Exu: Calamity brought this up plenty: Laerryn contends that the distinction is access to the Celestial plane, and seeks to dissolve the difference by achieving large-scale interplanar travel for all of Avalir; Zerxus embodies that so called "divine magic" is not strictly tied to a worshipful relationship with a deity.

In c2, god-or-not is a huge element of Jester's arc with the Traveler. Her build shows that, despite the very different class abilities/powers of warlocks and clerics, there is no mechanico-ontological constraining the distinction between a warlock patron and a god. These are roles defined through a relational existence, not in keeping with any essential taxonomy of substances.1 The Traveller’s position in the cosmic taxonomy as an Archfey has less bearing on the type of magic he can grant than the belief and conviction on the side of the grantee. Similarly, there’s the Luxon in all its mystery—a god but not a pantheon deity? Divine but not a god? The semantics seem less and less significant. 

Now’s probably a good time to remember that CR is a story, and stories are representative constructions wherein any logic other than narrative logic is secondary. D&D as a story engine allows fictional representation to evoke a unique facsimile of materialism because the diegetic laws of physics are established in such detail via mechanics. But still, in a fictional world, metaphysics kind of are physics, and also kind of are semiotics, and both answer to the symbolic. It's fun (for me) to dig into the worldbuilding using philosophy as a framework, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if the philosophy finds gaps so long as the rest of the narrative elements cohere around those gaps.

In c3, they do not. 

Next to c3, c1 gets the closest to leaning too hard against the logical house-of-cards making up cosmic ontology in Exandria due to the importance of the Divine Gate in defeating proto-god Vecna. The Divine Gate is, imo, the material nexus point where all the semantic and ontological contradictions coalesce: it was created so as to specifically block gods from traversing out of the Celestial plane, but is permeable to mortals. Presumably there is some quality or essential substance that decides who can move through it and who can’t—but what is that? What is the substance of divinity, not in the ontological sense but in the materialism of arcana? It’s not something exclusive to denizens of Tengar, because the Matron is also trapped; perhaps “divine” is a misnomer, and it only traps the specific entities designated at the time of its creation, regardless of any shared essential quality? Except no, because Vecna was able to be trapped behind it as well. 

On the flip side, the great thing about the Divine Gate is that it encompasses and narratively justifies that catch-22 of divine mechanics by adding the element of time. The gods used to be un-writably powerful Pre-Divergence, hence their cosmic standing, but the Divine Gate limits their powers of acting in the present, allowing for their mechanical impotence. The Divergence and the Divine Gate incorporate the gods’ disparate ontological states into the history of Exandria, a physical and temporal division that allows for these contradictions to coexist in separate corners of the narrative.*** 

This coheres throughout campaigns 1 and 2—even when c1 started approaching concepts of “divinity” more closely, the plot maintains a separation between mortal stakes and divine stakes. Vecna was Vox Machina’s problem because he posed a threat to mortals; he posed a threat to mortals because he was seeking to achieve god-level power on the mortal plane. We don’t need to know what the “power” exactly means to know it would be a huge imbalance. The threat is nullified by trapping Vecna behind the Divine Gate. We still don’t know what he is vis a vis godhood, but we do know his powers of acting and affecting on the Material Plane are curtailed and as such he’s not mortal’s problem anymore. Compare this to the Bell’s Hells attitudes towards their joint BBEGs of Ludinus and Predathos. Ludinus is the threat on the Material Plane; for much of the campaign, BH cap off cyclical debates on the gods by agreeing that stopping Ludinus is their actionable concern. In the end, however, Ludinus’ rhetoric succeeds in focalizing cosmic concerns: the narrative concludes with the resolution to the questions of ‘what to do about the gods and Predathos,’ reifying Ludinus’ view that the cosmic structure was a problem to be solved (despite the complete lack of supporting evidence to that point). Meanwhile the resolution to the—previously central—question of ‘what to do about Ludinus’ is ‘leave him to his cottage-core Thanos epilogue,’ as though he is not nor has he ever been a primary source of conflict.

I think Predathos is where the irreconcilability of material substance and ontological substance really start to chip away at the foundations of narrative coherence. The “God-eater” must be subject to the same questions re: “so what do you mean by god?” The takeaway is that the Predathos lore is frankly a hot mess of ludonarrative dissonance—perfect illustration for the other side of that catch-22 I was talking about!

 In theory, Matt could have introduced Predathos into Exandrian cosmology without it becoming a narrative problem, had it remained at a sufficient distance from the immediate plot to sit comfortably obscured in the same miasma of metaphysical unknowns as the Luxon or Tharizdun. It’s Ludinus and all the discussion surrounding these cosmic entities that shines a glaring spotlight on the contradictions by way of placing the gods into an ethical framework and using that judgement as a basis for praxis. Moral philosophy is not my area, but as far as it intersects with ontology: it is, to put it mildly, very fucking hard to put a subject under ethical judgement when said subject has no defined being as such that it’s very subjecthood is in question. 

What I’m trying to say is that you hold a guy in a very different ethical standing than the sun. The Dawnfather is both and can be reduced to neither. He is a character in a narrative with agency and personality and relationships at the same time he is a mechanical construction that has no independent existence and extremely limited powers of acting, and all the while he is semantically presumed all-powerful.

*I can’t find the post now to link it but I’m 99% sure it was by @utilitycaster

**For an illustration of (non-game) narratives where a pantheon of gods explicitly exist, are in possession of a certain cosmic power, and are direct narrative agents, see: Homer. I ran out of steam before getting to the full comparison I wanted to make, maybe I’ll get to that in another post, but trust me when I say it has massive implications—like, ‘requires a totally different method of engagement with the work, one which heavily departs from, and at times directly contradicts, literary and pedagogical tradition since at least the early modern period’-level implications.

***In terms of Pre-Divergence depictions, frankly I need to finish rewatching both Calamity and Downfall (possibly multiple times) to properly incorporate Brennan’s contributions to the text into this consideration. Drive-by assessment though, as it pertains to the main campaigns: we see glimpses of what the gods powers of acting can be without the Divine Gate, both with Asmodeus at the end of Calamity and the final battle in Downfall, to use as a comparison. These are useful for when c3 brings up the possibility for an alternate state of affairs while providing no examples for what those alternatives would entail. 

1. Bryant, Levi R. “Substantial Powers, Active Affects: The Intentionality of Objects.” Deleuze Studies 6, no. 4 (2012): 529–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45332014.

2. The structuralism I’m employing follows a number of works and theorists, namely Roland Barthes for lit theory and Richard Schechner for performance theory; the most relevant direct citation is Daniel McKay’s book The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art (2001), which references both of the above and many others.

[cottagecore-raccoon]

Since the Christmas season is upon us, I thought I'd recommend some of my favorite Good Omens fics that put me in the holiday spirit:

What Are You Doing New Year's Eve by theshoparoundthecorner (40k)

“Bit of an odd tradition, if you ask me,” he said, if not to get his mind off the longing that had settled in his chest. Aziraphale shrugged. “I think it’s rather sweet. A kiss for good luck. Seems a nice way to start the year. Very human.” Crowley nodded. “Can’t seem to keep their hands off each other, that lot. Always finding excuses. First it’s mistletoe at Christmas, then it’s luck for the New Year…” “Well there’s no need to be so grouchy about it,” Aziraphale said. “I think it’s lovely.” Crowley’s heart ached a little more as he watched Aziraphale smile up at the glowing numbers on the building above them. Yeah, he thought, lovely. Five times Crowley thought about kissing Aziraphale on New Year's Eve, and one time he did.

Snow Angel by Vagabond (14k)

Human!AU. Aziraphale needs a date to his brother's Christmas party to avoid getting set up with someone. Anathema suggests Crowley, the office bad boy. They go, get snowed in, and have a heart-to-heart that ends in a Happy Christmas. From a prompt: Human!AU: Aziraphale needs a date for family Christmas. He invites the office rebel/bad boy, Crowley.

all i need, darling, is a life in your shape by deadgreeks (14k)

After everything, Aziraphale and Crowley, by unspoken agreement, begin sharing their lives. --- Why? Aziraphale wanted to ask him, why millennia of the way things were, and now this? But while Crowley seemed to have little issue upending every unspoken rule they’d ever written for themselves, Aziraphale was not so flexible, and they had spent thousands of years never quite addressing whatever it was this had stemmed from. Words, Aziraphale had always felt, were for bickering about where to eat for lunch, or hashing out ontological debates, or other trivial nonsense; there was no need to trifle with the imprecision of language, with phrasing and the possibility of being misconstrued, when it came to important matters if the other person simply understood, without needing it said. Six thousand years ago, when Aziraphale had met Crowley on the wall of Eden, watching the first two humans set out to begin the rest of history, something deep within him, more central even than his Grace, had thought, oh, it’s you, and that had been enough for him--for both of them, he assumed--for three millennia. However much he wanted to ask, he didn’t know how. The words simply weren’t there.

Shelter from the Storm by AppleSeeds (13k)

They're coworkers in town for a conference, but a storm has knocked the power out in the hotel where they were supposed to be staying, so Crowley and Aziraphale brave the storm and find their way to a charming little B&B, which has one room available, and it's the honeymoon suite, which only has one bed, and now Aziraphale is injured and needs to be looked after, and oh no now the power's out here too but at least they have the soft flickering glow of the candlelight but OH NO the heating's gone off too and it's getting VERY cold and Newt's the one trying to fix it... whatever will Aziraphale and Crowley do? AKA, what happens when I try to squeeze as many tropes as I possibly can into one story.

The Anon Before Christmas by foolishlovers (67k)

When Crowley’s friend, blogging buddy and business partner Anathema announces her annual Secret Santa Exchange on Tumblr, she is very adamant Crowley should join this year. The old-fashioned (but admittedly compassionate) man he gets assigned to send anonymous messages to every day until Christmas sounds awfully similar to the fussy bookseller that his friends adore, yet Crowley tries to avoid at all costs. But surely his friends would have mentioned if Aziraphale had taken an interest in the Bad Omens fandom as well… right? Or: An Enemies to Lovers Secret Santa Tumblr AU.

I could definitely use some more recs, so reblog with your favorite holiday fics! Self recs more than welcome :)

[max1461]

I've said this before, but unfortunately a not-too-rare thing in philosophy, that really bugs me as a linguist, is people saying "the fact that language works like X tells us Y about the nature of [concept]", and not even bothering to check whether languages other than English and maybe French actually work that way.

Maybe I'm just not understanding the subtleties of these arguments, but I'm thinking of things like the linguistic objection to emotivism about ethics: "if ethical statements express emotional attitudes and not propositions, why can we make seemingly well-formed arguments out of them like we can with propositions?"

This is maybe an unusually strong argument of this general type, because you can claim quite reasonably that what makes a well-formed argument is independent of language. But what makes a seemingly well-formed argument is probably not independent of language, and one possible emotivist response to the objection could be "arguments employing ethical 'propositions' look well-formed but actually aren't".

In the Iroquoian languages kinship terms are verbs. Rather than a noun for "father" there is a verb "to be someone's father". In fact, most things are verbs in Iroquoian languages, really. And you can make all sorts of well-formed verbal expressions using them, although I'm not an Iroquoian speaker so I don't know precisely what they all look like. There's all kinds of nonsense things you could claim if you were an analytic philosopher who had only ever encountered other speakers of Iroquoian (it is fun to imagine alt-histories where such people are common, if you like that kind of thing): maybe "all relationships between things are ontologically a type of action; just look at how we can make all these well-formed action expressions out of them!".

In Japanese, many adjectives are verbs. 青い means "to be blue"; you can put it in the past tense, 青かった "was blue". I'm sure this is very important, and tells us a lot about the metaphysical structure of the world.

[velvetvexations]

“B-but if dipper is transmasc then Mabel is transphobic!” Mabel is being mean to him in all of these examples anyways even if he’s 100% a cis man and even if he’s a trans woman??? Not only that but, shocker I know, trans men in real life deal with transphobia All The Time, and it is in fact unfortunately very relatable to consider a character trans and to acknowledge his peers and family may be varying levels of transphobic to him about it.

“It’s so depressing to think about :((“ yeah that’s? Part of it? That he’s treated the way he is is a huge part of the reason he comes across as transmasc, because it is relatable to transmascs that have had a transphobic sister, or parents, or other family member or peer or authority figure they had to suffer through as a teen

The things believing trans men aren’t oppressed does to your brain smh

TRFs cannot deal with a reality where a little girl misgendering her brother a bit doesn't make her ontologically evil

funnily enough this is also the only time you'll ever see them actually acknowledge it's possible for trans men to experience bigotry

[drdemonprince]

so first off, sorry bc this is super fucking heavy.

re: commonalities between cis and trans men, and that other ask. something I've had to come to terms with is how even as a teenager before I had the concept of transitioning in my head - I still got all of the societal messaging wrt misogyny, etc. I totally benefited from it, even as a woman. I put other girls down. I was the cool chick. I cashed in where I could with it. i was absolutely a chauvinist when I transitioned. I felt inhuman as a woman, but I understood that ultimately that's the way women were *supposed* to be, as much as I wished otherwise. it took a long time to unlearn that.

my personal experience makes me very uncomfortable when I see other trans men talking about gendered socialization, or how overly negative people are towards men as a class. I wonder if they have ever sat down and really reconciled with the way they have, and do, benefit from their gendered position, or if they've convinced themselves they can't be a "bad person" by virtue of their birth sex.

I can't find a nuanced way to talk about this that won't be read in bad faith as essentialist rhetoric. rape culture is the system by which consent violation is normalized, its all the music and books and movies and bad relationships I assumed were normal and romantic as a young adult. I really, really hurt people, and I did it as men are encouraged to do, and as they are rewarded for doing. I found affirmation in hurting people, and it is so fucking easy to do this without even really thinking of it because it's the entire culture you've come up in.

I'm not even talking like, obvious cases here like phyrical domestic abuse & intentional date rape. there are so many subtle boundary erosions, there's weird gray areas around drugs & alcohol, there's attitudes and expectations in established relationships, there's the potential to exploit community for personal gain. there are partners who will fear you, and freeze and fawn and will not tell you "no."

a lot of the "we need a special word for masculine transphobia" types seem to also disavow the possibility that they hold male privelege. but we need to look at that shit, sexual or otherwise. it's scary to see guys who see women talking about it and they knee-jerk shout back "I'm not a rapist" and "not all men." guarantee some of them are, and just aren't aware of it. i was.

Thank you so much anon for this really brave, candid message. I think it's something that a lot of the trans guys crowing in my inbox about how cis men "are the bad gender" need to hear. (yes, someone literally said that to me). Portraying gendered categories, especially ones based on birth assignment!, as ontologically more evil or pure than others sets people up for abuse. Separating cis men out from trans men erases the ways in which trans guys can both leverage power and the ways in which toxic masculine norms are transmitted culturally to everyone regardless of assigned sex at birth. Lots of trans guys are palpably uncomfortable with their power, and can only see that relative to cis men, they experience transphobia and misogyny in greater amounts, and so they presume they must be in a highly victimized category. But they dont ever consider that as men they can and do often wield power over women -- especially trans women -- and they've got to fucking learn how to handle that reality responsibly, which many cis men actually do know how to fucking do. Especially multiply marginalized cis men who have been preyed upon and exploited themselves.

I think it's really powerful to hear you taking ownership of the actions you've taken that have hurt others, and the allure such actions had. Very few people have the courage to look their lower moments in the face and affirm that it's actually a part of them. If we're ever going to stop abusing and talking over women we've got to own up to our shit. I've seen what can happen when men come together to be vulnerable about their struggles, own their wrongdoing, and seek to change -- back when I was working in a men's drug treatment program. We can overcome this shit and take responsibility. But a lot of the birthday boy trans guy squad is incensed by even the idea of owing anything to anyone. Like a lot of MRAs.

[sophie-frm-mars]

Having to question something really fundamental about your reality can be really alarming but also makes you realize who around you hasn't had to do it which is also alarming and is why white queers feel the way they do about white cishets and often at the same time miss how much their whiteness is hiding from them about the world

Like something ontologically destabilizing is traumatic, there's no way around that, even if it's a nominally positive process like "accepting yourself" is supposed to be. So in this way coming out becomes a shared class trauma of queer people. White queers have a range of responses to this, from understanding their trauma as being one of many possible traumas, to thinking that all the traumas of marginalized classes are alike and equal, to acting protectively of their wound, insisting that anyone who doesn't have the same injury as them has never known pain

This tendency is especially intense in baby queers because the wound is fresh. Eventually it'll feel like your cishet friend's house burning down was probably as big a deal to him as realising you were bisexual was to you, and that that's okay. Or it'll be obvious that your friend who suffered serious abuse in childhood or lifelong racism in a white supremacist society or grew up without parents on top of being trans isn't a thing you share, and that being true doesn't mean that you've never shed a tear

[walks-the-ages]

let's play a game.

Biological Essentialism/Determinism can be summed up as, in the most simplified way, "what you are born as intrinsically determines your behavior and destiny".

"Gender Essentialism" uses the exact same framework but with a thin veneer of "trans inclusivity" slapped on top, to say that while your biology does not determine who you are, your gender identity does. Even before you realize you are trans or come out of the closet.

Under the framework of "Gender Essentialism" you're viewed as being X gender and somehow getting all of those 'benefits' from society even before you realize or come out as X gender.

So, some examples:

W is a member of a sentient Fantasy Race who is created to be Ontologically Evil. W being born into this Fantasy Race means that W is destined to be Evil and cruel no matter what and W and the rest of W's race will never ever be able to change their Evil ways.

X is assigned Female at birth. X is expected to be subservient, loyal to a single husband, and want to have children. X is expected to want these things from an early age and can and will be ostracized if X expressed any disinterest in these things or opposite behavior to the things expected of X's gender. (not wanting kids, not being interested in men, etc)

Y is assigned Male at birth. Y is expected to be fierce, strong, and to father many strong sons. Y is expected to want these things from an early age and can and will be ostracized if Y expresses any disinterest in these things or opposite behavior to the things expected of Y's gender. (being physically weak, not minding having daughters instead of sons, not being interested in women, etc)

Z is born into a strict caste system, and is born in the lowest caste. Z is expected to spend Z's whole life serving those 'better' than Z without recompense or complaint, with *no* possible avenue to advance in society due to the caste system.

This is inspired both by the wave of trans inclusive radical feminists who say that

"because trans men are of course men, that means they are inherently evil and oppressive and part of the patriarchy that seeks to tear trans women down."

and also because I've seen too many fantasy and scifi series way too comfortable with making Ontologically Evil Species and strictly enforced Caste Systems where everything is fine and dandy and everyone's happy with their lot in life as long as the ones with a caste system are the

"Beautiful, Pure and Good Elves, because as we all know, Happy Slaves aren't really Slaves, right? And if the Ruler has the Divine Right of Kings and all the little people think that's good, that makes it good, right?" (sarcasm).

If you've ever considering giving your fantasy or scifi race as 'caste' system that determins who does what based on their lineage or their body type and its apparently 'good and natural and everyone loves being their caste and wouldn't have it any other way'

....have you considered that Caste Systems have always been used as tools of oppression and discrimination and this is something real people face, and that we should not be writing "good caste systems" from the comfort of Western Society and perhaps consider the harm in romanticing these very real frameworks of systemic oppression?

Anyways, both in literature and real life:

do you agree that Biological Essentialism, Biological Determinism, and yes, "Trans-Inslusive Gender Essentialism" are ever correct and a good framework for viewing other people?

Or do you agree that this is an absolutely bullshit way to view individuals and that all it does is uphold systems of oppression, especially when it comes to queer people, people of color, disabled people, intersex people and more?

anyways just gonna leave you with this gif.

[ID: a gif from Pokemon the Movie 2000, showing Mew and Mewtwo floating over a battlefield, with Mewtwo having the realization "I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are." End ID]

[sagelasters]

𓇼 Metaphysical philosophers, connection to the mind.

Anne Conway 

Lady Anne Conway was one of the few female philosophers in the seventeenth-century and notable for her legacy in STEM. Her work consisted of the three layer hierarchy, in which she classified them as ‘species', Anne believed that although all creatures are born with a body, the spirit/soul/mind is better and has the possibility to be perfect like ‘God’. She rejects the material world and explains that suffering is a part of spiritual recovery. All creatures have the potential to be ‘perfect’, but nowhere near the perfection of ‘God’, she stated. The context of ‘God’ here can be interpreted in a different lens, it doesn’t necessarily entail religions. The context of so-called creatures are human beings limited by the laws of our Earthly realm. ‘God’ however are the ones who broke free, it is the limitless consciousness, it is the ego. 

Gargi Vachaknavi

Gargi Vachaknavi is a notable Vedic scholar and daughter of sage Vachaknu, she explores the knowledge of metaphysics and what was beyond the body. Gargi explains the journey of ‘koham’ (Who AM I?) and that the inquisitive mind aids us in the revolution of finding ‘soham’ (I AM). She challenged the notions of existence by daring to ask challenging questions like, what was the ‘woven, warp and woof’? Referring to what is beyond human understanding of the world beyond the sky and earth. It is notable that Hinduism seems to be the few religions where divine knowledge can be passed to both men and women equally. Although there is sadly a lack of English source materials, Gargi’s philosophy revolves around the fundamental ontology of the world. 

Plato

Plato is one of the oldest philosophers during the Classical era in Ancient Greece. He is a big believer in Dualism, separating the body and mind into two substances (the mind can live without the body even after death). His most famous theory is allegory of the cave where prisoners trapped in a cave believed that the shadows on the wall were their reality, the prisoners regarded the cave as true and nothing else outside of it exists. Eventually, one of the prisoners steps outside and is faced with true reality or enlightenment. The prisoner returned to the cave and tried to tell his peers, only to meet with hostility because everything they’ve known their entire life was false. The lesson of his allegory was the escape from ignorance, one must question every assumption they have about the reality they call ‘real’. Plato believed that reality is created by the mind. 

Hypatia of Alexandria 

Hypatia was a renowned astronomer, mathematician, hellenist, and philosopher in the Classical era of the Roman Empire. Most of her work did not survive through the test of time, but she was a strong believer in Neoplatonism. Neoplatonism was coined from Plato’s Platonic theory that argues that the world which we experience is only a copy of an ideal reality in which lies beyond our material world. Overall, Neoplatonists believed that happiness and prosperity can exist without an afterlife. Hypatia’s belief in Neoplatonism drove her to seek knowledge in mathematics and astronomy.