#phantastic beasts

[thenightling]

“The Land”

“Your land has been home to many since your day.” - Morpheus to Alianora in The Sandman: A Game of You.  As The Land holds striking similarities to a popular form of coming-of-age fantasy story that means within the lore of The Sandman that the skerry (island) in The Dreaming known as “The Land” may have also been the realms of: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking glass Lilith and Phantastes by George MacDonald.    Babes in Toyland  The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz / L. Frank Baum’s Oz books and The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (Same continuity) The Adventures of Peter Pan The Chronicles of Narnia (Mostly just The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, before the Christian allegories became too blatant) The Phantom Toll Booth  The Company of Wolves The Thief of Always  Labyrinth (Jim Henson’s Labyrinth) The 10th Kingdom Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) Beauty and the Beast AKA  La Belle et la Bête (The novel is not actually set in France) Halloweentown  Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (which is Underland instead of Wonderland) Over the Garden Wall  Wonderland Oz Neverland   Narnia  Toyland  The Labyrinth / The Underground  The Summer Isle  The House of Always  The 9 Kingdoms Halloweentown Underland The Enchanted Forest  The Unknown There are more but you get the idea. Pretty much every fantasy story where a child (usually a girl) goes on an adventure of self-discovery and growth in a surreal fantasy world full of odd characters may well be Barbie’s The Land in The Sandman.   

[the-gory-gazette]

New Classes Have Heads Spinning in Excitement

July 31, 2012

It's no secret that Headless Headmistress Bloodgood plans to announce new classes to the course lineup this fall, but what exactly can student bodies lurk forward to? According to our sources, the skulltastic new selection will span from the sciences to the arts (and every gory detail in between). It's been said some classes have been locked in the coffin for years, their syllabuses being perfected with the most caring third eye.

Here's a deeper look at what was just released! Pick up your copy of the final list at the front office and make sure to sign up early to get the beast class schedule!

Into the Abyss Algebra

This course is designed to assist student bodies in successfully learning the mysteries behind Abyss Algebra. Monsters will be taught using a variety of methods, preparing them for the torture chambers of standardized math tests that await them at the end of the year.

Other Worldly Science

This course is for student bodies that have a desire to become familiar with the supernatural, the things that go bump in the night and techniques we use to observe them. Each week students will have one midnight session at Ogre Observatory. Monster High will provide transportation to and from the observatory. Activities will focus on (1) Practical mythology from the standpoint of understanding the motions of monsters across time and space, (2) Telescopes and their use, (3) Nature of supernatural objects, which are observable with the unaided eye or small telescope.

Oracle Journalism

This course is the required introductory course for student bodies who want to contribute to the Monster High Gory Gazette. Through a combination of required readings, creative exercises, peer critiques and critical discussions, monsters will learn to develop both their third eyes as well as their sixth senses and will come to form a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of oracle journalism.

Phantom Photography 101

Building on methods and tools explored in Chop-shop for Photographers, this course offers an introduction to Phantom Photography techniques. Through demonstrations and readings, students learn to make slimy selection and color correction, scream of the crop editing and principles of creepology that are utilized in the photography process. Emphasis is on the development and exploration of a phantastic vision and the creation of a diabolical portfolio. Must be a Tell Tale Arts and Sciences student to enroll.

[lucy-midnight]

Main Masterlist.

One Direction

Liam Payne

Supernatural

Dean Winchester

Sam Winchester

Jensen Ackles

Jared Padalecki

The Originals

Elijah Mikaelson

Marvel

Steve Rogers

Bucky Barnes

AG!Peter Parker

Billy Russo

Criminal Minds

Spencer Reid

Shadow and Bone

The Darkling

9-1-1

Buddie (Buck x Eddie)

Phantastic Beasts

Theseus Scamander

The Chronicles of Narnia

Prince Caspian

Miscellaneous

Ben Barnes

Matthew Gray Gubler

Chip Taylor

Taron Egerton

Eggsy Unwin

Tom Holland

[angedemystere]

2022 Reading Tier List

For my first reading year with a planned list, I managed to finish 29 books. Not bad all things considered! I definitely fell way short of the original goal, but that’s ok - I’m happy to keep working on building up my reading pace, mostly in terms of consistency.

Here’s a slap-dash tier list of my reads (no particular order within the tier):

S Tier - The Name of the Rose, The Harrowing of Hell, Surprised by Joy, Pont-Au-Change Resurrections

A Tier - Norse Mythology, Kin, The Green Knight, Beasts and Beauty, Empire of Wild, One Corpse Too Many, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, The Bjorkan Sagas, The Light of the Midnight Stars, The Stone Child, Rendezvous with God

B Tier - Between Burning Worlds, The Prose Edda, The Book of Longings, Germania, The Dante Club, Absolution by Murder, Daughter of Cana, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, The Goddess of Nothing at All, Phantastes

C Tier - Moriarty, Shadow in the Empire of Light, Shadow of the Gods, No Gods No Monsters

D/F Tier - N/A

Yeah I honestly don’t think I read a bad book this year, or at least didn’t finish one. This tier list is of course entirely subjective and accounts for both what I consider to be strong or weak storytelling and what I personally enjoyed a lot or enjoyed less. Let me know your thoughts!

[monsterhighdiaries]

Porter's Haunted Diary - 5/12

I've already earned additional chains. 3X more! I couldn't resist ghost-spray painting the howlway where I spent study howl cleaning. I designed an image of a mop wrapped in chains, and the mop was trying to sweep away the 3 hall moanitors. Not to beast, but I thought it was phantastic! When an idea comes to me, I have to paint it. It's instinctive. They don't call me Paintergeist for nothing! But those 3 moanitors have no appreciation for art and no sense of humor, so they each gave me chains. It bites, but I think receiving triple the chains all at once is a new school record, so at least I have that. Always look on the fright side, ya know?

[bakathief]

Black Feather scene, written by @mintchocolateleaves

Had a hard time finding it on my tumblr so here it again. You can read the story here!

[sympathischeufos]

OP, just yesterday I was talking with a partner about how in their opinion, the "Phantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" movies had a weak cultural impact on the Harry Potter fandom because it was just movies and not books. They said that a movie cannot be picked apart as easily as a book, there is less "reading between the lines", less re-consuming the content, etc. Which kinda ties in into what Neil said - I think it's easier to develop an obsession with a character when your first experience with them is individual (I have zero scientific background on this apart from personal experience).

Hello Mr. Gaiman! Question about your experience writing both novels and their TV adaptations,

In terms of peoples' reactions, the cultural affects and just generally the way your works resonate with people, have you found writing for TV to be more impactful/rewarding? As an aspiring novelist I worry that, with books, people just read em, go "oh that was neat", put em down and continue on with their lives, while TV seems to stick more with people and inspire a community that continues long after they've finished the story.

Like with Good Omens, yeah the book was popular, but there sure weren't cosplays and works of fan art and groups of people visiting the real locations from the story and so on before the TV show came along and told the exact same story. That's not to say a story only exists to cultivate those things, but... it's still nice!

I just don't want anything I write in future to collect dust on a shelf without having left as much of a mark on a person as it would have if it were made in a visual medium. I wanted to ask if you think this is truly the case or not in your experience, and if you had any words of encouragement?

I think book fans are just as dedicated and as moved as TV fans, often more so. But they have individual experiences while TV experiences are shared.

[sokayisaidiot]

Okay hear me out!

I know I have nothing to say: but Phantastic Beasts and where to find them! With DanPlan

Jay with his millions of pets from the scp as Newt Scamanders

And Hosuh as Tina Goldstein

Jocat maybe as Jacob

Sorry QwQ

[dailydenne]

Niff Niff Niff

[theleftistdreamer]

Some cultural fu**ing industry here

[castingmysilver]

And here comes the Doylist reasoning—

Who was Lilith to CS Lewis himself? What did it evoke for *him*, to insert that name as an explanation of his villain? Why did he want the Beavers and, through them, the Human protagonists to believe she had anything to do with Narnia? We know as a hard fact that Lewis adored the Victorian Scottish novelist and sometimes fantasy-writer George MacDonald. He has been quoted as saying the man’s book Phantastes “baptized his imagination,” he gave MacDonald’s Curdie books to Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength as an easy comfort-read in Ransom’s house while she was recovering from her interrogation at the hands of the N.I.C.E., and he even wrote MacDonald into his afterlife supposal The Great Divorce as a visionary guide to teach his self-insert character about Heaven and the adjacent lands. And George MacDonald wrote an entire novel on the topic of Lilith. In fact very arguably, the image of George MacDonald’s Lilith is The White Witch’s literary and spiritual ancestor even if she weren’t a biological one.

MacDonald’s Lilith is an unjust ruler and enchantress, white as ivory with jet-black hair. She lures and deceives the protagonist until her nature is revealed along with the fact that she serially kills any children born in her domain, because of a prophecy that a child will defeat her. She has her differences from The White Witch’s particular form of villainy: her commonly-used powers include shapeshifting into beasts, she drinks blood like a vampire, her deception is seductive like that of the Lady of the Green Kirtle rather than based on authoritative persuasion and magical food, and at least part of her powers are heavily implied to come from a devilish contract. Still, when you hold her up next to The White Witch, you can see the family resemblance.

There is another thing about the Lilith novel as well, which seems to me to be very relevant to any Watsonian explanation of that name appearing. Lilith, like The Chronicles of Narnia, deals heavily in the concept of other Worlds or Realms where bizarre things can happen because the local rules of nature run differently, and with those individuals who can walk between them. In the Lilith system of how nature or magic runs, normal Earth-Humans cannot generally walk between Worlds at will. The mysterious guide-character Mr. Raven tells the protagonist that he can’t recognize doors, although they are there; that “You know nothing about whereness. The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home,” and that “You have stumbled in, and may, possibly, stumble out again. Whether you have got in UNFORTUNATELY remains to be seen.” He also explains that he himself can walk between the Worlds at will, but that he doesn’t visit ours much just because it isn’t currently to his taste.

So much for human travel; it seems we’re all doomed to stumble around through the “chinks and chasms” as Aslan calls Mr. Raven’s Doors Out and Doors In in Prince Caspian—but in Mr. Raven we have at least one example of someone for whom finding and stepping through the Doors when so desired, and understanding the whereness of a new place by making himself at home there, is a simple matter. And since Mr. Raven does turn out to be, among his other identities, our Adam, it’s very possible that Lilith as a fellow-member of the firstborn among God’s mortal creations would have similar capabilities if she really put her mind to it; and if not, there’s the question of whether she could find a workaround via her contract-magic. Either way, I consider it very probable that George MacDonald’s particular take on Lilith, the one who almost definitely influenced the creation of The White Witch in CS Lewis’ head, could break containment from her current homeworld.

So far so good, or so bad as the case may be for innocent bystanders! The case is very strong for The White Witch’s relation being possible, but what about Empress Jadis of Charn, the superior, raging, hubristic walking existential threat to the survival of civilization, who somehow became The White Witch after being heavily nerfed by traveling through a series of unfamiliar Worlds where her localized magic power was stripped away? Was she a complete retcon of Lewis’ first thoughts on The White Witch’s origin story, and even if so, is there any way that Lilith could still be compatible with Jadis of Charn?

"Jadis, George MacDonald's Lilith, Mr. Beaver's ancestry theory, and the corruption of the dynasty in Charn."

"Jadis, George MacDonald's Lilith, Mr. Beaver's ancestry theory, and the corruption of the dynasty in Charn."

We have in The Chronicles of Narnia what seem to be two very different origin stories for Jadis, the White Witch and enchantress-tyrant of Narnia. The Beavers tell the curious Pevensie children, who ask whether she is Human: "She'd like us to believe it. And it's on that that she bases her claim to be Queen. She comes of your father Adam's first wife, her they called Lilith. And she was one of the Jinn. That's what she comes from on one side. And on the other side she comes of the giants."

In the prequel-story The Magician's Nephew, originally not published until near the end of the series, we learn that she was the destructively victorious final ruler of the ancient world of Charn, brought into Narnia by tragic accident by the boy who grew up to become Professor Kirke. I have heard it proposed before that in the Doylist, Lewis hadn't fully decided what he was doing with her yet when he wrote Beaver's lines; and perhaps in the Watsonian sense Beaver was passing along a dark rumor popular among the Narnian resistance, with no real understanding of the truth behind the Witch. But I personally like to believe that the two origins are not actually completely incompatible.

It is at this point that my Doylist and Watsonian reasoning start to blur. Mr. Beaver, and the hypothetical resistance against the Witch in Narnia, had no good reason to know the Witch’s origin. The bit about the Giantish blood, at the very least, seems unlikely given the context of The Magician’s Nephew; I like to think it was an assumption based on Jadis having come down from the North where the Giants lived, within living memory for several of the more long-lived Narnian creatures such as the Trees. At the same time though, Mr. Beaver had no good reason to know about Lilith at all, unless she had some form of real existence within the Narnian universe. The only known Humans in Narnia up until that point in history had been, as far as we know: two young English children with little literary background other than adventure-stories and whatever they had taught to them in Victorian schools; one grown-up and very odd uncle with reason to have some understanding of the weird and unnatural, but who spent most of his time in Narnia frantically trying to avoid an existential crisis and avoiding talking to the Beasts there; two very decent and very working-class grown-up Humans who were probably Anglican Christian if anything religious before encountering Aslan, and who I’m not sure seem the sort for collecting semi-obscure myths and legends about extrabiblical figures; and arguably, depending on the timing of the Telmarines’ arrival, somewhere in the world of Narnia a band of rowdy pirate-relations and kidnapped islander women. No Human tradition Narnia had access to told Mr. Beaver about Lilith. But why mention her name in association with The White Witch?

[angelavd14]

2020: 4

My trip to London was successful, I brought 7 beautiful books and I am looking forward to reading them. It might take a while until I get to them though as my tbr list is still very long... But I was really happy this morning to find the right place for them on my book shelves :)

I bought:

A Tale of two cities by Charles Dickens (after a visit of the Charles Dickens     Museum which I can absolutely recommend)

Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (The Starless Sea is still on its way, apparently there was a problem at bol.com, very frustrating)

Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls by Maco Polo (It can accompany my clothbound edition of The Travels)

The Vegetarian of Han Kang

Before the coffee gets cold by Toshikanzu Kawaguchi

In Love with George Eliot by Kathy O’Shaughnessy

Death in a Destert Land by Andrew Wilson

And I finally bought a Niffler <3

I did not take Kader Abdolah to London because it is so heavy, but after I bought it I started reading the Vegetarian while I was still there and could not sleep. I am on page 109 at the moment and luckly it is not as disturbing as I was afraid as it might be until now...

[alicebeautifulwonderland-blog]

[marillian-flowers]

It's event time in Wizards Unite and look what a cutie I found at my home?! So beautiful!😍🦄

[mimoris-art]

My beautiful Annabeth from an ouwn story in the Harry Potter universe 💖

[jen-derless]

HP-verse headcanon

Because the second Phantastic Beasts movie recently came out on DVD etc: on one hand cute Newt is my standard favorite example for nontoxic masculinity, on another hand I'm drawn to headcanon him as agender - but don't want to make it look as nontoxic masculinity can't be found in masculine a identifying, so maybe a compromise on a spectrum: Agender masculine / demiboy? And speaking of spectrum, the autistic headcanon - after the first movie I was honestly not really a fan of that but suddenly in the second one I could more see it in him. If there could be a connection between all mentioned, maybe some autistic traits make him being more connected with nature's creatures than societal constructs like gender expectations.