#rand (mentioned)

[nat111love]

Are you asking me to dance!

[lenin-it-to-win-it]

i think my favorite parts are

my brother completely failing to identify captain kirk

my sister thinking scotty was spock's dad

my siblings completely independently of one another deciding that any woman they couldn't identify had to be a chef

[vorbarrsultana]

just a boy and his three dads

[facts-i-just-made-up]

Nervous and going out on a date with a coworker I've had a crush on for a year. How should I get to know him better?

Thankfully there are several safe and informative questions you can ask on a first date to get to know someone:

How many moose could you take in a fight? What if they were only the front half of each moose?

How many pizzas have you eaten today? Answer to the nearest integer of multiple of φ or I will leave.

How long have you been on tumblr? Why won't you admit you are on tumblr? What if I said I reblogged your selfie of August 17th 2015, 6:35PM eastern time?

You have lovely teeth, where did you find them?

What character's action figure would you put in your brony-jar?

Why are you leaving? Why did you leave your socks? What do you mean those are my socks? Why would MY socks have little pictures of your parents and siblings on them in spiral patterns?

What is your favorite Ayn Rand novel?

Kidding aside, don't ask that last one it's pretty messed up.

[markantonys]

Mat doesn't need to be in the polycule... just a single night of passion with Rand before/after a pivotal battle when they think they might never see each other again. Can picture Mat boasting at the pub how he "rode a dragon" and "the horn of Valere is the second greatest thing I've blown in my life"

I'M HOWLING your brain is so huge!!!! mat 100% WOULD make those exact brags in every pub he ever went to again, i can practically hear him saying it! rafe take notes!!

[thecouncilarchive]

Everyone shut up right now

[beautiful-destroyers]

"Saidin and saidar, like and unlike, could not mix."

"The male and female halves of the True Source were alike and unalike, attracting and repelling, fighting against each other even as they worked together to drive the Wheel of Time"

— Winter's heart chapter 35

[dramadred]

yeah …. i’m going to need a few days to process this one chief.

[uri59]

Do you still have any doubt the show's intention is to have the viewer hate on Rand or are you a light-blinded fool?

funny how they want to pass Rand as a cheater when the one who was flirting with every boy she met after leaving the Two Rivers and even deemed Rand as unlovable because of his ability to channel was egwene herself 🙄

Rafe Judkins really doesn't know how to make people like the marysuefication of his "favorite character"

[endlesslytired]

to finish this absolute madness I'm dealing with trying to put these together I give you the ones I forgot to add bc I lost them or didn't feel like worked right yet I still like, plus ones that I just had no place for at all. (aka solo topaz stuff)

bonusss, I wrote this very early on into playing hsr and realised this would be really neat to make in the maker. it's not much of a meme but a funny idea on stuff Kafka could have done.

prevus poast:

[feroluce]

Lucid Dreamer (2/2)

part 1

Gepard stalls almost a week before he finally goes out to the safehouse, and it takes him a couple days to find it because Sampo didn't have the time left to be wasn't super specific about the location. But he does find it.

It's pretty bare bones, really. Gepard knows that was probably to be expected, but… It feels crushing, when he realizes there are so few personal things here. It's nothing specific to Sampo. Just some food, some medical supplies. A cot and a heater and a lot of mismatched blankets. Nothing to remember someone by.

But he does find the letters, in a metal box stashed away under the bed.

There are two for him. Three for Natasha, and two for Seele. One for Hook, one for Serval, one for Pela, one for Bronya.

Bronya's is mostly business. They knew each other from the whole Stellaron incident, but not much beyond that, and the incoming catastrophe is a more pressing matter. Seele's is actually two copies of the same letter, and Gepard realizes why when Seele is so angry she rips the first one up without reading it. He gives her the copy a couple days later, and she slinks off without a word.

Pela seems completely normal after hers is delivered, but Gepard knows better than to trust that. The next day, he finds her asleep in bed with Serval, bottles abandoned on the floor, both their eye makeup smeared and running and Pela's glasses horribly smudged and crooked on her face. Serval doesn't read hers in front of him, but she's clingy with Gepard, Pela, and Lynx for quite a while after. She throws herself into her work a lot. She insists the heater from the safehouse is busted and she needs to keep it. It's too dangerous for use by someone who's not an engineer. Might burn their house down or something. Gepard doesn't argue.

Hook's letter is short, with easy to read words. The rest of it is actually a treasure map, and she and the moles spend the next several days running through the Underground, finding hidden candy and toys. Hook asks them when Sampo is coming back, because one of the marbles she found from his map looks green, just like his eyes, and she wants to give it to him. Natasha shoos Gepard out of the clinic before he can even begin to think of an answer.

Natasha refuses to let him see what's in her letters, which ok, fine, he'll respect that. He hears from Bronya who heard from Seele who heard from Natasha herself though that one of the letters was a map and the other a catalogue, with all of Sampo's hidden "warehouses." Gepard promptly marches himself back out to the frontlines, where he can turn a blind eye. If a ton of stolen goods suddenly enters the black market, and if the orphanage and the clinic suddenly have new supplies, well, technically that's none of his business.

Gepard goes to bed, curls up under mismatched blankets and closes his eyes.

He doesn't dream.

One of Gepard's letters was also business, like Bronya's and Natasha's. He and Bronya follow everything meticulously, down to the letter, because there has to be some good to get out of all this, there has to be. Gepard can't let it all be for nothing, it would bury him.

And so the catastrophe passes. Not without casualties, and not without a lot of damage and destruction. But Belobog survives.

And after that, time just kind of…goes on. Gepard has been a part of the Silvermanes since he was old enough to enlist. The Fragmentum had gotten so much worse in the years before Welt sealed the Stellaron. He knows the statistics, it is literally his and Pela's jobs to keep track. He knows when he sees a face everyday in the camps and then it's suddenly gone. He's not unfamiliar with things like grief and loss.

He still catches himself checking the trashcans and the supply crates and soldiers' footprints sometimes, though.

But there comes a night where Gepard goes to bed, holding the mismatched blankets to his face, and he dreams. And it's strange, it's off, it sticks with him. Sampo doesn't look the same. He's thinner. His muscles have atrophied. He looks like how Gepard has seen soldiers after months in the hospital.

The most unsettling difference is there's a scar across the left side of his head, Gepard can see it over his ear, peeking out past his hairline, carving towards his cheek. Sampo is always careful about his face. Gepard once saw him dodge a Fragmentum monster and literally let it cut across his neck just to keep his face clear. He wouldn't let that happen for nothing.

Their actions in the dream itself aren't new. Sampo seems tired, run down and worn out, but he announces his presence with aplomb by lobbing a bunch of smoke bombs off the rooftops and sending his soldiers scrambling. Same shit, different day.

The new part is what he says when Gepard chases him out to the edges of the camp, tackles him into the snow. Gepard pins him to the frozen ground to detain him and Sampo doesn't even fight it, just looks up at him like he's seeing sunrise for the first time in months.

"I'll be home in one week."

[n111ckk]

They’re on call with Faraday

[vorbarrsultana]

happy for people in the wot fandom, who think about siuanraine hot fish shack sex when they hear "on your knees", and not about "i forget nothing, aes sedai," rand said coldly. "i said six could come, but i count nine. i said you would be on an equal footing with the tower emissaries, and for bringing nine, you would be. they are on their knees, aes sedai. kneel!"

[captain-trainor]

I don't ever see anyone talking about just how Danny's trauma affected him. When I read the Power Man and Iron Fist comics I was shocked by how glanced over his problems were sometimes.

The way Danny freaked out when he was hanging in the air by a rope? Getting flashbacks to when his family was betrayed and his father was killed?

When Discus had Iron Fist on the roof and it was related to when Harold Meachum was pushing his father, Wendell Rand, off the mountain. When they literally said, "...as the father died, so, too, will die the son."

The way that after K'un L'un disowned Danny, he wasn't eating properly. Admitting that he doesn't feel like much of anything because of this. K'un L'un was all he had left in life after his parents died, and they took him in, after all.

He mourned his sister that he never even really knew. Tried to end his life when he found out that K'un L'un was destroyed because he had left to go to Earth, only to be marked as impure when he came out of his mind state. The way he would often go silent, bottle his emotions, give the cold shoulder to everyone when he was upset.

It just drives me insane that I never see any talk about any of this, it's just glanced over as if it wasn't important.

[radiantmists]

im an asmodean fan but the concept that this guy-- who spends all of tfoh one loud noise away from a nervous breakdown and just wants to play music-- was one of the dark one's top 13 lieutenants is always SO funny to me.

any member of the modern black ajah would eat him for breakfast. the quality of AoL darkfriends must have been abysmal.

[asha-mage]

WoT Meta: 'Salvation and Rebirth'

One thing that is fascinating to me about The Wheel of Time is that, despite the fact that the two of the biggest influences on Robert Jordan's cosmology are traditional Hinduism and Protestant theology (in general but especially American Protestantism), as near as I have been able to determine on my 20+ re-reads his world has neither a concept of karma or heaven.

Karma- the belief that your deeds in your current life will impact your rebirth in your next life (to vastly simplify)- is very Big Deal in Hinduism (and several other related religions, such as Buddhism- another big influence on Jordan's cosmology) and yet it is entirely absent from anyone's belief system in the WoT. No one seems to attach strongly to the idea that terrible deeds in your past life might be the source of your misfortune in this one, or that the reason to do good things in this life is to ensure a better rebirth next time. People hope for rebirth into a better life all the time, but they treat this as a capricious whim of fate, not something their actions might reasonably impact.

Interestingly though, some characters do subscribe to semi-related idea, not from Hinduism, but Christianity: Godly living. This is the idea that all troubles are self inflicted, and that if you just work hard, live virtuously, and embrace God ('walk in the light') nothing bad will happen to you ('you wont attract the Dark One's attention'). But their is no serious suggestion that this might be tied to past or future lives, and also the series takes great pains to demonstrate that it's wrong. Bad things happen to seemingly good people all the time (including Our Heroes), and if their is rhyme or reason to be found in it, it's usually the result of a working of fate so vast that the characters involved can not perceive it with their limited knowledge and view. This is one of those central themes of the series that I find so compelling and one Moiraine lays out in TDR (and during her confrontation with Logain in the show): The Wheel itself is not good or evil, it just is, and it weaves fate to a design so intricate and so massive that the human lives pulled about within it are given as much care as....well, as the loom gives to a single strand in a tapestry.

In the same vein the idea of a heaven- an enteral paradise, even just an intermediate one between rebirths, is also absent from Jordan's world building. Their is a belief that your soul will return to the nebulous 'Light' upon death if you where a good person and be taken by the Dark One if you where a bad, but no one seems to equate the 'returning to the Light' with being rewarded for good actions with a paradise where all their desires and needs will be meet, and where they get to chill out until, presumably, its time to be reborn. The idea of Heaven- that earthly suffering being rewarded after death with eternal salvation is a Big Deal in pretty much all Christianity but especially Protestantism, which fundamentally is/was about the idea that salvation could not be gate kept by earthly institutions and was solely the providence of God to deny or grant. The closest you get in Jordan's world any kind of afterlife is the World of Dreams, where the Heroes of the Horn (and only the Heroes) await their rebirth. But that can't properly be called a Heaven- not when nightmares walk it, and the conflicts of the living world can easily, and frequently do, seep inside. Not to mention any mortal can reach it without having to die- by just going to sleep.

And which, on that note, the very idea of the Heroes of the Horn is contradictory to the idea of an eternal salvation. In a system where their is salvation after death, the Heroes would be rewarded for their valor and heroism with eternal peace. Instead their reward is endless lifetimes of adventure, which means endless conflict but also endless legends and stories, as well as the chance to keep making the world better, righting wrongs and putting fate back on track. In this way the Heroes of the Horn are clearly inspired by the idea of the Dashavatara from Hinduism- mortal incarnations born specifically right the ship of cosmic order when fate/the world is getting out of whack. But interestingly, in Hinduism the Dashavataras (and the other avatars) are all Gods taking mortal flesh, and so inherently divine. This is an idea, once again, that many people in Jordan's world believe to be true (most notably the Prophet and his followers) but isn't- Rand isn't the Creator in the flesh, or a vessel of the Light. He's just a person, one whose heroic nature and kind heart earned him a place as a Hero of the Horn, but still mortal beneath all else that he is. And that fallibility, that reality that he isn't a God, that he can bled, be hurt, die, even turn to the Shadow- is a core part of understanding Rand's character arc.

One final thought on this (and the thing that started me thinking on the subject to begin with since The Fires of Heaven is where we are introduced to this idea for the first time in the books): there is something incredibly fascinating to me that to the characters in Jordan's world, the highest and most sacred oath you can swear is on 'your hope of salvation and rebirth'- which taken in the lens of our world are two fundamentally opposed ideas. For Christians salvation is eternal- the salvation of the immortal soul in Heaven free from earthly suffering. In Hinduism, rebirth by definition means continuation on earth, a chance to redeem past mistakes, to better the world, to make new good karma that will enrich your fate.

And yet, the characters in Randland don't view them as contradictory (or if someone does we never hear them voice that thought). Which makes me suspect that salvation and rebirth refers to the Prophecies of the Dragon and the hope they will come true. Salvation in this context is not the salvation of the soul, but the salvation of the world, the wheel, the pattern, fate- saved to continue on into eternity. Rebirth refers the hope you will get to be reborn again- which would only be denied to a person should the Dark One triumph and remake the world....or maybe even the hope that the Dragon will be reborn to save the world, to bring salvation to earth.

That would mean the oath came from a time when the Prophecies where fresh and new, before False Dragons tore countries asunder in wars and before hatred and fear of the Dragon had time to embed itself.

But by then, as often happens we are told, the origins, the why, where forgotten, even the tradition remained, and so no one realizes that, to this day, the most sacred of oaths, including the Three Oaths of Aes Sedai, are sworn in the name of the Dragon and on the hope of his coming.