#saving it or destroying it they’re built for it

[punkpandapatrixk]

🌟Blessings Rolling In throughout 2025 ♦︎ Timeless Pick A Card

Labyrinthia: When a government begins to falter, its people descend to pitiful depths… Perhaps this is what the fall of a nation looks like from ground level.

Clarissa: They’re as much victim as anyone else… Victims of the twisted chaos in this kingdom…

— conversation after defeating a band of bandits at Fallen Fowl Swamp; Wild Arms XF

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

The whole world right now, apparently, is going through a massive Dark Nights of the Soul. It is apocalyptic for a lot of people…but… It is ideal. The Apocalypse essentially denotes the end times for the ruling class ha ha and indicates a new era of liberation for Mankind. Well, in reality it's a bit more complicated than that...but let this perspective suffice for the time being. Normal peeps shouldn’t fear the end times, but uhm, not—not saying this with a religious spirit🙃

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Charlton: Force can destroy a nation, but it doesn’t make building one any easier, much less maintaining order once it’s built.

Rupert: Is that so?

Charlton: It is the ability of the princess mediums to connect with the Guardians that keeps Elesius stable and strong. The very existence of that power sends an unmistakable message to the people about who is the ruler, and who is being ruled. Clear stratification based on one’s inherited gifts is a tradition that has preserved Elesius since the time of our forefathers.

Edna: But now that system is breaking down.

— conversation about the importance of princess mediums (pssst High Priestesses) of the Kingdom of Elesius; Wild Arms XF

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

An Apocalypse is happening for the ruling class, but unfortunately—and hopefully soon enough you understand this—such a destruction is just the very thing they want to happen; all so they can build anew upon the ashes of the deconstructed establishment. In reality, it’s an ugly Hyper Game of which rules most peeps can’t even begin to comprehend.

But then…if the normal peeps are losing either way, what’s the Game Plan? Is there even one? There is something you can try to comprehend for the time being: to make apolitical of every decision you make in this world.

The problem with Gen Z (Sagittarius Pluto generation, which is 9th House aenergy, which is the House of Philosophical Foundations for Politics) and every other wokist from every generation, is that you make politic of every single thing that you do or think. You think it's the right thing to be this much politically awake in today's world, but with most people's level of exposure (or lack thereof) to real truths of Mankind's history... this is actually how you become a most effective generative pawn to the ruling class.

What if the most effective way to ‘dissolve the Matrix’ is to ignore its social engineering? ha ha

This year, what if you chose to live fully in your own Zero Point Awareness? From a plane of consciousness that feels most natural to you, when you're most in your element, true heartfelt Creation begins. Before you can save somebody else, you gotta make sure your bed is comfy and all the time tidy. Let the blessings roll up like tidal waves to pamper you this year, babe. You've survived too much all on your own~♦︎

This year, it's about YOU~\`★_★`/ Commence the personal miracle~!!

mind barricade: Apocalyptic Survivor Subliminal by DrVirtual7

evolution: Your Consciousness Can CHANGE Your Genetics by Dr Bruce Lipton

deck-bottom: I The Magician, Silver Astrologer (John Dee), Priestess of Success

[PAC Masterlist] [Patreon] [Paid Readings] [buymeaboba]

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 1 – Prosperity Abound, Beauty All Around

field: ★Green Aventurine Frequency★(Luck, Money, Wealth, Joy, Good Fortune, Abundance) by Quadible Integrity

direction of sounds – V The Hierophant

First of all, do you have a strong Saturnian/Capricorn placement? Or maybe you’re right in the middle of a Saturn Return period upon reading this? Or, it could be that you’re freshly out of a heartbreaking, bone breaking Saturn Return moment that almost killed you! Yeah, whichever the case, with The Hierophant being here, and it being a major arcana, know that whatever hardship is or has transpired in your Life was sorta…designed that way to strengthen the foundation of your incarnation this time.

It's because you have a massive, very important mission with your incarnation—what with having two major arcana back-to-back. You, are, intended to be very powerful and abundant in this lifetime. Some of you reading this are probably on your way to becoming some kind of a public figure. It could be anything, really. Influencer or thought leader or celebrity of some sort. You’ve known it since you were a wee kid that you were meant for something much, much, much bigger than the mundane Reality you were born into~♪

And when you consider that, maybe, just maybe, your path was that much harder, that much more restricted, because the Universe needed to test your innate goodness—whether or not you’d fall victim to the world’s greed and evil whatsoever. But you being YOU~ My gosh, you proved yourself, didn’t you? That in spite of everything, you’ve remained pure of heart and intent. I see you’ve devoted so much of yourself to the service of Love and Light. You know you were put here to make the world a better place with whatever natural talents you were bestowed with~ \`★_★`/

lights of intent – III The Empress

And so, what’s next? What’s in store this year for all of you powerful Souls in the world? If you’ve been around, maybe you’ve heard or read other readers say: ‘You’ve shifted paradigm!’ Or something along the lines of: ‘You’ve jumped timelines!’ Yes, all of this is very much true for you! I get this feeling that you may have felt ‘different’ in the sense that your manifestations are trickling in more effortlessly. The way that you work; the way that you walk; the way that you engage in your day-to-day tasks; even the way that you breathe and how your body feels…somehow everything is more aligned, effortless, and you feel safe.

You have manifested a world of your own design, babe~ All this time, all these painful years, you were building a world of your own ideal, brick by brick, with what little guidance you heard from your Higher Self and team of Spirit Guides. Within your Team and Crew are your Cosmic Ancestors who are making sure that none of that devotion goes to waste. You have to have your abundance and happy ending lest it beats the purpose of you being born. Got it~? Where your abundance and financial security are concerned, this quote sums it best for you this year:

‘I know why most people never get rich. They put the money ahead of the job. If you just think of the job, the money will automatically follow. This never fails.’ – Hedy La Marr

Your greatest blessing this year, if we could sum it up with this major arcana, is the freedom to engage in whatever creative pursuit is aligned with your Highest Intended Destiny. With The Hierophant accompanying this Pile, I’m sure you’re amongst those who’ve worked for a very long time for the manifestation of this great blessing. With that said, know with every single cell of your body that you deserve the peace and ease you’ll be swimming in this year~★

Highest Intended Action �� 7 of Pentacles

I know that you know in your heart of hearts that this calm period is at best temporary—and that’s exactly why it’s exciting~☆ Where you are right now upon finding this reading, you’re already this wee close to a BIGGER manifestation what will propel you into the spotlight (do you see the lights shining upon this man in the card?) and with that, some rest period is needed just because you DESERVE it!! Do you have any idea the load of your spiritual work that’s given birth to this new timeline for a chunk of Mankind? I don’t even think you give yourself enough credit, boo!♥︎

This year, you’re being prepared for a call or an opportunity that could be classified as your main Soul Mission—if there ever was such a thing ha ha Souls usually carry a multitude of missions with their incarnations, especially the very, very advanced Souls. But anyway~

Of all the piles, this one is the most varied in terms of what kinds of blessings are rolling in for you. This is because your blessings are highly individually specific to the spiritual work you’ve done on your terms. What’s certain though, is that an element of destined orchestration is huge at play for you. So that’s literally saying that there’s practically nothing you need to do at this point in your Life. All that’s left for you to do is enjoy your peace, abundance and creativity~\`★_★`/

PROMISES FROM THE UNIVERSE🔻❤️

catching the Future Express – Green Magus (John Dee)

on my way to Destiny – Priestess of Contemplation

Access full reading + cards on Patreon🌸

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 2 – All Shackles Dissolved, an Uncontrollable Revenge Glow-Up!

field: ★"The Elite" Mind Control Detox★ 264.377 GHz + 439.3920 MHz + 1111Hz + 139.6Hz by Quadible Integrity

direction of sounds – Ace of Pentacles

Ow yeah, baby~! Of all the piles, yours indicates the strongest a real physical glow-up~★~ This could be in the form of a beauty glow-up, but for many of you it also involves financial/career glow-up, house/apartment glow-up, country/city glow-up, and many other forms of real-living improvements that I feel you’ve been manifesting for quite a while! Honestly, you’ve worked so hard on this, practically all by yourself, with a tonne of shadow work!

Some of you probably resonate with having ghosted so many people so as not to get distracted by their low-quality frequencies and opinions. You hustled in secret, and you hustled motherfuckingly hard. Your health—mental and physical—is returning and improving this year! That’s the number one blessing you’re totally receiving this 2025~\`★_★`/

I’m hearing: when your finances and living situations get better, it would be wise to start ‘investing’ in higher-quality produce and eat cleanly and healthily. What is healthy for you may differ from the common narrative, so you may need to R&D yourself the ‘healthy dietary habits’ that work for you by reading and learning a lot! Naturally, as your diet gets cleaner and ‘healthier’ for you, it’s only a given that your physical beauty and energy improve as well. Babe, that’s just logic~😉

lights of intent – XV The Devil

If this is your main pile and you resonate with having struggled with health in some way—be it mental, physical, emotional or spiritual or all at once—this would do you good to acknowledge that some bad spells had been sent your way by some demonic entities. I really mean demonic as in the intents—the negative thought forms—were so bad, so evil, they sought to (possibly) even murder you.

This could’ve been done by an ex-lover, ex-fake ass friend, even relatives and ‘family’ members. Yeah, we don’t call those ‘family’ in this household but you know what rings true for you~♦︎ There’s also a possibility of an envious ex-worker or even…some of you will know this for yourself if this is your message…you could’ve been specifically targeted by some negatively-polarised e.l.i.t.e groups, yeah? Whichever the case may be for you, this year is all about a much deeper purging of the layers of negative effects from all this karmic trauma bullshit.

You’re guided to further separate your Reality from those who’d burn in the 3D-hell version of Earth, aight? Closing karmic cycles comes in…cycles LOL I feel that so much of your karmic burden wasn’t even yours to begin with. But your Soul may simply have volunteered to be born under such circumstances to end all forms of curses and break bloodline chains for many Humans in this world. It is a great, noble sacrifice, so your Cosmic Ancestors would like you to acknowledge that~!

Highest Intended Action – 6 of Cups Rx

You may want to check out other piles or readings on this blog if you want to truly get a sense of what kinds of ‘blessing’ or ‘action’ are available to you at the time you’re reading this, but for the most part, if this is your main pile, I’m getting the sense that you’re being guided more towards protection and the shedding of past karmic ties before you can even jump to your next chapter of Life~\`★_★`/

Any possession that you’ve had for a long time, if it doesn’t aenergetically feel good anymore to be wearing/using it, get rid of it. We’re Kondo Marie-ing shit in this household this year! Where it’s possible, get rid of old things that have some emotional or karmic ties to your Old Reality—they have no place in your superfluously abundant future, OK? If the items/gadgets are still good enough to be used by someone else, try this ‘burning ritual’ so you don’t accidentally pass on negative aenergy to the next recipient:

Imagine the item(s) burning in Violet Flame and make a clear intent to never have any connection to any past person or place tied to that item(s). If you’re burning a memory or a place, burn that motherfucking bridge, burn the whole city or house in your mind’s eye. This way, you will never be pulled to that bandwidth of Reality anymore~♥︎ Honestly, you can do whichever ‘cleansing ritual’ you know of that works for you—the intent is the KEY~★

PROMISES FROM THE UNIVERSE🔻💚

catching the Future Express – Gold Physician (Hippocrates)

on my way to Destiny – Priestess of Ritual

Access full reading + cards on Patreon🌸

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 3 – They All Knew You’d be This Big, That’s Why They Cursed

field: ★Leadership Gene rs4950★ [Advanced Genetics] by Quadible Integrity

direction of sounds – XIX The Sun

When I tap into your aenergy, there’s this notion that dings clearest as a crystal: Child of Light~★ You are an Ancient Soul with immaculate purity and massive powers. Many individuals within your ‘family unit’ knew of this since your birth. Maybe there were unusual—cursed or miraculous—happenings and events surrounding your birth. Immediately, you already had opps since you were practically a wee baby. There were individuals who saw your ancientness and instantly felt threatened by your immense wisdom.

It could be that the ‘family unit’ you were born into dabbled in black magick or some underground criminal shit of sort, and they knew that one day, one way or another, you were going to discover and uncover their bullshit—effectively disintegrating their entire ‘empire’ made of pure manure. There’s some dark shit in that sick family unit like maybe there was an ancestor who went mad or there was somebody who was a serial killer or a drug dealer, what have you. The aenergy not only is bleak but incredibly dark and evil.

It's unbelievable that a Soul as pure as you would sacrifice your Light by integrating into a bloodline like this tsk tsk… Are you a Blue Ray Starseed? he he you could be. Anyway, some fucks within that insane family unit knew that one day, a power—and beauty, and intelligence, and purity—as witnessed exuded by you would make you VERY big and important on a community scale, even world scale. They hated that. They wanted that for themselves ugh…

lights of intent – King of Wands Rx

Do you daydream a lot, luv? If you feel that you often drown in fantasies, like excessively to a point where you find it hard to even cope with physical Reality, I’d like you to understand that it’s only an effect of never truly living a Life of your ideals. Your Heart is yearning to dwell in the Higher Timeline you know deep, deep down you’re meant to traverse along~♦︎ And yes, you’re absolutely capable of living the life you can’t stop thinking about. Aaand…that’s where your opps came in, right?

Not sure if you’re aware of this yourself at this point in time but all of the passion and intelligence that you are, those are the very things they never wanted you to nourish. But goddam, silly them—they underestimated your sheer willpower! Your opps are insanely illogical; as much as they wanted your power for themselves, they didn’t want you to ever realise your true potential. It’s such petty envy, all things considered. But hey, all of this is in the past if you’re tuning into this aenergy as your main pile~★

You’ve uprooted yourself from that false Reality where your Light wasn’t loved. But you were just doing your Lightwork there akin to training at a military camp. And you survived, goddamn hoe, you’re a Dark Feminine Goddess. This year, or whenever you find this reading, you’re fully grown and ready for your greatest Soul Purpose for being born at this passage of time~ Know that this whole blueprint was created by not only your Higher Self but also all of the Cosmic Ancestors who wanted to bring down this dark bloodline. In the grand scheme of everything, hoe is you da VIRUS within their System LMAO

Highest Intended Action – 10 of Cups Rx

The family unit you were part of, whether you were born or brought into it, operates like a cult. This is an entirely ‘insane family unit’—yes, it’s a thing. I see feminine figures akin to the members of Bene Gesserit from DUNE. These were most likely femcel mothers, aunts or grandmas that were operating like cult leaders. Before we continue, try to understand that we’re talking about ‘femcel psychology’ from a sociology perspective, which can be an entirely different discussion from ‘girls that ain’t getting laid’ XD

Check out Exoticals United on YouTube to learn valuable gems of societal observations~\`★_★`/

Anyway, these dusty ass femcel fucks loved power with a sick mind and when they saw your birth, they couldn’t stand the potential of THE FUTURE LEADER THAT YOU ARE DESTINED TO BECOME. They saw and knew that when you grow up, you’d have the natural talent to attract a large audience—babe, if this is your main pile, I KNOW you’re gorgeous for daaays~♥︎ The way you attract attention by your natural beauty and sweetness, my gosh, they sought to destroy that very thing which they covet: people’s admiration!

It was apparent to them since your birth or at least from when your puberty started, that your greatness comes from the ‘other side’ of the bloodline. By that alone, they knew they could never be what your Ancestors were preparing you to become. Your superior DNA from the ‘other side’ appeared like bright wings from heavens which they knew would overshadow their ‘cult-like’ influences on everything good and harmonious which they sought to destroy!

PROMISES FROM THE UNIVERSE🔻💙

catching the Future Express – Green Astronomer (Nicolaus Copernicus)

on my way to Destiny – Priestess of Prosperity

Access full reading + cards on Patreon🌸

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

[PAC Masterlist] [Patreon] [Paid Readings] [buymeaboba]

[darkmajden]

[honourablejester]

I’m realising as I browse around that I really love lore when it comes to ttrpgs, games and game worlds. And by that I don’t mean I like to obsessively learn lists of dates and wars, and the names of leaders of factions, I mean …

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.

Lore is awesome. And weird lore is even more so. Heh.

[reasonsforhope]

"A recent World Meteorological Organization report called heat waves the “deadliest meteorological hazard” from 2015 to 2019, affecting people living on all continents, and setting new national heat records in many regions.

‍Canada’s top weather event in 2021 was British Columbia’s record-breaking heat, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. The temperature in Lytton, B.C., hit 49.6 C on June 29. The following day a wildfire destroyed 90 per cent of the town, killing two people and displacing 1,200 others.

Heat waves also exacerbate existing health issues, including cardiovascular and respiratory disease. They’re associated with increased hospital admissions, psychological stress and aggressive behavior, as well as excess mortality.

During heat waves, the highest temperatures are often found in urbanized areas. Urbanization is almost always associated with an increase in paved, impervious areas, and often a decrease in greenery. Concrete and asphalt roads, and other built materials readily absorb, store and release heat, raising city temperatures, a phenomenon called the urban heat island.

Many studies have shown that urban forests can reduce the urban heat island, and many policies focus their attention on large green spaces.

Small green spaces, such as yards, rooftops and small parcels of undeveloped land, can make impressive contributions to lowering urban heat, but they are often overlooked when developing strategies for urban cooling.

The effect of small green spaces

Cities rarely have the opportunity to add large green spaces to help counter the effects of heatwaves. Smaller vegetated spaces, however, can still meaningfully decrease local land temperatures.

Small green spaces, such as yards, rooftops and small parcels of undeveloped land, can make impressive contributions to lowering urban heat, but they are often overlooked when developing strategies for urban cooling.

A recent study in Adelaide, Australia, found that tree canopy cover and, to a lesser extent, grass cover decreased local daytime surface temperatures by up to 6 C during extreme summer heat conditions. Further inland, suburban yards and gardens can decrease local surface temperatures up to 5 C.

At a quite small scale, on the order of tens of square metres, trees reduced daytime surface temperatures twice as much as grass cover. But grass and other small, low-lying plants, grow relatively quickly, compared to trees.

Cities should adopt short-term and long-term strategies to respond to extreme heat, including the replacement of paved and impervious surfaces with grasses and turf, and increasing tree plantings to boost canopy coverage.

Amplifying the cooling effect

Furthermore, when managing small green spaces, city planners and foresters can select tree species based on their ability to cool the environment. Green spaces with a high diversity of tree species have a greater cooling effect in spring, summer and fall. They also have a larger maximum drop in temperature in the summer, compared to spaces that are less diverse.

For example, tree canopies with large leaves and high transpiration rates — the evaporation of water from plants occurring at the leaves — could provide more cooling.

Planting a variety of species, of different heights, can have a larger cooling effect than tall trees alone.

The structure of green space may also influence its cooling efficiency. In summer, a plant community with multiple layers of trees, shrubs and herbs can further decrease air temperature by 1 C on a sunny day and 0.5 C on a cloudy day, compared with an area only dominated by tall trees...

But overall, trees usually have a stronger effect on cooling than grass. Planting trees in groups, not individually or in lines, is recommended for regulating the microclimate (local climate conditions near the Earth’s surface).

Small green spaces can offer a lot of summer cooling in cities. And cities can learn to manage the configuration of small green spaces better to get more cooling benefits and minimize the trade-offs."

-via GoodGoodGood, July 4, 2024

[high-mackrels-musings]

The Point of the Prequels

I’ve seen it on more than one occasion that people attribute the message of the prequels to be that of the failure of the Jedi. To show us that the Jedi ultimately were too dogmatic, too arrogant, and too subservient to the Republic.

I do not have the time these days to write thousands of words refuting such nonsense, but I will point out that Lucas himself has attributed the Jedi as being the most moral beings in the galaxy:

They are the most moral of anybody in the galaxy. They’re monks. The Sith practice the dark side and are way of of balance. They Jedi aren’t as much out of balance because they’re the light side of the Force. - Star Wars Archives 1999-2005

One sees in the films that the Jedi are the only people out there trying to help people, they ask for nothing in return, they serve the republic because no one else has their reach, to quote Mace Windu:

Jedi do not fight for peace. That's only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are. Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace. We fight for justice because justice is the fundamental bedrock of civilization: an unjust civilization is built upon sand. It does not long survive a storm. -Mace Windu Shatterpoint

So, they have allied themselves with the largest government in the known universe, the only one with the reach to help the most amount of people.

And yes the Republic is corrupt and inefficient, and it is not perfect. But once more to quote Lucas:

The Jedi were equally determined to preserve the Republic and defeat the Sith, who they understood all too well were the masterminds of the Separatist movement. They still believed in the Republic, still deemed it a Republic worth saving. Their faith, which gave them superhuman strength in the face of mind-boggling power of the enemy, had yet to be shaken." -George Lucas Prologue to Shatterpoint

So, one may ask what is the point of the prequels? Well, the answer is greed will destroy us. The prequels show is George Lucas’ warning against greed, and not just the overt, the corporate greed of the Trade Federation, Techno Union, Banking clans, etc. the political greed of Palpatine and the senate, but also the personal greed of Anakin.

The prequels depict the Jedi as the only beings in all the galaxy that don’t ask for anything in return. Rather than the Jedi failing others, the greed of everyone else failed the Jedi.

[devildomwriter]

Obey Me As Tumblr #23

Diavolo: What is “lore”

Mammon: Baby don’t hurt me

•

Mammon: Compliment me

Beelzebub: Barbecue sauce

Mammon: Thanks

•

Satan: Once a man now deemed a clown

Solomon: This is without a doubt the funniest description of the joker I’ve ever seen

Leviathan: This is an excerpt from my resume

•

Solomon: When you brush your teeth you are petting your skeleton for a job well done

MC: Smoke meth – Hail Satan

Solomon: What the fuck

•

MC: I haven’t cha cha slid since high school

Mammon: I’ve never seen the cha cha slide referred to in the past tense and I am fucking shaken

•

Leviathan: I’m so glad they removed the “nut” from honey Cheerios

Asmodeus: Now you gotta add your own

Leviathan: Why must you do this to my posts

•

Diavolo: What does it mean when someone says they’re pescatarian and vegan

Raphael: Land animals are innocent of crime but the fish have sinned

•

Thirteen: We only came to this site in the first place b/c we were gay and liked Harry Potter

Asmodeus: I actually came to this site because of onceler incest

Thirteen: Your just gonna say those words huh

•

Leviathan: When manga characters add a heart to their speech… I wish I could do that

Simeon: You can. Just put a little love in your voice. Smile, people hear it

Asmodeus: Moan

Barbatos: Duality of man

•

Simeon: “Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung” — P.T. Barnum

Leviathan: Pegging clowns???

Asmodeus: Pegging hung clowns???

Lucifer: This is why this website is worth negative money

•

Mammon: Pregnancy is a hoax the baby sprouts out of the ground I’ve see it happen

Mammon: People pretend to be pregnant for clout it started with one woman named dvd and people been chasing the same high since

Mammon: Meant eve

•

Leviathan: I wish I had an even more vague void than the internet to scream into

Satan: An abandoned Kmart parking lot just before Dawn

Leviathan: Jesus I didn’t say a whole different dimension

•

Belphegor: They’ve got me in some kind of secret facility

Belphegor: Doing experiments on me

Belphegor: I have powers now

Belphegor: I’m gonna fight the government

Solomon: Me when I’m an original character made by a 12 year old

•

Leviathan: I’d rather see 1000 graffiti penises than 1 product billboard. I’d live in dick city if it meant I could avoid advertisements in my daily life

Asmodeus: We built dick city

Mammon: We built dick city on cock and balls

•

Mammon: It’s fun to stay at the y

Mephistopheles: M

Leviathan: M

Thirteen: M

Simeon: *smacks the side of my boom box to get it to stop skipping*

Luke: C

Satan: Young man

•

Solomon: People in the 70s would wake up and be like I need to go hitchhiking right now

MC: Mfs be like good morning Susan! Another serial killer in the paper today, so not groovy! Welp, time for our daily car ride with a stranger!

Mammon: I’d reply to this post but I’m waiting for my Uber

•

Satan: Imagine searching your whole life for the chosen one who will destroy the matrix and save the human race and you find him and he’s fucking Keanu Reeves

Diavolo: YOU FIND HIM DOING WHAT

First • Last • Next

[reality-detective]

This is the Red Alert You Can’t Ignore: Iran’s Military on U.S. Soil, Deep State Chaos, and the Elite’s Plot to Destroy America from Within!

The moment of truth is here. The battle for America’s soul is no longer in the shadows. The Deep State is waging war on our own soil, and the global elite are covering it up. Foreign forces are already inside our borders, preparing to strike.

We are on the brink of civil war. This isn't a drill. The Deep State, desperate to save their crumbling empire, has unleashed foreign troops to sow chaos. Enemy soldiers have infiltrated our country. Their targets: our key states, our critical infrastructure, and YOU.

Foreign Forces in Our Cities – Military Operations Escalate

The military is actively engaging on U.S. soil, but it’s not just our forces. Foreign soldiers are here, right now, waiting to tear America apart from the inside. California, Texas, Florida—they’ve been infiltrated by globalist-backed mercenaries disguised as South American gangs. These aren’t street criminals; they’re soldiers in the Deep State’s war against the American people.

Iranian troops have been sighted in the western U.S.—yes, actual Iranian military units, placed here by the Deep State to bring America to its knees when the time comes. The elites have sold us out—politicians and globalist operatives are working with these foreign forces to trigger America’s collapse.

Infrastructure is the target. Power grids, water supplies, and transportation hubs are all vulnerable, and the plan is clear: shut America down from within. When the lights go out, panic will explode, and the chaos will only grow. This is how they intend to bring America to its knees—through engineered collapse, martial law, and total domination.

The Deep State’s Master Plan: Civil War and Chaos

This plot has been years in the making. Every crisis, every election, every war was designed to bring us to this breaking point. But now, the Deep State is pulling the trigger on their final operation: a staged civil war. The military buildup in states like Texas, Florida, and California is not just for civil unrest; it’s a preparation for war against domestic and foreign enemies working for the Deep State.

Their endgame? Unleash chaos, call in foreign troops to “restore order,” and seize control. This is about more than power—it’s about absolute domination. They want you to own nothing, control nothing, and obey everything.

The Satanic Cabal: The Elite Families Want You Dead

Behind this operation are satanic monsters—the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and their elite cronies who have been profiting from war, famine, and suffering for generations. These aren’t just businessmen. They are child traffickers, blood-drinkers, and war profiteers. The exposure of their networks is happening NOW.

Child trafficking, satanic rituals, organ harvesting—all of it is coming to light. The military is poised to blow their operations wide open, and they know their time is up.

The Quantum Financial System (QFS): Their Greatest Fear

The elite’s worst nightmare is the Global Currency Reset (GCR) and Quantum Financial System (QFS). Once it’s activated, the entire corrupt financial structure they’ve built crumbles. This is why they’re desperate to cause chaos and civil war. They need to stop the QFS from liberating humanity from their debt slavery system.

The storm is coming. The Deep State is moving fast, but we are faster. Prepare now. Stock up, stay alert, and get ready for the fight of your life.

I have been seeing this 👆 more and more...

The Storm Is Approaching 🤔

[poppystheories]

Tyki’s reaction to being slapped fascinates me. This guy gets slapped by a helpless exorcist that's fully at his mercy and he kinda likes it. It wasn’t a weak slap either! Despite the state Allen’s in, it left a mark! But Tyki just laughs it off. Settles down to chat. Lights himself a cigarette.

Let’s face it. It’s charming.

I really like the contrast between Allen’s first meeting with Road and his first meeting with Tyki. Road had no intention of killing Allen from the start, and she wasn't really there to destroy any Innocence, but she gets incredibly rough with him: nailing his arm to the wall, stabbing his eye out, making a pincushion out of him with her candles. She fully delights in the bodily harm.

Tyki’s here to kill Allen and destroy his Innocence. That’s already decided. But he doesn’t brutalize him at any point.

Because Tyki's so casual, you keep thinking: hey, Allen’s going to get out of this totally fine. Someone is going to show up and save him. Lenalee should be looking for him. We haven’t seen the others in a while, so they must be on their way. Someone is going to arrive in the nick of time to save Allen, and everything’s going to be fine. We still have to get to Japan, after all.

But no one comes.

The scene progresses. Tyki keeps talking, he shows off his power a bit, tries to play with Allen like he played with the others. Tries to make him scared, maybe beg a little. He’s fooling around with the prey he’s already caught, like a cat.

But Allen's not scared, and Tyki backs off. The actual physical torture isn't the appeal for him, so if his victim isn't scared there's no reason to get violent.

So now you're thinking, wow, this guy is gonna regret taking his time when someone finally arrives! What a classic villain fumble; failing your mission because you were too busy monologuing.

But no one comes.

Tyki pulls out the card the Earl gave him. And you find out Tyki’s been searching for Allen. Specifically.

That’s bad, but it's okay. It'll be fine. Someone is going—

You turn the page, and Tyki is ripping Allen’s arm off. No warning, no posturing. One second Allen is fine—someone is going to save him, any second now, Tyki hasn’t even hurt him yet—and the next Allen’s fucking Innocence is on the forest floor.

Tyki keeps talking, smiling. Nothing about his demeanor has changed.

He destroys Allen's Innocence. Like it's nothing.

And at this point, you start to realize, maybe no one is coming. Or if they are, it’s already too late.

Tim gets sent away. He can go get help. But, now Allen’s truly alone with the assassin sent to kill him—if anyone’s coming, it has to be now! Where is everyone?!

Right on cue, you finally get to see the other characters.

And they’re still on the fucking ship.

Then maybe Lenalee—

No. Lenalee’s also at the ship. Tyki has his hand hovering over Allen’s chest and Lenalee’s at the goddamn ship.

No one is coming, you realize. No one was ever coming.

And just like that, Tyki kills Allen. Intimately, with a smile. He wants it to be slow, but quiet. He wants Allen to feel how helpless he really is.

Tyki's a serial killer: we've seen him stage his victims before, like leaving Daisya hanging like some kind of grisly ornament. We saw the state he left the General in.

Allen, however, gets more artistic treatment; he's by the far the favorite of Tyki's victims so far, and Tyki doesn't want to disturb the pretty picture he's already made too much, but it needs a little extra flair, doesn't it? A more personal touch.

So he scatters his own gift to Allen over him: a little something to suit his white hair and black coat and red scars, and the last thing we see is the black crescent of despair. Put there quite deliberately; it is not a typical image to appear on a Joker card.

Volume 6 ends, just like that.

It really is a merciless ending. You can't believe that the protagonist will really die here, but even if he somehow survives, his Innocence has been destroyed. The entire scene is built around your expectations as a reader that the protagonist can't die, so someone will save him, or there will be some other interference.

But no. No one was ever coming to save Allen; not this time.

And that? That has consequences.

[novelconcepts]

There’s a line from American Gods I keep coming back to in relation to Yellowjackets, an observation made early on by Shadow in prison: “The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment.” I keep rotating it in my head in thinking about the six survivors, the roles they occupy in the wilderness, and the way the show depicts them as adults in society.

Because in the wilderness, as in prison, they’re trapped—they’re suffering, they’re traumatized, they’re terrified—but they’re also able to construct very specific boxes to live in. And, in a way, that might make it easier. Cut away the fat, narrow the story down to its base arc. You are no longer the complex young woman who weighs a moral compass before acting. You no longer have the luxury of asking questions. You are a survivor. You have only to get to the next day.

Shauna: the scribe. Lottie: the prophet. Van: the acolyte. Taissa: the skeptic. Misty: the knight. Natalie: the queen. Neat, orderly, the bricks of a new kind of society. And it works in the woods; we know this because these six survive. (Add Travis: the hunter, while you’re at it, because he does make it to adulthood).

But then they’re rescued. And it’s not just lost purpose and PTSD they’re dealing with now, but a loss of that intrinsic identity each built in the woods. How do you go home again? How do you rejoin a so-called civilized world, where all the violence is restricted to a soccer field, to an argument, to your own nightmares?

How does the scribe, the one who wrote it all out in black and white to make sense of the horrors, cope with a world that would actively reject her story? She locks that story away. But she can’t stop turning it over in her head. She can’t forget the details. They’re waiting around every corner. In the husband beside her in bed. In the child she can’t connect with across the table. In the best friend whose parents draw her in, make her the object of their grief, the friend who lives on in every corner of their hometown. She can’t forget, so she tries so hard to write a different kind of story instead, to fool everyone into seeing the soft maternal mask and not the butcher beneath, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the prophet come back from the religion a desperate group made of her, a group that took her tortured visions, her slipping mental health, and built a hungry need around the very things whittling her down? She builds over the bones. She creates a place out of all that well-intended damage, and she tells herself she’s helping, she’s saving them, she has to save them, because the world is greedy and needs a leader, needs a martyr, needs someone to stand up tall and reassure everyone at the end of the day that they know what’s best. The world, any world, needs someone who will take those blows so the innocent don’t have to. She’s haunted by everyone she didn’t save, by the godhood assigned to her out of misplaced damage, and when the darkness comes knocking again, there is nothing else to do but repeat old rhymes until there is blood on her hands just the same.

How does the acolyte return to a world that cares nothing for the faith of the desperate, the faith that did nothing to save most of her friends, that indeed pushed her to destroy? She runs from it. She dives into things that are safe to believe in, things that rescue lonely girls from rough home lives, things that show a young queer kid there’s still sunshine out there somewhere. She delves into fiction, makes a home inside old stories to which she already knows the endings, coaxes herself away from the belief that damned her and into a cinemascope safety net where the real stuff never has to get in. She teaches herself surface-level interests, she avoids anything she might believe in too deeply, and still she’s dragged back to the place where blood winds up on her hands just the same.

How does the skeptic make peace with the things she knows happened, the things that she did even without meaning to, without realizing? She buries them. She leans hard into a refusal to believe those skeletons could ever crawl back out of the graves she stuffed them into, because belief is in some ways the opposite of control. She doesn’t talk to her wife. She doesn’t talk to anyone. It’s not about what’s underneath the surface, because that’s just a mess, so instead she actively discounts the girl she became in the woods. She makes something new, something rational and orderly, someone who can’t fail. She polishes the picture to a shine, and she stands up straight, the model achievement. She goes about her original plan like it was always going to be that way, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the knight exist in a world with no one to serve, no one to protect, no reason propelling the devastating choices she had grown comfortable making? She rechannels it. She convinces herself she’s the smartest person in the room, the most capable, the most observant. She convinces herself other people’s mysteries are hers to solve, that she is helping in every single action she takes. She makes a career out of assisting the most fragile, the most helpless souls she can find, and she makes a hobby out of patrolling for crimes to solve, and when a chance comes to strap her armor back on and ride into battle, she rejoices in the return to normalcy. She craves that station as someone needed, someone to rely upon in the darkest of hours, and she winds up with blood on her hands because, in a way, she never left the wilderness at all.

How does the queen keep going without a queendom, without a pack, without people to lead past the horrors of tomorrow? She doesn’t. She simply does not know how. She scrounges for something, anything, that will make her feel connected to the world the way that team did. She moves in and out of a world that rejects trauma, punishes the traumatized, heckles the grieving as a spectacle. She finds comfort in the cohesive ritual of rehabilitation, this place where she gets so close to finding herself again, only to stumble when she opens her eyes and sees she’s alone. All those months feeding and guiding and gripping fast to the fight of making it to another day, and she no longer knows how to rest. How to let go without falling. She no longer wears a crown, and she never wanted it in the first place, so how on earth does she survive a world that doesn’t understand the guilt and shame of being made the centerpiece of a specialized environment you can never explain to anyone else? How, how, how do you survive without winding up with blood on your hands just the same?

All six of these girls found, for better or worse, a place in the woods. All six of them found, for better or worse, a reason to get up the next day. For each other. And then they go home, and even if they all stayed close, stayed friends, it’d still be like stepping out of chains for the first time in years. Where do you go? How do you make small choices when every decision for months was life or death? How do you keep the part of yourself stitched so innately into your survival in a world that would scream to see it? How do you do away with the survivor and still keep going?

They brought it back with them. Of course they did. It was the only way.

[sea-buns]

Oh my god, the parallels that we are walking into the Bells Hells reunion with.

Team Wildemount went shopping. They formed close bonds to each other. They saved an ancient mystical creature and an entire city with the power of friendship and kindness and mercy. They all survived. They’re all committed to seeing this fight through. The people of this group who started a threesome and a robomance have no middle ground in that venn diagram. They are a literal pyramid built out of love and trust.

Team Issylra clothed themselves in the remains of a betrayal. They destroyed a temple of the gods. They saved a town through death and violence. No two people walked out of that fight feeling the same about its outcome. They had stressful debates questioning what could possibly be worth all this, nightly. They had an enemy in their midst the entire time. They’re returning to their family with one temporary companion.

We’re looking at a group who’s spent their entire time getting to know a living miracle of the Dawnfather, learning about Ludinus’ connection to the Matron of Ravens, the long list of horrors he’s committed. All who are about to reconvene with the people who helped tear down a temple of the Dawnfather, who killed his followers, who watched one of his angels turn to dust, who are returning with a believer of the Matron.

One group will be bubbly, and clean, and hopeful. And the other will arrive looking worse than they did at the end of the world. Dirty, and clouded, and sad.

Both of them have come to the conclusion that this is war. They’ve resolved to do anything to return to their people and keep it that way. To finish what they started. But the paths they went down to get here are on two wildly differing ends of the spectrum. Ethics and principles that will no doubt clash many times the further down this road they go.

[jerzwriter]

OK to the heartless demons who have asked why the “baby girl” scene in The Last of Us has destroyed me. (I’m being cheeky about heartless demons, but seriously, I’m flummoxed over this.)

This is the first time in Ellie’s life that she has someone who truly loves her. Someone who cares enough to risk their own life, they will gladly kill to protect her. And not because she is the potential golden child who holds the cure to the cordyceps infection, but because they LOVE HER. She means that much to them. They know that being forced to endure life without her would be a torture they’re not willing to accept.

The look in her eyes when David told her she has no father… the pain was palpable (God bless Bella Ramsey). We know she’s terrified of ending up alone. We know that everyone she has ever cared for has left her one way or another. She’s been alone her whole life and it’s the one thing she does not want to be.

She loves Joel, and he is one-hundred percent her father figure, but they’re both so guarded in protection of themselves. The pain and loss each has endured too profound to allow them to be vulnerable. But where Ellie has built an outer-layer to protect herself, Joel has built a fortress and fortified that fucker so no one can get in. We’ve been watching their defenses fall each week, but the last two episodes has shown us just how much they’re willing to do to save the other.

David’s sadistic words and demonic actions have put poor Ellie through living hell. Then she emerges into a cold, unfamiliar wilderness… alone. She’s lost and traumatized. This BADASS girl is as close to broken as we have ever seen her. Then, Joel appears, and until she realizes it is him, she is horrified.

Now, the look in Joel’s eyes (God bless Pedro Pascal). The horror, the pain, the guilt that he couldn’t protect her. Seeing her broken breaks him, but the relief at finding her. The man is overwhelmed, but instead of retreating, he gives in. He holds her, comforts her, he lets the feelings wash over him and she feels SAFE.

“It’s OK, baby girl. I got you.”

She’s loved and protected for the first time in her life. Joel has not uttered the words baby girl, nor experienced that level of affection since he lost Sarah twenty years before. He has surrendered. He loves her. She has surrendered, she’s accepting his love. Then, both wounded in every way, they stumble off to face the unknown together.

HOW ISN’T EVERYONE IN THE FETAL POSITION BAWLING? I should have had my therapist on speed dial.

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Adult SFF Books Bracket: Round 1

Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:

The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune (The Cerulean Chronicles)

Endorsements from submitter: "Utterly delightful book about found family and queerness and building community and questioning authority."

A magical island. A dangerous task. A burning secret.

Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge Of Magical Youth, he spends his days overseeing the well-being of children in government-sanctioned orphanages.

When Linus is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management he's given a curious and highly classified assignment: travel to Marsyas Island Orphanage, where six dangerous children reside: a gnome, a sprite, a wyvern, an unidentifiable green blob, a were-Pomeranian, and the Antichrist. Linus must set aside his fears and determine whether or not they’re likely to bring about the end of days.

But the children aren’t the only secret the island keeps. Their caretaker is the charming and enigmatic Arthur Parnassus, who will do anything to keep his wards safe. As Arthur and Linus grow closer, long-held secrets are exposed, and Linus must make a choice: destroy a home or watch the world burn.

An enchanting story, masterfully told, The House in the Cerulean Sea is about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place—and realizing that family is yours.

Fantasy, romance, series, adult

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

Endorsement from submitter: "Excellent first-contact book that really delves into the personal as political and centers around a queer family."

On a warm March night in 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to a warning of unknown pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay. She heads out to check what she expects to be a false alarm--and stumbles upon the first alien visitors to Earth. These aliens have crossed the galaxy to save humanity, convinced that the people of Earth must leave their ecologically-ravaged planet behind and join them among the stars. And if humanity doesn't agree, they may need to be saved by force.

The watershed networks aren't ready to give up on Earth. Decades ago, they rose up to exile the last corporations to a few artificial islands, escape the dominance of nation-states, and reorganize humanity around the hope of keeping their world liveable. By sharing the burden of decision-making, they've started to heal the wounded planet.

But now corporations, nation-states, and networks all vie to represent humanity to these powerful new beings, and if any one accepts the aliens' offer, Earth may be lost. With everyone’s eyes turned skyward, everything hinges on the success of Judy's effort to create understanding, both within and beyond her own species.

Science fiction, first contact, climate fiction, family, adult

[ahsoka-in-a-hood]

Star Wars politics are funny because they’re fundamentally grim in a way, despite being built on hope. I find that, well, utopians? I suppose, have trouble with it. There’s no peace promised, no ending, no resolution. only an individual duty of care. One that will exist as long as sentience exists. The fight will never actually end. In the prequels you have your democrats and your separatists and your imperials, but there’s no fourth option in the narrative, there’s no perfect system just lurking out of reach. There’s just them. There’s just us. Like, Padme isn’t politically naive, she spends the whole first movie getting intimately acquainted with the failings of the republic, but she’s still fighting for it. Her politics are lucas’s politics, democracy is the only hope simply because it’s the only option offered that’s supposed to offer individual agency to participate in it, and only people can save people, by caring enough to do so, but you can’t control how or whether people participate. They might exploit it, they might destroy it, they might passively watch as it slips away because they assumed someone else would defend it. They will all lose in the end, like Dooku did, like the separatists did, like the imperials did, because even if they won for a while, they don’t care about other people so they eat their own, because even if you are a predator, there’s always a bigger fish. ““but you said that the biggest problem in the galaxy is that people don’t help each other”“ when your thesis is the individual responsibility of every person to the interconnected universe they live in, then the dereliction of that duty is the cause of societal collapse and darkness. But there’s hope if you have faith in people, I guess.

[naazaif327]

Just to be clear on the state of things:

The Betrayers decided to side with the Primordials and kill all the mortals They created with the Primes. A war was fought, many mortals were slaughtered, and the Betrayers were not killed but sealed away. The Betrayers spent aeons trapped, plotting and scheming to escape, until they finally did manage to get out, and this time they decided that they didn’t just want to kill all the mortals, but torture them for eternity. A Great War was fought, many mortals were slaughtered and tortured, cultures and innovations and landscapes were turned to ash, and the Prime Deities once again refused to kill their siblings and instead sealed them away.

The betrayers spent the next thousand years plotting and scheming to pull themselves back into the material plane so they could defeat their siblings and torture mortal souls for all eternity. They even came close at least a few times, like the Crawling King’s attempt in Campaign 2. They’re still trying to get out and torture mortals for all eternity, and assuming Predathos is stopped, they will spend the rest of eternity trying to get out and torture mortals forever. If they ever do get out, the Prime Deities will (maybe) try to stop them but they will not kill their siblings and will always pull their punches, even if it means mortals will suffer.

Amidst this, mortals built a GodKiller weapon that might’ve actually killed the Betrayers that were trying to slaughter and torture them forever. In response, the Primes teamed up with their siblings to squash the entire city of Aeor while scolding them for reaching too far.

Now obviously Ludinus sucks, but assuming Predathos doesn’t just eat everyone and kill the universe, then that kinda doesn’t really matter to me. They succeed at stopping Predathos and then they can kill Ludinus or put him in jail or torture him or do whatever they think is justice. OR they fail at stopping Predathos and the gods all die and then they can still kill Ludinus. Either way they get their revenge.

But like, what other chance will mortals ever get besides now to kill the Betrayers who want to torture them for all eternity? If anyone tries to rebuild the GodKiller weapon, the gods will either smite them down or get their clerics and paladins and angels to kill them and destroy the weapon. The Primes will never ever let mortals kill the Betrayers (much less themselves). What other chance besides this does Dorian and every other mortals who was harmed or tortured or murdered by the Gods have for justice? The Gods created us and then turned on us and tried (and are still trying) to hurt us and kill us, but if things go on as they were the Spider Queen will never have to answer to Dorian for killing his brother or stealing his friend, unlike Ludinus.

And forget justice or revenge, is humanity to spend eternity carrying on like there isn’t a cage full of snarling feral dogs desperate to rip us to pieces sitting in the other room? Dogs that have broken out before and will do so again? Do I think Predathos or Ludinus are the best way to fix this? No, but beggars can’t quite be choosers.

If I were a mortal in Exandria who was shown the events of Downfall, my opinion would be that if the Prime Deities were ever put in a trolley problem situation where they had to choose between saving all mortals or the Betrayers, they would choose the Betrayers. And if that were the case, then maybe in our own version of this ethical dilemma (where we could get rid of the Betrayers but the Primes had to die too) it wouldn’t be so wrong to put our own safety first and let these old, tired, wounded divinities finally rest.

[susaken456]

Kris and Barry's dynamic is so interesting and I think it was very intentional from the writers putting these two morally opposing characters together. I adore Barry for many reasons and Kris is such a well-executed antagonist, I could write about them for pages and pages.

I think what makes Kris so enjoyable for me is that she's not an over-the-top antagonist. She ignores chances to be overly villainous, she doesn't make morally-gray choices just because, because she has her own reasons that seem logical to her. It's heavily implied that she has experienced harsh situations, so her pragmatic philosophy probably stems from that same pragmatism having previously worked out for her.

But Kris's downfall doesn't come from that, but from her stubbornness. She's unable to adapt to a new context because that'd mean changing her plan, and that'd imply she'd had lost control. This one post analizes this aspect very well.

She never falters: not when her ship is destroyed, not when Terrence dies; and even when they go off against Hollow she still goes straight to the escape shuttle, ignoring the Demeter crew.

It’s also interesting how Barry ends up being the complete opposite of her, despite her constantly manipulating and keeping him in line. He's very receptive of Vesta since the start, and though his curiosity and naïvitee can get the better of him sometimes, he’s still well-meaning at the end of the day. In contrast, we have Kris, the only human shown killing a creature without any real incentive (the little bug thing she finds when they’re about to climb solo in episode 9).

Unlike Kris, he builds a genuine bond with Azi. He listens to her talk about Mia, just like she listened to his climbing tips. It's a moment where they clearly show respect for each other’s input, a stark contrast to Kris’s inconsiderate commands.

However, I don't think Kris entirely lacks empathy. She's visibly hurt when Terrence dies and she seems regretful over “having to" leave Barry behind. But she also doesn't care to acknowledge Terrence’s death and she still leaves Barry and everyone else behind with what she knows is a dangerous creature. She doesn't care in a way that counts, so no one but her could know if she genuinely does care.

At the boiling point, Kris and Barry follow strikingly different courses of action.

 Barry defies Kris’s control after seeing the crew is still alive. He cares about saving them because Azi, a person he’s built a bond with, also cares about them. Kris didn’t build such a bond, so how could she see any value in them? Realizing she can't control Barry like she did anymore, she deceives him and closes the door behind him, locking him out without hesitation.

When Barry realizes Kris is leaving, he goes back and begs her to let him in. He still cares about her, and it shows to a heartbreaking point while Kris doesn't even spare a glance when he’s there.

After such a tragic experience, Barry ends up in a community of people who genuinely care about others, one in which he’s obviously thriving better than during the time we see him with Kris.

And Kris? She’s dehydrated in the stranded shuttle, and finds herself in a situation where she needs to depend on total strangers; an inversion of the same thing she did to the Demeter crew. She can only pray they have the compassion she did not.

[alex51324]

So I finally got around to reading the Gideon the Ninth/Locked Tomb series, which is awesome, and I have a number of observations, but let’s start with this: 

HERE BE SPOILERS!!  Big ones.  Up through Nona the Ninth.

I’ve seen John Gaius’s villain arc summed up as “he got mad and destroyed the solar system because they didn’t use his plan to save Earth/humanity.”  But the actual story, as I understand it, is way more relatable than that.  

I mean, here’s what I understood to have happened:  First, he’s involved in a plan to save humanity from extinction.  Said plan struggles to get funding and resources, until eventually it is put on hold.  (And he develops superpowers.)  Eventually, the Powers That Be reveal the replacement plan to save humanity from extinction, and it has...big, obvious holes in it.  Just does not pass the sniff test.  JG points this out, but nobody pays any attention.  (Meanwhile, he starts attracting more attention for his superpowers.  However, this does not result in any attention for his central message, i.e., “The newly-revised plan to save humanity from extinction is shady as fuck.”)

So he goes about collecting evidence for the shadiness of the New Plan.  Just reams of evidence showing that there is no possible way that there could possibly be enough FTL ships built in time to save more than a tiny fraction of the population.  He tries showing this evidence to world leaders.  He tries showing it to the general public.  (Meanwhile, the powers-that-be have started getting scared of his superpowers; in response he explodes some cows.)   He comes right out and says, “Hey, this small group of extremely rich people are conning the entire world into building & paying for a lifeboat that is only ever going to be big enough for them, and that’s super fucked-up.”

But  the people with seats in the lifeboat say, “That’s the guy who exploded those cows that one time, and cows have feelings.”

And everybody falls for it.  Nobody can be persuaded to care that 99.9% of humanity is going to be left to die, but there is plenty of outrage available for that herd of cows he exploded.  Every time he tries to show his evidence--large amounts of hard and extremely convincing evidence--that there is no second wave of lifeboats (much less any more after that), all anyone wants to talk about is the cows.  

He keeps on attempting to Reveal The Truth up until the lifeboats are on the launching pads and the countdown is starting.  Then, and only then, he goes, “OK, so apparently you only listen to cartoonishly evil supervillains, I can work with that” and starts cackling evilly and waving a nuclear bomb around.  

But the powers-that-be somehow guess that at this point he’s only posing as a cartoonishly evil supervillain at this point, so it doesn’t work, and finally, when it becomes clear that it’s now too late for any rational means of persuasion to work, he flips over to actually being a supervillain.

And man, as supervillain origin stories go, I just find that super-relatable.  

Disclaimer: obviously killing the entire solar system and everyone in it is bad!  And  pursuing a 10,000 year campaign of vengeance against the distant descendants of the people who conned the rest of humanity into building them a lifeboat and then left them (the rest of humanity) for dead is super fucked up. 

But.  If I were ever to go supervillain, it would probably be something like that.  I’ve had the experience of trying to show people that the course of action they’re pursuing is obviously and transparently worse, in all of the ways that they claim to care about than an alternative that they have rejected, and having them just...not care.  If I were given superpowers in the middle of such a situation, it would end badly, is what I’m saying.  

Anyway, I find that very impressive, writing-wise.  JG has obviously sailed way over the moral event horizon, and he’s kept on finding new ways to be evil after the whole genocide-starkiller thing, but the way he got there is a path I could very easily see myself going down.  

Looking back, I think the fundamental error was when he went from thinking, “They should listen to me because I have all this evidence,” to “they should listen to me because I could kill them with my magic powers.”  Everything else--for the next 10,000 years--kind of follows from that.  But I can’t be sure I wouldn’t make that mistake, if I A) was really mad, and B) had magic powers.