#secular & scared spaces

[furrysmp]

congrats to everyone that is still following me after I saw I had way too many followers to not have at least one antisemitic person following me, the fact that you don't think I murder children for fun is truly a comfort

[jewish-vents]

I've been think about this for a while and I'm a diaspora jew currently living in tel aviv and a lot of diaspora jews I've met here want to make aliyah.

And I don't. I don't want to live here where it doesn't snow, I don't want to live where bibi has been in power for over 20 years, I don't want to live where the spectrum of religous and secular is so polarized I feel like going to shul would mean I need to stand separately from another gender.

I like being a diapsora jew. I like being part of a tiny in group- a lot of secular israelis don't know the amida, or the tunes to the shema- sure they can read it, but they don't have the joy of running into a random jew drunk at a party and all of a sudden you've done the whole birkat hamazon.

I don't want to make aliyah. But I'm terrified if I don't then I'll be hurt, I wont be able to get my PhD, i won't be allowed on sports teams or in queer spaces (oh wait, these things are already happening). I'm scared if I don't make aliyah I won't be a diaspora jew.

Just a dead one.

.

[beloved-of-john]

Hi, I'm sorry if this comes across as trying to debate your faith, that's not my intent but as someone who was raised Devotely RC, and left the church after realising my queerness, I'm kinda curious what led you to join the church as a queer man?

That's a very valid question, and I really do sympathise with your experiences. I of course agree that the Catholic church is not great™ in its stances on queerness (and some other social issues). Maybe it's my hope that things will slowly improve, although I don't expect to see that in my lifetime.

I think at the end of the day it's the theology for me. I already had a Christian faith before I decided to convert, but when I started to read more into Catholic theology, it connected so much more with me than the Protestant ways of explaining things that I was used to. My personal experiences of God aligned much more, eg. things like having spiritual experiences with the Eucharist. I also loved the traditions, observances and the style of worship. All I can really say is the Catholic way of doing things connects me to God in a way nothing else does.

With my reasons for wanting to be Catholic laid out, I then had to consider my queerness. My godmother is a devout Catholic and so was her husband, and they had always been some of the most supportive people in my life of me being trans, so I knew that a queer-affirming version of Catholicism was possible. I was still scared of not being accepted though, so my godmother told her priest about my situation and he told her that it didn't matter if other people don't accept me, because what matters is that God does. And that did it for me really. I've been used to just living being an act of defiance for a long time now, so what else is new? If there's a space I'm not wanted, that's a space I'm going to take up. Especially if my own happiness stands to be gained. That's the priest I go to now for instruction, and while we haven't really discussed my transness, it makes a big difference to my confidence to ask questions knowing that I'm safe with him.

I think it probably helps that I realised and accepted my transness and queerness long before I felt a calling to religion. Going through that vulnerable point in my life while dealing with institutional transphobia/homophobia from the church would have certainly made things a lot more difficult when it comes to my relationship with religion. I have had bad experiences with religion growing up, and I do consider myself to have religious trauma, but I went from a very religious primary (elementary) school to a completely secular high school, and the queer stuff all went down at the latter, and my parents weren't and aren't religious. I do think God showed His presence in my life when He knew I'd be ready for it.

To sum it all up really, Catholicism is the version of Christianity that connects with me the most, I know a queer inclusive Catholicism is possible despite whatever the Pope says, and I am secure enough in my queerness and my faith that no amount of being told off is going to make any difference to me. God made me incredibly stubborn (and trans) so the haters can take it up with Him!

[windvexer]

yeah most definitely huge enormous THANK YOU. the no-nonsense no-woo approach to woo is what is SO MUCH needed in these spaces. after thinking over your posts for some serious time I have totally reworked my own practice and it got me to RESULTS! the biggest result tho is that I'm not scared anymore of things and not feel gate kept around tRuE kNoWlEdGe by the woo hibrow magic people on the internet. big up

Thank you for your words of support. I am always happy to hear my writing helps people find results.

In defense of the various bloggers who write of the woo, Witchcraft itself is a mystery tradition, one which does contain wooey True Knowledge!

I like to write about the exoteric aspects of practical sorcery, which I think often comes across more or less as secular sorcery; I think many things I post technically don't even count as witchcraft at all.

So without people talking about the True Knowledge and the Deep Mystery and the Woo, the work I share would be a woefully inadequate glimpse into a much larger picture.

But, I am happy to be able to help build a nice campfire for those who are looking for the dancing shadows of practical sorcery and divination. That is my goal, and I am very happy you shared your success with me.

[leam1983]

US Elections - A Few More Thoughts

There's something YouTube Atheists taught me, over the years. For one, they've taught me that even someone who's objectively correct can be a raging cornhole who you would very much like to Shut Up, and secondly that education can lead to a strangely contradictory reaction in the face of things like Trump's re-emergence.

That would be the Fallacy of Incredulity; or the underlying thesis that as I, as someone who is educated, worldly, self-aware, cognizant of the world stage and focused on both my personal betterment and that of others, have the utter and profound disbelief that others might vote vore or otherwise perform actions that are detrimental to themselves.

In simpler terms, that gives you the billion comments across thousands of platforms, that typically go something like "I can't believe fifty million or more people could've voted for this guy!" or "I can't believe we've done this!" or, even more naively still, "This isn't us!"

First, that shows you that even the most Humanist, dyed-in-the-wool Blue voter with a noted track record of Atheism still has faith in something - namely in the idea that the people around him remember what E Pluribus, Unum actually means. It also shows you that the same person has rose-tinted glasses firmly stapled on.

You have to consider the fact that as of the eighties, the Democratic Party has become the party of the intellectual elite, of coastal company leads with feet firmly entrenched in the Tech and Political spheres. It's the domain of those who at least understand the threat posed by Global Warming, and of those who see how the Western world's commitment to Democracy has been waning, as of the past two decades. It's the party of Centrist Sensibilities, that tries to steer the country towards a more rational future while still trying to pat down concepts like American Exceptionalism or even the Dominionist school of thought stating that hey, even if we're trying real, real, real hard to be secular, y'still gotta leave some space for my man Evangelical Jesus, y'know?

As to why it does that last part, it's easy to understand. Either you placate the Rust Belt and the Southern States led by would-be theocrats by assuring them that nonononono, the whole concept of Creflo Dollar Megachurches is totes fine, or you lose the manpower. Which is ironic in and of itself, as most of these States now rely either on unpaid labor from inmates stuck in revolving-door work-release programs for those in the prison system, or on dubiously-documented immigrants.

So let's tackle the root of the problem, then. Why Trump? Because Democrats have forgotten how to speak to people that live from paycheck to paycheck, if they only do so much. If you're stuck down South in a food desert and the cost of a dozen eggs becomes a serious concern for you, you're absolutely not in the right headspace to discuss things like the climate crisis or LGBTQA+ rights. No, these people aren't ignorant rubes - just ask Jonathan Maslow.

People voted for Trump because their needs are not being met. They've voted for a fallacious response, sure, as the Republicans are the party of partisan Big Tech and corporations playing buddy-buddy for tax incentives and most assuredly not the Party of the Average Joe.

So. In the coming days, try and stop demonizing those Trump voters in your vicinity who aren't MAGAts fully lost to the idiot's rhetoric. Most of them latched onto the idea of lessened tarrifs, of slashed taxes, and voted primarily to feel less of a pinch in the wallet at dinnertime. Most of them aren't bigots; they're just scared and fail to see their other options. It also means that Dems have an exam of conscience to go through, as they can't simply coast on being the Party for the Guys Who Fit the Bare Minimum of Being Mentally Stable. There's a dearth of education to fix that is crucial to reversing your fate, as most Republican voters do not, in fact, have so much as a Community College degree.

If the elections' results mean one thing, it's that half of America's citizens are scared, kept wilfully ignorant and afraid - and these aren't those who voted Democrat.

[randomwriteronline]

The moment a tree is cut in half before his very own eyes, Emmet’s hands grasp little shoulders tighter as if that alone could keep them still forever.

“Absolutely not,” he sentences.

“It’s the only way,” Irida argues.

“That is a safety hazard!” he replies instantly, eyes snapping suddenly to face her own. “Verrry dangerous even for an adult. They will not enter the arena.”

But the Commander has ordered otherwise: this is the child’s duty and nobody else’s, and neither Pearl nor Diamond Clan must attempt to take upon the grievous task in their stead lest they want him to get quite crossed at them - and considering what is known of him, nobody wants him to get crossed at them.

However! Emmet will sooner die than let a passenger (let alone a minor) on a train destined for derailment.

The little kid pulls at his fingers to pry them off of their shoulders; he doesn’t fight them.

He turns around, goes back to the river, refuses to look at the child while they stuff as many satchels of balm as they can in their little bag, and starts making small spheres of mud.

He keeps making them when they make their way into the arena, heart in their throat beating wildly and scared beyond belief.

Once he decides he has made enough, Emmet bolts - runs up the hill hissing through clenched teeth as his bad leg aches and sizzles in pain just in time to see the gargantuan beast descend into the small enclosed space, shining bright and golden yellow with a kind of insatiable blind wrath radiating from every joint of its exoskeleton as the axes of its arms glint like broken glass.

The cry that bellows out of Kleavor shakes the secular tree to its core.

Then something vaguely wet slaps the back of its head before it can charge against the kid.

“I am Emmet!” Emmet announces, and throws another ball against the side of the Noble's jaw. “I will be rude now!”

Mud splatters against Kleavor’s face when it turns to roar at the man.

“Your mandibles are laughable!”

“The Lord doesn’t have mandibles!” argues enraged the young Warden.

“That’s why they’re laughable!”

Miss Zisu be blessed for her insistence of keeping one’s sorroundings as heightened in the mind as possible; by the time the stone-cutting blow soars through the air with a hiss as Kleavor swings one of its blades with a horrid cry in his direction, Emmet has already rolled away to safety.

He hears something crack and fall where he previously stood.

A shrill laugh, all adrenaline and terror, leaves his bewildered mouth; then, once he has the Noble’s attention steady on himself (and not on the child pelting the back of the beast with soothing balms) he throws another mudball, and moves.

The beast follows him in raging hot pursuit as he forces it to crawl in circles around its tree, heavy axes hindering its speed as the wet earth cracks and falls to dust as it hits its carapace - he doubles down whenever it seems to realize there is another presence right behind it, whenever it appears to turn around and the kid begins scrambling for cover.

His bad leg strains. He powers through it.

Well, he doesn’t really.

His foot slips and he thumbles down into the arena gracelessly.

Ouch.

He groans as the pain blooms and spreads further all around his knee.

And now he cannot stand.

Verrry inconvenient.

Emmet looks up to meet the furious eyes clouded by golden light that are Kleavor’s, and feels horrendously cold all of a sudden.

The axes are planted firmly into the ground as the Bug pulls its body back, clearly giving itself the momentum necessary to hurl itself forward like a Feather Ball - no, on second thought its idea has it mirroring the parable of the throw of a regular Pokéball to catch a beast just out of reach, making a long arch in the air before landing heavily onto the target.

The kid yells his name and throws another satchel of balm.

Kleavor jumps.

There’s a loud BONK that makes Emmet wheeze uncontrollably for a moment together with the absolute agony of his injured limb after that very last minute roll to hide behind the secular tree, and all he can think as the adrenaline makes his hands shake and his stomach feel like he’s going to puke is something like oh my god oh my god oh my fucking god oh fucking sweet god oh my sweet fucking god holy mother of fuck that worked oh my sweet fucking mother of god.

A blinding light covers the tree: when he crawls on his good leg and two hands around the trunk he is positively ecstatic to see the child stand, unharmed if not for a couple bruises the few times they fell, before a much calmer Kleavor.

“Bravo!” he shouts (though the word feels weird in his mouth, like he should hear it but not say it) as he approaches the two of them.

The little kid beams at him, immediately trying to help him up.

“Don’t worry! I am fine,” he assures them, “Wyrdeer will carry me. You did verrry well! Are you hurt?”

The little one shakes their head; Kleavor instead nods.

Emmet turns towards it: “Ah! I would like to apologize,” he explains quickly, before the Pokémon gets mad again and tear him into many bloody ribbons, “I did not want to be rude. I had to distract you to ensure this passenger’s safety. Your warden is right to say you’re incredible. You are verrry strong! Verrry charismatic. Yup yup! I would like to battle you one day. If you’d like that too.”

When it’s not full of wrath, twice its size and shining with golden blinding light, Lord Kleavor seems a little bashful when it comes to praise. It chitters something with its deep croaky voice and scurries up the tree in a hurry.

After a moment it’s back down, holding in its mouth a sort of rock slab: it presents it to the little hero.

“A gift?” the man asks, and it nods. “How nice! Thank you.”

“Thank you,” AkaRei echoes him. After a second they add: “Very much.”

And off runs Lord Kleavor again.

Well, Emmet thinks as Lian yells at him for insulting poor Kleavor. Thank goodness the commander never said anything about anyone from Jubilife not taking care of it in the child’s stead.

-

The moment Elesa sees that the nice little Jubilife child at the Diamond settlement and hears that they’re going to stop Lady Lilligant all on their own, she insists on following them all the way to the Arena.

“It’s the only way,” Adaman explains.

To hell with that!, Elesa’s face says.

“You don’t want to get on the commander’s bad side,” the leader warns her, dead serious and concerned like she’s rarely seen him. “It would take him no time or hesitation to declare a state of alert and run our settlement over like a herd of Rapidash. With no help against him... It’s just not worth it, even if you think it’s unfair. Do you understand?”

Of course she does, and she would agree that he’s right. But that kid is what, eight? Why shouldn’t they be sitting on the sidelines and letting the adults handle something so dangerous?

The child pulls at her sleeve: “It’s fine,” they reassure her.

She doesn’t look at them as they stuff the balms for Lilligant in their little satchel, turning around and stomping back down the slope. Her leader watches her quizzically as she then stops, waits, and turns to the side of the cliff.

After a moment or two, right when the kid is almost done, she is running along the elevated land and edges the arena, scraping the soles of her boots against the rocks until she disappears in the mireland’s ashy fogs, unseen as she finally arrives on the small hill right behind the tableau that makes up the arena.

The wind picks up: in the middle of the small cyclone dissipating the low clouds, Lilligant shines brilliantly with her battle cry.

Well. Let’s cross fingers and pray it works.

Elesa takes as long a running start as she can on this strip of land, leaps, and near slams her chin on the cold hard stone as the sudden ground under her feet makes her stumble forward.

No time for that! The child hasn’t noticed her arrival, nervously scrambling around like a headless Starly as they are, throwing satchels aimlessly while Lilligant avoids them with a couple stretches and prepares her attack. She needs to act quick.

One of the soothing projectile landing near her gives her an idea.

Lady Lilligant’s performance comes to a complete halt before it can even start as she hears a wolfish whistle.

Who dares? Who dares?

The Lady turns.

The balm launched directly into her face (the motion of the arm and leg accompanying it to lend more strength to the throw is extraordinarily professional, clearly rehearsed many times) carries so much momentum that it sends her straight to the ground like in a cartoon - whatever a cartoon is.

The kid shouts Elesa’s name with such relief as she hoists them on her own shoulders to limit the harm coming to them that she almost manages out a croak to reassure them.

Adaman, Arezu and Calaba shout her name for completely different reasons, divided rather evenly between ‘what in the name of Sinnoh do you think you’re doing get back here this instant this isn’t a Stunky you can kick across the swamps’ and ‘did you just knock over a Noble with your bare fucking hands, you absolute madness in the shape of a woman’.

She waves in their direction as if to assure them she’s got this (not really but they don’t need to know) and nothing bad will happen (so she hopes).

Luckily her strategy is simple enough for the child to grasp even without her using words or signs - heavy feeling in the legs permitting, she’s going to run circles around this feisty overgrown weed and they just have to throw everything at it until the Lady calms down.

Easy peasy.

Lilligant, shining as golden as the midday sun, raises herself to her feet with some difficulty and turns, gleaming eyes full of fury.

She jumps something like four feet straight in the air.

Fuck.

Elesa is lucky she has such long limbs and a good enough awareness and coordination of every single part of her body that allows her to speed away as soon as the parable is two quarters of the way done, or she would have had her head split in half by, well. That apocalyptic split she just witnessed. And here comes another, and another, and another, each at the very least telegraphed by these immense jumps she does, and Elesa keeps running across the other side of the arena until the Lady loses her patience and jumps faster, landing so close this time that she damn near chops her foot off.

The kid beans the pale golden face with a balm that makes it stumble back. Elesa blesses them a million times over as she regains a good enough safety distance between the two of them and the Noble.

Lilligant composes herself with a spin and leaaps again, graceful and wrathful, and lands... In the middle of the clearing.

Huh?

Oh, no, wait.

There come the shockwaves.

Running was already putting a horrible strain on the entire lower half of her body, which is now ablaze with pangs of pain, and Elesa dreads the thought of having to jump. She tries to time herself and sort of step across the first wave, but it makes her legs howl and nearly knocks her down.

Fine.

She’ll just... Have to tank through this.

Hands grasping the kid’s legs like her life depends on it while they keep throwing balms, Elesa sucks in a breath through her teeth.

Second wave comes.

Hits her right in the ankles.

Third wave comes.

She almost buckles.

Fourth wave comes.

She bites her lip nearly hard enough to bleed.

Fifth wave comes.

The light explodes in a burst of glimmering gold and distracts her from the scream of anguish seeping into her nerves from her bones, and she barely notices she’s trembling.

The kid hugs her head tight, which doesn’t help the way it throbs. She lays them back down, taking the chance to kneel and rest a moment.

Are you alright?, she signs, too tired to wonder if they can understand them.

The kid just nods enthusiastically, searching in their bag until their arms are so full of Oran berries and medicinal leeks and some potions too that they begin falling from them, handing them over to her.

She smiles and drinks a bottle of medicine slowly: what a sweet child.

Lilligant also approaches, a little mortified and worried. Her long leaf arms hold a small slab which she offers to the child, and a petal plucked from her head for the woman, to soothe her aches.

Elesa touches her own chin and pulls then the hand forward.

“She says thank you,” AkaRei translates. “And thank you. From me too.”

Lilligant curtsies very gracefully.

Well, Elesa thinks as Arezu reconciles with her noble and Adaman and Calaba fuss over her. Thank goodness the commander never said anything about anyone from the Clans or Jubilife just helping the child.

-

The moment the kid is spotted speeding around on a large fish towards the other side of the coastlands, Briosa grabs Volo and drags him along while she climbs all the way up to the very end of the cliff.

Her eyes squint: there the little thing is, she can see the trail of tgeur aquatic steed.

“Hey,” she says snapping her fingers so Volo is paying attention before pointing at the speck dashing on the waves, “They’re going directly for the active volcano island, right?”

The apparently younger man squints too.

He nods.

“Not under my fucking watch,” she sentences.

Thank Arceus the madman decides against diving straight into the sea from the top of the cliff; she does however slide down from it back to the beach exceedingly fast, making Volo scramble to keep up with her, then seizes the first row boat she finds, hurls the other on it with little fanfare, and starts rowing away at a frankly breakneck velocity for a guy with such apparently spindly arms dragging along with herself a body roughly twice her weight.

About halfway through her arms start cramping, and a Tentacool has the genius idea of throwing a poison dart at her nose (which is indeed not small and, if it did extend a little further out instead of straight down, would definitely be a good target), missing her entirely.

The Scary Face she glares at it with is enough to make it lose all animosity.

A Pokéball to the face later, the small beast is latched onto the backside of the boat and propelling it with Hydropulsars, and Firespit Island is reached much quicker this way - though the Tentacool does halt and stutter in fear as a horrendous thunder is heard mere hundreds of meters away from it.

With the jellyfish freed (she already has a Water type, and a Poison type too), after knocking out a Venomoth that tries to pick a fight, Briosa drags her associate and ward into the isle’s boiling heart of rock and molten lava.

They hurry between the pits of lava heaving burning heat, dashing past the Magmars and the Gravelers eyeing them quizzically - thank goodness none are quick enough to keep up and simply remain where they stand instead of chasing them, since those pests are rather feisty.

A small group appears as they round the corners: Volo recognizes the young Pearl leader, the dead Lord's warden and that poor Iscan fellow who can't catch a break from neither ghosts nor exceptionally short men.

Beyond them, he also recognizes the enormous shape of an Arcanine.

Which is. A surprise.

Considering the Lord should be dead.

Briosa does not see the three more or less adult bodies before the arena.

She sees an enormous dog on fire, and a very small child in the middle of a sea of lava, on a thin grey pavement.

“SHIT!” she eloquently shouts.

Shedding her backpack and howling at whoever is not currently in the middle of a pool of molten rocks to remain behind the yellow line she bolts off with a Pokéball in hand to get that tiny, very clearly endangered passenger off of the tracks this damned instant.

Thank goodness Walrein is half Water type or she’d be melting in the heat. Thank goodness she’s half Ice type too, or that Hydropulsar would have been vaporized in a second instead of creating a path across the magma.

“Return to the platform!” she shouts as loud as she can.

The kid turns to her, smiles gladly, waves a little; just as the enormous Lord charges towards them, they roll across the temporary flooring in a pinch to evade the monster - and get on the other section of the arena.

“I SAID RETURN TO THE PLATFORM!”

Arcanine roars with a might that shakes the Earth to its very core.

Briosa, who is completely deaf, points her finger at him and barks right back: “DON’T TRY ME YOU SON OF A BITCH, I’LL RIP YOUR TEETH OUT!”

(Behind her, both wardens and young leader stand bewildered, stunned out of their wits in vaguely horrified silence; Volo’s hands run to hide his face within them, torn between screaming, praying this doesn’t completely destroy relations between the guild and the Pearl clan, and desperately holding back an explosion of nervous laughter as a Hydropump slams into the Lord’s side and makes him stumble back into the lava.)

The kid launches something against the very angry beast’s snout and hits it.

“STOP ANTAGONIZING THE MURDER DOG!” Briosa shrieks with such exhasperation that she can almost feel in slow motion which one of the blood vessels in her brain is about to explode with enough strength to leave a fuming crater in place of her frontal lobe.

Another roar, a charge.

Ice Beam hits the Lord right in the chest and has him stumble back.

Other projectiles are thrown, other fragile paths to shore are built on the magma; the kid uses it to move to a different section of the arena, still launching satchels as Walrein struggles to keep the massive beast occupied.

She extinguishes the flaming circle in the middle of the arena, she stops his charges midway, she tries to drown the big bastard on land at every opportunity.

The kid still never returns to more solid ground.

A badly timed roll, and one of their sleeves is nearly incinerated by fire.

For the love of all that is good, if they don’t die nor do her in with a heart attack by the end of this, Briosa is going to kill them.

What takes several minutes seems to pass in just a handful of seconds.

A flash of blinding light dissipates to show a much calmer but still enormous Arcanine, and the child cheers with too much adrenaline in their system to realize their arm has a burn that nearly covers half of it.

They barely have the time to turn around and thank Briosa that a bullet roughly as big as Terusho (the very nice older sibling they got when they joined the Survey Corps, Laventon’s assistant) shoots right towards them and they are uncerimoniously grabbed from under the armpit with a Rillaboom grip, raised in the air, very quickly transported away from any semblance of magma, and settled back down on the ground.

Briosa stares into their eyes with her own that look like rotten olives, and she is absolutely livid.

“PLEASE comply with station staff when asked to return to the platform!” she snarls, but the pitch of her voice makes her a little amusing even with the worry in her tone. She points at the arena, dead serious: “That is LAVA! If you fell there would not be BONES left! You would have been SOUP!”

They laugh nervously. The high is slowly going away and the terror is settling.

Briosa turns them around like a sack of potatoes, inspecting their wounds, muttering of Cheri berries. Something strikes her.

“Why the hell where you there anyway?” she asks, and gestures at the three waiting by at the edge of the arena (a little scared of her honestly): “They’re older. They should be handling a dangerous Pokémon.”

No help, they reply. Rule says only me. Clan no help.

“Who made the rule?” she demands.

In her mind she is replacing the bastard’s teeth with her fists.

They furrow their brow and put their hands under their nose, clearly imitating someone. Good choice, since they clearly have trouble spelling and she’s good with charades for reasons she can’t remember.

A moment and she clicks her tongue loudly - the Jubilife galaxy chief...

She gives them another look to assess the damage.

“First we cure those burns,” she decides, “Second I teach you how to throw someone thrice your size and weight, third...”

She waits a moment.

“You did hear me swear, right.”

They nod.

“Third don’t repeat anything I say ever. Fourth, we get that mustached motherfucker and hurl him into the ocean.”

The kid laughs.

Lord Arcanine approaches sheepishly and very, understandably afraid - he retreats for a moment when Briosa notices his arrival and hides the child behind herself, with a look like death in her pupils and Walrein readying a Hydropump that without the power lent by the frenzy is sure to destroy him.

His little savior stops both threats by pulling at the Ginko sleeve and talking with their hands, and he is free (though under a glare that could freeze his blood) to gently lay a plate from his mouth into their little palms.

“Att’a boy,” the small man comments.

“Thank you,” AkaRei says and signs before gently patting his snout.

Arcanine’s tail wags a little bit.

Well, Briosa thinks as people she doesn’t know finally come over and start talking while Volo eyes the plate hungrily as he hands her berries for the kid. Thank goodness the fucker never said anything about the Ginko guild helping.

-

The moment he actually realizes how the noble is to be quelled, Ingo’s hands grasp little shoulders tighter as if that alone could keep them still forever.

“Absolutely not,” he sentences.

“Now you come to your senses?!” Melli shrieks.

“I had not understood they would have to physically fight Electrode!” the other replies horrified. “This is no task for a child to take on! It’s inadmissible!”

But the Commander has ordered otherwise: this is the child’s duty and nobody else’s, and neither Pearl nor Diamond nor Ginko nor Jubilife must attempt to help them in any way lest they want him to get quite crossed at them - and considering what is known of him, nobody wants him to get crossed at them.

However! Ingo will sooner die than let a passenger (let alone a minor) on a train destined for derailment.

The little kid pulls at his fingers to pry them off of their shoulders; he struggles against them just for a moment.

He watches, uneasy, as they expertly stuff their bag with satchels with Melli’s begrudging help while the gears of his mind churn and turn to find some way to stop this trainwreck of a situation before the kid is grievously injured so much that they overtheat and his temples start hurting.

Considering they’re still alive however, either they have miraculously fought alone and survived each frenzied Noble (something hardly likely, because despite how skilled their battling abilities might be they are still a small and frail and slow 8-year-old), or someone has managed to help them. There has to be some kind of loophole to the commander’s orders, he is certain of that, but where? Effectively, anybody in Hisui has been ruled out.

The child fixes their bag and walks quickly into the arena.

The solution explodes in his brain.

He hurriedly shoves off hat and coat, grabs at the hem of his tunic - Adaman and Melli turn away from him in tandem, suddenly embarassed as they realize he’s undressing, but they’re late anyways: haggard uniform back over his undershirt, Ingo entrusts his fellow warden with both ornate bracelet and Pearl insignia.

His eyes pierce the opposing leader’s: “Please don’t tell Miss Irida of this.”

And then he’s on the rock wall sorrounding Moonview Arena, climbing upward like his life depends on it.

Lord Electrode is akin to a Sun fallen on the ground - enormous, glowing brilliantly, and in an incredibly worse mood than usual. In front of it, the kid looks even smaller than they already are.

It shakes fiercely, beady eyes overrun with wrath, earth quaking with it.

A fulmineous Poison Jab has it rolling on its side with a growling groan.

There is a relief in the terrified child’s face as they recognize the Gliscor soaring just above them that makes his heart hurt.

“I APOLOGIZE FOR THE TREATMENT I WILL BE RESERVING YOU, LORD ELECTRODE!” perched upon the rocky ring Ingo shouts as loud as he can, hoping the volume will break through the anger of the beast turning to face him at least a little: “I CANNOT ALLOW HARM TO COME TO PASSENGERS!”

“Don’t hurt him!” Melli’s voice comes from beneath.

“I WILL TRY TO MINIMIZE THE DAMAGE!”

Electrode shrieks at him and hurls a ball of pure electricity towards him. Gliscor tanks it without a scratch thanks to his Ground typing and replies with another Poison Jab.

A pinkish satchel hits the back of the round body, and a bit of that rage chips off.

The Lord turns around with horrifying speed, fuming. The spook is such that a second balm hits him straight in the face, but the problem is now clear: if Ingo wants to keep the kid alive and in one piece, the distractions need to come in a constant stream.

Gliscor will have to work overtime.

Luckily, he already loves playing with his food.

Even more luckily, it takes very little to get on the Lord’s nerves.

The only thing that can deal at least some noteworthy damage is Poison, so he has to make the most of the one move he managed to re-teach him right before the start of this rodeo.

It’s a game of Glameow-and-Rattata, hit-and-run after hit-and-run, and the only ones having fun seem to be Electrode’s offsprings as they gleefully try to self-destruct in the hovering Pokémon’s face and at the child’s feet. A rogue spark traveling too far from its detonation makes the kid yelp and Ingo want to jump in himself, but that would then leave his partner directionless and thus the passenger vulnerable and--

And the Lord is readying an explosion of his own, its range wide enough to cover almost the whole arena and there’s no way those little legs can evade that.

The child half scream in terror for a moment when a poisoned tail wraps around their middle and they find themselves high in the air; Gliscor, unable to apologize for the suddenness of the situation, does his best to keep a strong but not bruising grip on their little body just like his trainer has instructed.

The detonation blinds and deafens Ingo for a moment.

His ears ring and dark splotches still blot out his vision when a shower of satchels pelts the equally confused Electrode - it seems gravity, though forgotten in the middle of the chaos, came to their aid nonetheless.

A smaller bang of light: Lord Electrode shakes the last bit of frenzy off of himself as the child is lowered back to the ground.

The warden climbs into the arena like he’s just been possessed by a famished Dusknoir, power-walking his way to the very much not completely alright kid, case in point the piece of leg he can see through the ripped side of their pants with is very much getting purplish in color and a little bloody (though thank Sinnoh it’s more akin to a scratch instead of a gaping wound).

“Are you in pain?” he asks immediately, completely skiping pleasantries, one hand recalling his partner to get him some rest and the other rummaging in his pocket for a sort of ‘health kit’ he keeps on himself at all times.

When the kid shakes their head - bravely, but they seem to limp a little - he kneels before them to better inspect their leg and ignores their response, soaking a piece of bandage in medicinal leek juice and wrapping it carefully around their bleeding bruise.

“I apologize - I’ve committed a horrible mistake and made you pay the consequences,” he tells them sheepishly as they shake a little and hiss for the burn and Almighty Sinnoh they are just so small in his hands: “If I had been attentive this morning I might have been able to devise a better plan as we ascended to the arena, keeping you away from the battlefield entirely-”

He would go on if the little arms didn’t hug him tight.

He hugs back. Right. They are shaken. Comfort should come first; there is more than enough time for an apology later.

“You were incredibly brave,” he murmurs.

(Kamado is still going to get his ass handed to him verbally, physically or even both and no force in Hisui is going to spare him from his fate.)

There’s a sharp ‘spock’ sound, like empty wood against wood. When Ingo turns his head slightly to inspect where it came from, he sees the much calmer Lord near the tree that is his home, trying to roll in a few different directions before settling on his side and carefully approaching them, some kind of slab held tight between his teeth.

“Lord Electrode,” he greets him, to give the kid time to retract into his coat if they feel unsafe or wipe their tears away if they don’t want the Pokémon to see them: “I’m sorry for the treatment I’ve reserved you. I had no ill intentions...”

Electrode grumbles amiably through the thing in his mouth - it seems he recalls the apology yelled beforehand and is willing to let bygones be bygones seeing what the situation was. He can be surprisingly level-headed despite... You know. The exploding thing.

He offers the slab of rock very gently to the half hidden child.

“A gift?” the man asks, and he nods. “How kind! Thank you.”

“Thank you,” AkaRei echoes him. After a second they add: “Very much.”

Electrode accepts the Oran berries the warden sheepishly hands over to him rather gratefully.

Well, Ingo thinks as Melli rushes in to assess the damage and pretends he doesn’t sigh in relief at the kid being in one piece. Thank goodness the commander never said anything about foreigners being forbidden from helping.

-

The moment Avalugg emerges from the ice, shining brilliantly in a mound of light, as big as a mountain, roaring hard enough to make the Earth tremble, the child before him seizes with a shiver that even in this weather is more from terror than chill.

Adaman pales into snow.

Irida bites her lip.

“Almighty Sinnoh,” she hears him whisper, “He is a colossus.”

She knew already. She all but grew up on his back, after all.

Gaeric remains immoble next to her, unable to disobey her orders, with a face she isn’t sure she can interpret. She knows he cannot stop the kid after giving them his permission; she also knows, from the tension in his arms, that he does not want that child to be out there in the arena now more than ever.

Nobody can help.

Kamado has finally figured out a way to word his decision that doesn’t leave any breath, any opening, any slightest attempt at circumnavigating it: he’s left the kid alone to fend off a giant with only their Pokémon and nothing else.

But Avalugg is relentless, she knows, and slow and steady: it might take a while before the child has a moment to battle him, and nothing assures their little legs will manage to move quickly enough to evade any of the frozen boulders he hurls at them.

Her nails sink into her palm so she can't bite at them.

Next to her, her fellow clan leader thumbs at his bandages.

Avalugg roars.

Irida turns sharply to Adaman, entire body facing his, a determined look in her awfully nervous eyes; her fist intercepts his a moment too late, and their stiff arm stumble against one another for a moment before the tension in their bodies blocks them.

“I ask for your alliance,” she says with a throat that shakes with the knowledge that she is too young to be ready for war, “In the case Jubilife turns against the Pearl Clan for what I wish to do.”

“I ask for your alliance in the case Jubilife turns against the Diamond Clan for what I wish to do,” he says with a voice that shakes from the cold and the fear, “And your permission to do it.”

It’s her people’s Noble, after all.

Their wrists link for a second, as the enormous beast begins his attack: the contract is sealed.

Adaman darts into the arena without a word more, because he is impatient and an older brother, and he grabs the kid in a roll that gets them out of the way of a ball of ice hurtling their way before tucking them under his arm like a basket of softfoot roots, and Irida briefly forgets their just stipulated accord to clench her fists tight enough to break rock within them and think as strongly as she can that he’s an idiot and she will kill him because who in the name of Almighty Sinnoh would run directly into Lord Avalugg as if it were a sound decision under any circumstance, let alone this one in particular.

The Diamond leader could not hear her if she were shouting at him, busy as he is shielding the child in his haori as he tries balancing them on his hip, evading rows of frozen boulders, and thinks to himself that this was not, in fact, his greatest plan - to run in, Leaf Blades blazing, and set himself up against an enormous creature he cannot dream of attacking; firstly, because Gaeric would kill him on the spot, and he would be in the right; secondly, because the Lord is so much bigger and so, so much angrier than him.

The kid grabs him tight, arms around his waist, yells that he’s not supposed to be there, that Kamado will get angry, and they’re crying a little

Adaman hoists them up in his arms as the beast makes him dance about to not get skewered by the icy shards jutting out from across the length of the arena and gives them what he hopes is a genial, comforting smile.

“Don’t worry,” he reassures them: “I’m not alone.”

Avalugg roars.

The first icicle misses narrowly, the kid holding tighter onto his neck; the second one has him stumbling on his heels and falling backwards.

The third one disappears into the sky.

From where he lays a moment more Adaman recognizes stripes of red on white tails shaking in the wind, and wheezes a blessing at Irida.

The Pearl leader, iron grip on the paraglider carried by Lord Braviary, spares him a glance just to ascertain that he and the child have gotten back on their feet as she flies in circles over the enormous Noble to redirect his attacks somewhere she know he will struggle to aim at. She can tell the wings keeping her in the air strain as the frenzied Avalugg targets them with increasing fury.

A ray of freezing energy grazes Braviary while they fly a little too close, making his mighty wings flap in fright for a moment - the piercing chill escaping her Lord’s maw so violently nearly snakes its way under her skin, but she grits her teeth and sucks cold air through them.

She did not mean to hurl the Eternal Ice at the docile giant so harshly, but from such a height and in such a situation, she supposes it can’t exactly be helped.

Avalugg takes it all, all the balms thrown at him from smaller hands as well as more well-known ones, stunned in place by the dizziness his fully unleashed fury envelops him in. By the time his massive head shakes to regain composure and his eyes are again alight with wrath, the golden glow has drastically reduced its splendor; he still can’t hear his warden trying to plead with him, nor can he recognize the shape insistently circling his head as the little human girl he’s seen grow up under his careful gaze.

Between the small projectiles dirtying his maw and the avian annoyance, he decides the latter is more worthy of his rage.

Braviary shrieks, doing his best to evade the boulders of ice hurled blindly in his general direction, some coming far, far too close to him and his passenger for comfort (on land Gaeric yells something and Sabi, despite her reassurances that all will go well, clings harder to his leg). Irida grip slips just for a moment, half of her Eternal Ice falling to the ground uselessly, wasted, but she steels herself enough to fly to safety.

The good part of her strife is that, down below her, the danger level has been drastically reduced and the kid is getting their arms sore with throwing balms without rest.

That is, until Adaman decides he has a better, quicker idea.

It’s a very good thing that the child has no complaints about getting swung around in his arms like a moderately sized sack of flour, and also that they trust him completely as he jumps off the platform into the arena, a few meters away from the gargantuan rock pillars that are Avalugg’s legs, shaking the ground with every lumbering step as he turns and turns increasingly furious. There’s no doubt he’s too clouded by rage to even realize what he’s stepping on - even if it was a trail or bunch of his favorite treat.

Dozens of satchels of ice crack beneath the enormous weight of the Noble.

A golden burst blinds Lord Braviary for a moment: Irida’s hands slip to cover her face, but the ground meets her halfway.

It rumbles beneath her with an apologetic growl.

Despite his normally still impressive size, the Lord of the Tundra looks so much more docile, much more gentle without the frenzy coursing through him. He turns bashfully to the small humans at his side, shaking his head as if to apologize; his fellow Lord carefully perches hiself on one of its great tusks and rubs the soft feathers of his head against his large maw, crooning softly.

“Irida?” Adaman calls for her out of breath while the enormous beast lays slowly, trying to see past the block of ice and rock: “Are you alright?”

From the flat back of the Pokémon his fellow Leader’s voice comes weakly: “Yes,” she replies; her head peeks from above. “I’m fine.”

He helps her down from the Lord, and the kid rushes to hug her tight.

All three got out of this in one piece.

Thank Sinnoh.

Avalugg digs something up from the dirt: he pushes the plate a little closer to the smaller humans.

AkaRei picks it up, and smiles weakly: “Thank you.”

Well, Adaman and Irida think grimly as Gaeric, Sabi and Terusho (who hurried over worried by the quakes caused by the Lord’s attacks) slide down into the arena to ascertain that they’re alright. Now, to face the consequences.

[not-poignant]

I admit I was trawling for some easy smut to read and got Underline the Black. Usually I back out when the story doesn't go how I expect and instead I've binged the whole thing in six hours and find myself painfully relating to Efni's gender and sexual trauma.

I don't know how to describe it but I'm AFAB and grew up Christian with all these expectations and secular ones and I was so scared I rejected everything and tried to be this person I thought I had to be. And I've done that over and over and I'm thirty now and I think I'm finally coming to terms with my place in gender and sex and all that.

It's still a long journey and idk I know a lot of trans people get squicked by ABO stuff and it's based off bunk wolf science but. Idk. This is the most I've ever felt seen I think. So thanks.

Hi hi,

I really love omegaverse, you might be surprised how many trans people are writing it on AO3 - trust me when I say it's a lot of us. :)

A lot of the reasons trans folk can find omegaverse squicky is actually a lot of the same reasons why trans folk can find it cathartic or interesting or crave reading it. Everyone's reasons for ending up in omegaverse are different, because it's really just a huge umbrella term for like, countless different genres, tropes, levels of worldbuilding, sex, and types of story.

I don't really mind that it's based off debunked science, hell, I've even written a logical explanation for that in my Perth Shifters series lol. There's a lot of science we have today that was initially based off of bad science, that scientists then went 'oh yeah, that's not great, but we might keep the terminology anyway, because everyone's using it.' So that works out just fine. It's not like all of our science in reality started off in the best places, some started off in pure medieval spaces and then just kind of...grew up over time.

I apologise for the lack of easy smut though in Underline the Black! I have a lot more of erotica / smut in my other works, like Spoils of the Spoiled or Game Theory, so far we're still a while away from anything more than the handjob that's coming up in a couple of chapters re: Efnisien and Gary, that's definitely a slowburn! :D

(You might like Underline the Red though, which has some alpha/beta smut instead!)

And yeah, gender stuff is so hard. I'm glad you're coming to a place that feels right or is starting to feel right re: gender. I know I started that journey for myself in my early 30s and now that I'm in my early 40s it's only really started to settle into place. This stuff can be rough, especially when you're raised in repressed and oppressive and harmful societies.

Being able to explore gender stuff in Underline the Black has been a lot of fun for me. I much prefer doing it this way, than doing it with the genders we already have irl, tbh, because it lets me detach a little, but it also means that the omegaverse genders can become metaphorical for a lot of different issues, and I enjoy the power of something that can work in a few different ways. :D

(Also just a note, in the future can you please write it as a/b/o or just say omegaverse, because otherwise you're just writing a horrible slur towards Aboriginal Australians and we're generally trying to avoid that. Appreciate it going forward thank you! :) ).

[firstumcschenectady]

“The Things We Fear, and the Things We Want” based on Deuteronomy 28:58-68 and John 11:17-27

I'm not particularly great at monitoring the secular calendar, so before I preach this sermon, I need to admit that I completely forgot today was Mothers' day.  This is only relevant because I'm talking about parenting, which is something I'd have sought to avoid if I remembered.  But I didn't.  So here we are.

I'm intimidated by Mommy-blogs, online parent groups, and even parenting book.  So I don't read them.  I guess in part I think of them as being like the Book of Discipline – the second you open it to figure something out you find you are out of compliance and then you have to decide if you want to A. Exert an exceptional amount of energy coming into compliance or B. Maintain the status quo while feeling guilty for knowingly doing it wrong.  That said, I don't think parenting quite has rules like the Book of Discipline so may it is more than I'm well aware of how judgmental people are of parents, and I'm just terrified of entering a space where I'll be judged like that.

(It occurs to me this is a powerful motivator for why people stay away from church too.  Scary parallels.)

All of that is to say, I want to talk a little bit about parenting, but I don't know any of the official words and I'm far to scared to go down the rabbit hole of the internet to find them.  So, here are words that no one has agreed upon, but I think are right.  I aim to be a “feelings and needs parent.”  By which I mean I seek to provide a lot of names for feelings, because I think talking about feelings helps everything, and having good names helps in talking about feelings.  Things like, for example, “I have dread when I think about online parent groups.”  The other part of this is needs, and for me that means that I believe that all human actions are motivated by attempting to meet basic human needs.  To go back to that example, “I have dread when I think about online parenting groups because I have needs for compassion and to experience myself as competent and I'm afraid that both will be threatened.”

I'm pretty well bought in to the value of thinking about human behavior as an expression of human need, and I'm also committed to the value of using feelings as sources of wisdom.  These are whole life commitments, and also parenting ones.  They aren't particularly easy parenting commitments though.  It means working together to figure out what is going on, and how that has impacted behavior, and what that means about what needs are seeking to be met, and how we might meet those needs together safely and without stepping on other people's needs.  And basically there aren't any shortcuts to doing that work.

The good part is that the skills I develop in parenting around feelings and needs are also ones that are useful in dealing with myself, and also in working with others in the church.  The bad part is that one can get kinda drained doing things the hard way all the time.

Alas.

Because the another option is basically what we have in Deuteronomy, where God is presented as an authoritative, punitive parent who says “do it my way, or suffer the consequences.”  And there the consequences are particularly awful. 

Whenever I read Deuteronomy I remind myself to hear it in context.  Deuteronomy was written down in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem and the despair of the Exile, in an attempt to answer the questions, “Why did this happen to us and what could we have done to prevent it?”  Those writing have just experienced a huge communal trauma that threatened every part of their identity and theology, and they want to believe that it happened for a REASON.  Because that's just human.  We want to make sense of the things that happen.

As people who largely believed that everything that happened, happened because God wanted it to happen, they then believed that the destruction had been God's punishment, and to keep God in the right it thus it followed that their own misbehavior was the culprit.  So, I can hear in our passage today an underlying assumption “oh how we wish we'd been more motivated to do things God's way so this didn't' happen to us!  I wonder what would have convinced us.  Maybe these threats would have helped.”

Even so, I still cringe.  That isn't the way I parent, it isn't the way I was parented, this isn't the way I want to see power used in the church or the world, and to get to the point, it doesn't fit the way I understand God.       

And yet, the idea of God as one who punishes and rewards is quite a prevalent concept in the Bible and to take a stand against it requires acknowledging that.  I am so grateful for John Dominic Crossan for the way he named the two “streams of thought” in the Hebrew Bible.  One is the one we heard today – the stream of covenant, reward, punishment, and threat.  It is there, it is plentiful, it can be found in the New Testament too if you are looking for it.  BUT the other one is just as plentiful, and he called that the stream of “Sabbath and distributive justice.”  That one says God created Sabbath as a gift to be equally distributed to all, and after Sabbath is distributed so too should be the land, the food, the education, … the power, etc.  It is a vision of community, of sharing, of collaboration, and of motivation to love because God loves.

Both of the streams exist, and both are substantial.  And probably both of them exist in us all to some extent, but most of us end up choosing one or the other, and I stand firmly on the side of Sabbath and distributive justice.  I'm not arrogant enough to claim the other one is WRONG, or lacks value, or those who follow it are un-faithful.  I just am here admitting that I know where I stand.

The punishments I hear in Deuteronomy are scare tactics, they are what people fear.  But fear isn't a great motivator, even if plenty of us use it on ourselves all the time. OK, fine, it is a REALLY powerful short term motivator, but it doesn't change or form hearts or minds and it runs out of steam relatively quickly. The punishments from this passage flow pretty neatly into the conceptions of heaven and hell and a God who judges who goes where – used to motivate people toward goodness and compliance but also quite poorly.  I've been asked by people why I am motivated to do good in the world if not simply to avoid hell. 

OYE!

In truth, I tend to think of the two streams of thought in the Bible as being highly reflective of two steams of thought I see in our society.  The Covenant one with rewards and punishments sounds a whole lot like authoritative leadership and a parental style often described as “daddy knows best.”  (Which doesn't mean that every family system in which this is the model has a father or has the father as the one who knows best.)  In this system everyone else's wisdom as well as their needs are dismissed so that the authoritative figure gets what they want and others are simply expected to comply. 

The Sabbath, distributive justice one sounds like an egalitarian family, one where the feelings and needs of everyone are taken seriously, and win-win solutions are sought together. 

Dear ones, I work with God toward the kindom of God because I believe it is possible to be a part of a better world.  I believe we can take care of each other.  I believe we can distribute goods and resources fairly.  I believe people are lovely and it is worth working for everyone to be better off together.   I believe in ABUNDANCE and that means there is enough for everyone if we just STOP being scared. 

Which means I would rather not scare people, since fear itself is part of the resistance to just distribution.

Now, I think some of the same energy that we find in Deuteronomy is also in John this week.  Martha believes her brother wouldn't have died if only Jesus was there, and a conversation ensues about the correctness of her belief.  For the Gospel of John, Jesus IS God, and whatever we may think about that notion, it is useful to remember when listening to John.  So Martha believed the presence of God would have prevented her brother's untimely death, and is rather irked Jesus didn't show up.  This becomes a opening to talk about Jesus/God's power of life and resurrection, and in fact the story goes on past what we read today to the resurrection of Lazarus. 

However, as Wilda Gafney says, Lazarus “is raised to life in the same old world.  Life in Jesus happens here among the brokenness, failings, and limitations of the present world.”[1]  While it could be easy to hear Jesus as talking about AFTERLIFE, the context of Lazarus pulls us back to THIS world.

Which means it pulls us back to making THIS world better, together, for all of God's beloveds, all of us.  I don't know better motivations than gratitude and hope.  Gratitude for the goodness of life and love, hope that with God all things are possible.  Including win-win solutions.  Including everyone's needs being met and everyone's feelings being taken seriously.  To get there, we get to practice – with each other, with our families, every where we go.  And thank goodness, there is a whole lot of grace for when we slip up. 

If you want to take a first, tentative step towards all this, here is a link to a “Feelings and Needs” sheet with a lot of feeling words and a list of universal human needs, and it is best to start with yourself.  What do YOU feel?  What do you need?  And how is it you feel God nudging you along to get those needs met? 

Or, maybe get to a deeper question:  what is underneath what you want?  What needs are really seeking to be met and what ways are you willing to try to get them met?  As we learn more to trust in God to care, we become better and better at sharing that love with others. We learn to make space for feelings, and needs. May God help us all!  Amen

[1]   Wilda C. Gafney, A Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church (Church Publishing Incorporated: New York, NY, 2021) p. 185

Rev. Sara E. Baron  First United Methodist Church of Schenectady  603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305  Pronouns: she/her/hers  http://fumcschenectady.org/  https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

May 14, 2023

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

The other thing about Disney is that it’s wholesome and family-friendly, but not in any kind of explicitly religious way, and there are a lot of evangelical fundamentalists who get driven up a wall by stuff like that because, in their opinion, anything that’s not explicitly Jesus-ridden is of the devil.

It’s basic cult tactics--make sure your followers interact as little as humanly possible with the secular world so you can scare the shit out of them about it, they won’t know enough to see through your bullshit, and they’ll have a fucking hard time leaving the church no matter how much abusive shit you pull. For bonus points, you can threaten to kick them out of the church if they don’t fall in line, with most of the same psychological fallout as any other insular group that practices shunning.

But Disney stuff occupies this space where it’s so patently inoffensive and devoid of objectionable material that they look utterly unhinged when they try to convince people that the content is morally the same as a grindhouse movie or a Motley Crue album. Most other believers get exasperated with them about it, and people who aren’t deep enough in the fold to have run into too much of this sort of blatantly controlling horseshit are like, “Is Helen Lovejoy over there fucking kidding with this?”

It’s a point of (extremely minor) resistance to their “burn your books and your rock’n’roll albums” campaigns, so of course it sends them into a frothing goddamned rage, which doesn’t help with the whole “no, for real, are you fucking kidding me right now” interactions.

So they do what any Good Christian™ does in this situation: lie their tits off.

Just make a whole bunch of shit up about Disney being a hotbed of what the fuck ever libel Lou Dobbs is pushing this week and go to town! You may not see anything objectionable about Lion King, but the whole Disney animation department is run by child-hungry perverts, and there’s totally a scene where some dust clouds spell out S-E-X, which means you should only ever let your kid watch VeggieTales and you were so, so wrong to question Pastor Fucknuts when he said the only way to keep your family safe was to lock them in a dark basement and never let them out.

It’s part and parcel to the way reactionary groups get more and more sensitive to and hostile towards even the tiniest challenge as their environments get more homogenized and their control gets more absolute. (Same reason people in lily-white gated communities frequently start getting real aggro about minor differences in religion, class background, or politics--their comfort zone will just keep getting smaller and smaller the more they’re able to eject The Other from it.)

So I’ve been enjoying the Disney vs. DeSantis memes as much as anyone, but like. I do feel like a lot of people who had normal childhoods are missing some context to all this.

I was raised in the Bible Belt in a fairly fundie environment. My parents were reasonably cool about some things, compared to the rest of my family, but they certainly had their issues. But they did let me watch Disney movies, which turned out to be a point of major contention between them and my other relatives.

See, I think some people think this weird fight between Disney and fundies is new. It is very not new. I know that Disney’s attempts at inclusion in their media have been the source of a lot of mockery, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that as far as actual company policy goes, Disney has actually been an industry leader for queer rights. They’ve had policies assuring equal healthcare and partner benefits for queer employees since the early 90s.

I’m not sure how many people reading this right now remember the early 90s, but that was very much not industry standard. It was a big deal when Disney announced that non-married queer partners would be getting the same benefits as the married heterosexual ones.

Like — it went further than just saying that any unmarried partners would be eligible for spousal benefits. It straight-up said that non-same-sex partners would still need to be married to receive spousal benefits, but because same-sex partners couldn’t do that, proof that they lived together as an established couple would be enough.

In other words, it put long-term same-sex partners on a higher level than opposite-sex partners who just weren’t married yet. It put them on the exact same level as heterosexual married partners.

They weren’t the first company ever to do this, but they were super early. And they were certainly the first mainstream “family-friendly” company to do it.

Conservatives lost their damn minds.

Protests, boycotts, sermons, the whole nine yards. I can’t tell you how many books about the evils of Disney my grandmother tried to get my parents to read when I was a kid.

When we later moved to Florida, I realized just how many queer people work at Disney — because historically speaking, it’s been a company that has guaranteed them safety, non-discrimination, and equal rights. That’s when I became aware of their unofficial “Gay Days” and how Christians would show up from all over the country to protest them every year. Apparently my grandmother had been upset about these days for years, but my parents had just kind of ignored her.

Out of curiosity, I ended up reading one of the books my grandmother kept leaving at our house. And friends — it’s amazing how similar that (terrible, poorly written) rhetoric was to what people are saying these days. Disney hires gay pedophiles who want to abuse your children. Disney is trying to normalize Satanism in our beautiful, Christian America. 

Just tons of conspiracy theories in there that ranged from “a few bad things happened that weren’t actually Disney’s fault, but they did happen” to “Pocahontas is an evil movie, not because it distorts history and misrepresents indigenous life, but because it might teach children respect for nature. Which, as we all know, would cause them all to become Wiccans who believe in climate change.”

Like — please, take it from someone who knows. This weird fight between fundies and Disney is not new. This is not Disney’s first (gay) rodeo. These people have always believed that Disney is full of evil gays who are trying to groom and sexually abuse children.

The main difference now is that these beliefs are becoming mainstream. It’s not just conservative pastors who are talking about this. It’s not just church groups showing up to boycott Gay Day. Disney is starting to (reluctantly) say the quiet part out loud, and so are the Republicans. Disney is publicly supporting queer rights and announcing company-supported queer events and the Republican Party is publicly calling them pedophiles and enacting politically driven revenge.

This is important, because while this fight has always been important in the history of queer rights, it is now being magnified. The precedent that a fight like this could set is staggering. For better or for worse, we live in a corporation-driven country. I don’t like it any more than you do, and I’m not about to defend most of Disney’s business practices. But we do live in a nation where rights are largely tied to corporate approval, and the fact that we might be entering an age where even the most powerful corporations in the country are being banned from speaking out in favor of rights for marginalized people… that’s genuinely scary.

Like… I’ll just ask you this. Where do you think we’d be now, in 2023, if Disney had been prevented from promising its employees equal benefits in 1994? That was almost thirty years ago, and look how far things have come. When I looked up news articles for this post from that era, even then journalists, activists, and fundie church leaders were all talking about how a company of Disney’s prominence throwing their weight behind this movement could lead to the normalization of equal protections in this country.

The idea of it scared and thrilled people in equal parts even then. It still scares and thrills them now.

I keep seeing people say “I need them both to lose!” and I get it, I do. Disney has for sure done a lot of shit over the years. But I am begging you as a queer exvangelical to understand that no. You need Disney to win. You need Disney to wipe the fucking floor with these people.

Right now, this isn’t just a fight between a giant corporation and Ron DeSantis. This is a fight about the right of corporations to support marginalized groups. It’s a fight that ensures that companies like Disney still can offer benefits that a discriminatory government does not provide. It ensures that businesses much smaller than Disney can support activism.

Hell, it ensures that you can support activism.

The fight between weird Christian conspiracy theorists and Disney is not new, because the fight to prevent any tiny victory for marginalized groups is not new. The fight against the normalization of othered groups is not new.

That’s what they’re most afraid of. That each incremental victory will start to make marginalized groups feel safer, that each incremental victory will start to turn the tide of public opinion, that each incremental victory will eventually lead to sweeping law reform.

They’re afraid that they won’t be able to legally discriminate against us anymore.

So guys! Please. This fight, while hilarious, is also so fucking important. I am begging you to understand how old this fight is. These people always play the long game. They did it with Roe and they’re doing it with Disney.

We have! To keep! Pushing back!

[scentedchildnacho]

There is a China school near where I lived in Milwaukee Wisconsin....it could be a behavioural center if the school is outdated people can use my prior neighborhood for better non profit public incomes

That block district is poor compared to what surrounds it

If it was China drug or non violent crime wouldn't have to do time in the jail.....

Milwaukee has decent housing it doesn't make sense to take the children off home online yet....make them already learn office non ergonomics

The staff also told me their mental experience has lead them to prefer secularism.....I was around a true master in hare Krishna in San diego so talking to God or talking in tongues doesn't cause me duress but with technology and the way cops treat religionists sometimes I don't believe my visions are valid and may have elements of satanism

I don't participate as a member in religion because I would get beat up and the Irish and Italian working mans sometimes the Spanish influence on hygiene and I feel forced to be poor because I'm allergic

I think something about the mafia maybe even Mexican scared me really really bad as a child

No you have to be European citizens to understand Dublin on that type of chicagoness

Underground

If melanctha would arrive about barge workman's babies the baby would be okay but if left to the condition under Europeans sudden infant death or Fred Hampton was Baltics not whites

Uhm my coffee with the cops mug is made in the USA....so sure I do feel some anti emigration is a striking political maneuvar I wasn't overcoming my paranoia on entrepreneurial coffee cups not even bright color bright color i like china take away coffee because bright color

Space medicine.....micro satellites

I would want my cell bloc to have a verticulture garden and I would totally fly around in there picking the greens for lunch like this parachute film at the ucr exhibit in Riverside California

Moon walk around in there put my poster up of the man who like personifies all my morals over the jail light

But this emotion of sexual pleasure so transcends the actual idea of sexuality physical

Maybe it could be like Jordan......

Beautiful palatial entrance to a plain underground mountain

Spulunk cave dwelling

[poetandwolf]

things that make Al lose his shit which are vaguely canon in way because Science.

when people wear the incorrect masks in public spaces and take selfies. The N95 mask is the best-bet for protection against covid. when he sees (usually furries) posting selfies with the ' owo ' masks on he screams in my head. he believes it's all done for clout and if they actually 'gave a shit about their health they'd spend the 10 dollars or whatever the fuck they blew on that furry mask on a box of n95 masks at home fucking d3pot.'

debating about him when he's baking. good fucking lord. dry and wet measuring cups are different and baking has to be exact, it is chemistry at it's core. telling him or walking over him or (i wouldn't say man-splaning because no man has ever done this LOL) to him that "it doesn't matter." which one is used with give the man a fucking stroke. because every time it has happened the person just. walks over him and dumps the shit into the bowl while he's fishing out the wet measuring cup.

whining when you cause the problem yourself. if you are a victim of your own folly- do not complain to him. you date some fuck head, he will tell you, that person is a piece of shit. and you should leave. and if you continue to date said person, and whine to him about the person when you are perfectly in a position to walk the fuck away. do not. under any circumstance. whine about it. it doesn't even have to be dating. it can be anything. if you are going to do a thing- ask his input, he gives his hard blunt science cold input- but you do the thing anyway... oh god fucking help you if you cry to him about it. @deathsembrace662 has first hand experience. very good friend if you get on that level with him. but do not whine. if you have a comfortable home, food, water, aren't in pain or pain is managed (chronic pain have-er here, so there's a scare if it's a NEW pain or if Normal Pain is Higher then yeah. He'll help), ac or heat working and at a temp where you're good? whining in general, a friend, a GOOD FRIEND is sick. whines to him about all the problems and being sick- i stopped his claws from texting "well you're well complain and whine about it. you'll be fine. you probably don't need to go to the hospital. drink water and eat something. i don't fucking care if you hate the taste of water. >:O

breaking his boundaries or the boundaries of others. when he says "no" or anyone else says no- and he sees someone else still push.. the man will get fucking ruthless.

any nonsense about religion. this means all religions. having spiritual practices that aid you is fine. but putting blind faith in something when there is zero science to back it up with out putting the work to ensure that you remotely even tried to make things work- oi.

following that up with nosy christians who nit pick about someone else being non-christian or when christians get that "YOU KNOW WHERE IT ALL COMES FROM!!!" about others' beliefs or tattooes or whatever... just... he's very secular. he can not stand it when a supposed christian comes at someone for being a non-christian, more so when that non-christian is actually a decent human being and the christian is a shitty example of a human being. he can not stand hypocrisy. the arrogance and the look they give us, or anyone else who doesn't believe. the vanity they they have that they think they're 'better' than everyone else and the self entitlement to "save" people when, you know. the person doesn't need to hear about 'god' they just need to make the life easier for the other person by not creating more problems for the other person.

[litmagrejects]

Apostate

This story was originally published on March 29, 2023, at A Thin Slice of Anxiety.

It happened on a steamy summer night just after a church softball game. They came back to Calvin's place and needed a shower before dinner. Calvin held out the most luxurious towel in his linen closet, but they fumbled; they both reached for it, and Calvin landed one of his hands on the small of Kirk's back. His large palm enveloped the spot as Kirk lifted his upper body. Calvin allowed his hand to lower with gravity, and Kirk did nothing to remove it. Their eyes met, confessing their intense desire. Pulling their bodies into a tight embrace, they finally felt the evidence of their pent-up passion. No longer playing games, they became engulfed in each other as their mouths joined and their hands explored. He would never, for the rest of his life, forget Kirk's scent, his taste.

Just when it seemed like they couldn't turn back, without warning, Kirk pushed back and looked to the ground.

"No! I…I can't…"

Calvin was so disoriented from the sudden shift, it took a moment to realize what it meant. Kirk gathered his things and started for the door while Calvin stood dumbfounded, not knowing what to say or do.

Near the bus stop, propaganda posters layered all around the old phone pole. The new images slathered over the old in a protruding mass. A crimson-colored background and large hands with the Church logo reaching down to the masses with images of bounty. "Meeting All Your Needs!" In large block letters on the bottom. It reminded him of a film series about the "end times" shown in churches decades earlier. The films scared the hell out of people even as they tried to chase them into Heaven. Now, Calvin lived under the tyranny of theocracy, and the state-Church seemed content to hurl the entire world down the same dreadful path it once feared.

On the edge of the poster, he noticed a curious hole. He pushed it with his fingertip, and soon the entire digit sank deep into the layers. Years of old paper and glue separated as if he were burrowing the depths for something precious. The approaching bus shined a spotlight on him, and he jerked his hand away and prepared his phone for scanning.

Calvin lumbered up the bus's stairs, a tote bag on his arm, and his phone in hand. He glanced at the driver; in his peripheral vision, there was the young nurse in scrubs and an older man sleeping in his seat. He walked to the place furthest from the other two passengers and plopped down. A used newspaper sprawled across the seat next to him. He saw the headlines: "President Visits Tomorrow!" "Rioters at Church Headquarters Tied to Terrorists," and "US Expands Sanctions Against Secular Nations." He tossed the paper on the floor and stepped on it with both feet.

Calvin pulled out his prized possession, an antique Walkman from the 1980s. It once belonged to his favorite uncle, so it felt like a family heirloom, but it also sheltered him from the endless propaganda. Rather than the radio, he would listen to his vast collection of cassette tapes.

Looking at the current rotation he popped in "Eschatology Lectures, a Theological Study of the End Times," an old cassette by one-time prominent theologian Dr. Hulda M. Wyatt. How unsurprised she would be to see the world's current state. On the other hand, she would feel shocked and mortified to witness the Church's role in it all. The scenes whipping by the window didn't register in his mind because he had already wrapped himself in Dr. Wyatt's lecture. Every passing moment increased Calvin's primal desire for sleep, and soon he even tuned out Dr. Wyatt.

Calvin disembarked, failing to avoid the message wrapped around the entire bus shelter. "Support the Government! Report to Church!" emblazoned in red with the happiest models on earth pictured in every open space. Pictures of the perfect Church-approved family. His instant rage pulled him out of his slumber for a moment. He turned off the lecture and began a ferocious internal rant as he walked toward the store.

A few days after Kirk ran out of his apartment, he called Calvin and asked to meet him at the church. They met on a Monday because the rest of the staff took the day off. Calvin walked in and saw Kirk pacing near the open sanctuary doors. His face looked pale, drained of the usual cheer that could brighten any room. His dark hair, always stylish and brushed forward, now just hung unkempt like blinds over his eyes.

"Let's go talk in there," Kirk said, motioning to the pews in the back. They sat.

Calvin knew to expect the worst yet with Kirk’s body heat so close, he couldn’t stop his mind from wandering. He breathed deep, ingesting every particle in the air that they shared, archiving it deep inside.

"I don't know what happened at your place, but I almost quit over it," Kirk said. "No! Why? Calvin replied. "That seems a li—"

"But then I realized what happened was really about you, not me."

"What?" Calvin asked as he dropped his upper body back against the hard wood. "Cal, you are gay or whatever and misunderstood our friendship."

"Misunders--"

"You. You have to get yourself right, or one of us has to go," Kirk said.

For a moment, Calvin doubted himself. It was true that he had misread signals with friends in the past. But this time he could point to direct contact, places, and ways that Kirk touched him. All evidence from just a few days ago. He knew that the feelings were mutual, but he also felt desperate to salvage something between them. So rather than force Kirk to face his desires, he just accepted the blame.

"I'm sorry! I'm Sorry! I'll do whatever you want. Please. Can't we still be friends?" "Maybe, a long time from now, if you get yourself right."

"How lo—"

"I’ll be praying for you, Cal," Kirk said.

He lifted his hand to hide the tears in his blue eyes and paused as if he had something more to say.

Calvin could feel the conflict raging inside him, but Kirk turned and ran out, leaving any of those words unsaid.

Calvin let out a primal scream. "Why!"

Obscenities blasted out of his mouth toward the vaulted sanctuary roof. He felt tricked and betrayed. He had served his whole life, lived only to serve, but now he was left alone with this mortal wound. Even as his anger toward life and God erupted from him, he wondered if he could ever be forgiven.

The bank of ten monitors flickered a bluish hue across the cramped office. It hypnotized Calvin into a light sleep and then nudged him awake in endless cycles. This was the woeful reality of the life of a security guard, the only living thing in the store overnight.

He sent his hand across the particleboard desk and bumped into the radio. A classic country star yodeled after he turned it on. His eyes lifted like two heavy garage doors just as the song ended. "This is a news brief from the Patriot & Prophet News Corporation—"

"Oh god, bring back the yodeling!" Calvin said.

"God's Chosen, the President, on Wednesday detailed his plan to create a new international organization overseeing Church and morality initiati—"

Calvin's hand stung after he struck the radio with an open palm. He hit it so hard that the transmission turned off.

"It's all an abomination!"

Calvin tried to exhale his tension as he examined the radio.

After confirming that it still worked, he rose with the tightness of middle-age and began his end- of-shift tour a few hours early.

In the stairwell, he steadied himself on the cold steel railing and descended to the store's lower level. The glistening white floor shone as he made his way to the exterior doors on the other side. He removed the scanner from his jacket and pointed it at a bar code on the door frame. It beeped, documenting his first stop.

A distant call came over a loudspeaker as he put the scanner back in his pocket. Pulsating police lights blinded him through the six glass doors; the colors grew more intense as they came closer. He couldn’t help but wonder if they were coming for him.

You're paranoid, he thought.

"Stop!" The authorities yelled over their loudspeaker.

Calvin felt a brief moment of relief, knowing that they were hunting someone else.

"What the hell is going on out there?"

A man materialized from around the corner and crashed full speed into the middle door. The impact released an explosion of glass, each shard colored by the approaching police lights. Calvin let out an instinctual scream but was so transfixed on the scene he didn't shield himself. The fresh-faced young man looked up at him in desperation.

Blood starting to flow down covering his face, he whispered, "Help. Please, help me," as he struggled to get up.

His voice sounded even younger than he looked. His bangs, now red, weighted down near his eyes.

Before Calvin could say or do anything, morality officers barged through the gaping hole. They wore their purple uniforms with crimson Church logos across the chest.

The young man was unable to stand; still, the officers tackled him and unleashed their rage. When they had their fill, they put the kid in restraints and put a hood over his head.

In only moments, the immaculate area looked and smelled like a slaughterhouse. Calvin, filled with disgust, wanted to beat the officers with the nearest blunt object.

"Stop! Are you planning to kill him right next to the children's department?"

One of the younger officers shot a death stare back at him. "Mind yourself, rent-a-cop."

"Relax, officer." A svelte man in a black suit walked in, raising his hand.

Calvin noticed his slicked-back hair and the distinctive Church logo pinned to his lapel. "I'm Inspector White from Church Intelligence, and I'm sorry for what has hap—" "Yeah! I've got a large hole where a door used to be. Glass and blood all over!"

"Copy that. But we have contractors on call. They will have this place cleaned and repaired in no time."

"OK, well, I’ll have to write an incident report and leave a message for my supervisor," Calvin responded.

"Understandable. I will leave two officers behind to guard the door until everything is back to normal."

Calvin nodded as the officers moved the young man past him and toward the door. Blood now soaking through the hood made him nauseous.

"When The Righteous Judge gets through with you, you'll wish you died tonight," the younger officer told his prisoner.

Calvin bit his tongue as he turned around and made his way back to the security office. He spent the rest of his shift rewatching the security video.

"I don't know what they are anymore, but it’s not a church!"

Feeling emptied of everything inside, he stumbled to his church office and sat at his desk. The next morning Calvin woke with his senior pastor shaking him by the shoulders. "Calvin! Son, are you OK?"

Calvin looked up, feeling disoriented, and realized that his conversation with Kirk had not been a nightmare. He burst into tears as the weight of his sorrow covered him all over again. The head pastor walked him to his large office and eased him down onto the couch. Sitting next to him, he put his arm around Calvin. He looked at him with a mix of bewilderment and genuine compassion. His facial expression changed after Calvin made an unsolicited but complete confession, telling his senior pastor that he was gay.

He sent Calvin back home and put him on administrative leave until a disciplinary committee reviewed the matter. Calvin, numb from pain, didn't react, but he knew what it really meant. He remembered his original calling into ministry, the supernatural vision that he had as a preteen. It supercharged him through his youth, the college years and even through most of his internal struggles. That calling served as his touchstone, a guide to navigate life, and a context for everything. He knew that his promising career and passion for ministry died right there on his senior pastor’s couch. He felt a fog of prophetic doom descend all around him and he knew that it would be permanent.

The sun just began piercing the sky when Calvin boarded the waiting bus. He made his way to the back and looked toward the store. Replaying the barbarism that he witnessed earlier, he found himself admiring the young man. I don’t know what he did, but at least he did something. The more he thought about the young man’s voice, his build and face, the more he thought about Kirk. He wondered if Kirk had been swallowed whole by the Church, or did he eventually take a stand for himself?

Calvin harbored hate for the state-Church but never took concrete action. It seemed like a pattern through all the critical moments in his life, and he felt like a coward. He wished that he hadn’t repressed his sexuality for all of those years. He wished he had the strength to honor both hisown nature and his divine calling. Instead, he went with the program and buried his true identity. He sacrificed so many parts of himself to a Church that discarded him like trash. Those moments with Kirk released feelings that he never had before or since, but it also blew up his life into unrecognizable pieces. He thought of the wasted decades. He lived a long personal tribulation, wholly isolated and ruined.

The smell of diesel invaded his senses as he disembarked at his stop. A wave of depression filled Calvin on the ride home, and he wanted nothing more than to collapse and sleep it away.

Walking past the old telephone pole, he rammed all of his fingers into the hole he dug earlier. The whole hand buried, he grabbed past the decades of glue and paper and ripped out with violence. The thickness of the mass startled him as it all fell to the ground like a cinderblock. The faded poster that remained could have been about anything, but at least it wasn’t propaganda. His hand covered with a sticky glaze, he stared at it and realized what he had just done. This kind of act is a crime against the state, he thought. Huffing and puffing as he ran from the scene, Calvin darted down a nearby alley. Panting, he inhaled the smell of stale piss and rotting garbage as he moved forward—the evergreen sparkle of broken glass strewn across the alley.

My God, that felt good. Where did that even come from, he wondered. This might be the first public manifestation of his deep hate for the state-Church. A rush of excitement and wonder now replaced the depression that consumed him on the bus. Like an addict introduced to a powerful drug, he prayed that he could just make the feeling last.

Before he could form another thought, the same might that blew through him as a boy began to pour down, overflowing his entire being. Liquid lightening activated every cell. His legs became weak, and his body trembled as he fell to his knees. His face pointed up, and with the same courage that Calvin had as a child, he opened his eyes. A tear gashed across the sky as far as he could see, and at the center, the same light that he saw as a boy, the very same image moving closer. A mighty cloud of witnesses fanned out on either side, chanting a chorus in an unknown tongue.

Then a voice so evident in his heart that he didn't need an acoustic version. "I have put my words in your mouth."

"But who am I?" Calvin responded, "I've lost my calling, I'm bitter, I'm ga—" "My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in your weakness."

He closed his eyes, remembering that God had always spoken this way to him, with words from  scripture.

Hours seemed to pass in God’s presence, but in actual time only moments passed. Calvin opened his eyes, still kneeling on the cracked concrete, and saw everything back in its place. His legs were jittery, still feeling the glory in every fiber of his skin, bones, and spirit.

"I feel it…finally, I can feel it again," He said.

Calvin walked to his small apartment. When he entered, he went into his barren bedroom. He stared at the closet debating whether to go inside. Imbued with a new boldness to confront his past head-on, he went in and pulled down the box. He thought many times about destroying its contents, but something always stopped him. His old journal, photos, and a red scrapbook from his ministry days were still buried there. He had shoved his painful memories deep inside for a long time, and likewise, he entombed this physical evidence.

When he dusted off the red cover and began to page through it, he saw recognition awards, a copy of his college diploma, and the official letter credentialing him as a minister. There was a program from a national youth convention with himself listed as a keynote speaker. It struck him to see the sudden end of things just past the middle. Blank pages that he always intended to fill while still a young man.

He laid the scrapbook on his bed and started pulling out the scattered pictures. He rifled through them, reliving moments with a smile but stopped on one with a sick feeling in his stomach.

Calvin pictured together with Kirk, the children's minister at the church. Their arms draped around each other, and Kirk flashing that dimpled smile that made everything seem alright. They were inseparable in those early days working at the church. He found himself infatuated with a few male friends over the decades, but Kirk was the first one he loved with his whole heart. True love that he never experienced before or since. Short but explosive. Haunting and life-altering.

He took a pen from his uniform pocket and opened the old journal to the first blank page. Calvin wrote with such intensity that his words, like flames, consumed the pages. He documented his wandering, isolation, and struggles for the last 20 years. He wrote about his vision and renewed calling. He wrote about how he had finally battled the demons that this very journal represented to him.

"Maybe, I was never meant for conventional ministry." Calvin wrote.

Pausing for a moment, he felt a new revelation descend down and absorb into his mind. He pressed his pen deeper into the page and continued to pour inspiration out in ink.

"If I stayed in the Church, if I lived the lie, I would be a part of this abomination today. My extended pain, my unrelenting heartbreak may be my salvation."

"Is it possible that all of my past prepared me for this exact moment?" "God put a message in my heart, and I will speak it to the world. Today!"

Still experiencing spiritual ecstasy, he felt divinely led to put God's message out through a live stream video.

He drafted a three-point outline, trusting that he would be given all of the right words.

1.  Invitation to the oppressed, the poor, the stranger, those cast aside by the Church.

 2.  Appeal to genuine believers that have been misled. Return to your "First Love."

 3.  A harsh rebuke to Church leaders that prioritized political power over all else.

He continued to write, “They threw me out, ruined my life, and declared me an apostate. But an apostate is someone that abandons their faith. I never did, even in my worst moments. This so- called Church, on the other hand, has long turned away from the true faith."

Calvin sat on the worn sofa studying the tripod that he retrofitted to hold his phone. He hoped that the tape would hold during the live stream. He feared that the phone might fall and send a live feed of his carpet matted with years of spilled Mountain Dew.

He trembled with nervousness. He had cloistered himself for decades. He only saw other people on TV, on the bus, or when he went to the grocery store. Doing this video went against every impulse that he programmed into himself for all these years. But still, he knew that it must happen.

He checked the camera view of the phone and noticed the darkness in his living room. He went to the blinds and saw years, maybe decades of dust that had layered there. He opened them just enough to bring in light but not so much that someone could see inside. The dust particles that he set free streamed into his nose, circulated through his respiratory system, and he violently coughed them back out.

Calvin walked around the room, psyching himself up, but then caught a glimpse of his reflection on the darkened TV screen. He could see his flabby rounded frame, his too-large untucked shirt, and the outdated glasses on his face.

"I can't do it, I can't do it, I just can't do it!"

He fell back onto the sofa, the rate of his breathing increased, and his chest tightened. For a moment, he thought that it might be a heart attack or something worse.

At the peak of his panic, he began to hear a familiar, still-small voice repeating simple words of comfort.

"Be still. Be still. Be still."

Even in his current state of mind, he recognized the words from the Book of Psalms, "Be still and know that I am God."

Indeed, he could feel the growing blanket of comfort in those words. He could feel his pulse slow, his breath normalize, and the tension in his chest ease.

The anxiety had not left Calvin's mind, but it did start to reverse. And at that moment, he committed a flagrant act of faith. He hit record.

His vocal cords began to engage, and with the very first intonations, his apprehensions and fears melted away. Calvin started delivering his first sermon in over 20 years. The most important sermon of his entire life.

Calvin basked in the euphoria that he always felt after delivering a sermon that he knew connected, piercing through to the soul. Calvin wanted to celebrate. He wanted to give thanks for this miracle. He grabbed his favorite gospel cassette, blasted it, danced, clapped, and shouted all around his small apartment.

Curiosity drove him to check his live stream's statistics, and it astonished him to see almost 10,000 views.

He wondered how it could be possible from a new account with zero following.

Not very familiar with the platform, it took him a while to notice the comments. He couldn't help himself and began reading the barbaric attacks.

The Church's international troll army and government bots must be engaged already, he thought. He refreshed the page minutes later and found the video disabled, but the nasty comments kept piling up. Impulse drove him to continue refreshing, but he started to notice something different. Hundreds of new comments carried the same message.

"We are with you, brother!"

Embedded in every supportive message, a link to new individual pages with the full video still available.

"My God!" Calvin shouted.

A coordinated effort to thwart censors, battle trolls, and amplify his message.

"There's a resistance!"

Calvin exhausted in every way, but he couldn't stop looking at his original video's comments.

The video itself continued to spread like a virus throughout the internet. The government technicians and Church censors couldn't keep up. They couldn't stop the message.

Comments, now totaling over 1,000, he saw something new and terrifying. The trolls now started calling him out by name.

"They've identified me now," he said, his voice shaking.

He expected it at some point, but it still caused him to pause. He assumed that they might already know his physical location. He could feel in his guts that the stakes had risen.

Stories in the media started popping up, dismissing him as a depraved Sodomite, disgruntled because of his termination from the Church. Others focused on his status as a nobody, decades of dead-end jobs, and bankruptcies. He thought that the rapid pace of propaganda couldn't get worse until he saw an interview on the Church's TV network. Kirk's piercing blue eyes now looked dead as he stared into the cameras. He had a new and disturbing nervous tick, squinting his eyes as if absorbing pain.

Calvin could see how they purged all of the life from him, and he mourned for Kirk. The person that changed his world no longer existed.

He read a script accusing Calvin of sexually assaulting him when they worked together. He went on to make even more monstrous claims, lying to the entire world. Calvin's pain rolled through him like a storm. The old wounds that he thought he conquered started to throb.

He looked at his email, and he had over 1,000 new messages. He read many death threats and some disingenuous invitations for him to defend himself on Church-controlled media.

Then he saw a grouping of emails with the same subject line: "Fighting the good fight!"

Calvin started reading the supportive emails, and they all listed different ways that the resistance helped his cause. The link in one email went to a story posted on the Patriot & Prophet website. The defamatory content was replaced with his full video message. He clicked another link for the Church's TV network but discovered that the resistance hacked it, taking it down. Supportive comments stood in the place of the vile attacks all over the internet.

He witnessed such a sophisticated effort in real time. It must be a large group of people all over the world, he thought.

As he daydreamed about everything happening behind the scenes, the sound of his phone startled him. He just stared as it kept ringing.

He wondered if he should answer. He thought that it could be a death threat, or it could be the resistance.

"Or it could just be a wrong number.”

He realized that they couldn’t do much more to him, so he answered.

"Hello."

"Brother, there is not much time, so please just let me speak a word of knowledge to you." The women spoke in a Southern accented baritone.

"OK," Calvin responded.

"I am Anna the Prophet, and you should know that righteous men and women all over this world are fighting for you."

"I've seen that on—"

"Brother, please listen. You've planted seeds today, prophets have been called, and heroes of the true faith have been born. No matter what happens next, God wants you to know these truths."

"Th— Thank you for that," Calvin whispered.

"Now brother, I know that you don't know me, but we have special brothers and sisters coming to your home ri—"

"You know where I li--"

"Brother Calvin, time is short. Gather whatever you must and get ready. Those serving the Whore of Babylon will arrest you, so we want to move you underground."

"Where am I go—"

"Lord bless and keep you, Brother, get ready!" The prophet said, and she disconnected the call.

Calvin grabbed a garbage bag and started throwing in things that he might need. He put in his Walkman, a dozen cassettes, and a few days’ worth of clothes. He paced around the apartment, having second thoughts about what he should do next.

"Should I just run off on my own? How do I know Prophet Anna is for real?"

He wondered if he shouldn't run at all. Maybe he should just stay right there and let the morality officers take him away, just like they did to that young man in the store.

“I’m no better than him,” he said.

Calvin stacked his scrapbook, pictures, and journal and sat on the sofa. He reflected for a moment, and then it came to him. He already existed in a different world, on a different spiritual plane. His faith finally smoldered again inside him.

"They can't extinguish it, no matter what happens next."

[thatferalbogdruid]

Grimoire Blog #1 - 10/13/23 @ 6:33am, Friday

_my thoughts on gods and doubt_

This definitely won't be comprehensive, just me starting a little blog journal of my thoughts. This topic is one that's very present for me now that I'm in my own space with time to think, and quite honestly is on my mind a lot, so I'm starting here. As I always feel a bit lost on the gods front.

Since I grew up in a cult-ish environment with an oppressive god that I tried so hard to believe in, I think it'll always be hard to wrap my head around deity work. I'm aware of this, and know that's my own road block to face. I absolutely love to hear other pagans speak about their super personified relationships with their deities! I think sometimes I try to mirror that in my speech too, but it's never really resonated for me.

For me, my relationships with the beyond have fallen past words, at least now that I've connected to what I feel are their sources instead of their ideas. Before I even started deity work, when I first started my path, I wanted to be a secular witch, because I was so far traumatized by the idea of having a "god." But then I "felt" them, and got curious. Then I started having dreams that eventually led to my meeting An Mórrígan, Helja, Venus, and who I call 'the Wilds,' over a span of many years. Through many of the dreams, things were impressed upon me that surpassed any human language I know of. But even just writing that out makes me feel kind of insane.

Maybe I'm gaslighting myself? I am quite the skeptic! But at my core, I do believe there's more than the physical world in front of me. Maybe I'm fucking off my rocker -- and I am, I don't put that past myself -- but I still haven't found the balance here for myself. I don't know how to fully incorporate this belief into my practice in a way that feels solid and consistent because I continue to have these doubts.

I'm also, completely open to the idea that it's something like a placebo. Maybe the gods that have chosen me are just personifications of different facets of myself. Maybe it's all just psychological and I find myself drawn to archetypes that help me better myself. Maybe I'm giving an old name to concepts and physical aspects of the world so that they're easier to digest and incorporate. Like if I were to honor a sun god, I would simply be acknowledging that the sun exists, and giving it reverence. But does that reference really beg for me to name it? Why do I feel the need to name them? Because I often don't, that's why I ended up working with 'the Wilds,' because there is still something incredibly formless that sits beside my soul and helps me grow and break out of the confines I was steeped in in my youth and adolescence.

I guess the point of this entire blog is that I don't know who the gods are to me or how they fit into the fold of my perception of reality. To what degree am I leaning too far into "magical thinking" and losing touch with reality? As someone who's experienced an episode of minor psychosis, I'm scared to slip too far out of reality, and scared that my spirituality doesn't help. However, my spirituality is very important to me, and I don't see the harm in looking at life through a metaphysical lens. But then, I was never allowed to know a scientific reality in my youth, so am I still avoiding it? Where do these things mesh?

Maybe I just don't have it figured out. That's fine with me, because I know I never will in full. But I do want to find some explanation for myself as to why these things are hard for me to conceptualize. And maybe I don't need an explanation either, but I almost feel like I need a solid defense for myself, especially living in the South, where people get very in-your-face about religious beliefs. Hell, the reason I still lovingly cling to the term "Heathen" even when I've started following the Druid path more exclusively is because it's been used against me in a derogatory sense multiple times before, even by my own family (shocker, lol).

For now, I will still wake up and call out to Anmórheljave, and call to them before I sleep. I will still stand in the rain and call to the Wilds and ask them to stay with me. I will still talk to all of them through my days like a revered friend with more wisdom and experience than me. I will still set up altar spaces for them when I'm finally settled into my new house. I will still offer what I can to them. I will still request their aid. I will still love them.

And one way or another, I'll find the other side of these doubts. I can't wait for that day to come.

~ Willow ~

[w-ht-w]

The modern world is wonderful in many ways ...

 but it’s

0:09also powerfully and tragically geared to causing a high background level of anxiety and widespread

0:17low-level depression. There are six particular features of modernity that have this psychologically

0:23disturbing effect.

Meritocracy

Our societies tell us that everyone is free to make it if they have the talent and energy.

0:41The down side of this ostensibly liberating and beautiful idea is that any perceived lack

0:46of success is taken to be not, as in the past, an accident or misfortune, but a sure sign

0:52of a lack of talent or laziness. If those at the top deserve all their success, then

0:59those at the bottom must surely deserve all their failure.

2. Individualism

To be ‘ordinary’ is regarded as a curse.

1:52The result is that the very thing that most of us will end up being, statistically speaking,

1:56is associated, with freakish failure.

The cure is a cult of the good ordinary life – and

2:04proper appreciation of the pleasures and quiet heroism of the everyday.

3. Secularism

Secular

2:13societies cease to believe in anything that is bigger than or beyond themselves. Religions

2:19used to perform the useful service of keeping our petty ways and status battles in perspective.

2:26But now there is nothing to awe or relativise humans, whose triumphs and mishaps end up

2:32feeling like the be all and end all.

A cure would involve regularly using sources of transcendence

2:39to generate a benign, relativising perspective on our personal sorrows: music, the stars

2:46at night, the vast spaces of the desert or the ocean would humble us all in consoling

2:51ways. 

4. Romanticism

The philosophy of Romanticism tells us that each of us has one very special

3:00person out there who can make us completely happy. Yet mostly we have to settle for moderately

3:07bearable relationships with someone who is very nice in a few ways and pretty difficult

3:13in many others. It feels like a disaster – in comparison with our original huge hopes. The

3:19cure is to realise that we didn’t go wrong: we were just encouraged to believe in a very

3:26improbable dream. Instead we should build up our ambitions around friendship and non-sexual

3:32love.

5. The media

routinely directs our attention to things that scare, worry, panic and enrage us,

It typically attends to the

3:52least admirable sides of human nature, without a balancing exposure to normal good intentions,

3:58responsibility and decency. At its worst, it edges us towards mob justice.

The cure

4:05would be news that concentrated on presenting solutions rather than generating outrage,

4:10that was alive to systemic problems rather than gleefully emphasizing scapegoats and

4:15emblematic monsters 

6. Perfectibility

Modern societies stress

4:30that it is within our remit to be profoundly content, sane and accomplished. As a result,

4:35we end up loathing ourselves, feeling weak and sensing we’ve wasted our lives. A cure

4:42would be a culture that endlessly promotes the idea that perfection is not within our

4:46grasp – that being mentally slightly (and at points very) unwell is an inescapable part

4:52of the human condition and that what we need above all are good friends with whom we can

4:57sit and honestly discuss our real fears and vulnerabilities.

The forces of psychological

5:03distress in our world are – currently – much wealthier and more active than the needed

5:08cures. We deserve tender pity for the price we have to pay for being born in modern times.

5:14But more hopefully, cures are now open to us individually and collectively if only we

5:20recognise, with sufficient clarity, the sources of our true anxieties and sorrows.

[the-lost-kemetic]

Affirmations for Practitioners

When you start to run your own discord server, there's a lot you learn about people, especially newcomers to witchcraft and paganism. In a lot of spiritual spaces, I feel like there's always this shadow of doubt that follows everyone around, newcomers and elders in the craft alike. So I wanted to make this post to help everyone feel more confident!

❧You don't have to be Wiccan to practice witchcraft. Witchcraft is a secular practice. ❧Going along with the above, you don't have to be any religion to practice witchcraft. ❧Just because a deity hasn't personally reached out to you, doesn't mean you can't worship them. Not everyone gets reached out to. Sometimes you need to take initiative. ❧You don't need any fancy tools to do work. A lot of it can be found for free online. And even then, just use what you can find in nature around you. ❧Not everyone practitioner needs an altar. Not every practitioner needs to have a travel altar, nor do they have to. Sometimes you might not know your own practice yet, and that's ok. ❧Don't worry about making mistakes. Most groups are understanding if you mess something up, and most groups will help guide you in the right direction. ❧Alongside mistakes, there's a lot of misinformation out there about... every aspect you can think of. It's pretty much impossible to avoid it. Don't ever feel scared or inadequate because you need to ask a question. Even I miss things or forget things sometimes, and I've been practicing for many years. ❧Not every witch will be in a coven, and you don't need to be in one! It's just fine to be a solitary practitioner. ❧There's always a bunch of "types of witches" lists out there and while labeling your practice can be useful, don't focus on that. If you spend all your time worrying about how to label yourself, you'll never actually find joy in your practice! ❧If you don't connect with a tarot deck, rune set, etc., that's ok. It won't happen all the time, and it won't happen to everyone. Sometimes you need to find one that you connect with! ❧You don't need to practice every day to be a "true witch". You don't need to be devoted to a deity to be a "true pagan". Witchcraft isn't huge ceremonies or spells, it is your intuition and your beliefs. ❧Don't let anyone tell you that your beliefs (unless they are steeped in cultural appropriation, or something else that actively harms people) are wrong. Witchcraft and paganism are different, and they are beautiful. You are not wrong for following your own path. ❧Just because you do baneful magic doesn't make you a bad person. And don't let anyone say that to your face!

I hope these affirmations help you! Witchcraft is a different path that not everyone follows the same way. And that's a beautiful, gorgeous thing! New witches should never be ashamed of who they are!

[testudoaubrei-blog]

Content note for discussions of eternal damnation, and all sorts of other shit that will trigger a lot of folks with religious trauma.

Before I get started I might as well explain where I’m coming from - unlike a lot of She-Ra fans, and a lot of queer people, I don’t have much religious trauma, or any, maybe (okay there were a number of years I was convinced I was going to hell, but that happens to everyone, right?). I was raised a liberal Christian by liberal Christian parents in the Episcopal Church, where most of my memories are overwhelmingly positive. Fuck, growing up in the 90’s, Chuch was probably the only place outside my home I didn’t have homophobia spewed at me. Because it was the 90’s and it was a fucking hellscape of bigotry where 5 year olds knew enough to taunt each other with homophobic slurs and the adults didn’t know enough to realize how fucked up that was. Anyway. This is my experience, but it is an atypical one, and I know it. Quite frankly I know that my experience of Christianity has very little at all to do with what most people experienced, or what people generally mean when they talk about Christianity as a cultural force in America today. So if you were raised Christian and you don’t recognize your theology here, congrats, neither do I, but these ideas and cultural forces are huge and powerful and dominant. And it’s this dominant Christian narrative that I’m referring to in this post. As well as, you know, a children’s cartoon about lesbian rainbow princesses. So here it goes. This is going to get batshit.

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." - John Calvin

“We’re all just a bunch of wooly guys” - Noelle Stevenson

This is a post triggered by a single scene, and a single line. It’s one of the most fucked-up scenes in She-Ra, toward the end of Save the Cat. Catra, turned into a puppet by Prime, struggles with her chip, desperately trying to gain control of herself, so lost and scared and vulnerable that she flings aside her own death wish and her pride and tearfully begs Adora to rescue her. Adora reaches out , about to grab her, and then Prime takes control back, pronounces ‘disappointing’ and activates the kill switch that pitches Catra off the platform and to her death (and seriously, she dies here, guys - also Adora breaks both her legs in the fall). But before he does, he dismisses Catra with one of his most chilling lines. “Some creatures are meant only for destruction.”

And that’s when everyone watching probably had their heart broken a little bit, but some of the viewers raised in or around Christianity watching the same scene probably whispered ‘holy shit’ to themselves. Because Prime’s line - which works as a chilling and callous dismissal of Catra - is also an allusion to a passage from the Bible. In fact, it’s from one of the most fucked up passages in a book with more than its share of fucked up passages. It’s from Romans 9:22, and I’m going to quote several previous verses to give the context of the passage (if not the entire Epistle, which is more about who needs to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions but was used to construct a systematic theology in the centuries afterwards because people decided it was Eternal Truth).

19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

The context of the allusion supports the context in the show. Prime is dismissing Catra - serial betrayer, liar, failed conqueror, former bloody-handed warlord - as worthless, as having always been worthless and fit only to be destroyed. He is speaking from a divine and authoritative perspective (because he really does think he’s God, more of this in my TL/DR Horde Prime thing). Prime is echoing not only his own haughty dismissal of Catra, and Shadow Weaver’s view of her, but also perhaps the viewer’s harshest assessment of her, and her own worst fears about herself. Catra was bad from the start, doomed to destroy and to be destroyed. A malformed pot, cracked in firing, destined to be shattered against a wall and have her shards classified by some future archaeologist 2,000 years later. And all that’s bad enough.

But the full historical and theological context of this passage shows the real depth of Noelle Stevenson’s passion and thought and care when writing this show. Noelle was raised in Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. To my knowledge, he has never specified what sect or denomination, but in interviews and her memoir Noelle has shown a particular concern for questions that this passage raises, and a particular loathing for the strains of Protestant theology that take this passage and run with it - that is to say, Calvinism. So while I’m not sure if Noelle was raised as a conservative, Calvinist Presbyterian, his preoccupation with these questions mean that it’s time to talk about Calvinism.

It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that Calvinism is a systematic theology built entirely upon the Epistles of Romans and Galatians, but only -just- (and here my Catholic readers in particular will chuckle to themselves and lovingly stroke their favorite passage of the Epistle of James). The core of Calvinist Doctrine is often expressed by the very Dutch acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity - people are wholly evil, and incapable of good action or even willing good thoughts or deeds

Unconditional Election - God chooses some people to save because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not because they did anything to deserve, trigger or accept it

Limited Atonement - Jesus died only to save the people God chose to save, not the rest of us bastards

Irresistible Grace - God chooses some people to be saved - if you didn’t want to be saved, too bad, God said so.

Perseverance of the Saints - People often forget this one and assume it’s ‘predestination’ but it’s actually this - basically, once saved by God, always saved, and if it looks like someone falls out of grace, they were never saved to begin with. Well that’s all sealed up tight I guess.

Reading through these, predestination isn’t a single doctrine in Calvinism but the entire theological underpinnings of it together with humanity’s utter powerlessness before sin. Basically God has all agency, humanity has none. Calvinism (and a lot of early modern Protestantism) is obsessed with questions of how God saves people (grace alone, AKA Sola Fides) and who God saves (the people god elects and only the people God elects, and fuck everyone else).

It’s apparent that Noelle was really taken by these questions, and repelled by the answers he heard. He’s alluded to having a tattoo refuting the Gospel passage about Sheep and Goats being sorted at the end times, affirming instead that ‘we’re all just a bunch of wooly guys’ (you can see this goat tattoo in some of his self-portraits in comics, etc). He’s also mentioned that rejecting and subverting destiny is a huge part of everything he writes as a particular rejection of the idea that some individual people are 'chosen' by God or that God has a plan for any of us. You can see that -so clearly- in Adora’s arc, where Adora embraces and then rejects destiny time and again and finally learns to live life for herself.

But for Catra, we’re much more concerned about the most negative aspect of this - the idea that some people are vessels meant for destruction. And that’s something else that Noelle is preoccupied with. In her memoir in the section about leaving the church and becoming a humanistic atheist, there is a drawing of a pot and the question ‘Am I a vessel prepared for destruction?’ Obviously this was on Noelle’s mind (And this is before he came out to himself as queer!).

To look at how this question plays out in Catra’s entire arc, let’s first talk about how ideas of damnation and salvation actually play out in society. And for that I’m going to plug one of my favorite books, Gin Lun’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (if you can tell by now, I am a fucking blast at parties). Lun tells the long and very interesting story about, how ideas of hell and who went there changed during the Early American Republic. One of the interesting developments that she talks about is how while at first people who were repelled by Calvinism started moving toward a doctrine of universal salvation (no on goes to hell, at least not forever*), eventually they decided that hell was fine as long as only the right kind of people went there. Mostly The Other - non-Christian foreigners, Catholics, Atheists, people who were sinners in ways that were not just bad but weird and violated Victorian ideas of respectability. Really, Hell became a way of othering people, and arguably that’s how it survives today, especially as a way to other queer people (but expanding this is slated for my Montero rant). Now while a lot of people were consciously rejecting Calvinist predestination, they were still drawing the distinction between the Elect (good, saved, worthwhile) and the everyone else (bad, damned, worthless). I would argue that secularized ideas of this survive to this day even among non-Christian spaces in our society - we like to draw lines between those who Elect, and those who aren’t.

And that’s what brings us back to Catra. Because Catra’s entire arc is a refutation of the idea that some people are worthless and irredeemable, either by nature, nurture or their own actions. Catra’s actions strain the conventions of who is sympathetic in a Kid’s cartoon - I’ve half joked that she’s Walter White as a cat girl, and it’s only half a joke. She’s cruel, self-deluded, she spends 4 seasons refusing to take responsibility for anything she does and until Season 5 she just about always chooses the thing that does the most damage to herself and others. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Catra is morally culpable in every step of her descent into evil (except maybe her break with reality just before she pulls the lever). The way that Catra personally betrays everyone around her, the way she strips herself of all of her better qualities and most of what makes her human, hell even her costume changes would signal in any other show that she’s irredeemable.

It’s tempting to see this as Noelle’s version of being edgy - pushing the boundaries of what a sympathetic character is, throwing out antiheroics in favor of just making the villain a protagonist. Noelle isn’t quite Alex ‘I am in the business of traumatizing children’ Hirsch, who seems to have viewed his job as pushing the bounds of what you could show on the Disney Channel (I saw Gravity Falls as an adult and a bunch of that shit lives rent free in my nightmares forever), but Noelle has his own dark side, mostly thematically. The show’s willingness to deal with abuse, and messed up religious themes, and volatile, passionate, not particularly healthy relationships feels pretty daring. I’m not joking when I gleefully recommend this show to friends as ‘a couple from a Mountain Goats Song fights for four seasons in a cartoon intended for 9 year olds’. Noelle is in his own way pushing the boundaries of what a kids show can do. If you read Noelle’s other works like Nimona, you see an argument for Noelle being at least a bit edgy. Nimona is also angry, gleefully destructive, violent and spiteful - not unlike Catra. Given that it was a 2010s webcomic and not a kids show, Nimona is a good deal worse than Catra in some ways - Catra doesn’t kill people on screen, while Nimona laughs about it (that was just like, a webcomic thing - one of the fan favorite characters in my personal favorite, Narbonic, was a fucking sociopath, and the heroes were all amoral mad scientists, except for the superintelligent gerbil**). But unlike Nimona, whose fate is left open ended, Catra is redeemed.

And that is weird. We’ve had redemption arcs, but generally not of characters with -so- much vile stuff in their history. Going back to the comparison between her and Azula, many other shows, like Avatar, would have made Catra a semi-sympathetic villain who has a sob-story in their origin but who is beyond redemption, and in so doing would articulate a kind of psychologized Calvinism where some people are too traumatized to ever be fully and truly human. I’d argue this is the problem with Azula as a character - she’s a fun villain, but she doesn’t have moral agency, and the ultimate message of her arc - that she’s a broken person destined only to hurt people - is actually pretty fucked up. And that’s the origin story of so many serial killers and psycopaths that populate so many TV shows and movies. Beyond ‘hurt people hurt people’ they have nothing to teach us except perhaps that trauma makes you a monster and that the only possible response to people doing bad things is to cut them out of your life and out of our society (and that’s why we have prisons, right?)

And so Catra’s redemption and the depths from which she claws herself back goes back to Noelle’s desire to prove that no person is a vessel ‘fitted for destruction.’ Catra goes about as far down the path of evil as we’ve ever seen a protagonist in a kids show go, and she still has the capacity for good. Importantly, she is not subject to total depravity - she is capable of a good act, if only one at first. Catra is the one who begins her own redemption (unlike in Calvinism, where grace is unearned and even unwelcomed) - because she wants something better than what she has, even if its too late, because she realizes that she never wanted any of this anyway, because she wants to do one good thing once in her life even if it kills her.

The very extremity of Catra’s descent into villainy serves to underline the point that Noelle is trying to make - that no one can be written off completely, that everyone is capable of change, and that no human being is garbage, no matter how twisted they’ve become. Meanwhile her ability to set her own redemption in motion is a powerful statement of human agency, and healing, and a refutation of Calvinism’s idea that we are powerless before sin or pop cultural tropes about us being powerful before the traumas of our upbringing. Catra’s arc, then, is a kind of anti-Calvinist theological statement - about the nature of people and the nature of goodness.

Now, there is a darker side to this that Noelle has only hinted at, but which is suggested by other characters on the show. Because while Catra’s redemption shows that people are capable of change, even when they’ve done horrible things, been fucked up and fucked themselves up, it also illustrates the things people do to themselves that make change hard. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, two of the most sinister parts of her descent into villainy are her self-dehumanization (crushing her own compassion and desire to do good) and her rewriting of her own history in her speech and memory to make her own actions seem justified (which we see with her insistence that Adora left her, eliding Adora’s offers to have Catra join her, or her even more clearly false insistence that Entrapta had betrayed them). In Catra, these processes keep her going down the path of evil, and allow her to nearly destroy herself and everyone else. But we can see the same processes at work in two much darker figures - Shadow Weaver and Horde Prime. These are both rants for another day, but the completeness of Shadow Weaver’s narcissistic self-justification and cultivated callousness and the even more complete narcissism of Prime’s god complex cut both characters off from everyone around them. Perhaps, in a theoretical sense, they are still redeemable, but for narrative purposes they might as well be damned.

This willingness to show a case where someone -isn’t- redeemed actually serves to make Catra’s redemption more believable, especially since Noelle and the writers draw the distinction between how Catra and SW/Prime can relate to reality and other people, not how broken they are by their trauma (unlike Zuko and Azula, who are differentiated by How Fucked Uolp They Are). Redemption is there, it’s an option, we can always do what is right, but someone people will choose not to, in part because doing the right thing involves opening ourselves to the world and others, and thus being vulnerable. Noelle mentions this offhandedly in an interview after Season 1 with the She-Ra Progressive of Power podcast - “I sometimes think that shades of grey, sympathetic villains are part of the escapist fantasy of shows like this.” Because in the real world, some people are just bastards, a point that was particularly clear in 2017. Prime and Shadow Weaver admit this reality, while Catra makes a philosophical point that even the bastards can change their ways (at least in theory).

*An idea first proposed in the second century by Origen, who’s a trip and a fucking half by himself, and an idea that becomes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which protestants vehemently denied!

**Speaking of favorite Noelle tropes