#spirit of the west means so much to me and in my mind it is a movie that we all can watch together on some summer night

[angelsdean]

SPIRIT OF THE WEST: The Major Motion Picture

It's a summer evening in the late 90s and you and your friends are looking for something to watch at the slumber party. You go into your local Video & Variety and happen upon the coming of age romance, Spirit of the West. Let's hope this doesn't awaken anything in you....

SUMMARY:

Dean grew up on a horse farm and can't imagine any other life. There are drawbacks to working for his father, but they're worth it if it means remaining with his beloved horses. Besides, between his broken arm and his lack of prospects, he hasn't got much else.

Something of an outsider, Dean always feels like there's something he's missing. But this tense summer brings back a figure from his past: years ago, a teenaged Cas worked for a season at the Winchester ranch. His return could change everything.

Reviewers rave: "If you ever wanted a 90s horse girl book, but starring a young Dean Winchester, this is your flick."

Spirit of the West is written and directed by Teen_Dean / @urne-buriall

▶️ PLAY Spirit of the West ⏪ REWIND with Spirit of the West Prequel by @foolondahill17 ⏩ WATCH IT AGAIN with SOTW Daily 🌟 BONUS FEATURES ✨ Director's Commentary 🎶 The Official Motion Picture Soundtrack

[ryin-silverfish]

I understood that Fox spirits with gold and white fur are normally heavenly foxes. But Su Daji in the versions we know, killed people before the events of the story. So, will any type of fox spirit get this color when it already has its nine tails? even if they are already foxes that killed people?

I am kinda confused by the wording of this question. Correct me if I'm wrong:

-Heavenly foxes = foxes with gold/white fur and 9 tails

-Heavenly foxes are "good", or at least work for the establishment

-Su Daji of the Pinghua version is a heavenly fox, judging by her appearance

-But she kills people and isn't good

-Does that mean gold/white fur color and 9 tails is merely a signifier of power in fox spirits, and has nothing to do with their alignment or allegiance?

Well...time to dive into some fox spirit lore.

In the oldest Chinese legends, nine-tailed foxes are very much divine beasts. The Girl of Tushan, for example. Nine-tailed foxes also appeared in Han dynasty grave reliefs and paintings as part of Queen Mother of the West's worship:

They were very much auspicious beasts, like Qilins or Phoenixs. Same goes for white foxes.

The exact point in time where "Auspicious Foxes" started shifting into "Demonic Foxes" is unclear, but it probably had something to do with the change in ways people conceive of yaoguais: namely, the idea that anything that grow old enough can become a yaoguai.

Foxes seemed like a prime candidate for that kind of stuff, because unlike dragons or phoenixs, they were just too common, mundane, and eerie. Divine beasts don't sneak into your chicken coop under the cover of darkness.

By the Northern and Southern dynasty, in Ge Hong's Baopuzi, there was already the idea that animals that reached a certain age could transform into humans, and he cited foxes, wolves and jackals as an example:

"...They can live up to 800 years old, and when they reached 500 years old, these beasts transform into human shapes."

Around the same time period, Guo Pu's Xuanzhong Ji gave an even more elaborate account of fox spirits' transformation:

"Upon reaching 50 years of age, foxes can transform into women. 100 years, beautiful women, divine shaman, or men in order to charm women. They can know things from thousands of miles away, are masters of the arts of charms, able to make people lose their minds...at 1000 years old, they can commune with Heaven, and are known as heavenly foxes."

This concept of heavenly foxes had a renaissance in the Tang dynasty, where folk worship of foxes were very popular, and Daoist influences meant that many foxes in Tang folklore were practitioners of the Daoist arts.

If foxes could cultivate, it was only natural that the best cultivators among them could become immortals, just like human Daoists, and get a job in the Celestial Bureaucracy.

Curiously enough, all Tang dynasty heavenly foxes were male foxes, and the troubles they got into often stemmed from their own lust and entitlement to human women.

Heavenly fox status also offered them protection from death sentences: when they were subdued by Daoist masters or immortals, the punishments were either beating with a rod or exile.

However, only one Tang text connected heavenly foxes with nine-tailed foxes and a specific fur color: You Yang Za Zu, which I cited in a previous answer.

In a sense, this fusion of nine-tailed foxes with heavenly foxes was really going back to the roots of "Nine-tailed Foxes as Auspicious Beasts".

But it didn't last, and by the Song dynasty, nine-tailed foxes had undergone full yaoguai-fication like the rest of their kind.

This is just my speculation, but "Nine-tailed Foxes as Demonic Spirits" could perhaps be traced back as far as their more auspicious associations: the nine-tailed foxes of the Book of Mountains and Seas were just another type of man-eating fantastic beasts, after all.

Anyways, it is at this point that the idea of Daji being a nine-tailed fox first appeared, and FSYY Pinghua went a step further by merging Daji with the "heavenly nine-tailed fox" of You Yang Za Zu, turning the auspicious divine beast back into the demonic.

But, back to your question: a white/golden fox, or a nine-tailed fox, is not necessarily a heavenly fox. In the Qin-Han era, that's just an auspicious beast.

By Guo Pu's definition, a heavenly fox is just an incredibly powerful 1000 years old fox. By the Tang dynasty definition, a heavenly fox is a long-lived master of the Daoist arts who managed to get a job in the Celestial Bureaucracy.

They absolutely can be assholes (though shielded from the worst punishment). The idea that a heavenly fox is also a nine-tailed fox of unusual fur color is specific to that one passage in You Yang Za Zu and FSYY Pinghua.

Having nine tails/white or golden fur doesn't say anything about a fox's alignment or morality either. Rather, it says more about people's general conception of foxes during that specific era, and what was auspicious in one dynasty could easily become markers of the demonic in another.

[bnhaobservation]

Chap 431 and Touya's panel

Each time in chap 431 I look at the Touya's panel I get the feeling that there's something wrong with it, specifically, with his scars.

The last Shouto saw Touya, Touya was completely burned, so if this were just a memmory, that's how he should remember him, but this wouldn't be the first time the manga went back to Touya partially burned to depict him.

We had the dancing scene in chap 387...

...and we had the meeting with his father in chap 426.

Both scenes present us with a Touya with scars which are at the level of pre/during Dabi's dance.

We also have a scene with scarless Touya during chapter 388.

Now... the scars symbolically define Dabi, scarless Touya is clearly, in Touya's mind, just Touya, but scarred Touya is Touya with the Dabi experience and feelings and that's why he had them. Scarred Touya is Touya and Dabi in one single package.

However the scars were always represented at the level of pre/during Dabi's Dance and Dabi's chapter 431 has instead the ones post Dabi's dance.

Both Enji and Shouto got to see Touya with the scars post Dabi's dance, Enji for for a bunch of minutes before Touya was carried away by Monoma using Kurogiri's Quirk, Shouto for a little longer but it's hardly much.

Touya started burning off his skin before he answered Shouto's question about why he didn't come back home, we can best see it in this image in 349 but the other images too give us hints of this.

Shouto's glimpse of Touya with the post Dabi's dance scars is only slightly longer than his father's it would make more sense if he were to remember him with the pre Dabi's dance scars.

There's also another thing to note.

The scars are created with shading.

Horikoshi is usually very patiently drawing all the lines that compose the scars...

...but in that scene he only shaded them, even if he usually avoids doing so even when the Touya in question is tiny, or does it with another type of shading which gives the impression of lines.

That Touya is big enough for lines and has uniform shading.

No, I don't think something like 'oh my, Horikoshi didn't make him!', not exactly.

Look at him again.

This Touya is without clothes, and it makes sense, not because naked Touya is sexier but because Shouto is basically saying he was talking with his spirit (that's what you do when you go pray to the Butsudan in which someone is enshrined) and a Japanese way to deliver someone is a soul is to draw them naked.

Todoroki Shōto ‘Tōya no butsudan ni te o awaseteru toki ni futo kidzuitanda yo futo kidzuitanda yo.’ 轟燈焦凍「燈矢の仏壇に手を合わせてる時にふと気付いたんだよ。」 Todoroki Shōto “While I was holding my hands together at Tōya's Buddhist altar suddenly a feeling attached to me.” [Chap. 431]

So some more explanations on Shouto's sentence.

"Touya's buddist altar" or "Touya's Butsudan" doesn't mean the altar is SOLELY Touya's property or solely for Touya, just that it's the altar where touya is ALSO enshrined along with the other family members who died prior to him... and that altar ALSO has a PRIMARY use to pay respects to the Buddha so it was in the house PRIOR to Touya's dead, wasn't tossed away when Touya turned out alive or replaced when he died again... unless during the war it got damaged. It's not the altar that some people in the west make for their deceased family members, it has a different function and, according to Buddhist beliefs the spirits of the deceased LIVE inside the altar.

Shouto's 'holding his hands together' basically means he was in the praying position and likely he perceived the fact he was possessed by a sudden feeling as him kind of getting a message from Touya's spirit.

So yeah, this confirms that naked Touya is there to tell us that Shouto was talking with his soul... but okay, what about the scars?

Souls shouldn't have wounds, scars or so on, probably Touya was meant to be drawn without scars but, without scars, he would look like this.

Horikoshi already said that Touya's hairstyle looks too much like Bakugou. Even if the expression is unmistakeably's Touya and the text refers to him, without the scars (which are Touya's most distinctive trait) people might have confused him with Bakugou, hence my guess is Horikoshi (or one of his assistants) had to do a quick job of giving him staples and scars and shading them was the fastest way to do it.

Who did so forgot that previously, when Touya was represented with scars, they used the pre Dabi's dance scars and ended up giving him the post Dabi's dance scars.

At least, that's my guess, I can, of course be wrong as Horikoshi himself isn't super firm in how to represent a less scarred Touya after he burned off all his skin... in fact, truth to be told, we have an image with him with post Dabi's dance's scars in chap 388...

...but this is not only is from Touya's perspective (and it would makes sense he got used to see himself like that) but in the magazine version of this scene, which appeared in chap 389, it was part of a transition... so Touya likely went from scarless to scarred to completely burned.

Whatever. We'll probably never know the truth, I just wanted to add my two cents.

[thyras]

→ of the song of mairon & ilmarátâ (bonus chapter)

PAIRING → mairon | sauron x female!elf!reader

WORD COUNT → 1.6k words

SERIES → of sauron & the moriquendi

WARNINGS → no warnings for this chapter

SUMMARY → what would it be like to have your tale told by the generations after you? what would they say about the being you loved and were created for? would your tale end in tragedy or would it be of redemption? even in the darkest of shadows could there still be light?

AUTHORS NOTE → so this has been in my drafts for a while and i needed a little filler as i worked on the next chapter, i thought i'd share it as it is what i wrote as kind of an inspiration for rewriting my dark!reader series and creating of sauron & the moriquendi. i had just finished the silmarillion and i had a good grasp on the style, so i tried to imagine what marion's and mori's story would sound like if it was among the pages of the book. the name for mori used in here is ilmarátâ which means radiant one in valarian and is the inspiration i got for her sindarian name. grammarly HATED me so much so I had to turn it off so I could write in tolkien's style. boy was this a BITCH to edit without it. funny enough i submitted this to for one of my creative writing assignments at school and got a B on it 🤭 my professor apparently did not like the fact that i used mairon in my writing 🤣

PARTS → masterlist

Great was their love, for Ilúvatar in his thought sang their fëar into being. Yet sorrow touched his heart as he perceived the shadow growing in one of his servants—a spirit once radiant, who, in his striving for perfection and dominion, turned to darkness. Moved by the discord and foreseeing the strife to come, Ilúvatar wove a new theme into the Music: a being of light and grace, a counterpoint to the shadow. Ilmarátâ he named her, a maiden of the Quendi, fairest among the Children of Ilúvatar.

Ilmarátâ was set apart, destined to awaken in the appointed hour when her presence would be most needed. Unlike her kin, she would not feel the call of the Valar to the West, for her heart and fëa were bound to another purpose. She would not find fulfillment until her fate intertwined with the being Ilúvatar had fashioned for her—a light against the encroaching dark.

Her beauty would rival the stars, for her spirit shone with an untainted purity. Her heart would remain steadfast, her mind unyielding to shadow, and her essence unsullied by the marring of the world. For no great darkness, however vast, could overcome the light Ilúvatar had kindled within her.

Ilmarátâ was blessed by Varda, who set her among the stars as a daughter of their light, and by Yavanna, who wove into her the harmony of nurturing things. These two among the Valar watched over her, guiding her steps through the long path of her fate. Yet, even their wisdom could not foresee all, for Ilmarátâ’s tale was destined to turn toward shadow as the Ages unfolded, her light tested by the gathering dark.

When Ilúvatar conceived of Mairon, fairest and most potent among the Maiar, he entrusted him to Aulë, the great smith of the Valar. To Aulë, Ilúvatar gave the task of teaching Mairon the crafting of wonders, that through his skill the world might be enriched. And for a time, Mairon walked in the light, delighting in the works of his hands and the wisdom of his master. Yet Ilúvatar, in his infinite thought, knew that the notes of Mairon’s song carried a strain of sorrow and disquiet, for within his heart lay a yearning for great order and harmony that would draw him ever closer to the shadow. 

Thus Ilúvatar brought Ilmarátâ into being for this purpose: that she would remain untouched by shadow, her fëa unyielding and pure, beholding only the light of Ilúvatar’s creation. In her, the harmony of the Music would find its fullest expression, and through her, the beauty of the unmarred world would shine. For in Mairon, Ilúvatar had woven the potential for great light, though it was veiled by the discord of his own desires.

Ilmarátâ was destined to perceive in Mairon the light and harmony he was meant to walk among, the path for which he had been created. Her unshaken purity, shaped and blessed by the Valar—by Varda’s light and Yavanna’s nurturing wisdom—would stand as a beacon to temper the shadow in Mairon’s heart. Through her steadfastness, Ilúvatar foresaw that the dark threads of Mairon’s song might yet be woven back into the greater harmony, if he would but turn to the light she embodied.

In the light of his being, Mairon felt a great yearning, a longing for something unknown, a void in his fëa that he could neither name nor understand. Ever he sought to grasp the source of this incompleteness, to craft wonders so perfect and resplendent that they might fill the ache within him. And so it was that, in the secret depths of his labor, he forged a ring of surpassing beauty—a work of flawless design, imbued with his greatest skill. As he gazed upon it, joy kindled in his heart, for in its perfection he glimpsed something of the harmony for which his fëa yearned. Yet he knew not for whom this gift was wrought, nor why he had shaped it. Thus, he kept it hidden, guarded from all eyes, and continued in his toil.

But in time, Melkor came to Mairon, weaving dark words and promises into his thoughts. Melkor spoke to the hidden places of Mairon’s heart, to his longing for order amidst chaos and his desire to fulfill the emptiness he bore. With every word, the shadow grew stronger, and Mairon, drawn by the promise of answers, found the yearning in his fëa begin to fade, though it was but a fleeting balm. Believing that the Valar themselves were flawed and their works disorderly, he turned to Melkor, imagining that through the might of the Shadow he might impose order upon the world and, at last, quench the fire of his unfulfilled longing. And so, Mairon followed Melkor into the darkness, abandoning the light of Ilúvatar for the promises of power and purpose that Melkor offered.

The time came at last when the Quendi awoke beneath the starlight, the Firstborn of Ilúvatar, wondrous and unmarred. Yet Melkor, filled with hate and jealousy at the beauty of their creation, sought to taint them and draw them into his shadow. Knowing the Valar would summon the Quendi to Aman, he set himself to hinder their journey and poison their hearts with fear. To this end, he commanded his servant Mairon, the most cunning and watchful of his followers, to observe the Quendi and delay their coming forth, raising storms and upheavals to bar their path. Thus, through Mairon’s labors, Melkor hoped to plant the seeds of discord and rebellion against Ilúvatar's designs.

Yet in his watchfulness, Mairon grew enamored of the Quendi, especially the Moriquendi who lingered under the starlit skies. In them, he saw a beauty and harmony that stirred something deep within him, awakening the unfulfilled yearning of his fëa. Though tasked to hinder them, he found himself reluctant to obey, and the storms he raised grew less frequent, the upheavals less fierce. More and more, he walked among them in his fair form, veiling his purpose. Drawn by their light and grace, the Moriquendi seemed to Mairon to ease the shadow in his heart, and for a time, he marveled at their purity, forgetting the darkness to which he had bound himself.

But though his heart softened, the seeds of Melkor’s will remained, and even this strange affection was not free of shadow, for within it lay the beginnings of Mairon’s own desire to rule and shape the Children of Ilúvatar, bending them to his will in the name of harmony and perfection.

Yet when Mairon’s eyes first beheld the fair beauty of Ilmarátâ, the most radiant of Ilúvatar’s creations, his fëa was struck with a great and wondrous harmony, unlike anything he had known before. It was she who had drawn him to the Moriquendi, though he had not understood it. For Ilmarátâ was his match, the light that Ilúvatar had fashioned to shine even into the shadowed recesses of his heart.

For long centuries, Mairon lingered, watching her from afar as she journeyed beneath the stars. He saw her sorrow at the loss of kin and her grief as Melkor’s malice despoiled the land she loved. Her pain pierced his heart, and though he had bound himself to the will of the Shadow, he made a silent vow: never would he allow such sorrow to touch her again, even if it meant defying his master.

When the Valar overthrew Melkor and chained him in the depths of the Void, Mairon fled into the wild places of the world, unshackled for a time from his master’s dominion. In his newfound freedom, his thoughts turned to Ilmarátâ, his star and his light. He resolved to seek her once more, to step out of shadow and stand in her radiance. And so, he fashioned for himself a fair form, one of great beauty and grace, and with trembling hope, he came forth to her.

In her presence, Mairon was transformed. He took Ilmarátâ as his bride, and for many centuries they dwelt in light, their union a joy to both the Valar and Ilúvatar. For Ilmarátâ was his redemption, the purpose for which she had been created: to temper the shadow in his fëa and lead him back to the light he had forsaken. In her, Mairon found harmony, and for a time, he walked no longer in darkness but in the light of love and grace.

For such was Mairon’s love for Ilmarátâ that it is told, when he was at last stripped of his fair form by his own servants in their treachery, he cried out in great despair. His sorrow echoed through the void, for he knew that she would never again look upon him with love, his light forever lost to him. And when he was remade, clothed in a form shaped by malice and power, he sought only to possess Ilmarátâ’s light, believing that in doing so, he might reclaim the harmony he had once known.

Yet his heart had grown dark, and her light remained pure, untouchable by the shadow that now consumed him. In all things, shadow twists and tempers even the brightest of lights, and so it was that his love, once noble, turned to a desire for dominion. His longing for Ilmarátâ, no longer borne of selfless harmony, became a hunger to bind her to him, to make her his in defiance of the light she carried.

Thus, the tragedy of Mairon and Ilmarátâ was sealed, for though he yearned for redemption, the shadow within him twisted his path, and her light could not be dimmed nor corrupted by his darkness. In this, the wisdom of Ilúvatar was revealed: though shadow may cloud the world, it cannot extinguish the light of a fëa untainted, nor can it reclaim the harmony it has forsaken.

[vergess]

A work friend of mine's daughter has recently developed (?) schizophrenia. He seems to like my advice in general, and in particular thinks I gave him helpful advice about handling traumatic experiences he's had, and so talks to me about this a lot. I've tried to give advice along the lines of prioritizing her comfort/well-being/calmness over her "connection to reality" (his words), like not picking arguments over things she says in pursuit of correcting her, similar to taking care of someone with dementia.

Do you have any points I can focus on or resources I can look up to support him and by extension his daughter better? I'm not very familiar with the subject but do know that in looking this up I'm wading through a lot of stuff that's not very supported or with the schizophrenic person's well being and agency in mind.

You're exactly right about the comparison to dementia. Although not nearly as severe an illness, schizophrenia is one of those "redirect not reinforce" conditions.

So, one of the big things you can suggest, especially while the person is in the early period of onset (which can happen over the course of a year at any age, but usually between 20 and 30), is try to help them make plans for the future. Which sounds big and scary, but it mostly consists of honestly going through with them to make lists of the things they enjoy, the things that stress them out, etc. Because there is going to come a time, and it's sooner than anyone wants, where remembering what she finds relaxing will become impossible on her own (at least, during periods of high stress; she may always be able to self regulate in normal conditions).

Schizophrenia often makes people feel deeply afraid and out of control of their own thoughts, which is really scary!!

But your friend's daughter is likely still able to remember what things she enjoyed before the onset of her illness. Whenever she gets too wound up in a fearful delusion, rather than trying to combat the delusion, I suggest redirecting her to one of the things she enjoys, whatever that may be. A hobby, a movie, etc.

It's important that the idea for the redirection initially come from the schizophrenic person themself. This way, you can honestly say, "hey, remember when you said you like X, why don't we try some X together," and it be something reaffirming to the person's sense of control rather than fighting it.

Of course, if the delusion isn't fearful/scary/stressful, the best thing to do is to accept that it is her genuine reality right now, and just work around that belief. No need to start a fight and make it stressful.

Another thing is, and this is MUCH more controversial in the west but I'll go ahead and say it. Another thing is, if the daughter's voices are friendly or kind, to support her engaging with them (if she so chooses). This way if/when her voices become mean she can choose to "disengage" with them as a conscious change. In practical terms, this means if his daughter is ever having conversations with her voices that seem to be in good spirits, to treat that more like she is talking on the phone with someone you don't know, than to treat it as a scary hallucination.

Then, if the voices ever get mean, she can "give them the silent treatment" to help establish a sense of control over them and help her feel like she doesn't have to listen to them.

In a way, it can be good to conceptualize her voices as "influential strangers" and just encourage her to listen to good influences and ignore bad ones.

Finally, depending on where the daughter lives and her support needs, it might be good to get her registered with the healthcare service in your area sooner than later. In the US, a young person with schizophrenia automatically qualifies for medicaid and can also qualify for disability. Both will need to be applied for, and the application process is a byzantine mess.

Especially regarding disability, it is best to hire a lawyer to make your application (they will be paid out of your benefits not your pocket).

As such, if your coworker's daughter is unlikely to be able to live entirely on her own, including job, hygiene, travel, etc it's a good idea to get there registrations started ASAP. That way if the coworker ever becomes sick or when he eventually dies, etc the daughter can be supported.

If the daughter has low support needs and is likely to be able to live on her own (which can and does happen sometimes!! Even with schizophrenia), one of the biggest challenges she's going to face in the long term is going to the doctor.

Not only are doctors deeply, deeply scary to the mentally ill in the west (for good reason!), which makes doctors a prime target for delusions of fear and abuse. But also delusional thinking can interfere with a person's ability to identify their own body sensations.

EG, it is very common for schizophrenics to "be really angry and not know why" and it turns out it's because they have a UTI but couldn't feel it due to delusions. In fact, it's so common that one of the first things we do at work when a client is very upset like that, is ask them if they have been peeing more often (the answer is usually 'yes').

A huge part of the reason people with schizophrenia die young is the inability to tell when they are sick, followed by feeling unsafe going to the doctor.

Ultimately, the biggest thing to remember is that no matter how stressed or scared you are as a carer, the person with the illness is just as of more stressed. They aren't fighting you, they're fighting terror. Remembering that can make the intense demands of caring for someone with higher support needs less draining.

The second biggest thing is to remember to take time for yourself, because if you burn out as a carer, then you've left your kid without support for potentially months or years, and that's pretty bad compared to having them go to a fun adult program like a summer camp every day for a month while you recover.

Finally: there are more programs for schizophrenia support than you think. Even in my rural bumfuck town of 3000, we have two (2) different programs, including a year round day program that operates 5 days a week and takes walk ins.

Your coworker does not have to take care of his daughter alone. Support exists.

[skeelly]

"when im fat and old and my kids think im a joke"

hi!! welcome. i suggest putting a seatbelt on and i will pay for your therapy, dont worry. :)

☘ "hi, it's me. im the problem it's me.": im kristen! you can call me kristen or kris. minor. she/her. intp-t. ambivert. 🇵🇭. reader (sort of). notes app writer (sometimes). i could not care less about my dumb typos so deal with it. i suck at math. biiiiiggg ophelia wilde fan. delulu swiftie no.9273737277. rodrigoxpartidge's biggest supporter. claire rosinkranz is the reason for my existence. gracie abrams ily. "how long can we be a sad song?". im married to grayson hawthorne. mirrorball//tolerate it girlie 4 life. stromboli fan until the day i die. nick girlie by heart. pjo stan at this point. harry potter simp. hermione granger is my mother. sherlock and enola holmes stan. "no body, no crime". haylor (sorry not sorry). one direction is my life. FREE PALESTINE. kenji, my spirit animal. jude is so ughhhhh perfect. javery shipper cause jameson for avery, grayson for me :3. massive k!nye west hater so if you like him, please leave. but i love rap. certified professional procrastinator. capricorn (not a believer in those things though). i love reading poetry. correct grammar = non existent. i can (technically) fluently speak 3 languages. i can speak (basic, not much) about 5 languages?. piano enthusiast. very big sport girly (football *soccer. america football can kiss my toes. that sport sucks*, f1, volleyball, badminton, basketball, tennis and hockey fan). walker scobell is perfect and i love him. c²>>>>. sharl leclerc. max the axe. oscar paistry. ankara messi. sewy. leah is my bestie. dior is the best artist no cap. pookie nation frfr. charlie's luke is best luke. andrew is underrated. olivea is jusssttt.

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@mqstermindswift (quason) #nickyy

@nqds (NADS) #nads! or was it #NADS! ??

@reminiscentreader (JAS) #theworldneedsmorepeoplelikejas

@sophiesonlinediary (fifi) #fifi <3

@myster3y (kiaraah) #kiaraah

@regisdvmb(reggggg) ✶ @coco6420 (cocoo) ✶ @eddiethebanished (finn :)) ✶ @themidnightarcher ✶ @starchasers-stuff ✶ @what-about-wendy (wendy <3) ✶ @lucinda-008 ✶ @foaming-sea ✶ @lonelycatsblog ✶ @good-old-fashioned-lover ✶ @my-mind-is-frozen ✶ @dandelions-fly-in-summer-skies ✶ @baboland ✶ @blocked-zombieartist ✶ @sturn-wrld ✶ @swiftieannah ✶ @weeping-in-the-willows ✶ @s1xseasonsandamov1e ✶ @the-red-archer ✶ @svnflowermoon ✶ @helpimhopelesslyinlove ✶ @doyoujustnotwantto ✶ @atwtmvftvtvsgavralpsss ✶ @oh-whale13 ✶ @bonesofnixie ✶ @art-of-fools (stephanieee) ✶ @percabeths-blue-cookies ✶ @imthatweirdratinthecorner (a rat <3) ✶ @letmeseeallthefrogsinthecity ✶ @that-multi-fandom-hijabi (novaaa) ✶ @rachellelizabethhdare ✶ @sluttypoetsdepartment ✶ @kimu-dem ✶

[fatcatlittlebox]

I just had a really sad thought because who doesn't love angst with haladriel. It's from this passage from the tolkien wiki:

[Those, of any Elven people, who did not perish through bodily death or depart from Middle-earth across the sea would eventually fade. Fading occurred when their fëar 'consumed' their bodies and the body became merely a memory of the fëa. Elves in this faded state were completely invisible to mortal eyes, except for those among Men "into whose minds they may enter directly"]

What if, Galadriel decided to stay in ME and fade so her spirit can find Sauron's (after he's just a spirit himself ofc) and keep him company and together they watch the ages past?

Perhaps, but Galadriel didn't stay in ME. She sailed west eventually. It's a lovely tragic thought but I don't know if I could see her knowingly self-destruct on his account. I could see her staying behind as long as possible for Arwen and because she has his blood, this is her way of fulfilling her vow to stay in ME for as long as any trace of Sauron remains there. As much hope and stubborness as she has in her heart, my HC is that she believes that they will find each other again if they both strive towards the light. I can see her throwing a gauntlet or challenge: Meet me at the end of the world if you have the courage to do so.

But there are a couple of book canon events that are interesting to me. One, is that Galadriel was known to have been afflicted with "sea-longing" and that during the second age (I think?), she established herself there in Belfalas to relieve her melancholy. And I think it's interesting that the show has established the importance of the sea in her relationship with Sauron. I also think it's interesting how in the books, Celeborn is all over the place and decides NOT to sail west with his wife but remain behind. I mean, I'm all for healthy married cohabitation but that really is something.

[one-of-many-journeys]

Day 42

Snowchant Hunting Grounds

At dawn, I rode west toward Ourea's retreat to meet with Aratak and, hopefully, Cyan.

Both were inside. Cyan on her altar, surrounded by the murals painted by Ourea, and Aratak standing before her, bathed in the blue light. A recording of Ourea was playing, a conversation she shared with Cyan when she first told Ourea of the Daemon’s attack. She spoke of Aratak—his strength in battle, and her faith that if anyone could defeat the Daemon, it was him. Aratak left as soon as he noticed my presence. He must resent me greatly for what happened to Ourea. I’m the reason she went up the mountain.

I wasn’t sure how to speak to Cyan at first. I’d found logs and recordings of her talking to Kenny, but it had been a thousand years since then. She was friendly, and clearly eager to speak to me because of my understanding of Old World technology, and the Focus on my temple. She could share data with me directly. 

I had so many questions, but I began with the basics, the most pressing. What are you? 

What I had been calling ‘thinking machines’, she called artificial intelligence. They were common in the Old World. The Old Ones had the power to just…create these beings, fully conscious and aware, but with a machine's speed of thought and the ability to communicate with and control them. Just as the data I found told me, Cyan was created to oversee project Firebreak, and the level of intelligence required to manage the project autonomously couldn’t be achieved without introducing emotional responses as a byproduct. I suppose the two can’t be separated; one begets the other.

Cyan called her own emotional capacities ‘limited’, but they didn’t seem limited to me. She expressed grief over Ourea’s sacrifice, and I could tell it bothered her that she was never able to communicate on an equal level with Ourea, who saw her always as a spirit before a friend. She said that her colleagues, like Anita and Kenny, had to keep the true extent of her intelligence a secret. It was forbidden by…every tribe, it seems. All corporations. To have the ability to create life from light and words, and impose limits on it, never allow it to reach its full potential…it seems counterintuitive. Cruel, more importantly. Cyan didn’t seem to resent this fact, but didn’t give much in way of an explanation either—just said that both machines and human societies require laws to function effectively. I suppose that’s true, but I’ve come across my fair share of laws that are just as cruel. 

Cyan told me more about Firebreak, mostly confirming and expanding on the information I’d already picked up through datapoints. Despite the destruction of its facilities, Cyan had optimised the caldera’s stabilisation over the centuries to the point that an eruption wasn’t probable for over three-thousand years. At a guess, I’d say she surpassed her creators’ expectations. 

Most importantly of all, she told me about the Daemon. It’s name is Hephaestus, and it’s another artificial intelligence like Cyan, but far more advanced, according to her. By her earlier summation, advancement means intelligence, and intelligence means emotion. More complex emotions, I guess—harder to predict, and therefore harder to control. Good thing Cyan is so nice then. 

If the Old Ones used codes to control thinking machines the same way Faro controlled his war machines, and that control was lost somehow, I can only imagine the damage they could do, especially in the age of metal, where machines were used to do everything, were even hooked into people’s heads…So maybe someone lost control of Hephaestus, and Hades too. Remnants of the Old Ones’ society? 

The people behind the door?

Hephaestus tricked Cyan into making contact with it. She was desperate to communicate with a more technologically advanced people than the Banuk, who could only help and understand her so much. Then it…corrupted her. Took control of her entire network and made her mind into just another strand of its web. She caught glimpses of its thoughts, its objectives, but they remained elusive. Hephaestus wants to create deadly, aggressive machines like its Fireclaws to kill human hunters, but not wipe them out entirely. Cyan was very specific about that. Does it want its machines to rule over humans? 

Destroying Firebreak didn’t destroy Hephaestus. Its true body is somewhere else, maybe not even in one place at all, according to Cyan. It’s spread out across vast distances, dwelling in scattered pieces across many Cauldrons, attempting to take control. How long has it been trying to influence the creation of machines? It attacked Cyan five years ago, but she said it had already infected other Cauldrons by then. If I had to guess, it all started at least ten or fifteen years ago, whenever the Derangement began. 

If I’m right…If I can find it, and kill it, that would be the greatest act of healing imparted on the people of all lands. Once I stop the Eclipse and Hades, Hephaestus will be my next target. If it doesn’t make itself known to me first, that is. Back in the Cauldron core, it sounded furious. 

It turns out that Faro was the one who started Firebreak, giving it the resources it needed to succeed. Back then, he was known as ‘the man who saved the world’. Never has a man so thoroughly spurned his title, I can guarantee. Elisabet Sobeck must have still been part of Faro’s corporation then. Cyan never met Elisabet, though she told me that her work had greatly inspired Cyan’s creator, Anita. Cyan didn’t know anything about Zero Dawn either; she was put into ‘hibernation mode’ before Faro’s swarm came, and woke up centuries later to an empty world, spent the centuries since toiling away, alone. Never knowing what happened…and whether anyone was still out there to enjoy the world she was preserving. I think Ourea was more of a revelation to Cyan than the other way around. 

Cyan ended our conversation with a question that I had no idea how to answer. Aratak was planning to bring other Banuk up the Shaman’s path to see her—it was framed as a holy pilgrimage in that alone, here on the snow peak at the end of their sacred caves. Cyan didn’t know how to deal with their fervor. She felt she was deceiving them, but knew they lacked the technical aptitude to comprehend the truth. As if I haven’t been struggling with the same damn thing.

I deflected the question. You have to judge these situations as they come, person to person, I told her. As long as the truth comes out eventually, using whatever words needed to frame such lofty concepts. Truthfully, I still don’t understand half of what I read in the datapoints I find, and have to draw connections to concepts I’ve experienced, whether they're correct or not. It’s so frustrating. It seems like Cyan can help with that, though. Even though she was isolated, hidden from corporate laws, with only her colleagues for company, she knows far more than I. I’ll make sure to come back and visit her as I find more questions on my journey.

Aratak stood watching the white world below the peak, and I had to ask him: did he resent me? He denied it; if I hadn’t come, he would have led his Werak to their deaths on Thunders Drum, the Daemon would have spread its infection further, killing more hunters, and Ourea would have lost the spirit forever. He didn’t understand Ourea’s determination until he spoke to Cyan himself. Now he knew why she had been willing to sacrifice everything.

I passed the Cheiftain’s mantle back to him. I only borrowed it anyway, and we never did complete our challenge for the title. 

Aratak said I was practically Banuk. To him, that’s the highest honour he can bestow. There’s one more task for me here in the Cut. Five completed Fireclaws escaped before the makeshift Cauldron was destroyed. Now they’re roaming the wilds, wreaking havoc in their wakes. I have some hunting to do. 

As I was leaving the facility, Sylens finally deigned to speak. I’m sure he found the whole ordeal intriguing, as I fought for my life day after day. He wouldn’t tell me I was right to make my northern detour straight on, but I knew what he meant. Good intuition, Aloy, those Banuk ‘mysticisms’ were relevant to my elusive interests after all.

He had one interesting fact to offer: the names ‘Hades’ and ‘Hephaestus’ both came from the same language, one that was ancient even in the time of the Old Ones. I wonder, did they choose those names for themselves based on legend, perverting scripture just as Hades does now with his Shadow Carja underlings, or did the Old Ones name them thus? Whatever the truth, it seems that Hades and Hephaestus are some form of kin. 

Heading down the mountain, I spotted one of the escaped Fireclaws prowling beside a Ravager. An uninfected Ravager. I overrode it and it turned its cannon on the Fireclaw, but the beast made short work of my ally, and soon I was facing it alone. It took a swipe at me, but at least the snow was there to soothe my burns. I used the same strategy as I had in the Cauldron: fire unit, power cell detonations, blaze sack bursts, frost bombs, and more hardpoints to land the final blows. 

I climbed a mountainside nearby to harvest more Bluegleam—I had a Banuk-made war bow in mind—then made my way down to the foot of the Shaman’s path to purchase it.

Deep Din was close by—hard to miss the music. I snuck past the Snapmaws patrolling the entrance and slipped down to meet Laulai. I even joined in for a few stretches of song.

Maybe an ill-advised place to rest on account of the noise, but even Laulai settled down eventually. The sound of the Snapmaws pacing above was ominous, though. 

[digitaldoeslmk]

I apologize if you're not the right person to ask but I've been wondering this for a while and since you both enjoy (but are critical of) lmk and also enjoy/know a lot about jttw I figure you may be a decent person to ask. And I mean this is as an entirely genuine question.

Jttw has so many different adaptations and parodies and, for lack of a better term, spinoffs, why is it that LMK in particular seems to get so much more criticism? How is it different from any other story that uses jttw as a base?

I was under the impression that while a lot of events and chatacters have been changed or tweaked in some ways (looking at red son in particular, as well as seemingly replacing Buddha with the jade emperor, I could go on) it was still relatively faithful at least in spirit. It has a lot of callbacks and mentions to the book, even if it's more or less an AU of the original story.

So why is it that its adaptation in particular seems so...disliked I suppose? Or at least takes a lot more criticism than other adaptations. I could take a few guesses (fandom (and its lack of knowledge of the source material) being a big one, or otherwise being more western than the story probably should be) but as someone who was introduced to jttw by lmk (reading the book now and having a blast with it) I'm curious and confused as to why it seems to be disliked when there are so many other jttw adaptations that also change fair chunks of the story, and those don't seem to garner the same level of criticism.

And I apologize again if you're maybe the wrong person to ask, but I wasn't sure where else to start, if you know anyone who can maybe answer this better I'd love to hear from any of them as well, I've been so curious about this for a while.

no worries at all, and i appreciate the ask!

i do wanna preface this by saying that i have very little interaction with the LMK fandom, and mostly heard the horror stories through the grapevine or by others telling me their own experience with it. and make no mistake, this sideblog is very much me laser focusing on the few stuff i enjoy of the show and expanding on those and filling in the rest with a lot of plaster and spite ajdhawjhbdh

i will keep most of my vitriol to myself though, and that the opinion i'm giving is my own. there's a lot of good folks who are more than welcome to pitch in with their own criticisms here, for a larger poll of voices.

read more cus this is long xvx

as you have said, JTTW has an overwhelming amount of retelling, rewrites, sequels, prequels, adaptations, what have you. trust me, there is a JTTW adaptation for everyone out there and it's part of the beauty and appeal of it. and equally, everyone has their pros and cons for each of them.

one major point to keep in mind is that LMK has a very online fanbase, and it's an abnormally large one. it also has fans on the west and in china, and the language barrier tends to keep both rather separate, for better or worse. so a larger fanbase means a larger pool of criticism simply by law of averages.

another thing to keep in mind is that, because it is so large, a lot of people are getting into JTTW thanks to it, and it's exactly those changes that make it even more of a hurdle for people to meet JTTW where it's at. and by that i mean, a very different worldview and belief system than known in the west.

i've been in the JTTW fandom properly for, three months now?? three and a half lol and the amount of reading and studying i've been doing to just scratch at the depth of centuries of cultural context is not insignificant. and i'm only just starting! it's a wonderful experience, but not many in the LMK fandom are as eager or willing to learn all that, much less listen when people correct them on things that they believe, that are factually false. and that can be deeply frustrating for those who simply want to share in the joy of learning.

it's incredibly demeaning and patronizing, to have such an old and rich culture reduced to a single adaptation that rly lambasts the roots of its entire premise for existing. no other fans of other adaptations have that kind of attitude that i've come across; those are all understood as AUs and not to be taken as gospel, but some of the fandom treat LMK as the end all be all of JTTW media and it's, infuriating.

beyond the fandom leaving one hell of a bitter taste, there's the fact that LMK is a very westernized view and parody of JTTW. it breaks not only with the lore of it, but with the very fundamentals of Buddhist and Daoist cosmology. those changes you mentioned, like the JE replacing Buddha and then the guy getting killed, the absence of several concepts and deities, and sometimes the very change of them, are incredibly disrespectful on their own. it's very hard to remove JTTW from its religious roots (it can be done but those usually read more as "inspired by" rather than proper adaptations), and to do so by filling the empty space with a Greco-Christian view of cosmology is... A Big Ol Yikes.

while we in the west might be okay turning stuff like Christian, Norse, Greek, etc. mythology upside down for our stories, it comes off as disrespectful to do the same for an overall dismissed and ignored religion in the west like Daoism, and even more so for such a sprawling one as Buddhism. that attitude does not translate well at all, and to be faithful only in spirit is simply not enough. you wouldn't (i hope) say that about people who appropriate Indigenous or closed faith beliefs for their own use; it's 2023 surely we don't need to revive the W-nd-ig- debate again, or the Lilith one. (i can for further context but i'd rather not, but you're than welcome to google it)

at the end of the day, an AU is just an AU until you're using it to sell toys and it has turned into a massive entry window for many western fans into a foundational piece of literature for an entire country that has been and still is routinely degraded and discriminated against.

i hope this hasn't come off as too harsh, but this is smth that rly grinds my gears and i tend to be a bit stern when discussing it. none of it was aimed at you anon, i know you're just trying to understand the situation and i do appreciate the effort you're making!!

[talenlee]

4e: The Unmindful Monk

Normally when I write about 4e, I do so trying to talk about the game in a way that doesn’t involve or introduce any particular changes to the game. It’s not useful for me to advocate for a game in terms of ‘here’s how cool this game is, if you accept my houserules.’ Typically speaking, I try to talk about what’s in the rulebook, even if I’m gleeful about pointing out the ways that we didn’t play 3e by the rules and probably nobody else did.

But it’s a bit of a challenge to advocate for something when you’re actually advocating for a connected idea in your head. Like, at that point I might as well point out that part of why I like 4e D&D so much is I get to play it with my cool friends who are great, and at that point: Who am I fooling, of course that game kicks ass. If I present new content for 4e, it’s discretely new; it’s cultures from my own world, new class feats or whatnot, but it’s not asking you to change anything in the game that exists. That makes this something new, and something I am doing with so much more thought than it really needs.

Anyway, hey, what if the Monk was Martial, not Psionic?

I’ve written in the past about how the Monk, the class, in 4e is a psionic class, and how that psionic flag on them is a strange exception. My ‘conspiracy theory’ is that it’s detritus from the ki power source that was ditched at some point, either for good reasons (‘is this a little racist?’) or mediocre reasons (‘we can’t think of three other classes for this’). To simplify, the Psionic power source represents four classes: Battleminds, Ardents, Psions, and Monks. Battleminds, Ardents and Psions all have a system of power points and feats that relate to them, and the Monk has a totally different system called Full Disciplines. And the Monk is Psionic, despite having nothing in common with the other Psionic classes. Weird, right?

It’s not even like ‘Psionic’ is a generic term lacking in a particular meaning in the context of 4e D&D. In one of the stranger beats in the rulebook, ‘Psionic’ power is power that stems from a contact with the Far Realms. That makes sense for the horror opened unnatural eyes and bending of reality of the Battlemind and Psion, but the Monk’s power is described as coming from within. They’re expressed as pushing the limits of the body, tapping into a greater spirit, and coming to understand something about themselves.

Look, who am I kidding: You know exactly what “Monk” means. It’s Kung Fu shit. It’s a class of Kung Fu shit and Kung Fu in the west has no association with psychic powers. Despite the way Kung Fu may be tied to a bunch of different kinds of mysticism, in the west it’s tied to mastery of the body, and typically is explicitly the opposite of magical powers. A kung fu hero is the guy who beats up some kind of wizard or talisman wielder, not a guy who can channel the power of his mind to change things across the world. Sure, you can argue that Kung Fu shit is about using the mind to power the body, but the Kung Fu Shit still punches things powered by the mind.

It’s not far realm Lovecraftian brain tentacles. It’s cool Kung Fu shit.

Accept if you will that the Monk doesn’t really belong in the Psionic power category. Just accept that I accept it, even if you don’t. If it’s not Psionic now, what is it? You could hypothetically have a power sourceless class – there’s no reason for it to have to have one, it would just be even more bogglingly weird than the Psionic power source itself was. But there doesn’t have to be a complete vacation from that source when instead there’s an existing power source that the monk could belong to, and I mean, as written, should belong to.

See, here’s the description of the Martial Power Source in the Player’s Handbook:

Martial powers are not magic in the traditional sense, although some martial powers stand well beyond the capabilities of ordinary mortals. Martial characters use their own strength and willpower to vanquish their enemies. Training and dedication replace arcane formulas and prayers to grant fighters, rangers, rogues, and warlords, among others, their power.

Training and dedication. Training and dedication. Training and dedication. You know, those things that we use monks and monasteries to shorthand and signify. It’s not magical weapons, it’s dedicatedly training endlessly to refine the body into a perfect tool for the craft of… well, again, Kung Fu Shit.

What though! What changes if this change is implemented? What does this house rule open up? What need of mine does it satisfy, as the person who is going to play with this rule at best?

Well, it means that Monks lose access to all Psionic feats, Paragon Paths, and Epic Destinies. Of which Monks have… zero meaningful interactions. Alright, that sets that aside. Anything that ‘requires’ a monk and a psionic background can be easily folded to just ignore the psionic requirement. It also means that Monks gain access to Martial feats, Paragon Paths, and Epic Destinies. What does that mean?

Uh Martial Practices?

Which includes flavourful things like being able to craft and repair objects, tracking people, being able to prserve a corpse, balance perfectly, recognise details in a space perfectly, faking an identity, slowing your heartbeat and – hang on this is more Kung Fu shit!?

It does mean that Martial arts get to do more things like throw flame and channel the spirit of a dragon and all that but that stuff is meant to be a metaphor for what the body can do! You might see it as a development of something in the Martial space that you don’t want it to have, but I might suggest that the limited vision of how Martial characters can’t do things like that is part of the problem that led to bad opinions on 4e in the first place.

I’m going to level with you, that as a designer, this is not an important or meaningful change. This is a change that tidies up the bookkeeping of an organisation chart that nobody actually playing needs to care about. Maybe you have a monk character who would really like access to Martial Practice, and that player gets one bonus feat now they don’t have to spend. It’s such a niche thing, I can’t imagine it actually matters.

But it kinda matters to me.

Now, as with doing your own appendectomy, if the Monk moves out of the Psionic pool to the Martial pool, then that cleans up the Psionic Power Source, we are now filled with courage and confidence and ready to reach over and start extracting other organs.

Like c’mere, Vampire…

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[vigilskeep]

Hello, vampire blood person again! Big fan of your presentations and have been getting very inspired lately thanks to you and your blog so I thought you'd be a good person to come to and ask, how do you know so much? The lore stuff is pretty easy to research on a wiki but in terms of the real world comparisons, I remember you comparing the angel and spirits and talking about how interesting the differences between andrastaism and real life is and you just seem a very knowledgeable person. I was wondering if you just grew up religious or have studied the bible or anything like that? I'll study that whole damn brick if I have to but are there any resources you can suggest to study such things and better study DA as a whole? Good luck on the next presentation and thank you for being an inspiration!

hi!!

ah so as for my general knowledge i’m religious and grew up christian, and i’m also a, uh, student on pause; i have two and a half years of a history & english literature degree that i wasn’t able to quite finish at the time. so i have no qualifications i’m afraid but my general knowledge about christianity and about history, especially pre-modern history which i vastly prefer, is, i like to think, quite good?

so i have a lot of basic knowledge yes. i’m trying to think of how someone could replicate that from scratch as it were

for andrastianism, for example, a refresher on the basics of christianity is a must, for comparison’s sake alone. here’s the first fairrrrrrly neutral (sorry for relying on the bbc. by fairly neutral i mean not actively trying to convert you) site i could find with a lot of quick information for the fundamentals as it were. where’s a good friendly starting point for the medieval church. maybe something like the you’re dead to me podcast? it’s a very light fun introduction designed for no starting knowledge, they put a comedian and a historian on, it’s a good time. try the early medieval papacy episode for a relevant starting place. as for andrastianism’s origins, you’re going to need a grasp on the roman empire and the rise of christianity to know what they’re getting at. probably a good idea to know who joan of arc is, as well. you’re dead to me has an episode on her too!

trying to think of what other historical areas are useful... judaism in medieval western europe is a must if you care about city elves as they clearly drew on that, whatever they like to pretend. i should learn more myself. the norman conquest of england would be the comparison for the orlesian occupation of ferelden that jumps to mind. i don’t know how much comparison value there is, nothing springs to mind, but if you want to know the mechanics of that kind of invasion it should be useful enough. anything about western european medieval kings and dynasties is great for building on just how those dynamics work. on i guess a heavier note i think it’s crucial to be aware of what the crusades were and the kind of myths that medieval europeans had about outsiders to recognise a lot of what’s going on with, and discomfiting about, qunari lore

in many ways the real knack is just having enough general knowledge to know what game lore is referencing from. so really just the more you broaden your knowledge the more of a uhhhh palette you’ll have to compare it all too. be a sponge for information. also all of this is super useful for understanding everything else in general not just our favourite viddy game series!! not to soapbox but i think the assumption that everyone in the west simply knows what christianity is and doesn’t need to be taught really sets us back in terms of understanding our own cultures, for instance

sorry if this wasn’t that helpful but thank you for the message!!

[domain-of-sentience]

ch 39 ramblings (+ HoS analysis)

wow this was the greatest arc of all time huh

(due to length, this post will mainly be a HoS analysis but ill start off with summarizing my feelings about the chapter/arc as a whole)

Summary

in my prior posts i've already mentioned how these chapters had it all: good premise, good cast and character development, actual stakes, immersive and gut-wrenching scenes, the list goes on. lately i've seen people express concerns over Sa and how she compares to the likes of other antagonists like otto but honestly...

i care more about the chess pieces than the ones controlling them

i fucking love seeing characters struggle in the face of adversity. in some of the previous arcs, it felt like the protagonists would always find a way to be one step ahead. but whenever the salt snow cast tried to do the same, they'd end up spraining that metaphorical foot or be pushed many steps back... or just die onscreen 🙈 even if there wasn't true death, there were still lasting consequences

the spectacle was off the charts too. so many scenes were rendered with love and care that sprinkled additional life to these characters, many of whom had lofty dreams that were to end in a whimper than a bang.

and don't get me started on the elden ring ass boss fight and that tense platforming sequence. despite knowing that things were going to be ok somehow, i was able to suspend that thought and immerse myself in what truly felt like despair and isolation

Senti Thoughts (Unceasing)

she had plenty of memorable moments overall. at first i thought the writers were going Too hard on her haughty side, so much so that people were picking on her over it and even the fucking narrator had to jump in

(then i found out this was vita, sorry vita but you're on my list now)

i mean this is the same herrscher who made so many reasonable deductions in the previous chapter. the second time she met kevin she immediately surrendered knowing that she couldn't win. if this Sa was the quantum counterpart to the cocoon of finality then hos would certainly be more cautious, right?

but i think she was fairly confident in two things: the relative power level of Sa and her own natural adaptability to situations, such as the way she cleverly hid herself from Sa's omniscience:

this wasn't Finality that she was contending with, but a fellow rival in the domain of consciousness

Comparison to Vita

she and vita are alike in many ways: their clairvoyance, their eyes, their bird imagery, their selfishness, their love for freedom, their disdain for boredom, their interest in companionship, their struggles with free will, and even this weird tidbit:

i think the only remarkable difference they had was senti's activeness to vita's passiveness

tho, despite their similarities they don't have interesting interactions outside of the mindspace (WHICH BTW always fills me with nostalgia whenever they play that hos bgm)

Freedom, Mind and Body

freedom is one of the core themes of this arc (like, they really beat you in the head over it), but it's an extremely consistent trait for senti's character.

she is not a materialistic person; she would rather simulate the taste of tea in her mind than to experience it for herself. despite being a free spirit, she still has a Restraint that manifests as a mental shackle: an influence from memories that do not belong to her, which still affects her to this day. so who can blame her for always chasing freedom?

but the most interesting thing is this:

it would explain why she could taste the moonrock a long while ago when she didn't know it was rock salt. although, i guess it's largely unnecessary since she can just influence people's consciousness to look however she wants. but y'know, chekhov's gun and all....

also, the 72 transformations is another journey to the west reference!

The Status Quo

did you know senti is a character who hates stagnancy, but is stagnant herself?

she admitted to being stir-crazy in times of relative peace after the great eruption, she was seen pacing around in the country of iron sand while she couldn't do anything else, she'd rather beat up the problem head-on than to brew up a solution. indeed, she is a very active herrscher who likes to mire herself in chaos for the fun of it

ironically she gives away so much Therapy Guidance but she never addresses her own underlying issues, such as her wish for people to genuinely care about her. you can't fight that problem away, so she'd rather ignore it.

she couldn't even give that new body a real chance because it would unravel everything about her. she can't leave her comfort zone at all. even her fighting tactics haven't changed a bit (thanks mhy)

to use an analogy: she is like water. water is versatile and can easily turn into vapor or ice, just as how senti is adaptable and can literally change her physical state. but no matter what form water takes on, it is still molecular water in the end, just as how senti will always be senti

but what happens if water undergoes a chemical reaction and irreversibly changes?

even pseudo-death freaked her out. can you imagine what would happen if her authority diminished completely, or if she was restrained in a corporeal body, or if she was locked up with fuhua in a room forever-

Sentihua Crumbs

you can leave this post now if this isn't your thing

hmmmmmmm

hmmmmmmmmmmm also senti isn't beating the absent father allegations

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

the funny thing is that this arc was so fucking good that i want to go into the next one with ZERO expectations. like i'm not really sure if they can keep this momentum up and so far all of fuhua's appearances since the end of the taixuan arc were.... lackluster at best

but here's to hoping that fuhua and senti have genuinely meaningful interactions that can at least hold a candle to what the seeles got

[bimbinisrevinis]

The Asiri #1 is a design document that more or less resembles a story (spoilers)

I know I don’t tend to review a lot of comic books – by which I mean, I don’t think to write comic reviews like I think of writing reviews for other stuff which I never write – but something about The Asiri #1 feels unusually compelling for me to address, possibly because I’ve had an interest in its creator’s YouNeek Studios’ whole mission statement for a while – an expanded superhero/fantasy fiction universe centered around African characters and inspired by African culture, spanning across centuries of history, something that I went actively looking for when I was hunting for any non-American or European made superheroes I could read. But it could also be that a lot of my impressions of it let me elaborate on some more general opinions and thoughts I have about things beyond itself like comics in general, fiction in general, etc.

In any case, I have to say that interested as I am in the overall goal of the studio’s output as a whole, unfortunately my impression of the book, at least as of #1 is that it’s rather lackluster, I might even go as far as to say it’s kind of bad, which is pretty disappointing. I don’t want to rag on it too much when it’s such an indie, underdog project, setting out on the pretty portentous mission of single-handedly carrying the torch for African and African-inspired superhero stories, so for this review I’ll be adopting a more constructive tone than the much more mean spirited way I would adopt for something I genuinely despise – and oh do I have fun being mean spirited about things I despise, but today I don’t feel so spiteful in my heart so let’s have an easier time for this one.

To summarize briefly, The Asiri is an afrofuturist book about the West African civilization of the same name, that develops highly sophisticated technology with the use of some type of techno-spiritual power called Inkra, and that eventually colonizes Mars, and we start the story at a point at which they have to defend it from an old enemy. The book centers around a group of ten heroes called The Ascended, which is your superhero team for this book; they each have their own powers, role in the group and generally things they’re “about”. That’s a bit deceptive as a premise, however, for what we’ll see the most of, at least in the first volume of this series, is a lot of politicking: the main characters are not just legendary heroes, they also comprise the ruling council of the Asiri society and because the book is set during a major political crisis, naturally there’s a lot of discussion about political strategy and scandal and so on.

My issues with this book already start with the premise. Not because of the political drama, mind you. In fact, in theory, I should be fully on-board with this book’s entire deal, because I actually love political drama, and I’ve seen it integrated well into superhero stories before. Rather, my grievance is that I have kind of ambiguous feelings about afrofuturism as a genre. In theory, the idea of exploring advanced technology in an African setting with such focus on the African aspect of it invites an opposition to, perhaps direct defiance of, popular socio-historical narratives surrounding Africa that aim to present it as technologically void, its people savages and simpletons who cannot really build anything sophisticated, simply scavenge and steal from their betters; it potentially questions also popular truisms around technology itself, especially the apparent belief there is in people’s minds and in sci-fi of some kind of manifest destiny for technology that is the inevitable shape for it to take through an inevitable progression, rather than shaped by the circumstances and needs of the people who develop it.

In practice, of course, the term can be and often is used to designate what is really just any sci-fi with black people in it, at which point the use of a separate category that sections off black characters and artists away from all the, presumably, “normal” sci-fi starts feeling a little condescending. Not only that, but laying it on thick enough that the civilization in question is super duper advanced like no other runs the risk of coming across as a little petulant and insecure. It can somewhat feel like you do agree with the general notion that black people are less “advanced” if the only way you can imagine them/us excelling at technology under is blatantly unrealistic circumstances. That’s merely an aside, however, and not actually the trouble I have with the genre. It’s more so my general problem with the “futurism” part of afrofuturism, because I don’t like sci-fi in general. I tend to find its fixation with technology boring at best and ideologically objectionable at worst. Aside from specific subgenres like cyberpunk, sci-fi as a whole tends to be very uncritical of the notion that technological advancement is always good and desirable, and capable of solving humanity’s problems; I’m an anti-civ; I don’t much care for any of that.

The other immediate concern I have with the book is the amount of characters, a problem easily illustrated by the cover of the book. This thing is absolutely crowded. Ten is a lot of characters for the readers to instantly take in and internalize as on equal footing with each other, which you have to assume you should do given how equalized they all are – they are more or less all lined up in just such a way that none of them stands out or at least seems like they’re supposed to stand out.

Consider for a moment that the characters on the very end of the line on both sides, king Kafan (left), and general Ankor (right) are the first ones to have a dialogue scene and be introduced in these character profile pages that open each chapter. The overall impression you get is that they will be more focused on than some of the others, but the cover gives you no such indication – at most, they are shown as taller than the rest, and that is simply because they are, physically, taller than the rest.

(Admittedly these look really sick.)

They also made the, while kind of cool, mostly misguided decision of having their normal selves looking up at their koraa forms (aka when they have their superpowers turned on) so while there are only ten characters on the cover, at first glance it appears to actually have twenty main characters. It doesn’t help that some of them don’t quite look like their activated equivalents when seen as normal and from behind. It also doesn’t help that the koraa form design, well, it looks pretty damn evil – when I see silver skin I tend to think of Bizarro Superman first and Captain Atom second – so you might instead assume that figures facing you are the antagonists of the story, which is also a pretty bad first impression.

Not only that, the visual design of the characters themselves is not sufficiently distinctive, and that’s almost entirely to blame on the coloring choices: even though their costumes appear to look different from each other from their back poses, the coloring has averaged out everything in such a way that it feels very minimal. It just looks like a sea of purple and yellow with very little to distinguish between shapes. And beyond that, their frontal poses display even less difference in overall design. There are quite literally two men wearing the same armor, and with the same haircut and beard style.

Compare and contrast with this cover of Justice League International, a very iconic one that’s been recreated and reused for trades about a dozen times so I can’t for the life of me find the original.

Despite being apparently blander, it does a better job than The Asiri #1 at conveying and distinguishing the characters in the team: first, by arranging them in a way where your eyes focus on only some of them and not all of them at the same time – Guy Gardner is smack dab in the middle and in front of the group, and is the only one saying something: you can tell he’s going to be more prominent than the other ones. Also particularly centered in this image are Blue Beetle and Batman, right behind Guy. The rest of the characters, most of which are less known, are surrounding them, not taking up as much space. Some are even partially cut off. There’s a much more natural flow of attention.

And then crucially, of course, the characters themselves look different enough. Now, don’t get me wrong, I would never be one to accuse comics of having a flourishing level of body or ethnic diversity – or any – but superheroes have thus far fared off pretty okay by having characters distinguishable at least in costume, which I think you can say this cover does a decent job at. All of the characters have designs which are simultaneously simple while still maintaining major marked differences: varying levels of face coverage, type of coverage, garment shape, and, of course, most of all, color. The characters each have a very consistent, very distinctive color scheme, which the colorist for the cover bothered to convey.

This pastiche of it made years later further reinforces the point. The most important characters are generally taking up a more privileged space on the page, and now there are more of them, with Guy seemingly remarking on it, as if to say that no, you don’t have to be on board for every single one of these nobodies right away, you can stand to focus on the ones you know. Which, incidentally, is a luxury that The Asiri #1 doesn’t share: all of its main characters are brand new to this book; the reader is not expected to be familiar with any of them. Which only makes it more important to distinguish them right away than for the average superhero book that utilizes preexisting characters.

I’m much belaboring the point of the cover here, and its because these art direction and design problems are present in the rest of the book as well. The first real scene of the book is an all out battle between our main characters and an opposing force we have yet to make sense of (the start of the story skips ahead).

Something about the way it’s presented feels very jarring, and it took me a while to identify that it’s because the coloring is so inadequate. It’s a clear, normal looking sunny day and the scene is made up of bright colors that convey no tone in particular, but especially not the tension supposed to be conveyed. It is full of yellow in everyone’s armor and weapons and the lighting, which gives it a weirdly upbeat look. It has pretty much the same palette as the next scene, which is a pretty lighthearted scene of a teacher giving a lecture to some very excited children.

It just doesn’t feel right. I feel like a scene like that, in comparison, would be more suited to a more red tint, as is very common to see in comic scenes depicting war or large-scale conflict – hey, it may be cliché, but it’s cliché for a reason.

(Although, try not to let it get to Teen Titans: The Culling levels of red, please.)

The lighting is also flat in general, which makes the characters and backgrounds themselves look bi-dimensional, and it clashes heavily with the many places in the art where there is texturing that doesn’t feel well integrated with the shapes they’re on top of. Gives it a little bit of a Chowder effect, except, well, static. It’s not like it never works, in some places the textures are integrated better than others, even if clearly through use of liquify tools and the like. I understand this is a bit of necessary corner cutting because hand drawing your textures and patterns so that they always fit the physical shape they’re applied to is very time consuming, and probably unfeasible given how prevalent complex patterned/textured fabric is in African clothing. It just works better in some places than others.

(Various levels of integration here.)

Furthermore, I feel the need to point out (perhaps a bit late for how long I spent focused on the negative aspects) how once the action pauses and the characters get talking, and we get a good look at their faces up close, it’s clear that their designs are actually quite distinctive, which is something very worthy of praise in a comic book.

(Even if it’s obvious for some of them what celebrity they’re faceclaiming.)

It may not have the most expert design principles in the industry for the costumes, but in terms of what the actual people look like, it far exceeds the standard set by the average superhero comic coming from the big two – one need only to see a panel of Batman and Superman together whenever a writer has the brilliant idea to have them interact outside of costume to feel like someone is pulling a prank on you because yes, the two main characters of an enormous universe made up of hundreds of superheroes and super-villains are two guys who happen to look the exact fucking same as each other.

Now that’s all well and good but what about the funny words that go in the funny books to accompany the funny pictures? What’s the story like? And that’s when I feel I have to be disappointed again. The story doesn’t get off to a good start, and it continues to kind of aggravate me in some ways after that too. For starters it does this thing that a lot of sci-fi does that really gets on my nerves and doesn’t help me warm up on it where it renames a normal thing from the real world to something different and probably stupid, like changing the name of “days” to “cycles” (super basic one to do, too, I feel like I’ve seen that replacement a hundred times over), and then it just tells you anyway what it is so there’s no real reason for why the name’s changed.

(Seriously what is even the point.)

What is also apparent from the get go about this book is that it will proceed to do a lot of exposition to me, and I guess this is a good time to mention that when I call something exposition, be assured that I mean it as a bad thing. because I have the fairly esoteric belief that exposition is not actually a real thing, and where it is, it is necessarily bad. Because what exposition is, wherever it is defined, is “conveying information” to the reader that they “need” to know.

(These children clearly already know all this information. This is the writer telling me information they feel I need to know.)

Now, I don’t make aspersions on what people are looking for when they read a comic book, but on my part when I sit down with the latest issue of Gotham City Sirens or what have you I know I’m not looking to get well informed, and I would hardly call it necessary either. Whenever I read a comic book I expect it to make me feel something – in fact, necessarily, I will be feeling many different things over the course of it – and maybe also make me think about something which will make me feel a certain way. And in essence everything in a comic book, in any story, for that matter, should have a purpose of giving me some kind of sensation, which will make me care about that aspect of the story.

(Somehow I don’t feel like I’m supposed to be emotionally invested in how their communicator thingies work.)

And this is a particularly large disparity I find because most of what I read, at least when it comes to novels, is realist and literary fiction, while most of the people who believe in what I will call “exposition theory” are fans of so-called speculative fiction: stories of which setting have certain aspects of its own world and how it works that the audience won’t be aware of because it’s not set in the real world, which they’re familiar with. But this disparity is not for the reason an SF/F reader might assume. The mistaken implication seems to be that if its set in the real world the reader will simply already know everything there is to know about the setting, which is of course, ridiculous: notoriously, nobody knows everything there is to know about the universe we live in.

Rather, realist fiction does not need any notion as ridiculous as exposition because it draws no distinction between what it is telling you because you “need” to know it to understand the story and what is actually the story. When a realist book narrates about the setting, about what the houses in the town look like, what bird species is flying by, what time of day it is, that is not “exposition”, it is the story. It is telling you these things assuming that you already care about them for their own sake because you are supposed to. If you don’t, that is not because the story is “expositing” about the setting, it is because its narration failed to be interesting. In Inés of my Soul, Inés doesn’t tell you about Pedro de Valdivía’s wife that he abandoned in Spain so that you’ll “understand” why her romantic entanglement with him is scandalous, or for that matter, all manner of colorful characters whose presence in the book is minimal, but whose impression on the narrative is meaningful and exciting; you’re supposed to care about their brief tenures on it for their own sake.

And I simply don’t believe SF/F has any excuse to treat itself any differently in that regard, because much like I don’t need Chinua Achebe to tell me about how trials work in igbo culture for any other type of infraction than the one he depicts happening in Things Fall Apart, which in turn he need not tell me about before it happens; so too does this book not need to tell me about how their spaceships work unless those specific mechanic details happen to matter for the characters at the time that it tells me about it. Because otherwise it doesn’t feel like they are telling me a story, it feels like they are relaying information that they feel I’ll “need to know for later”.

And that’s what a lot of reading this book feels like. Not like I’m being told a story, but that I’m being relayed information so that I can understand a story that might eventually happen later, and in a lot of ways it feels like it never does. Because some 100 odd pages into this 140 page juggernaut the characters still say things in a way that feels very little like they are living a story and very much like they are discussing something simply for the benefit of informing me about something. The impression that I get is that even when the characters are talking about themselves, about their backstories, their feelings and their relationships, they do so in an unnatural matter-of-factly manner such that I feel more that the writer is trying to inform me about them rather than let me know them.

(This feels more like it’s telling trivia about their marriage than characterizing either of them as the type of people who say stuff like that.)

Now a wise reader may recognize my argument here and think “isn’t that just a flamboyantly overdrawn way of saying the story fails at ‘show don’t tell’?”, and in a way it is indeed my own insufferable contrarianism that sours me on the use of the term, but I also have principled opposition to the “show don’t tell” cliché because I think its framing is backwards: it’s not that you should “add” emotion and a sense of something actually happening to the “information” you give your reader so you can make them care about it, it’s that if you’re seeing a story as information in any way in the first place you’re already going about it the wrong way. If you find whatever you’re telling interesting and exciting, you should just get on with it. If you are telling them something that isn’t interesting, and you just feel that it “needs” to be there because of something else that comes after, it should not be there.

(Although it is pretty ironic that they wrote this in.)

And this endless stream of information devoid of emotion, ironically, makes the story very confusing and hard to follow, because while I’m caught in the midst of trying to memorize what amounts to context-free trivia about an overwhelming amount of characters very quickly, I soon find myself realizing that I don’t actually understand what any of them is presently doing and why, or how exactly one scene follows from another. I can get the general gist of what the story is about and how the characters are involved in it, but the progression itself is difficult to ascertain, and there’s little sense of narrative tension (again, much information and little emotion) to make me feel like we’re going anywhere at all.

It’s only really around page 110 that I start feeling like the book is telling a story rather than relaying information. Characters finally start feeling and thinking things in the present for their own sakes, rather than retroactively for my benefit. And by then, I kind of feel like it’s too little too late to make me care about the majority of what it spent all those previous pages expositing about to me rather than telling me a story about.

I feel like there is somewhere here the hints of an actual story. There were a handful of scenes that worked, in the sense that they made me feel something; but overall the book feels less like a story and more like a design document for one. There are a lot of concepts I can imagine someone wanted to fit in a story, and a lot of character outlines, but it’s like they didn’t quite finish incorporating those into a story proper. They started doing it, but then some kind of natural disaster happened and they published under-construction steel beams of it instead. In which case, I guess I’ll see if I can channel my interior “old man stopping in the street to watch a construction site” and check back in come volume #2 to see if they managed to get some walls raised up in here.

[magnorious]

A Lightning Thief Retrospective, 16 Years Later

Good grief, I am old. *Spoilers ahead*

In the spirit of the resurgence of appreciation for this series, I’m doing a retrospective on the books that single-handedly got me to love reading. No matter how old I get, Percy and co will always hold a special place on my bookshelf and in my soul. 16 years later and I have my own books to show for it.

*Disclaimer, I have read the books multiple times in the interim, but I first got my hands on it, and first fell in love with it, in 2008.

So: The Lightning Thief

The Greek-verse isn’t Riordan’s only series to open with a fourth-wall-breaking element, nor is it the only series to open with a “if you’re reading this, be warned” narrative (Maximum Ride comes to mind) but, at least in the paperback edition circa 2006, the last lines on the first page read:

Am I a troubled kid?Yeah, you could say that.

And I just… it’s so Percy. It’s perfect. You have no idea what it really means on your first read through but sixteen years later after growing up with these books, that line just makes me grin like the little kid that’s still inside.

As I kept reading, I tried my best to remove my “victim of the hellish IB Program, literary analyst” hat. This book spoon feeds you exposition in a really palatable way. We’ve seen the museum scene adapted twice now and while older me thinks that’s really convenient timing, it does a lot of legwork while also being short enough to keep the attention of its intended audience. It is also very, very good at foreshadowing, and setting up major payoffs, for events later in this book and beyond.

“Mr. Brunner” looking at the stele of the unnamed hero like he’d been to her funeral

Luke’s scar in the firelight making him look evil

Percy’s affinity for water and the sea, peeking into Cabin 3 before it’s his

The Fates’ electric-blue (remind you of anyone’s eyes?) string

“Someone summoned it,” Chiron said. “Someone inside the camp.”Luke came over….

Ares’ curse on Percy

Speaking of foreshadowing – prophecies. Since all five books have them, I’m dedicating a section in each review to each one.

You shall go west, and face the god who has turned.You shall find what was stolen, and see it safely returned.You shall be betrayed by one who calls you a friend.And you shall fail to save what matters most, in the end.

The whole point of these things is to drive you crazy trying to figure out what they mean before they play out, making you rotten suspicious and paranoid. The book does go line by line in the end and explains how each element was resolved. It’s both very deceptive, on purpose, but easy to grasp for younger readers. I think the prophecies in Titans Curse and Battle of the Labyrinth are superior, but it does its job well.

—

The whole book, likely intentionally so, with an ADHD protagonist, isn’t filled with fluffy narrative. There’s a ton of one-sentence paragraphs and Percy’s personality always shines through, even from page one, a la Holden Caulfield. Even when it’s an exposition-heavy scene, or just traveling while on their quest, nothing ever *lingers*.

Percy is direct in his observations and his narration jumps about from thinking about some random comment another character made that’s poignant in the moment to funny descriptions of the mythic world, to pitching his two-cents on the matter, expressing his annoyances with Annabeth, etc, all in a snappy and easy to keep up with manner. He doesn’t wax poetic, that’s not who he is and that’s not the story this book is telling.

For anyone intimidated by chapter books (re: me at that age) this book is endlessly approachable. He doesn’t have *too much* personality to be distracting, but he has enough to be more than a reader-insert everyman.

I don’t necessarily believe he’s twelve, but he does have that childish immaturity with his narrating and I forget if it ages with him. Since I brought up Maximum Ride earlier, she’s a child protagonist who does not read like a 14 year old girl, she reads like a quirky caricature written by a middle-aged dude.

**Side note, upon my re-read, it came to my attention that the Disney show inexplicably skipped the cutting of the thread with the Fates scene that is like, foreshadowing for the entire series**

*Side side note, Percy isn’t the one who came up with Wise Girl, it was Clarisse. Chapter 6**

I also forgot just how big a temper Percy has. He contemplates kicking Smelly Gabe in the balls for being mean to Sally, with zero care for the consequences. Not to mention the whole “Gabe would love to give away free appliances” schtick. He’s such a little sh*t and we love him.

For a book that’s largely action adventure, it balances the slower moments with the fight scenes smoother than butter. Percy’s demigod-ness gives him quite a bit of plot armor and excuse to survive these fights as a mostly-untrained twelve-year old without making him unrealistically over-competent.

The world building, at least in my opinion, feels like it looked at Harry Potter and went “I can fix that”. There’s not one cabin of demigods rudely and unfairly and problematically labeled Wizard Nazis, (except Grover insinuating that Hades’ kids were actual Nazis in WWII…. Hmm). The Mist exists to hand-wave away everything mortals aren’t supposed to see. It gets really creative with modernizing these myths and making them more child-friendly, and does a good job at urbanizing it, for lack of a better term. The concept of mapping Ancient Greece onto the US is neat, for American readers, and the explanation of “traveling Western Civilization” makes sense. The Underworld having traffic and toll booths was funny.

It treads the razor-thin line of “paganism is real” as well as it can, I think. It focuses less on “creation of the universe was definitely this” and more “the forces of nature have names and faces,” and sidesteps the giant sinkhole of Christianity and Christian readers with “we shan’t deal with the metaphysical,” and says nothing more about it, or demigods who grew up religious, or the other pantheons (yet). Beyond a throwaway dead preacher who Grover argues likely sees the underworld through his Christian kaleidoscope.

The series also doesn’t suffer egregious plot holes, only some continuity errors (like Blackjack). One that comes to mind in TLT is that if Camp contacted Sally about watching over Percy, Sally knew his dad was Poseideon. So how did the whole “I want to watch over your son cause he’s interesting, hm, can’t put my finger on why. Say, who’s his dad?” never lead anywhere? But it doesn’t break the immersion, certainly not for young readers.

It’s interesting how, looking back after knowing the entire story, how the seeds of doubt are right there, in your face, from the moment Percy learns the gods are real. It’s almost a meta self-fulfilling prophecy how things go so wrong for these characters, it’s so obvious.

SInce it is an adventure, the places they go are all wildly and entertainingly different. The garden gnome emporium, St. Louis Arch, Waterland, the Lotus casino, Crusty’s waterbed store. Each provides their own challenges and take full advantage of “mythology is real”.

Let’s talk about the villains, and how Hades was not done dirty this time. I’m going to presume that it’s bias on part of the characters for the whole “Hades’ kids were Nazis” and it’s absolutely on Chiron for insisting that Hades is the culprit when he sends Percy on his quest. Nowadays, especially with the staggering popularity of Nico, Hades has been pretty well redeemed in the eyes of a casual reader. But I think, at the time it was written, making Hades not the villain here was fantastic. He’s still a god, still a jerk, still dangerous, but he’s not the Devil. He drew the short straw and is an introvert written by salty extroverts.

Luke, for a twist villain (read my post here for a deeper analysis) and Ares as a tool of Kronos worked really well. If anyone got the Slytherin treatment, I guess it would have been the Ares cabin, but… he’s a jerk. His kids got his temperament, thus they are jerks. But even then – Ares was just a tool, a crude hammer swung alarmingly well.

Setting up your series-defining villain as a disembodied voice pulling strings is nothing new, but it comes with the benefit of two thousand years of real-world mythology backing up this entity’s power. Kronos is basically a non-entity in this book, but what he does is effective, and kudos for making readers’ skin crawl with the near-tragedy at the edge of Tartarus (foreshadowing!!!!!).

Something else the book does well is having a very well-written and uniquely motivated reluctant chosen one. Yeah, we’d all rather be demigods than Tributes, but being a demigod has drawbacks that being a wizard doesn’t. They don’t shy away from the risk of kids getting skewered and mauled, even if you don’t actually see it happening. This is dangerous work.

And, Percy calls it out – he exists to be used. That’s all demigods are worth to the Olympians. So, he’s going to use this quest to rescue his mom. He doesn’t give a damn about his dad, he doesn’t care about the looming civil war, doesn’t think it’s even the right thing to do, except to prevent the nuclear fallout that said war would cause.

He’s not one of those whiny “I just want to be normal” protagonists like no child in the history of ever has dreamed of if they were in their hero’s shoes. He’s also not pumped and jazzed and excited about being a demigod. They’re the victims of abusive and absent parents and, for a kids series, I still think such a sobering subject was handled really, really well.

You want to be a hero like Percy. You’re rooting for him from the first page. Discovering all his new powers is fun, daydreaming getting claimed right along with him. It isn’t dated with pop culture references and most of the humor lands (a novel experience that does not last forever, unfortunately). He’s sassy and sarcastic and his in-character ignorance and naivety opens the door for plenty of smooth exposition and letting the reader discover the world through his eyes, without feeling lifeless.

Speaking of personality, his rapport with Annabeth grows pretty decently over the course of the book, from being super catty to getting embarrassed on the tunnel of love ride, as if anyone would really care. They have their spats, but the budding friendship is realistic and she doesn’t feel at all like the girl hastily written in because the author forgot to include one.

She has her faults, but that’s the point. She’s also a victim of godly propaganda, and twelve, and literally burdened with hubris. All three of them bounce off each other well, each bringing different strengths and weaknesses to the trio, building each other up and bickering to tear each other down because, you know – twelve.

—

I read somewhere that the first five books all pay homage to some of the most famous Greek myths. Lightning Thief’s myth is that of the original Perseus with these familiar beats shared by both:

Murdering Medusa via reflective surface

Wrongfully convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and punished by Zeus

Hermes’ winged shoes

Hades’ missing war helm

Obtaining a cool new sword

Rescuing his mom from the Bad Guy

Not dying tragically

Princess Andromeda (the more famous Perseus myth adapted by Wrath and Clash of the Titans) does make an appearance in Sea of Monsters.

The joke people used to make about the fans of the series is that reading PJO does not make a mythology expert, but that isn’t the point. The books opened the door to further research at your own pace and maybe fostered love of a subject and culture you’d go on to study later in life.

This review is about the book, not the show, but it is a disservice to the book to cram nearly ten entire chapters of content, out of twenty-two (156 pages in the ‘06 paperback) into two episodes both less than an hour long. No wonder the premier felt, night and day, far inferior to episode 3. Episode 3 wasn’t sprinting the entire time.

Overall, the missing-persons-turned-possible-child-terrorist subplot stayed its welcome exactly as long as it needed to and every time I think about this book I forget it’s even part of the story. The payoff is really at the end with the free appliances and, of course, Gabe’s just desserts.

The book is absolutely, transparently, the first leg of a relay race, not one of those “I wrote this and it was successful now I have to come up with a sequel” stories and all the seeds of development for the series at large were expertly scattered.

The worst I have to say about the book is this: The constant “Thalia, daughter of Zeus.” There’s at least seven of them across the book and the whole title almost every time she’s mentioned reads a bit strange.

It’s paced excellently, with a few slow beats for good character development in between locations. The foundations of our heroes are solid, all the twists and turns with the true villains and the real meaning of the prophecy was well done. For the book that began a multi-series world of interconnected pantheons with new publications still coming out today, it’s humble and smart and, for a “children's” book, anyone can enjoy it, no nostalgia required.

[moeitsu]

Can i ask you about your OC Kate?

Where did your inspo for her character come from? Does she represent anything about yourself?

I really love your fic. I think it’s an interesting approach to Arthur’s character to explore the parental guilt he has for what happened to Eliza and Isaac. And I love the way you do that by introducing a character that’s pretty much a mirror of himself, but under different circumstances. And she has broken the cycle already. Her backstory literally gave me chills when I read it. You have a great way of adding so much detail in such a short amount of words! I really look forward to each chapter :)))

AHH OF COURSE YOU CAN!!!! 💗♥️💜

Ty Ty Ty for asking it means so much to me when you guys ask question/give feedback/leave comments on my work. I’m so serious it literally brightens my day.

I wish this wasn’t anon so I can thank you properly, but please DM me and if you want I will add you to the tags for the next chapters!!

I’m so ready to dive into the Kate McCanon lore, I’m sorry if I get carried away:

I can’t really take any credit for her name. It’s from a Colter Wall song called “Kate McCanon”, but her character is nothing like the woman he’s singing about. I just really loved the name tbh. (And I’m a big fan of his music)

As far as my inspo for her character traits, they kinda just developed over time. I began forming ideas of her as I played rdr2 for the first time, at first I kinda pictured myself in the time period and how I would respond/react to certain events. Then as the story progressed I was like hm, I would definitely be dead by now if this was me. So i made someone stronger but also kept certain aspects like her humor, sarcasm, honesty, intelligence and kindness that I think are sorta reflection of myself.

In a nutshell, the Kate we see with Arthur and the gang is a free spirited tomboy who fully embraces the freedom and possibilities of life in the west and she also defies the gender stereotypes of that time period.

However, the lack of description of Kates appearance was entirely on purpose. I dropped little snippets of her looks at the beginning such as her height and size. (She’s a big woman) But tbh i didn’t want the focus of the story to be on what she looked like or what she was wearing. I purposely mentioned she is half Italian on her mothers side, (bc that will come up again later in the story for the plot) but I also wanted you guys to picture her however you felt was right. In my mind, she is a woman who appears intimidating but once you get to know her she’s a total sweetheart (much like Arthur hehe)

One of the reasons why I choose to keep Kate out of most missions is because she genuinely wants to be done with hurting people. She gave that life up and vowed to do better. Only when she’s pushed and survival is at stake do we see her break that promise. It’s almost ironic considering she is with a gang of outlaws, but like the girls, and Arthur too, she sees them as just people trying to get by. When she meets Jack and Abigail she sees a future dangling on a thread, and decides that if there’s something good she can do here. Then it’s going to be helping that family escape this life. Falling in love with Arthur just happens to be a bonus ;)

I had always intended to give Kate a traumatic backstory (sorry girlie). It started with her family, I wrote out an entire detailed timeline of her life. With names and dates and even random life events that will never make it in the story. But it helped me so much with building her background. It made her feel more real to me. I did so much research on the time period and what Boston was like in the 1800s. Even though I didn’t go into grave detail about her childhood or the death of her family members. But by doing so, it made it easier for me to write about that hopelessness and vulnerability she felt when she finally lost everything.

I chose to open the story with her burying her husband and child because (spoiler alert, but not really if you’ve been actively reading) that is the tie that links her soul with Arthur’s. Even though she does not blame herself for their deaths, it’s something that is engraved into the very being of her identity. And it pretty much dictates the person she becomes throughout the story.

When Kate is captured and taken to a military fort, that is where her “rock bottom” hits its “peak” so to speak. She has nothing left to lose at this point but herself. And in a way, she does lose herself. River is a character I hold very dear to me. And i might write a small spin off about him and Kate in the future. He was a reflection of what Kate would have become if she did not make a change. At first, he was her hope. But when his family met the same fate as hers, he became consumed by the darkness and rage. And unfortunately, she was in a state where Rivers anger nurtured her own. (I want to make it clear River is not a villain, he’s a victim)

I do kinda regret not exploring their relationship more in the chapter. But tbh it probably wouldn’t have added anything. However, I will say the two of them pretty much trauma bonded. They loved each other deeply, but not really in a romantic sense. River offered to marry her, but it was more out of “you are the only one i have left” kind of way. He was never going to give up that life and settle down again, getting married to Kate would just be a way to seal their relationship and vow to stand by each other till the very end. (Does this kinda mirror Arthur/Mary? That might be a reach idk)

All in all, I wanted to give Arthur someone who already understands him, but doesn’t know it yet. Someone that he doesn’t need to explain himself to because Kate has already been there. Arthur knows he’s a bad man, and he knows Kate has been a bad woman. He believes he is beyond saving, beyond redemption. But Kate sees someone who can be saved, he just need the support to do it.

I’ve been trying to plant the seeds over time that Kate truly misses being a mother, and feels robbed of the life she should be living. Raising her daughter. Jacks character has helped me manifest that in the story a lot. Especially that first kiss scene. Kate longs for a family. But she’s pretty much convinced herself that she will never have one again. So by helping the Marstons it alleviates some of that yearning. Arthur believes he has failed as a father, but what Kate sees is the potential for him to be a very loving parent. And it makes her head dizzy with adoration. (There will be many more tender moments with Jack/Arthur/Kate in the future btw)

I hope you guys don’t think my Arthur is too out-of-character. In the game, his son really isn’t mentioned a whole lot, and we know the reason he gives John such a hard time is because he doesn’t want to see him make the same mistakes. But I honestly believe Arthur would have made a wonderful father. The motivation behind this whole fanfic is really just exploring grief and parenthood. Which is ironic because i don’t have children lmao.

TLDR: Kate McCanon domesticates the wild outlaw known as Arthur Morgan 😂

I can’t believe I rambled so much on this. I hope I didn’t overwhelm you. But I guess it just goes to show how much I appreciate your question, and the fact that you’ve taken time out of your day to read my story.

I love you guys! ♥️

[scionmysteries]

Alchemists (Chronicles of Darkness)

I’m a lot of things, but one of them is a science person. I’m driven to learn about the new and discover the unknown. All reality is one great big puzzle, and I get to see how the pieces fit together in new and exciting ways. So in fiction, I tend to have sympathy with academics, scientists, and explorers. I will die on my bed raving about how science wasn’t the problem in Jurassic Park. The problem was capitalism.

But alchemists? Alchemists in the Chronicles of Darkness scare me. Alchemists are the dark side of scientific progress, which transgresses and doesn’t care about the harm it causes. Alchemists are the western tradition’s deep connection with imperialism and its arrogance in disenfranchising other knowledge traditions. They are the “ends justify the means” people and the “it’s for your own good” people. They want knowledge, they want power (even if they won’t admit it to themselves), and they ultimately don’t care about anything that stops them from getting either.

Alchemists are mortals who tap into the secrets of Pyros, allowing them to learn Promethean’s Distillations, modify their bodies, and gain Dread Powers. Body modification? In a game crawling with body horror? Totally not going to backfire on you, but you do you. The catch is that most Alchemists get the barest trickle of Pyros and can’t stablize much of it at a time - unless they steal it from Prometheans. And those modifications? They need Vitrol to do that, so at best, they are delaying a Promethean’s progress toward becoming human for their own game. Most of the time, they just murder them.

If Promethean: the Created is a game that embraces humanity, its Alchemists represent the rejection of human nature. If you want to play a game where transhumanism leads to the loss of what makes humanity important, Alchemists are a great place to start.

Graveyard Gary’s been at this a long, long time. He considers himself a reanimator, in the “grand” tradition of Herbert West, while rather missing the point about West’s grizzly fate. In fact, Gary’s missed the point so completely that he didn’t even notice when his body died, but by that point, it was so laced with Spark of Life Distillations that it just kept moving. As a result, Gary’s lack of heartbeat and unblinking stare unnerve anyone who visits his cemetery, but other than the faint smell of formaldehyde and ozone, there is no decay. Gary wouldn’t even mind even if it was pointed out to him; this is the best he’s felt in years. Honestly. Mostly. Probably.

N0V4 thinks he’s big shit, with the corner office in his father’s company and a hacker alias, so he can pretend he’s on the worker’s side. He’s not untalented, but he’s a relentless taskmaster who isn’t half as bright as those who work for him. Unfortunately for every Promethean who comes near Toronto, the world of corporate ruthlessness trained him well for being an Alchemist. He’s mastered various Electrification and Luciferus Distillations, he even sees the electromagnetic spectrum’s invisible colours, but now the electricity is stalking him back. An electricity spirit has latched onto N0V4’s resonance, and it has no intention of letting its food source slow down his experiments.

Good intentions, hell, and all that. Annabel started her study of Alchemy after hearing rumours of the Created and hoped to help them. She’s even knowledgeable enough about Disquietism to help Prometheans learn the Transmutation. The problem is that she now inflicts Disquiet on those around her, and the temptation to use Weaponize to her advantage grows stronger daily.