#tbls

[original-punks]

"The tree is so high-ooven, so so hooven" (x)

[dylanakamura]

“Wadiyatalkinabeet” - A Meta Analysis of The Big Lez Show

Spoilers if you haven’t seen this amazing show. It’s fairly short and all on youtube so please do yourself a favor and watch it!!!

The Big Lez Show handles the 4th wall in really interesting ways. Even as early as Season 1 characters will reference the episode or show they are in as a passing joke and nobody will bat an eye. This all ties into the fact that the entire show can be seen as a show within a show, with Clarence Claymore as the director and creator and all the characters as actors. This gives Clarence’s role in the story as this immortal tortured soul such an interesting touch. The fact that Clarence created the Choomahs, these Homer Simpson like killing machines also plays into Lez’s own self determinism. The fact that Choomahs look like Homer Simpson and always attack Lez and his friends is symbolic of the formulaic nature of adult animation and how it totally kills any depth characters have. Lez’s own hatred for Norton can be viewed as manufactured by his father and the show as a whole, and Lez needs to break through that hatred to find his own happiness. After Lez’s sacrifice in the end of the story, the Choomahs show that they’ve grown intelligence and want to end the conflict, showing our cast has been freed from the cycle of stagnation and continued senseless combat.

Before I get into the next section I want to get into the cosmology of Big Lez, so I’ll need to talk about Sassy the Sasquatch. Sassy is essentially the universe itself, he houses infinite universes with himself. The Sassy we see in the show is only an observer sent to experience the many worlds and return to the larger universal Sassy. These infinite worlds mean that the multiple sorts of meta ideas at play, seemingly messy, can all coexist in the same way a multiverse does.

In the finale to Season 3, Choomah Island, Lez smokes a joint Sassy gave him and enters a sort of world beyond earth and meets the universal Sassy. Sassy opens Lez’s eyes to the fact that he lives within the box of a digital art software. His whole life has been drawn and created by someone else, every second of it. But with this realization Lez can take his life into his own hands. With the help of Sassy he breaks down his wants in life to, at its core, a desire to be happy. Lez doesn;t know how to achieve this but Sassy simply tells him “What’s the first thing everyone does before they start their day? They wake up.” That really is the heart of why I love these instances of meta cosmological mumbo jumbo.

All of these lenses you can view The Big Lez Show through are forms of escapism. Even in Sassy the Sasquatch spinoff we see how Sassy got lost in Lez’s world choosing to stay there instead of exploring the multiverse, but through exploring a reality where all of the show was the dream of Big Jez, Sassy is able to escape a self made time loop and return to his purpose . We can find millions of billions of external excuses for our bad habits and choose to ignore the root of our problems, and even the root of our desires. “Aren’t we all chasin’ the light mate? Lookin’ everywhere to find it. Everywhere but within.” These external forces far higher than ourselves can redefine our lives and make us get lost in our own heads when deep down the answers we need are within ourselves. Ironically once we wake up, our dreams are within reach.

[huachengeye]

ooh, this definitely helped me a lot!!

I'm not from the States, but from South America and here in my country with the younger generation, we are taking certain european-born religions as a joke, due to how much it harmed our native people and continues to harm people who are from religions from the African diaspora. So I think that's mostly why I found it so interesting to see how Buddhism is portrayed mostly in a good sense.

(Just to tell you a bit about appropriate dinner conversation in Brazil, since you find it interesting to know) It is somewhat similar to the States, as South America is a very religious continent. You will definitely hurt some tias (unties) if you talk badly about their faith, so that is a sensitive topic to have during dinner (unless you want to stir up some fights, then it is the perfect subject). But I think the younger generation is more open to have tough conversations, and as I said before, they started to even mock some of the more conservative believers, especially (as I've observed) queer folks, due to religious trauma.

Back to my initial question about Buddhism in Thailand, I got interested after watching I Will Knock You, since a big part of Noey's character is how comfortable and welcomed he feels in the temple – not only him, but all his gang and Thi too. To have these queer characters find comfort in religion, it is truly interesting, since so far my experience was with religions the white colonizers shoved down our throats, which, as you most definitely know, are filled with homofobia.

Hi P'ABL, how are you?

I love to see your analysis and thoughts on different BLs, and you always come off very well educated when it comes to cultural aspects, especially Thailand's culture.

Having this in mind, I think maybe you'll have some answer for my questions. Well, I want to know why Buddism is so heavily portrayed in BLs (like, for example, I Will Knock You). I know Buddism is the biggest religion in Thailand (please correct me if I'm wrong), but it still surprises me how prevalent it is in BLs. Also, I've seen a couple of BLs where the main character gets ordained, and from what I read on the subject, it is a pretty common thing to do, and is a sign of respect both to the religion but also to the family's believes.

Buddism in Thailand

December 2021:

Department of Religious Affairs reported that the population of Thailand identifies as:

92.5% Buddhist

5.% Muslim

1.2% Christian

In other words, a higher percentage of the population of Thailand identifies as Buddhist than the USA identifies as Christian (65% in 2019) or Catholic in Italy (79.2% in 2021).

So Buddism is in Thai BLs because it's in Thailand. It's just very prevalent. One might as well ask why there is so much Christianity in Hollywood's romantic product (oh it's there, language, swearing, modes of address, courting rituals, gendered attire, weddings, etc...).

It's probably unusual and interesting to you, so you noticed it. Also Americans (in particular) - I don't know how you identify but...) tend to be hyperaware of religious/spiritual representation in pop culture because it's so taboo, hyper-politicized, and divisive in the States.

(Appropriate dinner table conversation in different countries is one of the things that fascinates me the most. Like, what's taboo in different countries when you're visiting someone's home for a meal. In larges parts of the US, religion is generally a pretty taboo topic.)

I think it's also prevalent in BL because there's a lot of dead parents, and the death rituals of a culture come into play under those circumstances.

Anything dealing with the spiritual or paranormal, and now weddings and children and blessings and so forth we gonna see religious/spiritual belief rep. As we get more BL delving into different aspects of culture in search of story we will simply see more and more of those aspects of religion that intersect with that aspect of culture, for purely statistical reasons.

Monkhood

I would hazard a guess that the proportion of those in Thailand who chose to be ordained as a Monk is probably the same percent as any other Buddist nation.

Tharn Type 2 takes you through the entire process, if you wanna dive into that franchise.

Also I would highly recommend He's Coming to Me it's got some nifty death stuff going on. Also it's a great BL.

I have kinda talked about this before - old post:

[mossycakes]

"youre a vampire michael! you wait till mum finds out!!"

funniest possible reaction to your older brother being turned into a vampire

[allmyandroids]

Need that tbh 🥹💕

[mawchops]

Night Shift Part 02

[phoenix--quill]

Prompt 17: Cock warming

Pairing: Raymond Reddington/female reader

Rating: E (minors DNI)

Warnings: cockwarming

Length: ~650 words

Summery: a tired Raymond wakes you up in middle of the night

Notes: I know this is short and really late but in my defence I’ve had a fever for the past two days and is currently blowing my nose every 5mins so honestly I think we should all be grateful that anything even remotely coherent made it to paper.

AO3

It was still dark when you woke up – you weren’t sure if it was early morning or late at night. You rolled over, about to go back to sleep when you heard a noise from somewhere in the apartment. You almost reached for the gun hidden below the night stand but then you recognized the footsteps. They sounded heavy, tired, but you would recognize him everywhere. You smiled and snuggled back under the covers, he would join you soon enough.

Sure enough, you heard the bedroom door open and Raymond’s soft steps as he entered the room. You heard the soft swish as he took off his jacket, the soft click of his shoulder holster as he placed it on the dresser – layers after layers you heard him take off, carefully fold and place on the bench at the foot of your bed. You felt the mattress dip as he slid in behind you and planted a kiss on your shoulder.

“Raymond,” you whispered as he ran his nose across your shoulder blades.

“Shh, go back to sleep,” his voice was barely more than rumble against your skin.

“Is everybody okay?” you asked that every time he had been away without you and his answer was usually somewhere along the same lines.

You felt him nod behind you, “everybody is home and safe.” He kept his voice low and ran his soft lips across your shoulders. You could practically feel the exhaustion roll off of him and yet he didn’t seem to be able to stop kissing your sleep-warmed skin.

He ran his nose up your neck, planting a soft kiss to your hairline before burying his face in your hair and you could feel him take a deep breath, inhaling your scent.

He groaned softly and moved even closer, your bodies now completely flush under the covers, and placed a warm hand on your hip. “Can I...?”

“Always,” you breathed with a smile and moved your leg up and back to lie on top of his. It was another one of your little rituals, especially when he came home like this: too exhausted but unwilling to be apart from you.

His hand on your hip moved up under your long night shirt – technically one of his that you had borrowed – and found the waistband of your underwear, dragging it down your legs. He grabbed your leg, hiking it further up his and opened you up to give him better access to your leaking core – making both of you groan as his fingertips brushed against you.

You felt him reach behind you and then the blunt head of his already half-hard member as he ran it through your nether lips, catching the liquid that had already gathered there. He then sank into you, slowly, both of you savouring the feeling of simply being connected in such an intimate way.

His nose returned to the shell of your ear and you heard him give a sigh as he finally bottomed out and came to a stop, his fat cock nestled deep within you.

Your own body felt heavy, both with the exquisite, pleasurable stretch of having him inside you and the simple fatigue after having been woken up in the middle of the night.

“Go back to sleep,” he repeated in your ear as he placed your leg back down against the mattress and made sure you were both covered by the duvet.

“You too,” you whispered into the darkness.

You knew you would feel it in the morning, you always did when you had spend a night with him buried inside of you, but you knew it was worth it when you heard his breathing even out before going heavy as he drifted off to sleep; both of you feeling happy and safe, tangled up in one another.

[narzissenkreuz-ordo]

MARCH???? WHY DO YOU HAVE THE RENHENG "BEATS UP A CHILD" DIVORCE PHOTO ON YOUR WALL???

[pigglepiephi]

They both live in houses with death stairs, so no wonder they have no regard for their emotional or mental wellbeing when it comes to relationships

This first episode was confusing but at least you can rely on the stability of seeing this old friend!

[jimmyspades]

"Desire... drives him. His desires are so assimilated in every aspect of his life—he's constantly reminded of his desires at every turn, wherever he looks, wherever his eyes are at rest, whatever he touches, whatever he smells, is all about that. And because of that, I think he's horrified as well. I don't know whether it's horror so much as... he's extremely conflicted." JAMES SPADER on the set of SECRETARY (2002)

[prentissrollins]

Megan Boone as Elizabeth Keen

The Blacklist (2013 - 2023) - 7x08 (5/∞)

[windvexer]

I actually do think that doing magic takes a lot of work and is kinda hard and there aren't very many good shortcuts, and many modern shortcuts actually just amount to leaving out steps, which means you either have to be powerful enough to brute-force it or it fizzles.

Look, I know some people are just much better at magic and witchcraft; anything they do works with little effort, and the lengths some of us have to go to accomplish magic seems bizarre to them. Those people are cool and I wish I was like them but I'm not.

But I also think some of the truth of how to work effective sorcery gets paved over by these "witchcraft has no rules, do anything you want" support posts.

Because A) that is not true, I believe that witchcraft has lots and lots of rules (it's just that nobody else can tell you what they are), and B) I think do anything you want is taken to mean anything you do should work, which is also not true.

I feel like I always see advice given that you don't need to do things (like use physical tools, or cast circles, or whatever). But I never see anyone explaining the techniques and paths of power that are supposed to replace them.

Let's just imagine for a moment that clear quartz really is a universal substitute. Discordians would say that it totally is. So does that mean all you have to do to sub out clear quartz is to just put it on the altar and do the ritual as if it's something else?

Or do you have to do something more?

Do you have to consecrate the stone as being something other than what it is? Do you have to ritually birth it into a new life and baptize it like a baby? Do you have to spend weeks or months honing your technique of focus and beliefs so that you can mentally shift from consensus reality to a personal reality where there is literally no difference between clear quartz and sodalite?

Do you have to raise energies of sodalite and imprint them into the quartz crystal, perhaps working over it for an extended period of time? Do you have to use energy work to tie the clear quartz into Ideal Sodalite so that it becomes like an avatar?

No, you don't have to use physical tools if you don't want to. But that shouldn't be taken to imply that tools are useless or can be replaced in a way that matters by just visualizing that you have them.

A witch spends six months propitiating a tree, ingratiating themselves with the land, offerings and acts of fealty to the tree, a week-long branch harvesting ritual, blood offerings at midnight on a holy day, then another year curing the wood and crafting a wand. Big effort, right?

And you don't need to do that. But if you want that power, what are you going to do instead?

Same with circle-casting. Same with magic on the full moon. No, you don't have to wait until the full moon. You don't have to wait until the moon is in Libra. But there's a really good reason people do those things. So if you want those effects, what actions can replace those effects?

You literally could not do the spell while the full moon is in Libra. That's fine. But then what will bridge the gap? Will you have to raise more energy somewhere else? Include a new aspect? Modify the spell for the moon you can work with?

"You don't have to follow the moon phase for magic" doesn't mean the moon phase is irrelevant and some witches just like to inconvenience themselves for no reason. But it does mean that you can probably adapt your working to overcome the moon being in the inopportune phase.

Every time I talk about how much time, energy, and effort magic can be I feel like someone always replies, "well, it's just not that hard for me! I do what I want with what I have when I need it and it always just works, with very little effort."

Which I think is very great for them, but I also don't think that most people can get results with such low effort.

So anyway my entire point is that I think sometimes the reason people struggle with getting witchcraft to work is because they are operating off of out-of-context soundbites that make it sound like you can just completely cut out some of these foundational concepts of witchcraft.

Maybe you don't have to accomplish those steps in traditional ways. Maybe you don't need all of those steps for every spell you're doing.

But if you've just cut out swaths of steps only because you heard someone say you don't need them (not because of your own experiments working with magic and determining what works best for you), then is there enough left to constitute a functional system of magic?

[angelixues]

Merry Christmas! 🎄✨

[unfortunatetheorist]

Is Lemony's Kind Editor in the Netflix series?

Throughout the Netflix series, Lemony has used one of his infamous literary devices which I did not notice until rewatching it for the billionth time, when I was working on The Complete Works of Contradictory Logic in ASOUE. More on that to come.

Lemony uses a rather basic device which, I believe, can actually have an ENTIRELY radical new view on the show: Lemony speaks to the camera in the second person.

This just means he uses the pronouns 'you' and 'your', etc, when talking directly to camera.

e.g. TMM: "You could pretend the Duchess of Winnipeg had arrived, and had come to throw the Baudelaires a pony party at her chateau."

However, the 'you' could refer to Lemony's Unnamed Kind Editor. There are some points which back this up:

The Kind Editor is someone who does not know the story of the Baudelaires, they only know Lemony. This is why Lemony is the one to tell them the story of ASOUE.

The Kind Editor is NOT a member of V.F.D. This is why Lemony has to explain [either himself or via other characters] different V.F.D-related things that a member would've already known.

This logic can lead to the following:

Lemony is talking to his Kind Editor, who is filming VIDEO evidence to be used in court when Lemony clears his name and the names of the Baudelaires.

This means that the characters do not physically appear in ASOUE, but rather Lemony just imagines them saying the same words before actually saying them himself. This carries on from the idea (@snicketstrange) that Lemony used the Baudelaires' notes from An Incomplete History (series) or A Series of Unfortunate Events (book canon).

In TCC, the Baudelaires discover the SAME THING filmed by the SAME PERSON - but for ATWQ. Hence the reference to 'Stain'd-by-the-Sea'...

So what's the point?

THEORY: Lemony is using typewritten and video evidence, as filmed by his Kind Editor, in order to clear the names of all 4 people; the Baudelaires and himself.

But who is this mysterious Kind Editor? Many have suggested it to be Moxie Mallahan, as she was only friends with Lemony and no-one else from V.F.D.

However, given the circumstances described, I now present an alternative solution: Beatrice Baudelaire II.

In TBL, Beatrice II is 10 years old, capable of handling a camera. It provides an uncle-niece bonding opportunity for Lemony, and Beatrice gets to know the story of her adoptive parents (from her biological uncle).

Lemony is Beatrice's only hope of finding the Baudelaires, and Beatrice is Lemony's only hope of clearing the Baudelaires' names, as Lemony knows 100% that Beatrice is not an enemy or a spy of any kind.

¬ Th3r3534rch1ngr4ph, Unfortunate Theorist/Snicketologist

[allmyandroids]

Raymond Reddington

Season 6 Episode 3 - The Pharmacist

[mawchops]

Night Shift Pt 01