#the colonialist mind is a magical thing

[txttletale]

"everyone was cool with that" [citation needed]

[headspace-hotel]

against the logic of the lawn

Imagine a box.

This box is sealed with tape or adhesive, which shows you that it has never been opened or re-used. It is in pristine condition. Apart from that, the box could hold anything. It could contain a Star Wars Funko Pop, a printer, a shirt ordered from some sketchy online vendor, a knockoff store-brand cereal, six individually wrapped protein bars.

As a Consumer ("the" Consumer) this is your fundamental right: To purchase a box that is, presumably, identical to every other box like it.

When you Buy Product, it arrives in a box, entire of itself and without context. It has not changed since its creation. If and when Product does change—whether it is broken, spoiled, used up, or eaten—you can Buy Product that is identical in every meaningful way to the original.

It's okay if this doesn't make sense yet. (You can stop imagining the box now.)

Imagine instead a suburban housing development, somewhere in the USA.

Imagine row on row of pristine, newly built houses, each constructed with small, meaningless variations in their aesthetic, all with beige or white vinyl siding and perhaps some decorative brick, all situated on identical rectangles of land covered with freshly unrolled sod. This is the Product that every consumer aspires to Buy.

I am not exactly—qualified, or entitled, to speak on the politics of land ownership in this country. My ancestors benefited directly from the genocide of Native Americans, which allowed Europeans to steal the land they lived on, which is where a lot of wealth comes from in the end, even today. However, I have eyes in my head to see that the act of colonizing a continent, and an economic system that formed as a supporting infrastructure to colonization, have embedded something almost irreparably dysfunctional into the dominant American culture's relationship to land.

This dysfunctional Thing, this Sickness, leads us to consider land to be a Product, and to consider a human upon the land to be a Consumer.

From this point of view, land is either locked into this relationship of control and "use" to varying extents, or it is free of human influence. People trying to reason about how to preserve Earth's biosphere, working within this framework without realizing, decide that we must "set aside" large areas of land for "nature."

This is a naive and, I would reckon, probably itself colonialist way of seeing things. It appears to be well-validated by evidence. Where human population is largest, there is less biodiversity.

But I find the broad conclusions to be strikingly unscientific. The plan of "setting aside part of Earth for nature" displays little curiosity about the mechanisms by which human presence impacts biodiversity. Otherwise intelligent people, perhaps caught up in the "bargaining" phase of climate grief, seem taken in by the idea that the human species gives off a magical anti-biodiversity force field, as if feeling guiltier will fix the problems.

(Never mind that lands managed by indigenous folk actually have MORE biodiversity...almost like our species' relationship to the planet isn't inherently exploitative, but rather, the capitalist and colonialist powers destroying everything.......)

Let's go back to the image of the new housing development. This image could be just about anywhere in the USA, because the American suburban home is made for universal interchangeability, where each little house and yard is static and replaceable with any other.

Others have written about the generic-ification of the interiors of homes, how houses are decorated with the most soul-killing, colorless furnishings to make them into Products more effectively. (I think @mcmansionhell wrote about it.)

This, likewise, is the Earth turned into a Product—razed down into something with no pre-existing context, history, or responsibility. Identical parcels of land, identical houses, where once there was a unique and diverse distribution of life. The American lawn, the American garden, the industry that promotes these aesthetics, is the environmental version of that ghastly, ugly "minimalism" infecting the interiors of homes.

The extremely neat, sparse, manicured look that is so totally inescapable in American yards originated from the estates of European aristocracy, which displayed the owner's wealth by flaunting an abundance of land that was both heavily managed and useless. People defend the lawn on the basis that grass tolerates being walked upon and is good for children to play, but to say this is *the* purpose of a lawn is bullshit—children are far more interested in trees, creeks, sticks, weeds, flowers, and mud than Grass Surface, many people with lawns do not have children, and most people spend more time mowing their lawn than they do doing literally anything else outside. How often do you see Americans outside in their yards doing anything except mowing?

What is there to do, anyway? Why would you want to go outside with nothing but the sun beating down on you and the noise of your neighbors' lawn mowers? American culture tries to make mowing "manly" and emphasizes that it is somehow fulfilling in of itself. Mowing the lawn is something Men enjoy doing—almost a sort of leisure activity.

I don't have something against wanting a usable outdoor area that is good for outdoor activities, I do, however, have something against the idea that a lawn is good for outdoor activities. Parents have been bitching for decades about how impossible it is to drag kids outdoors, and there have been a million PSAs about how children need to be outside playing instead of spending their lives on video games. Meanwhile, at the place I work, every kid is ECSTATIC and vibrating with enthusiasm to be in the woods surrounded by trees, sticks, leaves, and mud.

The literal, straightforward historical answer to the lawn is that the American lawn exists to get Americans to spend money on chemicals. The modern lawn ideal was invented to sell a surplus of fertilizer created after WW2 chemical plants that had been used to make explosives were repurposed to produce fertilizer. Now you know! The more analytical, sociological answer is that the purpose of the lawn is to distance you from the lower class. A less strictly maintained space lowers property values, it looks shabby and unkempt, it reflects badly on the neighborhood, it makes you look like a "redneck." And so on. The largest, most lavish McMansions in my area all have the emptiest, most desolate yards, and the lush gardens all belong to tiny, run-down houses.

But the answer that really cuts to the core of it, I think, is that lawns are a technology for making land into a Product for consumers. (This coexists with the above answers.) Turfgrass is a perfectly generic blank slate onto which anything can be projected. It is emptiness. It is stasis.

I worry about the flattening of our imaginations. Illustrations in books generally cover the ground outdoors in a uniform layer of green, sometimes with strokes suggesting individual blades of grass if they want to get fancy. Video games do this. Animated shows and movies do this.

Short, carpet-like turfgrass as the Universal Outdoor Surface is so ubiquitous and intuitive that any alternative is bizarre, socially unacceptable, and for many, completely unimaginable. When I am a passenger in a car, what horrifies me the most to see out the window is not only the turfgrass lawns of individuals, but rather, the turfgrass Surface that the entire inhabited landscape has been rendered into—vacant stretches of land surrounding businesses and churches, separating parking lots, bordering Wal-Marts, apartment complexes, and roadsides.

These spaces are not used, they are almost never walked upon. They do nothing. They are maintained, ceaselessly, by gas-powered machines that are far, far more carbon-emitting than cars per hour of use, emitting in one hour the same amount of pollution as a 500-mile drive. It is an endless effort to keep the land in the same state, never mind that it's a shitty, useless state.

Nature is dynamic. Biodiversity is dynamic. From a business point of view, the lawn care industry has found a brilliant scheme to milk limitless money from people, since trying to put a stop to the dynamism and constant change of nature is a Sisyphean situation, and nature responds with increasingly aggressive and rapid change as disturbance gets more intense.

On r/lawncare, a man posted despairingly that he had spent over $1500 tearing out every inch of sod in his yard, only for the exact same weeds to return. That subreddit strikes horror in my heart that I cannot describe, and the more I learn about ecology, the more terrible it gets. It was common practice for people in r/lawncare to advise others to soak their entire yard in Roundup to kill all plant life and start over from a "blank slate."

Before giving up, I tried to explain over and over that it was 100% impossible to get a "blank slate." Weeds typically spread by wind and their seeds can persist for DECADES in the soil seed bank, waiting for a disastrous event to trigger them to sprout. They will always come back. It's their job.

It was impossible for those guys to understand that they were inherently not just constructing a lawn from scratch, and were contending with another power or entity (Nature) with its own interests.

The logic of the lawn also extends into our gardens. We are encouraged to see the dynamism of nature as something that acts against our interests (and thus requires Buy Product) so much, that we think any unexpected change in our yard is bad. People are sometimes baffled when I see a random plant popping up among my flowers as potentially a good thing.

"That's a weed!" Maybe! Nonetheless, it has a purpose. I don't know who this stranger is, so I would be a fool to kill it!

A good caretaker knows that the place they care for will change on its own, and that this is GOOD and brings blessings or at least messages. I didn't have to buy goldenrod plants—they came by themselves! Several of our trees arrived on their own. The logic that sees all "weeds" as an enemy to be destroyed without even identifying ignores the wisdom of nature's processes.

The other day at work, the ecologist took me to see pink lady's slipper orchids. The forest there was razed and logged about a hundred years ago, and it got into my head to ask how the orchids returned. He only shrugged. "Who knows?"

Garden centers put plants out for sale when they are blooming. People buy trees from Fast Growing Trees dot com. The quick, final results that are standard with Buy Product, which are so completely opposite the constant slow chaos of nature, have become so standard in the gardening world that the hideous black mulch sold at garden centers is severed from the very purpose of mulch, and instead serves to visually emphasize small, lonely plants against its dark background. (For the record, once your plants mature, you should not be able to SEE the mulch.)

Landscapers regularly place shrubs, bushes, trees and flowers in places where they have no room to reach maturity. It's standard—landscapers seem to plan with the expectation that everything will be ripped out within 5-10 years. The average person has no clue how big trees and bushes get because their entire surroundings, which are made of living things (which do in fact feel and communicate) are treated as disposable.

Because in ten years, this building won't be an orthodontists' office, in ten years, this old lady will be dead, in ten years, the kids will have grown, and capitalism is incapable of preparing for a future, only for the next buyer.

The logic of the lawn is that gardens and ecosystems that take time to build are not to be valued, because a lush, biodiverse garden is not easily sold, easily bought, easily maintained, easily owned, or easily treated with indifference. An ecosystem requires wisdom from the caretaker. That runs contrary to the Consumer identity.

And it's this disposable-ness, this indifference, that I am ultimately so strongly against, not grass, or low turf that you can step on.

What if we saw buying land as implying a responsibility to be its caretaker? To respect the inhabitants, whether or not we are personally pleased by them or think they look pretty? What creature could deserve to be killed just because it didn't make a person happy?

But the Consumer identity gives you something else...a sense of entitlement. "This is MY yard, and that possum doesn't get to live there." "This is MY yard, and I don't want bugs in it." "This is MY yard, and I can kill the spiders if I want to."

Meanwhile there is no responsibility to build the soil up for the next gardener. No responsibility to plant oaks that will grow mighty and life-giving. No responsibility to plant fruit-producing trees, brambles, and bushes. None of these things, any of which could have fulfilled a responsibility to the future. Rather, just to do whatever you damn well please, and leave those that come after with depleted, compacted soil and the aftermath of years of constant damage. It took my Meadow ten years to recover from being the garden patch of the guy that lived here before us. Who knows what he did to it.

The loss of topsoil in all our farmland is a bigger example, and explains how this is directly connected to colonialism. The Dust Bowl, the unsustainable farming practices that followed, the disappearance of the lush fertile prairie topsoil because of greed and colonizer mindset, and simple refusal to learn from what could be observed in nature. The colonizing peoples envisioned the continent as an "Empty" place, a Blank Slate that could be used and exploited however.

THAT is what's killing the planet, this idea that the planet is to be used and abused and bought and sold, that the power given by wealth gives you entitlement to do whatever you want. That "Land" is just another Product, and our strategies for taking care of Earth should be whatever causes the most Buy Product.

It's like I always write..."You are not a consumer! You are a caretaker!"

[flagellant]

The more I think about Wildmender the more I grow invested in it. It's a fascinating interpretation of terra nil and solarpunk since so often the genre is fundamentally rooted in settler-colonialist philosophy, and even games which are intended to be the opposite of that--terra nil comes to mind as the obvious one--just end up actually revealing a different side of the factorio problem, because terra nil is an incredible impersonal restoration of ecological systems. Terra Nil acknowledges climate destruction on a global catastrophic scale and it accepts the responsibility to fix that, but it isn't shown as a human act, nor does it really allow itself the realism of just how terrifyingly impossible the task is to try and literally fix the entire world. Its game structure is supposed to be the anti-factorio but its puzzle structures focusing on efficiency and robotic engineering patterns of rewilding end up feeling more like a dialogue than an inversion. It's trying to say that the idea of humanity as fundamentally destructive is wrong while it doesn't actually ever address the human element.

And then there's fucking Wildmender. A game where you are a single human child in a world of endless wasteland and death, where the only other things are ghosts who remember a halcyon era and the hubris that ended it, wraiths which are consumed by their own greed and destruction of the land for their cursed immortality, and a couple god statues. The entire map is just ceaseless grief, filled with the literal dessicated remains of all the biodiversity that came before the countless disasters. And it's a big fucking map.

And then...the game gives you a shovel and a sickle and a mirror that shows the wraiths what twisted reflections they've become.

And the game says, "The entire world is waiting to be better, and the only way to do that is by doing it yourself, long and hard and hopeless as it seems."

I cannot emphasize enough how overwhelming the task you're handed. There is not a single speck of life left in the world. You are given a shovel and a water bottle and just...expected to do something about it. To look at the literal endless wastes and think you can heal it.

This is what Wildmender cherishes that Terra Nil denies: This is an impossible task for you alone. But it has to be done...and you can actually do it. The way you can turn sand into soil and dig irrigation channels is beautiful. Every single scrap of land that you reclaim is something you had to do on purpose. You had to do it yourself. You had to actively choose how to do it.

And the game makes the reward of even just getting a bit more water into the sand feel like victory. Your starting oasis turns from soil into lush and beautiful meadows--sure, technically instantaneously by doing magic on a specific type of plant. But it took me 4-5 hours before I got there. You have to travel so far into the desert to learn how to grow grass again, and then you realize that this endless hostile wasteland is a fraction of the map you're given. And you look at this sudden profusion of meadowy grassland surrounding your spring and despite how sudden it feels you remember how big the world is. You made more progress in a minute than you did in 5 hours and it's not even a speck on the map. How the fuck is this gonna happen?

And the answer is by accepting that it's going to take a long fucking time and a lot of hard work.

That's how it's gonna happen. Get to work.

[elbiotipo]

Someone in the notes on your post about food in fantasy mentioned connection between at least early modern production of sugar and colonialism and slavery, and while I 100% agree that it's something that should be known, I think that if you want to have lighthearted fantasy setting there are definitely ways to work around this.

Like sugar is also produced from sugar beet. I don't know could it be done without modern equipment (production started at the very end of 18th century so while industrial equipment was primitive it was), but like you may do something with it, like some wizards developing production technology.

In the same vein, crop exchange in the Old World was mostly peaceful, or at least it wasn't due to slavery. Like rice was already grown in Egypt in 1000 BCE and made its way to Spain by 7th century CE. Bananas were grown in Turkey by 15th century CE. And tons of agricultural goods come from West Asia both ways. What I am trying to say is that if your world has equivalent of Americas your Europeans* could have just acquired potatoes and corn without colonization (because they were more ethical than irl or because they didn't have resources for conquest or because American nations were strong enough to stop them). Like potatoes and such are just crops, sailors could have picked them as a supplies and then someone decided to grow them at home.

This is like a suggestion specifically if you want to have a world for costume drama without dealing with heavy themes. I would suggest describing it specifically to point that out, and I can't say that it's very politically aware but definitely not worse than "they just have it" or "yes there are overseas colonies but pay it no mind".

*Because that's usually the case in examples that are discussed, from what I heard East Asian fantasy set in East Asia also suffers from this for the same reason, but I didn't read enough of it to say

Let me say you make real good points and I broadly agree with you. I do think the history of colonialism and where our foods came from is important (I do research that so no doubt). And I also agree that sometimes, those themes are too difficult to board properly, especially in a lighthearted story.

However, in fiction, it's not so much that I want people to do more "clean" ways of getting those crops. Many people told me "well, what if they get it through trade, or what if they got it through magical portals and such" my point is not that you find a "colonialist free" way to have potatoes in your setting, my point is that every crop in real life has a history behind them, and when you place them in your setting, I think you should consider that. Not only because you will learn about real life and its history, but also because of the storytelling potential.

I mean, I do have "worldbuilding fundamentalist" in my bio, and I think even if you don't sketch the entire world, you should at least know where your heroes are. Much of modern fantasy loves to adopt the "medieval" aesthetic, while in fact presenting a world with widespread trade, urbanization, a growing artisan class, etc. (I've done a longer rant about it here). Those things aren't just aesthetic choices, they are different societies that have different dynamics and they do affect the kind of plots and characters you might make on them.

I don't think fantasy should shy away from exploring themes such as imperialism and colonialism, trade and politics, intercultural contact and social change. One reason why I'm so insistent with the theme of crops and trade is that it's because it's emblematic of those issues. Sure, you don't want to explain the potatoes or chocolate in your setting, whatever. Don't you WANT to, though? Don't you want to explore beyond the pseudo-medieval aesthetic, and explore what an American or African -inspired setting might look like? Of course, you could and should also make your own new settings, but exploring actual history, geography, biology (at the broadest term, natural history) will make you a better worldbuilder and a better writer, AND also let you learn more about the world.

Sorry if this rant is a bit unfocused, just woke up from a nap after some wine, but this is why I'm so insistent with the stories that can arise just by considering the crops in your setting. Imagine what else can you write.

[millenniumfae]

Dragon Age Demons vs Real-Life 'Inner Demons'

Way back in the summer of 2015, my symptoms got so unbearable I was bedridden. 20 years old and experiencing psychosis, quasi-hallucinations, and actual, unending panic for the first time. It marked the start of a condition that has never stopped since.

My aunt (and other relatives) helped me develop proper mindfulness skills based off of our homeland's folk Buddhism - the 'second arrow'. The meaningless of forgiveness. Devaluing control. And something that struck me as a new Dragon Age fan … 'Possession'.

Well, when translated to english, you'll find texts using the word 'insight' rather than 'possession'. But that's the word my mom translated from off the top of her head, and it immediately resonated with me.

"Imagine your panic as an inner creature. Something that is also you, but is acting independently. Treat your panic with kindness and mentorship, not antagonism. The more you struggle in the spider's web, the worse things get. But if you nourish what's hurting in you, let them tantrum, then come back in to nurture."

Up until the 2010s, the most acclaimed mental health books you could buy written in the english language would most certainly be christianity-influenced. Maybe not overtly, (but you'd be surprised how many have a chapter about "insert-book-topic-here and Christ") but there's little hints like how the reader must have left home at 18 to avoid mooching off their parents, or how to 'turn guilt into something productive' (???), the use of the word 'gamble' as a bad word, etc. But these books tend to include a chapter that would be some weird bullshit like "The Dark Souls Of Respawning?? What Daoism Says About Immortality" and take a brief moment to talk about the radical, never-before-heard-of methods from across the pacific that Will Turn Your World Upside Down.

Behavior therapists (of the 1950s) were aware insights about the origins of the problem usually weren't helpful. Exposure to the thing the patient feared was often curative. -When Panic Attacks by David D. Burns MD, Chapter 18, "Taking a page from the Tibetan Book of the Dead"

Now, it's no secret that the Dragon Age serial is very. Um. Christian. Catholic, specifically. Faith is written to be an unequivocally redeeming trait. Attempts at inventing fake elf/qunari/Tevinter 'religions' still have them be belief-based, colonialist, and conversion-heavy, while also at the same time implying that the 'Maker' of Chantry faith is the single actual true god.

So it's no surprise that the demons and spirits of DA are very seven-deadly-sins. Party banter and side-quests do point out the euro/christian-centricity of this demon categorization (Merrill, Solas), but that doesn't mean shit if, in overall story and gameplay proper, Pride is the most powerful demon while Faith is virtue at all.

So here I am, lying in bed and only capable of just riding the waves of panic day after torturous day. You bet I'm gonna try to geek-erize my symptoms. If people do it with Jesus, then I can do it with Dragon Age.

Enter Vigilance the Spirit. I was an at-risk young Rivani mage, so their Magic Welfare Government helped me join their クサビ-依り代 program and matched me with a spirit to induce possession. Can't boil two skulls in one pot, so to speak. I could have chosen to do their hemispherectomy program (I am made Tranquil but carry around a piece of the Fade like a pacemaker that keeps me perfectly lucid, only turning off when I sleep), but that comes with its own risks.

But it doesn't take much for a spirit of Vigilance to do a 180 and become Panic. They're still Vigilance, and I am still me, but the taste in the mouth is different. Our life will need to adapt.

I will not kick myself for 'failing' my friend. Vigilance has turned to Panic, yes. But they have always been one. Now, so are me and Panic. Such is the nature of spirits.

If I am kind to my spirit, then I am kind to myself. It's what we both deserve.

[redtail-lol]

Updated views on "third gender" because I'm fully ready to put the feelings I've had to words.

I don't want to use it to describe myself anymore. Me, being aliagender/aporagender, do have a gender separate from man and woman, but it is not third. Because many other genders have existed before it. The term "third gender" is binarist, and is akin to calling all non-democrat, non-republican political parties third parties even when there are more than one. It also ignores that some people who are in between masculinity and femininity might feel they have a gender of their own, and just because it is a combination of the two or lies in between them doesn't make it not it's own thing. So I do not want to describe myself this way

I have also learned a lot more about how it's been used not to self identify, but more often to speak on other cultures and label their genders as "third" by comparing them to white european culture. It is, as the coiner of Maverique said, "prescriptivist" (quotes because it was their words, not because I'm mocking them). As such, I do not feel comfortable using it, even if I myself live in a binary gendered culture.

WITH THAT SAID, I still think people who say "nonbinary isn't a third gender" (or in some cases I've even seen "nonbinary isn't a magical third gender") are usually being shitty 9 times out of 10, because the way they use the statement isn't to point out that the term third gender is colonialist, but to erase the existence of nonbinary people who have genders that are fully not "man" and fully not "woman" and have no relation to them. To invalidate being attracted to nonbinary people because all nonbinary people are just men and/or women or agender. To defend the existence of nonbinary people who are men and/or women, at least partially, at the expense of nonbinary people who aren't (if you wanna say "nonbinary is an umbrella term for identities like bigender, genderfluid, demigenders, androgyne, and agender" after saying it's not a third gender, you gotta add maverique, aporagender, and/or outherine to the list, and why not throw in xenogender too). The very real and valid critiques of the colonialist usage of third gender does not change my mind on the erasure of outherininty, maverinity, and aporinity.

[foggyfanfic]

Encanto Headcanons Nobody Asked For

Hello! I am putting off writing my last essay of the semester, so here are some headcanons!

The thing where the kids touch the candle and promise to help Encanto however they can started as Alma's way to reassure nervous villagers that the Madrigals wouldn't misuse their gifts.

When Alma first got her door and saw an old woman on it, she was super confused, but also too tired from the day's events to question it too much. When she eventually looks the same as her picture on the door she has a small mid-life crisis that she reveals to nobody.

Same for each of the triplets.

People do actually break into song in universe, it is a side effect of all the magic in Encanto. The first time it happened was about seven months in and everybody freaked out about it for months.

Alma eventually gets used to the singing thing and never thinks to mention it isn't normal to her kids or grandkids. In fact, most people in Encanto take the singing for granted, so when the mountains open up and they get a few new villagers nobody bothers to warn them that the village will regularly break into song.

I know the creators said the village is completely self sufficient, but like... where's the quarry for all the stone? Where are they making glass, that requires a specific kind of sand, do they have that sand? How are they getting new books? Nah bro, the village has three merchants who journey past the mountains twice a year.

I know the generally accepted headcanon is that Agustin was born outside of the Encanto, but I think his parents were city dwellers visiting family when the village got raided. They escaped with their hosts and planned to take their family back to the city with them, then ended up in a magic paradise instead.

In the same vein, Agustin's dad was a banker and has become the town's unofficial treasurer since that's about the only way he can contribute with his skill set.

Agustin's mother passed in childbirth, his father eventually remarried, but only after a few years of grieving. Agustin has three much younger half siblings.

Bubba comes to Encanto and does indeed get with Isabela, but I mean... some AMAB dude who surrounds himself with the trappings of masculinity and had zero problem seeing through Isabella's hyper feminine facade? Trans woman Bubba. All I'm saying. (Transphobes dni, neither of us will change the other's mind).

The art book had something about Isabela looking more indigenous than her sisters, so we know the family has indigenous roots. I wasn't able to find a lot about queer history in Colombia, but I did see that two native men were murdered by colonizers for being gay out in the open. That kinda implies that homophobia comes from the colonialist side of modern Colombia. I choose to believe that Alma has a great aunt on the native side of her family who is married to a woman. She grew up hearing that they have to keep the marriage secret to protect her aunts, so when she notices Bruno has a boyfriend, she starts planning a secret wedding without mentioning anything to Bruno.

Bruno doesn't realize his mama knows he's not straight, he thinks he's hidden it very well. When Isabela and Bubba nervously come out at dinner and Alma asks Bruno if he has any advice about being queer, Bruno inhales what he's eating and needs the Heimlich.

I agree in general with queer Madrigal headcanons, but I'm also aware that we're dealing with an isolated community a couple decades before the lgbt rights movement really kicked off in Colombia. I suspect most of the characters wouldn't use any of the labels we use today, and in fact, characters like Mirabel wouldn't stop to consider they're not straight until they've already been happily married for two decades.

That said, I think Mirabel is what we consider to be bi with a heavy preference for men. Her husband is quiet and doesn't have a single creative bone in his body, but thinks everything she sews deserves to be put in a museum. They bond because he commissions her to make something for his mother.

Luisa gets a tiny little husband who falls to pieces when she flexes. He does not understand people who say she is too masculine, or call Isabela the pretty one.

Camilo's youngest son is autistic, not that any of them know that's what the kid's deal is. Camilo just thinks his son is hilariously blunt and really into bugs. He doesn't really get how the kid can spend hours looking at an ant hill without getting bored, but whatever, he'll just buy the kid an ant farm for his birthday.

When women marry into the Madrigal family that don't have anybody to walk them down the aisle, they ask Tio Bruno to do it. It started with Camilo's wife, whose father is abusive, and became a tradition as the family grew.

When Mirabel becomes a grandmother the family starts calling her Mirabuela. Similarly, Antonio eventually becomes Tio Nio, to the point that some people forget he has a first name.

I actually have a lot of headcanons about the future of the Madrigal family but this is getting long, so I'm going to stop. I've ended up mentally writing whole ass fics for Camilo's wife and his youngest granddaughter, as well as for Mirabel's daughter, and Dolores' great grandson, so if I get into all of that this thing is going to triple in length.

[southshoretides]

There was a great post I saw a while back but lost about the ideological lens of media criticism that went like "Your average Reylo-hater doesn't hate it because she thinks Rey is not submitting to Kylo as a wife rightfully should, they hate it because it normalizes abuse. People who really hate Avatar tend to think it's colonialist, not that the humans are failing to teach the Na'vi about Christianity. People who hate Harry Potter in 2024 hate it because it's a story about rich prep school kids growing up to become feds plus the trans stuff etc, not because books about magic are Of The Devil."

In other words, you can only say that shaming campaigns/social-media mobbing for people who like Problematic Content is inherently a conservative (i.e. bad) thing (which is an argument I see over and over again, and not just on Tumblr) if you define 'conservative' as entirely divorced from its object-level goals (re: family, religion, law and order, etc) and round it off to "telling people that their feelings are invalid or immoral," with the implied inverse being that it's unprogressive to ever criticize someone's tastes in media.

And I guess that's internally consistent if your modal progressive is a live-and-let-live hippie with a high openness-to-experience and agreeability scores, that's internally consistent. But it's 2024 and if that's your modal progressive, I'm wondering why. Part of the reason this sort of stuff gets me genuinely worked up in a way little else does these days is that it seems so willfully, deliberately ignorant of the last ten years of cultural change, and it often comes from people who really ought to know better.

Because if you listen to the sort of people who hate Problematic Content, you will find that they indeed don't care about media spreading the Gospel, or enforcing traditional heteronormative values, or being patriotic, in fact they have contempt for all those things (which are, yes, themselves, kind of hall-of-mirrorsy concepts, but the important point here is that most conservatives define themselves as favorable to those concepts).

But what they do care about is media that enforces harmful stereotypes, or causes harm to marginalized groups, or defends capitalism/nationalism/etc, and other things conservatives don't really care about. And it is entirely internally consistent to say "I hold progressive values XYZ, I think that fiction that opposes my values will weaken them, ergo I want to ban or suppress fiction that opposes my values." There's nothing inherently un-leftist about that, the Soviet bloc did it for decades! There are millions and millions of people who think that way who openly and proudly despise all things conservative and Republican.

Thousands of words have been spilled about what happened to the left in the 10s, how they willingly took on the pro-censorship, pro-word-police mantle once various proto-Trumps and the big guy himself ran in the opposite direction. Maybe the last few years of things (somewhat, sorta) swinging back the other way have made people forget. (And I put 'in 2024' up there for a reason: the battlefield really was very different as little as 15 years ago. But now it's not.)

But I think it's more likely that people who think you can't be both censorious and a progressive are simply still unwilling to truly accept that, that we have this whole class of people who may say the right things and vote the right way on green fuel and gay rights and whatever else, who claim the mantle of progressives, but are as strict and paranoid and closed-minded as any conservative in practice when it comes to anything outside their comfort zone, just as dependent on whisper campaigns and public moral grandstanding and consent-manufacture as the conservatives they hate.

And this is embarrassing for leftists who don't believe in media censorship, so they try to write these guys off as infected by enemy memes, or double agents, or just hopelessly confused. Either way, they're not real progressives, because they're not how I'd prefer progressives to be. And like again, fine, you can do that, but we have a term for that behavior, not a complimentary one. "Progressives don't ban books" only hold true insofar as progressives don't ban books--that the people with the levers of power in the progressive movement refrain from doing that.

Ultimately, a book banned for reasons of blah blah Jesus morals Christian America is a banned book, and a book banned for reasons of blah blah privilege historical inequity triggers trauma is a banned book, and no clever rhetoric can get you around that.

[libraryleopard]

Okay, so I'm reading The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna and I need to know if anyone else has had the same issues as me because I'm fifty pages from the end and I'm kind of losing my mind at how this apparently cozy fantasy novel keeps dropping in things that to me read as incredibly fucked up without really unpacking them

So the first thing that an established part of this world-building is that due to a curse, all witches are orphans because their biological parents will always die shortly after they're born. Which is honestly, like, something that could be in a horror novel and not a fluffy contemporary fantasy novel, but it's meant to explain that the main character, Mika, is an orphan who didn't have a family growing up. But then the novel adds in the fact that the protagonist's grandmother and and mother where both witches who didn't want to have children because of this but did anyway. There's a conversation Mika has with her childhood guardian, Primrose, where Primrose says "Neither your mother nor mother or grandmother ever planned to have children. I think they would have liked to if it hadn't been for the spell, but they did not have the luxury of choosing in the end." Which has also sorts of fucked-up implications to me–rape? violation of bodily autonomy? forced pregnancy?–but not does seem to be a thing that the novel is going to revisit or explore. And also there's no mention of Mika, say, being on birth control to avoid having a witch daughter and dying prematurely even though she has a spell to ease period cramps????

The second thing is that Mika, who is Indian and was raised in England by a witch white after her mother died, is hired to be a nanny for three young witch orphans, Altamira, Rosetta, and Terracotta, who are Black, Palestinian, and Vietnamese, respectively. After their parents died thanks to the witch-curse, the three girls were taken in by a white British archaeologist witch, Lillian, and renamed after notable archaeological discovers. There's, like, one mention of the current guardians of the three girls hoping that Mika could be kind of a role model for them since she's an older woman of color, but I find the fact that a white British lady took in three orphans of color, gave them these weird twee names instead of keeping the names they presumably already had, and is raising them with no connection to their birth cultures weirdly…colonialist? But the main worries of the novel seems to be just getting the girls to control their magic so they don't have to live in isolation. Sangu Mandanna is British Indian so she's coming to this with a different perspective than me (white American), but it just seems weird to me!! Like, there's a whole sequence of the adults preparing for Winter Solstice celebrations and I was just like damn none of these guardians seems to care about keeping the girls in their care in contact with the cultures of their birth families?

Also, the love interest has a really disturbing backstory where his older brothers were horrifically abusive to him after the death of their father (like, he recounts that they would whip him with his father's belt and say it was like he was being beaten by his father) and it's literally resolved in one off-page confrontation with the brothers where he decides they aren't as scary as they were when they were kids.

I just!! don't get!!!! why a book that's marketed as sweet and cozy keeps including these things that seemly massively fucked up and not unpacking them at all. I like fluffy books and I like romance novels (and I think light-hearted novels can still unpack serious topics–like I recently read Donut Fall in Love by Jackie Lau and it's primarily a sweet romance but also features characters dealing with the grief of losing a parent in a way that felt tonally fitting), but the dissonance of these things being included and not really unpacked in what's supposed to be a feel-good read is so weird to me!!!

And I really thought that the witch curse would end up being a primarily problem characters have to face at the end (it's established as being a protection spell that went wrong and became a curse, causing witches to lead lives isolated from each other), but it seems like it won't be.

Anyway, I'm almost done and I don't know if I'm overthinking things but it's driving me batty.

[tathrin]

Hi! How does a pirate au with gigolas sound?

From this prompt-meme.

Oh definitely not like something that's been slowly simmering in the back of my mind ever since I first saw this thing months ago.

We're going with a sort of East India Trading Company/Golden Age of Piracy era-mythos for our vibes, and a world that has less magic and epic battles to its history than Middle-earth for our setting, but one that still has our various fantasy species running around.

Númenor is sort of like an England/America hybrid, in that it's a newer land than the main continent, very expansionist/colonialist in attitude, and simultaneously an old power, because it has a bunch of colonies on the old continent now, and a belligerent attitude towards everyone else. They are the largest sea-power and like to claim even more dominion than they actually have.

Meanwhile to the south-west of them we have the islands of the Teleri (Eressëa) which are widely described as "the last free elven isles," and mainly stay that that by being A: not enough trouble to conquer and B: too much trouble to conquer. They keep to themselves (and their waters shrink a little more each year as Númenor keeps pressing in) so no one feels inspired to deal with them, and there's a lot of risk to trying to because water gets weird around those islands. Lots of shipwrecks, lots of strange creature in the waves. (The Teleri get some sort of mingled siren/kraken vibes here.) The eastern elves tell stories of a farther island beyond theirs, where no mortals have ever gone; where the seas themselves are sundered so as to protect their inhabitants from all encroachment...but more people these days know those are just fairy tales. There is no Western Shore; there are no Undying Lands. That's all just old sailors' stories and superstitions.

Anyway, Middle-earth itself: very old-school Europe vibes going on here, with lots of little kingdoms always sniping at one another for advantage, and whose power-balance has been kind of skewed by the Númenorian Colonies of Gondor and Arnor—really not colonies anymore at this point, because Númenor looked back east generations ago and decided to return to their ancestral homeland and claim it again farther back than any living mortal can remember. That doesn't stop Númenor from treating them like colonies still, which Denethor, the current ruling steward, isn't thrilled by. His people are more torn on the issue, with half of them liking the regalness of being Númenorian and the other half resentful at not being able to rule themselves. They even had a king once, for a few generations, but that collapsed during the civil wars called the Kinstrife, which were rumored to have been instigated by Númenor itself, although no one was ever able to prove that. There are rumors that an heir escaped the slaughter (Anastasia vibes!) but no one has been able to find proof of that. It may be no more than a pretty story. At any rate, no king has been seen in Gondor for generations.

Beyond the colonies of Gondor and Arnor, Númenor has other strong allies on the continent as well: Erebor, for one. The dwarves of the Lonely Mountains were driven from their home by the last of the dragons long ago, and the deal that their king made to acquire Númenorian assistance for taking it back from Smaug left the dwarves more indebted to the Númenorians than they intended. If only they could have found the Arkenstone, and been able to buy Númenor off with that the way they had planned...but if the Arkenstone was ever among Smaug's horde, it must have vanished at some point before the siege. (Some dwarves insist that it was there, had to have been there; and the only way it could be gone was if Númenor betrayed their word and burgled it when the dwarves' backs were turned—but that is a claim they cannot prove, alas, and so they must live with their debts to the White Island.) Erebor's might is more of craft than warfare, but those crafts have been put to good work on behalf of Númenor's military, and their armies are now the best-outfitted in the world, thanks to Ereborian smith-craft and manufacturing. They are allies far too valuable for Númenor to ever give up, no matter how richly they repay that debt.

As for the elven-lands, perhaps the most notable is the smallest: Rivendell. Founded by the brother of the First King of Númenor, Rivendell occupies a unique place in Númenorian headspace: it is deeply respected, but also looked down on a little. Elrond was clearly the lesser brother, choosing a life of lore and healing over the leadership that should have been in his blood; and yet, he is known for that wisdom, and his healing arts have saved many lives. He sails to Númenor occasionally to share his knowledge with their healers (although less often with each century) and to walk the lands where his brother once lived and died, and he is well-loved there...but they prefer the legend of Elrond to the reality, and their leaders more and more often welcome him with strained smiles than they do with open ones. Elrond will not participate in any endeavour which would lead to war, and the suffering that comes from such conflict; that does not mean that he approves of Númenors politics in these days of domination, and while he is always polite and respectful, he does not hesitate to offer its rulers his true opinions and advice.

They don't really care for that. But he is Elros's brother, so they force smiles and grateful platitudes, and then try and bundle him back onto his ship and off to his lovely but insignificant little valley as quickly as possible, and try to think about him and his dour warnings as little as they can when he's not around.

Mirkwood is the largest elven-kingdom, and the only one these days that truly counts as a kingdom. The lords of Númenor aren't keen on such a large nation existing without paying even lip-service allegiance to them, but on the other hand...does anyone really want alliance with Mirkwood? It's a terrible place, dark and dour and full of monsters. The elves there aren't like other elves; they're less wise, less refined...more dangerous. Feral, almost. There are rumors that—well, really it would be easier to compile the stories that aren't told about Mirkwood than to start listing all the ones that are. Death lives in those black trees. Even the water is dangerous to drink, more likely to cast you into a hundred years of dreams than to refresh your thirst. There are spiders in there the size of horses, deer with all their bones on the outside of their skin, squirrels that are venomous and moths that suck your blood. It is said that if you hear laughter in those trees, you might as well slit your own throat before the merry sound dies because you'll never escape the terrible, laughing things that hunt there. The stories even say that there are ghosts in those woods, wandering the south lands by the ruined citadel that towers over those gnarled black trees.

No one sane would live in Mirkwood. No one sane would even set foot in Mirkwood. No one sane should want anything to do with Mirkwood—and Númenor does not. Even the Daleman, known for being provincial weirdos, know better than to actually go into those black trees, even if they're deranged enough to trade goods with the elves that lurk there. Well, let them; and on their own heads be it when the wicked elvenking leads his people out for a feast of man-flesh!

(Some of the stories are true, but even the other elf-lords no longer know how many. Mirkwood has done far too good a job of spreading those terrible tales for anyone—maybe even them, sometimes—to remember which are false, and which are real. Even other elves steer-clear of those black trees, these days.)

The last elven-realm, Lothlórien, is something of an outlier among all the lands of Middle-earth: it is a small realm, which neither offers nor seeks trade or commerce with others, and yet which wields an outsize power in the affairs of greater nations. Lórien is a land of lore and mysteries, and it is said that the elf-witch who rules those golden trees can read a man's secrets merely by glancing at his eyes. Númenor wishes no war with the eerie elves of Lothlórien. Lady Galadriel is consequently invited to every grand affair of state, and never ever wanted there. Sometimes she attends (likely just to remind Númenor that she is real, and should not be trifled with) but mostly she stays in her trees, whispered about yet unseen.

As for the other lands of Middle-earth, many of them are tired of being to some degree under Númenor's heel, but not to the point of daring to risk open war against them. They all remember what happened to Eregion when Ost-in-Edhil's smith-lords though to oppose Númenorian domination.

Now, the world has settled into a sort of tense peace, where nation-states fight through commerce rather than the battlefield, and use their armies more for posturing and prestige than actual warfare.

Into this world, enter the pirates.

Númenor's domination of the sea has not gone unopposed. Círdan long defied them, until they sent their entire navy against him, landing soldiers to crush the Havens and take him and his lords prisoner back to Númenor for trial and punishment—but though the Havens fell, Círdan was not found there. Some say that he and all those closest to him were slaughtered, and Númenor covered it up; others say that he managed to slips their nets and sail West, and find the promised shores beyond the islands of the Teleri; still others say he is on those oceans still, hurrying Númenors ships as a rebel captain of a small pirate fleet. Whenever a ship fails to return to harbor, there are whispers that it fell to Círdan's rebels...but more likely it was claimed by waves and weather.

Probably.

The stories spread anyway, and those who sought to defy Númenor's will listened, and so they began too to seek the sea. Small, single pirate ships are no material threat to Númenor: their navy is too large for the sacking or disappearance of a few ships here and there to make any difference to them. But the stories of pirates being able to defy their might and slip away free of consequence...well, that might have more lasting repercussions. Certainly Númenor's leaders must think so, for they have devoted quite an undo amount of effort to hunting down and destroying these pests otherwise. Unless, of course, one believes the rumors that Gondor's lost heir is out there somewhere amongst the pirates, capable at any moment of returning and staking his claim to the throne—a claim which, thanks to the faltering and intermingling of generations since, gives him actually the most direct claim not only to the throne of Gondor but to Númenor itself, now that the line of the founding kings has broken so many times...provided such an heir even exists of course, which he does not.

Clearly.

And now, it's finally time to turn to our cast of characters: the good ship Fellowship was originally a merchant vessel, sailing the waves on behalf of the wealthy Took family. Hobbits do not go to sea very often themselves, but they appreciate life's comforts enough to finance ocean-going vessels, and are quite happy to pay the necessary tariffs to Númenor to have their protection on the waves, and there are always Men in Bree who are happy to sail on Hobbit ships (the rations they provide are always much nicer than you get on any other vessel!). Old Bilbo was one of the rare Hobbits who actually followed his sense of adventure all the way out to the waves, and was captain of the Fellowship in deed as well as name, and when his nephew was old enough he brought young Frodo along with him.

(Every gossip in the Shire said they would both come to a bad end, drowning just like Frodo's parents did; but even the sneering Sackville-Bagginses never expected pirates!)

For many years, the Fellowship went about its trade-routes quite respectably, causing no trouble and earning no malice. But then...well, the trouble started with that fellow called Strider. He was one of many sailors who signed-on from Bree one day, and should have been no more special than any of them. But there was something about him that always seemed a little disreputable, a little dangerous—and so it soon proved.

No one back on shore is quite sure how it happened. The nearest anyone has been able to piece the story together is that there was some sort of shipwreck, or a raft that escaped a shipwreck, and there was something on it—some chest or treasure. Whatever it was, it proved to be too much temptation for the sailors of the Fellowship. Instead of making a quick salvage of the wreckage and continuing on their way, they abandoned their course and their cargo's intended destination, and went from being respectable merchants to pirates.

Old Bilbo (who had retired some years ago) was scandalized, of course; positively scandalized. But of course, Bilbo had always been something of a scandal himself, and there were far too many suspicious eyes on him after everything went south. He sold Bag End, packed up his things, and disappeared from the Shire three weeks after the first wanted-for-piracy posters of his nephew went up. Rumor has it he went to Rivendell, but no one from Hobbitton has ever gone after him to check; Hobbits don't generally care for travel, and Rivendell is such a long was away. Must more pleasant to stay home by the fire, and gossip.

And gossip folk do, and not only in the Shire. Stories of the Fellowship quickly came to spread far beyond Hobbit-lands, and they got bigger as they went. Soon it was being said that Strider was not just a brigand, but a romantic scoundrel too, who had managed to steal the heart of Elrond's daughter before running away to sea before her brothers could revenge themselves upon him. He had a magic ring, which he had used to enthrall Frodo, and declare himself captain of the boat. He had a magic sword, which could break itself into pieces as short as a dagger and then reforge itself as long as a boathook at need. He had elf-blood, and was decades older than he looked. He had served in Gondor's army, and in Rohan's, and had learned healing from Elrond himself. He was one of the Rangers, the secretive wanderers that spread rumors against Númenor and hunted for treasure and forgotten beasts in the wilds.

The more outlandish stories even claimed that he was that lost heir, and his real name was Aragorn or Arathorn or something of that sort. Nonsense, of course—but nonsense that Númenor wasn't happy to hear being whispered up and down the Misty Mountains.

Their displeasure grew when word began to spread of Strider's companions: Frodo somehow recruited three of his friends to the ship (Hobbits at sea! What were the youth coming to?) but he had arranged for one of their more land-locked fellows to act as a blackmarket middle-man, passing coin and supplies and information back and forth between Bree and the boat. Fredagar Bolger was soon caught and arrested, but someone broke him out of prison before his trial could begin, and he disappeared as thoroughly as Bilbo had. (Rumors said that the Brandybuck and Took families had helped in that jail-break, for two of their own were among Frodo's crew, but no one could ever prove that; indeed, no one who had been on duty at the jail that night reported seeing anything. Fredagar had been there when they went to sleep; the next morning, he had been gone, and no one ever saw him in Hobbiton again.)

Even more outlandish than the idea of four Hobbits at sea, the stories insisted that they had a dwarf on the ship as well. Everyone knew that dwarves hated boats, and feared the ocean; everyone knew that a dwarf would sooner shave his beard than go to sea. Nonetheless, the stories persisted: the Fellowship had a dwarf. Rumor claimed that he was a disgruntled son of Erebor, who had joined Strider's band of pirates out of disgust for the debt that Númenor held over the Lonely Mountain; others insisted that his father had been friends with Bilbo (in addition to his other oddities, Bilbo had been known to have friends among the dwarves, somehow!) and that it was Frodo who had somehow coaxed a dwarf away from land and out to sea. Whatever the motivations that had brought that dwarf to the Fellowship, there was soon no denying that he was there: only dwarven craftmanship could have kept that ship afloat through all of Númenor's efforts to sink it, and sailing faster than any of their own vessels could follow.

In addition to the dwarf, there was an elf among the crew as well. A less absurd notion on the surface, but strange when one dug-down to the details, for this was no Teleri; nor was he even one of the elves of the Havens, or from Rivendell. No, this was a Wood-elf of Mirkwood, one of those half-feral creatures of death and shadow and knives in the dark. His eyes were keener than any looking-glass that Númenor could fashion, and he could see as clearly in the starlight as men could under bright sun. With those elven eyes in their crow's nest, there was no chance that the Fellowship could ever be sneaked-up upon again; and those who survived attacks by Strider's pirates told stories of his terrible bright laughter echoing across the waves like the ringing of doom-bells in their dreams.

(There was surely, surely no truth to the rumor that the elf and the dwarf were any more than grudging crew-mates; elves and dwarves were notoriously distrustful of one another's people, and since Eregion's fall there had been no sign of reconciliation or camaraderie between any of their kind again. The sailors who reported that the two had been heard cheerfully competing like friends during the battles taking Númenorian ships were mistaken; the ones who claimed that they had witnessed victory-kisses were suffering from sunstroke; and the shaken survivors who whispered that the elf had lost his mind and slaughtered an entire crew himself when one of their number managed to wound the dwarf were surely just suffering from shock. No single elf, not even a Mirkwood elf, could slay an entire contingent of Númenorian soldiers like that; and no elf would ever be spurred to do such a thing for a mere dwarf. These stories were just one of Strider's many attempts to undermine Númenorian rule, by attempting to foster an alliance between Erebor and Mirkwood based on ridiculous false rumors about the joining of two of their people. Such things simply did not happen.)

The worst of the Fellowship's many assaults upon Númenorian sea-supremacy was when they took a ship that had been carrying Rohan's princess out to make a state-marriage on the White Island. The rest of the Rohirrim they let go, including the king's nephew, whom one might have expected them to hold for ransom; instead they took only the girl, and no ransom demand ever came back for her. Indeed, rumors soon began to whisper that she had been somehow seduced to Strider's crew as well, and could be seen with a cutlass in one hand and her fair hair streaming in the salt-air, a fell smile on her face, whenever the Fellowship boarded their prey, her own unfettered laughter ringing out alongside the elf's deadly merriment.

That was a crime too far. Númenor needed to stop Strider's pirates, and stop them now. Gondor dispatched two of her own to go to sea and hunt him and the Fellowship down: Boromir and Faramir, sons of the Steward and noble warriors of stout heart and stalwart arms. Everyone assumed that that would be the end of the Fellowship, for no pirate had yet escaped bold Boromir, and Faramir's cunning wits would surely be enough to outsmart some ragged Ranger. For months they pursued the pirate vessel, chasing the Fellowship through storm and fog and sun-kissed waves; then, far off the coast of the Teleri islands, a hurricane rolled in, and both ships were lost from sight behind the grey rainclouds.

Imagine Denethor's fury, and Númenor's wrath, when the next stories that came back from the sea told of how bold Boromir and cunning Faramir had joined the terrible crew...

[secondspookyseason]

At some point I’m going to post about my personal practice bc it’s really solidified within the past year. It started as grounding rituals to maintain my day-to-day sanity, and now it is both more profound and more connected to community.

A short version:

- The Orphic Hymns Grimoire by Sara L. Mastros is pretty damn cool! I appreciate her approach to modernizing language so modern practitioners can use it and make it their own. The poems are fun to read aloud! The whole thing is a devotional to Hermes! And it’s got simplified suggested spells from the PGM. Love that. I have picked up lots of books but this one grabbed me with its writing style, which is important to me as a words person.

- I am a little bit involved with the Temple of Dionysus in RI. They seem like like-minded nerds.

- I read a book* that laid out the difference between Indigenous & colonialist relationships to the natural world and finally started to comprehend the scope of what we’ve lost by thinking of humans as separate from nature (and how that leads to, yknow, huge scale environmental destruction). I believe more completely and profoundly that magical practice is about knowing and understanding local ecology and tending garden and building relationships. It is not about shopping. I want to keep a closer eye on making all of my personal doings produce less waste.

- I’m very attached to the idea that paganism isn’t about ‘belief’ but about doing and sharing. It is not central to my practice that I feel that gods hear me, or that I hear them. My idea of what a god is is probably a bit more lax than other practitioners. But last week something in life knocked me for a loop, and felt like an answer. I did some divination (tarot) with a deck I had set aside for spiritual use, and in asking questions I believe that in this instance I got answers from someone other than me (and that I know who it is). This is new, and rare. I genuinely hope it stays rare, because it’s A Lot.

*The book is Braiding Sweetgrass. You’ve probably heard of it.

[anthonybialy]

Reviewing Basics About War and Everything Else

Explaining everything gives us a chance to review what’s taken for granted as we help those who never granted access to basic facts in their skulls.  Simple tones aren’t just for first contact with aliens.  Liberals could avoid feeling they’re being condescended to if they started grasping simple notions.  Declaring Israel needed to cease firing at terrorists who certainly won’t respect the honor system serves as yet another failed test.

Defining what war is may help those confused about which side to back.  We all agree it is very bad.  The rather unpleasant state involves explosions that may damage more than hearing.  People who end up dead and stuff that ends up broken.  The only thing worse may be not fighting one on account of how the diabolical other side may continue to wage it.  

World War III’s Axis fans don’t notice the corpses that spurred a righteous response.  Oh: it’s like inflation.  Missing steps like the Underpants Gnomes is essentially their doctrine. The difference is that liberals don’t end up discovering how commerce works.

It’s mean to make residents leave.  Tacit or active Hamas allies avoid encountering a reason Israel got bossy.  The evictors don’t need to root out the human demons who want to prevent their continued existence or anything.  Pondering why there’s an evacuation might lead to the end of sanctimony, and feeling superior is how liberals fuel themselves.  Their solar panels don’t work.

Time moving forward may seem restraining.  But at least noticing there’s only one direction allows for knowing which events happen first.  Take noticing just when a war began, which we call the Pearl Harbor factor.  For Earth’s present major conflict, recall just which side flew in to a music festival on a contraption too primitive for Mad Max and slaughtered everyone they could for the crime of not eating bacon for the wrong reason.

Locating terrorists before they go on another serial killing rampage through your streets might just be a legitimate reason for displacement.  I’m sorry for the disruption.  Finding something to drink requires excessive effort for some right not.  But primary victims will never have water or anything else again.  The Hamas Mutual Aid Society is stingy with Evian.

Determining who started this is a distinction that’s as important as it is easy.  Even amateur conflict detectives can uncover the most crucial aspect with minimal scrutiny.  There shouldn’t be any worry about something so obvious to spot, yet the answer eludes the self-proclaimed smartest amongst us.

Ask if one side turned water pipes into rockets.  The weapon of primitive losers who don’t even use protractors to aim is acceptable to fiends who want to kill anyone they might hit.  Condemning practices that are savage in every way shouldn’t be this hard.

Board the tour bus at any stop.  Noticing where the loop starts is too difficult to grasp for phonily high-minded types who cherish chances to condemn the cycle of violence without noting where said cycle began.  

Liberals never follow consequences, which explains why they’re liberals.  Grasping what comes next is for soothsayers.  The most sophisticated analysts believe in rationality and not magic about predicting tomorrow, which is why they’re always shocked when printing money doesn’t cure poverty.  

Pondering just why Israel is fighting would mean acknowledging a certain religion maintains a terror problem.  College professors reflexively thought that means Judaism.  Attacking civilization charms those living far away while benefiting from cushy protections.  Total non-anti-Semites are suspiciously eager to harvest grievances against a country that seems like America in its decadent love for gun rights and true tolerance.

Foes of the only place they’d want to live in the Middle East adore making up tales.  Pretending a rather broad-minded nation is a group of seething Islamophobic colonialists on occupied land who run their own open-air concentration camps doesn’t conform with reality, but that’s never stopped Democrats from maintaining their beliefs.

Leftists figure Israel must be the violators if they can win wars.  Equating strength with violation is as foolish as Donald Trump declaring power is all that matters.  They surely enjoy thinking on his terms.  They also don’t grasp how bearing arms allows the virtuous to outmuscle fiends if you’re seeking consistency.

The only debate is whether they’re unaware or familiar.  The result is the same, so figuring out why one of the two sides opposes the most just war possible is academic.  Condemning the republic fighting back against terrorism makes it seem as if the conflict is simply a matter of sadism.

Good guys try their hardest, which is the one time villains’ apologists aren’t into appeasement.  Israel is already at an infinitely higher standard for protecting the innocent, and the entity fighting to continue existing is still never good enough for liberals preening like it’s a serious Steven Spielberg movie.  Stick to special effects.

You simply can’t start a binge on season four.  Confused viewers are missing important context.  Don’t they wonder how characters got to the present situation?  Liberals don’t grasp drama or anything else.  Trying to explain what’s happening to the clueless means nobody can follow, which they sickly seem to enjoy.  The inattentive sure seem to enjoy others being as oblivious.

[thatndginger]

Post-Drive Notes

drove down to have dinner with the in-laws, Cryptid and I got into some discussions on the road, gotta write notes down before I forget them

Shapeshifter

-I should really nail down in word-form the 'science' behind shapeshifting, specifically how it affects the mind (it's not just a human mind in an animal body, human minds wouldn't be able to comprehend how to exist in an animal body. it's the human conscience in an animal mind - same personality, same memories, but in a mind capable of understanding the body it's in and the stimuli available to it. how does that affect memories across bodies? how about in shifters who can't control their animal side?)

-'I have the ability to help others, therefore I must' as a driving motivation

-intent is 9/10's of magic, but what kind of ingredients make up the other 1/10th? how do you choose them? Why do you choose them? Is it based on what senses you want to affect? Or elements?

War Witch

-Jon would probably have to be a veteran of at least some colonialist wars to achieve a certain rank. it makes more sense for him to be a lieutenant because of his interactions with his platoon and experience and role within the military structure (does he wear a cowboy hat? we shall see)

-i should look up the formation of the SAS and US expeditionary forces during westward expansion

-Cryptid doesn't think that Nate should get a redemption arc, and was pretty compelling about it

-i need to do some more pondering on what kind of information was lost during the Shattering before I go off spouting things like "modern technology would allow for advanced constructs capable of complex actions and rudimentary thinking processes" to someone who plays with computers and software for fun (also be careful comparing constructs to computers lol)

-pre-WWI geopolitical situation, maybe a bit of cold war flavor thrown in, look at the perception of wars and the fighting of before WWI and how the rapidly-increasing (usually dangerously slapped together) weaponry completely fucked up all ideas of how 'war should be done'

-mixing Roman and Imperialist British political/societal positions is basically a neon sign for imperialism and Cryptid approves :)

[thrythlind]

TORG

Torg is probably one of the earliest seeds of my interest in genre blender settings though it was eventually cemented by Fred Perry's Gold Digger and my own fanfictions. I was able to play a few games of this back in the 90s, short run games and one-shots that didn't go very far.

The basic premise of this game was that there were two cosmic forces, one of creation and one of destruction. And the force of destruction created Darkness Devices in order to tempt people to serve its cause by using them to slowly limit and destroy possibilities until things got to a point where the cosmic force could crush it all at once.

Part of how this would work is that the Dark Lords would anchor the axioms of their realities (called "Cosms") to the level of magic, tech, social, and spiritual development that they most desired with a handful of corollary side rules unique to each reality. And once they've succeeded in shaping their reality to their desire, they would begin to go out and conquer other realities and forcing it that image as well.

If a critical mass of residents from one region came into another one with the aid of the appropriate dark powers, then the invading realm would over-write the native one. Magic or tech native to the target Cosm would fail and residents would find their minds and memories rewritten to accept their position within the new Cosm.

The ultimate goal of these villains is to achieve enough power to claim the title of "TORG" (which I've heard is an acronym based on the working title of the game system)... but of course they're a pawn for destruction seeking to break everything, them included.

The original game focused on a version of Earth that was being invaded by several other Cosms:

Aysle - A fantasy realm of D&D style magic.

Cyberpapcy - A realm of advanced cybernetics and religious oppression.

Living Land - A realm of sentient dinosaur people and prehistoric or stone age action.

New Nile - A pulpy story of 1920s superheroes, gadgeteers, occultists, and a madman who believes himself to be a pharoah.

Nippon Tech - A near future (honestly, RL 2020s) realm of corporate greed and financial oppression. And because it was the 90s, cyberninja.

Orrosh - A realm of Victorian horror and colonialist invaders. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, white supremacists.

There were later one or two other Cosms involved, including a sort of "good guy" Cosm that still came across pretty pretentious.

The world of the original game eventually fought off their invaders and the world of the more recent version, Torg Eternity, explicitly features an Earth where things didn't go near as well.

The But...

I liked the basic idea here but there were things that bothered me at the time and bother me more now.

First of all, the fact that Social development was quantified.

Cosms had 4 axioms rated from 0 to 30 that rated the development of native magic, tech, spiritual involvement, and....social development.

On the one hand, they talk about the potential of these axioms fluctuating in different places and with enough people changing entirely. But it describes changing a rating by 1 point over 10 years to be very fast, with 1 point over 500 years being more likely.

(looks pointedly at real history)

Okay.

The very idea that there is a hard cosmic law that limits society from advancing is horrific to me and I hate it. And from a game play perspective, it is actively saying "you don't get to make real substantial changes to the world" to the players.

And yes, you can ignore that for your own game, but it does represent a rather horrific impression that that is the default.

To be clear.

I'm completely onboard with horrific invaders enforcing alien thought patterns, behaviors, and even natural or supernatural laws onto people. That sort of identity theft is a thing I dip into quite a bit.

Where I find it distasteful is that this hard limit of imposition is the default nature of the setting.

You can't share cultural points across Cosms. Unless you're one of those special Storm Knights who keep their own identity when traveling to other Cosms, then you hold tight to your own native-concepts and reject other concepts on a basic, cosmic level.

Which brings me to another problem.

You can't have healthy interaction between Cosms by default beyond a handful of Storm Knight envoys.

The most healthy way for different Cosms to exist is to stay separate and never interact with each other. And yeah... separate but equal is not a thing I like to deal with.

You can't have a character go around and acquire trainings and techniques from alternate Cosms... because their most base nature will reject that other Cosm.

Say you have a bunch of heroes from different Cosms finish the campaign by kicking out the invaders and even freeing the other Cosms from their tyrants...

Well the next thing is they all get separated not to mix again.

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

The Phyrexian story arc has so many more problems beyond this though. I know that seems insane to people reading this, because this already sounds like a shitshow and it definitely was, but I want to offer some additional key insights because there is literally so much, this storyline went south IMMEDIATELY upon Dominaria United.

Phyresis is supposed to be basically permanent. Once your body and mind are corrupted, that's it. Compleation is consistently regarded as a fate worse than death, as it warps your flesh and values to serve Phyrexia. It is in every way the main emotional thrust of defeating Phyrexia for many of the main characters in the story. There was, before the "Aftermath" part of the Arc, only one recorded instance of someone shrugging off Phyresis, and that required what was basically a special soul in order to do it. Technically possible, but requires as astronomical price. It's a good set-up, and they call back to it in the Aftermath arc later in similar fashion. And then proceed to have three other main characters either spontaneously uncompleat, or fight off their compleating by using their mind powers to convince their body they're actually sick, or have that done to them. If your main character had gotten compleated, they either died (unlikely) or were back to normal. It's infuriating, because there's no evidence that was even possible at large either. The fate worse than death is reversible...but only if you're a special magical person.

March of the Machines: Aftermath is a set that was...well supposed to tackle the aftermath of the Phyrexian invasion. This is a set that already has a pretty massive issue with it (condensing something that should have taken a long period of time into one set) but it's not without merit. Even it being a smaller set than average isn't without merit. But the product we got sucked on both ends. The primary consequence we got to see was not what happened to any of the worlds that were invaded or to the class of somewhat important characters like the Theros gods, but more than half of the set was devoted was to the Planeswalkers, the special main characters, losing their ability to jump between different worlds, the desparking. This is, and remains, a super flaccid consequence of the invasion, because it's a non-sequitur. Nothing in the previous arc would suggest that this would happen, and the story hasn't even given a definition answer as to why yet. Even then, the actual consequences of such a decision were heavily muted anyways. Paths opened up between worlds as a result of the multiversal destruction the invasion did, which allowed these characters to hop between worlds regardless, and several Planeswalkers still retain their spark. Planeswalkers and former Planeswalkers are still the main characters of the story, something many people were hoping would stop after this. This isn't even going into the little things like how the majority of Planeswalkers who have their sparks are men. It's a travesty. The cards we do get in Aftermath that show anything else are very weak too. The idea was that subsequent sets would elaborate further, but they haven't in a really satisfying way. The lone Tarkir card actually just insinuates that nothing of note really happened (also as far as I can tell, there's nothing to suggest that Kolaghan got compleated either) and their lives went back to normal, dragon ruled fascistic governments. Yippee.

Something that wasn't noted and SHOULD BE in the pantheons of mistakes not to do in your writing is that all three of the new planes so far we've visited: Bloomburrow, Thunder Junction, and Duskmourne, did not suffer a Phyrexian invasion. The first two were seemingly not known about and were lucky enough to miss it (even ignoring that Thunder Junction was a terra nullius and all the colonialist undertones that plane ended up having), while Duskmourne fought off their invasion rather easily with the implication being that Valgavoth is built different. Well literally he's a house now. Dumb joke aside, going to a new plane is not necessarily a bad thing in a vacuum, but the problem is that every plane we've been too has had no consequences of an invasion either. We did not happen upon a different, broken plane, struggling to put itself back together. We happened upon three pristine planes. The ultimate message of a lot of these decisions is that you, the player and person interested in the lore, shouldn't care about the worlds or the people in them. You should care, first and foremost, about the special main characters in the story. This, sucks. What happened to Theros or Zendikar, where the implication was that they suffered major damage? Who knows, and who fucking cares, because by the time we get back to them, it'll likely all be fixed, and the next set is the fucking multiversal Death Race set so it's not even going to be properly in tone.

I could write an essay about every single issue that I ended up having about this plotline, but this all really came about for a couple of reasons. The first is that the Phyrexian faction, with its deep horror elements and very Giger-esque visual aesthetic were extremely divisive. Many Magic players do not like the Phyrexians at all. They are, at least imo, Magic's most iconic villains, a real slam dunk, but that's not the opinion of everyone, and Magic design has increasingly catered to the idea that Magic should have something for everyone. The second is that they did not want to focus on the aftermath in much detail, wanting to avoid a years long period where the story was dull and dour.

But then why do this? Well, Avengers did it. The MCU had its grand multiverse event in Infinity War, so why can't Magic? Well it turns out they both had the same fucking problem, poor creative teams not thinking through their storybuilding decisions and having it all collapse through.

The thing is that the most interesting and novel invention of the MCU is a universe where billions of people turned into dust and then were physically reconstituted on the spot five years later, in a world that had just barely adapted to their absence.

That is wild. That is intense! That is a series of pathos-ridden emotionally complex doorstoppers waiting to happen. Half the entire world! All dead! And somehow we coped with that! And now we have to cope with them all being back?

A whole street of empty houses--surely not everyone there became ash. Some of them moved to better places, now opened by the mass mortality. Some of them died afterward. Who will live there now? Even if inheritances are reversed by resurrection, surely leases aren't renewed. What the fuck happens to everyone who remarried?

What happens to the children snapped back to a world where their parents didn't survive, or the reverse?

But they had to then hastily smooth over this utterly batshit sci-fi premise and get the world mostly back to normal working order as rapidly as possible, without too much emphasis on how literally every person in existence has been placed in a mason jar by a narcissist and shaken twice in five years.

So they could get on with more superhero whack-blam business, which is customarily done against a background of Normality.

This is, tragically, the most Comics thing these movies have ever done.

It is beyond satire that they did this immediately before and during a worldwide pandemic that everyone was pressured to smooth over and 'return to normal' about within 2 years if not sooner.

[milliebugydementia]

i wonder if vecna was just vecnaing specific people adjacent to the party to freak them out? like he knows that they're the only people that know about him and wanted to unveil his wicked plans in a dramatic way that would jostle them because he's very starved for attention and appreciation - i think this is why he would have picked will as the first victim because he is very similar to how he was as a kid, and he wanted to share his mind with someone else for once, have a companion to watch him tear down the world. especially cos will was already so fascinated about all things magical and otherworldly - i think some part of him thought will would admire him.

but then his other victims - chrissy, adam, patrick, and finally max. they dont really have anything in common aside from their trauma, and so whether that's supposed to be a commentary on how bad things happen to people of all backgrounds & lives (a popular girl and a popular black guy, a scrawny nerd, the three minorities) idk, but the only other thing they have in common is being close to members of the party. that could just be for screentime, but tactically it kind of feels like he's continually trying to torment the main characters of the show, cos they're the ones who already know about him, and he works his way inwards to the people around them before getting one of them. when he could have just targeted them all in one go and they wouldn't have figured out how to stop him.

i guess the reasonable explanation for this is that the duffer brothers wanted to drag out and add tension to taking out any of the main characters, especially cos they dont even have the heart to kill max in the end. and they wanted to give them a chance to actually be able to fight vecna when realistically all along he should have been able to kill any of them. idk all will be revealed.

but i do think the reason vecna would have targeted the main characters, besides just the fact that they're the only people that know about him, instead of going ham on popular and happy people like a true edgelord, is cos his frustrations with the world they live in arent matched by the gang. they're also weird freaks who managed to be well rounded and learn to be social. hes frustrated with them for not being jaded with the systems that equally rejected and hurt them, and for continuing to go about their lives within it as if they aren't freaks instead of getting swallowed whole by it like he has. like i imagine it's a kind of voldemort relationship where he gets pissed off that harry keeps fighting back like "you'll never know love or friendship" and refuses to be sucked into the very same void tom has gotten swallowed into himself, and just wants company inside of, even if that company is built on fear because it's all he can trust. like, he's very anti-humanity in general but particularly hates the humans who have been ostracised and seen the cruelty of other humans, and still maintain faith in them & in like colonialist structures. so i wonder if we'll see him get political or not? like take over hawkins, harness the power of nuclear weaponry etc.