#the lamb as effigy

[samusique-concrete]

My favorite albums of 2023

This is not a list of the ‘best’ albums of the year. These are just my favorites. However, i need you to understand something: I don’t have the time and/or brain bandwidth to listen to and forge a bond with every single album i’d like to get to in any given year. Thus, my disclaimer is twofold — the following are my favorite records of the year, among the selection of records that i did have time to get to. I’m sure i would’ve loved many others, but i just don’t wanna be someone who’d listen to an album for the first time at the end of the year, decide it’s ‘great’, and rank it shoulder to shoulder with my favorites. It would be disingenuous.

I will now present my ten favorite records of the past year, but there’s another catch: i will only talk about four of them, and they won’t be precisely my top four either. Instead, i’m going to talk about my tenth most liked album, and then my third through to number one. It’ll make sense as the read goes on.

Let’s begin.

IN TIMES NEW ROMAN…

Queens of the Stone Age

I’ll just say this right now: there hasn’t been, to me, a better mainstream rock act than Queens of the Stone Age since at least 2002. They represent what i would say is ‘as good as it gets’ in the genre. Even now, in 2023, when frontman Josh Homme is older and naturally starting to slow down (although tracks like Paper Machete would suggest there's plenty of gas left in the tank,) he still manages to unabashedly follow his own musical compass, that which was forged decades ago by his own design. 

In Times New Roman… is not one of the group’s best albums. In fact, i probably would prefer pretty much any other album in their catalog before this one, but therein lies the thing about this band: it doesn’t have to put out a mindblowing achievement of a record for it to be at least pretty good. Queens’ magic trick here is being consistent; if we were to buffoonishly rank their albums from worst to best, we’d find that the distance that separates the peak from the bottom is not at all Everest tall. That’s a hard trick to pull off.

Another point in favor of this album is its vulnerability. Infamously conceived as catharsis following a rough and tumultuous period in the frontman’s life, it was his interview on Neal Brennan’s The Blocks Podcast that really opened my eyes about this whole thing. In case it wasn’t made clear earlier, i’m a fan of the band, and as such it’s been always obvious to me that the guy’s had a complicated relationship with substances. You’d have to be deaf not to notice that. I’ve watched many interviews over the years, and i’d become accustomed to the certain type of way in which he carried himself. This is why his appearance on Blocks kind of stunned me. Here he was, nonchalantly going into a lot of detail about his drug abuse and how it has affected him and how he clearly sees how it has hurt others and also himself. Now, i don’t know the guy personally, i don’t know how he approaches these sorts of topics with people when the cameras are off, but what i do know is that that’s not the Josh Homme that he himself had constructed for years for the media to consume. The questionable performance seemed to be put to rest. This unceremoniously matured persona was refreshing to listen to: it made me appreciate the record a lot more, because he truly allowed himself to be vulnerable for once (although this feels like the next step in a process that began with 2013’s …Like Clockwork and continued with 2017’s Villains.) I’ll touch upon this a bit later, but that is, at least to me, very brave. The days of the emotionless tough guy are over, but that doesn’t mean that a very healthy dose of anti-establishment aggression has to be left by the wayside.

LIVE AT BUSH HALL

Black Country, New Road

Music isn’t movies. Therefore, it isn’t often that we get to say ‘you need to listen to the album that came before to understand this new one.’ This is the case for Live at Bush Hall.

Now, i would genuinely hate for this to add to the ongoing conversation in which the band’s past keeps taking center stage. I would much rather talk about the present and whatever the current work’s merits are. However, context is needed.

BC,NR quickly rose to indie fame thanks to the painful relatableness of their 2022 sophomore album, Ants from Up There; a beautiful, longing follow-up to their esoteric debut. The song’s lyrics were deeply personal and told what read as fictionalized autobiographical accounts of the band’s frontman’s love life. Shortly after releasing the record, however, he left the band. Paired with these news, the band announced that they’d keep making music without him, but that the old songs would not be played live in the future. This left fans and curious bystanders alike wondering about what they would sound like moving forward, who was going to sing now, how would the new lyrics meld with the pre-established themes of their past work, and so on. I think Live at Bush Hall is in equal parts a beautiful and thoughtful response to all of these propositions, which obviously the band worked towards answering first and foremostly for their own sake.

The fact that the group is a six piece ensemble containing piano, violin and saxophone on top of more conventional guitar music instrumentation notwithstanding, it is my opinion that Live at Bush Hall represents the present of all of rock music. What better way to capture this than with a live album? The idea is multilayered in its ingeniousness, since it wouldn’t be held to the audience’s expectations of what a studio album could bring in this new phase for the group. It’s also a gamble, though, since it’d be nearly fifty minutes of entirely new material played in front of a crowd, and also they’d have to nail the performances for the recording. Luckily, and to the surprise of no one who was already familiar with them, they proved to be excellent musicians who were very much up to the task and the gamble paid off in spades.

The fact that this is a live album also placed constraints on the compositions; these are the now canonized versions of new songs that couldn’t, by design, count on studio trickery or embellishments to stand out. It’s just the musicians, their instruments, and the arrangements. And it sounds amazing.

In a lovingly nodding manner, the opening track sees the band screaming “Look at what we did together / BCNR, friends forever”, in a way that seems to look back, but also look forward. Even more than in their already ambitious Ants From Up There, they take advantage of the instrumentation in very clever ways, adding to the performance and staging aspects of the album. Certain passages feel like they’re out of a play (with songs like The Boy explicitly being divided into chapters,) and it is obvious that this is very much the intended effect once you look at the video recording of the concerts that make up the the album: it was a whole mise-en-scène, purposefully directed, and well rehearsed. The band played three times at Bush Hall, and before each set they handed programmes to the attendees. They then hopped on stage dressed in deliberate costume design following a particular aesthetic. These ‘plays’, and their respective items (except for the setlist), were all different those three times. The movie intercalates takes of all of the three nights, so we get to see the band wearing all of their costumes, all of the sets, and all of the programmes.

This clear love of performance is evident in the songs themselves. Not to spoil the ending, but the album closes with a reprise of the first track (a real exposition-conflict-resolution move on their part,) and pretty much all of its themes are present and brought back, sometimes literally, in many of the songs. Even now distributing singing duties among several of their members, male and female voices alike, drama still emerges; not missing their vocal might after the departure of their lead singer, the band’s lyrics are still painful and their wails still resonant. Some of the performances are so good as to even elicit the sense that what they’re singing about isn’t just some story that somebody’s recounting; they’re happening to you. In performing arts that’s about the highest praise you can give.

PETRODRAGONIC APOCALYPSE; OR, DAWN OF ETERNAL NIGHT: AN ANNIHILATION OF PLANET EARTH AND THE BEGINNING OF MERCILESS DAMNATION

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

King Gizz have many times before come very close to having what could’ve been my favorite album of the year. It’s ok, though; i’m glad they can occupy that Scottie Pippen spot in my heart.

Petrodragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation is the band’s second full-fledged metal album, which is a genre that even before Infest the Rats’ Nest (its spiritual prequel) had popped up here and there amongst their numerous tracklists. Just in case you didn’t know already, the long story short is that KG has made a bajillion records and each of them has a unique concept and/or aesthetic. Sometimes some of those concepts reappear, making some of the records share a narrative and be in conversations with one another. 2019’s Infest the Rats’ Nest was the first time the band indulged completely in what was, inevitably at that point, a sound that needed to be explored comprehensively for the span of a whole record, after several songs in their discography having served as teasers of sorts. It proved to be a success (even being nominated for an ARIA Music Award for best metal album of the year, along with other, actual self-identified metal outfits,) pulling inspiration mainly from the thrash metal side of the spectrum and being always as vocal as they always have been in this particular common thread of theirs: we’re fucking up the planet. That's, like, their whole thing.

Petrodragonic Apocalypse feels like an evolution of Rats’ Nest in basically every regard. Its music is heavier, mathier, proggier, more dense, more environmentally minded, lengthier and, frankly, seemingly more difficult to perform. Being this not their first stab at heavier sounds, they complemented the album with one other area of expertise they possess: self-referencing musical passages.

Although their first record came out in 2012, it wasn’t until 2014 (which in retrospect isn’t that much time after) with I’m in your Mind Fuzz where they started to heavily introduce into their work the concept of melodies or refrains reappearing all throughout a single record. Maybe the first track would start out with a particular riff, which would later develop into a different melody for a couple of bars, which we soon would find would be used as the main riff for the following track, etcetera. This concept was then taken to its maximum exponent in 2016’s Nonagon Infinity, a record in which every track flows seamlessly into the next one (with even the last one looping back to the first one,) making it feel like one huge song. This would later culminate, at least narratively, in 2017’s space opera staging Murder of the Universe (that’s my favorite one!) but that way of making music, or albums specifically, seems to have become a habit of theirs, with fans now uploading countless videos on YouTube cross-referencing melodies from different albums to present as some kind of King Gizzard ‘lore’, regardless of what the main concept of each particular album ends up being. Petrodragonic Apocalypse harvests this skill and runs with it, adding some much needed cohesion to the madness. The drumming is insane, the guitar riffs are insane, the whole thing is insane! Yet, it is focused.

DESIRE, I WANT TO TURN INTO YOU

Caroline Polachek

Caroline Polachek made realize something very special: pop music is being vulnerable.

Now, we could dig into that statement with a hundred caveats, but that’d just suck the fun out of it. Here’s what i mean.

For many years i’ve thought of mainstream pop as something that didn’t, or couldn’t, contain me. It was very hard for me to relate to mainstream pop, probably because of its often rigid and spotless production and sound identity. Much of it sounded sterile to me, and i guess i sort of tagged that prejudice onto the entirety of the genre. I wanna be clear, though: i still think that about a lot of it — i just don’t think it’s all the same anymore. This type of change of mind would i’m sure seem inevitable to anyone that has simply sat down and listened to any given genre for long enough; pop music is simply an example in this case. It happens just like that; something unlocks inside your brain, and you get it. Heck, it’s happened to me with many other genres already.

I don’t feel any shame in admitting my teen-like stupidity. If you’re a teenager right now you won’t get this, but you have to be fifteen before you’re twenty-five. Any adult could tell you: it’s not that you have to go through adolescence — you have to live through stupidity. I didn’t say it, nor did i really think about it consciously in these terms, but when i was fifteen i took a certain kind of pride in not listening to pop music. I liked rougher, heavier stuff. That was my ‘whole thing.’ I would years later shift into the perspective that much of what i liked then was, actually, just as shallow, disingenuous, and, musically speaking, thought-murderingly conceived as the stuff i disdained and didn’t choose to listen to. However now i find that my favorite 2022 and 2023 albums have both been pop albums.

At some point i stumbled onto Queens of the Stone Age. Here, i found a band that, for lack of a better term, got it. Their "don't care if it hurts, just so long as it's real" attitude towards music, towards art, and by extension towards being a person in general, helped me. It’s not about the genre — it’s about what you make of it, and how you make it, and about it grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you. Years later this same ethos would aid me in making my mother understand that it’s not that she disliked all westerns or musicals, it’s that she didn’t like shitty movies.

The opener to QotSA’s 2002 mainstream rock masterpiece Songs for the Deaf could, potentially (though it hasn’t been scientifically tested, i’m pretty sure,) blow your head right off. Though in it, amidst hellishly screamed vocals, then-bassist Nick Oliveri mellows down his voice just the right amount in order to sing the following sentence:

Metal heavy, soft at the core.

This sentiment, purposefully or not, defines the band. It also crudely puts into words what i crave most about music, and the reason why they’ve been my favorite rock band ever since i listened to them for the first time: aesthetics are nothing if they’re not backed up by true emotion. You can tap into this true emotion by allowing your self to shine through whatever you’re doing, whatever that means to you. Façades are just that: 2D images that say nothing about who’s behind them, and it’s thanks to some real insecurity that you start depending on them, deploying them and taking cover. If you’re a teenager right now you probably won’t get this (or maybe you will and i got real old real fast and grew to misunderstand the youth,) but being yourself is the coolest thing in the universe because it requires of you a certain kind of vulnerability that is, more often than not, really hard to come by. You just have to be brave enough to do it. Motomami shares with Desire, I Want to Turn Into You that same vulnerability. I’m sure that had Sakura not been the closer to that album, it wouldn't have topped my last year’s list.

With Queens of the Stone Age’s refrain serving as my thesis statement, i will now use it to rephrase my opening statement: being yourself is being vulnerable, and being vulnerable is one of the coolest things you can be.

Caroline Polachek knows very well who she is.

During the brilliantly unorthodox set piece premiere performance of her single Dang, Caroline acted out screaming her lungs out at millions of americans watching live on a highly popular late night TV show. This isn’t regular ‘popstar’ stuff — she went and became a popstar at age 34 after already having recorded and released many different albums across many different projects, many of them not being really pop at all. She even dropped an entirely ambient album under the CEP moniker at some point. You might not get it right now, whatever age you are, but that’s fucking cool. I checked out Pang, the predecessor to Desire, I Want to Turn Into You (a sweetly elusive example of a punctuation mark deftly incorporated into an album title) right when it dropped, not really knowing who she was or what her ‘whole thing’ was. I figured she might as well have materialized right out of the pop aether. Well, i was wrong. Caroline has been very carefully crafting her musical presence since 2005, and i am as convinced that Desire represents the peak of her ‘herselfness’ just as i am, now knowing her, that whatever comes after will naturally surpass it in that regard.

Something interesting arises when thinking about her aforementioned premiere of Dang, or for example her NPR Tiny Desk Concert as well: she loves to perform. I can relate to this. There is a clear desire to display her art in striking ways, to set up these intricately rehearsed sequences that etch her everything into your brain with a tingling, instead of just letting the music stand on its own. It very much could, mind you, but by God, does she achieve the full effect. She’s a bespoke, partnerlessly designed whole package.

I could go on about how talented she is, but that’d be stating the obvious since it’s easily noticeable just from listening to any of her stuff. I particularly love how it’s evident in how she uses her voice that she’s not just a singer but also an instrument player (you will get this if you’ve played an instrument for more than a couple of years.) She even does all of the weird vocal stuff from her albums live, with her own vocal cords, instead of using effects or manipulation. That’s also so, so cool. But more than talent, i mainly wanna reflect on how Desire makes me feel. From its album cover (another example of her being on her own lane: the album clearly takes inspiration from early 2000s music, even bringing Dido on board for one of the tracks, yet the cover emphatically does not go with a generic Y2K aesthetic, even at the time of its release, when it seemed to be so in vogue,) it looks like there’s an unquenchable thirst powering her every movement. I interpret this as passion.

The music on the record is great, and i feel it's a step up from Pang. Each song has the right amount of space, and the harmony keeps the listener interested. There is more screaming (yay!) right from the beginning of the first track, Welcome To My Island, and i don’t know how to explain it, but the song itself does kind of sound like an island. I like how, as i alluded to earlier, it seems like the whole of the compositions are informed by her voice being thought of as the main instrument first, and how the songs are constructed around ideas that you could only have come up with after ‘noodling’ on your own vocal chords. The melodies become instantly super gratifying as she picks ear-pulling intervallic relationships to leap to or jump off from, or when she just makes interesting stepwise runs (some passages from the closer, Billions, remind me a bit of Morten Lauridsen’s Dirait-on, though i’m not necessarily inviting anyone to think she must’ve taken inspiration from it.) Her words can go from playful (like in the opener: “Welcome to my island / Hope you like me / You ain’t leaving”) to yearnful (from one of the slower numbers: “Starlight in a tunnel / Kind of familiar / Hopedrunk everasking / How does it feel to know / Your final form?”) But most of all, they are beautiful. Take the chorus of the single Sunset, for example:

No regrets

Cause you’re my sunset

Fiery red

Forever fearless

And in your arms

A warm horizon

Don’t look back

Let’s ride away

The words alone are gorgeous, but when you hear her singing them, it’s… Man, it’s something else. I’m lucky, and grateful, that a record as good and soulful and loving as this one could come along, reach out, and awaken something deep inside of me.

[motorikbeat4ever]

one of the best records of the year

[xartwrk]

The Lamb As Effigy by Sprain

[multifandom-rambler]

Imagine this: I’m the guest on some obscene talk show In a cell of moral compromise The audience is made up of everyone that I have ever met in my entire life Every sin I’ve ever committed is put up on display by screens hung around the stage And we watch The host says “I now present to you an elaborate choreography of failure!” The audience erupts with seemingly coordinated jets of jargon laughter Ha Ha Ha! “Shame on you!”

[reckonslepoisson]

The Lamb As Effigy Sprain (2023)

It’s obviously a shame that Sprain disbanded after The Lamb As Effigy – it is, after all, their first decent record – though it does sound rather a lot like a group of beings deliberately, recklessly, even gleefully hurtling towards their own demise. If anything, the scope alone of this monster ensures its exceptionality.

Pick: ‘Margin for Error’

[daiguit91]

Top 50 discos favoritos del 2023: 10 - 1

Por fin, los 10 discos que a mi consideración, fueron los mejores y que mas disfrute durante todo el año.

Espero les haya gustado la lista y de ser posible, que hayan descubierto cosas nuevas.

Felices fiestas a todos y por un 2024 mejor que el 2023.

10.- Kelela - Raven 

Alternative R&B, Electronic Breakbeat, UK Bass, Ambient, Ambient Pop, Downtempo

9.- Armand Hammer - We Buy Diabetic Test Strips

Experimental Hip Hop, Abstract Hip Hop, East Coast Hip Hop Drumless, Industrial Hip Hop, Conscious Hip Hop, Cloud Rap, Political Hip Hop, Jazz Rap

8.- Liturgy - 93696 

Avant-Garde Metal, Black Metal Totalism, Glitch, Chamber Music, Progressive Metal, Choral

7.- The National - Laugh Track 

Indie Rock, Chamber Pop Post-Punk Revival, Indietronica

6.- Sprain - The Lamb as Effigy

Experimental Rock, Post-Rock, Noise Rock Drone, Post-Hardcore, No Wave, Noise, Totalism, Neoclassical Darkwave, Experimental

5.- Ok Goodnight - The Fox and the Bird

Progressive Metal, Progressive Rock Djent, Art Rock, Alternative Metal

4.- KNOWER - Knower Forever 

Synth Funk, Jazz-Funk Nu Jazz, Art Pop, Jazzstep, Jazz Fusion

3.- Sufjan Stevens - Javelin

Indie Folk, Singer-Songwriter, Chamber Folk Folktronica

Shit Talk es la soty.

2.- Lankum - False Lankum

Irish Folk Music, Avant-Folk Drone, Neofolk

1.- Caroline Polachek - Desire, I Want to Turn Into You

Art Pop, Alt-Pop, Electronic Downtempo, UK Garage

[neomachine]

the way alex kent says "the band turned audience" in man proposes god disposes

[abyss55199794]

@vyl3tpwny

[s1x-foot-deep]

i don't know about you but i am at peace, i know what it is i must do

[myballsitchaurghouchie]

Doodle dump. drawing the Lamb differently each time is gonna be my new favourite thing

[IDs in Alt Text and under the cut]

Image 1: A headshot drawing of Narinder from the video game Cult Of The Lamb. He is shown smilling, eyes closed. He has many long whiskers and his ears are very long, ending in rounded points. Next to him is a picture of a feline, smilling the same way, with text above it saying "Get your big ass ears out of the goddamn caption" where the feline's ears overlap.

Image 2: A drawing of the Lamb, smilling excitedly with their fists closed. The Red Crown is floating next to them, looking unimpressed.

Image 3: A very simple sketch of Narinder, eyes wide as he starres at a jpeg of the asset 'Lamb Plush Effigy' from the video game.

Image 4: A messy sketch of the Lamb, looking down at someone unseen, with a disapproving expression.

Image 5: A sketch of the Lamb with a lot of wool around their neck holding Narinder's head as he purrs while frowning.

Image 6: A drawing of the Lamb and Kallamar singing together. The Lamb is courtsying to Kallamar who remains with his eyes closed.

[parisinflamesmp3]

i'm cooler than you btw.

listening to my 1.5hour 8 song album feeling like hot shit

[toto-the-cactus]

Ayo! Finished this damn thing. Hope this is still good. Tell me who we should go find next <333

Tagging some people that have been waiting for this update:

@danart501 @ilikemytittieswithwarmmilk

Summary: As a perpetual, you have been by the Emperor's side for most of your immortality. There's no name for what strange dynamic you both share, but you do trust him and your loyalty eventually pays off over millennia once he fulfills an old promise he made during your first ever encounter.

Pairing: Emperor of Mankind x Perpetual!Reader (Female)

CW: None

Part 1 - Part 2 - ?

The Mother (2)

The pregnancy had been a success and the development was nothing short of fast and strenuous. You should have expected Him to mold your body in a manner that would serve Him better for his wishes and plans to be fulfilled.

His Great Crusade needed to be accomplished and you suddenly became part of the means to that end.

What a dreadful fate. To be nothing but his petri dish.

And so, Horus was born. His little form being held against your chest like the precious treasure that he was, making the sorrow of not having the rest of your children there too be momentarily forgotten by his awaited arrival, cooing and grunting in delight at the warmness of your encompassing heartbeat once he settled at your bosom.

A memory you cherished to the end of time while it had burned itself on your soul to leave a lasting mark. You had cried in joy, hunched over yourself to blanket your newborn with your whole begin and feel him real, psychical, between your arms.

His accelerated growth didn’t deter you enough from enjoying any time with your baby boy, from supporting him during his unforgiving training to reading with each other's company at the main library of the Imperial Palace. All for the sake of letting him be loved by you.

It was a matter that (while not ideal) didn't interest the Emperor much, for his plans were already taking proper form and the ‘gift’ of not taking away your son from you was enough of a blessing that didn’t need to be addressed again.

Even if that notion tasted like ash on your mouth.

Your little boy wasn’t so little anymore and that sometimes worried you, as you knew very well the kind of expectations the Emperor held for Horus; the true born Primarch, a warrior to serve under his Father’s light as a tool despite his own Mother’s unyielding love. You couldn’t help but feel like this was a prelude of some sort of omen.

Most of the days eventually became grey on its core, for your son was now in charge of his Legion, the Luna Wolves, marking his very first start as an official Primarch under the service of his Father… laying you to the sides like you have always been when regarding the Emperor.

Did Horus know how much it hurt his distance? How much it hurt to witness his crave for the approval of a man made god… when you simply wished to read a book of old literature in his company?

You hated being made again this tragic effigy of the woman with the eyes of a dying lamb. You felt forgotten… a ghost from these golden walls.

But the eventual call of Erda served to stray you away from such gloom thoughts. Her psyker powers a breach through your mind’s wall but clear enough for a single sentence to make your heart take a leap out close to your throat.

“I found one of them”

You couldn’t have been faster in your life to get a lunar cruiser ready to reach the needed destination; not even willingly to explain yourself when the Emperor saw you boarding the vessel. But as always, He went and proved to still be an enigma to you thanks to his ever unnatural actions.

“Go along with her… and make sure to protect her and obey her during the travel only” his command was absolute when he addressed four of his Custodes, their impassive disposition only showing the barest of emotion when fulfilling their Emperor’s orders like a gospel, but the specifics of his directive weren’t lost to you: to obey you just this single time. Nothing more, nothing less.

Of course, you weren't ungrateful to his gesture and thanked him deeply for it with a kiss to the palm of his armored hand when he caressed your cheek, but He quickly dismissed the matter. He knew what you were about to do and it wasn't like he Himself hadn’t been picking any possible clues to find the other Primarchs out there that you two wholeheartedly believed to still be alive.

Sometimes you wondered if the Emperor had managed to have a tiny, small part of instinctual fatherhood to be awakened within him after all the time he had spent with Horus. It was a nice thought. A hopeful one, but you knew better than to get your expectations up.

Once settled inside the cruiser, the coordinates were introduced to start the travel to retrieve one of your children.

Erda’s voice still echoing inside your mind when she told you the planet that you needed to search for: Nuceria.

-°-

The sight had been painful.

The worst nightmare a mother could ever expect.

Your arrival had been anything but discret at the revolting planet of Nuceria, having been informed of the life that the elites carried at the expense of the blood and flesh of slaves forced to fight for any resemblance of survival by their supposed masters. The irony wasn’t lost on you, but millenia of serving the Emperor had made you receptive to his ideals and methods. Justifying your own purpose by standing on his side could derive a vulnerability that you weren’t ready to confront. You needed to believe in the Emperor even if he took too far the phrase “Any means justify the end”.

After all, immortality has only made it easier for your troubling love to persevere longer in your stubborn heart and for fickle human lives to become an afterthought. You were well aware that you weren’t any better than Him in the ever present inhumanity you carried. 

When your child had looked at your direction, imposing form towering over your smaller frame and covered in so many slashes and blood, your heart had seized in a painful knot. Those scars were injuries you hadn’t been able to sooth with compassion. You had failed your son and that was something you’ll never forgive yourself.

The only mercy you could offer was to take him away from this wretched place.

Just when you were ready to take a step towards him, you saw his eyes harden and his posture change in defense with squared up shoulders. A warning if you decided to go against him and the thorn inside your chest only bled even more.

The Custodes that had escorted you as per their orders maintained a cold and terrifying disposition, deterring any of the guards surrounding you and your son’s tribe to take a last step. The commotion at the fighting pit had been great but you cared little for these people and their sick sense of entertainment. Fighting was an art of the honorable and the strong; to be used in epic battles to build history and civilizations. Using it as a careless trick was absolutely insulting.

It was beyond you to do this. Against any of the natural ingrained fighting instinct that had saved you for years, but the desperation of a mother overrode any of that to mere dust and motivated you to do the one thing you wished to believe will make your son realize who you were.

“I’ve been dreaming of finding you… for so long. I’m here now, my son”

And you saw it behind his hardened eyes, and you rejoiced in the recesses of your mind. There was a semblance of recognition shining through his stare at the timbre of your voice.

A far away lullaby that accompanied him in his lowest moments.

An step became two, then three and so on until you found yourself right at your child’s side after a few strides, hand gently touching his roughed one until the grip over his twin axe became slack, allowing you to take a better hold in an attempt to convey all the encapsulated emotions that stormed within your soul.

Grief, sadness, frustration, longing, relief… love.

You’ve been waiting for so long.

No one moved beyond you, tugging his huge arm towards you while softly telling him “It’s time to go home”, but those words instead of making him relax in your presence, had the opposite as his stance became once again defensive. At least this time he genuinely looked conflicted on the matter, glancing back at the other slaves that simply stayed behind as mere spectators of the whole encounter, unable to properly react when not just a few moments ago they were ready to lose their lives in the pits.

Ah, you understood.

“I can’t… not without my people…” he seemed to want add more into that sentence, his eyes straying just a little towards a man that looked to be quite tall by mortal standards, covered in too many scars that told stories of his battles in this wretched place but carrying himself with enough dignity to be respected.

This is where you must make a decision that will carry quite the weight. You knew that there was space enough to carry the slaves, not comfortably, but it could be arranged to be a thigh fit. You knew He wouldn’t even have hesitated at the idea of just forcibly taking your son and leaving all these humans to die with their fate already chosen. The Emperor had no time to dwell in the aspects of mercy and compassion, you could acknowledge that very well and that had been the main reason he had kept you long enough around. To remind him about the nostalgia of the humanity he once possessed. He couldn’t provide the proper love Horus and these children dreamed of… so you would carry that responsibility and dry your heart to make sure your precious sons knew they were loved no matter what.

Your loyalty will always belong to the Emperor, just as much as your body, soul and mind… but you didn’t belong to yourself too anymore… the pittance of individuality you were sure to hold crumbled into dust once you had wished to be the mother of these children and that was something you would proudly carry.

And so, your decision was made.

“Custodes!” you call them, their attention fully on you now and waiting for your command. The grasp over your son’s hand became tighter in an attempt to reassure him once you felt him go tense at your stern tone. He had probably expected the worst and that notion only made something vile twist inside your stomach. “We will be taking the slaves with us too”

There was a beat of uncertainty and you could already guess that this choice would not be well received by the Emperor… but that was something you were willingly to bear over your shoulders like many times you have done in the past.

Things will work out. You can only trust blind hope, but that is enough for now.

You stretch your arm towards his face with some effort, for he is still taller than you, but he lets his head tilt towards you to help a bit and gives you the chance to offer a sweet caress over his cheek. You can feel the rough texture of his messy shave, of the scars, and your heart throbs painfully when you think about all the hardships he had to face.

You couldn’t assure him a better life away from battle, but you could at least give him the solace of a greater future along for his people.

“I’m here now… and I will not abandon you… ever” there had been an edge of something feral in your tone. The side you rarely showed but a reminder of why you had been beside the Emperor this long.

You hoped Horus would be open at the idea of some siblings.

Just messing around with this idea, don't get ya hopes up pls.

Love ya, fellas!

[j4gm]

SPOILERS!!! REFERENCES AND EASTER EGGS IN F&C ep. 8: JERRY

The last of four posts for today.

This episode has a very dark setting. This is the universe where The Lich wished for the extinction of all life. There is nothing here. This establishing shot features the Squirrel's apple cart, from a few episodes ago, but he is long dead and it is long abandoned.

We are introduced to a new cosmic entity, Orbo, who is Scarab's boss but is not to be mistaken for Prismo's boss, whose identity remains a mystery.

Simon name drops a whole bunch of magical items from the original Adventure Time series; the Armour of Zeldron from Blood Under the Skin, the Wand of Dispersement from Sons of Mars, the Porcelain Lamb from Beyond This Earthly Realm, and the magic beans from The Pods.

This episode suggests that the nature of Simon and Betty's relationship was initially quite unhealthy. He was one of her lecturers, and she had an infatuation with him from first sight.

This illustration features the ancient wizards who sealed Coconteppi beneath Wizard City in the Distant Lands episode of the same name.

Simon's expedition to find the Enchiridion was first mentioned in the newspaper clipping in I Remember You, and was mentioned again in Temple of Mars.

BMO apparently survived The Lich's wish because he isn't technically alive. I wonder where Neptr and the other MOs are. Cannibalised for batteries, perhaps. Also, that BRB note is very sad and is identical to the one Finn wrote in Blenanas.

There are various familiar items in the thawed out remains of the Ice Kingdom; ninja paraphernalia from The Chamber of Frozen Blades, Ice King's diary from The Empress Eyes, and of course the tape collection from Holly Jolly Secrets.

Here's a deep cut: That machine in the background to the right of Simon is the machine that held the lightning power that Finn went to steal in What is Life, so that he could power up Neptr. The Demonic Wishing Eye is also in this shot.

For a single frame, Ice King and Gunter can be seen reduced to skeletons. Presumably this was the exact moment that the Lich's wish took effect. Everyone died instantly, in less than a frame.

When I watched this episode for the first time I was confused about where Fionna got the working crown. But you can just about see it inside the drum in this shot, where Ice King mentioned he had put it in his tape.

This is the exact moment the photograph was taken for the newspaper clipping seen in I Remember You.

We first heard the story about how Simon met Betty after they tried to check out the same library book in Broke His Crown. It's cool to see it playing out for real.

Simon throws a pebble at the window and accidentally hits Babette in the face, exactly like Finn and Jake did to Kim Kil Whan in the episode Ocarina.

This is the second time Simon caused Betty to miss this research trip to Australia. She says in Temple of Mars that she never got the opportunity to go, and resolves that her life might not have been so messed up if she'd followed her own dreams instead of following Simon's.

The song in this scene, the motif of which has been heard throughout the series, is by Half Shy, who also wrote "Monster" for Obsidian.

BMO is buried with a paper flower because there are no real ones left alive. His death seemed pointlessly cruel.

THE LICH! He is in his half-disguised Billy form, confirming that this is his wish-altered reality. Like in his other appearances, the first line he speaks is a single word command. This time, the command is "Cease." But with nothing left to do he has become depressed, and he doesn't bother killing our protagonists.

And finally, we are left on this cliffhanger. Fionna and Cake have returned to their world. Scarab has convinced the boss that Simon must be destroyed. And GOLBetty is here to claim them both while the Lich watches on.

This episode's dream features a pair of Lich skulls either side an effigy of GOLB.

[nimbudcat]

Dahlia, the cults architect and one of the lambs first followers. She was rescued in the Darkwood after escaping silks cradle, where she would have been sacrificed to Shamura in his likeness, raised from birth to be burned in an effigy.

She is the very reason why the cult has thrived so well, the homes she builds sturdy and warm enough to get them through the winter while her silk clothing kept them cool them in the hot, beating summer. She designed the aqueducts and bathing houses in the cult later, when they were not so close to deaths door as the lamb grew more and more powerful.