#the novel is not bad if you aren't forced to study it at school

[greypetrel]

A small trip down one minimal character design choice...

#and josie's headpiece too! in this piece

I AM SO GLAD SOMEONE ASKED ABOUT IT. :D (so I can fangirl for a while over little trips of research I did)

Josie's headpiece is actually inspired by a regional Italian style from Lombardy (the region where Milan is, North, just above the peninsula)! Antiva is clearly Venice (motion: allow me to gift some spritz to Zevran in Origin), and back in the day Venice and Milan were biting at each other's neck... But the Inquisition symbol, so spiky, reminded me a lot of this hairstyle, very popular in XVII century Lombardy and featured in one of our most famous novels ever, Alessandro Manzoni's the Bethroted:

This hairstyle is very typical of the areas north of Milan, comprehending the surroundings of Como, Lecco, Varese and the Brianza (the area between Milan and the lakes). It was worn in special occasions and festive days by young girls who were of suitable age for marriage, but still unmarried.

It consists of long braids collected on the back of the head in a chignon, pinned in place with a long metal rod on the base -called a "sponton"- and decorated on both hands, and a set of long pins called "spadinn" ("little swords") placed to form a fan/crown/halo shape.

The material of the pins varied according to the possibilities of the family: froom the cheapest wood, to copper and brass, going up to silver and even gold. The outer extremity of the pins also were more or less decorated, the richest could have pearls and filigree, the poorest had just a wider concave shape similar to a spoon (and indeed they were also called "cugiaritt", little spoons).

The number varies from town to town and family to family, there's a range going from 24 to 47 (!) in Lecco, or 30 to 40 in Varese, and the tradition went that parents gifted one pin to their daughter from their First Communion (Catholicism yay, it usually happens when you're 10/11), and one for each birthday until they married.

A postcard featuring a girl from Lombardy in traditional dress.

This tho is Empress Charlotte of Mexico, an Habsburg princess, with a traditional Lombardy hairstyle! (most of the north of Italy, except for Piedmont and Turin, was under Austrian rule by then and until 1861)

This is not typical of Venice, and really Milan/Lombardy and Venezia/Veneto are two separate entities, still I thought that it could be a good way to fit a variation of this, shaping it more like an Inquisition eye... And that's my research pit of today.

All the sources I found are in Italian, unfortunately, but I found this website that explains it in english, with a lot of photos!

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Thank you for your moral guidance, Mature Content.

"The best way to convince you of my imaginary space wizard is for you to be in mortal distress and abject despair... which my god with a cosmic plan set into motion in the first place," isn't the win you think it is.

"Maybe you'll believe my nonsense if you're frantic and under duress," doesn't look as good as you think it does.

This is just a subtle way of admitting that reasonable people don't believe in your unreasonable claims. You have to wait until they're at their most unreasonable, most vulnerable, most irrational moment of their lives before your unreasonable, irrational claims can find traction. Because well-adjusted people can't be convinced by the straightforward "truth" of your claims. Mostly because, as you accidentally admitted, it's obviously not true.

That's how predators work. They create or wait for vulnerabilities, something they can exploit for their own ends. Placing yourself rather proudly and overtly into "predator" territory is an odd, yet clearly on-brand, move. I'll give you props for being so open and unapologetic about sticking with old-school exploitation, rather than something novel and risky, like "show the evidence," or "explain clearly and with facts why it's true."

In any event, it doesn't matter who you call upon; there is no prayer that stops a plane from falling out of the sky, or bounces your car harmlessly off a tree. Magic spells aren't real. Even when one person crawls out of the wreckage and you celebrate the "miracle," you're celebrating, like a complete psychotic, that everybody else didn't make it.

If your delusion was true, we could trivially tell by who survives or recovers or who makes it out of a bad situation. It would be obvious because believers of the "true" belief would be more successful, recover faster or at higher proportions, get parking spots and college admission disproportionately more often. Everybody, including believers, know they do not. Believers in your delusion die at the same rate as both non-believers, and those of every other delusion. A believer dies of cancer, while the non-believer in the bed next door recovers.

The efficacy of prayer has been studied. There is exactly no difference between you crying out to your god, or crying out to Odin, Superman or Mary Poppins. Statistically, you're better off calling out to Batman. It's far more probable that a wealthy businessman is running around saving people in a bat outfit, than an invisible celestial demon is plotting bad things to happen to people so they'll be convinced that it exists and fall in love with it.

You know your belief is nonsense, because you're forced to say stupid things like you just did, instead of simply pointing to the irrefutable statistics. Except, they, like your imaginary space demon, don't exist. The reason you felt compelled to say something so idiotic at all was not even for mine or anyone else's benefit, but for your own. It's an obvious, vacuous platitude that functions as a thought-terminating cliche. It's a basic psychological trick that you play on yourself to stop you from finally having to actually contemplate your beliefs. If you say the stupid line, your brain gives you a little buzz as a reward, then goes back to what it was doing.

"Whew, that was close."

Meanwhile, worshiping the monster who sends something bad to happen to you is pretty much the definition of an abusive relationship. If that's your fetish - or, clearly, one of your many sexual perversions - then that's your business. But the sick shit you do in your bedroom with your "god" needs to stay there, not out in public for you to try and coerce others into participating in it. Your perverted lifestyle is not my business, so keep it away of my business. Stop inviting me into your sick fetish fantasies, I'm not interested.

Most well-adjusted people prefer healthy relationships with real people, rather than degrading sado-masochism with an imaginary Santa Claus knock-off.

"God. For people who are not strong enough to cope with reality."