#this post is unrebloggable so Catholic Tumblr™️ doesn't get ahold of it. replies are welcome

[hauntedfalcon]

thinking about how my husband lamented that Rings of Power doesn't do much with the Valar. thinking about how the Queen of Numenor says faith is a thin thread to hang a nation from, which runs counter to... most of recorded human history, not to mention Tolkien's works, where multiple nations of men awaited their True King to deliver them into a golden age, and Boromir's declaration that "Gondor needs no king" signified faithlessness and that was a negative thing. thinking about how there are articles out there to explain why Galadriel was upset in Rings of Power, to explain that she turned her back on elf heaven, on the selfsame far green country with whose description Gandalf moved us all to tears in Return of the King, and she chose ruin and the world

thinking yet again about how Cersei Lannister blows up a whole church because the Sparrows had become more influential than the crown, and a handful of episodes later she says "hey smallfolk, come into the castle keep to stay safe from this battle" and the smallfolk... do it, instead of saying "fuck no, that's the lady with the wildfire who killed our beloved priests and committed the worst possible blasphemies, and this matters to us because we are peasants and the only thing in our lives is work and religion" and there were no further repercussions because apparently the influential state religion of Westeros was one building and a cool catchphrase

thinking about Tess of the Road, which I almost did not finish because wow it's grueling to be a woman in a fantasy novel isn't it? thinking about the spiritual epiphany it grants its title character in the midst of a kneejerk "Catholicism but even more oppressive" setting because it reads easily I guess (see also all the Dragon Age games). still haven't unpacked all my thoughts from that one tbh but it's rolling around in there and it will be for a while

thinking about how almost nobody wants to write characters who have relationships with their gods, even in fantasy, a genre where characters could have very literal relationships with their gods, be they adversarial or positive or realistically messy. thinking about how writers seem not to want to touch that, either because it's too messy or because of an impression that society is beyond that. thinking about how this extends beyond the fantasy genre. thinking about how sterile Station Eleven's post-apocalypse felt and how part of that was a lack of folk practices or any spiritualism apart from the antagonist's obviously bad oppressive pseudo-Christianity. thinking about Anne McCaffrey insisting there is no religion on Pern in the far future, versus, like, everything about Deep Space Nine. thinking about how Battlestar Galactica felt ballsy as fuck for having monotheistic Cylons and polytheistic humans, but in the end that thread and the implications of robots worshiping a god just... never went anywhere

thinking about how, when religion is included in a work of fiction, it’s almost always with a wink wink, nudge nudge, you know and I know how backward and bogus this is, but it’s almost never played straight, much less validated in the narrative (I love you Netflix’s Shadow and Bone). and when it is portrayed as a positive influence in people's lives, it's in the vaguest, always culturally-Christian, terms of "light" and "darkness" and "hope". thinking about how Midnight Mass told a story about people who took so much comfort in their religion that even after it turned them into vampires and destroyed their community they sang hymns as the sun rose, and how that was such a foreign thing that a lot of the audience found it unbelievable

thinking about the extra layer of hypocrisy in defending a work of fantasy by saying "it was just like that back then" when a) there was no back then because it's fantasy, and b) the work in question ignores the foundational role religion played throughout the medieval Europe all these fantasy worlds use as a template

thinking about how art is meant to nurture the soul, but increasingly neglects to grant one to its characters

thinking about how if we can't imagine a world where people have a spiritual life that isn't just a tool of oppression, how can we create one

thinking about how much I love the Queen's Thief series and Arthdal Chronicles