#to take down demonic eugenicists

[mirielvairenen]

Let’s add space travel! Tolkien could have teamed up with the angels of the other planets (who he met when he got kidnapped to Mars and only could speak to because of his linguist skills) to purge the demonic Nazis who are causing the Blitz. Also Merlin should wake up just because. By CS Lewis

I have a very rough idea in my head that I don't think I can clearly articulate beyond "And that concludes tonight's reports on German air forc—WHAT'S THIS? IT'S KING ARTHUR WITH A STEEL CHAIR"

[harpagornis]

Phyrexia and Black mana

As much as this man was an entitled incel, he still believed in a specific philosophy.

Phyrexia in MTG has been tied overtly to Black mana. In old flavor all phyrexians were black aligned (barring a few errata'd ones) and even by the time of New Phyrexia, when Phyrexia had access to all colours, it is still predominantly in Black (though in Scars of Mirrodin Green was framed as the second most phyrexian color, and an All Will be One and March of the Machine White has essentially become the de facto phyrexian color after Black).

A lot of this essentially boils down to three things: "elemental" aspects of the color pie, old villains being mostly Black, and marketing.

Is Phyrexia a Black system/philosophy?

I'd argue no, not really. "Progressive evolution" as Phyresis means simply means acquiring perfection through mettalurgy (Blue) and eugenics through survival of the fittest (Green). Both new and Old Phyrexia had strict religious hierarchies and scriptures, so White always felt at home. Overally, I'd see Phyrexia as a civilisation as a dark take on Bant, which seems to be the direction New Phyrexia under Elesh Norn is heading.

Now, Yawgmoth WAS Black aligned. The Thran throughly depicts him as an entitled, narcissistic freak, and you can argue that by the later stages of the Weatherlight Saga he abandoned all philosophy for the sake of petty revenge. But given his philosophy at least in The Thran, there's an argument to be made that he is Sultai, since he does believe in phyresis in its eugenicist purpose.

Ultimately, Old Phyrexia was mono-Black simply as an extension of Yawgmoth, and even then I'd argue other colours were present. The pneumagogs, for example, were pretty white aligned.

The elemental reason

MTG may have complex philosophies, but often things are of a certain colour just because that color controls an element. This is why you often hear of "wet blue" among the vorthos, where giant creatures better fitting in Green are mono-Blue due to being aquatic.

Phyrexia is matter of factly an undead faction. Phyresis destroys the body and implicitly the soul (though the Pneumagogs and Jin-Gitaxias experiments show that the soul can be preserved), so a compleated being is always brought back as a husk via necromancy. Black is the colour of necromantic magic, so it makes sense Phyrexia is Black aligned due to that.

However, other colours have steadily have had necromancy. Best seen is in the Lorehold College of Strixhaven, where spirits are ressurected, the mummies of Amonkhet which are mostly white aligned (albeit thanks to some curating and embalming) and the various Blue zombies we've had since Innistrad. Both Green and White have ressurection mechanics, so it's not out of flavor to depict them as engaging in necromancy, albeit perhaps a more "bring back to life" style than Black's puppet style.

Thus, while the elemental aspect probably means phyrexians will always be at home in Black, other colours can do it too.

Fundamentalist Shenigans

During the late 90's/early 2000's, MTG banned demons due to evengalist protests. The satanic scare wasn't satisfied with Pokemon or Harry Potter, so even an innocent card game had to pay. On the plus side, we've gotten quite a biting satire in the form of the Church of Tal.

To replace demons, horrors became Black's iconics, replacing the satanic with the lovecraftian. And Phyrexia was horror-haven, so for a while they were depicted as THE Black aligned faction. This endured even well after demons returned to the game.

Note that White here is represented by an angel while Black is represented by a horror, presumably phyrexian.

Prior to phyrexian being a creature type, horror was the default type for phyrexian creatures, so unsurprisingly this further enhanced their image as horrorland.

Eventually, horrors would spread to other colors, and eventually so did phyrexia.

Tentative Steps

Scars of Mirrodin was when New Phyrexia debuted, the glistening oil charged with the mana of all five suns of Mirrodin. This meant a phyrexia now equally divided into five colours. Even then, there was still the overt connection to Black; all colours were given mechanics and effects more in line with Black than how they usually operate, and the default phyrexian token, the germ, was still Black aligned.

From Kaldheim onwards, Phyrexia has been become more "normal" mechanics wise, the only deviation being White having access to poison counters. The redesigned praetors are now not out of place for normal MTG cards of their colours, and the germ was replaced by the colourless mite as the default phyrexian token.

Conclusion

Had phyrexian been designed today, I guarantee a five colour menace would be there since day one. As it stands, we see a slow but meticulous process of lessening Black's role in the Phyrexian identity, and I hope more non-Black phyrexian cards are to come in March of the Machine.

[sebastianshaw]

(flings a not-anon back at you XD) How does he handle feeling scared? Does he enjoy horror? Does he believe in the paranormal? What calms him down? Does he have any scary stories?

Shaw reacts to fear with anger and, if he can, retaliation. He refuses to LET himself indulge in fear, or at least recognize it as such, because that would be WEAKNESS! So he just reacts externally by getting PISSED to cover it. I don't think he sees the POINT of horror. Like he just doesn't get it. In Marvel, the paranormal isn't really a matter of belief, it's just an objective fact. He's dealt with more than one sorceress, he's under a family curse, he's punched demons in the face, and he's had sex with a ghost. But if he were a real-world person, I think he'd absolutely poo-poo it. What calms him down when he's scared is regaining a sense of control over a situation. Like forming a plan, or realizing that whatever has frightened him can be fought/hurt. He's a "if it bleeds, we can kill it!" kind of guy. For calming in general? A good glass (or five) of whiskey. His scary stories include having an evil eugenicist implant his DNA into him as a child under the guise of a doctor so that said DNA would take over him and remake him, body and mind, into the dude that implanted it. . .but honestly he'd say his main horror story is that his son turned out a disappointment DX @ratwhsprs

[toxicsamruby]

comparative post abt supernatural and revolutionary girl utena :( tw for incest, csa, abuse, and a brief mention of suicide. Also, spoilers for rgu.

supernatural and revolutionary girl utena (the anime. i havent seen the movie or read the manga this post is abt the show only) hit a lot of the same thematic notes and it is really striking because supernatural seems to hit them by accident and ends up with a totally different conclusion and when you compare it to rgu actually ends up endorsing everything that rgu criticized.

revolutionary girl utena is a surrealist show about ohtori academy, which is removed from reality and controlled by a godlike figure, akio. akio maintains his own power through grooming the students in his care and having them reproduce power dynamics, namely the system of gender, through abuse, violence, and bullying. akio sexually abuses his own younger sister, anthy, and multiple other students over the course of the show, and in turn, boys in attendance at this school learn abusive patterns of behavior while girls are conditioned to accept them. the key themes of the show are cycles of abuse, violence in gender roles, and the way interpersonal gender-based abuse feeds into the larger system of gender and misogyny and vice versa. the fact that ohtori is so removed from reality, that all the fighting and abuse that takes place inside of it is isolated from the "real world," is important; extremely stringent gender roles are reified as natural and necessary, as is akio's power, despite the fact both are social constructs.

surface level, supernatural couldn't be more different, yeah. but it actually does hit similar notes: the system of hunting is removed from the "real world," and although the characters tend to weave between the supernatural and normal worlds, there is always a level of separation between them and normalcy, there's always the sense that the supernatural world is almost entirely distinct from the normal one. even when they do mix, the subplot is resolved, and by the next episode or the next season the mix is forgotten about, as if the real world had never been touched by the supernatural at all. it is considered of paramount importance that "normal people" are never told about hunting but never explained why (this rule, at least originally, is made by john. an abusive figure of authority making arbitrary rules of isolation to control the children in his charge? hm.)

this level of isolation between the supernatural and the "real world" helps to reify the concept of monstrosity itself: within the world of hunting, anything other than human is a monster, even though these definitions are constantly shifting and the consequences for monstrosity change frequently. we are shown over and over again, textually, that there are many many sentient monsters with thoughts and feelings and emotions and needs and desires, who are just as morally complex as any human beings, but most of them end up under the control of hunters or exterminated anyway. why IS a monster a monster? the separation of hunting from normalcy serves to keep people from asking that question. the system of hunting is so entrenched in the world of the supernatural, and the world of the supernatural is so separated from normalcy, that the concept of monstrosity is considered to be natural and necessary. where a "normal" person might ask why those vampires in 'last holiday' had to be killed bc they didn't really do anything wrong on screen, hunters know that monsters need to die because that's the rules of the supernatural world.

in rgu, akio maintains his control of ohtori through the hierarchy of gender. that's how the school is structured, with boys playing a specific role and girls playing the counterpart role. akio needs that system, because it's what facilitates his abuse of anthy, and his abuse of anthy (and similar relationships where boys abuse girls and more specifically brothers abuse sisters) is what gives the rest of the system permission to continue existing. touga grooms and later sexually assaults his younger sister nanami. touga is a human child, no older than 16 years old, and was himself groomed by akio and the system in which he lives. his abuse of nanami is a manifestation of that system. these abusive relationships allow and are allowed by the system. at the end of the show, utena and anthy, two girls abused by akio, help one another escape not only their abuser but the school which permitted and fed off of their abuse. their escape doesn't destroy akio or ohtori or the system as a whole, but it puts a crack in it. it serves as a example to other abused children, and offers a path to healing. overall, its a genuinely impactful story about how gendered abuse happens, how damaging sibling abuse and incest is, and how a system of power both facilitates and depends upon abusive relationships happening within it.

the interesting thing about this is that supernatural's system of power is different (monsters and humans instead of girls and boys), but it's also enforced in similar ways by the god figure (well. the literal biblical god, actually. chuck.) in supernatural. monsters and human beings are divinely separated both in the afterlife (despite the arbitrary nature of the difference between them) and on earth (chuck has written down everything ahead of time, especially surrounding the protagonist hunters and their way of life). sam is established very early on to be monstrous, first because of the demon blood, then as lucifer's chosen vessel, later as soulless. each time, he needs to be brought back under human/hunter control, meaning dean's control. dean's authority over sam (and later his abuse of him) is in part a manifestation of the accepted power dynamic of hunter over monster, which is established at the beginning of season 2 when john tells dean that he might have to kill sam if he becomes a monster.

in rgu, the only acceptable male-female dynamic is controller and controlled, protector and protected, abuser and abused. women can only be witches, like anthy, or princesses, like nanami. in supernatural, the only acceptable human-monster dynamic is the same. monsters can only be 1. dead, or 2. under the control or supervision of a human/hunter. most end up dead, of course, but sam was always under the supervision of dean. it's at dean's discretion whether or not to kill sam in season 2, it's dean who's trying to get control of sam all through seasons 4 and 6. because of sam's self hatred about his monstrosity and "disappointing dean," he nearly kills himself at the end of season 8, and dean again makes major decisions for sam. the imbalanced dynamic between them is in large part because sam's humanity is always in question, and it's always up to dean to protect him, to control him, to put him down if need be. in supernatural, the imbalanced relationship btwn sam and dean is facilitated by the rules of the supernatural world, and it is because they can't break out of this power imbalance that they are so completely incapable of rethinking the system of hunting.

of course, it isn't 100% dean's fault. he was given the responsibility of Sam by john and by the bigger system of hunting. touga was groomed and most likely abused by akio, and it was only in imitation and admiration of akio that he abused nanami in the first place. in the context of hunting, it's dean's job to do harm, because that's the job that's been assigned to him by his father, the larger power system, and chuck. he was abused, and he also suffers by being forced into this role- he can't really connect with the people he cares about in a meaningful way. that's how the cycle continues.

the weird difference between the two? the system of hunting is never actually criticized, and the relationship between dean and sam is never addressed as abuse. so while revolutionary girl utena is a thoughtful and compassionate exploration of sibling abuse and gender, supernatural is a hamfisted action story that validates unhealthy family dynamics and eugenicist ideas about "monsters" that aren't really monsters at all. so at the end of rgu, utena and anthy break free of ohtori and akio. they end the cycles of abuse and are finally able to see each other outside of the roles prescribed to them by an abusive system. at the end of supernatural, the cycle isn't broken, the idea of monstrosity remains unrefuted, and sam and dean never see each other any differently than they always have.

[happymetalgirl]

Cattle Decapitation - Death Atlas

No vocalist this decade has been more innovative for extreme metal as Travis Ryan has with his diversity of snarls, growls, and screams stretching into uncharted melodic territory on the past few Cattle Decapitation albums, and no other band has been more vital and consistently creative for deathgrind as Cattle Decapitation has been for a long time now. The band have always taken a particularly uncomfortably gnarly and confrontational approach to the dicey topics of human mistreatment of animals in the food industry and the many despicable facets of species exceptionalism that humankind has operated under since the advent of mass industrialization, and their gratuitously grotesque and brutal musical and lyrical approach to such disgusting topics honestly couldn’t be more fitting for each other. I just recently picked up a physical copy of the band’s third LP, Humanure, and, looking at the lyrics, holy shit do they fit all too disgustingly well with the now-iconic cover art.

As the band’s sound has become grander since then, more stylistically unique, more polished, yet no less brutal than the goregrind on which they built their foundations, Cattle Decapitation have shifted their lyrical focus to the grander scope of self-driven environmental catastrophe and the worst case scenario of human extinction as a result of humankind’s own ecological carelessness. The band took a tremendous leap forward from the already tight and deathly goregrind of The Harvest Floor on 2012’s Monolith of Inhumanity, with Travis Ryan’s expansion of his harsh melodic range being a huge factor in that growth. But the rest of the band grew tighter and more capable of dishing out extremely intricate and technical agression at frightening speeds, and both Monolith of Inhumanity and the band’s 2015 follow-up, The Anthropocene Extinction, showed just how unbelievably versatile Cattle Decapitation could be with this style of music. I don’t want to get too hung up on reminiscing on the quality of old work with more of that quality packed into the band’s longest album to date to discuss at hand, but I don’t want to simply brush over and understate how immense the band’s past two albums have been for them and for extreme metal in general.

With Monolith of Inhumanity, Cattle Decapitation put on an absolutely baffling exhibition of a wide array of compositional protocols and instrumental and vocal techniques that broadened not only their horizons, but the horizons of deathgrind as a genre, of melody without compromising on brutality, especially on the vocal front. The band took their sickening brand of goregrind to its classically brutal extreme on the increasingly slow churn of “Forced Gender Reassignment” and the nasty grinding of “Projectile Ovulation”, but the band really pushed the boundaries of melodic terror on the vocal front on songs like “A Living, Breathing Piece of Defecating Meat”, “Your Disposal”, and “Kingdom of Tyrants”. The song with which the band really shattered the genre’s ceiling on melody was the strangely, astonishingly beautiful “Lifestalker”, on which Travis Ryan harnesses his filthy blackened snarl into a melody so emotive it’s hard to believe a band so focused on powerfully merciless brutality penned it. The album was a huge progression for Cattle Decapitation and for deathgrind, undoubtedly my favorite of the genre.

The band sought to refine their frenzied and newly dynamic grind on The Anthropocene Extinction with generally longer and more grandiose compositions like the monumental “Manufactured Extinct” and the gloriously grinding “Plagueborne” and “Pacific Grim”, while staying true to their gory roots all throughout and making sure to deliver more directly deadly blackened grinders like “The Prophets of Loss” and “Mutual Assured Destruction”. And the band did indeed give their already impressive and elevated sound an even more magnificent and grandious edge that generally isn’t associated with Cattle Decapitation or grindcore. As its title suggests, The Anthropocene Extinction marked an increase in the band’s urgency about the consequences of humanity’s careless abuse of resources and destruction of crucial ecosystems through industrial overconsumption. The band on their most recent past album sounded at least panicked and eager to call for whatever possible to mitigate the disastrous effects of humankind’s mistakes. Four years later, however, Cattle Decapitation are far less optimistic about the outcome of mankind’s abuse of its planetary home and certainly not any more sympathetic towards our species’ continued heedlessness in the face of scientific consensus on the forthcoming destruction and collapse of civilization as we know it.

As grim and forthrightly convicting as Cattle Decapitation have been in the past about how much needs to change to avoid disaster, the band sound more pessimistic than ever on Death Atlas, forecasting more than forewarning of the impending deathly consequences of our species’ prolonged malignant negligence. They play with a distinguishable air of numbness to sorrow as though the long foreseen end has already begun and that humanity is too late. Travis Ryan dips into melodic harshness more on this album than he did on even Monolith of Inhumanity, offering up eulogy after merciless eulogy for a dying species and a slowly (but not so slowly) burning world.

Indeed, Travis Ryan meditates harshly on the inevitability of the universe’s snuffing out of life grown out of control on the blackened melodic doomsday prophetics of  “The Geocide” on which he ominously sings “The universe it always find a way to purge / the sustainably inappropriate numbers that once surged”, and he is even more hopeless on the following track, “Be Still Our Bleeding Hearts”, which he opens with the line, “Every new life is a tragedy in waiting” and on which he breaks out another nastily sung/snarled melodic chorus of apocalyptic embrace over blackened deathgrind that reaches for the upper echelons of the band’s widely encompassing sound. Ryan had stated before the album’s release in a promotional interview that he wasn’t going to focus so much on overpopulation as much on this album being that he has said his piece thoroughly on albums past and that the valid ecological problem is being misdirected by modern eugenicists, yet here he calls (probably in defeated exaggeration) for mass human death, stating “Every new death is a step toward preservation”. He once again concludes in dismal defeat that “Human life is simply not sustainable”.

Ryan continues on his frustrated raging over humanity’s exponentiating population on the following song, “Vulturous”, on which it becomes clearer that he is not taking the warped, racist approach to this topic and is rather eulogizing the willful and self-inflicted destruction of so-called advanced cultures by their short-sighted capitalist urges, as evidenced by the lines “A horrible ghastly proclamation / That profits dominate what’s right” and the painfully and intentionally ironic “Living for ourselves / Anything at any time / as of tomorrow we will die”. Clearly these lines are not pinning the blame for catastrophic climate change on the usual, lower-consuming scapegoats of fascist eugenics, but rather the capitalism that exploits them and those doing the scapegoating and those who keep it in place because they have something to gain from it. Musically, the track is one of the more demonically sinister cuts on the album, with Ryan giving a particularly eerie, menacing, death-summoning vocal performance.

Indeed, while I am talking a lot about Travis Ryan’s lyrical contributions and one-of-a-kind vocal performances, I would hate to overlook the solid and vibrant instrumental foundation the rest of the band continue to provide him and Cattle Decapitation. Longtime drummer David McGraw’s jaw-droppingly lightning-injected performances continue to shine as one of the band’s major instrumental attractions as he absolutely punishes his kit at ungodly speeds with awe-inspiring technicality. Similarly fast-paced and technical strong-work continues to flow like a gushing torrent of hail from storied lead guitarist Josh Elmore and newly arrived rhythm guitar supporter Belisario Dimuzio, who together drive the album’s (and the band’s) likely under-appreciated emotional dynamic through their interplay between colossal eruptions of infernal guitar distortion and ashen atmospheric dissonance with cleaner tones when the time is right. And new bassist Olivier Pinard provides the essential foundational accents to meticulously track and support the maddeningly technical rhythms above him in the mix, and even surging up to the forefront of the mix when the rest of the band is at a lower instance of acceleration to provide his own moments of spotlighted technical brilliance as well. Together the band have continued to hone the already highly perfected form of epic deathgrind that they and no one else can channel.

Backed by particularly vicious grinding instrumentation, Travis Ryan continues to count down to calamity on “One Day Closer to the End of the World”, at first seemingly welcoming with open arms “the end of all life of this fucking planet” in a storm of hardcore-influenced guitar work, but clearly lamenting, as the song progresses, mankind’s seeming “Lust for dying” and the terrible, suffering-filled end it has set up for itself, as he closes the thundering instrumental chaos by characterizing humanity as “Out of breath, out of time - a species out of its mind”. This bend toward self-destruction is further examined throughout the more direct, technical blackened death metal of “Absolute Destitute”, which is mostly spare of the previous tracks’ melodic niceties and summed up nicely and poetically by the lines “A life in love with despair / in a world beyond repair / A global consensus that the powers that be are against us”, and Ryan essentially calls time on humanity’s soured reign over planet Earth on the fittingly apocalyptic-sounding melodic vocal and guitar dissonance and rhythmic crashing of “Time’s Cruel Curtain”, whose tragically cathartic and enigmatically beautiful sonic hideousness as a result of is truly a tough thing to describe, probably best likened to a fire-scarred martyr desperately sacrificing themselves one last time to no avail.

Travis Ryan shifts his mournful tone to a more critical one on the ruthlessly rapid-fire “Finish Them” as he concludes that “Now we see that the true evil has a face / Now we know the devil is the human race” as David McGraw’s dynamic playing shines at the track’s particularly fast pace, and Ryan subsequently imparts, furthermore, a stern warning to the opulent elites that those whose world they’ve ruined will be coming for their hides on the similarly high-octane percussive hurricane and roller coaster riff-fest of “With All Disrespect”.

Ryan does return to his more usual classically colorful beckoning of death on the surprisingly infectiously hook-laced, old-school (for the band), and darkly comedic “Bring Back the Plague”, which is an exaggerated call at wits end for exactly what the title implies, but musically one of the band’s most unique songs and a certain standout on an album filled with impressive tracks.

The band also includes a few shorter interludes to break up the relentless deathgrind, “The Great Dying”, “The Great Dying II”, and “The Unerasable Past”, which are strung with excerpts detailing the sequences of events that have led to humanity’s current predicament, including “55 Languages of Planet Earth” from NASA’s Voyager Space Probe on the intro track, “Anthropogenic: End Transmission”.

On the titular closing track, Travis Ryan offers his last sorrowless dirge for humanity as he screams “We deserve everything that’s coming” across the epic nine-minute firestorm of crunchy guitar riffage, furiously firing double-bass, and biblically monolithic death howls that wrap the album up in cinematically grand fashion without sacrificing any of the brutality of the band’s grind. And while the song’s second half isn’t quite the dizzying crush the first half is, the gradual fade out into an operatic lamentation for a biosphere’s graceless end is a fitting one for the image of the Earth humanity’s last days careening away into the void of space in abject meaninglessness to the rest of the universe and whatever may fill humankind’s empty place at square one of rebuilding a new civilization.

Given how greatly I still admire Monolith of Inhumanity and the Anthropocene Extinction obviously my expectations for death Atlas were pretty high. Yet Cattle decapitation still managed to surprise and around me with melodicism greater than even that which characterized Monolith of Inhumanity, incredibly surprisingly infectious hooks, and gripping, terrifyingly bleak prophetic lyricism amid consistently thrilling instrumental performances that continue to prove what a tremendous force to be reckoned with and what an important band Cattle Decapitation is and has been. While Cattle Decapitation are far from the only band addressing the huge, overbearing impending doom of environmental Armageddon, and while the novelty of the melodicism of the band’s terrifying assault and nauseating goring has worn off since Monolith of Inhumanity, Cattle Decapitation has expanded it to further elevate the grandiosity they cultivated on The Anthropocene Extinction to produce a swan song for the planet unlike any other. Truly, there are few bands more important today for metal than Cattle Decapitation is, and there is no situation more dire than humanity’s arrogant and self-assured loitering on the brink of civilizational downfall. And while a deathgrind album probably isn’t the kind of art piece that will pull humankind back from the edge, the uncompromisingly ugly and truly hellish portrayal of the world’s collapse on it makes Death Atlas the album the world needs and humanity deserves for its compounded failures. And I also suppose it’s quite fitting that the band releases this album on America’s frustratingly ironically times national holiday of celebrating capitalist consumerism after a day of supposed giving thanks whose tradition is warped to hide its ugly genocidal historical origin. Undoubtedly one of the most crucial albums of its time, one of the year’s, one of the decade’s, and Cattle Decapitation’s best.

And I count the days ‘til we expire for always/10

[aion-rsa]

Warrior Nuns Through TV History

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

TV nunning is a broad church. Sometimes, it’s all gunfire, demon-dissolving punches and running through walls, as in Netflix’s latest comic book adaptation Warrior Nun. In that show, a mystical artifact gives a non-believing teen superpowers passed down the generations from holy sister to holy sister. Defeat the demons, protect the world, praise the Lord, and so on.

Other fictional TV nuns lead quieter, more cake-focused lives, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t also fighters. You might say that like superheroes, not all warrior nuns wear capes. You’d be wrong – nuns definitely wear capes. They’re called mantles and though roomy and practical, likely represent a significant time commitment with regard to ironing.

Warrior Nun‘s superpowered teen follows in the echoey footsteps of a whole conventful of fictional TV nuns remembered here – some good, some bad, some inordinately fond of biscuits, but all, in their own way, warriors.

Sister Mary Loquacious in Good Omens (2019)

Played by: Nina Sosanya

Allegiance: Satanic nuns of the Chattering Order of St Beryl

Warrior level: Novice

Weapon of choice: Infantilising baby talk of hoofikins and widdle demonic tails

Specialism: Biscuits with pink icing

Most likely to say: ‘Fancy me holding the Antichrist! Counting his little toesy-woesies!’

Getting into heaven? Absolutely not

Demon Crowley and angel Aziraphale may have been Good Omens’ major players, but Sister Mary Loquacious kicked off the whole mess by accidentally confusing the infant Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Prince of this World and Lord of Darkness with the human child of a couple from the Oxfordshire village of Tadfield. Easily done.

Sister Agatha in Dracula (2020)

Played by: Dolly Wells

Allegiance: The Army of the Faithful, St Mary’s Convent of Budapest

Warrior level: Intellectually? Top Tier. She’s Dracula’s ‘every nightmare at once: an educated woman in a crucifix’

Weapon of choice: Wooden stakes and double-barrel wit

Specialism: Scientific rigour and one-liners

Most likely to say: ‘A house of God is it? Well that’s good, we could do with a man about the place, eh sister?’

Getting into heaven? Ja, if she cared to grace it with her presence.

Unfazed, brave, funny and intellectually curious, Dutch-born Agatha put both her faith and folklore to the test when she took on Count Dracula, meticulously gathering research on his powers and learning the rules of the beast to try to use them against him. A true scientist and quite a woman.

Sister Michael in Derry Girls (2018)

Played by: Siobhan McSweeney

Allegiance: Our Lady Immaculate College/Rawhide

Warrior level: Untested in battle but doubtless lethal

Weapon of choice: Apathy, withering sarcasm and eye-rolls

Specialism: Judo (on Fridays)

Most likely to say: ‘Sweet suffering Jehovah’

Getting into heaven? I wouldn’t be the one to stop her.

You won’t find an ounce of sentiment beneath this wimple, Sister Michael’s dry disdain for the pupils at Our Lady Immaculate is expressed only through cutting remarks and declarations of boredom. Not a fan of priests, the French, love songs or… most things, she’s an authority figure for the Derry Girls. Every so often though, like when she turned a blind eye to Erin and co. distributing their banned lesbianism-focused edition of the school magazine, she’ll surprise you.

Sister Jane Ingalls in Orange is the New Black (2013)

Played by: Beth Fowler

Allegiance: Catholicism

Warrior level: Basically nil as she’s a committed pacifist, though she does punch Gloria in the mouth at one point for PR

Weapon of choice: Civil disobedience and the Good Book

Specialism: Activism

Most likely to say: ‘I was afraid nunning was going to be boring!’

Getting into heaven? Sure

As a young novice in the 1960s, Ingalls fell in with the bad nuns and got a taste for non-violent activism. A bunch of protests and a memoir later (full points for the title: Nun Shall Pass), and the church didn’t want anything to do with her, neglecting to cover her legal fees after she handcuffed herself to a nuclear facility, landing her in Litchfield.

Sister Harriet in Hunters (2019)

Played by: Kate Mulvany

Allegiance: Anti-Nazi, Pro-Quip

Warrior level: Top level. A highly capable operative.

Weapon of choice: Gun, blowtorch, you name it

Specialism: Threats of extreme violence delivered in the voice of a Downton Abbey marchioness.

Most likely to say: ‘I will set you aflame, child’

Getting into heaven? There’s some intrigue as to her real deal but she certainly seems to be on the right side of history.

This MI6 agent/Nazi-hunting nun from Amazon Prime’s Hunters is something of a Scary Poppins. She does an excellent line in death threats and action-movie quips. She’s deadly, has a shady backstory, speaks in a cut-glass English accent and is fond of biscuits. In other words: our kind of nun.

Matron Casp in Doctor Who ‘New Earth’ (2006)

Played by: Doña Croll

Allegiance: Sisters of Plenitude

Warrior level: Merciless eugenicist

Weapon of choice: Cat claws and science

Specialism: Incinerating conscious and begging-for-help human cloning experiments without a spark of fellow-feeling.

Most likely to say: ‘Who needs arms when we have claws’

Getting into heaven? Nah. Space prison more like.

The Sisters of Plenitude, healers on New Earth, may have called their work ‘the tender application of science’ but ‘the incredibly painful application of bastard cruelty’ better sums up their human cloning farm. This order takes a lifelong vow to help and mend, but clearly not to do no harm. And their hospital doesn’t even have a shop.

Abbess Hild in The Last Kingdom (2015-)

Played by: Eva Birthistle

Allegiance: Uhtred of Bebbanburg/the Lord

Warrior level: Advanced (but retired)

Weapon of choice: Dagger

Specialism: Throwing buckets of cold water on a sleeping Uhtred and sawing through the necks of dead Danes

Most likely to say: ‘I have killed, and I will kill again I’m sure, but hopefully not today’

Getting into heaven? Big yes.

Hild’s journey in The Last Kingdom took her from nun to warrior and back again. Rescued from attack by Uhtred, Leofric and Yseult, she swore to become a fighter and more-than earned the title. Eventually, her vocation called her back to the church, where she now remains as the Abbess with whom you don’t mess.

Sister Jude in American Horror Story: Asylum

Played by: Jessica Lange

Allegiance: Catholicism and the teachings of Monseigneur Timothy Howard

Warrior level: Complicated

Weapon of choice: Forced commitment to an insane asylum,

Specialism: Guilt

Most likely to say: ‘All monsters are human’

Getting into heaven? Bad things happened under her watch but she does try to atone

The head of Briarcliff, an institution for the criminally insane, Sister Jude is a complex character with a complicated trajectory. She mistreats, but is also also gravely mistreated.

Sister Monica Joan in Call the Midwife (2012-)

Played by: Judy Parfitt

Allegiance: Raymond Nonnatus, patron saint of childbirth

Warrior level: Yoda

Weapon of choice: Forceps and fey literary quotation

Specialism: Sniffing out and emptying hidden cake tins

Most likely to say: ‘My first responsibility is to ensure the consumption of this cake’

Getting into heaven? Hundo P

AKA the best Call The Midwife nun, and an OG resident of Nonnatus House ever since the BBC One series began. Owing to her advanced years and developing dementia, Sister Monica Joan is now retired from midwifery, but in her prime there wasn’t a birth canal in Poplar that hadn’t welcomed her up to the elbow. She’s highly educated and extremely well-read with an instinctive love of beauty, poetry, cake and Doctor Who, which makes her the patron saint of all our hearts.

Sister Sybil in Camelot (2011)

Played by: Sinéad Cusack

Allegiance: Shady but ultimately loyal to Morgan

Warrior level: Witch

Weapon of choice: Dark magicks

Specialism: Child sacrifice?

Getting into heaven? Nah.

When Uther Pendragon banished his daughter Morgan in Chris Chibnall’s 2011 Camelot, she was raised in a nunnery by a sister who was no stranger to the dark arts. When Morgan (played by Eva Green) returned to claim her birthright, Sister Sybil was the one whispering poison in her ear and teaching her how to channel her powers.

Sister Bertrille in The Flying Nun (1967)

Played by: Sally Field

Allegiance: El Convento San Tanco in San Juan

Warrior level: Negligible

Weapon of choice: Not so much a weapon, but her flight-enabling cornette was the big thing.

Specialism: As the title suggests, flight

Most likely to say: ‘When lift plus thrust is greater than load plus drag, anything can fly.’

Getting into heaven? Si señor.

A creation of Tere Ríos’ book The Fifteenth Pelican, Sister Bertrille was the fresh-faced nun-next-door whose cornette combined with the Puerto Rico coastal winds allowed her to fly in the 1960s TV series. According to Sally Field’s excellent memoir In Pieces, the whole experience was more drag than take-off.

Miss Clavel in Madeline (1988-2001)

Voiced by: Judith Orban & various

Allegiance: An old house in Paris/the Catholic church

Warrior level: more sentry than prize fighter

Weapon of choice: Education! (Read: day trips to the circus)

Specialism: Waking up in the middle of the night with a nagging sense that something’s off kilter with her young schoolgirl charges, then singing a song about it.

Most likely to say: ‘Vite, vite mes petits’

Getting into heaven? Mais oui

The headteacher at Madeline’s Parisian boarding school in the Ludwig Bemelmans’ books and their various TV and film adaptations, Miss Clavel is a kindly sort. She gives her young boarding school pupils warm moral instruction and generally manages to extract Madeline from the mouth of whatever tiger she’s crawled inside that week. Not ferocious, as warriors go, but kind and dependable.

Septa Unella in Game of Thrones (2015)

Played by: Hannah Waddingham

Allegiance: The Faith of the Seven

Warrior level: High Bastard

Weapon of choice: Wooden spoon and ignominy

Specialism: Torture and bell-ringing.  

Most likely to say: ‘Confess!’  

Getting into heaven? Not in one piece she won’t after what Cersei did to her

The Geneva Convention didn’t reach the Seven Kingdoms. If it had, then the supposedly holy Septa Unella wouldn’t have beaten Cersei Lannister with a water ladle and made her drink from the floor like a dog before parading her naked to jeering crowds around the city. Not a nun to mess with, unless you’re a Lannister.

Also-Nuns

Sister Assumpta in Father Ted (1995)

Sister Boniface in Father Brown (2013)

(Briefly) Olive in Pushing Daisies (2007)

Mother Superior in Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005)

Kassia the Byzantine nun in Vikings (2019)

Warrior Nun is available to stream now on Netflix.

The post Warrior Nuns Through TV History appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2YVNZkS

[absynthe--minded]

an open letter to my fellow queer/disabled/leftist/mad/all of the above Christians

We need to start fighting.

We’re the front lines of defense against the right-wing evangelical tide that elected Trump and is going to be singing his praises. We’re the ones in a position that people will listen to. So it’s up to us to fight for freedom of religion and protection for Muslim and Jewish Americans, it’s up to us to stand up against anti-LGBT rhetoric in our churches and our homes and our communities, it’s up to us to shut down eugenicist or ableist discussions, it’s up to us to bash the fascists in our backyards right out of existence. Voices screaming against marginalized groups are going to get louder, not quieter, and we’re uniquely able to aid and protect.

I know this might be frightening. I’m not asking anybody to put themselves in danger, or out themselves to family if that means a risk of homelessness. But we can all do better. We need to do better. For the sake of our faith, and the lives that it’s going to be taking or damaging thanks to this bloody possibly-demonic election.

This is our fight, and it’s time we stepped the fuck up.